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
Sri Aurobindo wrote most of these pieces in a somewhat playful effort to match metrical models submitted to him by his disciple Dilip Kumar Roy. As Dilip writes in Sri Aurobindo Came to Me, p. 233: “At the time I was transposing some English modulations into our Bengali verse which he [Sri Aurobindo] greatly appreciated in so much that, to encourage me, he composed short poems now and then as English counterparts to my Bengali bases.” One such experiment resulted in the poem “Thought the Paraclete”, which Sri Aurobindo later revised and included in the book Poems (see above). All but one of the others existing one or more drafts in Sri Aurobindo's notebooks of the period. The exception, “In some faint dawn”, is known only by the text published by Dilip in Sri Aurobindo Came to Me. The nine poems published in that book are reproduced here in the same order. Another poem written in response to a letter from Dilip is placed before the rest, while two others, also metrical experiments, have been placed at the end of Dilip's set. All the poems except the last seem to have been written in 1934. All but one are untitled in the manuscripts.
O pall of black Night painted with still gold stars, Hang now thy folds, close, clinging against earth's bars, O dim Night! Then Slumber shall come swinging the unseen Gates, and to lands guarded by a screen Of strange light Set out, my soul charioted on a swift dream From earth escape slipping into the unknown gleam, The Ray white.
No title in the manuscript. Circa 1934. Three handwritten manuscripts. See Letters on Poetry and Art, pp. 236-37, for a letter that shows the genesis of this poem.
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