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

Canto Eight

The World of Falsehood, the Mother of Evil and the Sons of Darkness

Then could he see the hidden heart of Night:

The labour of its stark unconsciousness

Revealed the endless terrible Inane.

A spiritless blank Infinity was there;

A Nature that denied the eternal Truth

In the vain braggart freedom of its thought

Hoped to abolish God and reign alone.

There was no sovereign Guest, no witness Light;

Unhelped it would create its own bleak world.

Its large blind eyes looked out on demon acts,

Its deaf ears heard the untruth its dumb lips spoke;

Its huge misguided fancy took vast shapes,

Its mindless sentience quivered with fierce conceits;

Engendering a brute principle of life

Evil and pain begot a monstrous soul.

The Anarchs of the formless depths arose,

Great Titan beings and demoniac powers,

World-egos racked with lust and thought and will,

Vast minds and lives without a spirit within:

Impatient architects of error’s house,

Leaders of the cosmic ignorance and unrest

And sponsors of sorrow and mortality

Embodied the dark Ideas of the Abyss.

A shadow substance into emptiness came,

Dim forms were born in the unthinking Void

And eddies met and made an adverse Space

In whose black folds Being imagined Hell.

His eyes piercing the triple-plated gloom

Identified their sight with its blind stare:

Accustomed to the unnatural dark, they saw

Unreality made real and conscious Night.

A violent, fierce and formidable world,

An ancient womb of huge calamitous dreams,

Coiled like a larva in the obscurity

That keeps it from the spear-points of Heaven’s stars.

It was the gate of a false Infinite,

An eternity of disastrous absolutes,

An immense negation of spiritual things.

All once self-luminous in the spirit’s sphere

Turned now into their own dark contraries:

Being collapsed into a pointless void

That yet was a zero parent of the worlds;

Inconscience swallowing up the cosmic Mind

Produced a universe from its lethal sleep;

Bliss into black coma fallen, insensible,

Coiled back to itself and God’s eternal joy

Through a false poignant figure of grief and pain

Still dolorously nailed upon a cross

Fixed in the soil of a dumb insentient world

Where birth was a pang and death an agony,

Lest all too soon should change again to bliss.

Thought sat, a priestess of Perversity,

On her black tripod of the triune Snake

Reading by opposite signs the eternal script,

A sorceress reversing life’s God-frame.

In darkling aisles with evil eyes for lamps

And fatal voices chanting from the apse,

In strange infernal dim basilicas

Intoning the magic of the unholy Word,

The ominous profound Initiate

Performed the ritual of her Mysteries.

There suffering was Nature’s daily food

Alluring to the anguished heart and flesh,

And torture was the formula of delight,

Pain mimicked the celestial ecstasy.

There Good, a faithless gardener of God,

Watered with virtue the world’s upas-tree

And, careful of the outward word and act,

Engrafted his hypocrite blooms on native ill.

All high things served their nether opposite:

The forms of Gods sustained a demon cult;

Heaven’s face became a mask and snare of Hell.

There in the heart of vain phenomenon,

In an enormous action’s writhen core

He saw a Shape illimitable and vague

Sitting on Death who swallows all things born.

A chill fixed face with dire and motionless eyes,

Her dreadful trident in her shadowy hand

Outstretched, she pierced all creatures with one fate.

When nothing was save Matter without soul

And a spiritless hollow was the heart of Time,

Then Life first touched the insensible Abyss;

Awaking the stark Void to hope and grief

Her pallid beam smote the unfathomed Night

In which God hid himself from his own view.

In all things she sought their slumbering mystic truth,

The unspoken Word that inspires unconscious forms;

She groped in his deeps for an invisible Law,

Fumbled in the dim subconscient for his mind

And strove to find a way for spirit to be.

But from the Night another answer came.

A seed was in that nether matrix cast,

A dumb unprobed husk of perverted truth,

A cell of an insentient infinite.

A monstrous birth prepared its cosmic form

In Nature’s titan embryo, Ignorance.

Then in a fatal and stupendous hour

Something that sprang from the stark Inconscient’s sleep

Unwillingly begotten by the mute Void,

Lifted its ominous head against the stars;

Overshadowing earth with its huge body of Doom

It chilled the heavens with the menace of a face.

A nameless Power, a shadowy Will arose

Immense and alien to our universe.

In the inconceivable Purpose none can gauge

A vast Non-Being robed itself with shape,

The boundless Nescience of the unconscious depths

Covered eternity with nothingness.

A seeking Mind replaced the seeing Soul:

Life grew into a huge and hungry death,

The Spirit’s bliss was changed to cosmic pain.

Assuring God’s self-cowled neutrality

A mighty opposition conquered Space.

A sovereign ruling falsehood, death and grief,

It pressed its fierce hegemony on the earth;

Disharmonising the original style

Of the architecture of her fate’s design,

It falsified the primal cosmic Will

And bound to struggle and dread vicissitudes

The long slow process of the patient Power.

Implanting error in the stuff of things

It made an Ignorance of the all-wise Law;

It baffled the sure touch of life’s hid sense,

Kept dumb the intuitive guide in Matter’s sleep,

Deformed the insect’s instinct and the brute’s,

Disfigured man’s thought-born humanity.

A shadow fell across the simple Ray:

Obscured was the Truth-light in the cavern heart

That burns unwitnessed in the altar crypt

Behind the still velamen’s secrecy

Companioning the Godhead of the shrine.

Thus was the dire antagonist Energy born

Who mimes the eternal Mother’s mighty shape

And mocks her luminous infinity

With a grey distorted silhouette in the Night.

Arresting the passion of the climbing soul,

She forced on life a slow and faltering pace;

Her hand’s deflecting and retarding weight

Is laid on the mystic evolution’s curve:

The tortuous line of her deceiving mind

The Gods see not and man is impotent;

Oppressing the God-spark within the soul

She forces back to the beast the human fall.

Yet in her formidable instinctive mind

She feels the One grow in the heart of Time

And sees the Immortal shine through the human mould.

Alarmed for her rule and full of fear and rage

She prowls around each light that gleams through the dark

Casting its ray from the spirit’s lonely tent,

Hoping to enter with fierce stealthy tread

And in the cradle slay the divine Child.

Incalculable are her strength and ruse;

Her touch is a fascination and a death;

She kills her victim with his own delight;

Even Good she makes a hook to drag to Hell.

For her the world runs to its agony.

Often the pilgrim on the Eternal’s road

Ill-lit from clouds by the pale moon of Mind,

Or in devious byways wandering alone,

Or lost in deserts where no path is seen,

Falls overpowered by her lion leap,

A conquered captive under her dreadful paws.

Intoxicated by a burning breath

And amorous grown of a destroying mouth,

Once a companion of the sacred Fire,

The mortal perishes to God and Light,

An Adversary governs heart and brain,

A Nature hostile to the Mother-Force.

