Asoka by Laurence Binyon (1869-1943) is the poem I had been searching for and now I have got it from the Intranet, poetry webs and portals, but the things I get from these sites no teachers and keepers can give to in reality.

We have not written on Asoka, but he has and this is his quality of going through the pages of ancient India which he has done whatever be his source. Even the people of Magadha afterwards seemed to have forgotten and regressed in medievalism shunning human progress and development. It is a poem of some historical glory.

The day shines bright for Asoka and seems to be golden. All this speaks of the bright days to come and the way lying ahead of.

The night quite soothing and calm with the moonlight falling upon steals through the boughs and a fragrance keeps adding to mystic sweetness around.  

It is a monologue and a soliloquy of Asoka. What does the poet mean to show in Asoka? Does he want to show the rise and fall like the ones described in Greek tragedies?          

The lust for power, where does it lead to? What is that lasts it here? The ferocity of a brute too meets its end in time. Bestiality and brutality too cannot go it long. Perhaps the remorse of Asoka is the thing that he keeps relating to

The poem tells of Asoka, the rise of Magadha, the battle fought at the cost of blood-letting and loss of lives, the rattle of the clashing swords and the might of the warring prince who rose to power and also his conscience at work gliding through the forest to the Ganga banks, marking the moonshine, peace around, the prevailing still and quietness and the boats sailing, the mist encompassing the domains and the pathways losing track of. Now it is time to be at peace with oneself.

The poem is a biography, an autobiography of King Asoka and the poet has dramatized in a very beautiful way the moonlight-lit night and Asoka gliding through to delve and dwell it far. The poem has been relayed as a dream sequence. 

The first stanza speaks of the moonlight drizzling with the moon beams spread all around and the prince, Asoka steals through the bough to envisage a new world, a fresh world of mystery and silence. Flatteries he has no interest in them. The throngs of life he does not like to hear them. The misty moonshine, the misty woods he wants to get lost into as for to recompose himself.

I

Gentle as fine rain falling from the night,
The first beams from the Indian moon at full
Steal through the boughs, and brighter and more bright
Glide like a breath, a fragrance visible.
Asoka round him sees
The gloom ebb into glories half--espied
Of glimmering bowers through wavering traceries:
Pale as a rose by magical degrees
Opening, the air breaks into beauty wide,
And yields a mystic sweet;
And shapes of leaves shadow the pathway side
Around Asoka's feet.

O happy prince! From his own court he steals;
Weary of words is he, weary of throngs.
How this wide ecstasy of stillness heals
His heart of flatteries and the tale of wrongs!
Unseen he climbs the hill,
Unheard he brushes with his cloak the dew,
While the young moonbeams every hollow fill
With hovering flowers, so gradual and so still
As if a joy brimmed where that radiance grew,
Discovering pale gold
Of spikenard balls and champak buds that new
Upon the air unfold.

He gains the ridge. Wide open rolls the night!
Airs from an infinite horizon blow
Down holy Ganges, floating vast and bright
Through old Magadha's forests. Far below
He hears the cool wave fret
On rocky islands; soft as moths asleep
Come moonlit sails; there on a parapet
Of ruined marble, where the moss gleams wet
And from black cedars a lone peacock cries,
Uncloaking rests Asoka, bathing deep
In silence, and his eyes
Of his own realm the wondrous prospect reap;
At last aloud he sighs.

Why do people wrong? Why do they err? He feels about the life of the commoners and tries to see them. How are they at peace with? What a life have they and what a life has he!

II

"How ennobling it is to taste
Of the breath of a living power!
The shepherd boy on the waste
Whose converse, hour by hour,
Is alone with the stars and the sun,
His days are glorified!
And the steersman floating on
Down this great Ganges tide,
He is blest to be companion of the might
Of waters and unwearied winds that run
With him, by day, by night:
He knows not whence they come, but they his path provide.

"But O more noble far
From the heart of power to proceed
As the beam flows forth from the star,
As the flower unfolds on the reed.
It is not we that are strong
But the cause, the divine desire,
The longing wherewith we long.
O flame far--springing from the eternal fire,
Feed, feed upon my heart till thou consume
These bonds that do me wrong
Of time and chance and doom,
And I into thy radiance grow and glow entire!

