Collected Poems - Sri Aurobindo Ashram

598 Pondicherry, c. 1927 – 1947
The Ways of the Spirit [2]
Aroused from Matter’s sleep when Nature strove
Into the half lights of the embodied mind
She left not all imprisonment behind
But trailed an ever lengthening chain, and the love
Of shadows and half lustres went with her.
In timid mood were shaped our instruments;
Horizon and surface barriered thought and sense,
Forbidden to look too high, too deep to peer.
An algebra of signs, a scheme of sense,
A symbol language without depth or wings,
A power to handle deftly outward things
Are our scant earnings of intelligence.
Yet towards a greater Nature paths she keeps
Threading the grandeur of her climbing steeps.
Science and the Unknowable
In occult depths grow Nature’s roots unshown;
Each visible hides its base in the unseen,
Even the invisible guards what it can mean
In a yet deeper invisible, unknown.
Man’s science builds abstractions cold and bare
And carves to formulas the living whole;
It is a brain and hand without a soul,
A piercing eye behind our outward stare.
The objects that we see are not their form,
A mass of forces is the apparent shape;
Pursued and seized, their inner lines escape
In a vast consciousness beyond our norm.
Follow and you shall meet abysses still,
Infinite, wayless, mute, unknowable.