Sri Aurobindo

Collected Poems

CWSA.- Volume 2

Part Seven. Pondicherry, c. 1927 – 1947
Nonsense and “Surrealist” Verse

A Ballad of Doom

There was an awful awful man

Who all things knew and none

And never met a Saracen

And always drank a bun.

He said he was a bullywag

And that he did it for fun.

I don’t know what a bullywag is

And I don’t think he was one.

Of nonsense and Omniscience

He spoke as one who knew

That this was like a temperament

And that was like a hue.

He said there was a phantom sun

That saw a branching sky

And he who could but never should

Was always God’s best boy.

And he who should but never could

Was not in the savoury jam

That thronged the gates of Paradise

Jostling the great I am.

He said he saw a smudgy moon

Adown a patterned ridge

And that Beethoven to his ear

Rang like a bluzzing midge

That bluzzed and bluzzed and bluzzed and bluzzed

Until the eye grew green

With shouting for dear visible things

Where nothing could be seen.

For nothing can be seen, my child,

And when it’s seen it’s read,

And when red nothing once is seen

The world can go to bed.

This work was not included in SABCL, it was not compared with other editions.