Canto One

The World-Stair

Alone he moved watched by the infinity

Around him and the Unknowable above.

All could be seen that shuns the mortal eye,

All could be known the mind has never grasped;

All could be done no mortal will can dare.

A limitless movement filled a limitless peace.

In a profound existence beyond earth’s

Parent or kin to our ideas and dreams

Where Space is a vast experiment of the soul,

In an immaterial substance linked to ours

In a deep oneness of all things that are,

The universe of the Unknown arose.

A self-creation without end or pause

Revealed the grandeurs of the Infinite:

It flung into the hazards of its play

A million moods, a myriad energies,

The world-shapes that are fancies of its Truth

And the formulas of the freedom of its Force.

It poured into the Ever-stable’s flux

A bacchic rapture and revel of Ideas,

A passion and motion of everlastingness.

There rose unborn into the Unchanging’s surge

Thoughts that abide in their deathless consequence,

Words that immortal last though fallen mute,

Acts that brought out from Silence its dumb sense,

Lines that convey the inexpressible.

The Eternal’s stillness saw in unmoved joy

His universal Power at work display

In plots of pain and dramas of delight

The wonder and beauty of her will to be.

All, even pain, was the soul’s pleasure here;

Here all experience was a single plan,

The thousandfold expression of the One.

All came at once into his single view;

Nothing escaped his vast intuitive sight,

Nothing drew near he could not feel as kin:

He was one spirit with that immensity.

Images in a supernal consciousness

Embodying the Unborn who never dies,

The structured visions of the cosmic Self

Alive with the touch of being’s eternity

Looked at him like form-bound spiritual thoughts

Figuring the movements of the Ineffable.

Aspects of being donned world-outline; forms

That open moving doors on things divine,

Became familiar to his hourly sight;

The symbols of the Spirit’s reality,

The living bodies of the Bodiless

Grew near to him, his daily associates.

The exhaustless seeings of the unsleeping Mind,

Letterings of its contact with the invisible,

Surrounded him with countless pointing signs;

The voices of a thousand realms of Life

Missioned to him her mighty messages.

The heaven-hints that invade our earthly lives,

The dire imaginations dreamed by Hell,

Which if enacted and experienced here

Our dulled capacity soon would cease to feel

Or our mortal frailty could not long endure,

Were set in their sublime proportions there.

There lived out in their self-born atmosphere,

They resumed their topless pitch and native power;

Their fortifying stress upon the soul

Bit deep into the ground of consciousness

The passion and purity of their extremes,

The absoluteness of their single cry

And the sovereign sweetness or violent poetry

Of their beautiful or terrible delight.

All thought can know or widest sight perceive

And all that thought and sight can never know,

All things occult and rare, remote and strange

Were near to heart’s contact, felt by spirit-sense.

Asking for entry at his nature’s gates

They crowded the widened spaces of his mind,

His self-discovery’s flaming witnesses,

Offering their marvel and their multitude.

These now became new portions of himself,

The figures of his spirit’s greater life,

The moving scenery of his large time-walk

Or the embroidered tissue of his sense:

These took the place of intimate human things

And moved as close companions of his thoughts,

Or were his soul’s natural environment.

Tireless the heart’s adventure of delight,

Endless the kingdoms of the Spirit’s bliss,

Unnumbered tones struck from one harmony’s strings;

Each to its wide-winged universal poise,

Its fathomless feeling of the All in one,

Brought notes of some perfection yet unseen,

Its single retreat into Truth’s secrecies,

Its happy sidelight on the Infinite.

All was found there the Unique has dreamed and made

Tinging with ceaseless rapture and surprise

And an opulent beauty of passionate difference

The recurring beat that moments God in Time.

Only was missing the sole timeless Word

That carries eternity in its lonely sound,

The Idea self-luminous key to all ideas,

The integer of the Spirit’s perfect sum

That equates the unequal All to the equal One,

The single sign interpreting every sign,

The absolute index to the Absolute.

There walled apart by its own innerness

In a mystical barrage of dynamic light

He saw a lone immense high-curved world-pile

Erect like a mountain-chariot of the Gods

Motionless under an inscrutable sky.

As if from Matter’s plinth and viewless base

To a top as viewless, a carved sea of worlds

Climbing with foam-maned waves to the Supreme

Ascended towards breadths immeasurable;

It hoped to soar into the Ineffable’s reign:

A hundred levels raised it to the Unknown.

So it towered up to heights intangible

And disappeared in the hushed conscious Vast

As climbs a storeyed temple-tower to heaven

Built by the aspiring soul of man to live

Near to his dream of the Invisible.

Infinity calls to it as it dreams and climbs;

Its spire touches the apex of the world;

Mounting into great voiceless stillnesses

It marries the earth to screened eternities.

Amid the many systems of the One

Made by an interpreting creative joy

Alone it points us to our journey back

Out of our long self-loss in Nature’s deeps;

Planted on earth it holds in it all realms:

It is a brief compendium of the Vast.

This was the single stair to being’s goal.

A summary of the stages of the spirit,

Its copy of the cosmic hierarchies

Refashioned in our secret air of self

A subtle pattern of the universe.

It is within, below, without, above.

Acting upon this visible Nature’s scheme

It wakens our earth-matter’s heavy doze

To think and feel and to react to joy;

It models in us our diviner parts,

Lifts mortal mind into a greater air,

Makes yearn this life of flesh to intangible aims,

Links the body’s death with immortality’s call:

Out of the swoon of the Inconscience

It labours towards a superconscient Light.

If earth were all and this were not in her,

Thought could not be nor life-delight’s response:

Only material forms could then be her guests

Driven by an inanimate world-force.

Earth by this golden superfluity

Bore thinking man and more than man shall bear;

This higher scheme of being is our cause

And holds the key to our ascending fate;

It calls out of our dense mortality

The conscious spirit nursed in Matter’s house.

The living symbol of these conscious planes,

Its influences and godheads of the unseen,

Its unthought logic of Reality’s acts

Arisen from the unspoken truth in things,

Have fixed our inner life’s slow-scaled degrees.

Its steps are paces of the soul’s return

From the deep adventure of material birth,

A ladder of delivering ascent

And rungs that Nature climbs to deity.

Once in the vigil of a deathless gaze

These grades had marked her giant downward plunge,

The wide and prone leap of a godhead’s fall.

Our life is a holocaust of the Supreme.

The great World-Mother by her sacrifice

Has made her soul the body of our state;

Accepting sorrow and unconsciousness

Divinity’s lapse from its own splendours wove

The many-patterned ground of all we are.

An idol of self is our mortality.

Our earth is a fragment and a residue;

Her power is packed with the stuff of greater worlds

And steeped in their colour-lustres dimmed by her drowse;

An atavism of higher births is hers,

Her sleep is stirred by their buried memories

Recalling the lost spheres from which they fell.

Unsatisfied forces in her bosom move;

They are partners of her greater growing fate

And her return to immortality;

They consent to share her doom of birth and death;

They kindle partial gleams of the All and drive

Her blind laborious spirit to compose

A meagre image of the mighty Whole.

The calm and luminous Intimacy within

Approves her work and guides the unseeing Power.

His vast design accepts a puny start.

An attempt, a drawing half-done is the world’s life;

Its lines doubt their concealed significance,

Its curves join not their high intended close.

Yet some first image of greatness trembles there,

And when the ambiguous crowded parts have met

The many-toned unity to which they moved,

The Artist’s joy shall laugh at reason’s rules;

The divine intention suddenly shall be seen,

The end vindicate intuition’s sure technique.

A graph shall be of many meeting worlds,

A cube and union-crystal of the gods;

A Mind shall think behind Nature’s mindless mask,

A conscious Vast fill the old dumb brute Space.

This faint and fluid sketch of soul called man

Shall stand out on the background of long Time

A glowing epitome of eternity,

A little point reveal the infinitudes.

A Mystery’s process is the universe.

At first was laid a strange anomalous base,

A void, a cipher of some secret Whole,

Where zero held infinity in its sum

And All and Nothing were a single term,

An eternal negative, a matrix Nought:

Into its forms the Child is ever born

Who lives for ever in the vasts of God.

A slow reversal’s movement then took place:

A gas belched out from some invisible Fire,

Of its dense rings were formed these million stars;

Upon earth’s new-born soil God’s tread was heard.

Across the thick smoke of earth’s ignorance

A Mind began to see and look at forms

And groped for knowledge in the nescient Night:

Caught in a blind stone-grip Force worked its plan

And made in sleep this huge mechanical world,

That Matter might grow conscious of its soul

And like a busy midwife the life-power

Deliver the zero carrier of the All.

Because eternal eyes turned on earth’s gulfs

The lucent clarity of a pure regard

And saw a shadow of the Unknowable

Mirrored in the Inconscient’s boundless sleep,

Creation’s search for self began its stir.

A spirit dreamed in the crude cosmic whirl,

Mind flowed unknowing in the sap of life

And Matter’s breasts suckled the divine Idea.

A miracle of the Absolute was born;

Infinity put on a finite soul,

All ocean lived within a wandering drop,

A time-made body housed the Illimitable.

To live this Mystery out our souls came here.

A Seer within who knows the ordered plan

Concealed behind our momentary steps,

Inspires our ascent to viewless heights

As once the abysmal leap to earth and life.

His call had reached the Traveller in Time.

