All is abolished but the mute Alone.
The mind from thought released, the heart from grief,
Grow inexistent now beyond belief;
There is no I, no Nature, known-unknown.
The city, a shadow picture without tone,
Floats, quivers unreal; forms without relief
Flow, a cinema’s vacant shapes; like a reef
Foundering in shoreless gulfs the world is done.

Only the illimitable Permanent
Is here. A Peace stupendous, featureless, still.
Replaces all, – what once was I, in It
A silent unnamed emptiness content
Either to fade in the Unknowable
Or thrill with the luminous seas of the Infinite.

All the short poems or the sonnets which he did after, later on tell of a transformation, a shift in his poetic paradigm, art and style of writing when compared with the earlier ones and here one can see how yoga and meditation have been fused in the matters pertaining to transcendental meditation and mystic experience which he underwent with the light taking over and illuminating it all. Aurobindo the yogi, the sadhaka is the matter of reckoning which we take into consideration while deliberating upon the topic in hand. The mute Alone, what is this mute Alone? It is a poem of lapsing into the solitary landscapes, horizons lurking around, silent spaces prevailing upon and the vacuum engulfing us. Where does the self-disintegrate into? What there in the mind, the heart, the soul and the spirit if this existence is not? How the answer? Who to say it? There is none to answer it. It is better to be silent than to question is the truth doing the rounds for centuries. What it there in identity? One is identity less. Only the illimitable Permanent is the truth. A stupendous Peace replaces it all. What was I once, what am I now, these but are ever-changing and for the time being? When the mind from the thought is released, when the heart from grief, there remains it not anything else. A vacuum still vacuum that awaits us is the real thing. We are here just to fade into that silence, to lose our existence.

How beautiful is the line, “All is abolished but the mute Alone”, with which the poem starts from and takes us to the highest pedestals of thinking! It is a poem of reckoning as he has tried to brood in his way what it is nirvana, how does it come to. Pure metaphysics, abstract metaphysics forms the core content of Aurobindo so devoid of love and romanticism if one searches for that sort of aesthetic flavour. His poetry is just like the drama of George Bernard Shaw and John Galsworthy. An anti-romantic, he is a poet of transformation and metamorphosis. But metaphysically illumines it no doubt.

What does it remain it here? Nothing remains it here. Everything but fades it into the Unknowable. Or one may feel the thrill with the luminous seas of the Infinite. As the title of the poem Nirvana is so the philosophy doing the rounds, or the meaning hidden underneath. What is this world, what to say about it? What is this life? There is nothing as that stays it. There is nothing as material. Everything is but immaterial. Things are not as they seem to be. There is no solution. What’s there in ‘me’? What is known and unknown? Cities are just shadow pictures when thought about in an abstract way. What the body is? Where the pathway ends none can say it.

Everything is but immaterial and non-existent is this our presence, what we see is not true and real. Where the pathway, where to go, how the things here or there who to say it? Why to be after I which is non-existent itself?