Round the high Char Minar sounds of gay cavalcades
Blend with the music of cymbals and serenades.
Over the city
bridge Night comes majestical,
Borne like a queen to a
sumptuous festival.
STREET CRIES
When dawn's first cymbals beat upon the sky,
Rousing the world to labour's various cry,
To tend the flock, to bind the mellowing grain,
From
ardent toil to forge a little gain,
And fasting men go forth on hurrying feet,
BUY BREAD, BUY BREAD, rings down the eager street.
When the earth
falters and the waters swoon
With the implacable
radiance of noon,
And in dim shelters koils hush their notes,
And the faint, thirsting blood in
languid throats
Craves
liquid succour from the cruel heat,
BUY FRUIT, BUY FRUIT, steals down the panting street.
When
twilight twinkling o'er the gay bazaars,
Unfurls a sudden
canopy of stars,
When lutes are strung and
fragrant torches lit
On white roof-terraces where lovers sit
Drinking together of life's poignant sweet,
BUY FLOWERS, BUY FLOWERS, floats down the singing street.
TO INDIA
O young through all thy
immemorial years!
Rise, Mother, rise, regenerate from thy gloom,
And, like a bride high-mated with the spheres,
Beget new glories from thine ageless womb!
The nations that in fettered darkness weep
Crave thee to lead them where great mornings break . . . .
Mother, O Mother,
wherefore dost thou sleep?
Arise and answer for thy children's sake!
Thy Future calls thee with a
manifold sound
To
crescent honours, splendours, victories vast;
Waken, O slumbering Mother and be crowned,
Who once wert
empress of the
sovereign Past.
THE ROYAL TOMBS OF GOLCONDA
I muse among these silent fanes
Whose
spacious darkness guards your dust;
Around me sleep the hoary plains
That hold your ancient wars in trust.
I pause, my dreaming spirit hears,
Across the wind's unquiet tides,
The glimmering music of your spears,
The
laughter of your royal brides.
In vain, O Kings, doth time aspire
To make your names oblivion's sport,
While yonder hill wears like a tier
The ruined
grandeur of your fort.
Though centuries
falter and decline,
Your proven strongholds shall remain
Embodied memories of your line,
Incarnate legends of your reign.
O Queens, in vain old Fate decreed
Your flower-like bodies to the tomb;
Death is in truth the vital seed
Of your imperishable bloom
Each new-born year the bulbuls sing
Their songs of your renascent loves;
Your beauty wakens with the spring
To
kindle these pomegranate groves.
TO A BUDDHA SEATED ON A LOTUS
Lord Buddha, on thy Lotus-throne,
With praying eyes and hands elate,
What
mysticrapture dost thou own,
Immutable and ultimate?
What peace, unravished of our ken,
Annihilate from the world of men?
The wind of change for ever blows
Across the
tumult of our way,
To-morrow's
unborn griefs depose
The sorrows of our yesterday.
Dream yields to dream,
strife follows
strife,
And Death unweaves the webs of Life.
For us the travail and the heat,
The broken secrets of our pride,
The
strenuous lessons of defeat,
The flower deferred, the fruit denied;
But not the peace, supremely won,
Lord Buddha, of thy Lotus-throne.
With
futile hands we seek to gain
Our
inaccessible desire,
Diviner summits to attain,
With faith that sinks and feet that tire;
But
nought shall
conquer or control
The heavenward
hunger of our soul.
The end, elusive and afar,
Still lures us with its beckoning flight,
And all our
mortal moments are
A
session of the Infinite.
How shall we reach the great, unknown
Nirvana of thy Lotus-throne?
End