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
This, Sri Aurobindo's first collection of poems, was printed in 1898 for private circulation by the Lakshmi Vilas Printing Press, Baroda, under the title Songs to Myrtilla and Other Poems. No copy of the first edition survives. The second edition, which was probably a reimpression of the first, is undated. The date of publication must therefore be inferred from other evidence. The book's handwritten manuscript, as well as the second edition, contains the poem “Lines on Ireland”, dated 1896.The second edition contains a translation from Chandidasa that almost certainly was done using an edition of Chandidasa's works published in 1897. On 17 October 1898, Sri Aurobindo's brother Manmohan wrote in a letter to Rabindranath Tagore: “My brother... has just published a volume of poems at Baroda.” This book evidently is Songs to Myrtilla. In another letter Manmohan tells Tagore: “Aurobinda is anxious to know what you think of his book of verses.” This second letter is dated 24 October 1894, but the year clearly is wrong. Manmohan had not even returned to India from England by that date. When the two letters are read together and when other documentary evidence is evaluated, it becomes clear that the second letter also was written in 1898, and that this was the year of publication of the first edition of Songs to Myrtilla.[^1] The “second edition” apparently appeared a year or two later.
[^1]: Manmohan Ghose's letters to Tagore are reproduced and discussed in Sri Aurobindo: Archives and Research, volume 12 (1988), pp. 86-87, 89-91.
A new edition of the book, entitled simply Songs to Myrtilla, was published by the Arya Publishing House, Calcutta, in April 1923.
When a biographer suggested during the 1940s that all the poems in Songs to Myrtilla were written in Baroda, except for five that were written in England, Sri Aurobindo corrected him as follows: “It is the other way round; all the poems in the book were written in England except five later ones which were written after his return to India. “The following poems certainly were written in Baroda after his return to India in 1893: “Lines on Ireland” (dated 1896), “Saraswati with the Lotus” and “Bankim Chandra Chatterji” (both written after the death of Bankim in 1894), and “To the Cuckoo” (originally subtitled” A Spring morning in India”). “Madhusudan Dutt” was probably also written in Baroda, as were the two adaptations of poems by Chandidasa. This makes seven poems. The number five, proposed by the biographer and not by Sri Aurobindo, was probably not meant by Sri Aurobindo to be taken as an exact figure.
The handwritten manuscript of Songs to Myrtilla contains one poem, “The Just Man”, that was not printed in any edition of the book. (It is reproduced here in the third section of Part One.) The manuscript and the second edition contain a dedication and a Latin epigraph, which Sri Aurobindo later deleted. They are reproduced here from the manuscript:
To my brother Manmohan Ghose these poems are dedicated.
Tale tuum nobis carmen, divine poeta, Quale sopor fessis in gramine, quale per aestum Dulcis aquae saliente sitim restinguere rivo.
Quae tibi, quae tali reddam pro carmine dona?
The Latin lines are from Virgil's fifth Eclogue, lines 45-47 and 81.They may be translated as follows:
So is thy song to me, poet divine, As slumber on the grass to weary limbs, Or to slake thirst from some sweet-bubbling rill In summer's heat ... How, how repay thee for a song so rare?
Four of the poems in Songs to Myrtilla are adaptations of works written in other languages: two in ancient Greek and two in mediaeval Bengali. These adaptations are published here in their original context. They are also published in Translations, volume 5 of THE COMPLETE WORKS OF SRI AUROBINDO.
GLAUCUS Sweet is the night, sweet and cool As to parched lips a running pool; Sweet when the flowers have fallen asleep And only moonlit rivulets creep Like glow-worms in the dim and whispering wood, To commune with the quiet heart and solitude. When earth is full of whispers, when No daily voice is heard of men, But higher audience brings The footsteps of invisible things, When o'er the glimmering tree-tops bowed The night is leaning on a luminous cloud, And always a melodious breeze Sings secret in the weird and charmèd trees, Pleasant 'tis then heart-overawed to lie Alone with that clear moonlight and that listening sky.
AETHON But day is sweeter; morning bright Has put the stars out ere the light, And from their dewy cushions rise Sweet flowers half-opening their eyes. O pleasant then to feel as if new-born The sweet, unripe and virgin air, the air of morn. And pleasant are her melodies, Rustle of winds, rustle of trees, Birds' voices in the eaves, Birds' voices in the green melodious leaves; The herdsman's flute among his flocks, Sweet water hurrying from reluctant rocks, And all sweet hours and all sweet showers And all sweet sounds that please the noonday flowers.
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Morning has pleasure, noon has golden peace And afternoon repose and eve the heart's increase.
All things are subject to sweet pleasure, But three things keep her richest measure, The breeze that visits heaven And knows the planets seven, The green spring with its flowery truth Creative and the luminous heart of youth. To all fair flowers and vernal The wind makes melody diurnal. On Ocean all night long He rests, a voice of song. The blue sea dances like a girl With sapphire and with pearl Crowning her locks. Sunshine and dew Each morn delicious life renew. The year is but a masque of flowers, Of light and song and honied showers. In the soft springtide comes the bird Of heaven whose speech is one sweet word, One word of sweet and magic power to bring Green branches back and ruddy lights of spring. Summer has pleasant comrades, happy meetings Of lily and rose and from the trees divinest greetings.