The self of life yields up its instruments

To Titan and demoniac agencies

That aggrandise earth-nature and disframe:

A cowled fifth-columnist is now thought’s guide;

His subtle defeatist murmur slays the faith

And, lodged in the breast or whispering from outside,

A lying inspiration fell and dark

A new order substitutes for the divine.

A silence falls upon the spirit’s heights,

From the veiled sanctuary the God retires,

Empty and cold is the chamber of the Bride;

The golden Nimbus now is seen no more,

No longer burns the white spiritual ray

And hushed for ever is the secret Voice.

Then by the Angel of the Vigil Tower

A name is struck from the recording book;

A flame that sang in Heaven sinks quenched and mute;

In ruin ends the epic of a soul.

This is the tragedy of the inner death

When forfeited is the divine element

And only a mind and body live to die.

For terrible agencies the Spirit allows

And there are subtle and enormous Powers

That shield themselves with the covering Ignorance.

Offspring of the gulfs, agents of the shadowy Force,

Haters of light, intolerant of peace,

Aping to the thought the shining Friend and Guide,

Opposing in the heart the eternal Will,

They veil the occult uplifting Harmonist.

His wisdom’s oracles are made our bonds;

The doors of God they have locked with keys of creed

And shut out by the Law his tireless Grace.

Along all Nature’s lines they have set their posts

And intercept the caravans of Light;

Wherever the Gods act, they intervene.

A yoke is laid upon the world’s dim heart;

Masked are its beats from the supernal Bliss,

And the closed peripheries of brilliant Mind

Block the fine entries of celestial Fire.

Always the dark Adventurers seem to win;

Nature they fill with evil’s institutes,

Turn into defeats the victories of Truth,

Proclaim as falsehoods the eternal laws,

And load the dice of Doom with wizard lies;

The world’s shrines they have occupied, usurped its thrones.

In scorn of the dwindling chances of the Gods

They claim creation as their conquered fief

And crown themselves the iron Lords of Time.

Adepts of the illusion and the mask,

The artificers of Nature’s fall and pain

Have built their altars of triumphant Night

In the clay temple of terrestrial life.

In the vacant precincts of the sacred Fire,

In front of the reredos in the mystic rite

Facing the dim velamen none can pierce,

Intones his solemn hymn the mitred priest

Invoking their dreadful presence in his breast:

Attributing to them the awful Name

He chants the syllables of the magic text

And summons the unseen communion’s act,

While twixt the incense and the muttered prayer

All the fierce bale with which the world is racked

Is mixed in the foaming chalice of man’s heart

And poured to them like sacramental wine.

Assuming names divine they guide and rule.

Opponents of the Highest they have come

Out of their world of soulless thought and power

To serve by enmity the cosmic scheme.

Night is their refuge and strategic base.

Against the sword of Flame, the luminous Eye,

Bastioned they live in massive forts of gloom,

Calm and secure in sunless privacy:

No wandering ray of Heaven can enter there.

Armoured, protected by their lethal masks,

As in a studio of creative Death

The giant sons of Darkness sit and plan

The drama of the earth, their tragic stage.

All who would raise the fallen world must come

Under the dangerous arches of their power;

For even the radiant children of the gods

To darken their privilege is and dreadful right.

None can reach heaven who has not passed through hell.

This too the traveller of the worlds must dare.

A warrior in the dateless duel’s strife,

He entered into dumb despairing Night

Challenging the darkness with his luminous soul.

Alarming with his steps the threshold gloom

He came into a fierce and dolorous realm

Peopled by souls who never had tasted bliss;

Ignorant like men born blind who know not light,

They could equate worst ill with highest good,

Virtue was to their eyes a face of sin

And evil and misery were their natural state.

A dire administration’s penal code

Making of grief and pain the common law,

Decreeing universal joylessness

Had changed life into a stoic sacrament

And torture into a daily festival.

An act was passed to chastise happiness;

Laughter and pleasure were banned as deadly sins:

A questionless mind was ranked as wise content,

A dull heart’s silent apathy as peace:

Sleep was not there, torpor was the sole rest,

Death came but neither respite gave nor end;

Always the soul lived on and suffered more.

Ever he deeper probed that kingdom of pain;

Around him grew the terror of a world

Of agony followed by worse agony,

And in the terror a great wicked joy

Glad of one’s own and others’ calamity.

There thought and life were a long punishment,

The breath a burden and all hope a scourge,

The body a field of torment, a massed unease;

Repose was a waiting between pang and pang.

This was the law of things none dreamed to change:

A hard sombre heart, a harsh unsmiling mind

Rejected happiness like a cloying sweet;

Tranquillity was a tedium and ennui:

Only by suffering life grew colourful;

It needed the spice of pain, the salt of tears.

If one could cease to be, all would be well;

Else only fierce sensations gave some zest:

A fury of jealousy burning the gnawed heart,

The sting of murderous spite and hate and lust,

The whisper that lures to the pit and treachery’s stroke

Threw vivid spots on the dull aching hours.

To watch the drama of infelicity,

The writhing of creatures under the harrow of doom

And sorrow’s tragic gaze into the night

And horror and the hammering heart of fear

Were the ingredients in Time’s heavy cup

That pleased and helped to enjoy its bitter taste.

Of such fierce stuff was made up life’s long hell:

These were the threads of the dark spider’s-web

In which the soul was caught, quivering and rapt;

This was religion, this was Nature’s rule.

In a fell chapel of iniquity

To worship a black pitiless image of Power

Kneeling one must cross hard-hearted stony courts,

A pavement like a floor of evil fate.

Each stone was a keen edge of ruthless force

And glued with the chilled blood from tortured breasts;

The dry gnarled trees stood up like dying men

Stiffened into a pose of agony,

And from each window peered an ominous priest

Chanting Te Deums for slaughter’s crowning grace,

Uprooted cities, blasted human homes,

Burned writhen bodies, the bombshell’s massacre.

“Our enemies are fallen, are fallen,” they sang,

“All who once stayed our will are smitten and dead;

How great we are, how merciful art Thou.”

Thus thought they to reach God’s impassive throne

And Him command whom all their acts opposed,

Magnifying their deeds to touch his skies,

And make him an accomplice of their crimes.

There no relenting pity could have place,

But ruthless strength and iron moods had sway,

A dateless sovereignty of terror and gloom:

This took the figure of a darkened God

Revered by the racked wretchedness he had made,

Who held in thrall a miserable world,

And helpless hearts nailed to unceasing woe

Adored the feet that trampled them into mire.

It was a world of sorrow and of hate,

Sorrow with hatred for its lonely joy,

Hatred with others’ sorrow as its feast;

A bitter rictus curled the suffering mouth;

A tragic cruelty saw its ominous chance.

Hate was the black archangel of that realm;

It glowed, a sombre jewel in the heart

Burning the soul with its malignant rays,

And wallowed in its fell abysm of might.

