Sri Aurobindo's notes and letters on his life and yoga and letters on Himself and on The Mother.
Sri Aurobindo : corresp.
Sri Aurobindo's notes and letters on his life and yoga and letters on Himself and on The Mother. In these letters, Sri Aurobindo writes about his life as a student in England, a teacher in Baroda, a political leader in Bengal, and a writer and yogi in Pondicherry. He also comments on his formative spiritual experiences and the development of his yoga.
THEME/S
Q: In Shelley's "Skylark" my heart does not easily melt towards one simile—
Like a high-born maiden In a palace-tower, Soothing her love-laden Soul in secret hour With music sweet as love, which overflows her bower.
Sometimes I am inclined even to feel this is an atrocity. Then I wonder whether the sentimental stuff shouldn't be cut out and replaced by something deeper although in Shelley's style as much as possible—something like:
Like a child who wanders In an ancient wood Where the strange glow squanders All its secret mood Upon her lilting soul lost in that solitude.
A: The attempt to rewrite Shelley better than Shelley himself is a rash and hopeless endeavour. Your proposed stanza is twentieth century mysticism quite out of place in the Skylark and has not the simple felicity and magic and music of Shelley's verse. I fail to see why the high-born maiden is an atrocity—
Page 236
it expresses the romantic attitude towards love which was sentimental and emotional, attempting to lift it out of the coarseness of life into a mental-vital idealism which was an attempt to resuscitate the attitude of chivalry and the troubadours. Romantic and unreal, if you like, but not atrocious.
8-11-1934
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