Canto Six

The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Life

As one who between dim receding walls

Towards the far gleam of a tunnel’s mouth,

Hoping for light, walks now with freer pace

And feels approach a breath of wider air,

So he escaped from that grey anarchy.

Into an ineffectual world he came,

A purposeless region of arrested birth

Where being from non-being fled and dared

To live but had no strength long to abide.

Above there gleamed a pondering brow of sky

Tormented, crossed by wings of doubtful haze

Adventuring with a voice of roaming winds

And crying for a direction in the void

Like blind souls looking for the selves they lost

And wandering through unfamiliar worlds;

Wings of vague questioning met the query of Space.

After denial dawned a dubious hope,

A hope of self and form and leave to live

And the birth of that which never yet could be,

And joy of the mind’s hazard, the heart’s choice,

Grace of the unknown and hands of sudden surprise

And a touch of sure delight in unsure things:

To a strange uncertain tract his journey came

Where consciousness played with unconscious self

And birth was an attempt or episode.

A charm drew near that could not keep its spell,

An eager Power that could not find its way,

A Chance that chose a strange arithmetic

But could not bind with it the forms it made,

A multitude that could not guard its sum

Which less than zero grew and more than one.

Arriving at a large and shadowy sense

That cared not to define its fleeting drift,

Life laboured in a strange and mythic air

Denuded of her sweet magnificent suns.

In worlds imagined, never yet made true,

A lingering glimmer on creation’s verge,

One strayed and dreamed and never stopped to achieve:

To achieve would have destroyed that magic Space.

The marvels of a twilight wonderland

Full of a beauty strangely, vainly made,

A surge of fanciful realities,

Dim tokens of a Splendour sealed above,

Awoke the passion of the eyes’ desire,

Compelled belief on the enamoured thought

And drew the heart but led it to no goal.

A magic flowed as if of moving scenes

That kept awhile their fugitive delicacy

Of sparing lines limned by an abstract art

In a rare scanted light with faint dream-brush

On a silver background of incertitude.

An infant glow of heavens near to morn,

A fire intense conceived but never lit,

Caressed the air with ardent hints of day.

The perfect longing for imperfection’s charm,

The illumined caught by the snare of Ignorance,

Ethereal creatures drawn by body’s lure

To that region of promise, beating invisible wings,

Came hungry for the joy of finite life

But too divine to tread created soil

And share the fate of perishable things.

The Children of the unembodied Gleam

Arisen from a formless thought in the soul

And chased by an imperishable desire,

Traversed the field of the pursuing gaze.

A Will that unpersisting failed, worked there:

Life was a search but finding never came.

There nothing satisfied, but all allured,

Things seemed to be that never wholly are,

Images were seen that looked like living acts

And symbols hid the sense they claimed to show,

Pale dreams grew real to the dreamer’s eyes.

The souls came there that vainly strive for birth,

And spirits entrapped might wander through all time,

Yet never find the truth by which they live.

All ran like hopes that hunt a lurking chance;

Nothing was solid, nothing felt complete:

All was unsafe, miraculous and half-true.

It seemed a realm of lives that had no base.

Then dawned a greater seeking, broadened sky,

A journey under wings of brooding Force.

First came the kingdom of the morning star:

A twilight beauty trembled under its spear

And the throb of promise of a wider Life.

Then slowly rose a great and doubting sun

And in its light she made of self a world.

A spirit was there that sought for its own deep self,

Yet was content with fragments pushed in front

And parts of living that belied the whole

But, pieced together, might one day be true.

Yet something seemed to be achieved at last.

A growing volume of the will-to-be,

A text of living and a graph of force,

A script of acts, a song of conscious forms

Burdened with meanings fugitive from thought’s grasp

And crowded with undertones of life’s rhythmic cry,

Could write itself on the hearts of living things.

In an outbreak of the might of secret Spirit,

In Life and Matter’s answer of delight,

Some face of deathless beauty could be caught

That gave immortality to a moment’s joy,

Some word that could incarnate highest Truth

Leaped out from a chance tension of the soul,

Some hue of the Absolute could fall on life,

Some glory of knowledge and intuitive sight,

Some passion of the rapturous heart of Love.

A hierophant of the bodiless Secrecy

Interned in an unseen spiritual sheath,

The Will that pushes sense beyond its scope

To feel the light and joy intangible,

Half found its way into the Ineffable’s peace,

Half captured a sealed sweetness of desire

That yearned from a bosom of mysterious Bliss,

Half manifested veiled Reality.

A soul not wrapped into its cloak of mind

Could glimpse the true sense of a world of forms;

Illumined by a vision in the thought,

Upbuoyed by the heart’s understanding flame,

It could hold in the conscious ether of the spirit

The divinity of a symbol universe.

This realm inspires us with our vaster hopes;

Its forces have made landings on our globe,

Its signs have traced their pattern in our lives:

It lends a sovereign movement to our fate,

Its errant waves motive our life’s high surge.

All that we seek for is prefigured there

And all we have not known nor ever sought

Which yet one day must be born in human hearts

That the Timeless may fulfil itself in things.

Incarnate in the mystery of the days,

Eternal in an unclosed Infinite,

A mounting endless possibility

Climbs high upon a topless ladder of dream

For ever in the Being’s conscious trance.

All on that ladder mounts to an unseen end.

An Energy of perpetual transience makes

The journey from which no return is sure,

The pilgrimage of Nature to the Unknown.

As if in her ascent to her lost source

She hoped to unroll all that could ever be,

Her high procession moves from stage to stage,

A progress leap from sight to greater sight,

A process march from form to ampler form,

A caravan of the inexhaustible

Formations of a boundless Thought and Force.

Her timeless Power that lay once on the lap

Of a beginningless and endless Calm,

Now severed from the Spirit’s immortal bliss,

Erects the type of all the joys she has lost;

Compelling transient substance into shape,

She hopes by the creative act’s release

To overleap sometimes the gulf she cannot fill,

To heal awhile the wound of severance,

Escape from the moment’s prison of littleness

And meet the Eternal’s wide sublimities

In the uncertain time-field portioned here.

Almost she nears what never can be attained;

She shuts eternity into an hour

And fills a little soul with the Infinite;

The Immobile leans to the magic of her call;

She stands on a shore in the Illimitable,

Perceives the formless Dweller in all forms

And feels around her infinity’s embrace.

Her task no ending knows; she serves no aim

But labours driven by a nameless Will

That came from some unknowable formless Vast.

This is her secret and impossible task

To catch the boundless in a net of birth,

To cast the spirit into physical form,

To lend speech and thought to the Ineffable;

She is pushed to reveal the ever Unmanifest.

Yet by her skill the impossible has been done:

She follows her sublime irrational plan,

Invents devices of her magic art

To find new bodies for the Infinite

And images of the Unimaginable;

She has lured the Eternal into the arms of Time.

Even now herself she knows not what she has done.

For all is wrought beneath a baffling mask:

A semblance other than its hidden truth

The aspect wears of an illusion’s trick,

A feigned time-driven unreality,

The unfinished creation of a changing soul

In a body changing with the inhabitant.

Insignificant her means, infinite her work;

On a great field of shapeless consciousness

In little finite strokes of mind and sense

An endless Truth she endlessly unfolds;

A timeless mystery works out in Time.

The greatness she has dreamed her acts have missed,

Her labour is a passion and a pain,

A rapture and pang, her glory and her curse;

And yet she cannot choose but labours on;

Her mighty heart forbids her to desist.

As long as the world lasts her failure lives

Astonishing and foiling Reason’s gaze,

A folly and a beauty unspeakable,

A superb madness of the will to live,

A daring, a delirium of delight.

This is her being’s law, its sole resource;

She sates, though satisfaction never comes,

Her hungry will to lavish everywhere

Her many-imaged fictions of the Self

And thousand fashions of one Reality.

A world she made touched by truth’s fleeing hem,

A world cast into a dream of what it seeks,

An icon of truth, a conscious mystery’s shape.