These passions even objects seemed to exude, –

For mind overflowed into the inanimate

That answered with the wickedness it received, –

Against their users used malignant powers,

Hurt without hands and strangely, suddenly slew,

Appointed as instruments of an unseen doom.

Or they made themselves a fateful prison wall

Where men condemned wake through the creeping hours

Counted by the tollings of an ominous bell.

An evil environment worsened evil souls:

All things were conscious there and all perverse.

In this infernal realm he dared to press

Even into its deepest pit and darkest core,

Perturbed its tenebrous base, dared to contest

Its ancient privileged right and absolute force:

In Night he plunged to know her dreadful heart,

In Hell he sought the root and cause of Hell.

Its anguished gulfs opened in his own breast;

He listened to clamours of its crowded pain,

The heart-beats of its fatal loneliness.

Above was a chill deaf eternity.

In vague tremendous passages of Doom

He heard the goblin Voice that guides to slay,

And faced the enchantments of the demon Sign,

And traversed the ambush of the opponent Snake.

In menacing tracts, in tortured solitudes

Companionless he roamed through desolate ways

Where the red Wolf waits by the fordless stream

And Death’s black eagles scream to the precipice,

And met the hounds of bale who hunt men’s hearts

Baying across the veldts of Destiny,

In footless battlefields of the Abyss

Fought shadowy combats in mute eyeless depths,

Assaults of Hell endured and Titan strokes

And bore the fierce inner wounds that are slow to heal.

A prisoner of a hooded magic Force,

Captured and trailed in Falsehood’s lethal net

And often strangled in the noose of grief,

Or cast in the grim morass of swallowing doubt,

Or shut into pits of error and despair,

He drank her poison draughts till none was left.

In a world where neither hope nor joy could come

The ordeal he suffered of evil’s absolute reign,

Yet kept intact his spirit’s radiant truth.

Incapable of motion or of force,

In Matter’s blank denial gaoled and blind,

Pinned to the black inertia of our base

He treasured between his hands his flickering soul.

His being ventured into mindless Void,

Intolerant gulfs that knew not thought nor sense;

Thought ceased, sense failed, his soul still saw and knew.

In atomic parcellings of the Infinite

Near to the dumb beginnings of lost Self,

He felt the curious small futility

Of the creation of material things.

Or, stifled in the Inconscient’s hollow dusk,

He sounded the mystery dark and bottomless

Of the enormous and unmeaning deeps

Whence struggling life in a dead universe rose.

There in the stark identity lost by mind

He felt the sealed sense of the insensible world

And a mute wisdom in the unknowing Night.

Into the abysmal secrecy he came

Where darkness peers from her mattress, grey and nude,

And stood on the last locked subconscient’s floor

Where Being slept unconscious of its thoughts

And built the world not knowing what it built.

There waiting its hour the future lay unknown,

There is the record of the vanished stars.

There in the slumber of the cosmic Will

He saw the secret key of Nature’s change.

A light was with him, an invisible hand

Was laid upon the error and the pain

Till it became a quivering ecstasy,

The shock of sweetness of an arm’s embrace.

He saw in Night the Eternal’s shadowy veil,

Knew death for a cellar of the house of life,

In destruction felt creation’s hasty pace,

Knew loss as the price of a celestial gain

And hell as a short cut to heaven’s gates.

Then in Illusion’s occult factory

And in the Inconscient’s magic printing-house

Torn were the formats of the primal Night

And shattered the stereotypes of Ignorance.

Alive, breathing a deep spiritual breath,

Nature expunged her stiff mechanical code

And the articles of the bound soul’s contract,

Falsehood gave back to Truth her tortured shape.

Annulled were the tables of the law of Pain,

And in their place grew luminous characters.

The skilful Penman’s unseen finger wrote

His swift intuitive calligraphy;

Earth’s forms were made his divine documents,

The wisdom embodied mind could not reveal,

Inconscience chased from the world’s voiceless breast;

Transfigured were the fixed schemes of reasoning Thought.

Arousing consciousness in things inert,

He imposed upon dark atom and dumb mass

The diamond script of the Imperishable,

Inscribed on the dim heart of fallen things

A paean-song of the free Infinite

And the Name, foundation of eternity,

And traced on the awake exultant cells

In the ideographs of the Ineffable

The lyric of the love that waits through Time

And the mystic volume of the Book of Bliss

And the message of the superconscient Fire.

Then life beat pure in the corporeal frame;

The infernal Gleam died and could slay no more.

Hell split across its huge abrupt façade

As if a magic building were undone,

Night opened and vanished like a gulf of dream.

Into being’s gap scooped out as empty Space

In which she had filled the place of absent God,

There poured a wide intimate and blissful Dawn;

Healed were all things that Time’s torn heart had made

And sorrow could live no more in Nature’s breast:

Division ceased to be, for God was there.

The soul lit the conscious body with its ray,

Matter and spirit mingled and were one.

End of Canto Eight

Canto Nine

The Paradise of the Life-Gods

Around him shone a great felicitous Day.

A lustre of some rapturous Infinite,

It held in the splendour of its golden laugh

Regions of the heart’s happiness set free,

Intoxicated with the wine of God,

Immersed in light, perpetually divine.

A favourite and intimate of the Gods

Obeying the divine command to joy,

It was the sovereign of its own delight

And master of the kingdoms of its force.

Assured of the bliss for which all forms were made,

Unmoved by fear and grief and the shocks of Fate

And unalarmed by the breath of fleeting Time

And unbesieged by adverse circumstance,

It breathed in a sweet secure unguarded ease

Free from our body’s frailty inviting death,

Far from our danger-zone of stumbling Will.

It needed not to curb its passionate beats;

Thrilled by the clasp of the warm satisfied sense

And the swift wonder-rush and flame and cry

Of the life-impulses’ red magnificent race,

It lived in a jewel-rhythm of the laughter of God

And lay on the breast of universal love.

Immune the unfettered Spirit of Delight

Pastured his gleaming sun-herds and moon-flocks

Along the lyric speed of griefless streams

In fragrance of the unearthly asphodel.

A silence of felicity wrapped the heavens,

A careless radiance smiled upon the heights;

A murmur of inarticulate ravishment

Trembled in the winds and touched the enchanted soil;

Incessant in the arms of ecstasy

Repeating its sweet involuntary note

A sob of rapture flowed along the hours.

Advancing under an arch of glory and peace,

Traveller on plateau and on musing ridge,

As one who sees in the World-Magician’s glass

A miracled imagery of soul-scapes flee

He traversed scenes of an immortal joy

And gazed into abysms of beauty and bliss.

Around him was a light of conscious suns

And a brooding gladness of great symbol things;

To meet him crowded plains of brilliant calm,

Mountains and violet valleys of the Blest,

Deep glens of joy and crooning waterfalls

And woods of quivering purple solitude;

Below him lay like gleaming jewelled thoughts

Rapt dreaming cities of Gandharva kings.

