COLLECTED POEMS

 SRI AUROBINDO

CONTENTS

    Transformation  

         My breath runs in a subtle rhythmic stream;

         It fills my members with a might divine:

         I have drunk the Infinite like a giant’s wine.

Time is my drama or my pageant dream.

Now are my illumined cells joy’s flaming scheme

         And changed my thrilled and branching nerves to fine

         Channels of rapture opal and Hyaline

For the influx of the Unknown and the Supreme.

I am no more a vassal of the flesh,

         A slave to Nature and her leaden rule;

I am caught no more in the senses’ narrow mesh.

My soul unhorizoned widens to measureless sight,

         My body is God’s happy living tool,

My spirit a vast sun of deathless light.  

    Nirvana

All is abolished but the mute Alone.

         The mind from thought released, the heart from grief

         Grow inexistent now beyond belief;

There is no I, no Nature, known-unknown.

The city, a shadow picture without tone,

         Floats, quivers unreal; forms without relief

         Flow, a cinema’s vacant shapes; like a reef

Foundering in shoreless gulfs the world is done.

Only the illimitable Permanent

         Is here. A Peace stupendous, featureless, still,

                  Replaces all, - what once was I, in It

A silent unnamed emptiness content

         Either .to fade in the Unknowable

                  Or thrill with the luminous seas of the Infinite.

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     The Other Earths

An irised multitude of hills and seas,

         And glint of brooks in the green wilderness,

And trackless stars, and miracled symphonies

         Of hues that float in ethers shadowless,

A dance of fire-flies in the fretted gloom,

         In a pale midnight the moon’s silver flare,

Fire-importunities of scarlet bloom

         And bright suddenness of wings in a golden air,

Strange bird and animal forms like memories cast

         On the rapt silence of unearthly woods,

Calm faces of the gods on backgrounds vast

         Bringing the marvel of the infinitudes,

Through glimmering veils of wonder and delight

World after world bursts on the awakened sight.

      Contrasts

What opposites are here! A trivial life

         Specks the huge dream of Death called Matter; intense

         In its struggle of weakness towards omnipotence,

A thinking mind starts from the unthinking strife

In the order of the electric elements.

         Immortal life breathed in that monstrous death,

         A mystery of Knowledge wore as sheath

Matter’s mute nescience. Its enveloped sense

Or dumb somnambulist will obscurely reigns.

         Driving the atoms in their cosmic course

         Whose huge unhearing movement serves perforce

The works of a strange blind omniscience.

The world’s deep contrasts are but figures spun

Draping the unanimity of the One.

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   Man, the Thinking Animal

A trifling unit in a boundless plan

         Amidst the enormous insignificance

         Of the unpeopled cosmos’ fire-whirl dance,

Earth, as by accident, engendered man:

A creature of his own grey ignorance,

         A mind half-shadow and half-gleam, a breath.

         That wrestles, captive in a world of death,

To live some lame brief years. Yet his advance,

Attempt of a divinity within,

         A consciousness in the inconscient Night,

         To realise its own supernal Light

Confronts the ruthless forces of the Unseen.

Aspiring to godhead from insensible clay

He travels slow-footed towards the eternal day.

    The Dumb Inconscient

The dumb Inconscient drew life’s stumbling maze;

         A night of all things, packed and infinite,

It made our consciousness a torch that plays

         Between the abyss¹  and a supernal Light;

         It framed² our mind a lens of segment sight,

         Piecing out inch by inch the world’s huge mass,

And reason a small hard theodolite

         Measuring unreally the measureless ways.

Yet is the dark Inconscient whence come all,

         The self-same Power that shines on high unwon;

Our night shall be a sky purpureal,

         The torch transmute to a vast godhead’s sun.

Man is a narrow bridge, a call that grows,

His soul the dim bud of God’s flaming rose.

¹ its night  ²  made

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    The Infinitesimal Infinite

Out of a still Immensity all came!

         These million universes were to it

The Poor light-bubbles of a trivial game,

         A fragile glimmer in the Infinite.

It could not find its soul in all that vast:

         It drew itself into, a little speck

Infinitesimal, ignobly cast,

         Out of earth’s mud and slime strangely awake, -

A tiny plasm on a little globe

         In the small, system of a dwarflike sun,

A little life wearing the flesh for robe,

         A little mind winged through wide space to run!

