Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Poetry and Art

SABCL - Volume 27

Part 2. On His Own and Others’ Poetry
Section 2. On Poets and Poetry
Comments on the Work of Poets of the Ashram

Arjava (J. A. Chadwick) [5]

New-Risen Moon’s Eclipse

Harsh like the shorn head high of a gaunt grey-hooded friar

Who fears the beauty and use of sculptured limbs

(Branding the sculptor-archetype a liar),

O moon but lately risen from the foam where the seamew skims —

Form that a wan light cassocks, grace that a tonsure dims.

Joy that the leaden curse is rolled away to leave the golden

Tresses of earth-transforming gramarye

Whereby our wildered flesh-fret is enfolden —

O fair as the foam-fashioned goddess that awoke from the wondering sea,

Love with the earth-shroud lifted, star from the shade set free!

The poem is, on the contrary, a very good one. The one thing that can be said against it is that you need to go through it twice or thrice before the full beauty of the thought, rhythm and imagery comes to the surface,— but is that a demerit? Poems that are too easily read, as a French critic puts it, are not always the best. I myself doubted a little at first reading about the rhythm of the three first lines of the second verse, but that was because I was listening with the outer ear, my attention having been dulled by much dealing with miscellaneous correspondence before I turned to the poem; but as soon as it got inside to the inner ear, I felt the subtlety and rareness of the movement. There is a great beauty and significant force in the imagery and a remarkably successful fusion of the supporting object (physical symbol) into the revealing or transmuting image and the image into the object, which is part of the highest art of symbolic or mystic poetry. Heard before? If you refer to elements of the rhythm, words or phrases here and there, or images used before though not in the same way, where is the poetry in so old and rich a literature as the English that altogether escapes this suspicion of “heard before”? Absolute originality in that sense is rare, almost nonexistent; we are all those who went before us with something new added that is ourselves, and it is this something new added that transfigures and is the real originality. In this sense there is a great impression of original power in the beauty of the first verse and hardly less in the second. It seems to me very successful, and “triviality” is the description that can be least applied to it while it could lack interest only to those who have no mind for poetry of this character.

March 1932