COLLECTED POEMS

 SRI AUROBINDO

CONTENTS

This strutting “I” of human self and pride

         Is a puppet built by Nature for her use,

And dances as her strong compulsions bid,

         Forcefully feeble, brilliantly obtuse.

Our thinking is her leap of fluttering mind,

         We hear and see by her constructed sense;

Our force is hers; her colours have combined

         Our fly-upon-the-wheel magnificence.

He sits within who turns on her machine

         These beings, portions of his mystery,

Many dwarf beams of his great calm sunshine,

         A reflex of his sole infinity.

One mighty Self of cosmic act and thought

Employs this figure of a unit nought.    

    Omnipresence

He is in me, round me, facing everywhere.

         Self-walled in ego to exclude His right,

I stand upon its boundaries and stare

         Into the frontiers of the Infinite.

Each finite thing I see is a façade;

         From its windows looks at me the Illimitable.

In vain was my prison of separate body made;

         His occult presence burns in every cell.

He has become my substance and my breath;

         He is my anguish and my ecstasy.

My birth is His eternity’s sign, my death

         A passage of His immortality.

My dumb abysses are His screened abode;

In my heart’s chamber lives the unworshipped God.  

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   The Inconscient Foundation

My mind beholds¹ its veiled subconscient base,

         All the dead obstinate symbols of the past,

The hereditary moulds, the stamps of race

         Are upheld to sight, the old imprints effaced.

In a downpour of supernal light it reads

         The black Inconscient’s enigmatic script-

Recorded in a hundred shadowy screeds

         An inert world's obscure enormous drift;

All flames, is torn and burned and cast away.

         There slept the tab1es of the Ignorance,

There the dumb dragon edicts of her sway,

         The scriptures of Necessity and Chance.

Pure is the huge foundation left² and nude,

A boundless mirror of God’s infinitude.

     Adwaita

I walked on the high-wayed Seat of Solomon

         Where Shankaracharya’s tiny temple stands

Facing Infinity from Time’s edge, alone

         On the bare ridge ending earth’s vain romance.

Around me was a formless solitude:

         All had become one strange Unnamable,

An unborn sole Reality world-nude,

         Topless and fathomless, for ever still.

A Silence that was Being’s only word,

         The unknown beginning and the voiceless end

Abolishing all things moment-seen or heard,

         On an incommunicable summit reigned,

A lonely Calm and void unchanging Peace

On the dumb crest of Nature’s mysteries.

¹ My soul regards    ² now

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   The Hill-Top Temple

After unnumbered steps of a hill-stair

         I saw upon earth's head brilliant with sun

         The immobile Goddess in her house of stone

In a loneliness of meditating air.

Wise were the human hands that set her there

         Above the world and Time's dominion;

         The Soul of all that lives, calm, pure, alone,

Revealed its boundless self mystic and bare.

Our body is an epitome of some Vast

         That masks its presence by our humanness.

                  In us the secret Spirit can indite

                  A page and summary of the Infinite,

         A nodus of Eternity expressed

Live in an image and a sculptured face.

    Because Thou art

Because Thou art All-beauty and All-bliss,

         My soul blind and enamoured yearns for Thee;

It bears Thy mystic touch in all that is

         And thrills with the burden of that ecstasy.

Behind all eyes I meet Thy secret gaze

         And in each voice I hear Thy magic tune:

Thy sweetness haunts my heart through Nature’s ways;

         Nowhere it beats now from Thy snare immune.

It loves Thy body in all living things;

         Thy joy is there in every leaf and stone:

The moments bring Thee on their fiery wings;

         Sight’s endless artistry is Thou alone.

Time voyages with Thee upon its prow –

And all the future's passionate hope is Thou.

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     Divine Sight

Each sight is now immortal with Thy bliss:

         My soul through the rapt eyes has come to see;

A veil is rent and they no more can miss

         The miracle of Thy world-epiphany.

