A Water Colour Painting

Half of my inspiration I declare
Attributable to my easy-chair
On which the livelong day I love to sit
With eyelids closed, behind whose darkness, lit
With changing lights, dappled with changing shades,
A thousand pictures rise ..….. Life slowly fades
Into the faery twilight of the mind
Rememoried of beauty left behind
In childhood’s realms, and all prophetic grown
Of future miracles already sown
In the Unconscious, Childhood lives again
In the awakened slumber of the brain,
The treasure-house of myriad, memories, ....
I see once more will woodlands full of trees
And roaming butterflies behind the old
Romantic house, where noonday lavished gold
Upon the bleak bare rocks, and mornings came
Like elfin festivals of coloured flame
And sunset like red music came and went
Struck on some angel’s magic instrument.
I still remember how we chased and caught
Warm butterflies, bright as a poet’s thought.
Winged into lambent liberated flight
And shot courageously into the light;
And how we climbed the branches where we sat
And watched the grey and ruddy squirrels at
Their mid-day meal of fruit which seemed towait
As though the rich fulfilment of their fate
Depended on their hunger; and I yet
Remember every grassblade dripping wet
At dawn with midnight dews which slipped and fell
Like slow dissolving diamonds in the dell
Marking the moments ….. I remember well
The creaking bamboos margining the glade
Tall and unquiet, and the sounds they made
As though they mourned incalculable loss ....
And then we watched the clouds like camels cross
Unending azure desert miles of heaven
Between the glowing noon and glimmering even.

They all come to me; the bees, the doves,
The sky, the trees, the stones, my childhood’s loves
To whom I have been loyal to this day
All suddenly out of the far-away
Forgotten past they leap in recognition
Of me, their lover, when the hour of vision
Bridges eternity with time, the vast
Unhappened future with the happened past.
What else do Iremember? The queer sense
Of indefinable Omnipotence
Hidden within all things I heard and saw.
Some vaguely-felt, imperishable law
In silent operation everywhere;
I trembled at the blueness of the air,
The whiteness in the lily and the sweet
Coming of rain which, falling in a sheet
Of woven pearl, sent through my heart intense
And nervous tingles, coursing through, each sense
Like scented splendour. Every bird which sang
Went through my being like a sudden pang
Of parting, but from whom, I could not tell!
Each thing of beauty was an urgent bell
Calling my heart to prayer, while childhood was
As beautiful and dreamy as the pause
Of light upon a hill just at the break
Of morning when the first bird is awake.

I yet remember how I used to thrill
When in the rainy time the light lay chill
Sombre and magical, quiet and cool
Upon white lotuses along a pool ...
When overhead the heavy clouds appeared
Like heaven’s drooping eyelids many-teared.
How the leaves trembled in the trembling wind
Like to sweet poems in a poet’s mind,
Poems of life and death and joy and pain
In God’s cool breath which blows before the rain
Of gathered inspiration ... In a while
Each rainfed runnel was as good as Nile
Or Ganges on whose waves we set afloat
One carefully constructed paper boat
And then another boat and then another
Laden with news for our exiled brother
Living in Germany, a place that stood,
According to us, in the neighbourhood,
Perhaps, a furlong from our gardened wood.
But then, invariably O evil luck;
Our boats in a few moments would be struck
Against rough pebbles in the way or stuck
In some obstructing branch lying across
The swollen runnel .... O, our childhood’s loss
Of paper boats .... perchance, intenser than
The loss of real ones to grown-up man.

And when the sun came out again, the trees
Where loud with dark innumerable bees,
Purple reminders of the joy that lives
In never-failing Nature and forgives
The thrice unnatural wretchedness of man
Who hurts her harmony and pulls the plan
Of heavenwardness to pieces    man, the traitor
Of the original trust of the Creator
To whom creation with its fire and cloud
Bird, beast and man, bending in silence, vowed
Full, absolute obedience to His word
Ere they, out of travailing chaos, stirred
Into a perfect rhythm of intense
Self-mastery, exalted reticence.
All things and beings, save man, fulfil the vow:
The greeny yellow parrot on the bough,
The scarlet berry and each quivering leaf
Which, had not mortal coloured them with grief,
Had been unsullied rapture. In his pride
Of loathsome ignorance on every side
Man, hurling a blind challenge, wounds and draws
The blood of beauty, breaks the Law of laws
At every turn as easily as a flower ....
Believing that be hath defied the power
Vanquishing It, because It humbly bows
In patience for a period and allows
His hands to trifle with the pledge and tamper
With Its virginity without a hamper.
Until at last in high retaliation
It rises in the wrath of all creation
Against his huge corruption and demands
Full compensation at his errant hands
For all the hideous ruin that they wrought ...

Think you the offended Power remembers not
The offender?   … Fool! the broken Law breaks him
Who breaks It … since It is both quiet and grim
And jealous of the wonder It has set
And never never never can forget.

I loved such placid stones as dwell and dream
In the clear silent flowing of the stream,
Stones that are dead to us whose mortal sight
Behold not in their greyness brimming light
Issuing from the womb of heaven which knows
No difference between a stone and rose,
Sweet equal nurslings in the Master’s vision
At the still ancient hour when the division
Of fire and breath and colour was begun ....
In the immortal scales the moon and sun
Weigh equally with worm and dust and herb,
And when man’s inequalities disturb
The harmony, within a little while
The Maker with His unperturbed smile
Comes down to earth in His resistless form
Of retribution, blacker than a storm,
And under lightning’s wrath and thunder’s stress
Resuscitates the broken loveliness
Holding the scales again, and will not rest
Until all things responding to their test
Are equal to each other in the far
Unalterable balance where things are
Evasive essence, undecreed of earth,
Unmanacled of life and death and birth,
Unbondaged of the cyclic wheel which whirled
Incessantly sustains the visible world
But on the surface of existence dwell
Combating contraries which make the hell
Of inequalities around our lives
Wherein harsh exploitation rules and strives
Relentlessly reducing Nature’s house
To a huge sepulchre; Death like a mouse
Lurks in Life’s granaries and nibbles at
The gathered grain, and all the beauty that
Trembles outside of us is as a sleep
In which the canker never fails to keep
Its constant tryst, casting its ugly shade
On the world’s blossom, making it afraid.

Escaped from Singlehood, from shape to shape,

to the Singlehood we must escape
Through death and devastation and disease
Inevitable threat of contraries
Continued through the ages … All that’s born
By the sure shadow which it sheds is torn
And twisted into agony and dread
And at the fountains of its own blood fed
Under the fiery crimson-coloured pall
Of time’s enormous shadow covering all.

The lizard pounces on the moth at night,
The kite upon the chicken in the light
Of morning red upon the cottage-yard;
Under the mobled midnight many-starred
The tiger leaps upon the tethered cow,
The serpent on the frog, and on the bough
The blue-black crow feasts on the weak white worm …
Since lo, life holds within itself the germ
Of secret death in which her safety lies ....
Beauty is beauty all because she dies!

Through the dim portals of her myriad deaths,
Between the ceasing of her myriad breaths,
Her shadow into Time’s bare garden thrown
Touches at length the feet of the Unknown.