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 heard the coockcouck jabbering on the lea And saw the spokesman sprinting on the spud; The airmale soared to heaven majestically And dropped down with a strange miraculous thud. I could not break the bosom of the blue; I went for a walk and waltzed with woe awhile. The cat surprised me with a single mew; The porridge was magnificently vile. These things are symbols if you understand, But who can understand when poets resolve To nothing mean. The beautiful beast is banned; The problem grows too difficult to solve.
[The heart of the surrealist poet should be unfathomable. The problem is how to mean nothing, yet seem to mean anything or everything. His poetry should be at once about nothing at all and about all things in particular; nonsensically profound and irrationally beautiful. Unknown and extraordinary words are not indispensable in its texture but can have a place, if sparingly and mystically used. One who can do these things and others of a congenital character is a surrealist poet: Willy Whistler.]
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My way is over the Moro river, Amid projectiles and sad smiles. Wind bottles in a ghastly jam Explode before you can say damn. But the jam is over and we have passed: Alas, felicity can never last! I see an aeroplane on high, I hear it sob and sigh. Fate happier has been yours, my lad, For you are dead and I am mad. Kiss not the corpse but shove it in. Ah let the booby trap be. There is a moan upon the moving sea.
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