Collected Poems - Sri Aurobindo Ashram

The Meditations of Mandavya 511
While all the time He tells us, “It is nought.”
And now we say we never can be free,
For Nature binds us, for the fire must burn,
The water drown and death must seize his prey
And grief and torture do their will with us
And sin be like a lion with the world,
Because ’tis Nature. Man’s not infinite,
The proof is with us every day, they cry,
And God Himself’s a huge machine at last.
Yet over us all the while Thought’s lightnings play
And all the while within us works His love.
Now more than when the play began, He laughs.
2
Now I believe that it is possible
To manage the arising clouds, to silence
The thunder when it roars and put our rein
Upon the lightnings. Only first within
The god we must coerce who wallows here
In love with his subjection and confined
By his own servants, wantonly enslaved
To every lure and every tempting bond.
And therefore man loves power, but power o’ercome,
Force that accepts its limits. Wherefore then
A limit? Why not dare the whole embrace,
The vast attraction? Let us risk extinction then
If by that venture immortality
And high omnipotence come near our grasp.
’Tis not the little rippling wayward seas,
Nor all huge ocean tumbled by its storms
That can be our exemplar. The vault of heaven
Is not a true similitude for man
Whose space outgyres thought’s last horizon. Something
There is in us fears not the night beyond,
But breathless sails, unanchored, without helm,
Where mind and senses fail. Our naked soul