Collected Poems
CONTENTS
Part One
England and Baroda 1883 1898| Poem Published in 1883 Light |
| Complete Narrative Poems Urvasie Canto Love and Death |
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Sonnets from Manuscripts, c. 1900 1901 |
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Poems from Ahana and Other Poems |
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Poems from Manuscripts, c. 1900 1906 |
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Satirical Poem Published in 1907 Reflections of Srinath Paul, Rai Bahadoor, on the Present Discontents |
| Two Poems in Quantitative Hexameters Ilion |
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Poems Written as Metrical Experiments |
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Incomplete Poems from Manuscripts, c. 1927 1947 The Inconscient and the Traveller Fire The Fire King and the Messenger I am filled with the crash of war In the silence of the midnight |
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This body which was once my universe, Is now a pittance carried by the soul, — Its Titan's motion bears this scanty purse, Pacing through vastness to a vaster goal.
Too small was it to meet the giant need That only infinitude can satisfy: He keeps it still, for in the folds is hid His secret passport to eternity.
In his front an endless Time and Space deploy The landscape of their golden happenings; His heart is filled with sweet and violent joy, His mind is upon great and distant things.
How grown with all the world conterminous Is the little dweller in this narrow house!
My mind, my soul grow larger than all Space; Time founders in that vastness glad and nude: The body fades, an outline, a dim trace, A memory in the spirit's solitude.
This universe is a vanishing circumstance In the glory of a white infinity Beautiful and bare for the Immortal's dance, House-room of my immense felicity.
In the thrilled happy giant void within Thought lost in light and passion drowned in bliss, Changing into a stillness hyaline, Obey the edict of the Eternal's peace.
Life's now the Ineffable's dominion; Nature is ended and the spirit alone.
Page – 617
Light, endless Light! darkness has room no more, Life's ignorant gulfs give up their secrecy: The huge inconscient depths unplumbed before Lie glimmering in vast expectancy.
Light, timeless Light immutable and apart! The holy sealed mysterious doors unclose. Light, burning Light from the Infinite's diamond heart Quivers in my heart where blooms the deathless rose.
Light in its rapture leaping through the nerves! Light, brooding Light! each smitten passionate cell In a mute blaze of ecstasy preserves A living sense of the Imperishable.
I move in an ocean of stupendous Light Joining my depths to His eternal height.
Arisen to voiceless unattainable peaks I meet no end, for all is boundless He, An absolute joy the wide-winged spirit seeks, A Might, a Presence, an Eternity.
In the inconscient dreadful dumb Abyss Are heard the heart-beats of the Infinite. The insensible midnight veils His trance of bliss, A fathomless sealed astonishment of Light.
In His ray that dazzles our vision everywhere, Our half-closed eyes seek fragments of the One: Only the eyes of Immortality dare To look unblinded on that living Sun.
Yet are our souls the Immortal's selves within, Comrades and powers and children of the Unseen.
Page – 618
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.
I am a single Self all Nature fills. Immeasurable, unmoved the Witness sits: He is the silence brooding on her hills, The circling motion of her cosmic mights.
I have broken the limits of embodied mind And am no more the figure of a soul. The burning galaxies are in me outlined; The universe is my stupendous whole.
My life is the life of village and continent, I am earth's agony and her throbs of bliss; I share all creatures' sorrow and content And feel the passage of every stab and kiss.
Impassive, I bear each act and thought and mood: Time traverses my hushed infinitude.
Page – 619
He said, "I am egoless, spiritual, free," Then swore because his dinner was not ready. I asked him why. He said, "It is not me, But the belly's hungry god who gets unsteady."
I asked him why. He said, "It is his play. I am unmoved within, desireless, pure. I care not what may happen day by day." I questioned him, "Are you so very sure?"
He answered, "I can understand your doubt. But to be free is all. It does not matter How you may kick and howl and rage and shout, Making a row over your daily platter.
To be aware of self is liberty. Self I have got and, having self, am free."
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.
Page – 620
My soul regards 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. Here slept the tables of the Ignorance, There the dumb dragon edicts of her sway, The scriptures of Necessity and Chance.
Pure is the huge foundation now and nude, A boundless mirror of God's infinitude.
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 Unnameable, 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.
Page – 621
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.
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.
Page – 622
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 hunts 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.
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 a part, 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.
Page – 623
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.
I looked for Thee alone, but met my glance The iron dreadful Four who rule our breath, Masters of falsehood, Kings of ignorance, High sovereign Lords of suffering and death.
Whence came these formidable autarchies, From what inconscient blind Infinity, — Cold propagandists of a million lies, Dictators of a world of agony?
Or was it Thou who bor'st the fourfold mask? Enveloping Thy timeless heart in Time, Thou hast bound the spirit to its cosmic task, To find Thee veiled in this tremendous mime.
Thou, only Thou, canst raise the invincible siege, O Light, O deathless Joy, O rapturous Peace!
Page – 624
O worshipper of the formless Infinite, Reject not form, what dwells in it is He. Each finite is that deep Infinity Enshrining His veiled soul of pure delight. Form in its heart of silence recondite Hides the significance of His mystery, Form is the wonder-house of eternity, A cavern of the deathless Eremite.
There is a beauty in the depths of God, There is a miracle of the Marvellous That builds the universe for its abode. Bursting into shape and colour like a rose, The One, in His glory multitudinous, Compels the great world-petals to unclose.
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 Outlines its body luminous and unborn Behind the earth-robe; under the earth-mask grows clear The mould of an imperishable face.
Page – 625
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.
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 loves.
In all is one being many bodies bear; Here Krishna flutes upon the forest road, Here 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.
Page – 626
There is a brighter ether than this blue Pretence of an enveloping heavenly vault, A deeper greenness than this laughing assault Of emerald rapture pearled with tears of dew. Immortal spaces of caerulean 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.
Page – 627 |