Echo and Fire are smaller poems taken from Harindranath Chattopadhyaya’s Ancient Wings collection. Harindranath, the brother of Saroijini Naidu was a poet of mystical leanings. But politics, comedy, reality and other mundane and mortal things deviate and digress him.

What does the voice of mystery communicate to? What does it whisper into the ears? It calls to communicate. Leave you painted walls. Leave you the music and the dance of years. Come out of your small coterie. There is nothing in your cocooned living. Have a taste and tryst with my mystery, is the message.

The folds of mystery, you know it not, try to know them. How the things shrouded in mystery? The blanket of mystery, how is it rolled and lifted? None has come to feel it. 

Forget the hollow world and come to my world of immortal dreams. This voice of mystery haunts the grey silence that covers up the day’s last gleams.

Echo

The voice of mystery forever calls
My heart away from human smiles and tears,
It cries : “O leave your painted palace-walls
And leave the music and the dance of years;

“Forget the hollow world and come away,
Come to my kingdom of immortal dreams . .
This voice of mystery now haunts the grey
Silence that covers up the day’s last gleams.

The naked moon, like an ascetic, climbs
The silent heavens with an empty bowl . . .
And the white stars appear like burning rhymes
In the forgotten poem of my soul.

Fire as a poem is about mystical flame and fire. The infant questions Fire as for taking on his dead mother. How did it consume it, fed upon? How did the flames go on feeding? Fire burns it all, leaves it not, spares it not. None can escape. Flames leaping and red seem to be caressing. Fire, fire, is holy fire.

Thereafter the answer came. Fire said in his reply that it was terrible desire but went about in shaping him in the mother’s womb.

Fire

“O Who are you ? ” the infant asked
The leaping flames whose red caress
Caught his dead mother, and unmasked
Life in its lonely nakedness.

Then came an answer from the fire,
Sudden and sharp across the gloom,
“I am the terrible desire
That shaped you in the mother’s womb."