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

Amal Kiran (K. D. Sethna) [2]

This sonnet was more or less suggested by one written by Edward Shanks [see pages 431–32]. I should like to ascertain whether the seed fell on really fruitful soil or not. The form, I must admit, is not perfect, because while the sestet is Italian the octet does not correspond to the necessary abba abba.

Not only with the voice of mighty things,

Exultant rain or swift importunate sea,

But even on the unnoticeable wings

Of nameless birdsong I shall quest for Thee.

No fragmentary passion I aspire

To consecrate, howe’er magnificent:

But one glad life of mingling hours intent

Upon thy beauty, touched with self-same fire.

For, what avail great moments if their flight

Leave the familiar day a soulless din;

Nor give their glory a true antiphonal note

Each wandering wind-lark; nor the common night

Find the inward eye a placid mere wherein

Worship holds argently the heavens afloat?

(1) This can hardly be called a sonnet; fantasy of form is inconsistent with the severe building of a sonnet. If you want a new form and wish to make it by combining the Shakespearean rhyme sequence in the octet with the Miltonic in the sestet, you can make that venture, but in that case you will have to transpose the fifth and sixth lines

To consecrate, howe’er magnificent,—

No fragmentary passion I aspire,

But one glad life of mingling hours intent

Upon thy beauty, touched with self-same fire.

That would, to my mind, be an improvement in expression as well as in form. But the present khichadi is impossible.

(2) “Nor give their glory a true antiphonal note”

with its double anapaest is too jerky a movement. Anapaests and dactyls can be thrown into a modern pentameter, but they must be managed more skilfully than that. I would suggest

Nor give their glory’s true antiphonal note

Each wanderer wind-lark

(3) “Find the inward eye” is again rhythmically clumsy; especially amid so many lines of a smooth liquid movement it brings one up with a jerk like the sudden jolt of a smoothly running car.

Find the soul’s gaze a placid mere wherein

or something like that would do much better.

(4) Why semi-colons after “din” and “wind-lark” instead of the expected commas?

Apart from these defects of detail, the poem is a good one; once they are mended, it becomes a fine work.

12 June 1931