Apart in an unfathomed loneliness,

He travelled in his mute and single strength

Bearing the burden of the world’s desire.

A formless Stillness called, a nameless Light.

Above him was the white immobile Ray,

Around him the eternal Silences.

No term was fixed to the high-pitched attempt;

World after world disclosed its guarded powers,

Heaven after heaven its deep beatitudes,

But still the invisible Magnet drew his soul.

A figure sole on Nature’s giant stair,

He mounted towards an indiscernible end

On the bare summit of created things.

End of Canto One

Canto Two

The Kingdom of Subtle Matter

In the impalpable field of secret self,

This little outer being’s vast support

Parted from vision by earth’s solid fence,

He came into a magic crystal air

And found a life that lived not by the flesh,

A light that made visible immaterial things.

A fine degree in wonder’s hierarchy,

The kingdom of subtle Matter’s faery craft

Outlined against a sky of vivid hues,

Leaping out of a splendour-trance and haze,

The wizard revelation of its front.

A world of lovelier forms lies near to ours,

Where, undisguised by earth’s deforming sight,

All shapes are beautiful and all things true.

In that lucent ambience mystically clear

The eyes were doors to a celestial sense,

Hearing was music and the touch a charm,

And the heart drew a deeper breath of power.

There dwell earth-nature’s shining origins:

The perfect plans on which she moulds her works,

The distant outcomes of her travailing force,

Repose in a framework of established fate.

Attempted vainly now or won in vain,

Already were mapped and scheduled there the time

And figure of her future sovereignties

In the sumptuous lineaments traced by desire.

The golden issue of mind’s labyrinth plots,

The riches unfound or still uncaught by our lives,

Unsullied by the attaint of mortal thought

Abide in that pellucid atmosphere.

Our vague beginnings are overtaken there,

Our middle terms sketched out in prescient lines,

Our finished ends anticipated live.

This brilliant roof of our descending plane,

Intercepting the free boon of heaven’s air,

Admits small inrushes of a mighty breath

Or fragrant circuits through gold lattices;

It shields our ceiling of terrestrial mind

From deathless suns and the streaming of God’s rain,

Yet canalises a strange irised glow,

And bright dews drip from the Immortal’s sky.

A passage for the Powers that move our days,

Occult behind this grosser Nature’s walls,

A gossamer marriage-hall of Mind with Form

Is hidden by a tapestry of dreams;

Heaven’s meanings steal through it as through a veil,

Its inner sight sustains this outer scene.

A finer consciousness with happier lines,

It has a tact our touch cannot attain,

A purity of sense we never feel;

Its intercession with the eternal Ray

Inspires our transient earth’s brief-lived attempts

At beauty and the perfect shape of things.

In rooms of the young divinity of power

And early play of the eternal Child

The embodiments of his outwinging thoughts

Laved in a bright everlasting wonder’s tints

And lulled by whispers of that lucid air

Take dream-hued rest like birds on timeless trees

Before they dive to float on earth-time’s sea.

All that here seems has lovelier semblance there.

Whatever our hearts conceive, our heads create,

Some high original beauty forfeiting,

Thence exiled here consents to an earthly tinge.

Whatever is here of visible charm and grace

Finds there its faultless and immortal lines;

All that is beautiful here is there divine.

Figures are there undreamed by mortal mind:

Bodies that have no earthly counterpart

Traverse the inner eye’s illumined trance

And ravish the heart with their celestial tread

Persuading heaven to inhabit that wonder sphere.

The future’s marvels wander in its gulfs;

Things old and new are fashioned in those depths:

A carnival of beauty crowds the heights

In that magic kingdom of ideal sight.

In its antechambers of splendid privacy

Matter and soul in conscious union meet

Like lovers in a lonely secret place:

In the clasp of a passion not yet unfortunate

They join their strength and sweetness and delight

And mingling make the high and low worlds one.

Intruder from the formless Infinite

Daring to break into the Inconscient’s reign,

The spirit’s leap towards body touches ground.

As yet unwrapped in earthly lineaments,

Already it wears outlasting death and birth,

Convincing the abyss by heavenly form,

A covering of its immortality

Alive to the lustre of the wearer’s rank,

Fit to endure the rub of Change and Time.

A tissue mixed of the soul’s radiant light

And Matter’s substance of sign-burdened Force, –

Imagined vainly in our mind’s thin air

An abstract phantasm mould of mental make, –

It feels what earthly bodies cannot feel

And is more real than this grosser frame.

After the falling of mortality’s cloak

Lightened is its weight to heighten its ascent;

Refined to the touch of finer environments

It drops old patterned palls of denser stuff,

Cancels the grip of earth’s descending pull

And bears the soul from world to higher world,

Till in the naked ether of the peaks

The spirit’s simplicity alone is left,

The eternal being’s first transparent robe.

But when it must come back to its mortal load

And the hard ensemble of earth’s experience,

Then its return resumes that heavier dress.

For long before earth’s solid vest was forged

By the technique of the atomic Void,

A lucent envelope of self-disguise

Was woven round the secret spirit in things.

The subtle realms from those bright sheaths are made.

This wonder-world with all its radiant boon

Of vision and inviolate happiness,

Only for expression cares and perfect form;

Fair on its peaks, it has dangerous nether planes;

Its light draws towards the verge of Nature’s lapse;

It lends beauty to the terror of the gulfs

And fascinating eyes to perilous Gods,

Invests with grace the demon and the snake.

Its trance imposes earth’s inconscience,

Immortal it weaves for us death’s sombre robe

And authorises our mortality.

This medium serves a greater Consciousness:

A vessel of its concealed autocracy,

It is the subtle ground of Matter’s worlds,

It is the immutable in their mutable forms,

In the folds of its creative memory

It guards the deathless type of perishing things:

Its lowered potencies found our fallen strengths;

Its thought invents our reasoned ignorance;

Its sense fathers our body’s reflexes.

Our secret breath of untried mightier force,

The lurking sun of an instant’s inner sight,

Its fine suggestions are a covert fount

For our iridescent rich imaginings

Touching things common with transfiguring hues

Till even earth’s mud grows rich and warm with the skies

And a glory gleams from the soul’s decadence.

Its knowledge is our error’s starting-point;

Its beauty dons our mud-mask ugliness,

Its artist good begins our evil’s tale.

A heaven of creative truths above,

A cosmos of harmonious dreams between,

A chaos of dissolving forms below,

It plunges lost in our inconscient base.

Out of its fall our denser Matter came.

Thus taken was God’s plunge into the Night.

This fallen world became a nurse of souls

Inhabited by concealed divinity.

A Being woke and lived in the meaningless void,

A world-wide Nescience strove towards life and thought,

A Consciousness plucked out from mindless sleep.

All here is driven by an insentient will.

Thus fallen, inconscient, frustrate, dense, inert,

Sunk into inanimate and torpid drowse

Earth lay, a drudge of sleep, forced to create

By a subconscient yearning memory

Left from a happiness dead before she was born,

An alien wonder on her senseless breast.

This mire must harbour the orchid and the rose,

From her blind unwilling substance must emerge

A beauty that belongs to happier spheres.

This is the destiny bequeathed to her,

As if a slain god left a golden trust

To a blind force and an imprisoned soul.

An immortal godhead’s perishable parts

She must reconstitute from fragments lost,

Reword from a document complete elsewhere

Her doubtful title to her divine Name.

A residue her sole inheritance,

All things she carries in her shapeless dust.

Her giant energy tied to petty forms

In the slow tentative motion of her power

With only frail blunt instruments for use,

She has accepted as her nature’s need

And given to man as his stupendous work

A labour to the gods impossible.

A life living hardly in a field of death

Its portion claims of immortality;

A brute half-conscious body serves as means

A mind that must recover a knowledge lost

Held in stone grip by the world’s inconscience,

And wearing still these countless knots of Law

A spirit bound stand up as Nature’s king.

A mighty kinship is this daring’s cause.

All we attempt in this imperfect world,

Looks forward or looks back beyond Time’s gloss

To its pure idea and firm inviolate type

In an absolute creation’s flawless skill.

To seize the absolute in shapes that pass,

To fix the eternal’s touch in time-made things,

This is the law of all perfection here.

A fragment here is caught of heaven’s design;

Else could we never hope for greater life

And ecstasy and glory could not be.

Even in the littleness of our mortal state,

Even in this prison-house of outer form,

A brilliant passage for the infallible Flame

Is driven through gross walls of nerve and brain,

A Splendour presses or a Power breaks through,

Earth’s great dull barrier is removed awhile,

The inconscient seal is lifted from our eyes

And we grow vessels of creative might.

The enthusiasm of a divine surprise

Pervades our life, a mystic stir is felt,

A joyful anguish trembles in our limbs;

A dream of beauty dances through the heart,

A thought from the eternal Mind draws near,

Intimations cast from the Invisible

Awaking from Infinity’s sleep come down,

Symbols of That which never yet was made.

But soon the inert flesh responds no more,

Then sinks the sacred orgy of delight,

The blaze of passion and the tide of power

Are taken from us and, though a glowing form

Abides astonishing earth, imagined supreme,

Too little of what was meant has left a trace.

Earth’s eyes half-see, her forces half-create;

Her rarest works are copies of heaven’s art.

A radiance of a golden artifice,

A masterpiece of inspired device and rule,

Her forms hide what they house and only mime

The unseized miracle of self-born shapes

That live for ever in the Eternal’s gaze.

