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 published three short volumes of poetry, and a volume on poetics that included poems as illustrations, between 1934 and 1946. One of the volumes of poems, Poems Past and Present, comprises Part Six of the present volume. The other volumes are included in this part, which also contains complete and incomplete poems from his manuscripts of the same period.
These poems were written in 1932, 1933 and 1934. In 1934 a book was planned that would include the six poems along with translations of them into Bengali by disciples of Sri Aurobindo. This book was published by Rameshwar & Co., Chandernagore, before the end of the year. Shown a proposed publicity blurb for the book, Sri Aurobindo wrote: “One can't blow one's own trumpet in this monstrous way, nor do I want it to be indicated that I am publishing this book. It is Nolini's publication, not mine. Why can't a decent notice be given instead of these terrible blurbs?” He also wrote his own descriptive paragraph stating that the six poems were in “novel English metres” and that the book included “notes on the metres of the poems and their significance drawn from the letters of Sri Aurobindo”. The texts as well as the notes were reprinted in Collected Poems and Plays (1942).
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Gold-white wings a throb in the vastness, the bird of flame went glimmering over a sunfire curve to the haze of the west, Skimming, a messenger sail, the sapphire-summer waste of a soundless wayless burning sea. Now in the eve of the waning world the colour and splendour returning drift through a blue-flicker air back to my breast, Flame and shimmer staining the rapture-white foam-vest of the waters of Eternity.
Gold-white wings of the miraculous bird of fire, late and slow have you come from the Timeless. Angel, here unto me Bringst thou for travailing earth a spirit silent and free or His crimson passion of love divine,— White-ray-jar of the spuming rose-red wine drawn from the vats brimming with light-blaze, the vats of ecstasy, Pressed by the sudden and violent feet of the Dancer in Time from his sun-grape fruit of a deathless vine?
White-rose-altar the eternal Silence built, make now my nature wide, an intimate guest of His solitude, But golden above it the body of One in Her diamond sphere with Her halo of star-bloom and passion-ray! Rich and red is thy breast, O bird, like blood of a soul climbing the hard crag-teeth world, wounded and nude, A ruby of flame-petalled love in the silver-gold altar-vase of moon-edged night and rising day.
O Flame who art Time's last boon of the sacrifice, offering-flower held by the finite's gods to the Infinite, O marvel bird with the burning wings of light and the unbarred lids that look beyond all space, One strange leap of thy mystic stress breaking the barriers of mind and life, arrives at its luminous term thy flight; Invading the secret clasp of the Silence and crimson Fire thou frontest eyes in a timeless Face.
Page 547
17 October 1933. No handwritten manuscripts of this poem survive. There are three typed manuscripts, two of which are dated 17 October 1933. In a letter written shortly afterwards, Sri Aurobindo said that “Bird of Fire” was “written on two consecutive days—and afterwards revised”. He also wrote that this poem and “Trance” (see below) were completed the same day.[^1]
[^1]: Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Poetry and Art, volume 27 of THE COMPLETE WORKS OF SRI AUROBINDO, p. 244.
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