It lingered not like the earth-mind hemmed in

In solid barriers of apparent fact;

It dared to trust the dream-mind and the soul.

A hunter of spiritual verities

Still only thought or guessed or held by faith,

It seized in imagination and confined

A painted bird of paradise in a cage.

This greater life is enamoured of the Unseen;

It calls to some highest Light beyond its reach,

It can feel the Silence that absolves the soul;

It feels a saviour touch, a ray divine:

Beauty and good and truth its godheads are.

It is near to heavenlier heavens than earth’s eyes see,

A direr darkness than man’s life can bear:

It has kinship with the demon and the god.

A strange enthusiasm has moved its heart;

It hungers for heights, it passions for the supreme.

It hunts for the perfect word, the perfect shape,

It leaps to the summit thought, the summit light.

For by the form the Formless is brought close

And all perfection fringes the Absolute.

A child of heaven who never saw his home,

Its impetus meets the eternal at a point:

It can only near and touch, it cannot hold;

It can only strain towards some bright extreme:

Its greatness is to seek and to create.

On every plane, this Greatness must create.

On earth, in heaven, in hell she is the same;

Of every fate she takes her mighty part.

A guardian of the fire that lights the suns,

She triumphs in her glory and her might:

Opposed, oppressed she bears God’s urge to be born:

The spirit survives upon non-being’s ground,

World-force outlasts world-disillusion’s shock:

Dumb, she is still the Word, inert the Power.

Here fallen, a slave of death and ignorance,

To things deathless she is driven to aspire

And moved to know even the Unknowable.

Even nescient, null, her sleep creates a world.

When most unseen, most mightily she works;

Housed in the atom, buried in the clod,

Her quick creative passion cannot cease.

Inconscience is her long gigantic pause,

Her cosmic swoon is a stupendous phase:

Time-born, she hides her immortality;

In death, her bed, she waits the hour to rise.

Even with the Light denied that sent her forth

And the hope dead she needed for her task,

Even when her brightest stars are quenched in Night,

Nourished by hardship and calamity

And with pain for her body’s handmaid, masseuse, nurse,

Her tortured invisible spirit continues still

To toil though in darkness, to create though with pangs;

She carries crucified God upon her breast.

In chill insentient depths where joy is none,

Immured, oppressed by the resisting Void

Where nothing moves and nothing can become,

Still she remembers, still invokes the skill

The Wonder-worker gave her at her birth,

Imparts to drowsy formlessness a shape,

Reveals a world where nothing was before.

In realms confined to a prone circle of death,

To a dark eternity of Ignorance,

A quiver in an inert inconscient mass,

Or imprisoned in immobilised whorls of Force,

By Matter’s blind compulsion deaf and mute

She refuses motionless in the dust to sleep.

Then, for her rebel waking’s punishment

Given only hard mechanic Circumstance

As the enginery of her magic craft,

She fashions godlike marvels out of mud;

In the plasm she sets her dumb immortal urge,

Helps the live tissue to think, the closed sense to feel,

Flashes through the frail nerves poignant messages,

In a heart of flesh miraculously loves,

To brute bodies gives a soul, a will, a voice.

Ever she summons as by a sorcerer’s wand

Beings and shapes and scenes innumerable,

Torch-bearers of her pomps through Time and Space.

This world is her long journey through the night,

The suns and planets lamps to light her road,

Our reason is the confidante of her thoughts,

Our senses are her vibrant witnesses.

There drawing her signs from things half true, half false,

She labours to replace by realised dreams

The memory of her lost eternity.

These are her deeds in this huge world-ignorance:

Till the veil is lifted, till the night is dead,

In light or dark she keeps her tireless search;

Time is her road of endless pilgrimage.

One mighty passion motives all her works.

Her eternal Lover is her action’s cause;

For him she leaped forth from the unseen Vasts

To move here in a stark unconscious world.

Its acts are her commerce with her hidden Guest,

His moods she takes for her heart’s passionate moulds;

In beauty she treasures the sunlight of his smile.

Ashamed of her rich cosmic poverty,

She cajoles with her small gifts his mightiness,

Holds with her scenes his look’s fidelity

And woos his large-eyed wandering thoughts to dwell

In figures of her million-impulsed Force.

Only to attract her veiled companion

And keep him close to her breast in her world-cloak

Lest from her arms he turn to his formless peace,

Is her heart’s business and her clinging care.

Yet when he is most near, she feels him far.

For contradiction is her nature’s law.

Although she is ever in him and he in her,

As if unaware of the eternal tie,

Her will is to shut God into her works

And keep him as her cherished prisoner

That never they may part again in Time.

A sumptuous chamber of the spirit’s sleep

At first she made, a deep interior room,

Where he slumbers as if a forgotten guest.

But now she turns to break the oblivious spell,

Awakes the sleeper on the sculptured couch;

She finds again the Presence in the form

And in the light that wakes with him recovers

A meaning in the hurry and trudge of Time,

And through this mind that once obscured the soul

Passes a glint of unseen deity.

Across a luminous dream of spirit-space

She builds creation like a rainbow bridge

Between the original Silence and the Void.

A net is made of the mobile universe;

She weaves a snare for the conscious Infinite.

A knowledge is with her that conceals its steps

And seems a mute omnipotent Ignorance.

A might is with her that makes wonders true;

The incredible is her stuff of common fact.

Her purposes, her workings riddles prove;

Examined, they grow other than they were,

Explained, they seem yet more inexplicable.

Even in our world a mystery has reigned

Earth’s cunning screen of trivial plainness hides;

Her larger levels are of sorceries made.

There the enigma shows its splendid prism,

There is no deep disguise of commonness;

Occult, profound comes all experience,

Marvel is ever new, miracle divine.

There is a screened burden, a mysterious touch,

There is a secrecy of hidden sense.

Although no earthen mask weighs on her face,

Into herself she flees from her own sight.

All forms are tokens of some veiled idea

Whose covert purpose lurks from mind’s pursuit,

Yet is a womb of sovereign consequence.

There every thought and feeling is an act,

And every act a symbol and a sign,

And every symbol hides a living power.

A universe she builds from truths and myths,

But what she needed most she cannot build;

All shown is a figure or copy of the Truth,

But the Real veils from her its mystic face.

All else she finds, there lacks eternity;

All is sought out, but missed the Infinite.

A consciousness lit by a Truth above

Was felt; it saw the light but not the Truth:

It caught the Idea and built from it a world;

It made an Image there and called it God.

Yet something true and inward harboured there.

The beings of that world of greater life,

Tenants of a larger air and freer space,

Live not by the body or in outward things:

A deeper living was their seat of self.

In that intense domain of intimacy

Objects dwell as companions of the soul;

The body’s actions are a minor script,

The surface rendering of a life within.

All forces are Life’s retinue in that world

And thought and body as her handmaids move.

The universal widenesses give her room:

All feel the cosmic movement in their acts

And are the instruments of her cosmic might.

Or their own self they make their universe.

In all who have risen to a greater Life,

A voice of unborn things whispers to the ear,

To their eyes visited by some high sunlight

Aspiration shows the image of a crown:

To work out a seed that she has thrown within,

To achieve her power in them her creatures live.

Each is a greatness growing towards the heights

Or from his inner centre oceans out;

In circling ripples of concentric power

They swallow, glutted, their environment.

Even of that largeness many a cabin make;

In narrower breadths and briefer vistas pent

They live content with some small greatness won.

To rule the little empire of themselves,

To be a figure in their private world

And make the milieu’s joys and griefs their own

And satisfy their life-motives and life-wants

Is charge enough and office for this strength,

A steward of the Person and his fate.

This was transition-line and starting-point,

A first immigration into heavenliness,

For all who cross into that brilliant sphere:

These are the kinsmen of our earthly race;

This region borders on our mortal state.

This wider world our greater movements gives,

Its strong formations build our growing selves;

Its creatures are our brighter replicas,

Complete the types we only initiate

And are securely what we strive to be.