Here in a difficult half-finished world

Is a slow toiling of unconscious Powers;

Here is man’s ignorant divining mind,

His genius born from an inconscient soil.

To copy on earth’s copies is his art.

For when he strives for things surpassing earth,

Too rude the workman’s tools, too crude his stuff,

And hardly with his heart’s blood he achieves

His transient house of the divine Idea,

His figure of a Time-inn for the Unborn.

Our being thrills with high far memories

And would bring down their dateless meanings here,

But, too divine for earthly Nature’s scheme,

Beyond our reach the eternal marvels blaze.

Absolute they dwell, unborn, immutable,

Immaculate in the Spirit’s deathless air,

Immortal in a world of motionless Time

And an unchanging muse of deep self-space.

Only when we have climbed above ourselves,

A line of the Transcendent meets our road

And joins us to the timeless and the true;

It brings to us the inevitable word,

The godlike act, the thoughts that never die.

A ripple of light and glory wraps the brain,

And travelling down the moment’s vanishing route

The figures of eternity arrive.

As the mind’s visitors or the heart’s guests

They espouse our mortal brevity awhile,

Or seldom in some rare delivering glimpse

Are caught by our vision’s delicate surmise.

Although beginnings only and first attempts,

These glimmerings point to the secret of our birth

And the hidden miracle of our destiny.

What we are there and here on earth shall be

Is imaged in a contact and a call.

As yet earth’s imperfection is our sphere,

Our nature’s glass shows not our real self;

That greatness still abides held back within.

Earth’s doubting future hides our heritage:

The Light now distant shall grow native here,

The Strength that visits us our comrade power;

The Ineffable shall find a secret voice,

The Imperishable burn through Matter’s screen

Making this mortal body godhead’s robe.

The Spirit’s greatness is our timeless source

And it shall be our crown in endless Time.

A vast Unknown is round us and within;

All things are wrapped in the dynamic One:

A subtle link of union joins all life.

Thus all creation is a single chain:

We are not left alone in a closed scheme

Between a driving of inconscient Force

And an incommunicable Absolute.

Our life is a spur in a sublime soul-range,

Our being looks beyond its walls of mind

And it communicates with greater worlds;

There are brighter earths and wider heavens than ours.

There are realms where Being broods in its own depths;

It feels in its immense dynamic core

Its nameless, unformed, unborn potencies

Cry for expression in the unshaped Vast:

Ineffable beyond Ignorance and death,

The images of its everlasting Truth

Look out from a chamber of its self-rapt soul:

As if to its own inner witness gaze

The Spirit holds up its mirrored self and works,

The power and passion of its timeless heart,

The figures of its formless ecstasy,

The grandeurs of its multitudinous might.

Thence comes the mystic substance of our souls

Into the prodigy of our nature’s birth,

There is the unfallen height of all we are

And dateless fount of all we hope to be.

On every plane the hieratic Power,

Initiate of unspoken verities,

Dreams to transcribe and make a part of life

In its own native style and living tongue

Some trait of the perfection of the Unborn,

Some vision seen in the omniscient Light,

Some far tone of the immortal rhapsodist Voice,

Some rapture of the all-creating Bliss,

Some form and plan of the Beauty unutterable.

Worlds are there nearer to those absolute realms,

Where the response to Truth is swift and sure

And spirit is not hampered by its frame

And hearts by sharp division seized and rent

And delight and beauty are inhabitants

And love and sweetness are the law of life.

A finer substance in a subtler mould

Embodies the divinity earth but dreams;

Its strength can overtake joy’s running feet;

Overleaping the fixed hurdles set by Time,

The rapid net of an intuitive clasp

Captures the fugitive happiness we desire.

A Nature lifted by a larger breath,

Plastic and passive to the all-shaping Fire,

Answers the flaming Godhead’s casual touch:

Immune from our inertia of response

It hears the word to which our hearts are deaf,

Adopts the seeing of immortal eyes

And, traveller on the roads of line and hue,

Pursues the spirit of beauty to its home.

Thus we draw near to the All-Wonderful

Following his rapture in things as sign and guide;

Beauty is his footprint showing us where he has passed,

Love is his heart-beats’ rhythm in mortal breasts,

Happiness the smile on his adorable face.

A communion of spiritual entities,

A genius of creative Immanence,

Makes all creation deeply intimate:

A fourth dimension of aesthetic sense

Where all is in ourselves, ourselves in all,

To the cosmic wideness re-aligns our souls.

A kindling rapture joins the seer and seen;

The craftsman and the craft grown inly one

Achieve perfection by the magic throb

And passion of their close identity.

All that we slowly piece from gathered parts,

Or by long labour stumblingly evolve,

Is there self-born by its eternal right.

In us too the intuitive Fire can burn;

An agent Light, it is coiled in our folded hearts,

On the celestial levels is its home:

Descending, it can bring those heavens here.

But rarely burns the flame nor burns for long;

The joy it calls from those diviner heights

Brings brief magnificent reminiscences

And high splendid glimpses of interpreting thought,

But not the utter vision and delight.

A veil is kept, something is still held back,

Lest, captives of the beauty and the joy,

Our souls forget to the Highest to aspire.

In that fair subtle realm behind our own

The form is all, and physical gods are kings.

The inspiring Light plays in fine boundaries;

A faultless beauty comes by Nature’s grace;

There liberty is perfection’s guarantee:

Although the absolute Image lacks, the Word

Incarnate, the sheer spiritual ecstasy,

All is a miracle of symmetric charm,

A fantasy of perfect line and rule.

There all feel satisfied in themselves and whole,

A rich completeness is by limit made,

Marvel in an utter littleness abounds,

An intricate rapture riots in a small space:

Each rhythm is kin to its environment,

Each line is perfect and inevitable,

Each object faultlessly built for charm and use.

All is enamoured of its own delight.

Intact it lives of its perfection sure

In a heaven-pleased self-glad immunity;

Content to be, it has need of nothing more.

Here was not futile effort’s broken heart:

Exempt from the ordeal and the test,

Empty of opposition and of pain,

It was a world that could not fear nor grieve.

It had no grace of error or defeat,

It had no room for fault, no power to fail.

Out of some packed self-bliss it drew at once

Its form-discoveries of the mute Idea

And the miracle of its rhythmic thoughts and acts,

Its clear technique of firm and rounded lives,

Its gracious people of inanimate shapes

And glory of breathing bodies like our own.

Amazed, his senses ravished with delight,

He moved in a divine, yet kindred world

Admiring marvellous forms so near to ours

Yet perfect like the playthings of a god,

Deathless in the aspect of mortality.

In their narrow and exclusive absolutes

The finite’s ranked supremacies throned abide;

It dreams not ever of what might have been;

Only in boundaries can this absolute live.

In a supremeness bound to its own plan

Where all was finished and no widths were left,

No space for shadows of the immeasurable,

No room for the incalculable’s surprise,

A captive of its own beauty and ecstasy,

In a magic circle wrought the enchanted Might.

The spirit stood back effaced behind its frame.

Admired for the bright finality of its lines

A blue horizon limited the soul;

Thought moved in luminous facilities,

The outer ideal’s shallows its swim-range:

Life in its boundaries lingered satisfied

With the small happiness of the body’s acts.

Assigned as Force to a bound corner-Mind,

Attached to the safe paucity of her room,

She did her little works and played and slept

And thought not of a greater work undone.

Forgetful of her violent vast desires,

Forgetful of the heights to which she rose,

Her walk was fixed within a radiant groove.

The beautiful body of a soul at ease,

Like one who laughs in sweet and sunlit groves,

Childlike she swung in her gold cradle of joy.

The spaces’ call reached not her charmed abode,

She had no wings for wide and dangerous flight,

She faced no peril of sky or of abyss,

She knew no vistas and no mighty dreams,

No yearning for her lost infinitudes.

A perfect picture in a perfect frame,

This faery artistry could not keep his will:

Only a moment’s fine release it gave;

A careless hour was spent in a slight bliss.

Our spirit tires of being’s surfaces,

Transcended is the splendour of the form;

It turns to hidden powers and deeper states.

So now he looked beyond for greater light.

His soul’s peak-climb abandoning in its rear

This brilliant courtyard of the House of Days,

He left that fine material Paradise.

His destiny lay beyond in larger Space.

End of Canto Two

Canto Three

The Glory and the Fall of Life

An uneven broad ascent now lured his feet.

Answering a greater Nature’s troubled call

He crossed the limits of embodied Mind

And entered wide obscure disputed fields

Where all was doubt and change and nothing sure,

A world of search and toil without repose.

As one who meets the face of the Unknown,

A questioner with none to give reply,

Attracted to a problem never solved,

Always uncertain of the ground he trod,

Always drawn on to an inconstant goal

He travelled through a land peopled by doubts

In shifting confines on a quaking base.

In front he saw a boundary ever unreached

And thought himself at each step nearer now, –

A far retreating horizon of mirage.

A vagrancy was there that brooked no home,

A journey of countless paths without a close.

Nothing he found to satisfy his heart;

A tireless wandering sought and could not cease.

There life is the manifest Incalculable,

A movement of unquiet seas, a long

And venturous leap of spirit into Space,

A vexed disturbance in the eternal Calm,

An impulse and passion of the Infinite.

Assuming whatever shape her fancy wills,

Escaped from the restraint of settled forms

She has left the safety of the tried and known.

