Savitri, On Wars

Savitri (440/20-441/06):

Context:  Ongoing War between Iran, Israel, and the USA.

These lines describe how in an idiot hour, man destroys all that he has created for his well being. He has learnt nothing from the history and still relies on battle, ruin, and massacre to rule over his fellow men.

"---

This mortal creature is his own worst foe.

His science is an artificer of doom;

He ransacks earth for means to harm his kind;

He slays his happiness and others' good.

Nothing has he learned from Time and its history;

Even as of old in the raw youth of Time,

When Earth ignorant ran on the highways of Fate,

Old forms of evil cling to the world's soul:

War making nought the sweet smiling calm of life,

Battle and rapine, ruin and massacre

Are still the fierce pastimes of man's warring tribes;

An idiot hour destroys what centuries made,

His wanton rage or frenzied hate lays low

The beauty and greatness by his genius wrought

And the mighty output of a nation's toil.

All he has achieved he drags to the precipice.

His grandeur he turns to an epic of doom and fall;

His littleness crawls content through squalor and mud,

He calls heaven's retribution on his head

And wallows in his self-made misery.

A part author of the cosmic tragedy,

His will conspires with death and time and fate."