Collected Poems - Sri Aurobindo Ashram

54 England and Baroda, 1883 – 1898
A blue papyrus-leaf designed
With fretted curls of fire,
A purple page with coronet lined
Or labyrinthine spire:
The fiery-coloured bee of night
With folded purple wing,
Or solitary chrysolite
Shut in an emerald ring:
The vellum binding of a book,
A scented volume spiced with Ind,
A magic purse by Genie shook
To loose a murmuring wind.
And in the bridal pomp of hell
Walked Beauty hand-in-hand with sin,
And Thought, the glorious infidel,
Ahelmèd Paladin;
When shutting under cloudy bars
Astarte’s radiant eye,
God sowed with multitudinous stars
His peacock in the sky.
The diamonds perished from the deep,
The moon-tints from the edge,
The wrinkled water smoothed in sleep
His locks of ruffled sedge.
Imagination, like a sponge
Wrung very pure of beauty, wept,
As from his pores with a tired plunge
His flakes of fancy leaped.
But hark! a wailing anguish woke
The silence with a fiery sting:
The foaming gulfs of clamour broke
Around a fallen king:
A distant moan of battle high
Above a phantom land,
And heron-weird a woman’s cry
Went shrilling down the strand.