Canto 19The Lost Boat
Book 16. Part Seven - Pondicherry Circa 1927 – 1947
Poems Published in On Quantitative Metre
The Lost Boat
At the way’s end when the shore raised up its dim line and remote
lights from the port glimmered,
5Then a cloud darkened the sky’s brink and the wind’s scream was
the shrill laugh of a loosed demon
And the huge passion of storm leaped with its bright stabs and the
long crashing of death’s thunder;
As if haled by an unseen hand fled the boat lost on the wide
10homeless forlorn ocean.
Is it Chance smites? is it Fate’s irony? dead workings or blind
purpose of brute Nature?
Or man’s own deeds that return back on his doomed head with a
stark justice, a fixed vengeance?
15Or a dread Will from behind Life that regards pain and salutes
death with a hard laughter?
Is it God’s might or a Force rules in this dense jungle of events,
deeds and our thought’s strivings?
Yet perhaps sank not the bright lives and their glad venturings
20foiled, drowned in the grey ocean,
But with long wandering they reached an unknown shore and a
strange sun and a new azure,
Amid bright splendour of beast glories and birds’ music and deep
hues, an enriched Nature
25And a new life that could draw near to divine meanings and touched
close the concealed purpose.
In a chance happening, fate’s whims and the blind workings or dead
drive of a brute Nature,
In her dire Titan caprice, strength that to death drifts and to doom,
30hidden a Will labours.
Not with one moment of sharp close or the slow fall of a dim
curtain the play ceases:
Yet is there Time to be crossed, lives to be lived out, the unplayed
acts of the soul’s drama.