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
Know more >
A life of intensities wide, immune Floats behind the earth and her life-fret, A magic of realms mastered by spell and rune, Grandiose, blissful, coloured, increate.
A music there wanders mortal ear Hears not, seizing, intimate, remote, Wide-winged in soul-spaces, fire-clear, Heaping note on enrapturing new note.
Forms deathless there triumph, hues divine Thrill with nets of glory the moved air; Each sense is an ecstasy, love the sign Of one outblaze of godhead that two share.
The peace of the senses, the senses' stir On one harp are joined mysteries; pain Transmuted is ravishment's minister, A high note and a fiery refrain.
Page 549
All things are a harmony faultless, pure; Grief is not nor stain-wound of desire; The heart-beats are a cadence bright and sure Of Joy's quick steps, too invincible to tire.
A Will there, a Force, a magician Mind Moves, and builds at once its delight-norms, The marvels it seeks for surprised, outlined, Hued, alive, a cosmos of fair forms,
Sounds, colours, joy-flamings. Life lies here Dreaming, bound to the heavens of its goal, In the clasp of a Power that enthrals to sheer Bliss and beauty body and rapt soul.
My spirit sank drowned in the wonder surge: Screened, withdrawn was the greatness it had sought; Lost was the storm-stress and the warrior urge, Lost the titan winging of the thought.
It lay at ease in a sweetness of heaven-sense Delivered from grief, with no need left to aspire, Free, self-dispersed in voluptuous innocence, Lulled and borne into roseate cloud-fire.
But suddenly there soared a dateless cry, Deep as Night, imperishable as Time; It seemed Death's dire appeal to Eternity, Earth's outcry to the limitless Sublime.
"O high seeker of immortality, Is there not, ineffable, a bliss Too vast for these finite harmonies, Too divine for the moment's unsure kiss?
Page 550
"Arms taking to a voiceless supreme delight, Life that meets the Eternal with close breast, An unwalled mind dissolved in the Infinite, Force one with unimaginable rest?
"I, Earth, have a deeper power than Heaven; My lonely sorrow surpasses its rose-joys, A red and bitter seed of the raptures seven;— My dumbness fills with echoes of a far Voice.
"By me the last finite, yearning, strives To reach the last infinity's unknown, The Eternal is broken into fleeting lives And Godhead pent in the mire and the stone."
Dissolving the kingdoms of happy ease Rocked and split and faded their dream-chime. All vanished; ungrasped eternities Sole survived and Timelessness seized Time.
Earth's heart was felt beating below me still, Veiled, immense, unthinkable above My consciousness climbed like a topless hill, Crossed seas of Light to epiphanies of Love.
Home
Sri Aurobindo
Books
Share your feedback. Help us improve. Or ask a question.