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Poems from Manuscripts Circa 1900 1906
(Written during the progress of the Boer War.)
O Boers, you have dared much and much endured For freedom, your strong simple hearts inured To danger and privation nor so made As by death’s daily grasp to be dismayed, Nor numbers nor disasters in the field, Nor to o’erwhelming multitudes to yield. It was no secondary power you faced, But she who has the whole wide world embraced, England whose name is as the thunder, she Whose navies are the despots of the sea, Napoleon’s conqueror whose fair dreadful face Great nations loathe and fear and choose disgrace Rather than meet in wild and dangerous war Victors of Waterloo and Trafalgar. But you, a band of armed herdsmen small, Feared not her strength, her pride imperial, Nor all the union of her empire huge, Nor all her barking cannon, her deluge Of bullets, nor her horsehooves, nor her lance, Her boundless wealth, her bayonets aglance. You met her on her hills and overthrew, You crossed her by her streams and smote and slew. But soon in anger like the Ocean foiled For fiercer swift invasion she recoiled And multiplied her force until her troops Tenfold outnumbering your warlike groups Resurging rolled you back and seized your towns And spread like locusts over fields and downs. Not even then were you dismayed, not then Would tamely yield, but with a proud disdain Rejected proffered servitude and base. Therefore are you participants in praise
Page – 247 With Armin and Viriathus; you stand The last of Freedom’s children and your land Her latest foothold upon earth; nor can Your rugged pastoral mood disguise the man Identical at Salamis who waged Unequal battle and in salt floods assuaged The Persian’s lust of rule. Miltiades Is grown your brother; the strong Tyrolese Hold out their hands to you across the grave. From Rouen’s burning pile one watches; brave Hofer from sad Verona; in eastern skies Mewar’s unconquerable Rajpoots rise. They too preferred strong liberty and rude To a splendid ignominy of servitude. For liberty they gave to alien hands Their faery city and their fertile lands, Themselves to death, their women to the flame, And in wild woods and mountains harbouring came Often like sudden fire upon the foe: So for long decades fought, exile and woe Accepting, till the equal hand of God Restored to their hereditary abode. You too have greatly dared, and but that Fate For her remoter objects obdurate Averted her unmoved and marble gaze, No human force had power to erase From Earth’s free peoples. Not the armed pride Of England but decrees supreme o’erride This stubborn nation. Farm and smiling field Plundered and burned no more your sustenance yield, Your chiefs are taken one by one, your bands Wasted with battle, your great war-weary hands Avail no longer and your women die In England’s camps by famine miserably, Disease and famine, hunger’s squalid brood. The smiling babes who should prolong your blood, Pale victims flit, to death’s unbottomed maw
Page – 248 Devoted by the conqueror’s cynic law. And must you perish from earth’s record then, O nation of indomitable men? Look not towards Europe! Europe’s heart is dead. Hard atheisms, selfish lusts instead Usurp her bosom; not honest blood but gold Runs liquid in her veins: for she has sold Her soul to commerce, Mammon is her creed, The ledger lined her Bible, and Christ must bleed In plundered nations that the modern Jew May prosper. This is not Europe that you knew When from the clash of mighty States you went Into harsh sultry deserts well-content. For all her swift and sovran moods of old Are changed into a reckoning spirit cold And a hysteric wrath that dare not strike The strong man armed to meet the blow. She, like A trembling woman who puts o’er her shift Hard armour, wears the sword she dare not lift, Covering her coward heart with splendid arms: Clothed as in adamant shakes with pale alarms, Armed as with hell-fire fronts not answering shells, Blusters and trembles, menaces and pales. Therefore her navies case in triple steel, Therefore her legions grow apace; her heel Of iron breaks the weak ones of the world, But not against the strong her flags unfurled Shall flaunt the tempest, nor her hissing flail Of bullets thresh familiar hills and hail Of shells in Ocean sibilant be drowned While navies rend and sink her coasts around. Easier the naked African to quell Or on the ill-armed Mongolian shot and shell To lavish and with coward murder chase Or with strong lust invade a virtuous race. Meanwhile her prating conferences increase And gild her terrors with the name of peace.
