Sonnets of Sri Aurobindo

Table of Contents

Sonnets of Sri Aurobindo

Transformation

The Other Earths

Nirvana

Man the Thinking Animal

Contrasts

The Silver Call

Evolution [1]

The Call of the Impossible

Evolution [2]

Man the Mediator

The Infinitesimal Infinite

Discoveries of Science

The Ways of the Spirit [1]

The Ways of the Spirit [2]

Science and the Unknowable

The Yogi on the Whirlpool

The Kingdom Within

Now I have borne

Electron

The Indwelling Universal

Bliss of Identity

The Witness Spirit

The Hidden Plan

The Pilgrim of the Night

Cosmic Consciousness

Liberation [1]

The Inconscient

Life-Unity

The Golden Light

The Infinite Adventure

The Greater Plan

The Universal Incarnation

The Godhead

The Stone Goddess

The Cosmic Dance

Krishna

Shiva

Man the Enigma

The Word of the Silence

The Self’s Infinity

The Dual Being

Lila

Surrender

The Divine Worker

The Guest

The Inner Sovereign

Creation

A Dream of Surreal Science

In The Battle

The Little Ego

The Miracle of Birth

The Bliss of Brahman

Moments

The Body

Liberation [2]

Light

The Unseen Infinite

“I”

The Cosmic Spirit

Self

Omnipresence

The Inconscient Foundation

Adwaita

The Hill-Top Temple

The Divine Hearing

Because Thou Art

Divine Sight

Divine Sense

The Iron Dictators

Form

Immortality

Man, the Despot of Contraries

The One Self

The Inner Fields

Index

Index of Titles

Index of First Lines

Endnotes

Transformation [1]

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.

The Other Earths [2]

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 fireflies 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.

Nirvana [3]

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.

Man the Thinking Animal [4]

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.

Contrasts [5]

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.

The Silver Call [6]

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 those 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.

Evolution [1] [7]

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 Call of the Impossible [8]

A godhead moves us to unrealised things.

Asleep in the wide folds of destiny,

A world guarded by Silence’ rustling wings

Shelters their fine impossibility:

But parting quiver the caerulean gates;

Strange splendours look into our dreaming eyes;

We bear proud deities and magnificent fates;

Faces and hands come near from Paradise.

What shines above, waits darkling here in us:

Bliss unattained our future’s birthright is,

Beauty of our dim souls grows amorous,

We are the heirs of infinite widenesses.

The impossible is our mask of things to be,

Mortal the door to immortality.

Evolution [2] [9]

All is not finished in the unseen 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,

The 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 nor force can gain,

A knowledge seated in eternity,

A bliss beyond our struggle and our pain

Are the high pinnacles of our destiny.

O Thou who climb’dst to mind from the dull stone,

Face now the miracled summits still unwon.

Man the Mediator [10]

A 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 Abyss and a supernal Light.

Our mind was framed 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 came all

The self-same Power that shines on high unwon:

Our Night shall be a sky purpureal,

Our torch transmute to a vast godhead’s sun.

Rooted in mire heavenward man’s nature grows, —

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

The Infinitesimal Infinite [11]

Out of a still immensity we 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 upon a casual 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.

Discoveries of Science [12]

I saw the electric stream on which is run

The world turned motes and spark-whirls of a Light,

A Fire of which the nebula and sun

Are glints and flame-drops, scattered, eremite;

And veiled by viewless Light worked other Powers,

An Air of movement endless, unbegun,

Expanding and contracting in Time’s hours

And the intangible ether of the One.

The surface finds, the screen-phenomenon,

Are Nature’s offered ransom, while behind

Her occult mysteries lie safe, unknown,

From the crude handling of the empiric Mind.

Our truths discovered are but dust and trace

Of the eternal Energy in her race.

The Ways of the Spirit [1] [13]

What points ascending Nature to her goal?

’Tis not man’s lame transcribing intellect

With its carved figures rigid and erect

But the far subtle vision of his soul.

His instruments have served his weakness well

But they must change to tread the paths of Fire

That lead through his calm self immeasurable

To the last rapture’s incandescent spire.

The spirit keeps for him its ample ways,

A sense that takes the world into our being,

A close illumined touch and intimate seeing,

Wide Thought that is a god’s ensphering gaze,

A tranquil heart in sympathy with all,

A will wide-winging, armed, imperial.

The Ways of the Spirit [2] [14]

Aroused from Matter’s sleep when Nature strove

Into the half lights of the embodied mind

She left not all imprisonment behind

But trailed an ever lengthening chain, and the love

Of shadows and half lustres went with her.

In timid mood were shaped our instruments;

Horizon and surface barriered thought and sense,

Forbidden to look too high, too deep to peer.

An algebra of signs, a scheme of sense,

A symbol language without depth or wings,

A power to handle deftly outward things

Are our scant earnings of intelligence.

Yet towards a greater Nature paths she keeps

Threading the grandeur of her climbing steeps.

Science and the Unknowable [15]

In occult depths grow Nature’s roots unshown;

Each visible hides its base in the unseen,

Even the invisible guards what it can mean

In a yet deeper invisible, unknown.

Man’s science builds abstractions cold and bare

And carves to formulas the living whole;

It is a brain and hand without a soul,

A piercing eye behind our outward stare.

The objects that we see are not their form,

A mass of forces is the apparent shape;

Pursued and seized, their inner lines escape

In a vast consciousness beyond our norm.

Follow and you shall meet abysses still,

Infinite, wayless, mute, unknowable.

The Yogi on the Whirlpool [16]

On a dire whirlpool in the hurrying river,

A life-stilled statue naked, bronze, severe,

He kept the posture of a deathless seer

Unshaken by the mad water’s leap and shiver.

Thought could not think in him, flesh could not quiver;

The feet of Time could not adventure here;

Only some unknown Power nude and austere,

Only a Silence mighty to deliver.

