Sri Aurobindo

Collected Poems

CWSA.- Volume 2

Part Three. Baroda and Bengal, c. 1900 – 1909
Poems from Manuscripts, c. 1900 – 1906

To the Boers

(Written during the progress of the Boer War)

O Boers, you have dared much and much endured

For freedom, your strong simple hearts inured

To danger and privation nor so made

As by death’s daily grasp to be dismayed,

Nor numbers nor disasters in the field,

Nor to o’erwhelming multitudes to yield.

It was no secondary power you faced,

But she who has the whole wide world embraced,

England whose name is as the thunder, she

Whose navies are the despots of the sea,

Napoleon’s conqueror whose fair dreadful face

Great nations loathe and fear and choose disgrace

Rather than meet in wild and dangerous war

Victors of Waterloo and Trafalgar.

But you, a band of armèd herdsmen small,

Feared not her strength, her pride imperial,

Nor all the union of her empire huge,

Nor all her barking cannon, her deluge

Of bullets, nor her horsehooves, nor her lance,

Her boundless wealth, her bayonets aglance.

You met her on her hills and overthrew,

You crossed her by her streams and smote and slew.

But soon in anger like the Ocean foiled

For fiercer swift invasion she recoiled

And multiplied her force until her troops

Tenfold outnumbering your warlike groups

Resurging rolled you back and seized your towns

And spread like locusts over fields and downs.

Not even then were you dismayed, not then

Would tamely yield, but with a proud disdain

Rejected proffered servitude and base.

Therefore are you participants in praise

With Armin and Viriathus; you stand

The last of Freedom’s children and your land

Her latest foothold upon earth; nor can

Your rugged pastoral mood disguise the man

Identical at Salamis who waged

Unequal battle and in salt floods assuaged

The Persian’s lust of rule. Miltiades

Is grown your brother; the strong Tyrolese

Hold out their hands to you across the grave.

From Rouen’s burning pile one watches; brave

Hofer from sad Verona; in eastern skies

Mewar’s unconquerable Rajpoots rise.

They too preferred strong liberty and rude

To a splendid ignominy of servitude.

For liberty they gave to alien hands

Their faery city and their fertile lands,

Themselves to death, their women to the flame,

And in wild woods and mountains harbouring came

Often like sudden fire upon the foe:

So for long decades fought, exile and woe

Accepting, till the equal hand of God

Restored to their hereditary abode.

You too have greatly dared, and but that Fate

For her remoter objects obdurate

Averted her unmoved and marble gaze,

No human force had power to erase

From Earth’s free peoples. Not the armèd pride

Of England but decrees supreme o’erride

This stubborn nation. Farm and smiling field

Plundered and burned no more your sustenance yield,

Your chiefs are taken one by one, your bands

Wasted with battle, your great war-weary hands

Avail no longer and your women die

In England’s camps by famine miserably,

Disease and famine, hunger’s squalid brood.

The smiling babes who should prolong your blood,

Pale victims flit, to death’s unbottomed maw

Devoted by the conqueror’s cynic law.

And must you perish from earth’s record then,

O nation of indomitable men?

Look not towards Europe! Europe’s heart is dead.

Hard atheisms, selfish lusts instead

Usurp her bosom; not honest blood but gold

Runs liquid in her veins: for she has sold

Her soul to commerce, Mammon is her creed,

The ledger lined her Bible, and Christ must bleed

In plundered nations that the modern Jew

May prosper. This is not Europe that you knew

When from the clash of mighty States you went

Into harsh sultry deserts well-content.

For all her swift and sovran moods of old

Are changed into a reckoning spirit cold

And a hysteric wrath that dare not strike

The strong man armed to meet the blow. She, like

A trembling woman who puts o’er her shift

Hard armour, wears the sword she dare not lift,

Covering her coward heart with splendid arms:

Clothed as in adamant shakes with pale alarms,

Armed as with hell-fire fronts not answering shells,

Blusters and trembles, menaces and pales.

Therefore her navies case in triple steel,

Therefore her legions grow apace; her heel

Of iron breaks the weak ones of the world,

But not against the strong her flags unfurled

Shall flaunt the tempest, nor her hissing flail

Of bullets thresh familiar hills and hail

Of shells in Ocean sibilant be drowned

While navies rend and sink her coasts around.

Easier the naked African to quell

Or on the ill-armed Mongolian shot and shell

To lavish and with coward murder chase

Or with strong lust invade a virtuous race.

Meanwhile her prating conferences increase

And gild her terrors with the name of peace.

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 armèd hand

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,

For this He sifted you with searching wars.

Upon the Frisian waters bleak and isles

Where the cold northern Ocean steel-like smiles,

Savage and wide and bare, a nation sparse

Bleak-fishing under the chill midnight stars,

From the wild piercing blast your fathers drew

The breath that loves the desert. To them grew

The Saxon dour and the hard German rude,

And of that stubborn ore unbrittle, crude,

God hammered Him a sword with giant strokes

Upon the anvil of the Ocean rocks;

His fiercest furnace piled the ore to try;

Often He tempered it, often laid by

Unknown of all to harden and anneal.

He made it not of the fine Damasc steel

Comely to see or polished dazzling bright,

A dancing splendour and a pitiless light,

Nor as in Jaipur worked with genial art,

But sheer and stark to rive the adamant heart.

