fears he shall never reach Nirvana.Round and round by a hundred shrines
Glittering at the great Shwe's base
Falls the sound of his feet mid lines
Droned from the sacred Wisdom.
Round and round where the idols gaze
So pitiless on his pained distress
He passes on,
Pale-eyed and wan —
A pariah like the dogs behind him.
Oh, what sin in a life begot
Thousands of lives ago did he sin
That he is now by all forgot,
Even by Lord Gautama?
Oh, what sin, that the lowest shun
His very name as a thing of shame —
A sound to taint
The winds that faint
From the high bells that hear it uttered!
Midnight comes and the hours of morn,
Tapers die and the flowers all
From the most fêted altars: lorn
And desolate is their odour.
Midnight goes, but he watches still
By each cold spire the moon sets fire,
By every palm
Whose silvery calm
Pillar and jewelled porch pray under.
Is it dawn that is breaking?.. No,
Only a star that falls in the sea,
Only a wind-bell's louder flow
Of praise to Lord Gautama.
Faithless dawn! with illusive feet
It comes too late to ease his fate.
He sinks asleep
A helpless heap,
Tho for it he may never reach Nirvana.
THE SHIPS OF THE SEA
Into port when the sun was setting
Rode the ship that bore my love,
Over the breakers wildly fretting,
Under the skies that shone above.
Down to the beach I ran to meet him;
He would come as he had said:
And he came – in a sailor's coffin,
Dead!..
O the ships of the sea! the women
They from all hope but Heaven part!
The tide has nothing now to tell me,
The breakers only break my heart!
KINCHINJUNGA
O white Priest of Eternity, around
Whose lofty summit veiling clouds arise
Of the earth's immemorial sacrifice
To Brahma in whose breath all lives and dies;
O Hierarch enrobed in timeless snows,
First-born of Asia whose maternal throes
Seem changed now to a million human woes,
Holy thou art and still! Be so, nor sound
One sigh of all the mystery in thee found.
For in this world too much is overclear,
Immortal Ministrant to many lands,
From whose ice-altars flow to fainting sands
Rivers that each libation poured expands.
Too much is known, O Ganges-giving sire;
Thy people fathom life and find it dire,
Thy people fathom death, and, in it, fire
To live again, tho in Illusion's sphere,
Behold concealed as Grief is in a tear.
Wherefore continue, still enshrined, thy rites,
Tho dark Thibet, that dread ascetic, falls
In strange austerity, whose trance appals,
Before thee, and a suppliant on thee calls.
Continue still thy silence high and sure,
That something beyond fleeting may endure —
Something that shall forevermore allure
Imagination on to mystic flights
Wherein alone no wing of Evil lights.
Yea, wrap thy awful gulfs and acolytes
Of lifted granite round with reachless snows.
Stand for Eternity while pilgrim rows
Of all the nations envy thy repose.
Ensheath thy swart sublimities, unscaled.
Be that alone on earth which has not failed.
Be that which never yet has yearned or ailed,
But since primeval Power upreared thy heights
Has stood above all deaths and all delights.
And tho thy loftier Brother shall be King,
High-priest be thou to Brahma unrevealed,
While thy white sanctity forever sealed
In icy silence leaves desire congealed.
In ghostly ministrations to the sun,
And to the mendicant stars and the moon-nun,
Be holy still, till East to West has run,
And till no sacrificial suffering
On any shrine is left to tell life's sting.
THE BARREN WOMAN
At the burning-ghat, O Kali,
Mother divine and dread,
See, I am waiting with open lips
Over the newly dead.
I am childless and barren; pity
And let me catch the soul
Of him who here on the kindled bier
Pays to Existence toll.
See, by his guileless body
I cook the bread and eat.
Give me the soul he does not need
Now, for conception sweet.
Hear, or my lord and husband
Shall send me from his door
And take to his side a fairer bride
Whose breast shall be less poor.
Oft I have sought thy temples,
By Ganges now I seek,
Where ashes of all the dead are strewn,
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