As if thought-out eternal characters,

Entire, not pulled as we by contrary tides,

They follow the unseen leader in the heart,

Their lives obey the inner nature’s law.

There is kept grandeur’s store, the hero’s mould;

The soul is the watchful builder of its fate;

None is a spirit indifferent and inert;

They choose their side, they see the god they adore.

A battle is joined between the true and false,

A pilgrimage sets out to the divine Light.

For even Ignorance there aspires to know

And shines with the lustre of a distant star;

There is a knowledge in the heart of sleep

And Nature comes to them as a conscious force.

An ideal is their leader and their king:

Aspiring to the monarchy of the sun

They call in Truth for their high government,

Hold her incarnate in their daily acts

And fill their thoughts with her inspired voice

And shape their lives into her breathing form,

Till in her sun-gold godhead they too share.

Or to the truth of Darkness they subscribe;

Whether for Heaven or Hell they must wage war:

Warriors of Good, they serve a shining cause

Or are Evil’s soldiers in the pay of Sin.

For evil and good an equal tenure keep

Wherever Knowledge is Ignorance’s twin.

All powers of Life towards their godhead tend

In the wideness and the daring of that air,

Each builds its temple and expands its cult,

And Sin too there is a divinity.

Affirming the beauty and splendour of her law

She claims life as her natural domain,

Assumes the world’s throne or dons the papal robe:

Her worshippers proclaim her sacred right.

A red-tiaraed Falsehood they revere,

Worship the shadow of a crooked God,

Admit the black Idea that twists the brain

Or lie with the harlot Power that slays the soul.

A mastering virtue statuesques the pose,

Or a Titan passion goads to a proud unrest:

At Wisdom’s altar they are kings and priests

Or their life a sacrifice to an idol of Power.

Or Beauty shines on them like a wandering star;

Too far to reach, passionate they follow her light;

In Art and life they catch the All-Beautiful’s ray

And make the world their radiant treasure house:

Even common figures are with marvel robed;

A charm and greatness locked in every hour

Awakes the joy which sleeps in all things made.

A mighty victory or a mighty fall,

A throne in heaven or a pit in hell,

The dual Energy they have justified

And marked their souls with her tremendous seal:

Whatever Fate may do to them they have earned;

Something they have done, something they have been, they live.

There Matter is soul’s result and not its cause.

In a contrary balance to earth’s truth of things

The gross weighs less, the subtle counts for more;

On inner values hangs the outer plan.

As quivers with the thought the expressive word,

As yearns the act with the passion of the soul

This world’s apparent sensible design

Looks vibrant back to some interior might.

A Mind not limited by external sense

Gave figures to the spirit’s imponderables,

The world’s impacts without channels registered

And turned into the body’s concrete thrill

The vivid workings of a bodiless Force;

Powers here subliminal that act unseen

Or in ambush crouch waiting behind the wall

Came out in front uncovering their face.

The occult grew there overt, the obvious kept

A covert turn and shouldered the unknown;

The unseen was felt and jostled visible shapes.

In the communion of two meeting minds

Thought looked at thought and had no need of speech;

Emotion clasped emotion in two hearts,

They felt each other’s thrill in the flesh and nerves

Or melted each in each and grew immense

As when two houses burn and fire joins fire:

Hate grappled hate and love broke in on love,

Will wrestled with will on mind’s invisible ground;

Others’ sensations passing through like waves

Left quivering the subtle body’s frame,

Their anger rushed galloping in brute attack,

A charge of trampling hooves on shaken soil;

One felt another’s grief invade the breast,

Another’s joy exulting ran through the blood:

Hearts could draw close through distance, voices near

That spoke upon the shore of alien seas.

There beat a throb of living interchange:

Being felt being even when afar

And consciousness replied to consciousness.

And yet the ultimate oneness was not there.

There was a separateness of soul from soul:

An inner wall of silence could be built,

An armour of conscious might protect and shield;

The being could be closed in and solitary;

One could remain apart in self, alone.

Identity was not yet nor union’s peace.

All was imperfect still, half-known, half-done:

The miracle of Inconscience overpassed,

The miracle of the Superconscient still,

Unknown, self-wrapped, unfelt, unknowable,

Looked down on them, origin of all they were.

As forms they came of the formless Infinite,

As names lived of a nameless Eternity.

The beginning and the end were there occult;

A middle term worked unexplained, abrupt:

They were words that spoke to a vast wordless Truth,

They were figures crowding an unfinished sum.

None truly knew himself or knew the world

Or the Reality living there enshrined:

Only they knew what Mind could take and build

Out of the secret Supermind’s huge store.

A darkness under them, a bright Void above,

Uncertain they lived in a great climbing Space;

By mysteries they explained a Mystery,

A riddling answer met the riddle of things.

As he moved in this ether of ambiguous life,

Himself was soon a riddle to himself;

As symbols he saw all and sought their sense.

Across the leaping springs of death and birth

And over shifting borders of soul-change,

A hunter on the spirit’s creative track,

He followed in life’s fine and mighty trails

Pursuing her sealed formidable delight

In a perilous adventure without close.

At first no aim appeared in those large steps:

Only the wide source he saw of all things here

Looking towards a wider source beyond.

For as she drew away from earthly lines,

A tenser drag was felt from the Unknown,

A higher context of delivering thought

Drove her towards marvel and discovery;

There came a high release from pettier cares,

A mightier image of desire and hope,

A vaster formula, a greater scene.

Ever she circled towards some far-off Light:

Her signs still covered more than they revealed;

But tied to some immediate sight and will

They lost their purport in the joy of use,

Till stripped of their infinite meaning they became

A cipher gleaming with unreal sense.

Armed with a magical and haunted bow

She aimed at a target kept invisible

And ever deemed remote though always near.

As one who spells illumined characters,

The key-book of a crabbed magician text,

He scanned her subtle tangled weird designs

And the screened difficult theorem of her clues,

Traced in the monstrous sands of desert Time

The thread beginnings of her titan works,

Watched her charade of action for some hint,

Read the No-gestures of her silhouettes,

And strove to capture in their burdened drift

The dance-fantasia of her sequences

Escaping into rhythmic mystery,

A glimmer of fugitive feet on fleeing soil.

In the labyrinth pattern of her thoughts and hopes

And the byways of her intimate desires,

In the complex corners crowded with her dreams

And rounds crossed by an intrigue of irrelevant rounds,

A wanderer straying amid fugitive scenes,

He lost its signs and chased each failing guess.

Ever he met key-words, ignorant of their key.

A sun that dazzled its own eye of sight,

A luminous enigma’s brilliant hood

Lit the dense purple barrier of thought’s sky:

A dim large trance showed to the night her stars.

As if sitting near an open window’s gap,

He read by lightning-flash on crowding flash

Chapters of her metaphysical romance

Of the soul’s search for lost Reality

And her fictions drawn from spirit’s authentic fact,

Her caprices and conceits and meanings locked,

Her rash unseizable freaks and mysteried turns.

The magnificent wrappings of her secrecy

That fold her desirable body out of sight,

The strange significant forms woven on her robe,

Her meaningful outlines of the souls of things

He saw, her false transparencies of thought-hue,

Her rich brocades with imaged fancies sewn

And mutable masks and broideries of disguise.

A thousand baffling faces of the Truth

Looked at him from her forms with unknown eyes

And wordless mouths unrecognisable,

Spoke from the figures of her masquerade,

Or peered from the recondite magnificence

And subtle splendour of her draperies.

In sudden scintillations of the Unknown,

Inexpressive sounds became veridical,

Ideas that seemed unmeaning flashed out truth;

Voices that came from unseen waiting worlds

Uttered the syllables of the Unmanifest

To clothe the body of the mystic Word,

And wizard diagrams of the occult Law

Sealed some precise unreadable harmony,

Or used hue and figure to reconstitute

The herald blazon of Time’s secret things.

In her green wildernesses and lurking depths,

In her thickets of joy where danger clasps delight,

He glimpsed the hidden wings of her songster hopes,

A glimmer of blue and gold and scarlet fire.

