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COLLECTED POEMS
SRI AUROBINDO
CONTENTS
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II
SONNETS
1930-1950
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The kingdom Within
There is a kingdom of the spirit’s ease. It is not in this helpless swirl of thought, Foam from the world-sea or spray-whisper caught, With which we build mind’s shifting symmetries, Nor in life’s stuff of passionate unease, Nor the heart’s unsure emotions frailty wrought Nor trivial clipped sense-joys soon led1 to nought Nor in this body’s solid transiences.
Wider behind than the vast universe Our spirit scans the drama and the stir, A peace, a light, an ecstasy, a power Waiting at the end of blindness and the curse That veils it from its ignorant minister, The grandeur of its free eternal hour.
On a dire whirlpool in the hurrying river A life-stilled statue naked, bronze, severe He kept the posture of a deathless seer Unshaken by the mad water’s leap and shiver. Thought could not think in him; flesh could not quiver; The feet of Time could not adventure here: Only some unborn Power nude and austere, Only a Silence mighty to deliver.
His spirit world-wide and companionless Seated above the torrent of the days On the deep eddy that our being forms, Silent sustained the huge creation’s stress, Unchanged supporting Nature’s rounds and norms, Immobile background of the cosmic race.
1 brought Page-129 The Divine Hearing
All sounds, all voices have become Thy voice: Music and thunder and the cry of birds, Life’s babble of her sorrows and her joys, Cadence of human speech and murmured words,
The laughter of the sea’s enormous mirth, The winged plane purring through the conquered air, The auto’s trumpet-song of speed to earth, The machine's reluctant drone, the siren’s blare
Blowing upon the windy horn of Space A call of distance and of mystery, Memories of sun-bright lands and ocean-ways, - All now are wonder-tones and themes of Thee.
A secret harmony steals through the blind heart And all grows beautiful because Thou art.
The electron on which forms and worlds are built, Leaped into being, a particle of God. A spark from the eternal Energy spilt, It is the Infinite’s blind minute abode.
In that small flaming chariot Shiva rides. The One devised innumerably to be; His oneness in invisible forms he hides, Time’s tiny temples of ( to ) eternity.
Atom and molecule in. their unseen plan Buttress an edifice of strange onenesses, Crystal and plant, insect and beast and man, - Man on whom the World-Unity shall seize,
Widening his soul-spark to an epiphany Of the timeless vastness of Infinity. Page-130 I contain the whole world in my soul’s embrace: In me Arcturus and Belphegor burn. To whatsoever living form I turn I see my own body with another face.
All eyes that look on me are my sole eyes; The one heart that beats within all breasts is mine. The world’s happiness flows through me like wine, Its million sorrows are my agonies.
Yet all its acts are only waves that pass Upon my surface; inly for ever still, Unborn I sit, timeless, intangible: All things are shadows in my tranquil glass.
My vast transcendence holds the cosmic whirl; I am hid in it as in the sea a pearl.
I dwell in the spirit’s calm nothing can move And watch the actions of Thy vast world-force, Its mighty wings that through infinity move And the Time-gallopings of the deathless Horse.
This mute stupendous Energy that whirls The stars and nebulae in its long train, Like a huge Serpent through my being curls With its diamond hood of joy and fangs of pain.
It rises from the dim inconscient deep Upcoiling through the minds and hearts of men, Then touches on some height of luminous sleep The bliss and splendour of the eternal plane.
All this I bear in me, untouched and still Assenting to Thy all-wise inscrutable will. Page-131
I made an assignation with the Night; In the abyss was fixed our rendezvous: In my breast carrying God’s deathless light, I came her dark and dangerous heart to woo. I left the glory of the illumined Mind And the calm rapture of the divinised soul And travelled through a vastness dim and blind, To the grey shore where her ignorant waters roll. I walk by the chill wave through the dull slime And still that weary journeying knows no end; Lost is the lustrous godhead beyond Time, There comes no voice of the celestial.Friend, And yet I know my footprints’ track shall be A pathway towards Immortality.
However long Night’s hour, I will not dream That the small ego and the person’s mask Are all that God reveals in our life-scheme, The last result of Nature’s cosmic task. A greater Presence in her bosom works; Long it prepares its far epiphany: Even in the stone and beast the godhead lurks, A bright Persona of eternity. It shall burst out from the limit traced by Mind And make a. witness of the prescient heart; It shall reveal even in this inert blind Nature, long veiled in each inconscient part, Fulfilling the occult magnificent plan, The world-wide and immortal spirit in man. Page-132 The Inconscient
Out of a seeming void and dark-winged sleep Of dim Inconscient infinity A Power arose from the insentient deep, A flame-whirl of magician Energy.
Some huge somnambulist Intelligence. Devising without thought process and plan Arrayed the burning stars’ magnificence, The living bodies of beasts and the brain of man.
What stark Necessity or ordered Chance Became alive to know the cosmic whole? It magic of numbers, what mechanic dance Developed consciousness, assumed a soul?
The darkness was the Omnipotent’s abode, Hood of omniscience, a blind mask of God.
Liberation
I have thrown from me the whirling dance of mind And stand now in the spirit’s silence free; Timeless and deathless beyond creature-kind, The centre of my own eternity.
I have escaped and the small self is dead; I am immortal, alone, ineffable; I have gone out from the universe I made, And have grown nameless and immeasurable.
My mind is hushed in a wide and endless light, My heart a solitude of delight and peace, My sense unsnared by touch and sound and sight, My body a point in white infinities.
I am the one Being’s sole immobile Bliss: No one I am, I who am all that is. Page-133 |
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