His first poetry collection, A Beginning (1957), was published while he was an undergraduate at Oxford and earned him the Hawthornden Prize in 1958. To this day, he remains the youngest—and the only Indian—poet to have received this award, which came with a £100 prize. His second collection, Poems (1960), dedicated “to D,” a British actor named Dorothy, explores themes of love and sexuality. Moving in the same circles as W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and William Empson, Moraes gravitated toward the English language and its poetic tradition. His early work carries a distinctly Romantic sensibility, particularly evident in A Beginning, with its vivid descriptions of nature and fantastical figures, as seen in poems like Figures in the Landscape.

His 1965 collection John Nobody marked a turning point, after which Moraes increasingly turned to journalism. From 1968 to 1971, he wrote for The New York Times, and between 1971 and 1973, he served as an editor for Asia Magazine. Returning to India, he became more deeply engaged with the country’s socio-political and literary climate, notably defending Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses when it was denied publication in Bombay. In his final years, he lived with writer Sarayu Srivatsa, with whom he co-authored Out of God’s Oven, a travelogue on India, and The Long Strider, a biographical fiction and memoir of the English traveller Thomas Coryate.

Dom Moraes’s poetic rhetoric often explores the liminal spaces of imagination and landscape, overlaying the surreal eroticism of human relationships onto historical and natural settings. He draws upon ancient Indian epistemologies in his exploration of modern English poetry. One such poem, Kanheri Caves, published in the January 1959 issue of Poetry (Vol. 93, No. 4), focuses on the cave temples in the forests of Sanjay Gandhi National Park in Mumbai. Many of these caves are Buddhist viharas—spaces for monastic living and meditation—with larger halls used for congregation, adorned with carvings and sculptures.

Moraes's poetry often expresses the Romantic tension between dream and reality—a quality that Kanheri Caves encapsulates. The poem follows a speaker walking through a “green ambiguous landscape” that “teeters the perspective of the eye,” suggesting a cautious and skeptical voice. He uses sound to evoke the memory of the people who once lived there, describing them as fading “like a photograph,” with soft fricatives echoing the erosion of history. The second stanza details the physical remains of the caves, capturing their legacy. Although the stone is worn “smooth as flesh,” suggesting the possibility of rebirth, the third stanza introduces the image of a “stranger” possibly reborn, awakened by “hawks in a hot concentric ecstasy.” The “miles-off sea” alludes to an awareness of something distant and beyond, yet ultimately unreachable—a metaphor for longing, knowledge, or spiritual transcendence.