SRI AUROBINDO   Sri Aurobindo was born in Calcutta on 15 August 1872. In 1879, at the age of seven, he was taken with his two elder brothers to England for education and lived there for fourteen years. Brought up at first in an English family at Manchester, he joined St. Paul's School in London in 1884 and in 1890 went from it with a senior classical scholarship to King's College, Cambridge, where he studied for two years. In 1890 he passed also the open competition for the Indian Civil Service, but at the end of two years of probation failed to present himself at the ridin

  BOOK TEN The Book of the Double Twilight CANTO ONE   THE DREAM TWILIGHT OF THE IDEAL   ALL still was darkness dread and desolate; There was no change nor any hope of change. In this black dream which was a house of Void, A walk to Nowhere in a land of Nought, Ever they drifted without aim or goal; Gloom led to worse gloom, death to an emptier death, In some positive Non-Being's purposeless Vast Through formless wastes dumb and unknowable. An ineffectual beam of suffering light Through the despairing darkness dogged their steps Like the remembrance of a glory lost; E

  CANTO TWO   THE ISSUE   A WHILE, withdrawn in secret fields of thought, Her mind moved in a many-imaged past That lived again and saw its end approach: Dying, it lived imperishably in her; Transient and vanishing from transient eyes, Invisible, a fateful ghost of self, It bore the future on its phantom breast. Along the fleeting event's far-backward trail Regressed the stream of the insistent hours, And on the bank of the mysterious flood Peopled with well-loved forms now seen no more And the subtle images of things that were, Her witness spirit stood reviewing Time. All that she once

  CANTO SEVEN   THE DESCENT INTO NIGHT   A MIND absolved from life, made calm to know, A heart divorced from the blindness and the pang, The seal of tears, the bond of ignorance, He turned to find that wide world-failure's cause. Away he looked from Nature's visible face And sent his gaze into the viewless Vast, The formidable unknown Infinity, , Asleep behind the endless coil of things, That carries the universe in its timeless breadths And the ripples of its being are our lives. The worlds are built by its unconscious Breath And Matter and Mind are its figures or its powers,

  BOOK ELEVEN The Book of Everlasting Day CANTO ONE   THE ETERNAL DAY:-THE SOUL'S CHOICE AND  THE SUPREME CONSUMMATION   A MARVELLOUS sun looked down from ecstasy's skies On worlds of deathless bliss, perfection's home, Magical unfoldings of the Eternal's smile Capturing his secret heart-beats of delight. God's everlasting day surrounded her, Domains appeared1 of sempiternal light Invading all Nature with the Absolute's joy. Her body quivered with eternity's touch, Her soul stood close to the founts of the infinite. Infinity's finite fronts she lived in, new For ever to an everlasting sight.

  CANTO TEN   THE KINGDOMS AND GODHEADS OF THE LITTLE MIND   THIS too must now be overpassed and left, As all must be until the Highest is gained In whom the world and self grow true and one: Till that is reached our journeying cannot cease. Always a nameless goal beckons beyond, Always ascends the zigzag of the gods And upward points the spirit's climbing Fire. This breath of hundred-hued felicity And its pure heightened figure of Time's joy, Tossed upon waves of flawless happiness, Hammered into single beats of ecstasy, This fraction of the spirit's integer

  CANTO FIVE   THE YOGA OF THE KING: THE YOGA OF THE SPIRIT'S FREEDOM AND GREATNESS   THIS knowledge first he had of time-born men. Admitted through a curtain of bright mind That hangs between our thought and absolute sight, He found the occult cave, the mystic door Near to the well of vision in the soul, And entered where the Wings of Glory brood In the sunlit space where all is for ever known. Indifferent to doubt and to belief, Avid of the naked real's single shock He shore the cord of mind that ties the earth-heart And cast away the yoke of Matter's law. The body's rules bound not

  PART TWO Books IV - VIII BOOK FOUR The Book of Birth and Quest CANTO ONE   THE BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD OF THE FLAME   A MAENAD of the cycles of desire Around a Light she must not dare to touch, Hastening towards a far-off unknown goal Earth followed the endless journey of the Sun. A mind but half-awake in the swing of the void On the bosom of Inconscience dreamed out life And bore this finite world of thought and deed Across the immobile trance of the Infinite. A vast immutable silence with her ran: Prisoner of speed upon a jewelled wheel.. She communed with the mys

  CANTO THIRTEEN   IN THE SELF OF MIND   AT last there came a bare indifferent sky Where Silence listened to the cosmic Voice, But answered nothing to a million calls; The soul's endless question met with no response. An abrupt conclusion ended eager hopes, A deep cessation in a mighty calm, A finis-line on the last page of thought And a margin and a blank of wordless peace. There paused the climbing hierarchy of worlds. Hs stood on a wide arc of summit Space Alone with an enormous Self of Mind Which held all life in a corner of its vasts. Omnipotent, immobile and aloof, In the world

  CANTO FOUR   THE DREAM TWILIGHT OF THE EARTHLY REAL   THERE came a slope that slowly downward sank; It slipped towards a stumbling grey descent. The dim-heart marvel of the ideal was lost, Its crowding wonder of bright delicate dreams And vague half-limned sublimities she had left: Thought fell towards lower levels; hard and tense It passioned for some crude reality. The twilight floated still but changed its hues And heavily swathed a less delightful dream; It settled in tired masses on the air; Its symbol colours tuned with duller reds And almost seeme