Collected Poems - Sri Aurobindo Ashram

692 Collected Poems
in London, Cambridge and Baroda. His first collection, published in
Baroda in 1898, contained poems written in England and Baroda. This
collection is reproduced in the present part, along with other poems
written during these years.
Poem Published in 1883
Light. Published 1883. Asked in 1939, “When did you begin to write
poetry?”, Sri Aurobindo replied: “When my two brothers and I were
staying at Manchester. I wrote for the Fox family magazine. It was
an awful imitation of somebody I don’t remember.” The only English
journal having a name resembling “the Fox family magazine” is Fox’s
Weekly, which first appeared on 11 January 1883 and was suspended
the following November. Published from Leeds, it catered to the middle
and working classes of that industrial town. A total of nine poems
appeared in Fox’s Weekly during its brief existence. All but one of
them are coarse adult satires. The exception is “Light”, published in
the issue of 11 January 1883. Like all other poems in Fox’s Weekly,
“Light” is unsigned, but there can be no doubt that it was the poem
to which Sri Aurobindo referred when he said that his first verses
were published in “the Fox family magazine”. The poem’s stanza is an
imitation of the one used by P. B. Shelley in the well-known lyric “The
Cloud”. Sri Aurobindo remarked in 1926 that as a child in Manchester,
he went through the works of Shelley again and again. He also wrote
that he read the Bible “assiduously” while living in the house of his
guardian, William H. Drewett, a Congregationalist clergyman.
Songs to Myrtilla
This, Sri Aurobindo’s first collection of poems, was printed in 1898 for
private circulation by the Lakshmi Vilas Printing Press, Baroda, under
the title Songs to Myrtilla and Other Poems. No copy of the first edition
survives. The second edition, which was probably a reimpression of
the first, is undated. The date of publication must therefore be inferred
from other evidence. The book’s handwritten manuscript, as well as
the second edition, contains the poem “Lines on Ireland”, dated 1896.
The second edition contains a translation from Chandidasa that almost