Collected Poems - Sri Aurobindo Ashram

Note on the Texts 693
certainly was done using an edition of Chandidasa’s works published
in 1897. On 17 October 1898, Sri Aurobindo’s brother Manmohan
wrote in a letter to Rabindranath Tagore: “My brother . . . has just
published a volume of poems at Baroda.” This book evidently is Songs
to Myrtilla. In another letter Manmohan tells Tagore: “Aurobinda is
anxious to know what you think of his book of verses.” This second
letter is dated 24 October 1894, but the year clearly is wrong. Manmohan
had not even returned to India from England by that date. When
the two letters are read together and when other documentary evidence
is evaluated, it becomes clear that the second letter also was written in
1898, and that this was the year of publication of the first edition of
Songs to Myrtilla. 1 The “second edition” apparently appeared a year
or two later.
A new edition of the book, entitled simply Songs to Myrtilla, was
published by the Arya Publishing House, Calcutta, in April 1923.
When a biographer suggested during the 1940s that all the poems
in Songs to Myrtilla were written in Baroda, except for five that were
written in England, Sri Aurobindo corrected him as follows: “It is the
other way round; all the poems in the book were written in England
except five later ones which were written after his return to India.”
The following poems certainly were written in Baroda after his return
to India in 1893: “Lines on Ireland” (dated 1896), “Saraswati with
the Lotus” and “Bankim Chandra Chatterji” (both written after the
death of Bankim in 1894), and “To the Cuckoo” (originally subtitled
“A Spring morning in India”). “Madhusudan Dutt” was probably
also written in Baroda, as were the two adaptations of poems by
Chandidasa. This makes seven poems. The number five, proposed by
the biographer and not by Sri Aurobindo, was probably not meant by
Sri Aurobindo to be taken as an exact figure.
The handwritten manuscript of Songs to Myrtilla contains one
poem, “The Just Man”, that was not printed in any edition of the
book. (It is reproduced here in the third section of Part One.) The
manuscript and the second edition contain a dedication and a Latin
epigraph, which Sri Aurobindo later deleted. They are reproduced here
1 Manmohan Ghose’s letters to Tagore are reproduced and discussed in Sri Aurobindo:
Archives and Research, volume 12 (1988), pp. 86 – 87, 89 – 91.