When the heart tires and the throb stills recalling
Things that were once and again can be never,
When the bow falls and the drawn string is broken,
Hands that were clasped, yet for ever are parted,
When the soul passes to new births and bodies,
Lands never seen and meetings with new faces,
Is the bow raised and the fall’n arrow fitted,
Acts that were vain rewedded to the Fate-curve?
To the lives sundered can Time bring rejoining,
Love that was slain be reborn with the body?
In the mind null, from the heart’s chords rejected,
Lost to the sense, but the spirit remembers!
– Sri Aurobindo 1930, revised 1942
Reference: # 152 in “Les poèmes de Sri Aurobindo” (bilingual edition)
also in “Collected Poems and Plays, volume 2” – 370
and “Collected Poems” – 565
all published by Sri Aurobindo Ashram – Pondicherry
diffusion by SABDA