In her covert lanes, bordering her chance field-paths

And by her singing rivulets and calm lakes

He found the glow of her golden fruits of bliss

And the beauty of her flowers of dream and muse.

As if a miracle of heart’s change by joy

He watched in the alchemist radiance of her suns

The crimson outburst of one secular flower

On the tree-of-sacrifice of spiritual love.

In the sleepy splendour of her noons he saw,

A perpetual repetition through the hours,

Thought’s dance of dragonflies on mystery’s stream

That skim but never test its murmurs’ race,

And heard the laughter of her rose desires

Running as if to escape from longed-for hands,

Jingling sweet anklet-bells of fantasy.

Amidst live symbols of her occult power

He moved and felt them as close real forms:

In that life more concrete than the lives of men

Throbbed heart-beats of the hidden reality:

Embodied was there what we but think and feel,

Self-framed what here takes outward borrowed shapes.

A comrade of Silence on her austere heights

Accepted by her mighty loneliness,

He stood with her on meditating peaks

Where life and being are a sacrament

Offered to the Reality beyond,

And saw her loose into infinity

Her hooded eagles of significance,

Messengers of Thought to the Unknowable.

Identified in soul-vision and soul-sense,

Entering into her depths as into a house,

All he became that she was or longed to be,

He thought with her thoughts and journeyed with her steps,

Lived with her breath and scanned all with her eyes

That so he might learn the secret of her soul.

A witness overmastered by his scene,

He admired her splendid front of pomp and play

And the marvels of her rich and delicate craft,

And thrilled to the insistence of her cry;

Impassioned he bore the sorceries of her might,

Felt laid on him her abrupt mysterious will,

Her hands that knead fate in their violent grasp,

Her touch that moves, her powers that seize and drive.

But this too he saw, her soul that wept within,

Her seekings vain that clutch at fleeing truth,

Her hopes whose sombre gaze mates with despair,

The passion that possessed her longing limbs,

The trouble and rapture of her yearning breasts,

Her mind that toils unsatisfied with its fruits,

Her heart that captures not the one Beloved.

Always he met a veiled and seeking Force,

An exiled goddess building mimic heavens,

A Sphinx whose eyes look up to a hidden Sun.

Ever he felt near a spirit in her forms:

Its passive presence was her nature’s strength;

This sole is real in apparent things,

Even upon earth the spirit is life’s key,

But her solid outsides nowhere bear its trace.

Its stamp on her acts is undiscoverable.

A pathos of lost heights is its appeal.

Only sometimes is caught a shadowy line

That seems a hint of veiled reality.

Life stared at him with vague confused outlines

Offering a picture the eyes could not keep,

A story that was yet not written there.

As in a fragmentary half-lost design

Life’s meanings fled from the pursuing eye.

Life’s visage hides life’s real self from sight;

Life’s secret sense is written within, above.

The thought that gives it sense lives far beyond;

It is not seen in its half-finished design.

In vain we hope to read the baffling signs

Or find the word of the half-played charade.

Only in that greater life a cryptic thought

Is found, is hinted some interpreting word

That makes the earth-myth a tale intelligible.

Something was seen at last that looked like truth.

In a half-lit air of hazardous mystery

The eye that looks at the dark half of truth

Made out an image mid a vivid blur

And peering through a mist of subtle tints

He saw a half-blind chained divinity

Bewildered by the world in which he moved,

Yet conscious of some light prompting his soul.

Attracted to strange far-off shimmerings,

Led by the fluting of a distant Player

He sought his way amid life’s laughter and call

And the index chaos of her myriad steps

Towards some total deep infinitude.

Around crowded the forest of her signs:

At hazard he read by arrow-leaps of Thought

That hit the mark by guess or luminous chance,

Her changing coloured road-lights of idea

And her signals of uncertain swift event,

The hieroglyphs of her symbol pageantries

And her landmarks in the tangled paths of Time.

In her mazes of approach and of retreat

To every side she draws him and repels,

But drawn too near escapes from his embrace;

All ways she leads him but no way is sure.

Allured by the many-toned marvel of her chant,

Attracted by the witchcraft of her moods

And moved by her casual touch to joy and grief,

He loses himself in her but wins her not.

A fugitive paradise smiles at him from her eyes:

He dreams of her beauty made for ever his,

He dreams of his mastery her limbs shall bear,

He dreams of the magic of her breasts of bliss.

In her illumined script, her fanciful

Translation of God’s pure original text,

He thinks to read the Scripture Wonderful,

Hieratic key to unknown beatitudes.

But the Word of Life is hidden in its script,

The chant of Life has lost its divine note.

Unseen, a captive in a house of sound,

The spirit lost in the splendour of a dream

Listens to a thousand-voiced illusion’s ode.

A delicate weft of sorcery steals the heart

Or a fiery magic tints her tones and hues,

Yet they but wake a thrill of transient grace;

A vagrant march struck by the wanderer Time,

They call to a brief unsatisfied delight

Or wallow in ravishments of mind and sense,

But miss the luminous answer of the soul.

A blind heart-throb that reaches joy through tears,

A yearning towards peaks for ever unreached,

An ecstasy of unfulfilled desire

Track the last heavenward climbings of her voice.

Transmuted are past suffering’s memories

Into an old sadness’s sweet escaping trail:

Turned are her tears to gems of diamond pain,

Her sorrow into a magic crown of song.

Brief are her snatches of felicity

That touch the surface, then escape or die:

A lost remembrance echoes in her depths,

A deathless longing is hers, a veiled self’s call;

A prisoner in the mortal’s limiting world,

A spirit wounded by life sobs in her breast;

A cherished suffering is her deepest cry.

A wanderer on forlorn despairing routes,

Along the roads of sound a frustrate voice

Forsaken cries to a forgotten bliss.

Astray in the echo caverns of Desire,

It guards the phantoms of a soul’s dead hopes

And keeps alive the voice of perished things

Or lingers upon sweet and errant notes

Hunting for pleasure in the heart of pain.

A fateful hand has touched the cosmic chords

And the intrusion of a troubled strain

Covers the inner music’s hidden key

That guides unheard the surface cadences.

Yet is it joy to live and to create

And joy to love and labour though all fails,

And joy to seek though all we find deceives

And all on which we lean betrays our trust;

Yet something in its depths was worth the pain,

A passionate memory haunts with ecstasy’s fire.

Even grief has joy hidden beneath its roots:

For nothing is truly vain the One has made:

In our defeated hearts God’s strength survives

And victory’s star still lights our desperate road;

Our death is made a passage to new worlds.

This to Life’s music gives its anthem swell.

To all she lends the glory of her voice;

Heaven’s raptures whisper to her heart and pass,

Earth’s transient yearnings cry from her lips and fade.

Alone the God-given hymn escapes her art

That came with her from her spiritual home

But stopped half-way and failed, a silent word

Awake in some deep pause of waiting worlds,

A murmur suspended in eternity’s hush:

But no breath comes from the supernal peace:

A sumptuous interlude occupies the ear

And the heart listens and the soul consents;

An evanescent music it repeats

Wasting on transience Time’s eternity.

A tremolo of the voices of the hours

Oblivious screens the high intended theme

The self-embodying spirit came to play

On the vast clavichord of Nature-Force.

Only a mighty murmur here and there

Of the eternal Word, the blissful Voice

Or Beauty’s touch transfiguring heart and sense,

A wandering splendour and a mystic cry,

Recalls the strength and sweetness heard no more.

Here is the gap, here stops or sinks life’s force;

This deficit paupers the magician’s skill:

This want makes all the rest seem thin and bare.

A half-sight draws the horizon of her acts:

Her depths remember what she came to do,

But the mind has forgotten or the heart mistakes:

In Nature’s endless lines is lost the God.

In knowledge to sum up omniscience,

In action to erect the Omnipotent,

To create her Creator here was her heart’s conceit,

To invade the cosmic scene with utter God.

