Editor’s Note: In this month’s Guiding Light section we highlight three poems of Sri Aurobindo which speak of Silence, Space and Spirit.
The Infinitesimal Infinite
Out of a still immensity we came.
These million universes were to it
The poor light-bubbles of a trivial game,
A fragile glimmer in the Infinite.
It could not find its soul in all that Vast:
It drew itself into a little speck
Infinitesimal, ignobly cast
Out of earth’s mud and slime strangely awake,—
A tiny plasm upon a casual globe
In the small system of a dwarflike sun,
A little life wearing the flesh for robe,
A little mind winged through wide space to run.
It lived, it knew, it saw its self sublime,
Deathless, outmeasuring Space, outlasting Time.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, CWSA, Vol. 2, p. 589
Trance of Waiting
Lone on my summits of calm I have brooded with voices around me,
Murmurs of silence that steep mind in a luminous sleep,
Whispers from things beyond thought in the Secrecy flame-white for ever,
Unscanned heights that reply seek from the inconscient deep.
Distant below me the ocean of life with its passionate surges
Pales like a pool that is stirred by the wings of a shadowy bird.
Thought has flown back from its wheelings and stoopings, the nerve-beat of living
Stills; my spirit at peace bathes in a mighty release.
Wisdom supernal looks down on me, Knowledge mind cannot measure;
Light that no vision can render garments the silence with splendour.
Filled with a rapturous Presence the crowded spaces of being
Tremble with the Fire that knows, thrill with the might of repose.
Earth is now girdled with trance and Heaven is put round her for vesture.
Wings that are brilliant with fate sleep at Eternity’s gate.
Time waits, vacant, the Lightning that kindles, the Word that transfigures;
Space is a stillness of God building his earthly abode.
All waits hushed for the fiat to come and the tread of the Eternal;
Passion of a bliss yet to be sweeps from Infinity’s sea.
~ Sri Aurobindo, CWSA, Vol. 2, pp. 573-574
On the Mountains
Immense retreats of silence and of gloom,
Hills of a sterile grandeur, rocks that sublime
In bareness seek the blue sky’s infinite room
With their coeval snows untouched by Time!
I seek your solemn spaces! Let me at last
Forgotten of thought through days immemorable
Voiceless and needless keep your refuge vast,
Growing into the peace in which I dwell.
For like that Soul unmade you seem to brood
Who sees all things emerge but none creates,
Watching the ages from His solitude,
Lone, unconcerned, remote. You to all Fates
Offer an unchanged heart, unmoved abide,
Wordless, acceptant, sovereignly still.
There is a soul in us as silent, wide,
Mere, uncreative, imperturbable.
~ Sri Aurobindo, CWSA, Vol. 2, p. 261
