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 a total of seventy-five sonnets between 1933 and 1947. Only three of them were published in a book during his lifetime (see above under Poems). The other seventy-two are reproduced in the present section. See the note to “Transformation” for typographical conventions. Sri Aurobindo wrote in 1934 that he intended his sonnets to “be published in a separate book of sonnets”. This was done in the book Sonnets, first published in 1980.
One of these sonnets was written around 1934, the other two in 1939.Sri Aurobindo selected them from among his completed sonnets for publication in the Sri Aurobindo Circle, Bombay, in 1948. They were published under the heading “Three Sonnets”.
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A deep enigma is the soul of man. His conscious life obeys the Inconscient's rule, His need of joy is learned in sorrow's school, His heart is a chaos and an empyrean. His subtle Ignorance borrows Wisdom's plan; His mind is the Infinite's sharp and narrow tool. He wades through mud to reach the Wonderful, And does what Matter must or Spirit can.
All powers in his living's soil take root And claim from him their place and struggling right: His ignorant creature mind crawling towards light Is Nature's fool and Godhead's candidate, A demigod and a demon and a brute, The slave and the creator of his fate.
17 September 1939. Three handwritten and two typed manuscripts precede the Circle publication in 1948.
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