SUPPLEMENT TO VOLUME -  5

COLLECTED   POEMS

The following poems have all been taken from Sri Aurobindo's manuscripts. The Fragments are culled from the earliest manuscript in our possession, dating from the later part (1890 -1892) of his student days in England; the sonnets and the lyric are from the author's Baroda Period.  

FRAGMENTS

Blue lotus of the sea, on her large eyes

Ocean the tincture of nocturnal seas

Bestowed, the sweetness of her summer voice,

The flow of her green-rippling noonday laugh:

Night envied her long tresses and her cheeks

Were wild autumnal olives lightly flushed

With the shadow of a dying rose.  
                       

 We are no wizened hermits. . . . . . . .

 ……………………..whose fumbling hands

 Turn pale religious leaves, forgetting earth  

And this sweet natural light, this common air

That yet is precious, who with idiot scorn

And lunatic austerity repulse

The emparadising virtue of the soft

And roseate circle of a girl's embrace.

Nor know they lofty pride, nor golden words

Of wisest poets, nor to wield a spear,

To loose the silent winged snake of war,

To wrestle knee to knee with grisly death.

By meditation and insipid sweets

Of piety and goodness, they aspire

To passionless perfection, death in life

Pale nothingness. But we the stormy brood;

 Whom Ocean to imperious incest bore,

Were in the waste and ruinous conflict rocked

Of warring seas, and with thy nurturing milk

We drank the joy of battle, high disdain

That spurns obedience and the thirst unslaked

Indulgence prompts from sin to fiery sin.

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He passed the unbridged seas whose waters lap
The utmost promontories and escarped

 Immobile cliffs; he passed the desolate drifts,

The solitary sands, the antres wild,
Memorials of a mute, unstoried age;
He passed the secret woodland, whence the palm

Aspired, albeit of origin obscure,
To kiss high heaven, and the banyan spread

 Land-hungering tyrant, o'er full many a rood

 His bannered pomp; the pestilent fens he passed,

The salt and unplumbed marshes, direful nest

Of unkempt fever and malarious plague,
And that swan-cradling pool, blue Kolar called

Set like a jewel in the earth's brown throat.
All these he passed...

The heady rout of Maruts rode amain

Ratri the Ethiope handmaid of the Moon.

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