Across the vibrant secrecies of Space

A dim and happy music sweetly stole,

Smitten by unseen hands he heard heart-close

The harps’ cry of the heavenly minstrels pass,

And voices of unearthly melody

Chanted the glory of eternal love

In the white-blue-moonbeam air of Paradise.

A summit and core of all that marvellous world,

Apart stood high Elysian nameless hills,

Burning like sunsets in a trance of eve.

As if to some new unsearched profundity,

Into a joyful stillness plunged their base;

Their slopes through a hurry of laughter and voices sank,

Crossed by a throng of singing rivulets,

Adoring blue heaven with their happy hymn,

Down into woods of shadowy secrecy:

Lifted into wide voiceless mystery

Their peaks climbed towards a greatness beyond life.

The shining Edens of the vital gods

Received him in their deathless harmonies.

All things were perfect there that flower in Time;

Beauty was there creation’s native mould,

Peace was a thrilled voluptuous purity.

There Love fulfilled her gold and roseate dreams

And Strength her crowned and mighty reveries;

Desire climbed up, a swift omnipotent flame,

And Pleasure had the stature of the gods;

Dream walked along the highways of the stars;

Sweet common things turned into miracles:

Overtaken by the spirit’s sudden spell,

Smitten by a divine passion’s alchemy,

Pain’s self compelled transformed to potent joy

Curing the antithesis twixt heaven and hell.

All life’s high visions are embodied there,

Her wandering hopes achieved, her aureate combs

Caught by the honey-eater’s darting tongue,

Her burning guesses changed to ecstasied truths,

Her mighty pantings stilled in deathless calm

And liberated her immense desires.

In that paradise of perfect heart and sense

No lower note could break the endless charm

Of her sweetness ardent and immaculate;

Her steps are sure of their intuitive fall.

After the anguish of the soul’s long strife

At length were found calm and celestial rest

And, lapped in a magic flood of sorrowless hours,

Healed were his warrior nature’s wounded limbs

In the encircling arms of Energies

That brooked no stain and feared not their own bliss.

In scenes forbidden to our pallid sense

Amid miraculous scents and wonder-hues

He met the forms that divinise the sight,

To music that can immortalise the mind

And make the heart wide as infinity

Listened, and captured the inaudible

Cadences that awake the occult ear:

Out of the ineffable hush it hears them come

Trembling with the beauty of a wordless speech,

And thoughts too great and deep to find a voice,

Thoughts whose desire new-makes the universe.

A scale of sense that climbed with fiery feet

To heights of unimagined happiness,

Recast his being’s aura in joy-glow,

His body glimmered like a skiey shell;

His gates to the world were swept with seas of light.

His earth, dowered with celestial competence,

Harboured a power that needed now no more

To cross the closed customs-line of mind and flesh

And smuggle godhead into humanity.

It shrank no more from the supreme demand

Of an untired capacity for bliss,

A might that could explore its own infinite

And beauty and passion and the depths’ reply

Nor feared the swoon of glad identity

Where spirit and flesh in inner ecstasy join

Annulling the quarrel between self and shape.

It drew from sight and sound spiritual power,

Made sense a road to reach the intangible:

It thrilled with the supernal influences

That build the substance of life’s deeper soul.

Earth-nature stood reborn, comrade of heaven.

A fit companion of the timeless Kings,

Equalled with the godheads of the living Suns,

He mixed in the radiant pastimes of the Unborn,

Heard whispers of the Player never seen

And listened to his voice that steals the heart

And draws it to the breast of God’s desire,

And felt its honey of felicity

Flow through his veins like the rivers of Paradise,

Made body a nectar-cup of the Absolute.

In sudden moments of revealing flame,

In passionate responses half-unveiled

He reached the rim of ecstasies unknown;

A touch supreme surprised his hurrying heart,

The clasp was remembered of the Wonderful,

And hints leaped down of white beatitudes.

Eternity drew close disguised as Love

And laid its hand upon the body of Time.

A little gift comes from the Immensitudes,

But measureless to life its gain of joy;

All the untold Beyond is mirrored there.

A giant drop of the Bliss unknowable

Overwhelmed his limbs and round his soul became

A fiery ocean of felicity;

He foundered drowned in sweet and burning vasts:

The dire delight that could shatter mortal flesh,

The rapture that the gods sustain he bore.

Immortal pleasure cleansed him in its waves

And turned his strength into undying power.

Immortality captured Time and carried Life.

End of Canto Nine

Canto Ten

The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Little Mind

This too must now be overpassed and left,

As all must be until the Highest is gained

In whom the world and self grow true and one:

Till That is reached our journeying cannot cease.

Always a nameless goal beckons beyond,

Always ascends the zigzag of the gods

And upward points the spirit’s climbing Fire.

This breath of hundred-hued felicity

And its pure heightened figure of Time’s joy,

Tossed upon waves of flawless happiness,

Hammered into single beats of ecstasy,

This fraction of the spirit’s integer

Caught into a passionate greatness of extremes,

This limited being lifted to zenith bliss,

Happy to enjoy one touch of things supreme,

Packed into its sealed small infinity,

Its endless time-made world outfacing Time,

A little output of God’s vast delight.

The moments stretched towards the eternal Now,

The hours discovered immortality,

But, satisfied with their sublime contents,

On peaks they ceased whose tops half-way to Heaven

Pointed to an apex they could never mount,

To a grandeur in whose air they could not live.

Inviting to their high and exquisite sphere,

To their secure and fine extremities

This creature who hugs his limits to feel safe,

These heights declined a greater adventure’s call.

A glory and sweetness of satisfied desire

Tied up the spirit to golden posts of bliss.

It could not house the wideness of a soul

Which needed all infinity for its home.

A memory soft as grass and faint as sleep,

The beauty and call receding sank behind

Like a sweet song heard fading far away

Upon the long high road to Timelessness.

Above was an ardent white tranquillity.

A musing spirit looked out on the worlds

And like a brilliant clambering of skies

Passing through clarity to an unseen Light

Large lucent realms of Mind from stillness shone.

But first he met a silver-grey expanse

Where Day and Night had wedded and were one:

It was a tract of dim and shifting rays

Parting Life’s sentient flow from Thought’s self-poise.

A coalition of uncertainties

There exercised uneasy government

On a ground reserved for doubt and reasoned guess,

A rendezvous of Knowledge with Ignorance.

At its low extremity held difficult sway

A mind that hardly saw and slowly found;

Its nature to our earthly nature close

And kin to our precarious mortal thought

That looks from soil to sky and sky to soil

But knows not the below nor the beyond,

It only sensed itself and outward things.

This was the first means of our slow ascent

From the half-conscience of the animal soul

Living in a crowded press of shape-events

In a realm it cannot understand nor change;

Only it sees and acts in a given scene

And feels and joys and sorrows for a while.

The ideas that drive the obscure embodied spirit

Along the roads of suffering and desire

In a world that struggles to discover Truth,

Found here their power to be and Nature-force.

