Collected Poems

As a student in England Sri Aurobindo wrote many poems in Greek and in Latin as school or college assignments. A typical assignment would be to render an English poem into Greek or Latin verse of a given metre. The Greek epigram below appears to be an example of such an assignment. Sri Aurobindo also learned French in England, and in later years wrote two poems in that language.

January 1892. Sri Aurobindo wrote this epigram in a notebook he used at Cambridge. At the end he wrote “Jan. 1892 (Porson Schol)”. This refers to the Porson Scholarship examination, which was held at Cambridge that month. In order to win this scholarship, candidates had to take twelve papers over the course of a week. One of the papers required contestants to provide a Greek translation of the following poem by Richard Carlton (born circa 1558), an English madrigal composer:

The witless boy that blind is to behold
Yet blinded sees what in our fancy lies
With smiling looks and hairs of curled gold
Hath oft entrapped and oft deceived the wise.
No wit can serve his fancy to remove,
For finest wits are soonest thralled to love.

Sir Edmund Leach, late provost of King's College, Cambridge, who provided the information on the scholarship examination, went on to add:

It is possible that [Sri Aurobindo] Ghose was a candidate
for the Porson Scholarship; alternatively it is possible that
his King's College supervisor set him the Porson Scholarship
paper as an exercise to provide practice for the Classical Tripos
examination which he was due to take in June 1892.

Sri Aurobindo's epigram is not a literal translation of the English poem, but an adaptation of it in Greek verse. Transliterated into the Latin alphabet, the Greek text reads as follows:

Mōros Erōs alaos th'; ho d'homōs ha g'eni phresi keitai
Hēmōn, ophthalmous ōn alaos kathora.
Pai, su gar hēdu gelōn iobostrukhe kalliprosōpe,
Diktuō andra kalō kai sophon exapatas.
Oude sophos per anēr se, doloploke, phuximos oudeis;
Kai proteros pantōn doulos erōti sophos.