What is karma? Karma is dharma, your karam is your dharam, keep doing action without thinking about results, is the thing--- life is action, work is worship, as you sow so you reap, good will reproduce good, bad will reproduce bad. What is in my karma, what in yours, who can but say it, how the writ of destiny, but one thing that I know is this that through your karma you can change your destiny.

Karma is one of the best poems which have come down from the poetical pen of A.E. Russell who is a great Irish poet and mystic whom we have failed to comprehend and assess and his due he has not got what he ought to have. Here in this poem the poet as a mystic comes to grapple with karma, what karma is and how its retribution is. What is in my karma, in my dharma? How do I say it? Keep your doing, think you not about the fruits of karma, says it Krishna in the Bhagavad-Gita and so is his vision, but here in a broader form.

None can say, why are we here? What it the purpose of living? Why are we and for what? What is whose karma? Why did it happen? Why did it not? Karma is karma. Keep doing, acting, working; your karma is your dharma.

You should not complain about it as far as what it is, what one has got to do or is happening to one, for which no one can be held liable and to blame fate for all of your lapses too is not good. It is your action which matters it; it is your activity which is liable for. So, keep working without complaining.

All that is harsh or sweet to him is some affinity which has but been caused. What to hold it responsible for one’s doing? Why not admit and accept it? Why not confess that it was his fault rather than putting the blame on others? It has happened as had to and if had not to, it would not have. But what is readable in him is this that his is a discerning mind, not an Indian fatalist mind.

Even if you ask the wise, they may say the things elemental, composing air, sky, star and so on. They may not talk about justice. In a star-lit world of star-enchanted air, what is it to say about divine dispensation of justice? Who but can about Divine Jurisprudence?

Before coming to understand karma, we need to learn what we ought to? Is the heaven behind this edifice of day and night? Whose is this cosmos? How were the first things made? How were the sun, the moon and the stars? This is enough to derive and draw upon.

How his heart laughs, leaps up in thinking of, thinking about the Glory unimaginable, the Glory undreamt about! What causation was behind those creations? The sun shines, radiates and glistens. The moon rises and shines and goes down. Stars twinkle and set down. What is behind all that? Whose propositions are these and how are they?

All that was harsh or sweet
To me was brought
Through some affinity
With soul or sense or thought.
I complain not nor wonder.
Just was my lot.

I ask the wise to say
Why are we heir
To the wonder of the sky,
The shining there.
What justice gave to me
This star-enchanted air?

Is there still in us
A heaven-descended ray
Of that which built the palaces
Of night and day?
Do our first works, sun, moon, and stars,
Shine on our clay?

O, how my heart leaps up!
It can laugh.  It could fly,
Even in dream being knit
To that majesty!
Though long passed from our glory,
I can sing!  I could fly!

Had I not read A.E. Russell, my knowledge of Aurobindo and Tagore would have remained incomplete and unfinished. A.E. Russell is really an outstanding writer.