PHARPHAR ("...Abana and Pharphar, lucid streams"—Milton) Where is the glassy gold of Pharphar Or its echoing silver-grey When the magic ethers of evening Wash one the various day? I have travelled the whole earth over Yet never found The beautiful body of Pharphar Or its soul of secret sound. But all my dreams are an answer To Pharphar's blmd career; And the songs that I sing are an image Of quiets I long to hear. For, only this unreached beauty No time shall mar— This river of infinite distance, Pharphar. Page-113 Sri Aurobindo's Comment "Very beautiful indeed, subtle and g

HIMALAYA The tides of gold and silver sweep the sky But bring no tremor to my countenance: How shall sun-rise or moon-ebb lure, when I Have gripped the Eternal in a rock of trance? Here centuries lay down their pilgrim cry, Drowsed with the power in me to press my whole Bulk of unchanging peace upon the eye And weigh that vision deep into the soul. My frigid love no calls of earth can stir. Straight upward climbs my hush—but this lone flight Reveals me to broad earth an emperor Ruling all time's horizons through sheer height! Sri Aurobindo's Comment "A very fine poem. The lines marked are very fine and li

SOUL OF SONG I have been quiet a long while To fill my singing smile With a magic beyond the lips of man And very quiet will I be After the burst of minstrelsy To find at the close The light with which my tune began. Glowing behind The singer's mind, A mystery journeys forth to meet Across the rapture of rhyming feet Its own unplumbed repose. Come then, O listeners, with a tranquil mood To feel far more than the loud heart knows; Or else the King who moves through the common word Shall never be heard And keep unseen the strange infinitude He bears above our mortal woes, The

YOGA "Torment not with intangible fulgences! O master, to my hungry life impart The nectarous truth of yon Sky-Spirit unheard Whose sole revealing word Is a touch of cold far flame upon my heart! Of what avail mute mystic suns of snow?" "Banish from your dream-night The burning blindness of earth-hued desire, That scorching shadow masked as living light! Then only can your misery's Heart-hunger know The multi-splendoured sweetness of truth-glow, The embracing fire Of His inscrutable omnipotent peace!" Sri Aurobindo's Comment "I fear it is only eloquence—a long way from the Mantra. From the point of

GNOSIS No clamorous wing-waft knew the deeps of gold. An eagle lost in earth-forgetfulness, Rising without one stir of dreamy feather, Life gains the Unmeasured through a flame of sleep— A love whose heart is white tranquillity Upborne by vast surrender to this Sun. Flickering no longer with the cry of clay, The distance-haunted fire of mystic mind Embraces there its own eternal Self— Truth's burning core poised over the universe! Sri Aurobindo's Comment "It has become by the omitted and added lines a finer poem than before. The first line had lost much of its power through being cut off from immediate connection with the e

5 HARMONIES Unfathomed harmonies roll, drowning our sight In purple of their passionate abyss— A superhuman solitude of night Sprung from a deep where all the waves are bliss. O waves divine, dark to our shuddering eyes, You float a fire that glooms each common glow! Sweep over foundering thought your rhythmic skies Until we gain some marvellous earth below. There still the pure Atlantis shall be found Of rapture lost by souls unluminous: There rings of silver memories surround An empty throne of gold awaiting us. Sri Aurobindo's Comment "It is more mental than usual—but the vision and

EVANESCENCE Where lie the past noon-lilies And vesper-violets gone? Into what strange invisible deep Fall out of time the roses of each dawn? They draw for us a dream-way To ecstasies unhoured, Where all earth's form-hues flicker and drop, By some great wind of mystery overpowered. Sri Aurobindo's Comment "The simple revealing directness and beauty evoke without effort a pure sense of mystic truth. The opening stanza and continuation are exceedingly fine, full of magic suggestion. In the last two fines there is a mixture of the intuitive and the illumined, the rest is pure intuitive—but occult because it is from a province

NIGHT-HILLS Here on night-hills all passion-clamours cease: And to the wonder-spacious lonely mind The word of the incomprehensible wind Bears but a perfume of eternal peace; Until—on highest crags of heaven-surmise— Evoked by a spirit moon from the heart's deep, Plumbless inaudible waves of shining sleep Drown the mortality of lifted eyes. Sri Aurobindo's Comment Lines 2, 3, 4—"It is from the Illumined Mind that they come with a touch of the mystic intuitive, but only a touch." Lines 6, 7, 8—"These lines have a very high poetic and mystic value. They are a mixed result of Illumined Mind and occult vision with so

DISCLOSURE Stoop your calm beauty—let your shining hair Unveil its ages of high secrecy To float upon dull earth the frankincense Your face of love burns to an infinite sky. Fill life with mystic rondures of your breast And all that worship dreamed unknowable Bare through your body's perfect universe. O mate the sculptor-vigil of our gloom With those superb clay-lines that sing your soul: Then every stroke of time shall carve to birth Immortal moods lit by your ecstasy. Sri Aurobindo's Comment "Very fine poetry. Blank verse rhythm very good. Illumined Higher Mind." * Page-87

APOTHEOSIS Spurning the narrow cities of your mind, Climb to the turquoise dome of distances Where Nature's spirit wears a measureless crown— The unwalled glory of some Tartar day, The inscrutable puissance of a Negro night. There every straining mood brims infinite, An all-submerging primal mystery, A waveless ocean of omnipotent ease— Or like all heaven's truth-core flames the will! Sri Aurobindo's Comment "The Tartar day and Negro night have vividness and power; the other lines are very fine poetry. As a whole, the Higher Mind with a touch of Illumination." * Page-105