PATISAR,
13th August 1893.
Coming through these beels{1} to Kaligram, an idea took shape in my mind. Not that the thought was new, but sometimes old ideas strike one with new force.
{Footnote 1: Translator's Note.—Sometimes a stream passing through the flat Bengal country encounters a stretch of low land and spreads out into a sheet of water, called a beel, of indefinite extent, ranging from a large pool in the dry season to a shoreless expanse during the rains.
Villages consisting of a cluster of huts, built on mounds, stand out here and there like islands, and boats or round, earthen vessels are the only means of getting about from village to village.
Where the waters cover cultivated tracts the rice grows through, often from considerable depths, giving to the boats sailing over them the curious appearance of gliding over a cornfield, so clear is the water. Elsewhere these beels have a peculiar flora and fauna of water-lilies and irises and various water-fowl. As a result, they resemble neither a marsh nor a lake, but have a distinct character of their own.}
The water loses its beauty when it ceases to be defined by banks and spreads out into a monotonous vagueness. In the case of language, metre serves for banks and gives form and beauty and character. Just as the banks give each river a distinct personality, so does rhythm make each poem an individual creation; prose is like the featureless, impersonal beel. Again, the waters of the river have movement and progress; those of the beel engulf the country by expanse alone. So, in order to give language power, the narrow bondage of metre becomes necessary; otherwise it spreads and spreads, but cannot advance.
The country people call these beels "dumb waters"—they have no language, no self-expression. The river ceaselessly babbles; so the words of the poem sing, they are not "dumb words." Thus bondage creates beauty of form, motion, and music; bounds make not only for beauty but power.
Poetry gives itself up to the control of metre, not led by blind habit, but because it thus finds the joy of motion. There are foolish persons who think that metre is a species of verbal gymnastics, or legerdemain, of which the object is to win the admiration of the crowd. That is not so. Metre is born as all beauty is born the universe through. The current set up within well-defined bounds gives metrical verse power to move the minds of men as vague and indefinite prose cannot.
This idea became clear to me as I glided on from river to beel and beel to river.