All poems in English including sonnets, lyrical poems, narrative poems, and metrical experiments in various forms.
Poems
This volume consists of all poems in English including sonnets, lyrical poems, narrative poems, and metrical experiments in various forms. All such poems published by Sri Aurobindo during his lifetime are included here, as well as poems found among his manuscripts after his passing. Sri Aurobindo worked on these poems over the course of seven decades. The first one was published in 1883 when he was ten; a number of poems were written or revised more than sixty years later, in the late 1940s.
THEME/S
Sri Aurobindo wrote the first of these poems in isolation during the late 1920s or early 1930s. He wrote the other items as an amusement after some of his disciples tried to interest him in the subject of surrealistic poetry. See also the more serious sonnet “A Dream of Surreal Science” in the section “Lyrical Poems”.
There was an awful awful man Who all things knew and none And never met a Saracen And always drank a bun. He said he was a bullywag And that he did it for fun. I don't know what a bullywag is And I don't think he was one. Of nonsense and Omniscience He spoke as one who knew That this was like a temperament And that was like a hue. He said there was a phantom sun That saw a branching sky And he who could but never should Was always God's best boy. And he who should but never could Was not in the savoury jam That thronged the gates of Paradise Jostling the great I am. He said he saw a smudgy moon Adown a patterned ridge And that Beethoven to his ear Rang like a bluzzing midge That bluzzed and bluzzed and bluzzed and bluzzed Until the eye grew green With shouting for dear visible things Where nothing could be seen. For nothing can be seen, my child, And when it's seen it's read, And when red nothing once is seen The world can go to bed.
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Late 1920s or early 1930s. There is one hand-written manuscript of this piece, the writing of which has completely faded away. A transcription made years ago was published in the journal Mother India in April 1974. The editors have verified and corrected this transcription using images made by means of infrared photography, scanning and imaging software. Several words in the text remain somewhat doubtful.
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