Unshepherded by the fear that walks through Time,

Undaunted by Fate that dogs and Chance that springs,

She accepts disaster as a common risk;

Careless of suffering, heedless of sin and fall,

She wrestles with danger and discovery

In the unexplored expanses of the soul.

To be seemed only a long experiment,

The hazard of a seeking ignorant Force

That tries all truths and, finding none supreme,

Moves on unsatisfied, unsure of its end.

As saw some inner mind, so life was shaped:

From thought to thought she passed, from phase to phase,

Tortured by her own powers or proud and blest,

Now master of herself, now toy and slave.

A huge inconsequence was her action’s law,

As if all possibility must be drained,

And anguish and bliss were pastimes of the heart.

In a gallop of thunder-hooved vicissitudes

She swept through the race-fields of Circumstance,

Or, swaying, she tossed between her heights and deeps,

Uplifted or broken on Time’s inconstant wheel.

Amid a tedious crawl of drab desires

She writhed, a worm mid worms in Nature’s mud,

Then, Titan-statured, took all earth for food,

Ambitioned the seas for robe, for crown the stars

And shouting strode from peak to giant peak,

Clamouring for worlds to conquer and to rule.

Then, wantonly enamoured of Sorrow’s face,

She plunged into the anguish of the depths

And, wallowing, clung to her own misery.

In dolorous converse with her squandered self

She wrote the account of all that she had lost,

Or sat with grief as with an ancient friend.

A romp of violent raptures soon was spent,

Or she lingered tied to an inadequate joy

Missing the turns of fate, missing life’s goal.

A scene was planned for all her numberless moods

Where each could be the law and way of life,

But none could offer a pure felicity;

Only a flickering zest they left behind

Or the fierce lust that brings a dead fatigue.

Amid her swift untold variety

Something remained dissatisfied, ever the same

And in the new saw only a face of the old,

For every hour repeated all the rest

And every change prolonged the same unease.

A spirit of her self and aim unsure,

Tired soon of too much joy and happiness,

She needs the spur of pleasure and of pain

And the native taste of suffering and unrest:

She strains for an end that never can she win.

A perverse savour haunts her thirsting lips:

For the grief she weeps which came from her own choice,

For the pleasure yearns that racked with wounds her breast;

Aspiring to heaven she turns her steps towards hell.

Chance she has chosen and danger for playfellows;

Fate’s dreadful swing she has taken for cradle and seat.

Yet pure and bright from the Timeless was her birth,

A lost world-rapture lingers in her eyes,

Her moods are faces of the Infinite:

Beauty and happiness are her native right,

And endless Bliss is her eternal home.

This now revealed its antique face of joy,

A sudden disclosure to the heart of grief

Tempting it to endure and long and hope.

Even in changing worlds bereft of peace,

In an air racked with sorrow and with fear

And while his feet trod on a soil unsafe,

He saw the image of a happier state.

In an architecture of hieratic Space

Circling and mounting towards creation’s tops,

At a blue height which never was too high

For warm communion between body and soul,

As far as heaven, as near as thought and hope,

Glimmered the kingdom of a griefless life.

Above him in a new celestial vault

Other than the heavens beheld by mortal eyes,

As on a fretted ceiling of the gods,

An archipelago of laughter and fire,

Swam stars apart in a rippled sea of sky.

Towered spirals, magic rings of vivid hue

And gleaming spheres of strange felicity

Floated through distance like a symbol world.

On the trouble and the toil they could not share,

On the unhappiness they could not aid,

Impervious to life’s suffering, struggle, grief,

Untarnished by its anger, gloom and hate,

Unmoved, untouched, looked down great visioned planes

Blissful for ever in their timeless right.

Absorbed in their own beauty and content,

Of their immortal gladness they live sure.

Apart in their self-glory plunged, remote

Burning they swam in a vague lucent haze,

An everlasting refuge of dream-light,

A nebula of the splendours of the gods

Made from the musings of eternity.

Almost unbelievable by human faith,

Hardly they seemed the stuff of things that are.

As through a magic television’s glass

Outlined to some magnifying inner eye

They shone like images thrown from a far scene

Too high and glad for mortal lids to seize.

But near and real to the longing heart

And to the body’s passionate thought and sense

Are the hidden kingdoms of beatitude.

In some close unattained realm which yet we feel,

Immune from the harsh clutch of Death and Time,

Escaping the search of sorrow and desire,

In bright enchanted safe peripheries

For ever wallowing in bliss they lie.

In dream and trance and muse before our eyes,

Across a subtle vision’s inner field,

Wide rapturous landscapes fleeting from the sight,

The figures of the perfect kingdom pass

And behind them leave a shining memory’s trail.

Imagined scenes or great eternal worlds,

Dream-caught or sensed, they touch our hearts with their depths;

Unreal-seeming, yet more real than life,

Happier than happiness, truer than things true,

If dreams these were or captured images,

Dream’s truth made false earth’s vain realities.

In a swift eternal moment fixed there live

Or ever recalled come back to longing eyes

Calm heavens of imperishable Light,

Illumined continents of violet peace,

Oceans and rivers of the mirth of God

And griefless countries under purple suns.

This, once a star of bright remote idea

Or imagination’s comet trail of dream,

Took now a close shape of reality.

The gulf between dream-truth, earth-fact was crossed,

The wonder-worlds of life were dreams no more;

His vision made all they unveiled its own:

Their scenes, their happenings met his eyes and heart

And smote them with pure loveliness and bliss.

A breathless summit region drew his gaze

Whose boundaries jutted into a sky of Self

And dipped towards a strange ethereal base.

The quintessence glowed of Life’s supreme delight.

On a spiritual and mysterious peak

Only a miracle’s high transfiguring line

Divided life from the formless Infinite

And sheltered Time against eternity.

Out of that formless stuff Time mints his shapes;

The Eternal’s quiet holds the cosmic act:

The protean images of the World-Force

Have drawn the strength to be, the will to last

From a deep ocean of dynamic peace.

Inverting the spirit’s apex towards life,

She spends the plastic liberties of the One

To cast in acts the dreams of her caprice,

His wisdom’s call steadies her careless feet,

He props her dance upon a rigid base,

His timeless still immutability

Must standardise her creation’s miracle.

Out of the Void’s unseeing energies

Inventing the scene of a concrete universe,

By his thought she has fixed its paces, in its blind acts

She sees by flashes of his all-knowing Light.

At her will the inscrutable Supermind leans down

To guide her force that feels but cannot know,

Its breath of power controls her restless seas

And life obeys the governing Idea.

At her will, led by a luminous Immanence

The hazardous experimenting Mind

Pushes its way through obscure possibles

Mid chance formations of an unknowing world.

Our human ignorance moves towards the Truth

That Nescience may become omniscient,

Transmuted instincts shape to divine thoughts,

Thoughts house infallible immortal sight

And Nature climb towards God’s identity.

The Master of the worlds self-made her slave

Is the executor of her fantasies:

She has canalised the seas of omnipotence;

She has limited by her laws the Illimitable.

The Immortal bound himself to do her works;

He labours at the tasks her Ignorance sets,

Hidden in the cape of our mortality.

The worlds, the forms her goddess fancy makes

Have lost their origin on unseen heights:

Even severed, straying from their timeless source,

Even deformed, obscure, accursed and fallen, –

Since even fall has its perverted joy

And nothing she leaves out that serves delight, –

These too can to the peaks revert or here

Cut out the sentence of the spirit’s fall,

Recover their forfeited divinity.

At once caught in an eternal vision’s sweep

He saw her pride and splendour of highborn zones

And her regions crouching in the nether deeps.

Above was a monarchy of unfallen self,

Beneath was the gloomy trance of the abyss,

An opposite pole or dim antipodes.

There were vasts of the glory of life’s absolutes:

All laughed in a safe immortality

And an eternal childhood of the soul

Before darkness came and pain and grief were born

Where all could dare to be themselves and one

And Wisdom played in sinless innocence

With naked Freedom in Truth’s happy sun.

There were worlds of her laughter and dreadful irony,

There were fields of her taste of toil and strife and tears;

Her head lay on the breast of amorous Death,

Sleep imitated awhile extinction’s peace.

The light of God she has parted from his dark

To test the savour of bare opposites.

Here mingling in man’s heart their tones and hues

Have woven his being’s mutable design,

His life a forward-rippling stream in Time,

His nature’s constant fixed mobility,

His soul a moving picture’s changeful film,

His cosmos-chaos of personality.

The grand creatrix with her cryptic touch

Has turned to pathos and power being’s self-dream,

Made a passion-play of its fathomless mystery.

But here were worlds lifted half-way to heaven.

The Veil was there but not the Shadowy Wall;

In forms not too remote from human grasp

Some passion of the inviolate purity

Broke through, a ray of the original Bliss.

Heaven’s joys might have been earth’s if earth were pure.

There could have reached our divinised sense and heart

Some natural felicity’s bright extreme,

Some thrill of Supernature’s absolutes:

All strengths could laugh and sport on earth’s hard roads

And never feel her cruel edge of pain,

All love could play and nowhere Nature’s shame.

But she has stabled her dreams in Matter’s courts

And still her doors are barred to things supreme.

These worlds could feel God’s breath visiting their tops;

Some glimmer of the Transcendent’s hem was there.