Page – 249 All these high nations who with paeans loud Acclaimed your victories, the bitter crowd And the loose tongues who spat their venom base In England’s evil hour on England’s face Avenging thus decades of craven fear, Not one shall dare to speak high words with her For your sake, none shall raise his armed hand Against the inheritors of sea and land. Nor shall the American’s pale feverish face Be lifted from his heaps of gold and trays Of silver. Deal not with such things as these, You who are men, not gibbering shades. Increase Strength rather, of yourselves and Heaven be sure; Firm make your hearts, magnanimous to endure More than loud ruin. Though at last you yield, Yet nowise vain your firmness in the field, Daring and all the bitter sweat of blood. Boers, you have sown the veldt with greatness, stood Irrigating from your own veins farmstead And kopje and with the bodies of your dead Manured them: women and young children gave Their lives to help the seedtime of the brave. Shall harvest fail you? No, the Power is just That veils Himself behind the world, not thrust From puissance by the maxim’s brutal roar Nor to the shrapnel gives His sceptre o’er. The harvest that you sowed, your sons shall reap, Stern liberty; nor the example sleep Imprisoned in the Afric seas, but hurled Reverberate through the upstarting world. And the dead nations in the East shall rise And they that slumber in the West; with eyes Dismayed the elder Empires overgrown Shall feel a sudden spirit breathe, a tone Of challenge hearkening know, at last awake, Earth was not wide for one sole nation’s sake. For this He fashioned you Who built the stars,
Page – 250 For this He sifted you with searching wars. Upon the Frisian waters bleak and isles Where the cold northern Ocean steel-like smiles, Savage and wide and bare, a nation sparse Bleak-fishing under the chill midnight stars, From the wild piercing blast your fathers drew The breath that loves the desert. To them grew The Saxon dour and the hard German rude, And of that stubborn ore unbrittle, crude, God hammered Him a sword with giant strokes Upon the anvil of the Ocean rocks; His fiercest furnace piled the ore to try; Often He tempered it, often laid by Unknown of all to harden and anneal. He made it not of the fine Damasc steel Comely to see or polished dazzling bright, A dancing splendour and a pitiless light, Nor as in Jaipur worked with genial art, But sheer and stark to rive the adamant heart. With this He smote the Iberian and the Gaul; This from his scabbard leaps whene’er o’er all His earth of various use in various lands One domination spreads out selfish hands. Not for its own sake is the falchion keen, Not for self-greatness was it forged, through skin, Flesh, heart and bone of giant power to cleave. Its flash is as the lightning on the eve Of the stupendous storm that shall uproot Some oak of empire. When Heaven grows a clot Of darkness, then God’s dagger rips the sky. Small is the blade and narrow to the eye The rift; but through it seas of light shall pour And through it the world-shaking thunders roar And from the storm the sweet fresh day have birth. When Spain was mighty and cruel and all earth Darkened by her huge shadow, your fathers first Defied her puissance; — they the chains accursed
Page – 251 Asunder rent and braved the bigot’s flame And braved the unvanquished terrors of her name. Then England grew, then France arose. The one Repulsed her from the sea’s dominion Making the narrow floods an empire’s tomb When the shot-ridden galleons through the gloom Of heaven and the wrath of spuming seas Fled through grey Ocean and the Hebrides, God’s anger swift behind. Then was her hand Loosened from France’s throat; the smiling land Healed her deep wounds and from her masculine strife Of mighty spirits forged united life Now first; so, her high natural vigour found, Hurled the wide-sprawling Titan to the ground. But ’twas stern Holland shore his feet of clay Opening to these the splendours of their day. Next when great Louis’ grandiose mind and high O’ervaulted all the West like God’s own sky, Your fathers first opposed their petty strength To his huge destinies; nor defeat, nor length Of weary struggle could out-tire nor break