ধ্বনিটিরে প্রতিধ্বনি সদা ব্যঙ্গ করে,
ধ্বনি কাছে ঋণী সে যে পাছে ধরা পড়ে।

SINCE THE FIRST day-break of human age misted with myths,
they walk wonder-eyed on strange shores, the seekers,
and the fighters march at the drum-beats of storm gods
towards an ever-distant time,
along an endless stretch of battle-fields.
The earth trembles at the ceaseless treads of deadly pursuits,
the midnight sleep is troubled,
the easeful life is embittered
and death is made precious.
Those who rushed out at the urge of the road
ever move on beyond the boundaries of death,
and those who clung to their homes
are doomed to lie perpetually encased in the shell of a rigid
life in a soulless world.
Who is there who must be lured by an insipid peace,
by a stagnant stinking security,
and dully choose to build his shelter in a realm of ghosts?
In the beginning man found himself
at the cross-road of existence.
The provision of his journey was given him of his blood,
in his dream, in his path itself.
When he sat down to fix his plan and raised his tower high among clouds its base crumbled away;
he built his dyke only to let it be swept away by floods.
Time and again he fell asleep in his hall of tired carousal
in the gasping light of smoke-bedimmed lamps,
till a sudden assault of a nightmare choked him,
rattled his ribs together
and he woke up in a groaning agony of death.
A sudden awakening has often startled him forth
from the ring-fence of decrepit centuries
towards undefined horizons,
and an impulse forced him away from the fetter of his swollen success,
reminding him that pillars of triumph across Time's chariot-path
bury the builder under their nameless ruins.
He hastens to join the army of the wreckers of patterns
coming from all ages,
crossing hills,
breaking stone walls,
bursting iron gates
while the sky throbs with the drum-beats of Eternity.

ছাতা বলে, ধিক্‌ ধিক্‌ মাথা মহাশয়,
এ অন্যায় অবিচার আমারে না সয়।
তুমি যাবে হাটে বাটে দিব্য অকাতরে,
রৌদ্র বৃষ্টি যতকিছু সব আমা-'পরে।
তুমি যদি ছাতা হতে কী করিতে দাদা?
মাথা কয়, বুঝিতাম মাথার মর্যাদা,
বুঝিতাম তার গুণে পরিপূর্ণ ধরা,
মোর একমাত্র গুণ তারে রক্ষা করা।