GLAUCUS For who in April shall remember The certain end of drear November? No flowers then live, no flowers Make sweet those wretched hours; From dead or grieving branches spun Unwilling leaves lapse wearily one by one; The heart is then in pain With the unhappy sound of rain. No secret boughs prolong
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A green retreat of song; Summer is dead and rich repose And springtide and the rose, And woods and all sweet things make moan; The weeping earth is turned to stone. The lovers of her former face, Shapes of beauty, melody, grace, Where are they? Butterfly and bird No more are seen, no songs are heard. They see her beauty spent, her splendours done; They seek a younger earth, a surer sun. When youth has quenched its soft and magic light, Delightful things remain but dead is their delight.
AETHON Ah! for a little hour put by Dim Hades and his pageantry. Forget the future, leave the past, The little hour thy life shall last. Learn rather from the violet's days Soft-blooming in retired ways Or dewy bell, the maid undrest With creamy childhood in her breast, Fierce foxglove and the briony And sapphire thyme, the work-room of the bee. Behold in emerald fire The spotted lizard crawl Upon the sun-kissed wall And coil in tangled brake The green and sliding snake Under the red-rose-briar. Nay, hither see Lured by thy rose of lips the bee To woo thy petals open, O sweet, His flowery murmur here repeat, Forsaking all the joys of thyme.
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Stain not thy perfumed prime With care for autumn's pale decay, But live like these thy sunny day. So when thy tender bloom must fall, Then shalt thou be as one who tasted all Life's honey and must now depart A broken prodigal from pleasure's mart, A leaf with whom each golden sunbeam sinned, A dewy leaf and kissed by every wandering wind.
GLAUCUS How various are thy children, Earth! Behold the rose her lovely birth, What fires from the bud proceed, As if the vernal air did bleed. Breezes and sunbeams, bees and dews Her lords and lovers she indues, And these her crimson pleasures prove; Her life is but a bath of love; The wide world perfumes when she sighs And, burning all the winds, of love she dies. The lily liveth pure, Yet has she lovers, friends, And each her bliss intends; The bees besides her treasure Besiege of pollened pleasure, Nor long her gates endure. The snowdrop cold Has vowed the saintly state to hold And far from green spring's amorous guilds Her snowy hermitage she builds. Cowslip attends her vernal duty And stops the heart with beauty. The crocus asks no vernal thing, But all the lovely lights of spring Are with rich honeysuckle boon
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And praise her through one summer moon. Thus the sweet children of the earth Fulfil their natural selves and various birth. For one is proud and one sweet months approve Diana's saint, but most are bond-maidens of Love.
Love's feet were on the sea When he dawned on me. His wings were purple-grained and slow; His voice was very sweet and very low; His rose-lit cheeks, his eyes' pale bloom Were sorrow's anteroom; His wings did cause melodious moan; His mouth was like a rose o'erblown; The cypress-garland of renown Did make his shadowy crown. Fair as the spring he gave And sadder than a winter's wave And sweet as sunless asphodel, My shining lily, Florimel, My heart's enhaloed moon, My winter's warmth, my summer's shady boon.
AETHON Not from the mighty sea Love visited me. I found as in a jewelled box Love, rose-red, sleeping with imprisoned locks; And I have ever known him wild And merry as a child, As roses red, as roses sweet, The west wind in his feet, Tulip-girdled, kind and bold, With heartsease in his curls of gold, Since in the silver mist Bright Cymothea's lips I kissed,
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Whose laughter dances like a gleam Of sunlight on a hidden stream That through a wooded way Runs suddenly into the perfect day. But what were Cymothea, placed Where like a silver star Myrtilla blooms? Such light as cressets cast In long and sun-lit rooms. Thy presence is to her As oak to juniper, Thy beauty as the gorgeous rose To privet by the lane that blows, Gold-crowned blooms to mere fresh grass, Eternal ivy to brief blooms that pass.
GLAUCUS But Florimel beside thee, sweet, Pales like a candle in the brilliant noon. Snowdrops are thy feet, Thy waist a crescent moon, And like a silver wand Thy body slight doth stand Or like a silver beech aspire. Thine arms are walls for white caresses, Thy mouth a tale of crimson kisses, Thine eyes two amorous treasuries of fire. To what shall poet liken thee? Art thou a goddess of the sea Purple-tressed and laughter-lipped From thy choric sisters slipped To wander on the flowery land? Or art thou siren on the treacherous sand Summer-voiced to charm the ear Of the wind-vext mariner? Ah! but what are these to thee, Brighter gem than knows the sea,
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Lovelier girl than sees the stream Naked, Naiad of a dream, Whiter Dryad than men see Dancing round the lone oak-tree, Flower and most enchanting birth Of ten ages of the earth! The Graces in thy body move And in thy lips the ruby hue of Love.
Circa 1890-98. This, the title-poem of the collection, is headed in the manuscript “Sweet is the night”.
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