Page:Poets of John Company.djvu/135

Rh

Has he learnt how thy honours are rated?
 * Has he cast his accounts in thy school?

With the sweets of authority sated,
 * Would he give up his throne to be cool?

Doth he curse Oriental romancing,
 * And wish he had toiled all his day,

At the Bar, or the Banks, or financing.
 * And got damned in a common-place way?

Thou hast racked him with duns and diseases.
 * And he lies, as thy scorching winds blow,

Recollecting old England's sea breezes
 * On his back in a lone bungalow;

At the slow coming darkness repining,
 * How he girds at the sun till it sets,

As he marks the long shadows declining
 * O'er the Land of Regrets.

Let him cry, as thy blue devils seize him,
 * O step-mother, careless as Fate,

He may strive from thy bonds to release him.
 * Thou hast passed him his sentence—Too Late;

He has found what a blunder his youth is.
 * His prime what a struggle, and yet

Has to learn of old age what the truth is
 * In the Land of Regret.

Allah is great, my children, and kind to a slave like me; The great man's tent is gone from under the peepul tree: With his horde of hungry retainers, and oil-fed slaves of the quill; I paid them the bribes they wanted, and Satan may settle my bill.