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) [12]

The Flower of Light

This whiteness has no withering;

When petals fall,

Miraculous swan’s-down through the air,

A hundred petals build the crowning flower

Still, nor all

Dissevering gusts can make that stateliness less fair.

The bee can settle in its heart of light —

O wingèd soul;

But we with fettered feet and soiled with clay

Gaze through bewildered tears

At that quintessenced goal,

Craving one prized petal-touch may light on our dismay.

I have been long an admirer of Nolini’s poems in free verse. Does this experiment of mine fall between two stools, creating expectations of regularity which it then disappoints — and sounding more like a metrical medley or “salad” than one piece of rhythmic movement?

Well, it is not free verse as people understand it. But it is verse which the usual thing is not and at the same time it is free. I find it fascinating — the rhythm is subtle, delicate and faultless. I don’t know enough of modern (contemporary) poetry to be sure that it is a new form you have found, but at any rate it is one well worth following out. It enables one to vary the length and movement, form and distribution of rhymes as the thought and feeling need without falling into the formlessness of a prose movement — it has, that is to say, the quality of metrical poetry without its fetters. As for the poem itself, it is magnificently beautiful; it has that psychic quality — here the expression of a psychic sorrow — which is so rare and the language is luminous and felicitous all through.

1 November 1936