Songs to Myrtilla GLAUCUS Sweet is the night, sweet and cool As to parched lips a running pool; Sweet when the flowers have fallen asleep And only moonlit rivulets creep Like glow-worms in the dim and whispering wood, To commune with the quiet heart and solitude. When earth is full of whispers, when No daily voice is heard of men, But higher audience brings The footsteps of invisible things, When o’er the glimmering tree-tops bowed The night is leaning on a luminous cloud, And always a melodious breeze Sings secret in the weird and charmed trees, Pleasant ’tis then heart-overawed to lie Alone with that clear moonlight and that listening sky.

The Guest I have discovered my deep deathless being: Masked by my front of mind, immense, serene It meets the world with an Immortal’s seeing, A god-spectator of the human scene. No pain and sorrow of the heart and flesh Can tread that pure and voiceless sanctuary. Danger and fear, Fate’s hounds, slipping their leash Rend body and nerve, - the timeless Spirit is free. Awake, God’s ray and witness in my breast, In the undying substance of my soul Flamelike, inscrutable the almighty Guest. Death nearer comes and Destiny takes her toll; He hears the blows that shatter Nature’s house: Calm sits he, f

Parabrahman These wanderings of the suns, these stars at play In the due measure that they chose of old, Nor only these, but all the immense array Of objects that long Time, far Space can hold, Are divine moments. They are thoughts that form, They are vision in the Self of things august And therefore grandly real. Rule and norm Are processes that they themselves adjust. The Self of things is not their outward view, A Force within decides. That Force is He; His movement is the shape of things we knew, Movement of Thought is Space and Time. A free And sovereign master of His world within, He is not boun

Love and Death In woodlands of the bright and early world, When love was to himself yet new and warm And stainless, played like morning with a flower Ruru with his young bride Priyumvada. Fresh-cheeked and dew-eyed white Priyumvada . Opened her budded heart of crimson bloom To love, to Ruru; Ruru, a happy flood Of passion round a lotus dancing thrilled, Blinded with his soul's waves Priyumvada. To him the earth was a bed for this sole flower, To her all the world was filled with his embrace. Wet with new rains the morning earth, released From her fierce centuries and burning suns, Lavished her breath in greenness; poignant f

Bankim Chandra Chatterji How hast thou lost, O month of honey and flowers, The voice that was thy soul! Creative showers, The cuckoo's daylong cry and moan of bees, Zephyrs and streams and softly-blossoming trees And murmuring laughter and heart-easing tears And tender thoughts and great and the compeers Of lily and jasmine and melodious birds, All these thy children into lovely words He changed at will and made soul-moving books From hearts of men and women's honied looks. O master of delicious words! the bloom Of chompuk and the breath of king-perfume Have made each musical sentence with the noi

The Island Sun I have sailed the golden ocean And crossed the silver bar; I have reached the Sun of knowledge The earth-self ’s midnight star. Its fields of flaming vision, Its mountains of bare might, Its peaks of fiery rapture, Its air of absolute light, Its seas of self-oblivion, Its vales of Titan rest, Became my soul’s dominion, Its Island Blest. Alone with God and silence, Timeless it lived in Time; Life was His fugue of music, Thought was Truth’s ardent rhyme. The Light was still around me When I came back to earth Bringing the Immortal’s knowledge Into man’s cave of birth. Page-106

SONNETS Undated Sonnets Transformation My breath runs in a subtle rhythmic stream; It fills my members with a might divine: I have drunk the Infinite like a giant’s wine. Time is my drama or my pageant dream. Now are my illumined cells joy’s flaming scheme And changed my thrilled and branching nerves to fine Channels of rapture opal and Hyaline For the influx of the Unknown and the Supreme. I am no more a vassal of the flesh, A slave to Nature and her leaden rule; I am caught no more in the senses’ narrow mesh. My soul unhorizoned widens to measureless sight, My body is God’s happy liv

The Spring Child ON BASANTI’S BIRTHDAY - JYESTHA 1900 Of Spring is her name for whose bud and blooming We praise today the Giver, — Of Spring, and its sweetness clings about her For her face is Spring and Spring’s without her, As loth to leave her. See, it is summer; the brilliant sunlight Lies hard on stream and plain, And all things wither with heats diurnal; But she! how vanished things and vernal In her remain. And almost indeed we repine and marvel To watch her bloom and grow; For half we had thought our sweet bud could never Bloom out, but must surely remain for ever The child we kno

Answer to a Criticism * Milford accepts the rule that two consonants after a short vowel make the short vowel long, even if they are outside the word and come in another word following it. To my mind that is an absurdity. I shall go on pronouncing the y of frosty as short whether it has two consonants after it or only one or none; it remains "frosty whether it is a frosty scalp or frosty top or a frosty anything. In no case have I pronounced it or could I consent to pronounce it as frostee. My hexameters are intended to be read naturally as one would read any English sentence. But if you admit a short syllable to be long whenever there are two consonants after i

Life Mystic Miracle, daughter of Delight,           Life, thou ecstasy, Let the radius of thy flight           Be eternity. On thy wings thou bearest high           Glory and disdain, Godhead and mortality,           Ecstasy and pain. Take me in thy wild embrace           Without weak reserve Body dire and unveiled face;            Faint not, Life, nor swerve. All thy bliss I would explore,           All thy tyranny. Cruel like the lion’s roar,           Sweet like springtide be. Like a Titan I would take,           Like a God enjoy, Like a man contend and make,           Revel like a bo