سما سکتا نہيں پہنائے فطرت ميں مرا سودا

All Nature’s vastness cannot contain you, oh my madness: vain, those wanderings to and fro in deserts!

In deserts! By selfhood only are the spells | Of sense broken,— that power we did not know.

Rub your eyes, sluggard! Light is Nature’s law, | And not unknown to Ocean its waves flow.

Where reason and revelation war, faith errs | To think the Mystic on his cross its foe,

For God’s pure souls, in thralldom or on thrones, have one safe shield, his scorn of this world’s show.

But do not, Gabriel, envy my rapture: better for Heaven’s dounce folk the prayer and the beads’ neat row!

I have seen many a wine-shop East and West; but here no Saki, there in the grape no glow.

In Iran no more, in Tartary no more, | Those world‐renouncers who could overthrow

Great kings; the Prophet’s heir filches and sells | The blankets of the Prophet’s kin. When to

The Lord I was denounced for crying Doomsday | Too soon, by that Archangel who must blow

God made answer: Is Doomsday far? ‘When Makkah sleeps while China worships?’ (Second part of the verse is of Hakim Sanai).

The bowl of faith finds none to pour, the beaker | Of modern thought brims with the wine of No.

Subdued by the dexterous fiddler’s chords there murmurs: In the lowest string the wail of Europe’s woe.

Her waters that have bred the shark now breed | The storm‐wave that will smash its den below!

Slavery—exile from the love of beauty: | Beauty—whatever free men reckon so;

Trust no slave’s eyes, clear sight and liberty | Go hand in hand. His own resolves bestow

The empire of To‐day on him who fishes | To‐morrow’s pearl up from Time’s undertow.

The Frankish glassblowers’ arts can make stone run: | My alchemy makes glass flint‐hard. Pharaoh

Plotted and plots against me; but what harm? | Heaven lifts my hand, like Moses’, white as snow;

Earth’s rubbish‐heaps can never quell this spark | God struck to light whole deserts, His flambeau!

Love, self‐beholding, self‐sustaining, stands | Un‐awed at the gates of Caesar or Khosro;

If moon or Pleiades fall my prey, what wonder! Myself bound fast to the Prophet’s saddle-bow!

کہ میں تو ذہن اور فطری طور پر اس بلند و بالا ہستی کے خاک پا کی حیثیت رکھتا ہوں جو نبی آخر الزماں ہے اور ازل سے ابد تک پوری کائنات میں اس کا کوئی ہمسر نہیں ۔

He—Guide, Last Envoy, Lord of All—lent brightness | Of Sinai to our dust; Love’s eyes, not slow

To kindle, hail him Alpha and Omega, | Chapter, and Word, and Book. I would not go

I would not go pearl-diving there, for reverence of Sina‘i; but in these tides a million pearls still grow.