Here are devised the forms of an ignorant life

That sees the empiric fact as settled law,

Labours for the hour and not for eternity

And trades its gains to meet the moment’s call:

The slow process of a material mind

Which serves the body it should rule and use

And needs to lean upon an erring sense,

Was born in that luminous obscurity.

Advancing tardily from a limping start,

Crutching hypothesis on argument,

Throning its theories as certitudes,

It reasons from the half-known to the unknown,

Ever constructing its frail house of thought,

Ever undoing the web that it has spun.

A twilight sage whose shadow seems to him self,

Moving from minute to brief minute lives;

A king dependent on his satellites

Signs the decrees of ignorant ministers,

A judge in half-possession of his proofs,

A voice clamant of uncertainty’s postulates,

An architect of knowledge, not its source.

This powerful bondslave of his instruments

Thinks his low station Nature’s highest top,

Oblivious of his share in all things made

And haughtily humble in his own conceit

Believes himself a spawn of Matter’s mud

And takes his own creations for his cause.

To eternal light and knowledge meant to rise,

Up from man’s bare beginning is our climb;

Out of earth’s heavy smallness we must break,

We must search our nature with spiritual fire:

An insect crawl preludes our glorious flight;

Our human state cradles the future god,

Our mortal frailty an immortal force.

At the glow-worm top of these pale glimmer-realms

Where dawn-sheen gambolled with the native dusk

And helped the Day to grow and Night to fail,

Escaping over a wide and shimmering bridge,

He came into a realm of early Light

And the regency of a half-risen sun.

Out of its rays our mind’s full orb was born.

Appointed by the Spirit of the Worlds

To mediate with the unknowing depths,

A prototypal deft Intelligence

Half-poised on equal wings of thought and doubt

Toiled ceaselessly twixt being’s hidden ends.

A Secrecy breathed in life’s moving act;

A covert nurse of Nature’s miracles,

It shaped life’s wonders out of Matter’s mud:

It cut the pattern of the shapes of things,

It pitched mind’s tent in the vague ignorant Vast.

A master Magician of measure and device

Has made an eternity from recurring forms

And to the wandering spectator thought

Assigned a seat on the inconscient stage.

On earth by the will of this Arch-Intelligence

A bodiless energy put on Matter’s robe;

Proton and photon served the imager Eye

To change things subtle into a physical world

And the invisible appeared as shape

And the impalpable was felt as mass:

Magic of percept joined with concept’s art

And lent to each object an interpreting name:

Idea was disguised in a body’s artistry,

And by a strange atomic law’s mystique

A frame was made in which the sense could put

Its symbol picture of the universe.

Even a greater miracle was done.

The mediating light linked body’s power,

The sleep and dreaming of the tree and plant,

The animal’s vibrant sense, the thought in man,

To the effulgence of a Ray above.

Its skill endorsing Matter’s right to think

Cut sentient passages for the mind of flesh

And found a means for Nescience to know.

Offering its little squares and cubes of word

As figured substitutes for reality,

A mummified mnemonic alphabet,

It helped the unseeing Force to read her works.

A buried consciousness arose in her

And now she dreams herself human and awake.

But all was still a mobile Ignorance;

Still Knowledge could not come and firmly grasp

This huge invention seen as a universe.

A specialist of logic’s hard machine

Imposed its rigid artifice on the soul;

An aide of the inventor intellect,

It cut Truth into manageable bits

That each might have his ration of thought-food,

Then new-built Truth’s slain body by its art:

A robot exact and serviceable and false

Displaced the spirit’s finer view of things:

A polished engine did the work of a god.

None the true body found, its soul seemed dead:

None had the inner look which sees Truth’s whole;

All glorified the glittering substitute.

Then from the secret heights a wave swept down,

A brilliant chaos of rebel light arose;

It looked above and saw the dazzling peaks,

It looked within and woke the sleeping god.

Imagination called her shining squads

That venture into undiscovered scenes

Where all the marvels lurk none yet has known:

Lifting her beautiful and miraculous head,

She conspired with inspiration’s sister brood

To fill thought’s skies with glimmering nebulae.

A bright Error fringed the mystery-altar’s frieze;

Darkness grew nurse to wisdom’s occult sun,

Myth suckled knowledge with her lustrous milk;

The infant passed from dim to radiant breasts.

Thus worked the Power upon the growing world;

Its subtle craft withheld the full-orbed blaze,

Cherished the soul’s childhood and on fictions fed

Far richer in their sweet and nectarous sap

Nourishing its immature divinity

Than the staple or dry straw of Reason’s tilth,

Its heaped fodder of innumerable facts,

Plebeian fare on which today we thrive.

Thus streamed down from the realm of early Light

Ethereal thinkings into Matter’s world;

Its gold-horned herds trooped into earth’s cave-heart.

Its morning rays illume our twilight’s eyes,

Its young formations move the mind of earth

To labour and to dream and new-create,

To feel beauty’s touch and know the world and self:

The Golden Child began to think and see.

In those bright realms are Mind’s first forward steps.

Ignorant of all but eager to know all,

Its curious slow enquiry there begins;

Ever its searching grasps at shapes around,

Ever it hopes to find out greater things.

Ardent and golden-gleamed with sunrise fires,

Alert it lives upon invention’s verge.

Yet all it does is on an infant’s scale,

As if the cosmos were a nursery game,

Mind, life the playthings of a Titan’s babe.

As one it works who builds a mimic fort

Miraculously stable for a while,

Made of the sands upon a bank of Time

Mid an occult eternity’s shoreless sea.

A small keen instrument the great Puissance chose,

An arduous pastime passionately pursues;

To teach the Ignorance is her difficult charge,

Her thought starts from an original nescient Void

And what she teaches she herself must learn

Arousing knowledge from its sleepy lair.

For knowledge comes not to us as a guest

Called into our chamber from the outer world;

A friend and inmate of our secret self,

It hid behind our minds and fell asleep

And slowly wakes beneath the blows of life;

The mighty daemon lies unshaped within,

To evoke, to give it form is Nature’s task.

All was a chaos of the true and false,

Mind sought amid deep mists of Nescience;

It looked within itself but saw not God.

A material interim diplomacy

Denied the Truth that transient truths might live

And hid the Deity in creed and guess

That the World-Ignorance might grow slowly wise.

This was the imbroglio made by sovereign Mind

Looking from a gleam-ridge into the Night

In her first tamperings with Inconscience:

Its alien dusk baffles her luminous eyes;

Her rapid hands must learn a cautious zeal;

Only a slow advance the earth can bear.

Yet was her strength unlike the unseeing earth’s

Compelled to handle makeshift instruments

Invented by the life-force and the flesh.

Earth all perceives through doubtful images,

All she conceives in hazardous jets of sight,

Small lights kindled by touches of groping thought.

Incapable of the soul’s direct inlook

She sees by spasms and solders knowledge-scrap,

Makes Truth the slave-girl of her indigence,

Expelling Nature’s mystic unity

Cuts into quantum and mass the moving All;

She takes for measuring-rod her ignorance.