"For he who his own strength trusts,
And by violence hungers to tame
Men and the earth to his lusts,
Though mighty, he falls in shame;
As a great fell tiger, whose sound
The small beasts quake to hear,
When he stretches his throat to the shuddering ground
And roars for blood; yet a trembling deer
Brings him at last to his end.
In a winter torrent falls his murderous bound!
His raging claws the unheeding waters rend;
Down crags they toss him sheer,
With sheep ignobly drowned,
And his fierce heart is burst with fury of its fear.

Immortal Powers must not deal in such a way. As because we wrong, fall a prey to lust, greed, ego during the weak hours of ours. How your divine springs out of mercy brim they, but fortitude tells of the pathway the moral men take to!

III

"Not so ye deal,
Immortal Powers, with him
Who in his weak hour hath made haste to kneel
Where your divine springs out of mystery brim,
And carries thence through the world's uproar rude
A clear--eyed fortitude;
As the poor diver on the Arabian strand
From the scorched rocky ledges plunging deep,
Glides down the rough dark brine with questing hand
Until he feels upleap
Founts of fresh water, and his goatskin swells
And bears him upward on those buoyant wells
Back with a cool boon for his thirsting land.

"I also thirst,
O living springs, for you:
Would that I might drink now, as when at first
Life shone about me glorious and all true,
And I abounded in your strength indeed,
Which now I sorely need.
You have not failed, 'tis I! Yet this abhorred
Necessity to hate and to despise--
'Twas not for this my youthful longing soared,
Not thus would I grow wise!
Keep my heart tender still, that still is set
To love without foreboding or regret,
Even as this tender moonlight is outpoured.

"Now now, even now,
Sleep doth the sad world take
To peace it knows not. Radiant Sleep, wilt thou
Unveil thy wonder for me too, who wake?
O my soul melts into immensity,
And yet 'tis I, 'tis I!
A wave upon a silent ocean, thrilled
Up from its deepest deeps without a sound,
Without a shore to break on, or a bound,
Until the world be filled.
O mystery of peace, O more profound
Than pain or joy, upbuoy me on thy power!
Stay, stay, adorèd hour,
I am lost, I am found again:
My soul is as a fountain springing in the rain.''

--Long, long upon that cedarn--shadowed height
Musing, Asoka mingled with the night.
At last the moon sank o'er the forest wide.
Within his soul those fountains welled no more,
Yet breathed a balm still, fresh as fallen dew:
The mist coiled upward over Ganges shore;
And he arose and sighed,
And gathered his cloak round him, and anew
Threaded the deep woods to his palace door.

What does sleep give to? The world is asleep, but he keeps awake and gliding through the moonbeam-lit canopies, woods and boughs. Asoka keeps musing about. Perhaps it may be lost in war, humanity and the fate of man. What is that composes oneself? How the victory by peace?  

An eponymous poem it discusses the whole saga of Prince Asoka but through the fleeting imagery of the moon shining through the forests by the Ganges and the prince getting relieved from.

In a very beautiful way, Binyon starts his poem entitled Asoka. The picture is one of the moon stealing through the boughs and Asoka  straying, grovelling and gliding through:

Gentle as fine rain falling from the night,
The first beams from the Indian moon at full
Steal through the boughs, and brighter and more bright
Glide like a breath, a fragrance visible.

His life beset with difficulties, fraught with thorns and troublesome pathways as the decree of fate willed so mar it, but instead of he tries to recompose the self forgetting all that turmoil, strife and battles fought, blood shed:

O happy prince! From his own court he steals;
Weary of words is he, weary of throngs.
How this wide ecstasy of stillness heals
His heart of flatteries and the tale of wrongs!

Here the thirst, the thirst is for peace, internal peace, peace from all internal strife what it rakes making, the inner self of his torn by agony, lust for power and the victory shown upon:

I also thirst,
O living springs, for you:
Would that I might drink now, as when at first
Life shone about me glorious and all true,
And I abounded in your strength indeed,
Which now I sorely need.

His soul immerses into immensity and assumes of becoming one with the silence prevailing around, drenched into the moonshine. It is nature which composes one, the beauty and mystery of nature:

O my soul melts into immensity,
And yet 'tis I, 'tis I!

How pregnant with meaning, thought and idea are these lines telling of the discovery and re-discovery of the self of Asoka! 

I am lost, I am found again:
My soul is as a fountain springing in the rain.

Musing, Asoka mingles with the night while the moon keeps sinking over the forest wide:

--Long, long upon that cedarn--shadowed height
Musing, Asoka mingled with the night.
At last the moon sank o'er the forest wide.

We do not know how could he write this great poem in 1900, a great historical poem of some astounding merit and significance, poetic metaphor and excellence.