Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, INDIA, by VICTOR GUSTAVE PLARR


Poetry Explorer

Classic and Contemporary Poetry

INDIA, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: Before the face of the eternal east
Last Line: And orient heavens fill with fire of morn.
Subject(s): India


The brooding East with awe beheld
Her impious younger world.
MATTHEW ARNOLD.

Before the face of the eternal East
Our songs, our systems, and our histories seem
Frail, hueless, childlike even as the least
Of the faint blooms that float upon Life's stream,
Or of the motes that in Life's sun swim grey,
Their oldest glories things of yesterday.

Lo! orient Asia, mother of mankind,
Most mute and motionless of countenance,
Like to a still sphinx in her stony trance,
Watcheth the clouds of dust uprolled behind
Her children's caravans that strain and run
For evermore toward the setting sun.

And she is unforsaken; by her side
The faithful of her children yet abide
As multitudinous as midnight stars,
Or grains of sand in ocean's shifting bars.

Or ere the first barbarians sought the West
The peoples spread to Asia's utmost bound,
And one, most loved of all her children, wound
Into the waste of mountains which uprose,
Enwrapped in keen and everlasting snows,
Against the huge and fire-fraught skies, and pressed
Adown each pine-clad steep and palm-clad slope
Into a splendid heritage of hope.

O India, with intensest fire and stress
Thou mirrorest thy mother's loveliness,
A second and more perfect Asia thou;
O mystic flower bound upon Time's brow;
O land of swift and teeming tropic birth,
And of as speedy and unending death;
Through thee, as through a great heart of the Earth,
Life's current elemental thundereth.
Men call thee India; mighty phantasies
Throng on the heart at naming of thy name;
Temples and thrones and bloodstained dynasties,
And inarticulate hosts, grown meek and tame,
Whose dusky faces crowd us in our dreams,
And countless cedarn houses heaped with stores
Of lustrous fabrics, odours, jewels, ores,
And moonlit garden-lawns round hushed hareems,
And holiest rivers lapsing without cease
Through wildernesses or dank fields of peace,
And mountain lands that thrust their heads on high,
And steep vales choked with bloom of tropic trees,
Made voiceful by strange beasts and birds and bees,
And over all the clear sweet purple sky.

In Hindostan, 'mid such an untold throng
Of memories and hopes and hues and forms,
Song is enmeshed by very wealth of song,
And silenced by the voices of the storms
Of Time and Change and Woe, that sweep and rave
Around our world's own garden, cradle, grave.

Hellenic Homer hath not wandered yet
To beg song's pittance by th' Aegean bays,
When from the two seas to the Himalays
A thousand realms and cities rise or set,
And all the Aryans know the joy and strife
Of a strong nation's swiftly-pulsing life.
Within the bounds of some small village state
The peasants hasten toiling soon and late.
Here gentle oxen and their driver brown
Are cleaving goodly furrows up and down.
Here in the long street busily to and fro
The lithe-limbed folk in graceful draperies go,
And, as they pass, the cunning hawkers ply
Their inmost heart with loud and eager cry.
Here, underneath the shade of grassy caves,
Behind his frame the weaver deftly weaves.
From darkened doorways comes the regular sound
Of the slow hand-mills turning round and round.
Here 'gainst the coming of her wearied lord
A woman on her threshold white has scored
A fair and fortunate device to fright
The ill-eyed ghosts that prowl in dim twilight.
Here, 'neath green cloisters of a banyan,
In meditation sits some holy man.
The reverent bystanders seeing him
So rapt of countenance, so gaunt of limb,
With sackcloth girt, with ashes on his head,
To life, to love, to riches wholly dead,
Have brought him little gifts they scarce can spare,
Winning the priceless guerdon of his prayer.
Anon, with clamouring of horns and drums,
With heralds, runners, guards, a Rajah comes.
High in his curtained howdah is he borne
Above the hot earth and its ways forlorn.
At the soft tread of his great elephant
The bellows in the stithy cease to pant;
Even the swiftly circling nautch-girls pause
Amid their fallen flowers and golden gauze;
Even the hunter from the jungle drear
Throws down his quarry and his hunting-spear
To bow beside his fellows, till the king
Has heard the village minstrel duly sing
Some stately song of Eastern blandishment,
And, like a vision of delight, has bent
Into the feathery palm-wood, whence there peep,
In their immortal youth of sunlit sleep,
The fretted walls and towers and delicate domes
And carven arches of his home of homes.

