Collected Poems - Sri Aurobindo Ashram

Incomplete Poems 521
The Tale of Nala [1]
Nala, Nishadha’s king, paced by a stream
Which ran, escaping from the solitudes
To flow through gardens in a pleasant land.
Murmuring it came of the green souls of hills
And of the towns and hamlets it had seen,
The brown-limbed peasants toiling in the sun,
And the tired bullocks in the thirsty fields.
In its bright talk and laughter it recalled
The moonlight and the lapping dangerous tongues,
The sunlight and the skimming wings of birds,
And gurgling jars, and bright bathed limbs of girls
At morning, and its noons and lonely eves.
This memory to the jasmine trees it sang
Which dropped their slow white petalled kisses down
Upon its haste of curling waves. Far off
A mountain rose, alone and purple vague,
Wide-watching from its large stone-lidded eye
The drowsy noontide earth; vastly outspread
Like Vindhya changed, against the height of heaven
It stood and on the deep-blue nearness leaned
Its shoulder in a mighty indolence.
Reclined for giant rest the Titan paused.
The birds were voiceless on the unruffled boughs;
The spotted lizard in a dull unease
Basked on his sentinel stone, a single kite
Circled above; white-headed over rust
Of brown and gold he stained the purple noon.
Solitary in the spaces of his mind
Among these sights and sounds King Nala paced
Oblivious of the joy of outward things.
Shrill and dissatisfied the wanderer’s cry
Came to his ear; he saw with absent eyes
The rapid waters in their ripple run
Nor marked the ruddy sprouting of the leaves,
Nor heard the dove’s rare cooing in the trees.