The Adventure of the Apocalypse

Behind Man's Form

I have seen the inmost truth behind man's form.

No man it is but a multi-mooded wonder

Of reasonless beauty and strength: his brain an eagle,

His heart a tiger, his belly an elephant,

His legs the great trunks of two baobabs!

The sun-stare and the pinions of wide dream,

The warm magnificence of leaping love,

The endurance that abysses every pain,

The blind unbreakable poise on primal earth—

All these are born from a subhuman life

Lighted up by a superhuman soul,

The mere man nothing but a mask of mind

Behind which mysteries below, beyond,

Are caught together. . .The eagle shall grow one

With a secrecy of freedom infinite

And consciousness like an all-knowing fire,

The tiger a freedom and a fire combined

To an all-desiring all-enfolding bliss,

The elephant a loneliness of trance

Where world on world is lost without one sigh,

The baobab trunks a hushed companionship

Of some unutterable First and Last

Founded on strange earth-hued eternities!

A pyramidding miracle based above

Hangs downward concentrating to pass on

The immense and the intense of deathless power

To the intense and the immense of force

Pyramidding upward out of mutable time.

Lo the soul's magic kindles their touch and thrill,

Then their deep fusion to a single Self

Making the soul Its new creation's cry

Sent from the inmost to the outermost:

A huge star breaks with halo of boundlessness,

And the mask of mind becomes the face of God!

Page 76