A Centenary Tribute

Part IV

Moments of Illumination

(Poems with Sri Aurobindo's Comments)

1. Very neat and conceited. But perhaps the intellectual ingenuity of the conceit is too pronounced to allow die conversion of the conceit into the entirely poetic image. "Saboteur" ought, I believe, to have its accents on the first and third syllable, you seem to put it on the second; - a "has" would set the rhythm right.

2. Good; some of the lines are very fine, especially the last line and a half of the second stanza and the whole of the last stanza. But can a sea hang? Well, perhaps in a faindy Donnish style. And "Sat like a taste" has not much force: I would myself have written "Sat, a heaven-taste".

3. In the second stanza the first line is very good, but I don't exactly thrill to "essence" and "sucked"; it may be a prejudice. The first stanza is very good and the third good.

"Fifteen Years After"

Non Bene

Homie must not expect the rather portentous article or essay he demands from me. You know I have made it a rule not to make any public pronouncement; the Cripps offer was an exception that remains solitary; for the other things on the War were private letters, not written for publication. I do not propose to change the rule in order to set forth a programme for the Supramental energy to act on if and when it comes down now or fifteen years after. Great Powers do not publish beforehand, least of all in a journalistic compilation, their war-plans or even their peace plans; the Supermind is the greatest of all Powers and we can leave it to its own secrecy until the moment of its action.

January 14,1945

I don't find these poems very well-inspired or conspicuously successful. You seem to be trying at this to develop a penchant for the bizarre, extravagant, outre; but that is a modernist tendency which has produced nothing or little of any value. There is also in the first poem an indulgence of bibhatsa-rasa; but this rasa comes out well only when the feeling seized is terror or horror. Otherwise the ugly and repulsive remains only ugly and repulsive and does not transform itself into beauty. The image and the phrase in these poems is strained, violent and exaggerated; it fails to please or satisfy the aesthetic sense. Your true poetic capacity does not lie in that direction; when you indulge it, it seems to be in obedience to some intellectual kink not to the central intuition. Some lines are good but not more than good; the rest is energetic without felicity. The last poem is an ingenuity of sentiment and the expression does not ring quite true. Sorry to be so damnatory but that is my honest reaction.

Don't wait for any poems for your Annual, I think the Pondicherry poets will have to march out without a captain, unless you take the lead. I have been hunting among a number of poems which I perpetrated at intervals, mostly sonnets, but I am altogether dissatisfied with the inspiration which led me to perpetrate them; none of them is in my present opinion good enough to publish, at any rate in their present form, and I am too busy to recast especially as poetically I am very much taken up with "Savitri" who is attaining giant stature, she has grown immensely since you last saw the baby. I am besides revising and revising without end so as let nothing pass which is not upto mark. And I have necessarily much else to do.

March 18,1945

[This is the last letter written in his own hand by Sri Aurobindo to Amal Kiran.]

(Sri Aurobindo's comment communicated by Nolini)

(The call: A letter to the Mother and her answer)