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Last Poems: Translations from the Book of Indian Love cover

Last Poems: Translations from the Book of Indian Love

Chapter 8: Unanswered
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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.

Unanswered

Something compels me, somewhere. Yet I see
No clear command in Life’s long mystery.
Oft have I flung myself beside my horse,
To drink the water from the roadside mire,
And felt the liquid through my being course,
Stilling the anguish of my thirst’s desire.
A simple want; so easily allayed;
After the burning march; water and shade.
Also I lay against the loved one’s heart
Finding fulfilment in that resting-place,
Feeling my longing, quenched, was but a part
Of nature’s ceaseless striving for the race.
But now, I know not what they would with me;
Matter or Force or God, if Gods there be.
I wait; I question; Nature heeds me not.
She does but urge in answer to my prayer,
“Arise and do!” Alas, she adds not what;
“Arise and go!” Alas, she says not where!