Sri Aurobindo

Collected Poems

CWSA.- Volume 2

Part Seven. Pondicherry
Incomplete Poems from Manuscripts, c. 1927 – 1947

The Inconscient

Artist of cosmos wrapped in thy occult shadow,

Godhead sole awake in the dreams of Matter,

Thee and thy truth men searching for ever vainly,

Find and are baffled.

Always thou workst and seemst not to know thy workings,

Yet thy touch, Geometer, wide-wayed Builder,

Vastest things can shape and minutest, potent,

Patient, unerring.

All is thou or is thine but who art thou, Dreamer,

Paradox ensouling the soulless spaces,

Self-creator weaving thy magic figures,

Mechanist Mystic?

Who thou art none knoweth, ungrasped thy nature,

Ever we see thee veiled by thy titan forces,

Only some dim greatness we feel, a mute-eyed

Inscrutable Presence.

Ageless, formless, nameless and uncreated,

Lost in night where never was seed of living,

Ancient, mighty, lone is thy wordless spirit,

Blind and immortal.

All at first was only thy giant shadow;

Time then was not, space was not yet imagined,

Thoughtless, soundless lay the inconscient ocean

Emptily brooding.

What compelled thee, O Void, to create and labour,

Or who rose up in thee, a living Maker?

How could thought begin in thy vacant silence

Measureless, dateless?

All these stars that spin in the fields of Nothing,

Tiny Time-fires lit in thy untoned darkness

Faintly hailing through the enormous distance

Aimless and lifeless,–

Why were they made, for what are their wheels and turnings,

Splendid desert-hearted disastrous burnings,

Mindless hopeless fierce inarticulate yearnings

Fruitless for ever?

All these waves of forces that running circling

Leap by discontinuous starts through Nowhere,

Strangely born in quantums of causeless Matter

Wombed out of Nihil –

Each is a lawless entity chance-directed,

Yet a law prevails in their sum of movement;

Is thy soul released in these particles formwards,

Thy thought that governs?

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