Into an ecstasy of vision caught

         Each natural object is of Thee apart,

A rapture-symbol from Thy substance wrought,

         A poem shaped in Beauty’s living heart,

A master-work of colour and design,

         A mighty sweetness borne on grandeur’s wings;

A burdened wonder of significant line

         Reveals itself in even commonest things.

All forms are Thy dream-dialect of delight,

O Absolute, O vivid Infinite.

      Divine Sense

Surely I take no more an earthly food

         But eat the fruits and plants of Paradise!

For Thou hast changed my sense’s habitude

         From mortal pleasure to divine surprise.

Hearing and sight are now an ecstasy,

         And all the fragrances of earth disclose

A sweetness matching in intensity

         Odour of the crimson marvel of the rose.

In every contact’s deep invading thrill,

         That lasts as if its source were infinite,

I feel Thy touch; Thy bliss imperishable

         Is crowded into that moment of delight.

The body burns with Thy rapture’s sacred fire,

Pure, passionate, holy, virgin of desire.

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     Immortality

I have drunk deep of God’s own liberty

         From which an occult sovereignty derives:

         Hidden in an earthly garment that survives,

I am the worldless being vast and free.

A moment stamped with that supremacy

         Has rescued me from cosmic hooks and gyves;

         Abolishing death and time my nature lives

In the deep heart of immortality.

God’s contract signed with Ignorance is torn;

         Time has become the Eternal’s endless year,

               My soul’s wide self of living infinite Space,¹  

Outlines its body luminous and unborn

         Behind the earth-robe; under the mask²  grows clear

               The mould of an imperishable face.

    Man, the Despot of Contraries

I am greater than the greatness of the seas,

         A swift tornado of God-energy:

A helpless flower that quivers in the breeze

         I am weaker than the reed one breaks with ease.

I harbour all the wisdom of the wise

         In my nature of stupendous Ignorance;

On a flame of righteousness I fix my eyes

         While I wallow in sweet sin and join hell’s dance.

My mind is brilliant like a full-orbed moon,

         Its darkness is the caverned troglodyte’s.

I gather long Time’s wealth and squander soon;

         I am an epitome of opposites.

I with repeated life death’s sleep surprise;

I am a transience of the eternities.

¹  My soul, the living self of infinite Space,    ²  under the earth

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    Evolution

I passed into a lucent still abode

         And saw as in a mirror crystalline

         An ancient Force ascending serpentine

The unhasting spirals of the aeonic road.

Earth was a cradle for the arriving god

         And man but a half-dark half-luminous sign

         Of the transition of the veiled Divine

From Matter’s sleep and the tormented load

Of ignorant life and death to the Spirit’s light.

         Mind liberated swam Light's ocean vast,

               And life escaped from its grey tortured line;

I saw Matter illumining its parent Night.

         The soul could feel into infinity cast

               Timeless God-bliss the heart incarnadine.

    The Silver Call

There is a godhead of unrealised things

         To which Time’s splendid gains are hoarded dross;

A cry seems near, a rustle of silver wings

         Calling to heavenly joy by earthly loss.

All eye has seen and all the ear has heard

         Is a pale illusion by some greater voice

And mightier vision; no sweet sound or word,

         No passion of hues that make the heart rejoice

Can equal these diviner ecstasies.

         A Mind beyond our mind has sole the ken

Of those yet unimagined harmonies,

         The fate and privilege of unborn men.

As rain-thrashed mire the marvel of the rose,

Earth waits that distant marvel to disclose.

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    The Inner Fields

There is a brighter ether than this blue

         Pretence of an enveloping heavenly vault,

        A deeper greenness than this laughing assault¹

Of emerald rapture pearled with tears of dew.

Immortal spaces of cerulean hue

         Are in our reach and fields without this fault

         Of drab brown earth and streams that never halt

In their deep murmur which white flowers strew

Floating like stars upon a strip of sky.

         This world behind is made of truer stuff

                  Than the manufactured tissue of earth’s grace.

There we can walk and see the gods go by

         And sip from Hebe’s cup nectar enough

                  To make for us heavenly limbs and deathless face.

¹ Royaler investiture than this massed assault

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