The title of this booklet is taken from one of Sri Aurobindo’s poems of the same name. The first section is on a few “autobiographical” poems and statements of Sri Aurobindo which are arranged chronologically, giving us a timeline of his development as a poet and a yogi. In the second section, the author elaborates on poetry as mantra.
With the exception of a few, poets in Sri Aurobindo’s time were abandoning metre and rhyme for freer self-expression. Sri Aurobindo sympathised with them, but insisted that “metre … is not only the traditional, but also surely the right physical basis” for great poetry. In his own poetry he explored ways of adding quantity to stress and accent for creating new rhythms in English poetry. In the final section of the book, Shraddhavan examines an 8-line metrical fragment by Sri Aurobindo as an example of his experiment with quantitative metre.
