Collected Poems - Sri Aurobindo Ashram

Sonnets 619
“I”
This strutting “I” of human self and pride
Is a puppet built by Nature for her use,
And dances as her strong compulsions bid,
Forcefully feeble, brilliantly obtuse.
Our thinking is her leap of fluttering mind,
We hear and see by her constructed sense:
Our force is hers; her colours have combined
Our fly-upon-the-wheel magnificence.
He sits within who turns on her machine
These beings, portions of his mystery,
Many dwarf beams of his great calm sunshine,
A reflex of his sole infinity.
One mighty Self of cosmic act and thought
Employs this figure of a unit nought.
The Cosmic Spirit
I am a single Self all Nature fills.
Immeasurable, unmoved the Witness sits:
He is the silence brooding on her hills,
The circling motion of her cosmic mights.
I have broken the limits of embodied mind
And am no more the figure of a soul.
The burning galaxies are in me outlined;
The universe is my stupendous whole.
My life is the life of village and continent,
I am earth’s agony and her throbs of bliss;
I share all creatures’ sorrow and content
And feel the passage of every stab and kiss.
Impassive, I bear each act and thought and mood:
Time traverses my hushed infinitude.