Poems by Themis

Publisher's Note

We are very happy to bring out this collection of poems by Themis (the name given by the Mother to Tehmi for the first publication of her poems). A professor of English Literature at the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education for twenty-five years, she now teaches Sri Aurobindo's works. With her fine perceptive insight into Sri Aurobindo's poetry she has over the years shared her knowledge with many of her students and has been a source of inspiration to them.

The readers will find it of interest to know the comment Sri Aurobindo made when most of the poems in Part One were read out to him by Nirodbaran:

"The poems are remarkable, especially the later ones. They have power of revelatory image and phrase and of expressing spiritual experience. Also, her later poems are very remarkably built, the thought is worked out in a perfect beginning, middle and end in a way which is not very common. Many poems contain a beautiful lyrical quality.

"The early poems too are very powerful expressions of the kind of experience she had and as poetry hardly inferior to the later ones. There are many remarkable lines and stanzas though they are not as well-built as the later ones."