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.
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O grey wild sea, Thou hast a message, thunderer, for me. Their huge wide backs Thy monstrous billows raise, abysmal cracks Dug deep between. One pale boat flutters over them, hardly seen. I hear thy roar Call me, "Why dost thou linger on the shore With fearful eyes Watching my tops visit their foam-washed skies? This trivial boat Dares my vast battering billows and can float. Death if it find, Are there not many thousands left behind? Dare my wide roar, Nor cling like cowards to the easy shore.
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Come down and know What rapture lives in danger and o'erthrow." Yes, thou great sea, I am more mighty and outbillow thee. On thy tops I rise; 'Tis an excuse to dally with the skies. I sink below The bottom of the clamorous world to know. On the safe land To linger is to lose what God has planned For man's wide soul, Who set eternal godhead for its goal. Therefore He arrayed Danger and difficulty like seas and made Pain and defeat, And put His giant snares around our feet. The cloud He informs With thunder and assails us with His storms, That man may grow King over pain and victor of o'erthrow Matching his great Unconquerable soul with adverse Fate. Take me, be My way to climb the heavens, thou rude great sea. I will seize thy mane, O lion, I will tame thee and disdain; Or else below Into thy salt abysmal caverns go, Receive thy weight Upon me and be stubborn as my Fate. I come, O Sea, To measure my enormous self with thee.
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