His spirit world-wide and companionless,

Seated above the torrent of the days

On the deep eddy that our being forms,

Silent sustained the huge creation’s stress,

Unchanged supporting Nature’s rounds and norms,

Immobile background of the cosmic race.

The Kingdom Within [17]

There is a kingdom of the spirit’s ease.

It is not in this helpless swirl of thought,

Foam from the world-sea or spray whispers caught,

With which we build mind’s shifting symmetries,

Nor in life’s stuff of passionate unease,

Nor the heart’s unsure emotions frailly wrought

Nor trivial clipped sense-joys soon brought to nought,

Nor in this body’s solid transiences.

Wider behind than the vast universe

Our spirit scans the drama and the stir,

A peace, a light, an ecstasy, a power

Waiting at the end of blindness and the curse

That veils it from its ignorant minister

The grandeur of its free eternal hour.

Now I have borne [18]

Now I have borne Thy presence and Thy light,

Eternity assumes me and I am

A vastness of tranquillity and flame,

My heart a deep Atlantic of delight.

My life is a moving moment of Thy might

Carrying Thy vision’s sacred oriflamme

Inscribed with the white glory of Thy name

In the unborn silence of the Infinite.

My body is a jar of radiant peace,

The days a line across my timelessness,

My mind is made a voiceless breadth of Thee,

A lyre of muteness and a luminous sea;

Yet in each cell I feel Thy fire embrace,

A brazier of the seven ecstasies.

Electron [19]

The electron on which forms and worlds are built,

Leaped into being, a particle of God.

A spark from the eternal Energy spilt,

It is the Infinite’s blind minute abode.

In that small flaming chariot Shiva rides.

The One devised innumerably to be;

His oneness in invisible forms he hides,

Time’s tiny temples to eternity.

Atom and molecule in their unseen plan

Buttress an edifice of strange onenesses,

Crystal and plant, insect and beast and man, —

Man on whom the World-Unity shall seize,

Widening his soul-spark to an epiphany

Of the timeless vastness of Infinity.

The Indwelling Universal [20]

I contain the wide world in my soul’s embrace:

In me Arcturus and Belphegor burn.

To whatsoever living form I turn

I see my own body with another face.

All eyes that look on me are my sole eyes;

The one heart that beats within all breasts is mine.

The world’s happiness flows through me like wine,

Its million sorrows are my agonies.

Yet all its acts are only waves that pass

Upon my surface; inly for ever still,

Unborn I sit, timeless, intangible:

All things are shadows in my tranquil glass.

My vast transcendence holds the cosmic whirl;

I am hid in it as in the sea a pearl.

Bliss of Identity [21]

All Nature is taught in radiant ways to move,

All beings are in myself embraced.

O fiery boundless Heart of joy and love,

How art thou beating in a mortal’s breast!

It is Thy rapture flaming through my nerves

And all my cells and atoms thrill with Thee;

My body Thy vessel is and only serves

As a living wine-cup of Thy ecstasy.

I am a centre of Thy golden light

And I its vast and vague circumference;

Thou art my soul great, luminous and white

And Thine my mind and will and glowing sense.

Thy spirit’s infinite breath I feel in me;

My life is a throb of Thy eternity.

The Witness Spirit [22]

I dwell in the spirit’s calm nothing can move

And watch the actions of Thy vast world-force,

Its mighty wings that through infinity move

And the Time-gallopings of the deathless Horse.

This mute stupendous Energy that whirls

The stars and nebulae in its long train,

Like a huge Serpent through my being curls

With its diamond hood of joy and fangs of pain.

It rises from the dim inconscient deep

Upcoiling through the minds and hearts of men,

Then touches on some height of luminous sleep

The bliss and splendour of the eternal plane.

All this I bear in me, untouched and still,

Assenting to Thy all-wise inscrutable will.

The Hidden Plan [23]

However long Night’s hour, I will not dream

That the small ego and the person’s mask

Are all that God reveals in our life-scheme,

The last result of Nature’s cosmic task.

A greater Presence in her bosom works;

Long it prepares its far epiphany:

Even in the stone and beast the godhead lurks,

A bright Persona of eternity.

It shall burst out from the limit traced by Mind

And make a witness of the prescient heart;

It shall reveal even in this inert blind

Nature, long veiled in each inconscient part,

Fulfilling the occult magnificent plan,

The world-wide and immortal spirit in man.

The Pilgrim of the Night [24]

I made an assignation with the Night;

In the abyss was fixed our rendezvous:

In my breast carrying God’s deathless light

I came her dark and dangerous heart to woo.

I left the glory of the illumined Mind

And the calm rapture of the divinised soul

And travelled through a vastness dim and blind

To the grey shore where her ignorant waters roll.

I walk by the chill wave through the dull slime

And still that weary journeying knows no end;

Lost is the lustrous godhead beyond Time,

There comes no voice of the celestial Friend.

And yet I know my footprints’ track shall be

A pathway towards Immortality.

Cosmic Consciousness [25]

I have wrapped the wide world in my wider self

And Time and Space my spirit’s seeing are.

I am the god and demon, ghost and elf,

I am the wind’s speed and the blazing star.

All Nature is the nursling of my care,

I am the struggle and the eternal rest;

The world’s joy thrilling runs through me, I bear

The sorrow of millions in my lonely breast.

I have learned a close identity with all,

Yet am by nothing bound that I become;

Carrying in me the universe’s call

I mount to my imperishable home.

I pass beyond Time and life on measureless wings,

Yet still am one with born and unborn things.

Liberation [1] [26]

I have thrown from me the whirling dance of mind

And stand now in the spirit’s silence free;

Timeless and deathless beyond creature kind,

The centre of my own eternity.

