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) [9]

Across triumphant acres of the night

Slow-swung pinions of the unborn dream

To the hidden daybreak pursue primeval flight.

Chartless unfrontiered aeons of the dark,

On their lonely silence breaks no morning theme,—

Our dreams have held the Promethean spark.

But half descried, the dawn-lit peaks of joy,—

There, living hues shall blend in a rainbow stream,

And there no sundering thought can enter or destroy.

I feel rather oppressed by the contrast between the genuineness and depth and strength of the feeling in my experience, and the surely very inadequate means of conveying any of it to the reader. Words like “triumphant ... night”, “hidden daybreak”, “lonely silence”, “sundering thought” are surely being entrusted with a task which can never be carried out with a reader who does not go out far more than half way to meet the emotional significance?

It is always the difficulty of expression that words can only suggest these deeper things though they can suggest them with a certain force — even a creative force — but there must be the receptivity in the reader also. Your phrases “triumphant acres of the night” etc. have a considerable power in them; all the lines indeed are such that the significance could hardly be better conveyed, but still the full significance (the suggestion not merely of the idea, but of the experience behind it) can only be got if the reader listens not only with the mind, but with the inner sense and feeling.

8 January 1935