Toiling to transform the still far Absolute

Into an all-fulfilling epiphany,

Into an utterance of the Ineffable,

She would bring the glory here of the Absolute’s force,

Change poise into creation’s rhythmic swing,

Marry with a sky of calm a sea of bliss.

A fire to call eternity into Time,

Make body’s joy as vivid as the soul’s,

Earth she would lift to neighbourhood with heaven,

Labours life to equate with the Supreme

And reconcile the Eternal and the Abyss.

Her pragmatism of the transcendent Truth

Fills silence with the voices of the gods,

But in the cry the single Voice is lost.

For Nature’s vision climbs beyond her acts.

A life of gods in heaven she sees above,

A demigod emerging from an ape

Is all she can in our mortal element.

Here the half-god, the half-titan are her peak:

This greater life wavers twixt earth and sky.

A poignant paradox pursues her dreams:

Her hooded energy moves an ignorant world

To look for a joy her own strong clasp puts off:

In her embrace it cannot turn to its source.

Immense her power, endless her act’s vast drive,

Astray is its significance and lost.

Although she carries in her secret breast

The law and journeying curve of all things born

Her knowledge partial seems, her purpose small;

On a soil of yearning tread her sumptuous hours.

A leaden Nescience weighs the wings of Thought,

Her power oppresses the being with its garbs,

Her actions prison its immortal gaze.

A sense of limit haunts her masteries

And nowhere is assured content or peace:

For all the depth and beauty of her work

A wisdom lacks that sets the spirit free.

An old and faded charm had now her face

And palled for him her quick and curious lore;

His wide soul asked a deeper joy than hers.

Out of her daedal lines he sought escape;

But neither gate of horn nor ivory

He found nor postern of spiritual sight,

There was no issue from that dreamlike space.

Our being must move eternally through Time;

Death helps us not, vain is the hope to cease;

A secret Will compels us to endure.

Our life’s repose is in the Infinite;

It cannot end, its end is Life supreme.

Death is a passage, not the goal of our walk:

Some ancient deep impulsion labours on:

Our souls are dragged as with a hidden leash,

Carried from birth to birth, from world to world,

Our acts prolong after the body’s fall

The old perpetual journey without pause.

No silent peak is found where Time can rest.

This was a magic stream that reached no sea.

However far he went, wherever turned,

The wheel of works ran with him and outstripped;

Always a farther task was left to do.

A beat of action and a cry of search

For ever grew in that unquiet world;

A busy murmur filled the heart of Time.

All was contrivance and unceasing stir.

A hundred ways to live were tried in vain:

A sameness that assumed a thousand forms

Strove to escape from its long monotone

And made new things that soon were like the old.

A curious decoration lured the eye

And novel values furbished ancient themes

To cheat the mind with the idea of change.

A different picture that was still the same

Appeared upon the cosmic vague background.

Only another labyrinthine house

Of creatures and their doings and events,

A city of the traffic of bound souls,

A market of creation and her wares,

Was offered to the labouring mind and heart.

A circuit ending where it first began

Is dubbed the forward and eternal march

Of progress on perfection’s unknown road.

Each final scheme leads to a sequel plan.

Yet every new departure seems the last,

Inspired evangel, theory’s ultimate peak,

Proclaiming a panacea for all Time’s ills

Or carrying thought in its ultimate zenith flight

And trumpeting supreme discovery;

Each brief idea, a structure perishable,

Publishes the immortality of its rule,

Its claim to be the perfect form of things,

Truth’s last epitome, Time’s golden best.

But nothing has been achieved of infinite worth:

A world made ever anew, never complete,

Piled always half-attempts on lost attempts

And saw a fragment as the eternal Whole.

In the aimless mounting total of things done

Existence seemed a vain necessity’s act,

A wrestle of eternal opposites

In a clasped antagonism’s close-locked embrace,

A play without denouement or idea,

A hunger march of lives without a goal,

Or, written on a bare blackboard of Space,

A futile and recurring sum of souls,

A hope that failed, a light that never shone,

The labour of an unaccomplished Force

Tied to its acts in a dim eternity.

There is no end or none can yet be seen:

Although defeated, life must struggle on;

Always she sees a crown she cannot grasp;

Her eyes are fixed beyond her fallen state.

There quivers still within her breast and ours

A glory that was once and is no more,

Or there calls to us from some unfulfilled beyond

A greatness yet unreached by the halting world.

In a memory behind our mortal sense

A dream persists of larger happier air

Breathing around free hearts of joy and love,

Forgotten by us, immortal in lost Time.

A ghost of bliss pursues her haunted depths;

For she remembers still, though now so far,

Her realm of golden ease and glad desire

And the beauty and strength and happiness that were hers

In the sweetness of her glowing paradise,

In her kingdom of immortal ecstasy

Half-way between God’s silence and the Abyss.

This knowledge in our hidden parts we keep;

Awake to a vague mystery’s appeal,

We meet a deep unseen Reality

Far truer than the world’s face of present truth:

We are chased by a self we cannot now recall

And moved by a Spirit we must still become.

As one who has lost the kingdom of his soul,

We look back to some god-phase of our birth

Other than this imperfect creature here

And hope in this or a diviner world

To recover yet from Heaven’s patient guard

What by our mind’s forgetfulness we miss,

Our being’s natural felicity,

Our heart’s delight we have exchanged for grief,

The body’s thrill we bartered for mere pain,

The bliss for which our mortal nature yearns

As yearns an obscure moth to blazing Light.

Our life is a march to a victory never won.

This wave of being longing for delight,

This eager turmoil of unsatisfied strengths,

These long far files of forward-striving hopes

Lift worshipping eyes to the blue Void called heaven

Looking for the golden Hand that never came,

The advent for which all creation waits,

The beautiful visage of Eternity

That shall appear upon the roads of Time.

Yet still to ourselves we say rekindling faith,

“Oh, surely one day he shall come to our cry,

One day he shall create our life anew

And utter the magic formula of peace

And bring perfection to the scheme of things.

One day he shall descend to life and earth,

Leaving the secrecy of the eternal doors,

Into a world that cries to him for help,

And bring the truth that sets the spirit free,

The joy that is the baptism of the soul,

The strength that is the outstretched arm of Love.

One day he shall lift his beauty’s dreadful veil,

Impose delight on the world’s beating heart

And bare his secret body of light and bliss.”

But now we strain to reach an unknown goal:

There is no end of seeking and of birth,

There is no end of dying and return;

The life that wins its aim asks greater aims,

The life that fails and dies must live again;

Till it has found itself it cannot cease.

All must be done for which life and death were made.

But who shall say that even then is rest?

Or there repose and action are the same

In the deep breast of God’s supreme delight.

In a high state where ignorance is no more,

Each movement is a wave of peace and bliss,

Repose God’s motionless creative force,

Action a ripple in the Infinite

And birth a gesture of Eternity.

A sun of transfiguration still can shine

And Night can bare its core of mystic light;

The self-cancelling, self-afflicting paradox

Into a self-luminous mystery might change,

The imbroglio into a joyful miracle.

Then God could be visible here, here take a shape;

Disclosed would be the spirit’s identity;

Life would reveal her true immortal face.

But now a termless labour is her fate:

In its recurrent decimal of events

Birth, death are a ceaseless iteration’s points;

The old question-mark margins each finished page,

Each volume of her effort’s history.

A limping Yes through the aeons journeys still

Accompanied by an eternal No.

All seems in vain, yet endless is the game.

Impassive turns the ever-circling Wheel,

Life has no issue, death brings no release.

A prisoner of itself the being lives

And keeps its futile immortality;

Extinction is denied, its sole escape.

An error of the gods has made the world.

Or indifferent the Eternal watches Time.

End of Canto Six

Canto Seven

The Descent into Night

A mind absolved from life, made calm to know,

A heart divorced from the blindness and the pang,

The seal of tears, the bond of ignorance,

He turned to find that wide world-failure’s cause.

Away he looked from Nature’s visible face

And sent his gaze into the viewless Vast,

The formidable unknown Infinity,

Asleep behind the endless coil of things,

That carries the universe in its timeless breadths

And the ripples of its being are our lives.

