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 Some Passages of Prose

Lawrence’s Letters [1]

I write to let you know what is occupying me — Yoga meditation alternating with Lawrence’s engrossing {{0}}letters,[[Aldous Huxley, ed., The Letters of D. H. Lawrence (London: William Heinemann, 1934).]] of which I give you some lines that I liked very much.

Why are you so sad about your life? Only let go all this will to have things in your own control. We must all submit to be helpless and obliterated, quite obliterated, destroyed, cast away into nothingness. There is something will rise out of it, something new, that now is not. This which we are must cease to be, that we may come to pass in another being. Do not struggle, with your will, to dominate your conscious life — do not do it. Only drift, and let go — let go, entirely, and become dark, quite dark — like winter which mows away all the leaves and flowers, and lets only the dark underground roots remain....

I tell this to you, I tell it to myself — to let go, to release from my will everything that my will would hold, to lapse back into darkness and unknowing. There must be deep winter before there can be spring. [pp. 285 – 86]

I suppose Lawrence was a Yogi who had missed his way and come into a European body to work out his difficulties. “To lapse back into darkness and unknowing” sounds like the Christian mystic’s passing into the “night of God”, but I think Lawrence thought of a new efflorescence from the subconscient while the mystic’s night of God was a stage between ordinary consciousness and the Superconscient Light.

26 June 1936