Volume V, Issue 5
Author: Suhas Mehra
Editor’s Note: Sri Aurobindo once said about his poetry,
“I am expressing spiritual truth or spiritual experience through poetry.”
~ Sri Aurobindo, CWSA, Vol. 27, p. 260
The poem that is our focus in this issue was not given any title by Sri Aurobindo. The handwritten manuscript was dated January 14, 1946 in the notebook. But the editors of his Complete Works felt that this was most likely a slip and it should have been 14 January 1947. They concluded this because the rest of the contents of the notebook in which the poem was written were from 1947.
Silence is All – I
Silence is all, say the sages.
Silence watches the work of the ages;
In the book of Silence the cosmic Scribe has written his cosmic pages:
Silence is all, say the sages.
Silence is All – II
What then of the word, O speaker?
What then of the thought, O thinker?
Thought is the wine of the soul and the word is the beaker;
Life is the banquet-table as the soul of the sage is the drinker.
Silence is All – III
What of the wine, O mortal?
I am drunk with the wine as I sit at Wisdom’s portal,
Waiting for the Light beyond thought and the Word immortal.
Long I sit in vain at Wisdom’s portal.
Silence is All – IV
How shalt thou know the Word when it comes, O seeker?
How shalt thou know the Light when it breaks, O witness?
I shall hear the voice of the God within me and grow wiser and meeker;
I shall be the tree that takes in the light as its food, I shall drink its nectar of sweetness.