The worlds are built by its unconscious Breath

And Matter and Mind are its figures or its powers,

Our waking thoughts the output of its dreams.

The veil was rent that covers Nature’s depths:

He saw the fount of the world’s lasting pain

And the mouth of the black pit of Ignorance;

The evil guarded at the roots of life

Raised up its head and looked into his eyes.

On a dim bank where dies subjective Space,

From a stark ridge overlooking all that is,

A tenebrous awakened Nescience,

Her wide blank eyes wondering at Time and Form,

Stared at the inventions of the living Void

And the Abyss whence our beginnings rose.

Behind appeared a grey carved mask of Night

Watching the birth of all created things.

A hidden Puissance conscious of its force,

A vague and lurking Presence everywhere,

A contrary Doom that threatens all things made,

A Death figuring as the dark seed of life,

Seemed to engender and to slay the world.

Then from the sombre mystery of the gulfs

And from the hollow bosom of the Mask

Something crept forth that seemed a shapeless Thought.

A fatal Influence upon creatures stole

Whose lethal touch pursued the immortal spirit,

On life was laid the haunting finger of death

And overcast with error, grief and pain

The soul’s native will for truth and joy and light.

A deformation coiled that claimed to be

The being’s very turn, Nature’s true drive.

A hostile and perverting Mind at work

In every corner ensconced of conscious life

Corrupted Truth with her own formulas;

Interceptor of the listening of the soul,

Afflicting knowledge with the hue of doubt

It captured the oracles of the occult gods,

Effaced the signposts of Life’s pilgrimage,

Cancelled the firm rock-edicts graved by Time,

And on the foundations of the cosmic Law

Erected its bronze pylons of misrule.

Even Light and Love by that cloaked danger’s spell

Turned from the brilliant nature of the gods

To fallen angels and misleading suns,

Became themselves a danger and a charm,

A perverse sweetness, heaven-born malefice:

Its power could deform divinest things.

A wind of sorrow breathed upon the world;

All thought with falsehood was besieged, all act

Stamped with defect or with frustration’s sign,

All high attempt with failure or vain success,

But none could know the reason of his fall.

The grey Mask whispered and, though no sound was heard,

Yet in the ignorant heart a seed was sown

That bore black fruit of suffering, death and bale.

Out of the chill steppes of a bleak Unseen

Invisible, wearing the Night’s grey mask,

Arrived the shadowy dreadful messengers,

Invaders from a dangerous world of power,

Ambassadors of evil’s absolute.

In silence the inaudible voices spoke,

Hands that none saw planted the fatal grain,

No form was seen, yet a dire work was done,

An iron decree in crooked uncials written

Imposed a law of sin and adverse fate.

Life looked at him with changed and sombre eyes:

Her beauty he saw and the yearning heart in things

That with a little happiness is content,

Answering to a small ray of truth or love;

He saw her gold sunlight and her far blue sky,

Her green of leaves and hue and scent of flowers

And the charm of children and the love of friends

And the beauty of women and kindly hearts of men,

But saw too the dreadful Powers that drive her moods

And the anguish she has strewn upon her ways,

Fate waiting on the unseen steps of men

And her evil and sorrow and last gift of death.

A breath of disillusion and decadence

Corrupting watched for Life’s maturity

And made to rot the full grain of the soul:

Progress became a purveyor of Death.

A world that clung to the law of a slain Light

Cherished the putrid corpses of dead truths,

Hailed twisted forms as things free, new and true,

Beauty from ugliness and evil drank

Feeling themselves guests at a banquet of the gods

And tasted corruption like a high-spiced food.

A darkness settled on the heavy air;

It hunted the bright smile from Nature’s lips

And slew the native confidence in her heart

And put fear’s crooked look into her eyes.

The lust that warps the spirit’s natural good

Replaced by a manufactured virtue and vice

The frank spontaneous impulse of the soul:

Afflicting Nature with the dual’s lie,

Their twin values whetted a forbidden zest,

Made evil a relief from spurious good,

The ego battened on righteousness and sin

And each became an instrument of Hell.

In rejected heaps by a monotonous road

The old simple delights were left to lie

On the wasteland of life’s descent to Night.

All glory of life was dimmed, tarnished with doubt;

All beauty ended in an aging face;

All power was dubbed a tyranny cursed by God

And Truth a fiction needed by the mind:

The chase of joy was now a tired hunt;

All knowledge was left a questioning Ignorance.

As from a womb obscure he saw emerge

The body and visage of a dark Unseen

Hidden behind the fair outsides of life.

Its dangerous commerce is our suffering’s cause.

Its breath is a subtle poison in men’s hearts;

All evil starts from that ambiguous face.

A peril haunted now the common air;

The world grew full of menacing Energies,

And wherever turned for help or hope his eyes,

In field and house, in street and camp and mart

He met the prowl and stealthy come and go

Of armed disquieting bodied Influences.

A march of goddess figures dark and nude

Alarmed the air with grandiose unease;

Appalling footsteps drew invisibly near,

Shapes that were threats invaded the dream-light,

And ominous beings passed him on the road

Whose very gaze was a calamity:

A charm and sweetness sudden and formidable,

Faces that raised alluring lips and eyes

Approached him armed with beauty like a snare,

But hid a fatal meaning in each line

And could in a moment dangerously change.

But he alone discerned that screened attack.

A veil upon the inner vision lay,

A force was there that hid its dreadful steps;

All was belied, yet thought itself the truth;

All were beset but knew not of the siege:

For none could see the authors of their fall.

Aware of some dark wisdom still withheld

That was the seal and warrant of this strength,

He followed the track of dim tremendous steps

Returning to the night from which they came.

A tract he reached unbuilt and owned by none:

There all could enter but none stay for long.

It was a no man’s land of evil air,

A crowded neighbourhood without one home,

A borderland between the world and hell.

There unreality was Nature’s lord:

It was a space where nothing could be true,

For nothing was what it had claimed to be:

A high appearance wrapped a specious void.

Yet nothing would confess its own pretence

Even to itself in the ambiguous heart:

A vast deception was the law of things;

Only by that deception they could live.

An unsubstantial Nihil guaranteed

The falsehood of the forms this Nature took

And made them seem awhile to be and live.

A borrowed magic drew them from the Void;

They took a shape and stuff that was not theirs

And showed a colour that they could not keep,

Mirrors to a phantasm of reality.

Each rainbow brilliance was a splendid lie;

A beauty unreal graced a glamour face.

Nothing could be relied on to remain:

Joy nurtured tears and good an evil proved,

But never out of evil one plucked good:

Love ended early in hate, delight killed with pain,

Truth into falsity grew and death ruled life.

A Power that laughed at the mischiefs of the world,

An irony that joined the world’s contraries

And flung them into each other’s arms to strive,

Put a sardonic rictus on God’s face.

Aloof, its influence entered everywhere

And left a cloven hoof-mark on the breast;

A twisted heart and a strange sombre smile

Mocked at the sinister comedy of life.

Announcing the advent of a perilous Form

An ominous tread softened its dire footfall

That none might understand or be on guard;

None heard until a dreadful grasp was close.

Or else all augured a divine approach,

An air of prophecy felt, a heavenly hope,

Listened for a gospel, watched for a new star.

The Fiend was visible but cloaked in light;

He seemed a helping angel from the skies:

He armed untruth with Scripture and the Law;

He deceived with wisdom, with virtue slew the soul

And led to perdition by the heavenward path.

A lavish sense he gave of power and joy,

And, when arose the warning from within,

He reassured the ear with dulcet tones

Or took the mind captive in its own net;

His rigorous logic made the false seem true.

Amazing the elect with holy lore

He spoke as with the very voice of God.

The air was full of treachery and ruse;

Truth-speaking was a stratagem in that place;

Ambush lurked in a smile and peril made

Safety its cover, trust its entry’s gate:

Falsehood came laughing with the eyes of truth;

Each friend might turn an enemy or spy,

The hand one clasped ensleeved a dagger’s stab

And an embrace could be Doom’s iron cage.

