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) [11]

My appreciation of the effect of Arjava’s poem, especially its first eight lines, was a little staled by the memory of De la Mare’s Listeners.

De la Mare’s poem has a delicate beauty throughout and a sort of daintily fanciful suggestion of the occult world. I do not know if there is anything more. The weakness of it is that it reads like a thing imagined — the images and details are those that might be written of a haunted house on earth which has got possessed by some occult presences. Arjava must no doubt have taken his starting point from a reminiscence of this poem, but there is nothing else in common with De la Mare — his poem is an extraordinarily energetic and powerful vision of an occult world and every phrase is intimately evocative of the beyond as a thing vividly seen and strongly lived — it is not on earth, this courtyard and this crescent moon, we are at once in an unearthly world and in a place somewhere in the soul of man and all the details, sparing, with a powerful economy of phrase and image and brevity of movement but revelatory in each touch as opposed to the dim moonlight suggestiveness supported by a profusion of detail and long elaborating development in De la Mare — of course that has its value also — make us entirely feel ourselves there. I therefore maintain my description “original” not only for the latter part of the poem but for the opening also. It is not an echo, it is an independent creation. Indeed the difference of the two poems comes out most strongly in these very lines.

... the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,

That goes down to the empty hall,

... the dark turf,

’Neath the starred and leafy sky

are a description of things on earth made occult only by the presence of the phantom listeners. But

... the empty eerie courtyard

With no name

or

... the crescent moon swung wanly,

White as curd

are not earthly, they belong to a terrible elsewhere, while the later part of the poem carries this elsewhere into a province of the soul. That is the distinction and makes the perfect successfulness of Arjava’s poem.

13 October 1936