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A LOVER OF LIGHT AMONG LUMINARIES : Dilip Kumar Roy Brevity is an indispensable characteristic of lyrical poetry. Dilip Kumar Roy, in a few strokes creates a picture of a well-known person which anyone can see and recognize, even when he is not named.
All of these poems are short lyrical metrical compositions. It is a rare achievement of Dilip Roy that he has succeeded in writing metrical verse in a foreign language like English which is quite different from his mother tongue. Even Tagore preferred to translate his poems published in Gitanjali in prose.
Dilip Roy was very much interested in music and poetry for a long time before he became Sri Aurobindo's disciple. But, as he informs his readers in Sri Aurobindo Came to Me, his style and rhythm were halting in the earlier career. Even Tagore, who spoke highly of his musical talents, never spoke favourably about his poetiy. But Sri Aurobindo explained to him that through yogic or occult power people could write a great poem or compose great music because poetry and music come from the inner being and to write or to compose true and great things one has to have the passage clear between the outer mind and something in the inner being. Yoga helps one in clearing the passage. Hence, Dilip Roy, who wanted to flower into a poet, first of all, translated Sri Aurobindo's poems. Then he wrote his own Bengali poems and sent them to Sri Aurobindo for his comment. Sri Aurobindo advised him not to follow the methods of any great poet like his father, Dwijendralal or Tagore, but to write in his own peculiar manner which might suit his inspiration and substance. He also exhorted Roy not to become too simple and direct and also to avoid obscurity, artifice and rhetoric and to follow the inner movement.
When Roy sent his poems to Tagore, as we have seen in Chapter 4 of this book, he was very much surprised to see Roy's progress and praised him for acquiring rhythm so soon in his poetry.
Almost all the poems of the volume are composed in quartrains:
"Quartrains, stanzas of four lines, are the most common of all, and show great variety of pattern... The staple arrangement is the ballad stanza, used in medieval folk poetry and revived in
the late eighteenth century for modern ballad-writing."13
The metre is alternate iambic tetrameters and trimeters rhyming in the second and fourth lines, generally, with the rhyme scheme of a, b,c,b. Dilip Roy has employed this stanzaic form in a few of his poems 'Come Krishna' and 'Indira Devi'.
"When all four lines rhyme, a, b, a, b, we have common measure, a favourite rhythm for hymn-tunes. If all the lines are tetrameters and rhyme alternately (a, b, a, b,) the stanza is long measure. 14
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