Agony and danger stalked their trembling prey

And softly spoke as to a timid friend:

Attack sprang suddenly vehement and unseen;

Fear leaped upon the heart at every turn

And cried out with an anguished dreadful voice;

It called for one to save but none came near.

All warily walked, for death was ever close;

Yet caution seemed a vain expense of care,

For all that guarded proved a deadly net,

And when after long suspense salvation came

And brought a glad relief disarming strength,

It served as a smiling passage to worse fate.

There was no truce and no safe place to rest;

One dared not slumber or put off one’s arms:

It was a world of battle and surprise.

All who were there lived for themselves alone;

All warred against all, but with a common hate

Turned on the mind that sought some higher good;

Truth was exiled lest she should dare to speak

And hurt the heart of darkness with her light

Or bring her pride of knowledge to blaspheme

The settled anarchy of established things.

Then the scene changed, but kept its dreadful core:

Altering its form the life remained the same.

A capital was there without a State:

It had no ruler, only groups that strove.

He saw a city of ancient Ignorance

Founded upon a soil that knew not Light.

There each in his own darkness walked alone:

Only they agreed to differ in Evil’s paths,

To live in their own way for their own selves

Or to enforce a common lie and wrong;

There Ego was lord upon his peacock seat

And Falsehood sat by him, his mate and queen:

The world turned to them as Heaven to Truth and God.

Injustice justified by firm decrees

The sovereign weights of Error’s legalised trade,

But all the weights were false and none the same;

Ever she watched with her balance and a sword,

Lest any sacrilegious word expose

The sanctified formulas of her old misrule.

In high professions wrapped self-will walked wide

And licence stalked prating of order and right:

There was no altar raised to Liberty;

True freedom was abhorred and hunted down:

Harmony and tolerance nowhere could be seen;

Each group proclaimed its dire and naked Law.

A frame of ethics knobbed with scriptural rules

Or a theory passionately believed and praised

A table seemed of high Heaven’s sacred code.

A formal practice mailed and iron-shod

Gave to a rude and ruthless warrior kind

Drawn from the savage bowels of the earth

A proud stern poise of harsh nobility,

A civic posture rigid and formidable.

But all their private acts belied the pose:

Power and utility were their Truth and Right,

An eagle rapacity clawed its coveted good,

Beaks pecked and talons tore all weaker prey.

In their sweet secrecy of pleasant sins

Nature they obeyed and not a moralist God.

Inconscient traders in bundles of contraries,

They did what in others they would persecute;

When their eyes looked upon their fellow’s vice,

An indignation flamed, a virtuous wrath;

Oblivious of their own deep-hid offence,

Moblike they stoned a neighbour caught in sin.

A pragmatist judge within passed false decrees,

Posed worst iniquities on equity’s base,

Reasoned ill actions just, sanctioned the scale

Of the merchant ego’s interest and desire.

Thus was a balance kept, the world could live.

A zealot fervour pushed their ruthless cults,

All faith not theirs bled scourged as heresy;

They questioned, captived, tortured, burned or smote

And forced the soul to abandon right or die.

Amid her clashing creeds and warring sects

Religion sat upon a blood-stained throne.

A hundred tyrannies oppressed and slew

And founded unity upon fraud and force.

Only what seemed was prized as real there:

The ideal was a cynic ridicule’s butt;

Hooted by the crowd, mocked by enlightened wits,

Spiritual seeking wandered outcasted, –

A dreamer’s self-deceiving web of thought

Or mad chimaera deemed or hypocrite’s fake,

Its passionate instinct trailed through minds obscure

Lost in the circuits of the Ignorance.

A lie was there the truth and truth a lie.

Here must the traveller of the upward Way –

For daring Hell’s kingdoms winds the heavenly route –

Pause or pass slowly through that perilous space,

A prayer upon his lips and the great Name.

If probed not all discernment’s keen spear-point,

He might stumble into falsity’s endless net.

Over his shoulder often he must look back

Like one who feels on his neck an enemy’s breath;

Else stealing up behind a treasonous blow

Might prostrate cast and pin to unholy soil,

Pierced through his back by Evil’s poignant stake.

So might one fall on the Eternal’s road

Forfeiting the spirit’s lonely chance in Time

And no news of him reach the waiting gods,

Marked “missing” in the register of souls,

His name the index of a failing hope,

The position of a dead remembered star.

Only were safe who kept God in their hearts:

Courage their armour, faith their sword, they must walk,

The hand ready to smite, the eye to scout,

Casting a javelin regard in front,

Heroes and soldiers of the army of Light.

Hardly even so, the grisly danger past,

Released into a calmer purer air,

They dared at length to breathe and smile once more.

Once more they moved beneath a real sun.

Though Hell claimed rule, the spirit still had power.

This No-man’s-land he passed without debate;

Him the heights missioned, him the Abyss desired:

None stood across his way, no voice forbade.

For swift and easy is the downward path,

And now towards the Night was turned his face.

A greater darkness waited, a worse reign,

If worse can be where all is evil’s extreme;

Yet to the cloaked the uncloaked is naked worst.

There God and Truth and the supernal Light

Had never been or else had power no more.

As when one slips in a deep moment’s trance

Over mind’s border into another world,

He crossed a boundary whose stealthy trace

Eye could not see but only the soul feel.

Into an armoured fierce domain he came

And saw himself wandering like a lost soul

Amid grimed walls and savage slums of Night.

Around him crowded grey and squalid huts

Neighbouring proud palaces of perverted Power,

Inhuman quarters and demoniac wards.

A pride in evil hugged its wretchedness;

A misery haunting splendour pressed those fell

Dun suburbs of the cities of dream-life.

There Life displayed to the spectator soul

The shadow depths of her strange miracle.

A strong and fallen goddess without hope,

Obscured, deformed by some dire Gorgon spell,

As might a harlot empress in a bouge,

Nude, unashamed, exulting she upraised

Her evil face of perilous beauty and charm

And, drawing panic to a shuddering kiss

Twixt the magnificence of her fatal breasts,

Allured to their abyss the spirit’s fall.

Across his field of sight she multiplied

As on a scenic film or moving plate

The implacable splendour of her nightmare pomps.

On the dark background of a soulless world

She staged between a lurid light and shade

Her dramas of the sorrow of the depths

Written on the agonised nerves of living things:

Epics of horror and grim majesty,

Wry statues spat and stiffened in life’s mud,

A glut of hideous forms and hideous deeds

Paralysed pity in the hardened breast.

In booths of sin and night-repairs of vice

Styled infamies of the body’s concupiscence

And sordid imaginations etched in flesh,

Turned lust into a decorative art:

Abusing Nature’s gift her pervert skill

Immortalised the sown grain of living death,

In a mud goblet poured the bacchic wine,

To a satyr gave the thyrsus of a god.

Impure, sadistic, with grimacing mouths,

Grey foul inventions gruesome and macabre

Came televisioned from the gulfs of Night.

Her craft ingenious in monstrosity,

Impatient of all natural shape and poise,

A gape of nude exaggerated lines,

Gave caricature a stark reality,

And art-parades of weird distorted forms,

And gargoyle masques obscene and terrible

Trampled to tormented postures the torn sense.

An inexorable evil’s worshipper,

She made vileness great and sublimated filth;

A dragon power of reptile energies

And strange epiphanies of grovelling Force

And serpent grandeurs couching in the mire

Drew adoration to a gleam of slime.

All Nature pulled out of her frame and base

Was twisted into an unnatural pose:

Repulsion stimulated inert desire;

Agony was made a red-spiced food for bliss,

Hatred was trusted with the work of lust

And torture took the form of an embrace;

A ritual anguish consecrated death;

Worship was offered to the Undivine.

A new aesthesis of Inferno’s art

That trained the mind to love what the soul hates,

Imposed allegiance on the quivering nerves

And forced the unwilling body to vibrate.

