Collected Poems - Sri Aurobindo Ashram

Incomplete Poems 667
O all my worlds, you who glitter and wander, God has devised you
Burning nails in my heart, stones of my prisonhouse. God,
Architect tranquil relentless and mighty, built and incised you,
Clamped with you Time, his road towards Nothingness, Death’s deep
abode.
I the Inconscient have passioned for life and its beat and its glory, —
Life that Death might die. O, was it life that He gave me?
Pulse of my darkness, reflex and nerve-beat! More hopeless I suffer,
Racked by the flame an obscure will in me kindled to save me.
Life? or a sorrowful throb of my Matter teaching it anguish,
Teaching it hope and desire trod down by Time in the mire?
Life? this joy that weeps for its briefness, this foot-path for sorrow?
Life, this embrace of a death treasuring some transient breath?
Boons of a shortlived sweetness twisted and turned into torture, —
Hope more blind than my Night, desire and its deadly delight,
Bliss that is small on the wings of a moment, vivid and fragile,
Love grown a kinsman to hate, will made an engine of Fate.
Torn with my anguish I cried out for knowledge, light on my midnight,
Light on my symbols of dream and a power in the Light to redeem.
Yea, was it knowledge He gave me, this thought that is tangled in darkness,
Ignorance reading its own record in sense and in stone?
Ignorance tracing its plans and its dreams on a canvas of error!
Mind this half-light in me born, like the glow of a morrowless morn?
Autographs, hieroglyphs of the reflexes life has engendered,
Spasms of matter caught into luminous figments of thought.
Nay, is not God but myself, Death’s euphemism fictioned immortal,
Nothing eternalised, bare, yet as if one who is None,
Death yet for ever alive, an Inconscient troubled with seemings,
Matter tormented with life, a Void with its forces at strife?