Sri Aurobindo

Collected Poems

SABCL - Volume 5

I. Short Poems
1895-1908

Rebirth

Not soon is God’s delight in us completed,

Nor with one life we end;

Termlessly in us are our spirits seated

And¹ termless joy intend.

Our souls and heaven are of an equal stature

And have a dateless birth;

The unending seed, the infinite mould of Nature,

They were not made on earth,

Nor to the earth do they bequeath their ashes,

But in themselves they last.

An endless future brims beneath thy lashes,

Child of an endless past.

Old memories come to us, old dreams invade us,

Lost people we have known,

Fictions and pictures; but their frames evade us,–

They stand out bare, alone.

Yet all we dream and hope are memories treasured,

Are forecasts we misspell,

But of what life or scene he who has measured

The boundless heavens can tell.

Time is a strong convention; future and present

Were living in the past;

They are one image that our wills complaisant

Into three schemes have cast.

Our past that we forget, is with us deathless,

Our births and later end

Already accomplished. To a summit breathless

Sometimes our souls ascend,

Whence the mind comes back helped; for there emerges

The ocean vast of Time

Spread out before us with its infinite surges,

Its symphonies sublime;

And even from this veil of mind the spirit

Looks out sometimes and sees

The bygone aeons that our lives inherit,

The unborn centuries:

It sees wave-trampled realms expel the Ocean,–

From the vague depths uphurled

Where now Himaloy² stands, the flood’s huge motion

Sees measuring half the world;

Or else the web behind us is unravelled

And on its threads we gaze,–

Past motions of the stars, scenes long since travelled

In Time’s far-backward days.

Later edition of this work: The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo.- Set in 37 volumes.- Volume 2.- Collected Poems.- Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 2009.- 751 p.

¹ 2009 ed. CWSA, vol.2: A

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² 2009 ed. CWSA, vol.2: Himâloy

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