Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

CWSA 27

Fragment ID: 6800

The Genesis of Thought the Paraclete and Rose of God

I am sending you copies of two poems. One, Thought the Paraclete, is a development of four lines (now 3–6) originally written some time ago as an English metrical correspondence for a Bengali new metre of Dilip’s. He had asked for some more lines and I thought the four I had written good enough to warrant a complete poem. Dilip’s scheme was

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but in English another arrangement might be preferable, either

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or

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It is not an easy metre and does not seem to admit of sufficient variations for a longer poem.

The other, Rose of God, is a lyric, an invocation. The metrical plan is – for the first two lines of the stanza, three parts with 2 main stresses in each, the first identical throughout, the other two variable at pleasure; for the last two lines, two parts of equal length, three stresses in each part.