The Blue Bird I am the bird of God in His blue; Divinely high and clear I sing the notes of the sweet and the true For the god’s and the seraph’s ear. I rise like a fire from the mortal’s earth Into a griefless sky And drop in the suffering soil of his birth Fire-seeds of ecstasy. My pinions soar beyond Time and Space Into unfading Light; I bring the bliss of the Eternal’s face, And the boon of the Spirit’s sight. I measure the worlds with my ruby eyes; I have perched on Wisdom’s tree Thronged with the blossoms of Paradise By the streams of Eternity. Nothing is hid from my burning heart; My mind is shoreless and stil

Who In the blue of the sky, in the green of the forest, Whose is the hand that has painted the glow? When the winds were asleep in the womb of the ether, Who was it roused them and bade them to blow? He is lost in the heart, in the cavern of Nature, He is found in the brain where He builds up the thought: In the pattern and bloom of the flowers He is woven, In the luminous net of the stars He is caught. In the strength of a man, in the beauty of woman, In the laugh of a boy, in the blush of a girl; The hand that sent Jupiter spinning through heaven, Spends all its cunning to fashion a curl. These are His works and His veils and

II SONNETS 1930-1950 The kingdom Within There is a kingdom of the spirit’s ease. It is not in this helpless swirl of thought, Foam from the world-sea or spray-whisper caught, With which we build mind’s shifting symmetries, Nor in life’s stuff of passionate unease, Nor the heart’s unsure emotions frailty wrought Nor trivial clipped sense-joys soon led1 to nought Nor in this body’s solid transiences. Wider behind than the vast universe Our spirit scans the drama and the stir, A peace, a light, an ecstasy, a power Waiting at the end of blindness and the curse That veils it from its ignorant

The Mother of God A conscious and eternal Power is here Behind unhappiness and mortal birth And the error of Thought and blundering trudge of Time. The Mother of God, his sister and his spouse, Daughter of his wisdom, of his might1 the mate, She has leapt from the Transcendent’s secret breast To build her rainbow worlds of mind and life. Between the superconscient absolute Light And the lnconscient’s vast unthinking toil In the rolling and routine of Matter’s sleep And the somnambulist motion of the stars She forces on the cold unwilling Void Her adventure of life, the passionate dreams of her lust. Amid the wo

SHORT POEMS Fragments Morcundeya O will of God that stiffest and the Void Is peopled, men have called thee force, upbuoyed Upon whose wings the stars borne round and round Need not one hour of rest; light, form and sound Are marks of thy eternal movement. We See what thou choosest, but ’tis thou we see. I Morcundeya whom the worlds release, The Seer, - but it is God alone that sees! – Soar up above the bonds that hold below Man to his littleness, lost in the show Perennial which the senses round him build; I find them out and am no more beguiled. But ere I rise, ere I become the vast And luminous Infinite

The Tale of Nala Nala Nishadha's king, paced by a stream Which ran escaping from solitudes To flow through gardens in a pleasant land. Murmuring it came of the green souls of hills And of the lawns and hamlets it had seen, The brown-limbed peasants toiling in the sun, And the tired bullocks in the thirsty fields. In its bright talk and laughter it recalled The moonlight and the lapping dangerous tongues, The sunlight and the skimming wings of birds, And gurgling jars, and bright bathed limbs of girls At morning, and its noons and lonely eves. This memory to the jasmine trees it sang Which dropped their slow white-petalled kisses down Upon

Epiphany Majestic, mild, immortally august, In silence throned, to just and to unjust One Lord of deep unutterable love, I saw Him, Shiva, like a brooding dove Close-winged upon her nest. The outcaste came, The sinners gathered round that tender Flame, The demons, by the other sterner gods Rejected from their luminous abodes, Gathered around the Refuge of the lost, Soft-smiling on that wild and grisly host. All who were refugeless, wretched, unloved, The wicked and the good together moved Naturally to Him, the asylum sweet, And found their heaven at their Master’s feet. The vision changed and in His place there stood

Madhusudan Dutt Poet, who first with skill inspired did teach Greatness to our divine Bengali speech ,— Divine, but rather with delightful moan Spring’s golden mother makes when twin-alone She lies with golden Love and heaven's birds Call hymeneal with enchanting words Over their passionate faces, rather these Than with the calm and grandiose melodies (Such calm as consciousness of godhead owns) The high gods speak upon their ivory thrones Sitting in council high, — till taught by thee Fragrance and noise of the world-shaking sea. Thus do they praise thee who amazed espy Thy winged epic and hear the arrows cry And jour

TheThreeCriesofDeiphobus Awake, awake, O sleeping men of Troy, That sleep and know not in the grasp of Hell I perish in the treacherous lonely night To foes betrayed, environed and undone. O Trojans, will ye sleep until the doom Have slipped its leash and bark upon your doors? Not long will ye, unless in Pluto’s realm, Have slumber, since forsaken among foes I drink the bitter cup of lonely death Unheeded and from helping faces far. O Trojans, Trojans, yet again I call! Swift help we need, or Ilion’s days are done. Epitaph Moulded of twilight and the vesper star Midnight in her with noon made quiet

To R. ON HER BIRTHDAY The repetition of thy gracious years Brings back once more thy natal morn. Upon the crest of youth thy life appears, – A wave upborne. Amid the hundreds thronging Ocean’s floor A wave upon the crowded sea With regular rhythm pushing towards the shore Our life must be. The power that moves it is the Ocean’s force Invincible, eternal, free, And by that impulse it pursues its course Inevitably. We, too, by the Eternal Might are led To whatsoever goal He wills. Our helm He grasps, our generous sail outspread His strong breath fills. Exulting in the grace and stre