To Summarize
AUSTIN COATES
These slender mosques and
palaces,
These great forts mortifying
rebellion,
The mighty temples of
Vijayanagar,
Of Maurya, Chola, or Hoysala
days,
The oldest caves, hewn out from
daunting rocks,
The earliest edifice, the
strangest monument,
The most derelict ruins or
misunderstood remains,
Are too, young to have heard my
voice in India.
And I am too old, my times were
too ancient,
Too distant, my eyesight too dim,
too blurred,
To remember what stood before
these later inventions,
To grasp the ancient India my
dreams have heard –
The land that has succored my
buried intentions,
That will live for me again at
the breath of a word.
What sorrow is this, what patient
leaning
Through the dull mesh of an
accomplished tide,
In search of a melody supposedly
unending,
Shewing forth the cradle where
secrets hide,
Of the nevermore past now clogged
and clayed
By the uncouth hands of later
ages,
Cloaking the secret’s unending
portent,
The fires of love, the whisper of
sages?
This melody is hidden in rocks
and caves,
Or far away, apart, for the
lonely vagarite;
Nothing will remain for the
cold-eyed glitter
Of microscope, pick-axe, and
theodolite.
In the rivers alone, Godavari,
Krishna,
Mahanadi, Indus, and Ganges’
plain;
In the gentle hills, the blue-eyed
Nilgiri;
The dry South rocks in the red
terrain;
In the bed of vanished waters;
the eternal rice-fields;
The heat of summer sunlight;
God’s relief of rain;
Here alone is India as my soul
entreats it,
Here alone the structure which
has known my pain.
Leave aside the shipping, the
dusty highways,
The white-clad multitudes, the
westernized bazaars,
The suffocating railways, sordid
cities,
The poverty abiding in slum
alleys and bye-ways,
The relentless suffering of a
million pariahs.
Leave it behind you, this sorrow
and dejection,
Forgive it an instant from your
bleeding mind,
Though its stain will encroach on
your every reflection.
–Bind not care on the back of a
tortoise,
But rather on a fleeting mare,
And diligently seek that quiet
village India,
Whose lamplight burning at dusk
is kind
To a traveler, against whom there
shall be no sin,
Lest the Lord Himself, disguised,
shall have entered in.
Then stay, O heart; muse and
dwell
On mortal happiness and sanctity;
Of the rose that blooms on a thorn-tree,
And water from the depth of a
well.