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
Pururavus from converse held with Gods On unseen crests of Nature high, occult, Traversed the tumult of the flame-tossed seas That cast their fire between the spirit's poles. Alone like a bright star twixt earth and heaven, He reached the crossways of eternity. A Soul to our apparent life reborn
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Out of the vastness of the original Self, Journeying in dim momentous solitude Led by the flickering of uncertain suns, He essayed the fringe of Night's tremendous home. Before him lay the subtle realm of light Our organed sense conceals, the light that gleams Across the sealless musings of the seer, A slumberless wide eye upon our scene. But destined to earth's darkly pregnant dream He tarried not on these mysterious shores, But still descending the divine abyss To new adventure in the eternal Night Transgressed the wonder-line of things beyond Abruptly into mortal space and time. A universe appeared of difficult birth, The labour of eclipsed and ignorant gods, An immortality of chance and change. Bridging the gulf between antagonist planes He saw the circles of Heaven's rash advance. Sun upon sun, God's sentinels in the void, Life's radiant and immeasurable camp Blazed in the order of the aeonic Will. But with the menace of the dragon depths The old blind vigilant Nescience stretched afar Hungering in serpent dumb infinitude, And her dark shade besieged the luminaries. Silence and Death opposed the invading Fire. And even before he broke into our pale There came on him a breath from tarnished worlds. Averse from an obscure material touch The images of the supernal field That he had left sank from the front of thought And held their session in the heart's dumb cave; The glory and grace, the light, the sacred life Receded as behind a burning door: Subliminal beneath the lid of mind The grandeur and the passion and the calm.
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His mind became a beat of memory. Sight, hearing changed towards our diminished scale; The little views grew great, the great grew small. As yet some largeness was of inmost things And he remembered in the formless sense Proud kingdoms of intense and beautiful life And love left free to do his absolute will And dreams at once commuted into power. Affronting many starfields of our space And shortening ever the vast lens of Time He met a smaller movement of desire Prisoned in the orbit of a few pale globes And knew in front our little solar belt Hung casually among the giant stars. Our earth received him mid her living forms. Her deep inconscient motions packed and mute, Her darknesses more wise than her small lights Oppressed again his young divinity.
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