Across the white aeonic silences

Immortal figures of embodied joy

Traversed wide spaces near to eternity’s sleep.

Pure mystic voices in beatitude’s hush

Appealed to Love’s immaculate sweetnesses,

Calling his honeyed touch to thrill the worlds,

His blissful hands to seize on Nature’s limbs,

His sweet intolerant might of union

To take all beings into his saviour arms,

Drawing to his pity the rebel and the waif

To force on them the happiness they refuse.

A chant hymeneal to the unseen Divine,

A flaming rhapsody of white desire

Lured an immortal music into the heart

And woke the slumbering ear of ecstasy.

A purer, fierier sense had there its home,

A burning urge no earthly limbs can hold;

One drew a large unburdened spacious breath

And the heart sped from beat to rapturous beat.

The voice of Time sang of the Immortal’s joy;

An inspiration and a lyric cry,

The moments came with ecstasy on their wings;

Beauty unimaginable moved heaven-bare

Absolved from boundaries in the vasts of dream;

The cry of the Birds of Wonder called from the skies

To the deathless people of the shores of Light.

Creation leaped straight from the hands of God;

Marvel and rapture wandered in the ways.

Only to be was a supreme delight,

Life was a happy laughter of the soul

And Joy was king with Love for minister.

The spirit’s luminousness was bodied there.

Life’s contraries were lovers or natural friends

And her extremes keen edges of harmony:

Indulgence with a tender purity came

And nursed the god on her maternal breast:

There none was weak, so falsehood could not live;

Ignorance was a thin shade protecting light,

Imagination the free-will of Truth,

Pleasure a candidate for heaven’s fire;

The intellect was Beauty’s worshipper,

Strength was the slave of calm spiritual law,

Power laid its head upon the breasts of Bliss.

There were summit-glories inconceivable,

Autonomies of Wisdom’s still self-rule

And high dependencies of her virgin sun,

Illumined theocracies of the seeing soul

Throned in the power of the Transcendent’s ray.

A vision of grandeurs, a dream of magnitudes

In sun-bright kingdoms moved with regal gait:

Assemblies, crowded senates of the gods,

Life’s puissances reigned on seats of marble will,

High dominations and autocracies

And laurelled strengths and armed imperative mights.

All objects there were great and beautiful,

All beings wore a royal stamp of power.

There sat the oligarchies of natural Law,

Proud violent heads served one calm monarch brow:

All the soul’s postures donned divinity.

There met the ardent mutual intimacies

Of mastery’s joy and the joy of servitude

Imposed by Love on Love’s heart that obeys

And Love’s body held beneath a rapturous yoke.

All was a game of meeting kinglinesses.

For worship lifts the worshipper’s bowed strength

Close to the god’s pride and bliss his soul adores:

The ruler there is one with all he rules;

To him who serves with a free equal heart

Obedience is his princely training’s school,

His nobility’s coronet and privilege,

His faith is a high nature’s idiom,

His service a spiritual sovereignty.

There were realms where Knowledge joined creative Power

In her high home and made her all his own:

The grand Illuminate seized her gleaming limbs

And filled them with the passion of his ray

Till all her body was its transparent house

And all her soul a counterpart of his soul.

Apotheosised, transfigured by wisdom’s touch,

Her days became a luminous sacrifice;

An immortal moth in happy and endless fire,

She burned in his sweet intolerable blaze.

A captive Life wedded her conqueror.

In his wide sky she built her world anew;

She gave to mind’s calm pace the motor’s speed,

To thinking a need to live what the soul saw,

To living an impetus to know and see.

His splendour grasped her, her puissance to him clung;

She crowned the Idea a king in purple robes,

Put her magic serpent sceptre in Thought’s grip,

Made forms his inward vision’s rhythmic shapes

And her acts the living body of his will.

A flaming thunder, a creator flash,

His victor Light rode on her deathless Force;

A centaur’s mighty gallop bore the god.

Life throned with mind, a double majesty.

Worlds were there of a happiness great and grave

And action tinged with dream, laughter with thought,

And passion there could wait for its desire

Until it heard the near approach of God.

Worlds were there of a childlike mirth and joy;

A carefree youthfulness of mind and heart

Found in the body a heavenly instrument;

It lit an aureate halo round desire

And freed the deified animal in the limbs

To divine gambols of love and beauty and bliss.

On a radiant soil that gazed at heaven’s smile

A swift life-impulse stinted not nor stopped:

It knew not how to tire; happy were its tears.

There work was play and play the only work,

The tasks of heaven a game of godlike might:

A celestial bacchanal for ever pure,

Unstayed by faintness as in mortal frames

Life was an eternity of rapture’s moods:

Age never came, care never lined the face.

Imposing on the safety of the stars

A race and laughter of immortal strengths,

The nude god-children in their play-fields ran

Smiting the winds with splendour and with speed;

Of storm and sun they made companions,

Sported with the white mane of tossing seas,

Slew distance trampled to death under their wheels

And wrestled in the arenas of their force.

Imperious in their radiance like the suns

They kindled heaven with the glory of their limbs

Flung like a divine largess to the world.

A spell to force the heart to stark delight,

They carried the pride and mastery of their charm

As if Life’s banner on the roads of Space.

Ideas were luminous comrades of the soul;

Mind played with speech, cast javelins of thought,

But needed not these instruments’ toil to know;

Knowledge was Nature’s pastime like the rest.

Investitured with the fresh heart’s bright ray,

An early God-instinct’s child inheritors,

Tenants of the perpetuity of Time

Still thrilling with the first creation’s bliss,

They steeped existence in their youth of soul.

An exquisite and vehement tyranny,

The strong compulsion of their will to joy

Poured smiling streams of happiness through the world.

There reigned a breath of high immune content,

A fortunate gait of days in tranquil air,

A flood of universal love and peace.

A sovereignty of tireless sweetness lived

Like a song of pleasure on the lips of Time.

A large spontaneous order freed the will,

A sun-frank winging of the soul to bliss,

The breadth and greatness of the unfettered act

And the swift fire-heart’s golden liberty.

There was no falsehood of soul-severance,

There came no crookedness of thought or word

To rob creation of its native truth;

All was sincerity and natural force.

There freedom was sole rule and highest law.

In a happy series climbed or plunged these worlds:

In realms of curious beauty and surprise,

In fields of grandeur and of titan power,

Life played at ease with her immense desires.

A thousand Edens she could build nor pause;

No bound was set to her greatness and to her grace

And to her heavenly variety.

Awake with a cry and stir of numberless souls,

Arisen from the breast of some deep Infinite,

Smiling like a new-born child at love and hope,

In her nature housing the Immortal’s power,

In her bosom bearing the eternal Will,

No guide she needed but her luminous heart:

No fall debased the godhead of her steps,

No alien Night had come to blind her eyes.

There was no use for grudging ring or fence;

Each act was a perfection and a joy.

Abandoned to her rapid fancy’s moods

And the rich coloured riot of her mind,

Initiate of divine and mighty dreams,

Magician builder of unnumbered forms

Exploring the measures of the rhythms of God,

At will she wove her wizard wonder-dance,

A Dionysian goddess of delight,

A Bacchant of creative ecstasy.

This world of bliss he saw and felt its call,

But found no way to enter into its joy;

Across the conscious gulf there was no bridge.

A darker air encircled still his soul

Tied to an image of unquiet life.

In spite of yearning mind and longing sense,

To a sad Thought by grey experience formed

And a vision dimmed by care and sorrow and sleep

All this seemed only a bright desirable dream

Conceived in a longing distance by the heart

Of one who walks in the shadow of earth-pain.

Although he once had felt the Eternal’s clasp,

Too near to suffering worlds his nature lived,

And where he stood were entrances of Night.

Hardly, too close beset by the world’s care,

Can the dense mould in which we have been made

Return sheer joy to joy, pure light to light.

For its tormented will to think and live

First to a mingled pain and pleasure woke

And still it keeps the habit of its birth:

A dire duality is our way to be.

In the crude beginnings of this mortal world

Life was not nor mind’s play nor heart’s desire.

When earth was built in the unconscious Void

And nothing was save a material scene,

Identified with sea and sky and stone

Her young gods yearned for the release of souls

Asleep in objects, vague, inanimate.

In that desolate grandeur, in that beauty bare,

In the deaf stillness, mid the unheeded sounds,

Heavy was the uncommunicated load

Of Godhead in a world that had no needs;

For none was there to feel or to receive.

This solid mass which brooked no throb of sense

Could not contain their vast creative urge:

Immersed no more in Matter’s harmony,

The Spirit lost its statuesque repose.

In the uncaring trance it groped for sight,

Passioned for the movements of a conscious heart,

Famishing for speech and thought and joy and love,

In the dumb insensitive wheeling day and night

Hungered for the beat of yearning and response.

The poised inconscience shaken with a touch,

The intuitive Silence trembling with a name,

They cried to Life to invade the senseless mould

And in brute forms awake divinity.

A voice was heard on the mute rolling globe,

A murmur moaned in the unlistening Void.

A being seemed to breathe where once was none:

Something pent up in dead insentient depths,

Denied conscious existence, lost to joy,

Turned as if one asleep since dateless time.

Aware of its own buried reality,

Remembering its forgotten self and right,

It yearned to know, to aspire, to enjoy, to live.

Life heard the call and left her native light.

