Classic Poem

For like a child sent with a fluttering light
To feel his way along a gusty night
Man walks the world: again and yet again
The lamp shall be by fits of passion slain:
But shall not He who sent him from the door
Relight the lamp once more, and yet once more?

Shah Mahmud, absent on an enterprise,
Ayaz, the very darling of his eyes,
At home under an evil eye fell sick,
Then cried the Sultan to a soldier, “Quick!
To horse! to horse! without a moment's stay—
The shortest road with all the speed you may—
Or, by the Lord, your head shall pay for it!”
Off went the soldier, plying spur and bit—
Over the sandy desert, over green
Valley, and mountain, and the stream between,
Without a moment's stop for rest or bait—
Up to the city—to the palace gate—
Up to the presence-chamber at a stride—
And lo! The Sultan at his darling's side!
Then thought the soldier—“I have done my best,
And yet shall die for it.” The Sultan guessed
His thought and smiled. “Indeed your best you did,
The nearest road you knew, and well you rid:
And if I knew a shorter, my excess
Of knowledge does but justify thy less.”

“He that a miser lives and miser dies,
At the Last Day what figure shall he rise?”
A fellow all his life lived hoarding gold,
And, dying, hoarded left it. And behold,
One night his son saw peering through the house
A man, with yet the semblance of a mouse,
Watching a crevice in the wall—and cried—
“My father?”—“Yes,” the Musulman replied,
“Thy father!”—“But why watching thus?”—“For fear
Lest any smell my treasure buried here.”
“But wherefore, Sir, so metamousified?”
“Because, my son, such is the true outside
Of the inner soul by which I lived and died.”