I have escaped and the small self is dead;

I am immortal, alone, ineffable;

I have gone out from the universe I made,

And have grown nameless and immeasurable.

My mind is hushed in wide and endless light,

My heart a solitude of delight and peace,

My sense unsnared by touch and sound and sight,

My body a point in white infinities.

I am the one Being’s sole immobile Bliss:

No one I am, I who am all that is.

The Inconscient [27]

Out of a seeming void and dark-winged sleep

Of dim inconscient infinity

A Power arose from the insentient deep,

A flame-whirl of magician Energy.

Some huge somnambulist Intelligence

Devising without thought process and plan

Arrayed the burning stars’ magnificence,

The living bodies of beasts and the brain of man.

What stark Necessity or ordered Chance

Became alive to know the cosmic whole?

What magic of numbers, what mechanic dance

Developed consciousness, assumed a soul?

The darkness was the Omnipotent’s abode,

Hood of omniscience, a blind mask of God.

Life-Unity [28]

I housed within my heart the life of things,

All hearts athrob in the world I felt as mine;

I shared the joy that in creation sings

And drank its sorrow like a poignant wine.

I have felt the anger in another’s breast,

All passions poured through my world-self their waves;

One love I shared in a million bosoms expressed.

I am the beast man slays, the beast he saves.

I spread life’s burning wings of rapture and pain;

Black fire and gold fire strove towards one bliss:

I rose by them towards a supernal plane

Of power and love and deathless ecstasies.

A deep spiritual calm no touch can sway

Upholds the mystery of this Passion-play.

The Golden Light [29]

Thy golden Light came down into my brain

And the grey rooms of mind sun-touched became

A bright reply to Wisdom’s occult plane,

A calm illumination and a flame.

Thy golden Light came down into my throat,

And all my speech is now a tune divine,

A paean song of Thee my single note;

My words are drunk with the Immortal’s wine.

Thy golden Light came down into my heart

Smiting my life with Thy eternity;

Now has it grown a temple where Thou art

And all its passions point towards only Thee.

Thy golden Light came down into my feet;

My earth is now Thy playfield and Thy seat.

The Infinite Adventure [30]

On the waters of a nameless Infinite

My skiff is launched; I have left the human shore.

All fades behind me and I see before

The unknown abyss and one pale pointing light.

An unseen Hand controls my rudder. Night

Walls up the sea in a black corridor, —

An inconscient Hunger’s lion plaint and roar

Or the ocean sleep of a dead Eremite.

I feel the greatness of the Power I seek

Surround me; below me are its giant deeps,

Beyond, the invisible height no soul has trod.

I shall be merged in the Lonely and Unique

And wake into a sudden blaze of God,

The marvel and rapture of the Apocalypse.

The Greater Plan [31]

I am held no more by life’s alluring cry,

Her joy and grief, her charm, her laughter’s lute.

Hushed are the magic moments of the flute,

And form and colour and brief ecstasy.

I would hear, in my spirit’s wideness solitary,

The Voice that speaks when mortal lips are mute:

I seek the wonder of things absolute

Born from the silence of Eternity.

There is a need within the soul of man

The splendours of the surface never sate;

For life and mind and their glory and debate

Are the slow prelude of a vaster theme,

A sketch confused of a supernal plan,

A preface to the epic of the Supreme.

The Universal Incarnation [32]

There is a wisdom like a brooding Sun,

A Bliss in the heart’s crypt grown fiery white,

The heart of a world in which all hearts are one,

A Silence on the mountains of delight,

A Calm that cradles Fate upon its knees;

A wide Compassion leans to embrace earth’s pain;

A Witness dwells within our secrecies,

The incarnate Godhead in the body of man.

Our mind is a glimmering curtain of that Ray,

Our strength a parody of the Immortal’s power,

Our joy a dreamer on the Eternal’s way

Hunting the unseizable beauty of an hour.

Only on the heart’s veiled door the word of flame

Is written, the secret and tremendous Name.

The Godhead [33]

I sat behind the dance of Danger’s hooves

In the shouting street that seemed a futurist’s whim,

And suddenly felt, exceeding Nature’s grooves,

In me, enveloping me the body of Him.

Above my head a mighty head was seen,

A face with the calm of immortality

And an omnipotent gaze that held the scene

In the vast circle of its sovereignty.

His hair was mingled with the sun and breeze;

The world was in His heart and He was I:

I housed in me the Everlasting’s peace,

The strength of One whose substance cannot die.

The moment passed and all was as before;

Only that deathless memory I bore.

The Stone Goddess [34]

In a town of gods, housed in a little shrine,

From sculptured limbs the Godhead looked at me, —

A living Presence deathless and divine,

A Form that harboured all infinity.

The great World-Mother and her mighty will

Inhabited the earth’s abysmal sleep,

Voiceless, omnipotent, inscrutable,

Mute in the desert and the sky and deep.

Now veiled with mind she dwells and speaks no word,

Voiceless, inscrutable, omniscient,

Hiding until our soul has seen, has heard

The secret of her strange embodiment,

One in the worshipper and the immobile shape,

A beauty and mystery flesh or stone can drape.

The Cosmic Dance [35]

(Dance of Krishna, Dance of Kali)

Two measures are there of the cosmic dance.

Always we hear the tread of Kali’s feet

Measuring in rhythms of pain and grief and chance

Life’s game of hazard terrible and sweet.

The ordeal of the veiled Initiate,

The hero soul at play with Death’s embrace,

Wrestler in the dread gymnasium of Fate

And sacrifice a lonely path to Grace,

Man’s sorrows made a key to the Mysteries,

Truth’s narrow road out of Time’s wastes of dream,

The soul’s seven doors from Matter’s tomb to rise,

Are the common motives of her tragic theme.

But when shall Krishna’s dance through Nature move,

His mask of sweetness, laughter, rapture, love?

