Collected Poems - Sri Aurobindo Ashram

24 England and Baroda, 1883 – 1898
By this treasure-house of flowers
In the sweet ambiguous hours.
Many a girl’s lips ruby-red
With their vernal honey fed
Happy mouths, and soft cheeks flushed
With Love’s rosy sunlight blushed.
Ruddy lips of many a boy
Blithe discovered hills of joy
Ruby-guided through a kiss
To the sweet highways of bliss.
Here they saw the evening still
Coming slowly from the hill
And the patient stars arise
To their outposts in the skies;
Heard the ocean shoreward urge
The speed and thunder of his surge,
Singing heard as though a bee
Noontide waters on the sea.
These no longer. For our rose
In her place they wreathed once, blows,
And thy glorious garland, sweet,
Kissed not once those wandering feet.
All the lights of spring are ended,
To the wintry haven wended.
Beauty’s boons and nectarous leisure,
Lips, the honeycombs of pleasure,
Cheeks enrosed, Love’s natal soil,
Breasts, the ardent conqueror’s spoil,
Spring rejects; a lovelier child
His brittle fancies has beguiled.
O her name that to repeat
Than the Dorian muse more sweet
Could the white hand more relume
Writing and refresh the bloom
Of lips that used such syllables then,
Dies unloved by later men.