Collected Poems - Sri Aurobindo Ashram

208 Baroda and Bengal, c. 1900 – 1909
Come down and know
What rapture lives in danger and o’erthrow.”
Yes, thou great sea,
I am more mighty and outbillow thee.
On thy tops I rise;
’Tis an excuse to dally with the skies.
Isinkbelow
The bottom of the clamorous world to know.
Onthesafeland
To linger is to lose what God has planned
For man’s wide soul,
Who set eternal godhead for its goal.
Therefore He arrayed
Danger and difficulty like seas and made
Pain and defeat,
And put His giant snares around our feet.
The cloud He informs
With thunder and assails us with His storms,
That man may grow
King over pain and victor of o’erthrow
Matching his great
Unconquerable soul with adverse Fate.
Take me, be
My way to climb the heavens, thou rude great sea.
I will seize thy mane,
O lion, I will tame thee and disdain;
Or else below
Into thy salt abysmal caverns go,
Receive thy weight
Upon me and be stubborn as my Fate.
I come, O Sea,
To measure my enormous self with thee.