Krishna [36]

At last I find a meaning of soul’s birth

Into this universe terrible and sweet,

I who have felt the hungry heart of earth

Aspiring beyond heaven to Krishna’s feet.

I have seen the beauty of immortal eyes,

And heard the passion of the Lover’s flute,

And known a deathless ecstasy’s surprise

And sorrow in my heart for ever mute.

Nearer and nearer now the music draws,

Life shudders with a strange felicity;

All Nature is a wide enamoured pause

Hoping her lord to touch, to clasp, to be.

For this one moment lived the ages past;

The world now throbs fulfilled in me at last.

Shiva [37]

On the white summit of eternity

A single Soul of bare infinities,

Guarded he keeps by a fire-screen of peace

His mystic loneliness of nude ecstasy.

But, touched by an immense delight to be,

He looks across unending depths and sees

Musing amid the inconscient silences

The Mighty Mother’s dumb felicity.

Half now awake she rises to his glance;

Then, moved to circling by her heart-beats’ will,

The rhythmic worlds describe that passion-dance.

Life springs in her and Mind is born; her face

She lifts to Him who is Herself, until

The Spirit leaps into the Spirit’s embrace.

Man the Enigma [38]

A deep enigma is the soul of man.

His conscious life obeys the Inconscient’s rule,

His need of joy is learned in sorrow’s school,

His heart is a chaos and an empyrean.

His subtle Ignorance borrows Wisdom’s plan;

His mind is the Infinite’s sharp and narrow tool.

He wades through mud to reach the Wonderful,

And does what Matter must or Spirit can.

All powers in his living’s soil take root

And claim from him their place and struggling right:

His ignorant creature mind crawling towards light

Is Nature’s fool and Godhead’s candidate,

A demigod and a demon and a brute,

The slave and the creator of his fate.

The Word of the Silence [39]

A bare impersonal hush is now my mind,

A world of sight clear and inimitable,

A volume of silence by a Godhead signed,

A greatness pure of thought, virgin of will.

Once on its pages Ignorance could write

In a scribble of intellect the blind guess of Time

And cast gleam-messages of ephemeral light,

A food for souls that wander on Nature’s rim.

But now I listen to a greater Word

Born from the mute unseen omniscient Ray:

The Voice that only Silence’ ear has heard

Leaps missioned from an eternal glory of Day.

All turns from a wideness and unbroken peace

To a tumult of joy in a sea of wide release.

The Self’s Infinity [40]

I have become what before Time I was.

A secret touch has quieted thought and sense:

All things by the agent Mind created pass

Into a void and mute magnificence.

My life is a silence grasped by timeless hands;

The world is drowned in an immortal gaze.

Naked my spirit from its vestures stands;

I am alone with my own self for space.

My heart is a centre of infinity,

My body a dot in the soul’s vast expanse.

All being’s huge abyss wakes under me,

Once screened in a gigantic Ignorance.

A momentless immensity pure and bare,

I stretch to an eternal everywhere.

The Dual Being [41]

There are two beings in my single self.

A Godhead watches Nature from behind

At play in front with a brilliant surface elf,

A time-born creature with a human mind.

Tranquil and boundless like a sea or sky,

The Godhead knows himself Eternity’s son.

Radiant his mind and vast, his heart as free;

His will is a sceptre of dominion.

The smaller self by Nature’s passions driven,

Thoughtful and erring learns his human task;

All must be known and to that Greatness given

His mind and life, the mirror and the mask.

As with the figure of a symbol dance

The screened Omniscient plays at Ignorance.

Lila [42]

In us is the thousandfold Spirit who is one,

An eternal thinker calm and great and wise,

A seer whose eye is an all-regarding sun,

A poet of the cosmic mysteries.

A critic Witness pieces everything

And binds the fragments in his brilliant sheaf;

A World-adventurer borne on Destiny’s wing

Gambles with death and triumph, joy and grief.

A king of greatness and a slave of love,

Host of the stars and guest in Nature’s inn,

A high spectator spirit throned above,

A pawn of passion in the game divine,

One who has made in sport the suns and seas

Mirrors in our being his immense caprice.

Surrender [43]

O Thou of whom I am the instrument,

O secret Spirit and Nature housed in me,

Let all my mortal being now be blent

In Thy still glory of divinity.

I have given my mind to be dug Thy channel mind,

I have offered up my will to be Thy will:

Let nothing of myself be left behind

In our union mystic and unutterable.

My heart shall throb with the world-beats of Thy love,

My body become Thy engine for earth-use;

In my nerves and veins Thy rapture’s streams shall move;

My thoughts shall be hounds of Light for Thy power to loose.

Keep only my soul to adore eternally

And meet Thee in each form and soul of Thee.

The Divine Worker [44]

I face earth’s happenings with an equal soul;

In all are heard Thy steps: Thy unseen feet

Tread Destiny’s pathways in my front. Life’s whole

Tremendous theorem is Thou complete.

No danger can perturb my spirit’s calm:

My acts are Thine; I do Thy works and pass;

Failure is cradled on Thy deathless arm,

Victory is Thy passage mirrored in Fortune’s glass.

In this rude combat with the fate of man

Thy smile within my heart makes all my strength;

Thy Force in me labours at its grandiose plan,

Indifferent to the Time-snake’s crawling length.

No power can slay my soul; it lives in Thee.

Thy presence is my immortality.

The Guest [45]

I have discovered my deep deathless being:

Masked by my front of mind, immense, serene

It meets the world with an Immortal’s seeing,

A god-spectator of the human scene.

No pain and sorrow of the heart and flesh

Can tread that pure and voiceless sanctuary.

Danger and fear, Fate’s hounds, slipping their leash

Rend body and nerve, — the timeless Spirit is free.

