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
These eight poems were published as a booklet by the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in 1946. (Four of them—”Musa Spiritus”, “Bride of the Fire”, “The Blue Bird” and “A God's Labour”—had appeared in journals connected with the Ashram earlier the same year.) All the poems were written at least a decade, one of them four and a half decades, before 1946. The first draft of “Hell and Heaven” dates back to around 1902, early drafts of “Kamadeva” and “Life” to around 1913. A notebook containing these three early poems was uncovered by Sri Aurobindo's secretary, Nolini Kanta Gupta, in April 1932. He typed out copies and sent them to Sri Aurobindo with this note: “I have copied these poems out of a notebook that was being hopelessly eaten away by insects. I do not know how far I have been able to recover the text.” Sri Aurobindo revised these poems around that time, adding a fourth, “One Day”, while he worked. Several years later these four poems were published along with four that had been written in 1935 and 1936 under the title Poems Past and Present. The eight poems are reproduced here in the order in which they are printed in that book.
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O Word concealed in the upper fire, Thou who hast lingered through centuries, Descend from thy rapt white desire, Plunging through gold eternities.
Into the gulfs of our nature leap, Voice of the spaces, call of the Light! Break the seals of Matter's sleep, Break the trance of the unseen height.
In the uncertain glow of human mind, Its waste of unharmonied thronging thoughts, Carve thy epic mountain-lined Crowded with deep prophetic grots.
Let thy hue-winged lyrics hover like birds Over the swirl of the heart's sea. Touch into sight with thy fire-words The blind indwelling deity.
O Muse of the Silence, the wideness make In the unplumbed stillness that hears thy voice; In the vast mute heavens of the spirit awake Where thy eagles of Power flame and rejoice.
Out, out with the mind and its candle flares, Light, light the suns that never die. For my ear the cry of the seraph stars And the forms of the Gods for my naked eye!
Let the little troubled life-god within Cast his veils from the still soul, His tiger-stripes of virtue and sin, His clamour and glamour and thole and dole;
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All make tranquil, all make free. Let my heart-beats measure the footsteps of God As He comes from His timeless infinity To build in their rapture His burning abode.
Weave from my life His poem of days, His calm pure dawns and His noons of force. My acts for the grooves of His chariot-race, My thoughts for the tramp of His great steeds' course!
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