It lived, it knew, it saw its self sublime,

Deathless, outmeasuring Space, outlasting Time.

    Evolution

All is not finished in the Unseen’s decree!

         A mind beyond our mind demands our ken;

A life of unimagined harmony

         Awaits, concealed, the grasp of unborn men.

The crude beginnings of the lifeless earth

         And mindless stirrings of the plant and tree

Prepared our thought; thought for a godlike birth

         Broadens the mould of our mortality.

A might no human will or force could gain,

         A knowledge seated in eternity,

A joy¹ beyond our struggle and our pain

         Is this earth-hampered creature’s destiny.

O Thou who climbedst to mind from the dull stone,

Turn to the mirac1ed summits yet unwon.

¹ bliss

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   The One Self

All are deceived, do what the One Power dictates,

         Yet each thinks his own will his nature moves;

The hater knows not ’tis himself he hates,

         The lover knows not 'tis himself he 1oves.

In all is one being many bodies bear,

         There Krishna flutes upon the forest mood,

There Shiva sits ash-smeared, with matted hair.

         But Shiva and Krishna are the single God.

In us too Krishna seeks for love and joy,

         In us too Shiva struggles with the world’s grief.

One Self in all of us endures annoy,

         Cries in his pain and asks his fate’s relief.

My rival’s downfall is my own disgrace,

I look on my enemy and see Krishna’s face.

    Our godhead calls us

Our godhead calls us in unrealised things.

         Asleep in the wide fields of destiny,

A world guarded by Silence’ rustling wings

         Sheltered their fine impossibility.

But part, but quiver the cerulean gates,

         Close splendours look into our dreaming eyes,

We bear proud deities and magnificent fates;

         Faces and hands come near from Paradise.

What shone thus far above is here in us;

         Bliss unattained our future’s birthright is;

Beauty of our dim soul is amorous;

         We are the heirs of infinite widenesses.

The impossible is the hint of what shall be,

Mortal the door to immortality.

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    Discoveries of Science  I

Only by electric hordes your¹ world is run?

         But they are motes and spark-whirls of a Light,

A Fire of which your nebula and your sun

         Are glints and flame-drops scattered eremite.

Veiled²  by the unseen Light act other Powers,

         An Air of endless movement unbegun

Expanding and contracting in Time-hours,

         And the intangible ether of the One.

These surface findings - screen-phenomenon –³

         Are Nature’s offered reasons but behind

Her occult mysteries lurk safe unknown

         To the crude handling of the empiric Mind.

All yet⁴ discovered are but mire and trace

Of the eternal Energy in her race.

¹ the    ² And veiled    ³ These things, a front, a screen-phenomenon   ⁴ Your truths

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Discoveries of Science   II

How shall ascending nature near her goal? ¹

         Not through man’s stumbling tardy intellect

         Patient all forms and powers ² to dissect

But by the surer vision of his soul.

An algebra of mind, a scheme of sense,

         A symbol language without depth or wings,

         A power to handle deftly outward things

Are our scant earnings³ of intelligence.

The Truth ⁴ is greater and asks⁵ deeper ways.

         A sense that gathers all in its own being,⁶

                  A close and luminous touch,⁷ an intimate seeing,

A Thought flung free from the words' daedal maze,⁸

A tranquil heart in sympathy with all,

A will one-pointed, wide, imperial.

¹ How shall earth’s evolution find its goal?   ²  Godheads    ³  Is our poor booty

⁴ Our Spirit / The Soul.    ⁵ has     ⁶  into our being,   ⁷ A luminous touch direct,

⁸  A Thought that is a god’s all-seeing gaze,

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Discoveries of Science III

Our science is an abstract cold and, brief

         That cuts in formulas the living whole.

         It has a brain and head but not a soul:

It sees all things in outward carved relief.

But how without its depths can the world be known?

         The visible has its roots in the unseen

         And each invisible hides what it can mean

In a yet deeper invisible, unshown.

The objects that you probe are not their form.

         Each is a mass of forces thrown in shape.

         The forces caught, their inner-lines escape

In a fathomless consciousness beyond mind’s norm.

                  Probe it and you shall meet a Being¹ still

         Infinite, nameless, mute, unknowable.

¹ abysses

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