Awake, God’s ray and witness in my breast,

In the undying substance of my soul

Flamelike, inscrutable the almighty Guest.

Death nearer comes and Destiny takes her toll;

He hears the blows that shatter Nature’s house:

Calm sits he, formidable, luminous.

The Inner Sovereign [46]

Now more and more the Epiphany within

Affirms on Nature’s soil His sovereign rights.

My mind has left its prison-camp of brain;

It pours, a luminous sea from spirit heights.

A tranquil splendour, waits my Force of Life

Couched in my heart, to do what He shall bid,

Poising wide wings like a great hippogriff

On which the gods of the empyrean ride.

My senses change into gold gates of bliss;

An ecstasy thrills through touch and sound and sight

Flooding the blind material sheath’s dull ease:

My darkness answers to His call of light.

Nature in me one day like Him shall sit

Victorious, calm, immortal, infinite.

Creation [47]

Since Thou hadst all eternity to amuse,

O sculptor of the living shapes of earth,

O dramatist of death and life and birth,

World-artist revelling in forms and hues,

Hast Thou shaped the marvel of the whirling spheres,

A scientist passing Nature through his tubes,

And played with numbers, measures, theorems, cubes,

O mathematician Mind that never errs,

Building a universe from Thy theories?

Protean is Thy spirit of delight,

Craftsman minute and architect of might,

World-adept of a thousand mysteries.

Or forged some deep Necessity, not Thy whim,

Fate and Inconscience and the net of Time?

A Dream of Surreal Science [48]

One dreamed and saw a gland write Hamlet, drink

At the Mermaid, capture immortality;

A committee of hormones on the Aegean’s brink

Composed the Iliad and the Odyssey.

A thyroid, meditating almost nude

Under the Bo-tree, saw the eternal Light

And, rising from its mighty solitude,

Spoke of the Wheel and eightfold Path all right.

A brain by a disordered stomach driven

Thundered through Europe, conquered, ruled and fell,

From St Helena went, perhaps, to Heaven.

Thus wagged on the surreal world, until

A scientist played with atoms and blew out

The universe before God had time to shout.

In The Battle [49]

Often, in the slow ages’ wide retreat

On Life’s long bridge through Time’s enormous sea,

I have accepted death and borne defeat

If by my fall some gain were clutched for Thee.

To this world’s inconscient Power Thou hast given the right

To oppose the shining passage of my soul:

She levies on each step the tax of Night.

Doom, her unjust accountant, keeps the roll.

Around my way the Titan forces press;

This earth is theirs, they hold the days in fee,

I am full of wounds and the fight merciless:

Is it not yet Thy hour of victory?

Even as Thou wilt! What still to Fate Thou owest,

O Ancient of the worlds, Thou knowest, Thou knowest.

The Little Ego [50]

This puppet ego the World-Mother made,

This little profiteer of Nature’s works,

Her trust in his life-tenancy betrayed,

Makes claim on claim, all debt to her he shirks.

Each movement of our life our ego fills;

Inwoven in each thread of being’s weft,

When most we vaunt our selflessness, it steals

A sordid part; no corner void is left.

One way lies free, our heart and soul to give,

Our body and mind to Thee and every cell,

And steeped in Thy world-infinity to live.

Then lost in light, shall fade the ignoble spell.

Nature, of her rebellion quit, shall be

A breath of the spirit’s vast serenity.

The Miracle of Birth [51]

I saw my soul a traveller through Time;

From life to life the cosmic ways it trod,

Obscure in the depths and on the heights sublime,

Evolving from the worm into the god.

A spark of the eternal Fire, it came

To build a house in Matter for the Unborn.

The inconscient sunless Night received the flame,

In the brute seed of things dumb and forlorn

Life stirred and Thought outlined a gleaming shape

Till on the stark inanimate earth could move,

Born to somnambulist Nature in her sleep,

A thinking creature who can hope and love.

Still by slow steps the miracle goes on,

The Immortal’s gradual birth mid mire and stone.

The Bliss of Brahman [52]

I am swallowed in a foam-white sea of bliss,

I am a curving wave of God’s delight,

A shapeless flow of happy passionate light,

A whirlpool of the streams of Paradise.

I am a cup of His felicities,

A thunderblast of His golden ecstasy’s might,

A fire of joy upon creation’s height;

I am His rapture’s wonderful abyss.

I am drunken with the glory of the Lord,

I am vanquished by the beauty of the Unborn;

I have looked alive on the Eternal’s face.

My mind is cloven by His radiant sword,

My heart by His beatific touch is torn,

My life is a meteor-dust of His flaming Grace.

Moments [53]

If perfect moments on the peak of things,

These tops of knowledge, greatness, ecstasy,

Are only moments, this too enough might be.

I have put on the rapid flaming wings

Of souls whom the Ignorance black-robed Nature brings

And the frail littleness of mortality

Can bind not always. A high sovereignty

Makes them awhile creation’s radiant kings.

These momentary upliftings of the soul

Prepare the spirit’s glorious permanence.

The peace of God, a mighty transience,

Is now my spirit’s boundless atmosphere.

All parts are gathered into a timeless whole;

All moments blaze in an eternal year.

The Body [54]

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!

Liberation [2] [55]

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.

Light [56]

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.

The Unseen Infinite [57]

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.

“I” [58]

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.

The Cosmic Spirit [59]

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.

Self [60]

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.”

Omnipresence [61]

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.

The Inconscient Foundation [62]

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.

Adwaita [63]

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.

The Hill-Top Temple [64]

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.

The Divine Hearing [65]

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.

Because Thou Art [66]

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.

Divine Sight [67]

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.

Divine Sense [68]

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.

The Iron Dictators [69]

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!

Form [70]

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.

Immortality [71]

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.

Man, the Despot of Contraries [72]

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.

The One Self [73]

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.