In her own domain a pontiff and a seer,

That greater Power with her half-risen sun

Wrought within limits but possessed her field;

She knew by a privilege of thinking force

And claimed an infant sovereignty of sight.

In her eyes however darkly fringed was lit

The Archangel’s gaze who knows inspired his acts

And shapes a world in its far-seeing flame.

In her own realm she stumbles not nor fails,

But moves in boundaries of subtle power

Across which mind can step towards the sun.

A candidate for a higher suzerainty,

A passage she cut through from Night to Light,

And searched for an ungrasped Omniscience.

A dwarf three-bodied trinity was her serf.

First, smallest of the three, but strong of limb,

A low-brow with a square and heavy jowl,

A pigmy Thought needing to live in bounds

For ever stooped to hammer fact and form.

Absorbed and cabined in external sight,

It takes its stand on Nature’s solid base.

A technician admirable, a thinker crude,

A riveter of Life to habit’s grooves,

Obedient to gross Matter’s tyranny,

A prisoner of the moulds in which it works,

It binds itself by what itself creates.

A slave of a fixed mass of absolute rules,

It sees as Law the habits of the world,

It sees as Truth the habits of the mind.

In its realm of concrete images and events

Turning in a worn circle of ideas

And ever repeating old familiar acts,

It lives content with the common and the known.

It loves the old ground that was its dwelling-place:

Abhorring change as an audacious sin,

Distrustful of each new discovery

Only it advances step by careful step

And fears as if a deadly abyss the unknown.

A prudent treasurer of its ignorance,

It shrinks from adventure, blinks at glorious hope,

Preferring a safe foothold upon things

To the dangerous joy of wideness and of height.

The world’s slow impressions on its labouring mind,

Tardy imprints almost indelible,

Increase their value by their poverty;

The old sure memories are its capital stock:

Only what sense can grasp seems absolute:

External fact it figures as sole truth,

Wisdom identifies with the earthward look,

And things long known and actions always done

Are to its clinging hold a balustrade

Of safety on the perilous stair of Time.

Heaven’s trust to it are the established ancient ways,

Immutable laws man has no right to change,

A sacred legacy from the great dead past

Or the one road that God has made for life,

A firm shape of Nature never to be changed,

Part of the huge routine of the universe.

A smile from the Preserver of the Worlds

Sent down of old this guardian Mind to earth

That all might stand in their fixed changeless type

And from their secular posture never move.

One sees it circling faithful to its task,

Tireless in an assigned tradition’s round;

In decayed and crumbling offices of Time

It keeps close guard in front of custom’s wall,

Or in an ancient Night’s dim environs

It dozes on a little courtyard’s stones

And barks at every unfamiliar light

As at a foe who would break up its home,

A watch-dog of the spirit’s sense-railed house

Against intruders from the Invisible,

Nourished on scraps of life and Matter’s bones

In its kennel of objective certitude.

And yet behind it stands a cosmic might:

A measured Greatness keeps its vaster plan,

A fathomless sameness rhythms the tread of life;

The stars’ changeless orbits furrow inert Space,

A million species follow one mute Law.

A huge inertness is the world’s defence,

Even in change is treasured changelessness;

Into inertia revolution sinks,

In a new dress the old resumes its role;

The Energy acts, the stable is its seal:

On Shiva’s breast is stayed the enormous dance.

A fiery spirit came, next of the three.

A hunchback rider of the red Wild-Ass,

A rash Intelligence leaped down lion-maned

From the great mystic Flame that rings the worlds

And with its dire edge eats at being’s heart.

Thence sprang the burning vision of Desire.

A thousand shapes it wore, took numberless names:

A need of multitude and uncertainty

Pricks it for ever to pursue the One

On countless roads across the vasts of Time

Through circuits of unending difference.

It burns all breasts with an ambiguous fire.

A radiance gleaming on a murky stream,

It flamed towards heaven, then sank, engulfed, towards hell;

It climbed to drag down Truth into the mire

And used for muddy ends its brilliant Force;

A huge chameleon gold and blue and red

Turning to black and grey and lurid brown,

Hungry it stared from a mottled bough of life

To snap up insect joys, its favourite food,

The dingy sustenance of a sumptuous frame

Nursing the splendid passion of its hues.

A snake of flame with a dull cloud for tail,

Followed by a dream-brood of glittering thoughts,

A lifted head with many-tinged flickering crests,

It licked at knowledge with a smoky tongue.

A whirlpool sucking in an empty air,

It based on vacancy stupendous claims,

In Nothingness born to Nothingness returned,

Yet all the time unwittingly it drove

Towards the hidden Something that is All.

Ardent to find, incapable to retain,

A brilliant instability was its mark,

To err its inborn trend, its native cue.

At once to an unreflecting credence prone,

It thought all true that flattered its own hopes;

It cherished golden nothings born of wish,

It snatched at the unreal for provender.

In darkness it discovered luminous shapes;

Peering into a shadow-hung half-light

It saw hued images scrawled on Fancy’s cave;

Or it swept in circles through conjecture’s night

And caught in imagination’s camera

Bright scenes of promise held by transient flares,

Fixed in life’s air the feet of hurrying dreams,

Kept prints of passing Forms and hooded Powers

And flash-images of half-seen verities.

An eager spring to seize and to possess

Unguided by reason or the seeing soul

Was its first natural motion and its last,

It squandered life’s force to achieve the impossible:

It scorned the straight road and ran on wandering curves

And left what it had won for untried things;

It saw unrealised aims as instant fate

And chose the precipice for its leap to heaven.

Adventure its system in the gamble of life,

It took fortuitous gains as safe results;

Error discouraged not its confident view

Ignorant of the deep law of being’s ways

And failure could not slow its fiery clutch;

One chance made true warranted all the rest.

Attempt, not victory, was the charm of life.

An uncertain winner of uncertain stakes,

Instinct its dam and the life-mind its sire,

It ran its race and came in first or last.

Yet were its works nor small and vain nor null;

It nursed a portion of infinity’s strength

And could create the high things its fancy willed;

Its passion caught what calm intelligence missed.

Insight of impulse laid its leaping grasp

On heavens high Thought had hidden in dazzling mist,

Caught glimmers that revealed a lurking sun:

It probed the void and found a treasure there.

A half-intuition purpled in its sense;

It threw the lightning’s fork and hit the unseen.

It saw in the dark and vaguely blinked in the light,

Ignorance was its field, the unknown its prize.

Of all these Powers the greatest was the last.

Arriving late from a far plane of thought

Into a packed irrational world of Chance

Where all was grossly felt and blindly done,

Yet the haphazard seemed the inevitable,

Came Reason, the squat godhead artisan,

To her narrow house upon a ridge in Time.

Adept of clear contrivance and design,

A pensive face and close and peering eyes,

She took her firm and irremovable seat,

The strongest, wisest of the troll-like Three.

