☀️ 𝓓epicting 𝓣he 𝓓ivine ☀️

Uloupie

Canto I

Under the high and gloomy eastern hills
The portals of Pataala are and there
The Bhogavathie with her sinuous waves
Rises, a river alien to the sun,
And often to its strange and gleaming sands
Uloupie came, weary of those dim shades
And great disastrous caverns neighbouring Hell,
Avid of sunlight. Through the grasses long
She glided and her fierce and gorgeous hood
Gleamed with a perilous beauty and a light
Above the green spikes of the grass; often
In the slow sinuous waters she was spied
Swimming, with mystic dusky hair and cheeks
That had no rose,—one shoulder's dipping glow
Through water and one white breast hardly seen.
But as she swam she looked towards the west
Dreaming of daily sunlight and of flowers
That need soft rain and of the night with stars,
A friendly darkness and the season's change
In beautiful Aryavertha far away,
The country of the Gods, and yet sometimes
Vaguely expectant to the southward gazed.

Sri Aurobindo

Note:

Uloupie. Circa 1901-2. A portion of the rough draft of this poem was written below some notes that may be dated to May 1901. The poem was never completed, but was drawn upon in the writing of Chitrangada . His notebook that contains the fair copy of Uloupie was seized by the British police when Sri Aurobindo was arrested in 1908. This made it impossible for him to revise or publish these poems after his release from jail in 1909.