The Inner Fields [74]

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.

Index

Index of Titles

A Dream of Surreal Science

Adwaita

Because Thou Art

Bliss of Identity

Contrasts

Cosmic Consciousness

Creation

Discoveries of Science

Divine Sense

Divine Sight

Electron

Evolution [1]

Evolution [2]

Form

“I”

Immortality

In The Battle

Krishna

Liberation [1]

Liberation [2]

Life-Unity

Light

Lila

Man, the Despot of Contraries

Man the Enigma

Man the Mediator

Man the Thinking Animal

Moments

Nirvana

Now I have borne

Omnipresence

Science and the Unknowable

Self

Shiva

Surrender

The Bliss of Brahman

The Body

The Call of the Impossible

The Cosmic Dance

The Cosmic Spirit

The Divine Hearing

The Divine Worker

The Dual Being

The Godhead

The Golden Light

The Greater Plan

The Guest

The Hidden Plan

The Hill-Top Temple

The Inconscient

The Inconscient Foundation

The Indwelling Universal

The Infinite Adventure

The Infinitesimal Infinite

The Inner Fields

The Inner Sovereign

The Iron Dictators

The Kingdom Within

The Little Ego

The Miracle of Birth

The One Self

The Other Earths

The Pilgrim of the Night

The Self’s Infinity

The Silver Call

The Stone Goddess

The Universal Incarnation

The Unseen Infinite

The Ways of the Spirit [1]

The Ways of the Spirit [2]

The Witness Spirit

The Word of the Silence

The Yogi on the Whirlpool

Transformation

Index of First Lines

A bare impersonal hush is now my mind,

A deep enigma is the soul of man.

A dumb Inconscient drew life’s stumbling maze,

A godhead moves us to unrealised things.

A trifling unit in a boundless plan

After unnumbered steps of a hill-stair

All are deceived, do what the One Power dictates,

All is abolished but the mute Alone.

All is not finished in the unseen decree;

All Nature is taught in radiant ways to move,

All sounds, all voices have become Thy voice,

An irised multitude of hills and seas,

Arisen to voiceless unattainable peaks

Aroused from Matter’s sleep when Nature strove

At last I find a meaning of soul’s birth

Because Thou art All-beauty and All-bliss,

Each sight is now immortal with Thy bliss:

He is in me, round me, facing everywhere.

He said, “I am egoless, spiritual, free,”

However long Night’s hour, I will not dream

I am a single Self all Nature fills.

I am greater than the greatness of the seas,

I am held no more by life’s alluring cry,

I am swallowed in a foam-white sea of bliss,

I contain the wide world in my soul’s embrace:

I dwell in the spirit’s calm nothing can move

I face earth’s happenings with an equal soul;

I have become what before Time I was.

I have discovered my deep deathless being:

I have drunk deep of God’s own liberty

I have thrown from me the whirling dance of mind

I have wrapped the wide world in my wider self

I housed within my heart the life of things,

I looked for Thee alone, but met my glance

I made an assignation with the Night;

I passed into a lucent still abode

I sat behind the dance of Danger’s hooves

I saw my soul a traveller through Time;

I saw the electric stream on which is run

I walked on the high-wayed Seat of Solomon

If perfect moments on the peak of things,

In a town of gods, housed in a little shrine,

In occult depths grow Nature’s roots unshown;

In us is the thousandfold Spirit who is one,

Light, endless Light! darkness has room no more,

My breath runs in a subtle rhythmic stream;

My mind, my soul grow larger than all Space;

My soul regards its veiled subconscient base;

Now I have borne Thy presence and Thy light,

Now more and more the Epiphany within

O Thou of whom I am the instrument,

O worshipper of the formless Infinite,

Often, in the slow ages’ wide retreat

On a dire whirlpool in the hurrying river,

On the waters of a nameless Infinite

On the white summit of eternity

One dreamed and saw a gland write Hamlet, drink

Out of a seeming void and dark-winged sleep

Out of a still immensity we came.

Since Thou hadst all eternity to amuse,

Surely I take no more an earthly food

The electron on which forms and worlds are built,

There are two beings in my single self.

There is a brighter ether than this blue

There is a godhead of unrealised things

There is a kingdom of the spirit’s ease.

There is a wisdom like a brooding Sun,

This body which was once my universe,

This puppet ego the World-Mother made,

This strutting “I” of human self and pride

Thy golden Light came down into my brain

Two measures are there of the cosmic dance.

What opposites are here! A trivial life

What points ascending Nature to her goal?

Endnotes

Transformation

[1] Transformation. Circa 1933. This sonnet was published in the Calcutta Review in October 1934. Two months earlier, Sri Aurobindo asked his secretary to type copies of this poem and three others (“The Other Earths”, “The World Game” and “Symbol Moon”) from the notebook in which they and others had been written. When “Transformation” and “The Other Earths” were published in 1934, Sri Aurobindo informed a disciple that they were “some years old already” (Letters on Poetry and Art, p. 211), but it is unlikely that they were more than a year old at that time. The first draft of “Transformation” occurs in a notebook just after the first draft of “Trance”, which is dated 16 October 1933; it is probable that “Transformation” was written the same year. There are two handwritten and two typed manuscripts of this poem.

In a note written after “Transformation” and the next two sonnets were typed for publication, Sri Aurobindo said that he wanted the sestets of Miltonic sonnets to be set as they have been set in the present book, irrespective of rhyme scheme.

The Other Earths

[2] The Other Earths. Circa 1933. This sonnet was published in the Calcutta Review in October 1934. Its first draft occurs just after the first draft of “Transformation”, which is dated 16 October 1933; thus it belongs, in all probability, to the year 1933. See the note to “Transformation” for more details. Writing to a disciple who was trying to translate it into Bengali, Sri Aurobindo wrote that the line “Fire importunities of scarlet bloom” meant “an abundance of scarlet blossoms importuning (constantly insisting, besieging) with the fire of their vivid hues”. There are two handwritten and two typed manuscripts of this poem.