Their spirit obstinate for freedom’s sake, When Nassau led them. He was such a man As you love best to set in your stern van, Wordless and lonely, stubborn as the hills, With nature strong to brook tremendous ills In silence, dowered with vigilant brain and nerve That never from the goal consent to swerve But tame down fiercest Fate as men may school Some dangerous lion to constraining rule. He sowed the seed; strong England reaped the fruit, Bringing down showers with the loud cannon’s bruit. Then did she grow indeed. Iberia proud Being humbled she upon the Ocean loud Her dwarfish stature launched, but now she trod Both hemispheres, now giantlike bestrode The Atlantic and her crest was in the skies,
Page – 252 Earth but a market for her merchandise. The double Indies all their wealth disgorged To swell her and her thunders iron-forged Possessed the hither and the farther seas: She strewed their waters with her enemies. Ever she grew and as when Rome was great, No limit seemed of her supreme estate. Frore Canada to the Austral heats she joins And peoples Earth from her exhaustless loins. Asia and the equator were her spoil, Her footstool, or a workshop for her toil. Nor sole she walked, but Europe emulous Where she had trampled followed orgulous Like dwarfs behind a giant, gleaning wide Footholds too small for her gigantic stride. They too grow great, they too are sons of God Who meant, they say, all earth for their abode And increase; others the Almighty made Their menial peoples, stamped with yellow shade Or dark, savage of heart, of reason weak. Nay, but their lords shall make them wise and meek! Inferior races, let them serve and crouch Obedient, with the kennel for their couch, Too happy if but spared the knout and rod. Yet shall the proud blasphemers know that God For nobler uses to immortal man This body’s garb designed when He began To build the planets. His foreseeing eyes Of ease and its corroding puissance wise, Reserving to more memorable blows, From you His chosen stock your sternest chose And hardest in the grain and drove them forth From their too populous and prosperous North Over to torrid regions burning far Under a fierier sun and brighter star. There had He worked His Amazulu hordes To His great purpose ‘neath their savage lords,
Page – 253 Chaka the brain of war and Dingaan; — there Your steel was once again in the red flare Of that strong furnace tested and annealed, And that its hard rough temper glints might yield Of fire, into its molten ore He sank The Celt’s swift force and genius of the Frank: Nor in the wave-washed regions of the south Allowed your home, but to the higher drouth Scourged northward half the iron-minded brood In the high hills and the veldt’s solitude ‘Twixt Vaal and the Limpopo. There you stand Fighting for liberty and fatherland, O little people of a mighty birth, The huge colossus who bestrides the earth. Therefore let not defeat your hearts dismay, For He that made you, knows His hour, — today Or after Time grows old, the Spirit high Prepares His mighty ends unwaveringly. Not by the fluent tongue is Freedom earned, Nor lightly, but when her spirit long has burned In the strong bosom fronting giant fears And wrestling with defeat and hostile years, Antagonist of its opposing fate, — Such hearts earn mighty Freedom for their mate. Such hearts are yours and will not falter. Firm Your destiny stands assured its strenuous term In God’s great keeping who His deathless trust Keeps for the race when your strong hearts are dust, — Freedom that blooms not but upon the grave Where they who loved her sleep, her slaughtered brave.
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Who art thou that roamest Over mountains dim In the haunts of evening, Sister of the gleam!
Whiter than the jasmines, Roses dream of thee; Softly with the violets How thine eyes agree!
As thy raven tresses Night is not so black, From thy moonbright shoulders Floating dimly back.
Feet upon the hilltops, Lilies of delight, With their far-off radiance Tinge the evening bright.
In the vesper calmness Lightly like a dove, With thy careless eyelids Confident of love,
As of old thou comest Down the mountains far, Smiling from what gardens, Glowing from what star?