Thus do the Sanskrit-speaking people dwell
Full peacefully around each village well.
And o'er their lives the mystic Hindoo gods,
A firmament of strange divinities,
Keep vigil aye with kind or cruel eyes;
And in their hands they hold rewards and rods
Wherewith to gladden or to guide and goad
Each votary groaning underneath his load.
Yet are these countless idols, that imbrute
The popular faith till outer men deride,
But broideries upon the veils that hide
One Para-Brahma's Wisdom Absolute.
Wholly apart he watcheth from his height
The vale of things created, and therein
His Emanations hurling bolts of light,
And scourging the rebellious in their sin,
Nor heedeth how, 'mid lands with travail riven,
'Mid wail of ancient sorrow far and near,
The victor's wreaths and victims aye are given
To Seeva, the Destroyer, who is Fear.

Only the sacred Brahmins, they who erst
Out of the head of Brahma's first-born burst,
Are privileged to bear laborious pains,
To scourge the sense, to break its clinging chains,
Thereby to win Nirvâna's perfect peace,
And cease as dewdrops in the ocean cease.
From arm, thigh, foot of Brahm, the Veda sang,
All meaner and more witless mortals sprang
– Warriors and husbandmen and toilers last.

Ah woe! all mortal men have fall'n asleep,
Bound deep within the iron gulf of Caste,
Where never gleams of Freedom's dawning creep,
In fetters of a deathless despotism.
Yet lo! the Sunrise steeps the long abysm;
Buddha hath met with Brahma face to face;
Buddha shall cast each idol from its base,
Bidding all men to enter on the Way,
To scorn the lures of life that spoil and slay,
To seek the Right alone, so they shall be
As dewdrops merged into Nirvâna's sea.

Now fear the Brahmins, lest the priest, who raves
In Salsette's or in Elephanta's caves,
Shall hear no answer in those dim confines
To all the drunken callings of his prayer
Save a lone echo from the lines and lines
Of twisted tyrant faces carven there.
They fear, lest now the elephant-head men carve
In streets and portals, Seeva's sapient son,
For lack of sweetmeats and of flowers shall starve,
Lest incense, chaplets, honey-cakes and wine
Be brought no longer unto Kreeshna's shrine,
The shepherd tinted as the purple main;
Or unto Lord Kama, that joyous one,
Who bears the wreathed shafts and bow of cane.
They fear, lest the huge car, that groans and reels
When Jagernaut's fierce Vishnou festal hath,
Shall crush no pilgrims prone beneath its wheels,
But smoothly glide along a bloodless path.

After long lapse of years, on India's verge
The dusts of marching armies rise and surge,
And the shrill cymbals shriek the battle dirge.
Afar the Crescent gleams o'er billowy hosts.
What boots it now for Brahmins proud to curse
New heresies with many a Vedic verse?
For straightway Tamerlane is in their coasts,
And all the Indian faiths and nations now
Shall to the servants of the Prophet bow.
In Indian towns, before men's angry eyes,
The grace of mosque and minaret shall rise,
And sunlit precincts unto prayer invite,
With fanning wings and falling waters white.

O Indian world, was thou forgotten then
By our young race? Nay, in the mouths of men
Thy name in broken legends lingered long,
Breathing of mystery and ancient song,
Though thou wast blind when for a little while
We mimicked thee, and the eternal town,
Mid shallow splendour and unfathomed guile,
Crowned her mad rulers with an Indian crown.
It was from thee young Dionysos came
Upon that yellow tiger he made tame,
Bearing betwixt his hands the purple vine,
Wherewith to change and quicken hearts and lips.
It was from thee the old Sidonian ships
Sailed homeward over leagues of treacherous brine,
And brought their bright freight to parch'd Israel.
It was to thee, o'er half a world that slept,
The Macedonian impotently swept.
It was of thee old travellers would tell,
Till England's mariners and merchants sought
Thy shores for commerce, and an empire bought.
Mark we once more the Moslem's ranks updrawn
On Plassey's plain, beneath the lurid dawn.
Hear we once more the nations as they strive,
And the long thunder of the guns of Clive.

India is Saxon now; and we have tamed
Our mother Asia's child, who shrinks ashamed
With heart's blood and with treasure paying toll
Unto the young might of the Western soul.
And she is Saxon now; no, rather say
The youngest children of the ages flow
Back to the eldest who beheld them play
About their Eastern cradle long ago.

