Collected Poems - Sri Aurobindo Ashram

580 Pondicherry, c. 1927 – 1947
Renewal
When the heart tires and the throb stills recalling
Things that were once and again can be never,
When the bow falls and the drawn string is broken,
Hands that were clasped, yet for ever are parted,
When the soul passes to new births and bodies,
Lands never seen and meetings with new faces,
Is the bow raised and the fall’n arrow fitted,
Acts that were vain rewedded to the Fate-curve?
To the lives sundered can Time bring rejoining,
Love that was slain be reborn with the body?
In the mind null, from the heart’s chords rejected,
Lost to the sense, but the spirit remembers!
Soul’s Scene
The clouds lain on forlorn spaces of sky, weary and lolling,
Watch grey waves of a lost sea wander sad, reckless and rolling,
A bare anguish of bleak beaches made mournful with the
breath of the Northwind
And a huddle of melancholy hills in the distance.
The blank hour in some vast mood of a Soul lonely in Nature
On earth’s face puts a mask pregnantly carved, cut to misfeature,
And man’s heart and his stilled mind react hushed in a spiritual
passion
Imitating the contours of her desolate waiting.
Impassible she waits long for the sun’s gold and the azure,
The sea’s song with its slow happy refrain’s plashes of pleasure, —
As man’s soul in its depths waits the outbreaking of the light
and the godhead
And the bliss that God felt when he created his image.