Racing from the hilltops Like a brilliant stream, Burning in the valleys Marble-bright of limb,
Page – 255 Singing in the orchards When the shadows fall, With thy crooning anklets To my heart that call,
By the darkening window Like a slender fire, With the night behind thee, Daughter of desire!
Open wide the doorway, Bid my love come in With the night behind her And the dawn within.
Take, O radiant fingers, Heart and hands of me, Hide them in thy bosom, O felicity!
Hearken, Ganges, hearken, thou that sweepest golden to the sea, Hearken, Mother, to my voice. From the feet of Hari with thy waters pure thou leapest free, Waters colder-pure than ice.
On Himâloy ‘s grandiose summits upright in his cirque of stones Shiva sits in breathless air, Where the outcast seeks his refuge, where the demon army moans, Ganges erring through his hair.
Down the snowwhite mountains speeding, the immortal peaks and cold, Crowd thy waves untouched by man. From Gungotry through the valleys next their icy tops were rolled, Bursting through Shivadry ran.
Page – 256 In Benares’ stainless city by defilement undefiled Ghauts and temples lightly touched With thy fingers as thou ranst, laughed low in pureness like a child To his mother’s bosom clutched.
Where the steps of Rama wandered, where the feet of Krishna came, There thou flowest, there thy hand Clasps us, Bhagirathie, Jahnavie or Gunga, and thy name Holier makes the Aryans’ land.
But thou leavest Aryavurtha, but thou leapest to the seas In thy hundred mighty streams; Nor in the unquiet Ocean vast thy grandiose journeyings cease, Mother, say thy children’s dreams.
Down thou plungest through the Ocean, far beneath its oozy bed In Patala’s leaden gloom Moaning o’er her children’s pain our mother, Ganges of the dead, Leads our wandering spirits home.
Mighty with the mighty still thou dwelledst, goddess high and pure; Iron Bhîshma was thy son, Who against ten thousand rushing chariots could in war endure; Many heroes fled from one.
Devavrath the mighty, Bhîshma with his oath of iron power, Smilingly who gave up full Joy of human life and empire, that his father’s wish might flower And his father’s son might rule.
Who were these that thronged thereafter? wherefore came these puny hearts Apter for the cringing slave, Wrangling, selfish, weak and treacherous, vendors of their nobler parts, Sorry food for pyre and grave?
Page – 257 O but these are men of mind not yet with Europe’s brutal mood alloyed, Poets singing in their chains, Preachers teaching manly slavery, speakers thundering in the void. Motley wear these men of brains!
Well it is for hound and watchdog fawning at a master’s feet, Cringing, of the whip afraid! Well it is for linnet caged to make with song his slavery sweet. Man for other ends was made.
Man the arrogant, the splendid, man the mighty wise and strong, Born to rule the peopled earth, Shall he bear the alien’s insult, shall he brook the tyrant’s wrong Like a thing of meaner birth?
Sreepoor in the east of Chand and Kédar, bright with Mogul blood, And the Kings of Aracan And the Atlantic pirates helped that hue, — its ruined glory flood Kîrtinasha’s waters wan.
Buried are our cities; fallen the apexed dome, the Indian arch; In Chitore the jackals crowd: Krishna’s Dwarca sleeps for ever, o’er its ruined bastions march All the Oceans thundering loud.
Still, yet still the fire of Kali on her ancient altar burns Smouldering under smoky pall, And the deep heart of her peoples to their Mighty Mother turns, Listening for her Titan call.
Yet Pratapaditya’s great fierce spirit shall in might awake In Jessore he loved and made, Sitaram the good and mighty for his well-loved people’s sake Leave the stillness and the shade.
Page – 258 And Bengal the wide and ancient where the Senas swayed of old Up to far Benares pure, She shall lead the Aryan peoples to the mighty doom foretold And her glory shall endure.