Overflowing from her bright magnificent plane

On the rigid coil and sprawl of mortal Space,

Here too the gracious great-winged Angel poured

Her splendour and her swiftness and her bliss,

Hoping to fill a fair new world with joy.

As comes a goddess to a mortal’s breast

And fills his days with her celestial clasp,

She stooped to make her home in transient shapes;

In Matter’s womb she cast the Immortal’s fire,

In the unfeeling Vast woke thought and hope,

Smote with her charm and beauty flesh and nerve

And forced delight on earth’s insensible frame.

Alive and clad with trees and herbs and flowers

Earth’s great brown body smiled towards the skies,

Azure replied to azure in the sea’s laugh;

New sentient creatures filled the unseen depths,

Life’s glory and swiftness ran in the beauty of beasts,

Man dared and thought and met with his soul the world.

But while the magic breath was on its way,

Before her gifts could reach our prisoned hearts,

A dark ambiguous Presence questioned all.

The secret Will that robes itself with Night

And offers to spirit the ordeal of the flesh,

Imposed a mystic mask of death and pain.

Interned now in the slow and suffering years

Sojourns the winged and wonderful wayfarer

And can no more recall her happier state,

But must obey the inert Inconscient’s law,

Insensible foundation of a world

In which blind limits are on beauty laid

And sorrow and joy as struggling comrades live.

A dim and dreadful muteness fell on her:

Abolished was her subtle mighty spirit

And slain her boon of child-god happiness,

And all her glory into littleness turned

And all her sweetness into a maimed desire.

To feed death with her works is here life’s doom.

So veiled was her immortality that she seemed,

Inflicting consciousness on unconscious things,

An episode in an eternal death,

A myth of being that must for ever cease.

Such was the evil mystery of her change.

End of Canto Three

Canto Four

The Kingdoms of the Little Life

A quivering trepidant uncertain world

Born from that dolorous meeting and eclipse

Appeared in the emptiness where her feet had trod,

A quick obscurity, a seeking stir.

There was a writhing of half-conscious force

Hardly awakened from the Inconscient’s sleep,

Tied to an instinct-driven Ignorance,

To find itself and find its hold on things.

Inheritor of poverty and loss,

Assailed by memories that fled when seized,

Haunted by a forgotten uplifting hope,

It strove with a blindness as of groping hands

To fill the aching and disastrous gap

Between earth-pain and the bliss from which Life fell.

A world that ever seeks for something missed,

Hunts for the joy that earth has failed to keep.

Too near to our gates its unappeased unrest

For peace to live on the inert solid globe:

It has joined its hunger to the hunger of earth,

It has given the law of craving to our lives,

It has made our spirit’s need a fathomless gulf.

An Influence entered mortal night and day,

A shadow overcast the time-born race;

In the troubled stream where leaps a blind heart-pulse

And the nerve-beat of feeling wakes in sense

Dividing Matter’s sleep from conscious Mind,

There strayed a call that knew not why it came.

A Power beyond earth’s scope has touched the earth;

The repose that might have been can be no more;

A formless yearning passions in man’s heart,

A cry is in his blood for happier things:

Else could he roam on a free sunlit soil

With the childlike pain-forgetting mind of beasts

Or live happy, unmoved, like flowers and trees.

The Might that came upon the earth to bless,

Has stayed on earth to suffer and aspire.

The infant laugh that rang through time is hushed:

Man’s natural joy of life is overcast

And sorrow is his nurse of destiny.

The animal’s thoughtless joy is left behind,

Care and reflection burden his daily walk;

He has risen to greatness and to discontent,

He is awake to the Invisible.

Insatiate seeker, he has all to learn:

He has exhausted now life’s surface acts,

His being’s hidden realms remain to explore.

He becomes a mind, he becomes a spirit and self;

In his fragile tenement he grows Nature’s lord.

In him Matter wakes from its long obscure trance,

In him earth feels the Godhead drawing near.

An eyeless Power that sees no more its aim,

A restless hungry energy of Will,

Life cast her seed in the body’s indolent mould;

It woke from happy torpor a blind Force

Compelling it to sense and seek and feel.

In the enormous labour of the Void

Perturbing with her dreams the vast routine

And dead roll of a slumbering universe

The mighty prisoner struggled for release.

Alive with her yearning woke the inert cell,

In the heart she kindled a fire of passion and need,

Amid the deep calm of inanimate things

Arose her great voice of toil and prayer and strife.

A groping consciousness in a voiceless world,

A guideless sense was given her for her road;

Thought was withheld and nothing now she knew,

But all the unknown was hers to feel and clasp.

Obeying the push of unborn things towards birth

Out of her seal of insentient life she broke:

In her substance of unthinking mute soul-strength

That cannot utter what its depths divine,

Awoke a blind necessity to know.

The chain that bound her she made her instrument;

Instinct was hers, the chrysalis of Truth,

And effort and growth and striving nescience.

Inflicting on the body desire and hope,

Imposing on inconscience consciousness,

She brought into Matter’s dull tenacity

Her anguished claim to her lost sovereign right,

Her tireless search, her vexed uneasy heart,

Her wandering unsure steps, her cry for change.

Adorer of a joy without a name,

In her obscure cathedral of delight

To dim dwarf gods she offers secret rites.

But vain unending is the sacrifice,

The priest an ignorant mage who only makes

Futile mutations in the altar’s plan

And casts blind hopes into a powerless flame.

A burden of transient gains weighs down her steps

And hardly under that load can she advance;

But the hours cry to her, she travels on

Passing from thought to thought, from want to want;

Her greatest progress is a deepened need.

Matter dissatisfies, she turns to Mind;

She conquers earth, her field, then claims the heavens.

Insensible, breaking the work she has done

The stumbling ages over her labour pass,

But still no great transforming light came down

And no revealing rapture touched her fall.

Only a glimmer sometimes splits mind’s sky

Justifying the ambiguous providence

That makes of night a path to unknown dawns

Or a dark clue to some diviner state.

In Nescience began her mighty task,

In Ignorance she pursues the unfinished work,

For knowledge gropes, but meets not Wisdom’s face.

Ascending slowly with unconscious steps,

A foundling of the Gods she wanders here

Like a child-soul left near the gates of Hell

Fumbling through fog in search of Paradise.

In this slow ascension he must follow her pace

Even from her faint and dim subconscious start:

So only can earth’s last salvation come.

For so only could he know the obscure cause

Of all that holds us back and baffles God

In the jail-delivery of the imprisoned soul.

Along swift paths of fall through dangerous gates

He chanced into a grey obscurity

Teeming with instincts from the mindless gulfs

That pushed to wear a form and win a place.

Life here was intimate with Death and Night

And ate Death’s food that she might breathe awhile;

She was their inmate and adopted waif.

Accepting subconscience, in dumb darkness’ reign

A sojourner, she hoped not any more.

There far away from Truth and luminous thought

He saw the original seat, the separate birth

Of the dethroned, deformed and suffering Power.

An unhappy face of falsity made true,

A contradiction of our divine birth,

Indifferent to beauty and to light,

Parading she flaunted her animal disgrace

Unhelped by camouflage, brutal and bare,

An authentic image recognised and signed

Of her outcast force exiled from heaven and hope,

Fallen, glorying in the vileness of her state,

The grovel of a strength once half divine,

The graceless squalor of her beast desires,

The staring visage of her ignorance,

The naked body of her poverty.

Here first she crawled out from her cabin of mud

Where she had lain inconscient, rigid, mute:

Its narrowness and torpor held her still,

A darkness clung to her uneffaced by Light.

There neared no touch redeeming from above:

The upward look was alien to her sight,

Forgotten the fearless godhead of her walk;

Renounced was the glory and felicity,

The adventure in the dangerous fields of Time:

Hardly she availed, wallowing, to bear and live.

A wide unquiet mist of seeking Space,

A rayless region swallowed in vague swathes,

That seemed, unnamed, unbodied and unhoused,

A swaddled visionless and formless mind,

Asked for a body to translate its soul.

Its prayer denied, it fumbled after thought.

As yet not powered to think, hardly to live,

It opened into a weird and pigmy world

Where this unhappy magic had its source.

On dim confines where Life and Matter meet

He wandered among things half-seen, half-guessed,

Pursued by ungrasped beginnings and lost ends.

There life was born but died before it could live.

There was no solid ground, no constant drift;

Only some flame of mindless Will had power.

Himself was dim to himself, half-felt, obscure,

As if in a struggle of the Void to be.

In strange domains where all was living sense

But mastering thought was not nor cause nor rule,

Only a crude child-heart cried for toys of bliss,

Mind flickered, a disordered infant glow,

And random shapeless energies drove towards form

And took each wisp-fire for a guiding sun.

This blindfold force could place no thinking step;

Asking for light she followed darkness’ clue.

An inconscient Power groped towards consciousness,

Matter smitten by Matter glimmered to sense,

Blind contacts, slow reactions beat out sparks

Of instinct from a cloaked subliminal bed,

Sensations crowded, dumb substitutes for thought,

Perception answered Nature’s wakening blows

But still was a mechanical response,

A jerk, a leap, a start in Nature’s dream,

And rude unchastened impulses jostling ran

Heedless of every motion but their own

And, darkling, clashed with darker than themselves,

Free in a world of settled anarchy.

The need to exist, the instinct to survive

Engrossed the tense precarious moment’s will

And an unseeing desire felt out for food.

