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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
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.
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. Page-127
He
passed the unbridged seas whose waters lap Immobile cliffs; he passed the desolate drifts, The
solitary sands, the antres wild, Aspired,
albeit of origin obscure, 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, Set
like a jewel in the earth’s brown throat. The heady rout of Maruts rode amain Ratri the Ethiope handmaid of the Moon. Page-128 |
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