Collected Poems - Sri Aurobindo Ashram

250 Baroda and Bengal, c. 1900 – 1909
All these high nations who with paeans loud
Acclaimed your victories, the bitter crowd
And the loose tongues who spat their venom base
In England’s evil hour on England’s face
Avenging thus decades of craven fear,
Not one shall dare to speak high words with her
For your sake, none shall raise his arme ` dhand
Against the inheritors of sea and land.
Nor shall the American’s pale feverish face
Be lifted from his heaps of gold and trays
Of silver. Deal not with such things as these,
You who are men, not gibbering shades. Increase
Strength rather, of yourselves and Heaven be sure;
Firm make your hearts, magnanimous to endure
More than loud ruin. Though at last you yield,
Yet nowise vain your firmness in the field,
Daring and all the bitter sweat of blood.
Boers, you have sown the veldt with greatness, stood
Irrigating from your own veins farmstead
And kopje and with the bodies of your dead
Manured them: women and young children gave
Their lives to help the seedtime of the brave.
Shall harvest fail you? No, the Power is just
That veils Himself behind the world, not thrust
From puissance by the maxim’s brutal roar
Nor to the shrapnel gives His sceptre o’er.
The harvest that you sowed, your sons shall reap,
Stern liberty; nor the example sleep
Imprisoned in the Afric seas, but hurled
Reverberate through the upstarting world.
And the dead nations in the East shall rise
And they that slumber in the West; with eyes
Dismayed the elder Empires overgrown
Shall feel a sudden spirit breathe, a tone
Of challenge hearkening know, at last awake,
Earth was not wide for one sole nation’s sake.
For this He fashioned you Who built the stars,