I do not attach much importance to the publication or non publication of my poetry and never have done. Most of it (the published part) appeared five, ten, fifteen or even thirty or more years after they were written. The few recently published in magazines (not all of them new, e.g. the sonnets) owed their fate to Nolini's eagerness and not to my initiative. But the vast bulk of what I have written (long poems mostly) lies on shelf and in drawer, most of it for more than a decade, awaiting either dissolution or an interminable revision or total recasting which at the present rate may well retain them there a decade or two more. But that is my own idiosyncrasy—it cannot be a rule or example for others.
O Word concealed in the upper fire, Thou who hast lingered through centuries, Descend from thy rapt white desire, Plunging through gold eternities.
Into the gulfs of our nature leap, Voice of the spaces, call of the Light! Break the seals of Matter's sleep, Break the trance of the unseen height.
In the uncertain glow of human mind, Its waste of unharmonied thronging thoughts, Carve thy epic mountain-lined Crowded with deep prophetic grots.
Let thy hue-winged lyrics hover like birds Over the swirl of the heart's sea. Touch into sight with thy fire-words The blind indwelling deity.
O Muse of the Silence, the wideness make In the unplumbed stillness that hears thy voice; In the vast mute heavens of the spirit awake Where thy eagles of Power flame and rejoice.
Out, out with the mind and its candle flares, Light, light the suns that never die. For my ear the cry of the seraph stars And the forms of the Gods for my naked eye!
Let the little troubled life-god within Cast his veils from the still soul, His tiger-stripes of virtue and sin, His clamour and glamour and thole and dole;
All make tranquil, all make free. Let my heart-beats measure the footsteps of God As He comes from His timeless infinity To build in their rapture His burning abode.
Weave from my life His poem of days, His calm pure dawns and His noons of force. My acts for the grooves of His chariot-race, My thoughts for the tramp of His great steeds' course!
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