Collected Poems - Sri Aurobindo Ashram

Note on the Texts 713
— it took only a few minutes”. In Six Poems “Trance” was placed
after “The Bird of Fire”.
Shiva. 6 November 1933. There are two handwritten manuscripts and
one typed manuscript, which is dated “6.11.33”.
The Life Heavens. 15 November 1933. There are four handwritten and
three typed manuscripts. The typed manuscripts are dated “15.11.33”.
Jivanmukta. 13 April 1934. There are four handwritten and two typed
manuscripts. The typed manuscripts are dated “13.4.34”. The poem
was published in the Calcutta Review in June 1934.
In Horis Aeternum. 19 April 1932. Sri Aurobindo began this poem
while corresponding with Arjava (J. A. Chadwick, a British disciple)
about English prosody. He wrote the first stanza in a letter to Arjava
and the full poem in a subsequent letter (Letters on Poetry and Art,
pp. 231 – 34). There are two handwritten and two typed manuscripts.
One of the typed manuscripts is dated “19.4.32”.
Notes. These notes were compiled from Sri Aurobindo’s letters and
revised by him for publication while Six Poems was under production.
Poems
These six poems were written during the early 1930s and published as
a booklet by the Government Central Press, Hyderabad, in 1941. The
next year they were reprinted in Collected Poems and Plays under the
heading “Transformation and Other Poems”. Sometime in the 1940s
a small edition of the book was published by the India Library Society,
New York.
Transformation. Circa 1933. This sonnet was published in the Calcutta
Review in October 1934. Two months earlier, Sri Aurobindo asked
his secretary to type copies of this poem and three others (“The Other
Earths”, “The World Game” and “Symbol Moon”) from the notebook
in which they and others had been written. When “Transformation”
and “The Other Earths” were published in 1934, Sri Aurobindo informed
a disciple that they were “some years old already” (Letters on
Poetry and Art, p. 211), but it is unlikely that they were more than
a year old at that time. The first draft of “Transformation” occurs in
a notebook just after the first draft of “Trance”, which is dated 16