Sri Aurobindo

Translations

CWSA.- Volume 5

Part One. Translations from Sanskrit
Section Four. Bhartrihari. The Century of Life

Miscellaneous Verses

The Transience of Worldly Rewards

Your gleaming palaces of brilliant stone,

Your bright-limbed girls for grace and passion made,

Your visible glory of dominion,

Your sceptre and wide canopy displayed,

These things you hold, but with what labour won

Weaving with arduous toil a transient thread

Of shining deeds on careful virtue spun!

Which easily broken, all at once is sped;

As when in lover’s amorous war undone

A pearl-string, on all sides the bright pearls shed

Collapse and vanish from the unremembering sun.