The gusts of Nature were the only law,

Force wrestled with force, but no result remained:

Only were achieved a nescient grasp and drive

And feelings and instincts knowing not their source,

Sense-pleasures and sense-pangs soon caught, soon lost,

And the brute motion of unthinking lives.

It was a vain unnecessary world

Whose will to be brought poor and sad results

And meaningless suffering and a grey unease.

Nothing seemed worth the labour to become.

But judged not so his spirit’s wakened eye.

As shines a solitary witness star

That burns apart, Light’s lonely sentinel,

In the drift and teeming of a mindless Night,

A single thinker in an aimless world

Awaiting some tremendous dawn of God,

He saw the purpose in the works of Time.

Even in that aimlessness a work was done

Pregnant with magic will and change divine.

The first writhings of the cosmic serpent Force

Uncoiled from the mystic ring of Matter’s trance;

It raised its head in the warm air of life.

It could not cast off yet Night’s stiffening sleep

Or wear as yet mind’s wonder-flecks and streaks,

Put on its jewelled hood the crown of soul

Or stand erect in the blaze of spirit’s sun.

As yet were only seen foulness and force,

The secret crawl of consciousness to light

Through a fertile slime of lust and battening sense,

Beneath the body’s crust of thickened self

A tardy fervent working in the dark,

The turbid yeast of Nature’s passionate change,

Ferment of the soul’s creation out of mire.

A heavenly process donned this grey disguise,

A fallen ignorance in its covert night

Laboured to achieve its dumb unseemly work,

A camouflage of the Inconscient’s need

To release the glory of God in Nature’s mud.

His sight, spiritual in embodying orbs,

Could pierce through the grey phosphorescent haze

And scan the secrets of the shifting flux

That animates these mute and solid cells

And leads the thought and longing of the flesh

And the keen lust and hunger of its will.

This too he tracked along its hidden stream

And traced its acts to a miraculous fount.

A mystic Presence none can probe nor rule,

Creator of this game of ray and shade

In this sweet and bitter paradoxical life,

Asks from the body the soul’s intimacies

And by the swift vibration of a nerve

Links its mechanic throbs to light and love.

It summons the spirit’s sleeping memories

Up from subconscient depths beneath Time’s foam;

Oblivious of their flame of happy truth,

Arriving with heavy eyes that hardly see,

They come disguised as feelings and desires,

Like weeds upon the surface float awhile

And rise and sink on a somnambulist tide.

Impure, degraded though her motions are,

Always a heaven-truth broods in life’s deeps;

In her obscurest members burns that fire.

A touch of God’s rapture in creation’s acts,

A lost remembrance of felicity

Lurks still in the dumb roots of death and birth,

The world’s senseless beauty mirrors God’s delight.

That rapture’s smile is secret everywhere;

It flows in the wind’s breath, in the tree’s sap,

Its hued magnificence blooms in leaves and flowers.

When life broke through its half-drowse in the plant

That feels and suffers but cannot move or cry,

In beast and in winged bird and thinking man

It made of the heart’s rhythm its music’s beat;

It forced the unconscious tissues to awake

And ask for happiness and earn the pang

And thrill with pleasure and laughter of brief delight,

And quiver with pain and crave for ecstasy.

Imperative, voiceless, ill-understood,

Too far from light, too close to being’s core,

Born strangely in Time from the eternal Bliss,

It presses on heart’s core and vibrant nerve;

Its sharp self-seeking tears our consciousness;

Our pain and pleasure have that sting for cause:

Instinct with it, but blind to its true joy

The soul’s desire leaps out towards passing things.

All Nature’s longing drive none can resist,

Comes surging through the blood and quickened sense;

An ecstasy of the infinite is her cause.

It turns in us to finite loves and lusts,

The will to conquer and have, to seize and keep,

To enlarge life’s room and scope and pleasure’s range,

To battle and overcome and make one’s own,

The hope to mix one’s joy with others’ joy,

A yearning to possess and be possessed,

To enjoy and be enjoyed, to feel, to live.

Here was its early brief attempt to be,

Its rapid end of momentary delight

Whose stamp of failure haunts all ignorant life.

Inflicting still its habit on the cells

The phantom of a dark and evil start

Ghostlike pursues all that we dream and do.

Although on earth are firm established lives,

A working of habit or a sense of law,

A steady repetition in the flux,

Yet are its roots of will ever the same;

These passions are the stuff of which we are made.

This was the first cry of the awaking world.

It clings around us still and clamps the god.

Even when reason is born and soul takes form,

In beast and reptile and in thinking man

It lasts and is the fount of all their life.

This too was needed that breath and living might be.

The spirit in a finite ignorant world

Must rescue so its prisoned consciousness

Forced out in little jets at quivering points

From the Inconscient’s sealed infinitude.

Then slowly it gathers mass, looks up at Light.

This Nature lives tied to her origin,

A clutch of nether force is on her still;

Out of unconscious depths her instincts leap;

A neighbour is her life to insentient Nought.

Under this law an ignorant world was made.

In the enigma of the darkened Vasts,

In the passion and self-loss of the Infinite

When all was plunged in the negating Void,

Non-Being’s night could never have been saved

If Being had not plunged into the dark

Carrying with it its triple mystic cross.

Invoking in world-time the timeless truth,

Bliss changed to sorrow, knowledge made ignorant,

God’s force turned into a child’s helplessness

Can bring down heaven by their sacrifice.

A contradiction founds the base of life:

The eternal, the divine Reality

Has faced itself with its own contraries;

Being became the Void and Conscious-Force

Nescience and walk of a blind Energy

And Ecstasy took the figure of world-pain.

In a mysterious dispensation’s law

A Wisdom that prepares its far-off ends

Planned so to start her slow aeonic game.

A blindfold search and wrestle and fumbling clasp

Of a half-seen Nature and a hidden Soul,

A game of hide-and-seek in twilit rooms,

A play of love and hate and fear and hope

Continues in the nursery of mind

Its hard and heavy romp of self-born twins.

At last the struggling Energy can emerge

And meet the voiceless Being in wider fields;

Then can they see and speak and, breast to breast,

In a larger consciousness, a clearer light,

The Two embrace and strive and each know each

Regarding closer now the playmate’s face.

Even in these formless coilings he could feel

Matter’s response to an infant stir of soul.

In Nature he saw the mighty Spirit concealed,

Watched the weak birth of a tremendous Force,

Pursued the riddle of Godhead’s tentative pace,

Heard the faint rhythms of a great unborn Muse.

Then came a fierier breath of waking Life,

And there arose from the dim gulf of things

The strange creations of a thinking sense,

Existences half-real and half-dream.

A life was there that hoped not to survive:

Beings were born who perished without trace,

Events that were a formless drama’s limbs

And actions driven by a blind creature will.

A seeking Power found out its road to form,

Patterns were built of love and joy and pain

And symbol figures for the moods of Life.

An insect hedonism fluttered and crawled

And basked in a sunlit Nature’s surface thrills,

And dragon raptures, python agonies

Crawled in the marsh and mire and licked the sun.

Huge armoured strengths shook a frail quaking ground,

Great puissant creatures with a dwarfish brain,

And pigmy tribes imposed their small life-drift.

In a dwarf model of humanity

Nature now launched the extreme experience

And master-point of her design’s caprice,

Luminous result of her half-conscious climb

On rungs twixt her sublimities and grotesques

To massive from infinitesimal shapes,

To a subtle balancing of body and soul,

To an order of intelligent littleness.

Around him in the moment-beats of Time

The kingdom of the animal self arose,

Where deed is all and mind is still half-born

And the heart obeys a dumb unseen control.

The Force that works by the light of Ignorance,

Her animal experiment began,

Crowding with conscious creatures her world-scheme;

But to the outward only were they alive,

Only they replied to touches and surfaces

And to the prick of need that drove their lives.

A body that knew not its own soul within,

There lived and longed, had wrath and joy and grief;

A mind was there that met the objective world

As if a stranger or enemy at its door:

Its thoughts were kneaded by the shocks of sense;

It captured not the spirit in the form,

It entered not the heart of what it saw;

It looked not for the power behind the act,

It studied not the hidden motive in things

Nor strove to find the meaning of it all.

Beings were there who wore a human form;

Absorbed they lived in the passion of the scene,

But knew not who they were or why they lived:

Content to breathe, to feel, to sense, to act,

Life had for them no aim save Nature’s joy

And the stimulus and delight of outer things;

Identified with the spirit’s outward shell,

They worked for the body’s wants, they craved no more.

The veiled spectator watching from their depths

Fixed not his inward eye upon himself

Nor turned to find the author of the plot,

He saw the drama only and the stage.

There was no brooding stress of deeper sense,

The burden of reflection was not borne:

Mind looked on Nature with unknowing eyes,

Adored her boons and feared her monstrous strokes.

It pondered not on the magic of her laws,

It thirsted not for the secret wells of Truth,

But made a register of crowding facts

And strung sensations on a vivid thread:

It hunted and it fled and sniffed the winds,

Or slothed inert in sunshine and soft air:

It sought the engrossing contacts of the world,

But only to feed the surface sense with bliss.

These felt life’s quiver in the outward touch,

They could not feel behind the touch the soul.

To guard their form of self from Nature’s harm,

To enjoy and to survive was all their care.

The narrow horizon of their days was filled

With things and creatures that could help and hurt:

The world’s values hung upon their little self.