Thus unto us, who in our strength rejoice,
From India's heart might sing a poet's voice.

O young barbarian Europe, fierce and wild,
Through whose strong limbs and passionate life-veins
The voice of forests hoar and raving mains,
The keen breath of the tempests from the North
Stir unto strife until thou leapest forth
To glorious guests, an arm'd yet blinded child;
O Saxon England, Europe's mightiest-born,
Who spite of slipping steps and raiment torn,
And spite of surging lines of clamorous foes,
Shall't speed with Freedom's lamp unto the close;
Pass ye, yet softly to your Mother's feet,
To Asia dreaming in the heavy heat.
Pass ye to India. Lo, she hath the mien
Of an enchanted, beauteous, Eastern queen.

Mark as she standeth in the slumbering plains
Upon her feet the weight of ancient chains,
And on her listless hands forgotten scars.
Lo, round her calm head cluster the still stars;—
And through blue night she chaseth thoughts divine.
Yet, ever and anon, her dim outline
Is shaken with the wind of hopes and fears,
And the dark eyes wax dim with unshed tears.

Then English hearts can echo back again
One solemn answer to the Indian's strain.
Where Delhi keeps sad vigil 'mid the fall
Of dynasty and power, tomb and wall,
So beauteous yet, and grand, that strangers say:
'A Niobe in Asia mourns to-day;'
Where holy Ganges through the long land sweeps,
Reflecting in her still and lustral deeps
The gardens golden with the champac's blooms,
And leagues of waving fields, and forest glooms,
And the dense jungle's insect-peopled brake,
And lithe shapes that at eventide awake,
And part the reeds, and from the trampled brink
Roar their fierce hunting songs, and stooping drink,
And lapping gently past white temple stairs,
When all the odorous eve grows sad with airs
Of lamentation and perplexity
Sung by the mourners, who keep drawing nigh,
And to the steps on dusky shoulders bring
The dead man, in his death-sark, sorrowing,—
Whom thence she bears, a poor and silent guest,
Into the shadows of his long last rest,
And flowing calmed, where some sweet Hindoo maid
With tremulous hand on her strong flood has laid
A little earthern lamp to sink or float
Sharing the fortune of a loved one's boat;
Where Agra shrines her dead queen, India's gem,
In the domed tomb's immortal anadem;
Where dream Nerbadda's deeps of violet,
Deeps, where, 'twixt shadows of an avenue
Of rose-flushed marble cliffs, some lone canoe
May glide and float when day draws night to set;
From the Five Rivers unto Adam's grave,
From Himalay unto the Southern wave,
Wherever grows an Indian Mango tree,
Wherever sounds the sobbing Indian sea,
Wherever words of some old Indian tongue
By Indian lips to Indian hearts are sung,
There floats our English flag against the sky,
There for our brothers we can toil and die,
There reign the English law and strenuous will
To seek the Right and do away the Ill.

Most verily that Indian world has moaned
Through an initiation kin to death,
Through ages of hoar tyranny enthroned,
Through haggard labour, through the prison's breath,
Through the dominion of those cruel wraiths
Fear gave to her in her primeval faiths,
Through pestilence, through the tumultuous flood
Of broken-hearted tears and mutinous blood,
Through the unrest, men feel, and dread despair
When the wide wings of Famine fan the air.
It were not strange had India's children grown
Like their own jungle tiger fell and wild.
Yet have they caught his gentler moods alone.
Unto the fugitive's fortune reconciled,
With silent step along Life's way they tread,
Nor seek to taste the woes of fathers dead,
And, brought to bay, they crouch and lick the dust.
Ay, let men call it cunning if they must.
Thus, verily, the Indian world has passed
Through dread initiation, and at last,
Gaunt with the strife, each weary neophyte
Lifting his countenance beholds the Light.
For, with the triumph of the conqueror,
Another faith at last hath dawned for her,
Purer than sweet Siddârtha's ere could be,
Even the Word men heard in Galilee.
And, in the white light of these elder years,
'Tis ours alone to conquer the distress
That binds her feet and dims her eyes with tears
And set her free in newer loveliness.

So may the conquered and the conquerors climb
From steep to steep of Progress, until Time
Shall see the multitudes in all the lands
To one another stretching brothers' hands.
Yet even now to Indian cheeks are borne
The waking winds. Behold! Night's blinding shroud
Is cloven and changed to leagues of golden cloud,
And orient heavens fill with fire of Morn.





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