Comments on the Work of Arjava

by Sri Aurobindo

Totalitarian

Night was closing on the traveller
When he came
To the empty eerie courtyard
With no name.
Loud he called; no echo answered;
Nothing stirred:
But a crescent moon swung wanly,
White as curd.
When he flashed his single sword-blade
Through the gloom,
Non resisted - till he frantic,
Filled with doom,
Hurled his weapon through the gloaming.
Took no aim;
Saw his likenesses around him
Do the same:
Viewed a thousand swordless figures
Like his own -
Then first knew in that cold starlight
Hell, alone.

Sri Aurobindo: «Exceedingly original and vivid — the description with its economy and felicity of phrase is very telling.»

11 October 1936

Question: My appreciation of the effect of Arjava's poem, especially its first eight lines, was a little staled by the memory of De la Mare's Listeners.

Sri Aurobindo: «De la Mare’s poem has a delicate beauty throughout and a sort of daintily fanciful suggestion of the occult world. I do not know if there is anything more. The weakness of it is that it reads like a thing imagined — the images and details are those that might be written of a haunted house on earth which has got possessed by some occult presences.
Arjava must no doubt have taken his starting point from a reminiscence of this poem, but there is nothing else in common with De la Mare — his poem is an extraordinarily energetic and powerful vision of an occult world and every phrase is intimately evocative of the beyond as a thing vividly seen and strongly lived — it is not on earth, this courtyard and this crescent moon, we are at once in an unearthly world and in a place somewhere in the soul of man and all the details, sparing, with a powerful economy of phrase and image and brevity of movement but revelatory in each touch as opposed to the dim moonlight suggestiveness supported by a profusion of detail and long elaborating development in De la Mare — of course that has its value also - make us entirely feel ourselves there.
I therefore maintain my description “original” not only for the latter part of the poem but for the opening also. It is not an echo, it is an independent creation. Indeed the difference of the two poems comes out most strongly in these very lines.

...the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,
That goes down to the empty hall,
...the dark turf,
'Neath the starred and leafy sky

are a description of things on earth made occult only by the presence of the phantom listeners. But

...the empty eerie courtyard
With no name

or

...the crescent moon swung wanly,
White as curd

are not earthly, they belong to a terrible elsewhere, while the later part of the poem carries this elsewhere into a province of the soul. That is the distinction and makes the perfect successfulness of Arjava’s poem.»

13 October 1936