Last Poems: Translations from the Book of Indian Love

Chapter 26: Atavism

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About This Book

The collection gathers lyrical poems rendered as translations or imitations of love songs and laments set in an exoticized eastern milieu, presenting intimate monologues that explore desire, jealousy, mourning, and the interplay of sensuality and spiritual yearning. Vivid sensory imagery—flowers, spices, night, ritual, dance, and seafaring—frames recurring motifs of loss, unrequited passion, and elegiac remembrance. Many pieces assume the voice of longing speakers, blending eroticism with melancholy and occasional bitterness, while others meditate on heroism, sacrifice, and the social rituals that shape intimate life. A mix of narrative lyric and descriptive pieces yields a unified mood of intense emotion and poetic exoticism.

Atavism

Deep in the jungle vast and dim,

That knew not a white man’s feet,

I smelt the odour of sun-warmed fur,

Musky, savage, and sweet.

Far it was from the huts of men

And the grass where Sambur feed;

I threw a stone at a Kadapu tree

That bled as a man might bleed.

Scent of fur and colour of blood:—

And the long dead instincts rose,

I followed the lure of my season’s mate,—

And flew, bare-fanged, at my foes.

Pale days: and a league of laws

Made by the whims of men.

Would I were back with my furry cubs

In the dusk of a jungle den.