terrace, and spent my
days in solitude. While thus left in communion with my self alone, I
know not how I slipped out of the poetical groove into which I had
fallen. Perhaps being cut off from those whom I sought to please, and
whose taste in poetry moulded the form I tried to put my thoughts into,
I naturally gained freedom from the style they had imposed on me.

I began to use a slate for my writing. That also helped in my
emancipation. The manuscript books in which I had indulged before seemed
to demand a certain height of poetic flight, to work up to which I had
to find my way by a comparison with others. But the slate was clearly
fitted for my mood of the moment. "Fear not," it seemed to say. "Write
just what you please, one rub will wipe all away!"

As I wrote a poem or two, thus unfettered, I felt a great joy well up
within me. "At last," said my heart, "what I write is my own!" Let no
one mistake this for an accession of pride. Rather did I feel a pride in
my former productions, as being all the tribute I had to pay them. But I
refuse to call the realisation of self, self-sufficiency. The joy of
parents in their first-born is not due to any pride in its appearance,
but because it is their very own. If it happens to be an extraordinary
child they may also glory in that--but that is different.

In the first flood-tide of that joy I paid no heed to the bounds of
metrical form, and as the stream does not flow straight on but winds
about as it lists, so did my verse. Before, I would have held this to be
a crime, but now I felt no compunction. Freedom first breaks the law and
then makes laws which brings it under true Self-rule.

The only listener I had for these erratic poems of mine was Akshay Babu.
When he heard them for the first time he was as surprised as he was
pleased, and with his approbation my road to freedom was widened.

The poems of Vihari Chakravarti were in a 3-beat metre. This triple time
produces a rounded-off globular effect, unlike the square-cut multiple
of 2. It rolls on with ease, it glides as it dances to the tinkling of
its anklets. I was once very fond of this metre. It felt more like
riding a bicycle than walking. And to this stride I had got accustomed.
In the _Evening Songs_, without thinking of it, I somehow broke off this
habit. Nor did I come under any other particular bondage. I felt
entirely free and unconcerned. I had no thought or fear of being taken
to task.

The strength I