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
With two exceptions, these poems were written in 1942 for publication in Collected Poems and Plays. Sri Aurobindo later commented that he wrote them “very rapidly—in the course of a week, I think”. In regard to “Flame-Wind” and “Trance of Waiting”, this would refer not to the composition but the revision, since the first drafts of these pieces were written during the mid 1930s. The fourteen poems, along with the first 371 lines of Ilion, first appeared as an appendix to On Quantitative Metre. This text was published as part of Collected Poems and Plays, and also as a separate book, in 1942. Each of the poems was followed by a footnote written by the author giving details of the metre used. These notes have not been included in the present volume, but maybe seen in the text of On Quantitative Metre, published in The Future Poetry with On Quantitative Metre, volume 26 of THE COMPLETE WORKS OF SRI AUROBINDO. The first 371 lines of Ilion appear in Part Five of the present volume as part of the full text of the poem.
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Silence is round me, wideness ineffable; White birds on the ocean diving and wandering; A soundless sea on a voiceless heaven, Azure on azure, is mutely gazing.
Identified with silence and boundlessness My spirit widens clasping the universe Till all that seemed becomes the Real, One in a mighty and single vastness.
Someone broods there nameless and bodiless, Conscious and lonely, deathless and infinite, And, sole in a still eternal rapture, Gathers all things to his heart for ever.
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