Too sweet and too harmonious to excite

In this regime that soiled the being’s core,

Beauty was banned, the heart’s feeling dulled to sleep

And cherished in their place sensation’s thrills;

The world was probed for jets of sense-appeal.

Here cold material intellect was the judge

And needed sensual prick and jog and lash

That its hard dryness and dead nerves might feel

Some passion and power and acrid point of life.

A new philosophy theorised evil’s rights,

Gloried in the shimmering rot of decadence,

Or gave to a python Force persuasive speech

And armed with knowledge the primaeval brute.

Over life and Matter only brooding bowed,

Mind changed to the image of a rampant beast;

It scrambled into the pit to dig for truth

And lighted its search with the subconscient’s flares.

Thence bubbling rose sullying the upper air,

The filth and festering secrets of the Abyss:

This it called positive fact and real life.

This now composed the fetid atmosphere.

A wild-beast passion crept from secret Night

To watch its prey with fascinating eyes:

Around him like a fire with sputtering tongues

There lolled and laughed a bestial ecstasy;

The air was packed with longings brute and fierce;

Crowding and stinging in a monstrous swarm

Pressed with a noxious hum into his mind

Thoughts that could poison Nature’s heavenliest breath,

Forcing reluctant lids assailed the sight

Acts that revealed the mystery of Hell.

All that was there was on this pattern made.

A race possessed inhabited those parts.

A force demoniac lurking in man’s depths

That heaves suppressed by the heart’s human law,

Awed by the calm and sovereign eyes of Thought,

Can in a fire and earthquake of the soul

Arise and, calling to its native night,

Overthrow the reason, occupy the life

And stamp its hoof on Nature’s shaking ground:

This was for them their being’s flaming core.

A mighty energy, a monster god,

Hard to the strong, implacable to the weak,

It stared at the harsh unpitying world it made

With the stony eyelids of its fixed idea.

Its heart was drunk with a dire hunger’s wine,

In others’ suffering felt a thrilled delight

And of death and ruin the grandiose music heard.

To have power, to be master, was sole virtue and good:

It claimed the whole world for Evil’s living room,

Its party’s grim totalitarian reign

The cruel destiny of breathing things.

All on one plan was shaped and standardised

Under a dark dictatorship’s breathless weight.

In street and house, in councils and in courts

Beings he met who looked like living men

And climbed in speech upon high wings of thought

But harboured all that is subhuman, vile

And lower than the lowest reptile’s crawl.

The reason meant for nearness to the gods

And uplift to heavenly scale by the touch of mind

Only enhanced by its enlightening ray

Their inborn nature’s wry monstrosity.

Often, a familiar visage studying

Joyfully encountered at some dangerous turn,

Hoping to recognise a look of light,

His vision warned by the spirit’s inward eye

Discovered suddenly Hell’s trademark there,

Or saw with the inner sense that cannot err,

In the semblance of a fair or virile form

The demon and the goblin and the ghoul.

An insolence reigned of cold stone-hearted strength

Mighty, obeyed, approved by the Titan’s law,

The huge laughter of a giant cruelty

And fierce glad deeds of ogre violence.

In that wide cynic den of thinking beasts

One looked in vain for a trace of pity or love;

There was no touch of sweetness anywhere,

But only Force and its acolytes, greed and hate:

There was no help for suffering, none to save,

None dared resist or speak a noble word.

Armed with the aegis of tyrannic Power,

Signing the edicts of her dreadful rule

And using blood and torture as a seal,

Darkness proclaimed her slogans to the world.

A servile blinkered silence hushed the mind

Or only it repeated lessons taught,

While mitred, holding the good shepherd’s staff,

Falsehood enthroned on awed and prostrate hearts

The cults and creeds that organise living death

And slay the soul on the altar of a lie.

All were deceived or served their own deceit;

Truth in that stifling atmosphere could not live.

There wretchedness believed in its own joy

And fear and weakness hugged their abject depths;

All that is low and sordid-thoughted, base,

All that is drab and poor and miserable,

Breathed in a lax content its natural air

And felt no yearning of divine release:

Arrogant, gibing at more luminous states

The people of the gulfs despised the sun.

A barriered autarchy excluded light;

Fixed in its will to be its own grey self,

It vaunted its norm unique and splendid type:

It soothed its hunger with a plunderer’s dream;

Flaunting its cross of servitude like a crown,

It clung to its dismal harsh autonomy.

A bull-throat bellowed with its brazen tongue;

Its hard and shameless clamour filling Space

And threatening all who dared to listen to truth

Claimed the monopoly of the battered ear;

A deafened acquiescence gave its vote,

And braggart dogmas shouted in the night

Kept for the fallen soul once deemed a god

The pride of its abysmal absolute.

A lone discoverer in these menacing realms

Guarded like termite cities from the sun,

Oppressed mid crowd and tramp and noise and flare,

Passing from dusk to deeper dangerous dusk,

He wrestled with powers that snatched from mind its light

And smote from him their clinging influences.

Soon he emerged in a dim wall-less space.

For now the peopled tracts were left behind;

He walked between wide banks of failing eve.

Around him grew a gaunt spiritual blank,

A threatening waste, a sinister loneliness

That left mind bare to an unseen assault,

An empty page on which all that willed could write

Stark monstrous messages without control.

A travelling dot on downward roads of Dusk

Mid barren fields and barns and straggling huts

And a few crooked and phantasmal trees,

He faced a sense of death and conscious void.

But still a hostile Life unseen was there

Whose deathlike poise resisting light and truth

Made living a bleak gap in nullity.

He heard the grisly voices that deny;

Assailed by thoughts that swarmed like spectral hordes,

A prey to the staring phantoms of the gloom

And terror approaching with its lethal mouth,

Driven by a strange will down ever down,

The sky above a communiqué of Doom,

He strove to shield his spirit from despair,

But felt the horror of the growing Night

And the Abyss rising to claim his soul.

Then ceased the abodes of creatures and their forms

And solitude wrapped him in its voiceless folds.

All vanished suddenly like a thought expunged;

His spirit became an empty listening gulf

Void of the dead illusion of a world:

Nothing was left, not even an evil face.

He was alone with the grey python Night.

A dense and nameless Nothing conscious, mute,

Which seemed alive but without body or mind,

Lusted all beings to annihilate

That it might be for ever nude and sole.

As in a shapeless beast’s intangible jaws,

Gripped, strangled by that lusting viscous blot,

Attracted to some black and giant mouth

And swallowing throat and a huge belly of doom,

His being from its own vision disappeared

Drawn towards depths that hungered for its fall.

A formless void oppressed his struggling brain,

A darkness grim and cold benumbed his flesh,

A whispered grey suggestion chilled his heart;

Haled by a serpent-force from its warm home

And dragged to extinction in bleak vacancy

Life clung to its seat with cords of gasping breath;

Lapped was his body by a tenebrous tongue.

Existence smothered travailed to survive;

Hope strangled perished in his empty soul,

Belief and memory abolished died

And all that helps the spirit in its course.

There crawled through every tense and aching nerve

Leaving behind its poignant quaking trail

A nameless and unutterable fear.

As a sea nears a victim bound and still,

The approach alarmed his mind for ever dumb

Of an implacable eternity

Of pain inhuman and intolerable.

This he must bear, his hope of heaven estranged;

He must ever exist without extinction’s peace

In a slow suffering Time and tortured Space,

An anguished nothingness his endless state.

A lifeless vacancy was now his breast,

And in the place where once was luminous thought,

Only remained like a pale motionless ghost

An incapacity for faith and hope

And the dread conviction of a vanquished soul

Immortal still but with its godhead lost,

Self lost and God and touch of happier worlds.

But he endured, stilled the vain terror, bore

The smothering coils of agony and affright;

Then peace returned and the soul’s sovereign gaze.

To the blank horror a calm Light replied:

Immutable, undying and unborn,

Mighty and mute the Godhead in him woke

And faced the pain and danger of the world.

He mastered the tides of Nature with a look:

He met with his bare spirit naked Hell.

End of Canto Seven