Last week brought  Rabindranath Tagore to our pages.  Today we bring a short poem from “The American-educated poet Yonejiro Noguchi, who fell out with Tagore in the 1930’s, published a poem in 1944 rejecting his earlier obeisance to Western ideals as profoundly mistaken:

America and England in the old days were for me countries of Justice:
America was the country of Whitman,
England the country of Browning:
But now they are dissolute countries fallen into the pit of wealth,
Immoral countries, craving after unpardonable dreams.

Reprinted in “From the Ruins of Empire” by Pankaj Mishra. 2012
[the best review I’ve seen of this brilliant book is here]

And this from  Rabindranath Tagore  (1938) quoted in the same book,

The carefully nurtured yet noxious plant of national egoism
Is shedding its seeds all over the world
making the callow schoolboys of the East rejoice
because of the harvest produced by these seeds
the harvest of antipathy with its endless cycle of self-renewal
bears a western name of high-sounding distinction.

Great civilisations have flourished in the past in the East
as well as in the West
because they produced food for the spirit of man for all time.
These great civilisations were at last run to death by men
of the type of our precocious schoolboys of modern times
smart and superficially critical, worshippers of self,
shrewd bargainers in the market of profit and power
efficient in their handling of the ephemeral, who . . .
eventually, driven by suicidal forces of passion,
set their neighbours’ houses on fire and were themselves
enveloped by the flame.