Armed with her lens and measuring-rod and probe,

She looked upon an object universe

And the multitudes that in it live and die

And the body of Space and the fleeing soul of Time,

And took the earth and stars into her hands

To try what she could make of these strange things.

In her strong purposeful laborious mind,

Inventing her scheme-lines of reality

And the geometric curves of her time-plan,

She multiplied her slow half-cuts at Truth:

Impatient of enigma and the unknown,

Intolerant of the lawless and the unique,

Imposing reflection on the march of Force,

Imposing clarity on the unfathomable,

She strove to reduce to rules the mystic world.

Nothing she knew but all things hoped to know.

In dark inconscient realms once void of thought,

Missioned by a supreme Intelligence

To throw its ray upon the obscure Vast,

An imperfect light leading an erring mass

By the power of sense and the idea and word,

She ferrets out Nature’s process, substance, cause.

All life to harmonise by thought’s control,

She with the huge imbroglio struggles still;

Ignorant of all but her own seeking mind

To save the world from Ignorance she came.

A sovereign worker through the centuries

Observing and remoulding all that is,

Confident she took up her stupendous charge.

There the low bent and mighty figure sits

Bowed under the arc-lamps of her factory home

Amid the clatter and ringing of her tools.

A rigorous stare in her creative eyes

Coercing the plastic stuff of cosmic Mind,

She sets the hard inventions of her brain

In a pattern of eternal fixity:

Indifferent to the cosmic dumb demand,

Unconscious of too close realities,

Of the unspoken thought, the voiceless heart,

She leans to forge her credos and iron codes

And metal structures to imprison life

And mechanic models of all things that are.

For the world seen she weaves a world conceived:

She spins in stiff but unsubstantial lines

Her gossamer word-webs of abstract thought,

Her segment systems of the Infinite,

Her theodicies and cosmogonic charts

And myths by which she explains the inexplicable.

At will she spaces in thin air of mind

Like maps in the school-house of intellect hung,

Forcing wide Truth into a narrow scheme,

Her numberless warring strict philosophies;

Out of Nature’s body of phenomenon

She carves with Thought’s keen edge in rigid lines,

Like rails for the World-Magician’s power to run,

Her sciences precise and absolute.

On the huge bare walls of human nescience

Written round Nature’s deep dumb hieroglyphs

She pens in clear demotic characters

The vast encyclopaedia of her thoughts;

An algebra of her mathematics’ signs,

Her numbers and unerring formulas

She builds to clinch her summary of things.

On all sides runs as if in a cosmic mosque

Tracing the scriptural verses of her laws

The daedal of her patterned arabesques,

Art of her wisdom, artifice of her lore.

This art, this artifice are her only stock.

In her high works of pure intelligence,

In her withdrawal from the senses’ trap,

There comes no breaking of the walls of mind,

There leaps no rending flash of absolute power,

There dawns no light of heavenly certitude.

A million faces wears her knowledge here

And every face is turbaned with a doubt.

All now is questioned, all reduced to nought.

Once monumental in their massive craft

Her old great mythic writings disappear

And into their place start strict ephemeral signs;

This constant change spells progress to her eyes:

Her thought is an endless march without a goal.

There is no summit on which she can stand

And see in a single glance the Infinite’s whole.

An inconclusive play is Reason’s toil.

Each strong idea can use her as its tool;

Accepting every brief she pleads her case.

Open to every thought, she cannot know.

The eternal Advocate seated as judge

Armours in logic’s invulnerable mail

A thousand combatants for Truth’s veiled throne

And sets on a high horse-back of argument

To tilt for ever with a wordy lance

In a mock tournament where none can win.

Assaying thought’s values with her rigid tests

Balanced she sits on wide and empty air,

Aloof and pure in her impartial poise.

Absolute her judgments seem but none is sure;

Time cancels all her verdicts in appeal.

Although like sunbeams to our glow-worm mind

Her knowledge feigns to fall from a clear heaven,

Its rays are a lantern’s lustres in the Night;

She throws a glittering robe on Ignorance.

But now is lost her ancient sovereign claim

To rule mind’s high realm in her absolute right,

Bind thought with logic’s forged infallible chain

Or see truth nude in a bright abstract haze.

A master and slave of stark phenomenon,

She travels on the roads of erring sight

Or looks upon a set mechanical world

Constructed for her by her instruments.

A bullock yoked in the cart of proven fact,

She drags huge knowledge-bales through Matter’s dust

To reach utility’s immense bazaar.

Apprentice she has grown to her old drudge;

An aided sense is her seeking’s arbiter.

This now she uses as the assayer’s stone.

As if she knew not facts are husks of truth,

The husks she keeps, the kernel throws aside.

An ancient wisdom fades into the past,

The ages’ faith becomes an idle tale,

God passes out of the awakened thought,

An old discarded dream needed no more:

Only she seeks mechanic Nature’s keys.

Interpreting stone-laws inevitable

She digs into Matter’s hard concealing soil,

To unearth the processes of all things done.

A loaded huge self-worked machine appears

To her eye’s eager and admiring stare,

An intricate and meaningless enginery

Of ordered fateful and unfailing Chance:

Ingenious and meticulous and minute,

Its brute unconscious accurate device

Unrolls an unerring march, maps a sure road;

It plans without thinking, acts without a will,

A million purposes serves with purpose none

And builds a rational world without a mind.

It has no mover, no maker, no idea:

Its vast self-action toils without a cause;

A lifeless Energy irresistibly driven,

Death’s head on the body of Necessity,

Engenders life and fathers consciousness,

Then wonders why all was and whence it came.

Our thoughts are parts of the immense machine,

Our ponderings but a freak of Matter’s law,

The mystic’s lore was a fancy or a blind;

Of soul or spirit we have now no need:

Matter is the admirable Reality,

The patent unescapable miracle,

The hard truth of things, simple, eternal, sole.

A suicidal rash expenditure

Creating the world by a mystery of self-loss

Has poured its scattered works on empty Space;

Late shall the self-disintegrating Force

Contract the immense expansion it has made:

Then ends this mighty and unmeaning toil,

The Void is left bare, vacant as before.

Thus vindicated, crowned, the grand new Thought

Explained the world and mastered all its laws,

Touched the dumb roots, woke veiled tremendous powers;

It bound to service the unconscious djinns

That sleep unused in Matter’s ignorant trance.

All was precise, rigid, indubitable.

But when on Matter’s rock of ages based

A whole stood up firm and clear-cut and safe,

All staggered back into a sea of doubt;

This solid scheme melted in endless flux:

She had met the formless Power inventor of forms;

Suddenly she stumbled upon things unseen:

A lightning from the undiscovered Truth

Startled her eyes with its perplexing glare

And dug a gulf between the Real and Known

Till all her knowledge seemed an ignorance.

Once more the world was made a wonder-web,

A magic’s process in a magical space,

An unintelligible miracle’s depths

Whose source is lost in the Ineffable.

