FRAGMENTS
Blue lotus of the sea, on her large eyes
Ocean
the tincture of nocturnal seas
Bestowed,
the sweetness of her summer voice,
The flow of her green-rippling noonday laugh:
Night
envied her long tresses and her cheeks
Were
wild autumnal olives lightly flushed
With
the shadow of a dying rose.
We are no wizened hermits. . . . . . . .
……………………..whose fumbling hands
Turn pale religious leaves, forgetting earth
And
this sweet natural light, this common air
That
yet is precious, who with idiot scorn
And
lunatic austerity repulse
The emparadising virtue of the soft
And roseate circle of a girl's embrace.
Nor know they lofty pride, nor golden words
Of
wisest poets, nor to wield a spear,
To loose the silent winged snake of war,
To
wrestle knee to knee with grisly death.
By meditation and insipid sweets
Of piety and goodness, they aspire
To passionless perfection, death in life
Pale
nothingness. But we the stormy brood;
Whom
Ocean to imperious incest bore,
Were
in the waste and ruinous conflict rocked
Of
warring seas, and with thy nurturing milk
We
drank the joy of battle, high disdain
That
spurns obedience and the thirst unslaked
Indulgence
prompts from sin to fiery sin.
He
passed the unbridged seas whose waters lap
The utmost promontories and escarped
Immobile
cliffs; he passed the desolate drifts,
The
solitary sands, the antres wild,
Memorials of a mute, unstoried age;
He passed the secret woodland, whence the palm
Aspired,
albeit of origin obscure,
To kiss high heaven, and the banyan spread
Land-hungering
tyrant, o'er full many a rood
His
bannered pomp; the pestilent fens he passed,
The
salt and unplumbed marshes, direful nest
Of
unkempt fever and malarious plague,
And that swan-cradling pool, blue Kolar called
Set
like a jewel in the earth's brown throat.
All these he passed...
The heady
rout of Maruts rode amain
Ratri the
Ethiope handmaid of the Moon.
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