Collected Poems - Sri Aurobindo Ashram

Thou bright choregus
Thou bright choregus of the heavenly dance
Who with thy lively beauty wouldst endear
The alien stars and turnst thy paler glance
To us thy dominating sphere
Why didst thou with Erinna impart thy mind,
The faithful copyist of this cruelty,
Who to usurpers pays allegiance kind
Passing the true pretender by?
Like a white statue
Like a white statue made of lilies
Her eyes were hidden jewels beneath scabbards of black silk: her
shoulders moonlit mountain-slopes when they are coated with
new-fallen snow: her breasts two white apples odorous with the
sweet fragrance of girlhood, her body a heap of silk in a queen’s
closet, her legs were marble pillars very clear-cut, her face ivory
flushed by the dawn.
He frowned on her like a dark cloud instinct with rain over
a tall white ship at sea.
The full orb of her loveliness revealed as when the fleecy gown
is stripped from the shoulders of the moon and she stands naked
in heaven.
The moon of the three worlds.
Her gait was the swan’s in stateliness, the other’s wild and jocund
as the sea-fowl, her hair windtost, her eyes sparkling like bubbles
in a wine-cup, her face slim and very girlish.