TIRED OF waiting, you burst your bonds, impatient flowers, before the winter had gone. Glimpses of the unseen comer reached your wayside watch, and you rushed out running and panting, impulsive jasmines, troops of riotous roses.
You were the first to march to the breach of death, your clamour of colour and perfume troubled the air. You laughed and pressed and pushed each other, bared your breast and dropped in heaps.
The Summer will come in its time, sailing in the floodtide of the south wind. But you never counted slow moments to be sure of him. You recklessly spent your all in the road, in the terrible joy of faith.
You heard his footsteps from afar, and flung your mantle of death for him to tread upon. Your bonds break even before the rescuer is seen, you make him your own ere he can come and claim you.

৯৮
ধরণীর যজ্ঞ-অগ্নি বৃক্ষরূপে শিখা তার তুলে,
       স্ফুলিঙ্গ ছড়ায় ফুলে ফুলে॥  

YOU MAKER of pictures,
a ceaseless traveller among men and things,
rounding them up in your net of vision
and bringing them out in lines
far above their social value and market price.
Yonder colony of the outcaste,
its crowd of rustic roofs,
and an empty field in the background
scorched by the angry April sun
are hurriedly passed by and never missed,
till your wayfaring lines spoke out;
they are there,
and we started up and said, indeed they are.
Those nameless tramps fading away every moment into shadows
were rescued from their nothingness
and compelled us to acknowledge
a greater appeal of the real in them
than is possessed by the rajahs
who lavish money on their portraits of dubious worth
for fools to gape at in wonder.
You ignored the mythological steed of paradise
when your eyes were caught by a goat
who is only noticed with our expostulation
when straying on our brinjal plot.
You brought out its own majesty of goatliness in your lines
and our mind woke up into a surprise.
The poor goat-seller remains ignorant of the fact
that the picture does not represent the commonplace beast that is
his own,
but it is a discovery.