With this He smote the Iberian and the Gaul;

This from his scabbard leaps whene’er o’er all

His earth of various use in various lands

One domination spreads out selfish hands.

Not for its own sake is the falchion keen,

Not for self-greatness was it forged, through skin,

Flesh, heart and bone of giant power to cleave.

Its flash is as the lightning on the eve

Of the stupendous storm that shall uproot

Some oak of empire. When Heaven grows a clot

Of darkness, then God’s dagger rips the sky.

Small is the blade and narrow to the eye

The rift; but through it seas of light shall pour

And through it the world-shaking thunders roar

And from the storm the sweet fresh day have birth.

When Spain was mighty and cruel and all earth

Darkened by her huge shadow, your fathers first

Defied her puissance; – they the chains accursed

Asunder rent and braved the bigot’s flame

And braved the unvanquished terrors of her name.

Then England grew, then France arose. The one

Repulsed her from the sea’s dominion

Making the narrow floods an empire’s tomb

When the shot-ridden galleons through the gloom

Of heaven and the wrath of spuming seas

Fled through grey Ocean and the Hebrides,

God’s anger swift behind. Then was her hand

Loosened from France’s throat; the smiling land

Healed her deep wounds and from her masculine strife

Of mighty spirits forged united life

Now first; so, her high natural vigour found,

Hurled the wide-sprawling Titan to the ground.

But ’twas stern Holland shore his feet of clay

Opening to these the splendours of their day.

Next when great Louis’ grandiose mind and high

O’ervaulted all the West like God’s own sky,

Your fathers first opposed their petty strength

To his huge destinies; nor defeat, nor length

Of weary struggle could out-tire nor break

Their spirit obstinate for freedom’s sake,

When Nassau led them. He was such a man

As you love best to set in your stern van,

Wordless and lonely, stubborn as the hills,

With nature strong to brook tremendous ills

In silence, dowered with vigilant brain and nerve

That never from the goal consent to swerve

But tame down fiercest Fate as men may school

Some dangerous lion to constraining rule.

He sowed the seed; strong England reaped the fruit,

Bringing down showers with the loud cannon’s bruit.

Then did she grow indeed. Iberia proud

Being humbled she upon the Ocean loud

Her dwarfish stature launched, but now she trod

Both hemispheres, now giantlike bestrode

The Atlantic and her crest was in the skies,

Earth but a market for her merchandise.

The double Indies all their wealth disgorged

To swell her and her thunders iron-forged

Possessed the hither and the farther seas:

She strewed their waters with her enemies.

Ever she grew and as when Rome was great,

No limit seemed of her supreme estate.

Frore Canada to the Austral heats she joins

And peoples Earth from her exhaustless loins.

Asia and the equator were her spoil,

Her footstool, or a workshop for her toil.

Nor sole she walked, but Europe emulous

Where she had trampled followed orgulous

Like dwarfs behind a giant, gleaning wide

Footholds too small for her gigantic stride.

They too grow great, they too are sons of God

Who meant, they say, all earth for their abode

And increase; others the Almighty made

Their menial peoples, stamped with yellow shade

Or dark, savage of heart, of reason weak.

Nay, but their lords shall make them wise and meek!

Inferior races, let them serve and crouch

Obedient, with the kennel for their couch,

Too happy if but spared the knout and rod.

Yet shall the proud blasphemers know that God

For nobler uses to immortal man

This body’s garb designed when He began

To build the planets. His foreseeing eyes

Of ease and its corroding puissance wise,

Reserving to more memorable blows,

From you His chosen stock your sternest chose

And hardest in the grain and drove them forth

From their too populous and prosperous North

Over to torrid regions burning far

Under a fierier sun and brighter star.

There had He worked His Amazulu hordes

To His great purpose ’neath their savage lords,

Chaka the brain of war and Dingaan; – there

Your steel was once again in the red flare

Of that strong furnace tested and annealed,

And that its hard rough temper glints might yield

Of fire, into its molten ore He sank

The Celt’s swift force and genius of the Frank:

Nor in the wave-washed regions of the south

Allowed your home, but to the higher drouth

Scourged northward half the iron-minded brood

In the high hills and the veldt’s solitude

’Twixt Vaal and the Limpopo. There you stand

Fighting for liberty and fatherland,

O little people of a mighty birth,

The huge colossus who bestrides the earth.

Therefore let not defeat your hearts dismay,

For He that made you, knows His hour,– today

Or after Time grows old, the Spirit high

Prepares His mighty ends unwaveringly.

Not by the fluent tongue is Freedom earned,

Nor lightly, but when her spirit long has burned

In the strong bosom fronting giant fears

And wrestling with defeat and hostile years,

Antagonist of its opposing fate,–

Such hearts earn mighty Freedom for their mate.

Such hearts are yours and will not falter. Firm

Your destiny stands assured its strenuous term

In God’s great keeping who His deathless trust

Keeps for the race when your strong hearts are dust,–

Freedom that blooms not but upon the grave

Where they who loved her sleep, her slaughtered brave.

Earlier edition of this work: Archives and Research: A biannual journal.- Volume 2, No1 (1978, April).- p.23.