“SABBE PI DUKKHAM”
43
In shapes not seen of men, abiding ever
Above the lonely river
Aloft: no more I saw than this,
The shadowy bending to the first sweet kiss
That surely could not end, though earth
should end.
Therefore my shut eyes blend
With sleep’s own secret eyes and eyelashes,
Long and deep ecstasies,
Knowing as now I know—at last—how this
Foreshadows my own bliss
Of falling into death when life is tired.
For of all things desired
Not one as death is so desirable,
Seeing all sorrows pass, all joys endure,
All lessons last. Not heaven and not hell
(My spirit is grown sure)
Await the lover
But death’s veil draws, life’s mother to dis-
cover,
Nature ; no longer mother, but a bride !
Ay ! there is none beside.
O brothers mightier than my mightiest word
In the least sob that stirred
Your lyres, bring me, me also to the end !
Be near to me, befriend
Me in the moonlit, moonless deeps of death,
And with exalted breath
Breathe some few flames into the embers dull
Of these poor rhymes and leave them
beautiful.
“SABBE PI DUKKHAM.”
(Zverything 1s Sorrow.)
A LESSON FROM EURIPIDES.
Written in Lamma Sayadaw Kyoung, Akyad.
ILAUGHTER in the faces of the people
Running round the theatre of music
When the cunning actors play the Bacchae,
Greets the gay attire and gait of Pentheus,
Pentheus by his blasphemy deluded,
Pentheus caught already in the meshes
Of the fate that means to catch and crush him,
Pentheus going forth with dance and revel,
Soon by Bassarids (wild joys of Nature)
To be hunted. Ai! the bedy mangled
By the fatal fury of the Maenads
Led by Agave his maddened mother
(Nature’s self). But this the people guess not,
Only see the youth in woman’s raiment,
Feigned tresses drooping from his forehead,
Awkward with unwonted dress, rude waving
Aye the light spear tipped with mystic pine-
cone ;
Hear his boast who lifts the slender thyrsus:
‘*T could bear the mass of swart Cithaeron,
And themselves the Maenads on my shoul-
ders.”
So the self-willed’s folly lights the laughter
Rippling round the theatre. But horror
Seizes on the heart of the judicious.
They see only madness and destruction
In the mockery’s self innate, implicit.
Horror, deeper grief, most dreadful musings
Theirs who penetrate the poet’s purpose !
So in all the passing joys of nature,
Joys of birth, and joys of life, in pleasures |
Beautiful or innocent or stately,
May the wise discern the fact of being—
Change and death, the tragedy deep-lurking
llidden in the laughter of the people,
So that laughter’s self grows gross and hateful.
Then the Noble Truth of Sorrow quickens
Every heart, and, seeking out its causes,
Still the one task of the wise, their wisdom
Finds desire, and, seeking out its medicine,
Finds cessation of desire, and, seeking
How so fierce a feat may be accomplished,
Finds at first in Truth a right foundation,
Builds the walls of Rightful Life upon it,
Four-square, Word and Act and Aspiration
Folded mystically across each other,
Crowns that palace of enduring marble
With sky-piercing pinnacles of Will-power
Rightly carven, rightly pointed ; strengthens
[Mind sole centred on the single object] _
All against the lightning, earthquake, thunder,
Meteor, cyclone with strong Meditation.
There, the sacred spot. from wind well-
guarded, Co
May the lamp, the golden lamp, be lighted