Isolated, cramped in the vast unknown,

To save their small lives from surrounding Death

They made a tiny circle of defence

Against the siege of the huge universe:

They preyed upon the world and were its prey,

But never dreamed to conquer and be free.

Obeying the World-Power’s hints and firm taboos

A scanty part they drew from her rich store;

There was no conscious code and no life-plan:

The patterns of thinking of a little group

Fixed a traditional behaviour’s law.

Ignorant of soul save as a wraith within,

Tied to a mechanism of unchanging lives

And to a dull usual sense and feeling’s beat,

They turned in grooves of animal desire.

In walls of stone fenced round they worked and warred,

Did by a banded selfishness a small good

Or wrought a dreadful wrong and cruel pain

On sentient lives and thought they did no ill.

Ardent from the sack of happy peaceful homes

And gorged with slaughter, plunder, rape and fire,

They made of human selves their helpless prey,

A drove of captives led to lifelong woe,

Or torture a spectacle made and holiday,

Mocking or thrilled by their torn victims’ pangs;

Admiring themselves as titans and as gods

Proudly they sang their high and glorious deeds

And praised their victory and their splendid force.

An animal in the instinctive herd

Pushed by life impulses, forced by common needs,

Each in his own kind saw his ego’s glass;

All served the aim and action of the pack.

Those like himself, by blood or custom kin,

To him were parts of his life, his adjunct selves,

His personal nebula’s constituent stars,

Satellite companions of his solar I.

A master of his life’s environment,

A leader of a huddled human mass

Herding for safety on a dangerous earth,

He gathered them round him as if minor Powers

To make a common front against the world,

Or, weak and sole on an indifferent earth,

As a fortress for his undefended heart,

Or else to heal his body’s loneliness.

In others than his kind he sensed a foe,

An alien unlike force to shun and fear,

A stranger and adversary to hate and slay.

Or he lived as lives the solitary brute;

At war with all he bore his single fate.

Absorbed in the present act, the fleeting days,

None thought to look beyond the hour’s gains,

Or dreamed to make this earth a fairer world,

Or felt some touch divine surprise his heart.

The gladness that the fugitive moment gave,

The desire grasped, the bliss, the experience won,

Movement and speed and strength were joy enough

And bodily longings shared and quarrel and play,

And tears and laughter and the need called love.

In war and clasp these life-wants joined the All-Life,

Wrestlings of a divided unity

Inflicting mutual grief and happiness

In ignorance of the Self for ever one.

Arming its creatures with delight and hope

A half-awakened Nescience struggled there

To know by sight and touch the outside of things.

Instinct was formed; in memory’s crowded sleep

The past lived on as in a bottomless sea:

Inverting into half-thought the quickened sense

She felt around for truth with fumbling hands,

Clutched to her the little she could reach and seize

And put aside in her subconscient cave.

So must the dim being grow in light and force

And rise to his higher destiny at last,

Look up to God and round at the universe,

And learn by failure and progress by fall

And battle with environment and doom,

By suffering discover his deep soul

And by possession grow to his own vasts.

Half-way she stopped and found her path no more.

Still nothing was achieved but to begin,

Yet finished seemed the circle of her force.

Only she had beaten out sparks of ignorance;

Only the life could think and not the mind,

Only the sense could feel and not the soul.

Only was lit some heat of the flame of Life,

Some joy to be, some rapturous leaps of sense.

All was an impetus of half-conscious Force,

A spirit sprawling drowned in dense life-foam,

A vague self grasping at the shape of things.

Behind all moved seeking for vessels to hold

A first raw vintage of the grapes of God,

On earth’s mud a spilth of the supernal Bliss,

Intoxicating the stupefied soul and mind

A heady wine of rapture dark and crude,

Dim, uncast yet into spiritual form,

Obscure inhabitant of the world’s blind core,

An unborn godhead’s will, a mute Desire.

A third creation now revealed its face.

A mould of body’s early mind was made.

A glint of light kindled the obscure World-Force;

It dowered a driven world with the seeing Idea

And armed the act with thought’s dynamic point:

A small thinking being watched the works of Time.

A difficult evolution from below

Called a masked intervention from above;

Else this great, blind inconscient universe

Could never have disclosed its hidden mind,

Or even in blinkers worked in beast and man

The Intelligence that devised the cosmic scheme.

At first he saw a dim obscure mind-power

Moving concealed by Matter and dumb life.

A current thin, it streamed in life’s vast flow

Tossing and drifting under a drifting sky

Amid the surge and glimmering tremulous wash,

Released in splash of sense and feeling’s waves.

In the deep midst of an insentient world

Its huddled waves and foam of consciousness ran

Pressing and eddying through a narrow strait,

Carrying experience in its crowded pace.

It flowed emerging into upper light

From the deep pool of its subliminal birth

To reach some high existence still unknown.

There was no thinking self, aim there was none:

All was unorganised stress and seekings vague.

Only to the unstable surface rose

Sensations, stabs and edges of desire

And passion’s leaps and brief emotion’s cries,

A casual colloquy of flesh with flesh,

A murmur of heart to longing wordless heart,

Glimmerings of knowledge with no shape of thought

And jets of subconscious will or hunger’s pulls.

All was dim sparkle on a foaming top:

It whirled around a drifting shadow-self

On an inconscient flood of Force in Time.

Then came the pressure of a seeing Power

That drew all into a dancing turbid mass

Circling around a single luminous point,

Centre of reference in a conscious field,

Figure of a unitary Light within.

It lit the impulse of the half-sentient flood,

Even an illusion gave of fixity

As if a sea could serve as a firm soil.

That strange observing Power imposed its sight.

It forced on flux a limit and a shape,

It gave its stream a lower narrow bank,

Drew lines to snare the spirit’s formlessness.

It fashioned the life-mind of bird and beast,

The answer of the reptile and the fish,

The primitive pattern of the thoughts of man.

A finite movement of the Infinite

Came winging its way through a wide air of Time;

A march of knowledge moved in Nescience

And guarded in the form a separate soul.

Its right to be immortal it reserved,

But built a wall against the siege of death

And threw a hook to clutch eternity.

A thinking entity appeared in Space.

A little ordered world broke into view

Where being had prison-room for act and sight,

A floor to walk, a clear but scanty range.

An instrument-personality was born,

And a restricted clamped intelligence

Consented to confine in narrow bounds

Its seeking; it tied the thought to visible things,

Prohibiting the adventure of the Unseen

And the soul’s tread through unknown infinities.

A reflex reason, Nature-habit’s glass

Illumined life to know and fix its field,

Accept a dangerous ignorant brevity

And the inconclusive purpose of its walk

And profit by the hour’s precarious chance

In the allotted boundaries of its fate.

A little joy and knowledge satisfied

This little being tied into a knot

And hung on a bulge of its environment,

A little curve cut off in measureless Space,

A little span of life in all vast Time.

A thought was there that planned, a will that strove,

But for small aims within a narrow scope,

Wasting unmeasured toil on transient things.

It knew itself a creature of the mud;

It asked no larger law, no loftier aim;

It had no inward look, no upward gaze.

A backward scholar on logic’s rickety bench

Indoctrinated by the erring sense,

It took appearance for the face of God,

For casual lights the marching of the suns,

For heaven a starry strip of doubtful blue;

Aspects of being feigned to be the whole.

There was a voice of busy interchange,

A market-place of trivial thoughts and acts:

A life soon spent, a mind the body’s slave

Here seemed the brilliant crown of Nature’s work,

And tiny egos took the world as means

To sate awhile dwarf lusts and brief desires,

In a death-closed passage saw life’s start and end

As though a blind alley were creation’s sign,

As if for this the soul had coveted birth

In the wonderland of a self-creating world

And the opportunities of cosmic Space.

This creature passionate only to survive,

Fettered to puny thoughts with no wide range

And to the body’s needs and pangs and joys,

This fire growing by its fuel’s death,

Increased by what it seized and made its own:

It gathered and grew and gave itself to none.

Only it hoped for greatness in its den

And pleasure and victory in small fields of power

And conquest of life-room for self and kin,

An animal limited by its feeding-space.

It knew not the Immortal in its house;

It had no greater deeper cause to live.

In limits only it was powerful;

Acute to capture truth for outward use,

Its knowledge was the body’s instrument;

Absorbed in the little works of its prison-house

It turned around the same unchanging points

In the same circle of interest and desire,

But thought itself the master of its jail.

Although for action, not for wisdom made,

Thought was its apex – or its gutter’s rim:

It saw an image of the external world

And saw its surface self, but knew no more.

Out of a slow confused embroiled self-search

Mind grew to a clarity cut out, precise,

A gleam enclosed in a stone ignorance.

In this bound thinking’s narrow leadership

Tied to the soil, inspired by common things,

Attached to a confined familiar world,

Amid the multitude of her motived plots,

Her changing actors and her million masks,

Life was a play monotonously the same.

There were no vast perspectives of the spirit,

No swift invasions of unknown delight,

No golden distances of wide release.

This petty state resembled our human days

But fixed to eternity of changeless type,

A moment’s movement doomed to last through Time.

Existence bridge-like spanned the inconscient gulfs,

A half-illumined building in a mist,

Which from a void of Form arose to sight

And jutted out into a void of Soul.

A little light in a great darkness born,

Life knew not where it went nor whence it came.

Around all floated still the nescient haze.

End of Canto Four