Sri Aurobindo

Collected Poems

SABCL - Volume 5

VI. Poems in New Metres

Ascent [1]

The Silence¹

Into the Silence, into the Silence,

Arise, O Spirit immortal,

Away from the turning Wheel, breaking the magical Circle.

Ascend, single and deathless:

Care no more for the whispers and the shoutings in the darkness.

Pass from the sphere of the grey and the little,

Leaving the cry and the struggle,

Into the Silence for ever.

Vast and immobile, formless and marvellous,

Higher than Heaven, wider than the universe,

In a pure glory of being,

In a bright stillness of self-seeing,

Communing with a boundlessness voiceless and intimate,

Make thy knowledge too high for thought, thy joy too deep for emotion;

At rest in the unchanging Light, mute with the wordless self-vision,

Spirit, pass out of thyself; Soul, escape from the clutch of Nature.

All thou hast seen cast from thee, O Witness.

Turn to the Alone and the Absolute, turn to the Eternal:

Be only eternity, peace and silence,

O world-transcending nameless Oneness,

Spirit immortal.

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 Free quantitative verse with a predominant dactylic movement.

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