Canto 14Bankim Chandra Chatterji
Book 1. Part One - England and Baroda 1883 – 1898
England and Baroda, 1883–1898
If one brief moment steal thee from mine eyes,
My heart within me dies.
As girls who keep
5The treasures of the deep,
I string thee round my neck and on my bosom prize.
Bankim Chandra Chatterji
How hast thou lost, O month of honey and flowers,
The voice that was thy soul! Creative showers,
10The cuckoo’s daylong cry and moan of bees,
Zephyrs and streams and softly-blossoming trees
And murmuring laughter and heart-easing tears
And tender thoughts and great and the compeers
Of lily and jasmine and melodious birds,
15All these thy children into lovely words
He changed at will and made soul-moving books
From hearts of men and women’s honied looks.
O master of delicious words! the bloom
Of chompuk and the breath of king-perfume
20Have made each musical sentence with the noise
Of women’s ornaments and sweet household joys
And laughter tender as the voice of leaves
Playing with vernal winds. The eye receives
That reads these lines an image of delight,
25A world with shapes of spring and summer, noon and night;
All nature in a page, no pleasing show
But men more real than the friends we know.
O plains, O hills, O rivers of sweet Bengal,
O land of love and flowers, the spring-bird’s call
30And southern wind are sweet among your trees:
Your poet’s words are sweeter far than these.
Your heart was this man’s heart. Subtly he knew
The beauty and divinity in you.
His nature kingly was and as a god