Pujit Aggarwal Redivivus - Sonnet 94

 

They that have power to hurt and will do none,
That do not do the thing they most do show,
Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,
Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow:
They rightly do inherit heaven's graces
And husband nature's riches from expense;
They are the lords and owners of their faces,
Others but stewards of their excellence.
The summer's flower is to the summer sweet
Though to itself it only live and die,
But if that flower with base infection meet,
The basest weed outbraves his dignity:
For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.  


This sonnet commemorates the singular profile of a leader who is in full control of his qualities. More often than not damage is caused not necessarily by our vices but our virtues also when they are either misused or used without proper self-audit. A true blue leader exercises proper restraint in the dispensation of his resources. You may have the power to obliterate the host of enemies arrayed before you but you don’t do that without justifiable provocation. A person in power is a custodian of all the resources which comprise the wealth of his sovereignty. He husbands all that is precious and good in his domain. To put it briefly, he is a man of sterling character whom all his subordinates follow faithfully and meticulously.

  If the nobility of his character is at all infected by the canker of impurity, the contagious corrupts the entire domain.

  The poet stresses the importance of integrity and purity in the last couplet. All the glory, the grandeur and the prowess are by-products of the solid character which always resists the canker of arrogance, abuse of governance, avarice, or injustice. When such a great man disintegrates, his crash is the worst of debacles in the graveyard of the mightiest who fell. 

  Nothing can be worse than the moral degeneration of such a grand, noble exemplar. Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.


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