Once more we face the blank Unknowable.

In a crash of values, in a huge doom-crack,

In the sputter and scatter of her breaking work

She lost her clear conserved constructed world.

A quantum dance remained, a sprawl of chance

In Energy’s stupendous tripping whirl:

A ceaseless motion in the unbounded Void

Invented forms without a thought or aim:

Necessity and Cause were shapeless ghosts;

Matter was an incident in being’s flow,

Law but a clock-work habit of blind force.

Ideals, ethics, systems had no base

And soon collapsed or without sanction lived;

All grew a chaos, a heave and clash and strife.

Ideas warring and fierce leaped upon life;

A hard compression held down anarchy

And liberty was only a phantom’s name:

Creation and destruction waltzed inarmed

On the bosom of a torn and quaking earth;

All reeled into a world of Kali’s dance.

Thus tumbled, sinking, sprawling in the Void,

Clutching for props, a soil on which to stand,

She only saw a thin atomic Vast,

The rare-point sparse substratum universe

On which floats a solid world’s phenomenal face.

Alone a process of events was there

And Nature’s plastic and protean change

And, strong by death to slay or to create,

The riven invisible atom’s omnipotent force.

One chance remained that here might be a power

To liberate man from the old inadequate means

And leave him sovereign of the earthly scene.

For Reason then might grasp the original Force

To drive her car upon the roads of Time.

All then might serve the need of the thinking race,

An absolute State found order’s absolute,

To a standardised perfection cut all things,

In society build a just exact machine.

Then science and reason careless of the soul

Could iron out a tranquil uniform world,

Aeonic seekings glut with outward truths

And a single-patterned thinking force on mind,

Inflicting Matter’s logic on Spirit’s dreams

A reasonable animal make of man

And a symmetrical fabric of his life.

This would be Nature’s peak on an obscure globe,

The grand result of the long ages’ toil,

Earth’s evolution crowned, her mission done.

So might it be if the spirit fell asleep;

Man then might rest content and live in peace,

Master of Nature who once her bondslave worked,

The world’s disorder hardening into Law, –

If Life’s dire heart arose not in revolt,

If God within could find no greater plan.

But many-visaged is the cosmic Soul;

A touch can alter the fixed front of Fate.

A sudden turn can come, a road appear.

A greater Mind may see a greater Truth,

Or we may find when all the rest has failed

Hid in ourselves the key of perfect change.

Ascending from the soil where creep our days,

Earth’s consciousness may marry with the Sun,

Our mortal life ride on the spirit’s wings,

Our finite thoughts commune with the Infinite.

In the bright kingdoms of the rising Sun

All is a birth into a power of light:

All here deformed guards there its happy shape,

Here all is mixed and marred, there pure and whole;

Yet each is a passing step, a moment’s phase.

Awake to a greater Truth beyond her acts,

The mediatrix sat and saw her works

And felt the marvel in them and the force

But knew the power behind the face of Time:

She did the task, obeyed the knowledge given,

Her deep heart yearned towards great ideal things

And from the light looked out to wider light:

A brilliant hedge drawn round her narrowed her power;

Faithful to her limited sphere she toiled, but knew

Its highest, widest seeing was a half-search,

Its mightiest acts a passage or a stage.

For not by Reason was creation made

And not by Reason can the Truth be seen

Which through the veils of thought, the screens of sense

Hardly the spirit’s vision can descry

Dimmed by the imperfection of its means:

The little Mind is tied to little things:

Its sense is but the spirit’s outward touch,

Half-waked in a world of dark Inconscience;

It feels out for its beings and its forms

Like one left fumbling in the ignorant Night.

In this small mould of infant mind and sense

Desire is a child-heart’s cry crying for bliss,

Our reason only a toys’ artificer,

A rule-maker in a strange stumbling game.

But she her dwarf aides knew whose confident sight

A bounded prospect took for the far goal.

The world she has made is an interim report

Of a traveller towards the half-found truth in things

Moving twixt nescience and nescience.

For nothing is known while aught remains concealed;

The Truth is known only when all is seen.

Attracted by the All that is the One,

She yearns towards a higher light than hers;

Hid by her cults and creeds she has glimpsed God’s face:

She knows she has but found a form, a robe,

But ever she hopes to see him in her heart

And feel the body of his reality.

As yet a mask is there and not a brow,

Although sometimes two hidden eyes appear:

Reason cannot tear off that glimmering mask,

Her efforts only make it glimmer more;

In packets she ties up the Indivisible;

Finding her hands too small to hold vast Truth

She breaks up knowledge into alien parts

Or peers through cloud-rack for a vanished sun:

She sees, not understanding what she has seen,

Through the locked visages of finite things

The myriad aspects of infinity.

One day the Face must burn out through the mask.

Our ignorance is Wisdom’s chrysalis,

Our error weds new knowledge on its way,

Its darkness is a blackened knot of light;

Thought dances hand in hand with Nescience

On the grey road that winds towards the Sun.

Even while her fingers fumble at the knots

Which bind them to their strange companionship,

Into the moments of their married strife

Sometimes break flashes of the enlightening Fire.

Even now great thoughts are here that walk alone:

Armed they have come with the infallible word

In an investiture of intuitive light

That is a sanction from the eyes of God;

Announcers of a distant Truth they flame

Arriving from the rim of eternity.

A fire shall come out of the infinitudes,

A greater Gnosis shall regard the world

Crossing out of some far omniscience

On lustrous seas from the still rapt Alone

To illumine the deep heart of self and things.

A timeless knowledge it shall bring to Mind,

Its aim to life, to Ignorance its close.

Above in a high breathless stratosphere,

Overshadowing the dwarfish trinity,

Lived, aspirants to a limitless Beyond,

Captives of Space, walled by the limiting heavens,

In the unceasing circuit of the hours

Yearning for the straight paths of eternity,

And from their high station looked down on this world

Two sun-gaze Daemons witnessing all that is.

A power to uplift the laggard world,

Imperious rode a huge high-winged Life-Thought

Unwont to tread the firm unchanging soil:

Accustomed to a blue infinity,

It planed in sunlit sky and starlit air;

It saw afar the unreached Immortal’s home

And heard afar the voices of the Gods.

Iconoclast and shatterer of Time’s forts,

Overleaping limit and exceeding norm,

It lit the thoughts that glow through the centuries

And moved to acts of superhuman force.

As far as its self-winged air-planes could fly,

Visiting the future in great brilliant raids

It reconnoitred vistas of dream-fate.

Apt to conceive, unable to attain,

It drew its concept-maps and vision-plans

Too large for the architecture of mortal Space.

Beyond in wideness where no footing is,

An imagist of bodiless Ideas,

Impassive to the cry of life and sense,

A pure Thought-Mind surveyed the cosmic act.

Archangel of a white transcending realm,

It saw the world from solitary heights

Luminous in a remote and empty air.

End of Canto Ten