I. IN A MANGO-TOPE⁠[1]

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!