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.
The Old Pindaree.
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.
