Collected Poems

The Inconscient and the Traveller Fire

The Inconscient

Flame that invadest my empire of sorrow wordless and sombre,
Arrow of azure light golden-winged, barbed with delight,
Who was it aimed thee into this crucified Soul that for ever
Passions and beats in the womb of a universe built for its tomb?

Lo, I am Death and I live in the boundless cavern of Nature,
Death who cannot die, Shadow of Eternity,
Vainly I burn in stars as they err through a Void without feature,
Scintillant forms of my Nought vast without life, without thought.

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O all my worlds, you who glitter and wander, God has devised you
Burning nails in my heart, stones of my prisonhouse. God,
Architect tranquil relentless and mighty, built and incised you,
Clamped with you Time, his road towards Nothingness, Death's deep abode.

I the Inconscient have passioned for life and its beat and its glory,—
Life that Death might die. O, was it life that He gave me?
Pulse of my darkness, reflex and nerve-beat! More hopeless I suffer,
Racked by the flame an obscure will in me kindled to save me.

Life? or a sorrowful throb of my Matter teaching it anguish,
Teaching it hope and desire trod down by Time in the mire?
Life? this joy that weeps for its briefness, this foot-path for sorrow?
Life, this embrace of a death treasuring some transient breath?

Boons of a shortlived sweetness twisted and turned into torture,—
Hope more blind than my Night, desire and its deadly delight,
Bliss that is small on the wings of a moment, vivid and fragile,
Love grown a kinsman to hate, will made an engine of Fate.

Torn with my anguish I cried out for knowledge, light on my midnight,
Light on my symbols of dream and a power in the Light to redeem.
Yea, was it knowledge He gave me, this thought that is tangled in darkness,
Ignorance reading its own record in sense and in stone?

Ignorance tracing its plans and its dreams on a canvas of error!
Mind this half-light in me born, like the glow of a morrowless morn?
Autographs, hieroglyphs of the reflexes life has engendered,
Spasms of matter caught into luminous figments of thought.

Nay, is not God but myself, Death's euphemism fictioned immortal,
Nothing eternalised, bare, yet as if one who is None,
Death yet for ever alive, an Inconscient troubled with seemings,
Matter tormented with life, a Void with its forces at strife?

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O by my thought to escape from myself out of thought into Nothing—
Thus I had hoped to dissolve, rapt in some tensionless Bliss,
Rending the Illusion I made to be immobile and formless and timeless—
This dream too now I leave, long not even to cease.

Into my numb discontent I have lapsed of a universe barren,
Goalless, condemned to survive, a spirit of matter in pain.
Now have I known myself as this boundless finite, this darkness
Shadowily self-lit, grown content to strive without end and in vain.

Fire that travellest from immortality, spark of the Timeless,
Why hast thou come to my night, an unbearable Idol of Light?
Ah from what happier universe strayedst thou kindling my torpor?
Thou, O spirit of Light, perturb not my vastness of Night.