Classic Poem

On their streets torn up by your swift chariots you yoked
lines of vile donkeys with white-frothing mouths and, plowing their noble,
spacious strongholds, made them wastelands!
You drove your chariot across the lands of your enemies
where the curving hooves of your horses, prancing with their white plumes,
hammered on the renowned, fertile fields resounding with birds.
You bathed your elephants, with necks
swaying and immense, giant feet and
raging glances and glittering tusks,
in the reservoirs those men had once guarded!
Given your fury, which of these then is greater in number
—your once eager enemies shamed and despairing after brandishing
their long spears that throw shadows and their beautiful shields
embossed with iron against the power of your swift vanguard
with its shining weapons, or else the number of spacious sites
where you have set up columns after performing many sacrifices
prescribed by the Four Vedas and the books of ritual,
fine sacrifices of an excellence that will not die away
and charged with a fame that is difficult to achieve,
oblations that rose rich in ghee and all the other
elements of the sacrifice? For you, which is greater,
O greatness! you whose might is a proper theme
for the odes that praise invasions and are performed by women singers
to the beat of the great drum
smeared with black paste and wrapped with strips of leather?