WHAT THEN?—I
What if my life is fed
With all that seems most sweet?
What if my foeman's head
Is ground beneath my feet?
What if my wealth makes friends
Again and yet again?
What if my soul ascends
Through countless lives? What then?
WHAT THEN?—II
Old rags, or fine, white silk that flows and clings—
Why should I care?
Poor wife, or horses, elephants, and things—
What difference there?
Sweet rice, or wretched food when day is o'er—
Why care again?
God's light, or groping in the dark once more—
What then? What then?
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Wednesday, November 23, 2011
What Then?
Bhartrihari, Vairagya Sataka 73-74, tr. Arthur William Ryder in Original Poems together with Translations from the Sanskrit (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1939), p. 71: