Collected Poems - Sri Aurobindo Ashram

186 Baroda, c. 1898 – 1902
There are flowers in God’s garden of prouder blooming
Brilliant and bold and bright,
The tulip and rose are fierier and brighter,
But this has a softer hue, a whiter
And milder light.
Long be thy days in rain and sunshine,
Often thy spring relume,
Gladdening thy mother’s heart with thy beauty,
Flowerlike doing thy gentle duty
To be loved and bloom.
A Doubt
Many boons the new years make us
But the old world’s gifts were three,
Dove of Cypris, wine of Bacchus,
Pan’s sweet pipe in Sicily.
Love, wine, song, the core of living
Sweetest, oldest, musicalest.
If at end of forward striving
These, Life’s first, proved also best?
The Nightingale
An Impression
Hark in the trees the low-voiced nightingale
Has slain the silence with a jubilant cry;
How clear in the hushed night, yet voluble
And various as sweet water wavering by,
That murmurs in a channel small
Beneath a low grey wall,
Then sings amid the fitful rye.