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COLLECTED POEMS
SRI AUROBINDO
CONTENTS
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Fragments
Morcundeya
O will of God that stiffest and the Void Is peopled, men have called thee force, upbudyed Upon whose wings the stars borne round and round Need not one hour of rest; light, form and sound Are marks of thy eternal movement. We See what thou choosest, but ’tis thou we see.
I Morcundeya whom the worlds release, The Seer, - but it is God alone that sees! – Soar up above the bonds that hold below Man to his littleness, lost in the show Perennial which the senses round him build; I find them out and am no more beguiled. But ere I rise, ere I become the vast And luminous Infinite and from the past And future utterly released forget These beings who themselves their bonds create, Once I will speak and what I see declare. The rest is God. There’s silence everywhere.
My eyes within were opened and I saw.
(Alexandrines)A voice arose that was so sweet and terrible It thrilled the heart with love and pain, as if all hell Tuned with all heaven in one inextricable note. Born from abysmal depths on highest heights to float, It carried all sorrow that the souls of creatures share, Yet hinted every rapture that the gods can bear. O Sun of God who camst into my blackest Night To sound and know its gulfs and bring the immortal light. Page-117 (Alexandrines)
I walked beside the waters of a world of light On a gold ridge guarding two seas of high-rayed night. One was divinely topped with a pale bluish moon And swam as in a happy deep spiritual swoon More conscious than earth’s waking; the other’s wide delight Billowed towards an ardent orb of diamond white. But where I stood, there joined in a bright marvellous haze The miracled moons with the long ridge’s golden blaze. I knew not if two wakings or two mighty sleeps Mixed the great diamond fires and the pale pregnant deeps, But all my glad expanding soul flowed satisfied Around me and became the mystery of their tide. As one who finds his own eternal self, content, Needing naught else beneath the spirit’s firmament, It knew not Space, it heard no more Time’s running feet, Termless, fulfilled, lost richly in itself, complete. And so it might have lain for ever. But there came A dire intrusion wrapped in married cloud and flame, Across the blue-white moon-hush of my magic seas A sudden sweeping of immense peripheries Of darkness ringing lambent lustres; shadowy-vast A nameless dread, a Power incalculable passed Whose feet were death, whose wings were immortality; Its changing mind was time, its heart eternity. All opposites were there, unreconciled, uneased, Struggling for victory, by victory unappeased. All things it bore, even that which brings undying peace, But secret, veiled, waiting for some supreme release. I saw the spirit of the cosmic Ignorance; I felt its power besiege my gloried fields of trance. Page-118 SHORT POEMS Urvasie
Pururavus from converse held with Gods On unseen crest of Nature high, occult, Traversed the tumult of the flame-tossed seas That cast their fire between the spirit’s poles. Alone like a bright star twixt earth and heaven, He reached the crossways of infinity.(eternity.) A Soul to our apparent life reborn Out of the vastness of the original Self, Journeying in dim momentous solitude Led by the flickering of uncertain suns, He essayed the fringe of Night’s tremendous home. Before him lay the subtle realm of light Our organed sense conceals, the light that gleams Across the sealless musings of the seer, A slumberless wide eye upon our scene. Attracted ( But destined ) to earth’s darkly pregnant dream He tarried not on these mysterious shores But still descended the divine abyss To new adventure in the eternal Night, Transgressed the wonder-line of things beyond Abruptly into mortal space and time. A Universe appeared of difficult birth, The labour of eclipsed and ignorant gods, An immortality of chance and change. Bridging the gulf between antagonist planes He saw the circles of Heaven’s rash advance, Sun upon sun, God’s sentinels in the void; Life’s radiant and immeasurable camp Blazed in the order of the aeonic Will. But with the menace of the dragon depths The old blind vigilant Nescience stretched afar Hungering in serpent dumb infinitude, And her dark shade besieged the luminaries. Silence and Death opposed the invading Fire. And even before he broke into our pale There came on him a breath from tarnished worlds. Page-119 Averse from an obscure material touch The images of the supernal realms( fields ) That he had left sank from the front of thought And held their session in the heart's dumb cave. The glory and grace, the light, the sacred life Receded as behind a burning door: Subliminal beneath the lid of mind The grandeur and the passion and the calm. His mind became a beat of memory. Sight, hearing changed towards our diminished scale; The little views grew great, the great grew small. As yet some largeness was of inmost things And he remembered in the formless sense Proud kingdoms of intense and beautiful life And love left free to do his absolute will And dreams at once commuted into power. Affronting many starfields of our space And shortening ever the vast lens of Time He met a smaller movement of desire Prisoned in the orbit of a few pale globes And knew in front our little solar belt Hung casually among the giant stars. Then ( Our) earth received him mid her living forms. Her deep inconscient motions packed and mute, Her darknesses more wise than her small lights Oppressed again his young divinity.
I look across the world and no horizon walls my gaze; I see Paris and Tokio and New York, I see the bombs bursting on, Barcelona and on canton streets. Man’s numberless misdeeds and rare good deeds take place within my single self.
I am the beast he slays, the bird he feeds and saves. The thoughts of unknown minds exalt me with their thrill, I carry the sorrow of millions in my lonely breast. Page-120 |