Canto 23On the Mountains
Book 3. Part Three - Baroda and Bengal Circa 1900 – 1909
Poems from Manuscripts
Quietly down through the mystical night of her tresses on gleaming
Shoulders, betwixt her great breasts noble as hills at noontide
Back to their hurrying home: nor heeded the laughter near her.
5Only at times when the clamour grew high, she would look up smiling
Such a slow sweet serious smile as a tender mother
Watching her children at play might smile forgetting the sorrow
Down in her own still patient heart where the deep tears gathered
Swell unwept, till they turn to a sea of sorrowful pity.
10On the Mountains
Immense retreats of silence and of gloom,
Hills of a sterile grandeur, rocks that sublime
In bareness seek the blue sky’s infinite room
With their coeval snows untouched by Time!
15I seek your solemn spaces! Let me at last
Forgotten of thought through days immemorable
Voiceless and needless keep your refuge vast,
Growing into the peace in which I dwell.
For like that Soul unmade you seem to brood
20Who sees all things emerge but none creates,
Watching the ages from His solitude,
Lone, unconcerned, remote. You to all Fates
Offer an unchanged heart, unmoved abide,
Wordless, acceptant, sovereignly still.
25There is a soul in us as silent, wide,
Mere, uncreative, imperturbable.