Nirvana

[3] Nirvana. August 1934. This sonnet was written while the texts of “Transformation” and “The Other Earths” were being prepared for publication in the Calcutta Review. It was published along with them in that journal in October 1934. There are two handwritten manuscripts and one typed manuscript of this poem.

Man the Thinking Animal

[4] Man the Thinking Animal. Circa 1934. Five handwritten manuscripts and one typed manuscript, the earliest contemporaneous with close-to-final drafts of “Transformation” and “The Other Earths”.

Contrasts

[5] Contrasts. Circa 1934. Five handwritten manuscripts and one typed manuscript, the earliest contemporaneous with close-to-final drafts of “Transformation” and “The Other Earths”.

The Silver Call

[6] The Silver Call. Written on or before 25 April 1934 (when Sri Aurobindo quoted five lines in a letter to Dilip Kumar Roy); revised 1944. Five handwritten manuscripts and one typed manuscript; the first handwritten manuscript was written shortly after those of the two preceding sonnets. The original poem went through several versions, eventually becoming two, “The Silver Call” and “The Call of the Impossible”. The final version of “The Silver Call” is dated “193 – (?) / 23.3.44”.

Evolution [1]

[7] Evolution [1]. Circa 1934, revised 1944. Five handwritten manuscripts and one typed manuscript, that is dated “193 – (?) / 22.3.44”. This poem and the one above were often worked on together, as were the two that follow.

The Call of the Impossible

[8] The Call of the Impossible. 1934; revised subsequently. Four handwritten manuscripts and one typed manuscript. This poem began as a variant of “The Silver Call”: the first lines of the two poems were once identical — “There is a godhead in unrealised things” — and the first rhyming words remain the same even in the final versions.

Evolution [2]

[9] Evolution [2]. Circa 1934. Two handwritten and one typed manuscript. The handwritten drafts were written around the same time as early drafts of “The Call of the Impossible”; the final typed version of the two poems are also contemporaneous. The present sonnet has the same title as the one which forms a pair with “A Silver Call” (see “Evolution [1]” above). There is no textual relation between it and its namesake, but there is some between it and “The Silver Call”: its closing couplet was first used as the close of “The Silver Call” and its second and fourth lines are similar to the tenth and twelfth lines of “The Silver Call”.

Man the Mediator

[10] Man the Mediator. Circa 1934. Four handwritten manuscripts and one typed manuscript.

The Infinitesimal Infinite

[11] The Infinitesimal Infinite. Circa 1934. This sonnet and two others were published in Sri Aurobindo Circle, Bombay, in 1948. Three handwritten and four typed drafts of this sonnet precede the Circle publication.

Discoveries of Science

[12] Discoveries of Science. Circa 1934 – 35. Three handwritten manuscripts.

The Ways of the Spirit [1]

[13] The Ways of the Spirit [1]. Circa 1934 – 35. Four handwritten manuscripts.

The Ways of the Spirit [2]

[14] The Ways of the Spirit [2]. No title in the manuscript. Circa 1934 – 35. Three handwritten manuscripts.

Science and the Unknowable

[15] Science and the Unknowable. Circa 1934 – 35. Three handwritten manuscripts.

The Yogi on the Whirlpool

[16] The Yogi and the Whirlpool. 1936. Two handwritten manuscripts, neither of them dated, but certainly written just before “The Kingdom Within”.

The Kingdom Within

[17] The Kingdom Within. 14 March 1936. Two handwritten manuscripts.

Now I have borne

[18] Now I have borne. No title in the manuscript. 2 February 1938. Two handwritten manuscripts.

Electron

[19] Electron. 15 July 1938. Two handwritten manuscripts.

The Indwelling Universal

[20] The Indwelling Universal. 15 July 1938. Two handwritten manuscripts.

Bliss of Identity

[21] Bliss of Identity. 25 July 1938, revised 21 March 1944. Two handwritten manuscripts, the first entitled “Identity”.

The Witness Spirit

[22] The Witness Spirit. 26 July 1938, revised 21 March 1944. Two handwritten manuscripts.

The Hidden Plan

[23] The Hidden Plan. 26 July 1938, revised 18 and 21 March 1944. Two handwritten manuscripts.

The Pilgrim of the Night

[24] The Pilgrim of the Night. 26 July 1938, revised 18 March 1944. Three handwritten manuscripts, the first entitled “In the Night”.

Cosmic Consciousness

[25] Cosmic Consciousness. 26 July 1938, revised apparently on 21 March 1944. Two handwritten manuscripts, the first entitled “The Cosmic Man”.

Liberation [1]

[26] Liberation [1]. 27 July 1938, revised 22 March 1944. Two handwritten manuscripts.

The Inconscient

[27] The Inconscient. 27 July 1938, revised 21 March 1944. Two handwritten manuscripts.

Life-Unity

[28] Life-Unity. 8 August 1938, revised 22 March 1944. Two handwritten manuscripts.

The Golden Light

[29] The Golden Light. 8 August 1938, revised 22 March 1944. Two handwritten manuscripts.

The Infinite Adventure

[30] The Infinite Adventure. 11 September 1939. Three handwritten manuscripts.

The Greater Plan

[31] The Greater Plan. 12 September 1939. Three handwritten manuscripts.

The Universal Incarnation

[32] The Universal Incarnation. 13 September 1939. Four handwritten manuscripts.

The Godhead

[33] The Godhead. 13 September 1939. Three handwritten manuscripts. This sonnet is about an experience Sri Aurobindo had during the first year of his stay in Baroda (1893).

