Overhead Poetry

Exile

With you unseen, what shall my song adore?

Though waves foam-garland all the saffron shore

My music cannot mingle with their tone,

Because a purer worship I have known.

How shall I join the birds' delight of space,

Whose eyes have winged the heaven of your face?

Or with the rain urge blossoms to be sweet,

When I have lost the altar of your feet?

A lone tranquillity whose eyelids fall

Is now my only voice, for thus I call

Your godhead back: the gates of outwardness

I shut and my lost rapture repossess—

Your spirit in my spirit, deep in the deep,

Walled by a wizardry of shining sleep.

Sri Aurobindo's Comment

"I find it very good. It is not sentimental at all, for feeling and sentiment are not the same thing. It comes from the intuitive mind and has a note of fine adequacy which is often the best form for that inspiration to take. The last two lines are more intense and come straight from the Intuition itself—an expression not of mind, but of truth-sight pure and sheer."

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