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
Love, a moment drop thy hands; Night within my soul expands. Veil thy beauties milk-rose-fair In that dark and showering hair. Coral kisses ravish not When the soul is tinged with thought; Burning looks are then forbid. Let each shyly-parted lid Hover like a settling dove O'er those deep-blue wells of Love. Darkness brightens; silvering flee Pomps of foam the driven sea.
In this garden's dim repose Lighted with the burning rose, Soft narcissi's golden camp Glimmering or with rosier lamp Censered honeysuckle guessed By the fragrance of her breast,— Here where summer's hands have crowned Silence in the fields of sound, Here felicity should be. Hearken, Edith, to the sea.
What a voice of grief intrudes On these happy solitudes! To the wind that with him dwells Ocean, old historian, tells All the dreadful heart of tears Hidden in the pleasant years. Summer's children, what do ye By the stern and cheerless sea?
Not we first nor we alone Heard the mighty Ocean moan
Page 23
By this treasure-house of flowers In the sweet ambiguous hours. Many a girl's lips ruby-red With their vernal honey fed Happy mouths, and soft cheeks flushed With Love's rosy sunlight blushed. Ruddy lips of many a boy Blithe discovered hills of joy Ruby-guided through a kiss To the sweet highways of bliss. Here they saw the evening still Coming slowly from the hill And the patient stars arise To their outposts in the skies; Heard the ocean shoreward urge The speed and thunder of his surge, Singing heard as though a bee Noontide waters on the sea.
These no longer. For our rose In her place they wreathed once, blows, And thy glorious garland, sweet, Kissed not once those wandering feet. All the lights of spring are ended, To the wintry haven wended. Beauty's boons and nectarous leisure, Lips, the honeycombs of pleasure, Cheeks enrosed, Love's natal soil, Breasts, the ardent conqueror's spoil, Spring rejects; a lovelier child His brittle fancies has beguiled. O her name that to repeat Than the Dorian muse more sweet Could the white hand more relume Writing and refresh the bloom Of lips that used such syllables then, Dies unloved by later men.
Page 24
Are we more than summer flowers? Shall a longer date be ours, Rose and springtime, youth and we By the everlasting sea?
Are they blown as legends tell In the smoke and gurge of hell? Writhe they in relucent gyres O'er a circle sad of fires? In what lightless groves must they Or unmurmuring alleys stray? Fields no sunlight visits, streams Where no happy lotus gleams? Yet, where'er their steps below, Memories sweet for comrades go. Lethe's waters had their will, But the soul remembers still. Beauty pays her boon of breath To thy narrow credit, Death, Leaving a brief perfume; we Perish also by the sea.
We shall lose, ah me! too soon Lose the clear and silent moon, The serenities of night And the deeper evening light. We shall know not when the morn In the widening East is born, Never feel the west-wind stir, Spring's delightful messenger, Never under branches lain Dally with the sweet-lipped rain, Watch the moments of the tree, Nor know the sounds that tread the sea.
With thy kisses chase this gloom:— Thoughts, the children of the tomb.
Page 25
Kiss me, Edith. Soon the night Comes and hides the happy light. Nature's vernal darlings dead From new founts of life are fed. Dawn relumes the immortal skies. Ah! what boon for earth-closed eyes? Love's sweet debts are standing, sweet; Honied payment to complete Haste—a million is to pay— Lest too soon the allotted day End and we oblivious keep Darkness and eternal sleep. See! the moon from heaven falls. In thy bosom's snow-white walls Softly and supremely housed Shut my heart up; keep it closed Like a rose of Indian grain, Like that rose against the rain, Closed to all that life applauds, Nature's perishable gauds, And the airs that burdened be With such thoughts as shake the sea.
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