By her heart of quick emotion, by her brain of living fire, By her vibrant speech and great, She shall lead them, they shall see their destiny in her warm desire Opening all the doors of Fate.
By the shores of Brahmaputra or where Ganges nears the sea, Even now a flame is born Which shall kindle all the South to brilliance and the North shall be Lighted up as with the morn.
And once more this Aryavurtha fit for heavenly feet to tread, Free and holy, bold and wise, Shall lift up her face before the world and she whom men thought dead, Into strength immortal rise.
Not in icy lone Gungotry nor by Kashi’s holy fanes, Mother, hast thou power to save Only, nor dost thou grow old near Sagar, nor our vileness stains, Ganges, thy celestial wave.
Dukkhineswar, Dukkhineswar, wonderful predestined pile, Tell it to our sons unborn, Where the night was brooding darkest and the curse was on the soil Heaviest, God revealed the morn.
Page – 259 Suddenly out from the wonderful East
Suddenly out from the wonderful East like a woman exulting Dawn stepped forth with a smile on her lips, and the glory of morning Hovered over the hills; then sweet grew air with the breezes, Sweet and keen as a wild swift virgin; the wind walked blithely, Low was the voice of the leaves as they rustled and talked with the river, Ganges, the sacred river. Down from the northlands crowding, Touching the steps of the ghauts with the silver tips of their fingers Lightly the waters ran and talked to each other of sunshine, Lightly they laughed. But high on his stake impaled by the roadway Hung Mandavya the mighty in marble deep meditation, Sepulchred, dumb; on his either side were the thieves, immobile. They were dead, made free from cruelty, ceasing from anguish, And forgetting the thirst. But past them Ganges the mighty, First of the streams of the earth, our Mother, remembering the ages, Poured to the sea. Early at dawn by her ghauts the women of Mithila gathered. There they filled their gurgling jars, or gilding the Ganges Bathed in her waters and laughed as they bathed there clamouring, dashing Dew of her coolness in eyes of each other: the banks called sweetly Mad with the musical laughter of girls and joy of their crying, Low melodious cries. As when in a wood on the hillsides Thousands of bulbuls flitting and calling, eating the wild plums, Filling the ear with sweetness carry from treetop to treetop Vermeil of crest and scarlet of tail and small brown bodies Flitting and calling, calling and flitting, full of sweet clamour, Full of the wine of life, even such was the sweetness and clamour, Women bathing close by the ghauts of the radiant Ganges, Golden-limbed or white or darker than olives when ripest, Lovely of face or of mood, but all sweethearted and happy Aryan women. One there seemed of another moulding Who was aloof from the crowd and the chaos of cheerful faces. She at one side of the stairway slowly like one half-musing Bathed there, hiding her face in the deep cool bosom of waters, Losing herself in Ganges, or let its pearl drops dribble
Page – 260 Quietly down through the mystical night of her tresses on gleaming Shoulders, betwixt her great breasts noble as hills at noontide Back to their hurrying home: nor heeded the laughter near her. Only at times when the clamour grew high, she would look up smiling Such a slow sweet serious smile as a tender mother Watching her children at play might smile forgetting the sorrow Down in her own still patient heart where the deep tears gathered Swell unwept, till they turn to a sea of sorrowful pity.
Immense retreats of silence and of gloom, Hills of a sterile grandeur, rocks that sublime In bareness seek the blue sky’s infinite room With their coeval snows untouched by Time!
I seek your solemn spaces! Let me at last Forgotten of thought through days immemorable Voiceless and needless keep your refuge vast, Growing into the peace in which I dwell.
For like that Soul unmade you seem to brood Who sees all things emerge but none creates, Watching the ages from His solitude, Lone, unconcerned, remote. You to all Fates
Offer an unchanged heart, unmoved abide, Wordless, acceptant, sovereignly still. There is a soul in us as silent, wide, Mere, uncreative, imperturbable.
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