Collected Poems - Sri Aurobindo Ashram

668 Pondicherry, c. 1927 – 1947
O by my thought to escape from myself out of thought into Nothing —
Thus I had hoped to dissolve, rapt in some tensionless Bliss,
Rending the Illusion I made to be immobile and formless and timeless —
This dream too now I leave, long not even to cease.
Into my numb discontent I have lapsed of a universe barren,
Goalless, condemned to survive, a spirit of matter in pain.
Now have I known myself as this boundless finite, this darkness
Shadowily self-lit, grown content to strive without end and in vain.
Fire that travellest from immortality, spark of the Timeless,
Why hast thou come to my night, an unbearable Idol of Light?
Ah from what happier universe strayedst thou kindling my torpor?
Thou, O spirit of Light, perturb not my vastness of Night.
I walked beside the waters
I walked beside the waters of a world of light
On a gold ridge guarding two seas of high-rayed night.
One was divinely topped with a pale bluish moon
And swam as in a happy deep spiritual swoon
More conscious than earth’s waking; the other’s wide delight
Billowed towards an ardent orb of diamond white.
But where I stood, there joined in a bright marvellous haze
The miracled moons with the long ridge’s golden blaze.
I knew not if two wakings or two mighty sleeps
Mixed the great diamond fires and the pale pregnant deeps,
But all my glad expanding soul flowed satisfied
Around me and became the mystery of their tide.
As one who finds his own eternal self, content,
Needing naught else beneath the spirit’s firmament,
It knew not Space, it heard no more Time’s running feet,
Termless, fulfilled, lost richly in itself, complete.
And so it might have lain for ever. But there came
A dire intrusion wrapped in married cloud and flame,