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COLLECTED POEMS
SRI AUROBINDO
CONTENTS
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The Dwarf Napoleon
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HITLER, OCTOBER 1939
Behold, by Maya’s fantasy of will A violent miracle takes sudden birth, The real grows one with the incredible. In the control of her magician wand The small achieves things great, the base things grand. This puny creature would bestride the earth Even as the immense colossus of the past. Napoleon’s mind was swift and bold and vast, His heart was calm and stormy like the sea, His will dynamic in its grip and clasp. His eye could hold a world within its grasp And see the great and small things sovereignly. A movement of enormous1depth and scope He seized and gave cohesion2 to its hope. Far other this creature of a nether clay, Void of all grandeur, like a gnome at play, Iron and mud his nature’s mingled stuff, A little limited visionary brain Cunning and skilful in its narrow vein, A sentimental egoist poor and rough, Whose heart was never sweet and fresh and young, A headlong spirit driven by hopes and fears, Intense neurotic with his shouts and tears, Violent and cruel, devil, child and brute, This screaming orator with his strident tongue, The prophet of a scanty fixed idea, Plays now the leader of our human march; His might shall build the future’s triumph arch. Now is the world for his eating a ripe fruit. His shadow falls from London to Korea. Cities and nations crumble in his course. A terror holds the peoples in its grip: World-destiny waits upon that foaming lip. A Titan Power supports3 this pigmy man,
1 gigantic 2 coherence 3 upholds Page-110 The
crude dwarf instrument of a1
mighty Force. Made only of strength and skill and giant might, A Will to trample humanity into, clay And unify earth beneath one iron sway, Insists upon its fierce enormous plan. Trampling man’s mind and will into one mould Docile and facile in a dreadful hold, It cries its demon slogans to the crowd; But if its2 tenebrous empire were allowed, Its mastery would prepare the dismal hour When the Inconscient shall regain its right, And man who emerged as Nature’s conscious power, Shall sink into the deep original night Sharing like all her forms that went before The doom of the mammoth and the dinosaur. It is the shadow of the Titan’s robe That looms across the panic-stricken globe. In his high villa on the fatal hill Alone he listens to that sovereign Voice, Dictator of his action's sudden choice, The tiger leap of a demoniac skill. Too small and human for that dreadful Guest, An energy his body cannot invest3 , - A tortured channel, not a happy vessel, Drives him to think and act and cry and wrestle. Thus driven he must stride on conquering all, Threatening and clamouring, brutal, invincible, Perhaps to meet4 upon his storm-swept road A greater devil- or thunderstroke of God.
1his 2that 3house 4Until he meets Page-111 |
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