Poems of India - In a Mango-Tope

Between the sky-line and my feet

The stretch of lemon-grass is sere,

And, from some hidden village near,

There comes a single tom-tom’s beat.

High noon is grey on bush and tree,

The plain runs on without a change,

As though, for once, the eye could range

Through time into eternity.

And round me, in the mango-tope,

No sound disturbs the stillness wide

But the horse tethered at my side

Cropping the herbage of the slope.

All human stress has died away,

As if life, pausing, held apart,

As if this vain world’s fretting heart

Stood still to hear the silence pray.

In many a mud-walled haunt of man

To-night the screaming conch will blare

—God knows what forces throng the air

Above these plains of Hindoostan.

From under every banyan-tree

Whose roots entwine the reddened stone

Carved with some god that lurks alone

Beneath the aërial canopy,

From every grove within the land

Whose shadows hide a crumbling shrine

There seems to come some unknown sign,

Some touch of an undreamed-of hand.

And where, without the village wall,

Some woman’s soul went up in fire

And the thick reek above the pyre

Hung in mid-heaven like a pall,

Around that altar in the plain,

Hid though it be in jungle grass,

Forgotten as the seasons pass,

There clings the majesty of pain;

The life-through-death that has not ceased,

Which cannot drown in Lethe’s flood,

That sign of sacrificial blood

That stains and glorifies the East.

O land so near the veil, where life

Is lived beside the shore of death,

Which treads the rose to taste its breath

And wraps the garland round the knife,

Beneath the chastening of thy sun,

By tree and plain and jungle-shrine,

Whose soul through silence touches thine,

May know that life and death are one!