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
I walked beside the waters of a world of light On a gold ridge guarding two seas of high-rayed night. One was divinely topped with a pale bluish moon And swam as in a happy deep spiritual swoon More conscious than earth's waking; the other's wide delight Billowed towards an ardent orb of diamond white. But where I stood, there joined in a bright marvellous haze The miracled moons with the long ridge's golden blaze. I knew not if two wakings or two mighty sleeps Mixed the great diamond fires and the pale pregnant deeps, But all my glad expanding soul flowed satisfied Around me and became the mystery of their tide. As one who finds his own eternal self, content, Needing naught else beneath the spirit's firmament, It knew not Space, it heard no more Time's running feet, Termless, fulfilled, lost richly in itself, complete. And so it might have lain for ever. But there came A dire intrusion wrapped in married cloud and flame,
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Across the blue-white moon-hush of my magic seas A sudden sweeping of immense peripheries Of darkness ringing lambent lustres; shadowy-vast A nameless dread, a Power incalculable passed Whose feet were death, whose wings were immortality; Its changing mind was time, its heart eternity. All opposites were there, unreconciled, uneased, Struggling for victory, by victory unappeased. All things it bore, even that which brings undying peace, But secret, veiled, waiting for some supreme release. I saw the spirit of the cosmic Ignorance; I felt its power besiege my gloried fields of trance.
But now its huge Enigma had a voice, a cry That echoed through my oceans of felicity.
A Voice arose that was so sweet and terrible It thrilled the heart with love and pain, as if all hell Tuned with all heaven in one inextricable note. Born from abysmal depths on highest heights to float, It carried all sorrow that the souls of creatures share, Yet hinted every rapture that the gods can bear. "O Son of God who cam'st into my blackest Night To sound and know its gulfs and bring the immortal light Into the passion of its darkness, castst thou man's fate For thy soul's freedom and its magic are forfeit, Renouncing the high pain that gave thee mortal birth And made thy soul a seeker on the common earth? When first the Eternal cast Himself abroad to be His own unimaginable multiplicity, Expressing in Time and shape what timelessly was there, The mighty Mother stood alone in diamond air And took into her that Godhead streaming from above And worlds of her endless beauty and delight and love Leaped from her fathomless heart.
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