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

To the Sea O grey wild sea, Thou hast a message, thunderer, for me. Their huge wide backs Thy monstrous billows raise, abysmal cracks Dug deep between. One pale boat flutters over them, hardly seen. I hear thy roar Call me, “Why dost thou linger on the shore With fearful eyes Watching my tops visit their foam-washed skies? This trivial boat Dares my vast battering billows and can float. Death if it find, Are there not many thousands left behind? Dare my wide roar, Nor cling like cowards to the easy shore. Come down and know What rapture lives in danger and o’erthrow.” Yes, thou great sea, I am more mighty and outbil

Thought the Paraclete As some bright archangel in vision flies Plunged in dream-caught spirit immensities, Past the long green crests of the seas of life, Past the orange skies of the mystic mind Flew my thought self-lost in the vasts of God. Sleepless wide great glimmering wings of wind Bore the gold-red seeking of feet that trod Space and Time's mute vanishing ends. The face Lustred, pale-blue-lined of the hippogriff, Eremite, sole, daring the bourneless ways, Over world-bare summits of timeless being Gleamed; the deep twilights of the world-abyss Failed below. Sun-realms of supernal seeing, Crimson-white mooned oceans of pauseless bliss Dre

Revelation Someone leaping from the rocks Past me ran with wind-blown locks Like a startled bright surmise Visible to mortal eyes,– Just a cheek of frightened rose That with sudden beauty glows, Just a footstep like the wind And a hurried glance behind, And then nothing, – as a thought Escapes the mind ere it is caught. Someone of the heavenly rout From behind the veil ran out. A Tree A tree beside the sandy river-beach Holds up its topmost boughs Like fingers towards the skies they cannot reach, Earth-bound, heaven-amorous. This is the soul of man. Body and brain Hungry for earth

The Dwarf Napoleon HITLER, OCTOBER 1939 Behold, by Maya’s fantasy of will A violent miracle takes sudden birth, The real grows one with the incredible. In the control of her magician wand The small achieves things great, the base things grand. This puny creature would bestride the earth Even as the immense colossus of the past. Napoleon’s mind was swift and bold and vast, His heart was calm and stormy like the sea, His will dynamic in its grip and clasp. His eye could hold a world within its grasp And see the great and small things sovereignly. A movement of enormous1depth and scope He seized and g