Collected Poems - Sri Aurobindo Ashram

Note on the Texts 729
Voice of the Summits. Circa 1946 – 47. One handwritten manuscript.
The poem was probably written after “The Inner Fields”, which is
dated 14 March 1947.
APPENDIX: POEMS IN GREEK AND IN FRENCH
As a student in England Sri Aurobindo wrote many poems in Greek
and in Latin as school or college assignments. A typical assignment
would be to render an English poem into Greek or Latin verse of a
given metre. The Greek epigram below appears to be an example of
such an assignment. Sri Aurobindo also learned French in England,
and in later years wrote two poems in that language.
Greek Epigram. January 1892. Sri Aurobindo wrote this epigram in a
notebook he used at Cambridge. At the end he wrote “Jan. 1892 (Porson
Schol)”. This refers to the Porson Scholarship examination, which
was held at Cambridge that month. In order to win this scholarship,
candidates had to take twelve papers over the course of a week. One
of the papers required contestants to provide a Greek translation of
the following poem by Richard Carlton (born circa 1558), an English
madrigal composer:
The witless boy that blind is to behold
Yet blinded sees what in our fancy lies
With smiling looks and hairs of curled gold
Hath oft entrapped and oft deceived the wise.
No wit can serve his fancy to remove,
For finest wits are soonest thralled to love.
Sir Edmund Leach, late provost of King’s College, Cambridge, who
provided the information on the scholarship examination, went on to
add:
It is possible that [Sri Aurobindo] Ghose was a candidate
for the Porson Scholarship; alternatively it is possible that
his King’s College supervisor set him the Porson Scholarship
paper as an exercise to provide practice for the Classical Tripos
examination which he was due to take in June 1892.