The Stone Goddess

[34] The Stone Goddess. 13 September 1939. Four handwritten manuscripts. This sonnet is about an experience Sri Aurobindo had at a temple in Karnali, on the banks of the Narmada, near the end of his stay in Baroda (c.1904 – 06.)

The Cosmic Dance

[35] The Cosmic Dance. 15 September 1939. Published with “The Infinitesimal Infinite” and “Man the Enigma” in Sri Aurobindo Circle in 1948. Four handwritten and two typed drafts precede the Circle publication.

Krishna

[36] Krishna. 15 September 1939. Three handwritten manuscripts.

Shiva

[37] Shiva. 16 September 1939. Three handwritten manuscripts.

Man the Enigma

[38] Man the Enigma. 17 September 1939. Published with “The Infinitesimal Infinite” and “The Cosmic Dance” in 1948. Three handwritten and two typed manuscripts precede the Circle publication.

The Word of the Silence

[39] The Word of the Silence. 18 – 19 September 1939. Three handwritten manuscripts.

The Self’s Infinity

[40] The Self’s Infinity. 18 – 19 September 1939. Three handwritten manuscripts, the second one entitled “Self-Infinity”.

The Dual Being

[41] The Dual Being. 19 September 1939. Three handwritten manuscripts.

Lila

[42] Lila. 20 September 1939. Three handwritten manuscripts, the second entitled “The Thousandfold One”.

Surrender

[43] Surrender. 20 September 1939. Three handwritten manuscripts.

The Divine Worker

[44] The Divine Worker. 20 September 1939. Three handwritten manuscripts.

The Guest

[45] The Guest. 21 September 1939. Three handwritten manuscripts, the first two entitled “The Guest of Nature”.

The Inner Sovereign

[46] The Inner Sovereign. 22 September 1939, revised 27 September. Three handwritten manuscripts, the first two entitled “The Sovereign Tenant”.

Creation

[47] Creation. 24 September 1939, revised 28 September. Three handwritten manuscripts, the first two entitled “The Conscious Inconscient”.

A Dream of Surreal Science

[48] A Dream of Surreal Science. 25 September 1939. Three handwritten manuscripts.

In The Battle

[49] In the Battle. 25 September 1939. Two handwritten manuscripts.

The Little Ego

[50] The Little Ego. 26 September 1939, revised 29 September. Two handwritten manuscripts.

The Miracle Of Birth

[51] The Miracle of Birth. 27 September 1939, revised 29 September. Six handwritten manuscripts, the second entitled “The Divine Mystery”, the third “The Divine Miracle-Play”, and the fourth and fifth “The Miracle-Play”.

The Bliss Of Brahman

[52] The Bliss of Brahman. 29 September 1939, revised 21 October. Five handwritten manuscripts; the first has the epigraph: “He who has found the bliss of the Brahman, has no fear from any quarter./ Upanishad [Taittiriya Upanishad 2.4]”.

Moments

[53] Moments. 29 September 1939, revised 2 October. Four handwritten manuscripts.

The Body

[54] The Body. 2 October 1939. Three handwritten manuscripts.

Liberation [2]

[55] Liberation [2]. 2 – 3 October 1939, revised 5 November. Three handwritten manuscripts.

Light

[56] Light. 3 – 4 October 1939. Three handwritten manuscripts.

The Unseen Infinite

[57] The Unseen Infinite. 4 October 1939. Three handwritten manuscripts, the first entitled “The Omnipresent”.

“I”

[58] “I”. 15 October 1939, revised 5 November. Two handwritten manuscripts.

The Cosmic Spirit

[59] The Cosmic Spirit. 15 October 1939, revised 5 November. Two handwritten manuscripts, the first entitled “Cosmic Consciousness”, revised to “Cosmic Self”.

Self

[60] Self. 15 October 1939. Three handwritten manuscripts, the first entitled “Liberty”.

Omnipresence

[61] Omnipresence. 17 October 1939. Three handwritten manuscripts, the first two entitled “The Omnipresent”.

The Inconscient Foundation

[62] The Inconscient Foundation. 18 October 1939, revised 7 February 1940. Two handwritten manuscripts.

Adwaita

[63] Adwaita. 19 October 1939. Three handwritten manuscripts. This poem was written about an experience Sri Aurobindo had while walking on the Takht-i-Sulaiman (“Seat of Solomon”), near Srinagar, in Kashmir, in 1903.

The Hill-Top Temple

[64] The Hill-top Temple. 21 October 1939. Three handwritten manuscripts, the first two entitled “The Temple on the Hill-top”. This sonnet is about an experience Sri Aurobindo had at a shrine in the temple-complex on Parvati Hill, near Poona, probably in 1902.

The Divine Hearing

[65] The Divine Hearing. 24 October 1939. Three handwritten manuscripts, one of which is entitled “Sounds”.

Because Thou Art

[66] Because Thou art. 25 October 1939. Three handwritten manuscripts, all untitled.

Divine Sight

[67] Divine Sight. 26 October 1939. Three handwritten manuscripts.

Divine Sense

[68] Divine Sense. 1 November 1939. Three handwritten manuscripts.

The Iron Dictators

[69] The Iron Dictators. 14 November 1939. Two handwritten manuscripts.

Form

[70] Form. 16 November 1939. Three handwritten manuscripts.

Immortality

[71] Immortality. 8 February 1940. One handwritten manuscript.

Man, the Despot of Contraries

[72] Man, the Despot of Contraries. 29 July 1940. Two handwritten manuscripts; the first one, entitled “The Spirit of Man”.

The One Self

[73] The One Self. 1945 – 47. One handwritten manuscript, undated, but in the almost illegible handwriting of the late 1940s.

The Inner Fields

[74] The Inner Fields. 14 March 1947. One handwritten manuscript, legible only with difficulty, and another in the handwriting of Nirodbaran, Sri Aurobindo’s scribe.