The Eighth Hymn to Agni   DIVINE WILL, THE UNIVERSAL FULFILLER   [The Rishi having declared the continuity of the great effort and aspiration from the earliest times hymns divine Will harboured in us, inmate, priest of the sacrifice, master of this dwelling, who fulfils the universal impulse in all its multiplicity and both stimulates and leads it in act and knowledge.]       1. Will who art by force created in us, thee the pristine Power the pristine seekers of the Truth kindled entirely that they might grow in their being, the god in the sacrifice, who be cause he has the multitude of his delights establishes

' ' by Sri Aurobindo Page 1 of 50 V   Surya Savitri, Creator and Increaser   Rig Veda V.81     1. Men illumined yoke their mind and they yoke their thoughts to him who is illumination and largeness and clear perceiving. Knowing all phenomena he orders, sole, the Energies of the sacrifice. Vast is the affirmation in all things of Savitri, the divine Creator.     2. All forms he takes unto himself, the Seer, and he creates from them good for the twofold existence and the fourfold. The Creator, the supreme Good, manifests Heaven wholly and his light pervades all as he follows the

XIII   Soma, Lord of Delight and Immortality   Rig Veda IX.83     l. Wide spread out for thee is the sieve of thy purifying, O Master of the soul; becoming in the creature thou pervadest his members all through. He tastes not that delight who is unripe and whose body has not suffered in the heat of the fire; they alone are able to bear that and enjoy it who have been prepared by the flame.     2. The strainer through which the heat of him is purified is spread out in the seat of Heaven; its threads shine out and stand extended. His swift ecstasies foster the soul that purifies him; he asc

Chapter III   Modern Theories   IT WAS the curiosity of a foreign culture that broke after many centuries the seal of final authoritativeness which Sayana had fixed on the ritualistic interpretation of the Veda. The ancient Scripture was delivered over to a scholarship laborious, bold in speculation, ingenious in its flights of fancy, conscientious according to its own lights, but ill-fitted to understand the method of the old mystic poets; for it was void of any sympathy with that ancient temperament, unprovided with any clue in its own intellectual or spiritual environment to the ideas hidden in the Vedic figures and parables. The result has been of

Chapter XI    The Course of English Poetry ­ 3    THE ELIZABETHAN drama is an expression of the stir of the life-spirit; at its best it has a great or strong, buoyant or rich or beautiful, passionately excessive or gloomily tenebrous force of vital poetry. The rest of the utterance of the time is full of the lyric joy, sweetness or emotion or moved and coloured self-description of the same spirit. There is much in it of curious and delighted thinking, but little of a high and firm intellectual value. Culture is still in its imaginative childhood and the thinking mind rather works for the curiosity and beauty of thought and even more for the curios

Chapter X    The Course of English Poetry ­ 2    Elizabethan Drama  Shakespeare and the Poetry of the Life-Spirit   THE ELIZABETHAN age, perhaps the era of most opulent output in the long history of English poetic genius, is abundant, untrammelled and unbridled in its power, but not satisfying in its performance. Beautiful as are many of its productions, powerful as it is in the mass, if we look at it not in detail, not merely revelling in beauty of line and phrase and image, in snatches of song and outbursts of poetic richness and creative force, but as a whole, in its total artistic creation, it bears a certain stamp of defect a

The Future Poetry   Part II Chapter I    The Ideal Spirit of Poetry   TO ATTEMPT to presage the future turn or development of mind or life in any of its fields must always be a hazardous venture. For life and mind are not

Chapter VII    The Character of English Poetry ­ 1   OF ALL the modern European tongues the English language — I think this may be said without any serious doubt, — has produced, not always the greatest or most perfect, but at least the most rich and naturally powerful poetry, the most lavish of energy and innate genius. The unfettered play of poetic energy and power has been here the most abundant and brought forth the most constantly brilliant fruits. And yet it is curious to note that English poetry and literature have been a far less effective force in the shaping of European culture than the poetry and literature of other tongues i

Chapter V    The Power of the Spirit   A POETRY born direct from and full of the power of the spirit and therefore a largest and a deepest self-expression of the soul and mind of the race is that for which we are seeking and of which the more profound tendencies of the creative mind seem to be in travail. This poetry will be a voice of eternal things raising to a new significance and to a great satisfied joy in experience the events and emotions and transiences of life which will then be seen and sung as the succession of signs, the changing of the steps of an eternal manifestation; it will be an expression of the very self of man and the self of

Jhalakati Speech   FELLOW-COUNTRYMEN, delegates and people of Barisal and Bakarganj:– I have first to express to you my personal gratitude for the kindly reception you have accorded to me. For a year I have been secluded from the fellowship and brotherly embrace of my fellow-countrymen. To me, therefore, the kindliness of your welcome must awake much keener feelings than would have been the case in other circumstances. Especially is it a cause of rejoicing to me to have that welcome in Barisal. When I come to this District, when I come to this soil of Bakarganj which has been made sacred and ever memorable in the history of this