Sri Aurobindo

Collected Poems

CWSA.- Volume 2

Baroda and Pondicherry, c. 1902 – 1936
Poems Past and Present

Musa Spiritus

O Word concealed in the upper fire,

Thou who hast lingered through centuries,

Descend from thy rapt white desire,

Plunging through gold eternities.

Into the gulfs of our nature leap,

Voice of the spaces, call of the Light!

Break the seals of Matter’s sleep,

Break the trance of the unseen height.

In the uncertain glow of human mind,

Its waste of unharmonied thronging thoughts,

Carve thy epic mountain-lined

Crowded with deep prophetic grots.

Let thy hue-winged lyrics hover like birds

Over the swirl of the heart’s sea.

Touch into sight with thy fire-words

The blind indwelling deity.

O Muse of the Silence, the wideness make

In the unplumbed stillness that hears thy voice;

In the vast mute heavens of the spirit awake

Where thy eagles of Power flame and rejoice.

Out, out with the mind and its candle flares,

Light, light the suns that never die.

For my ear the cry of the seraph stars

And the forms of the Gods for my naked eye!

Let the little troubled life-god within

Cast his veils from the still soul,

His tiger-stripes of virtue and sin,

His clamour and glamour and thole and dole;

All make tranquil, all make free.

Let my heart-beats measure the footsteps of God

As He comes from His timeless infinity

To build in their rapture His burning abode.

Weave from my life His poem of days,

His calm pure dawns and His noons of force.

My acts for the grooves of His chariot-race,

My thoughts for the tramp of His great steeds’ course!

Earlier edition of this work: Sri Aurobindo Birth Century Library: Set in 30 volumes.- Volume 5.- Collected Poems.- Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Asram, 1972.- 625 p.