The Adventure of the Apocalypse

God's elephant

Why art thou slow, with grey somnambulist gait,

Eyes like small gems gripped in a giant rock,

An elephant swaying to some dense delight

Whose mystery bulks too heavy for time's heart?

"Loaded with a dream out measuring common deed,

Ponderous I come and all swift slynesses

Laugh to themselves, 'He never shall lay bare

The wisdom-grandeur locked in that huge head.'

Dust are these wanton jeering, when I hold

Their doom in my belly of beatitude!

Little they guess the immobile Vigilling

And the enormous hesitation pack

A plenitude's power deep and more deep within

Like the drawn cord of some omniscient bow

Happy to wait for ages with tense truth

Because it views already the blind tare

Hidden in the body of mutable desire.

This centuries poise shall tire all crafty claws.

Then strikes my hour: none harks the signal sound:

I quicken to no earth-impelled alarm:

At some white call across the hills of trance

The gradual elephant shall rear his chest,

Rouse to a sudden sky his sleepy trunk

And wake in the pure tusks a war on passion

By one far bellow of earthquaking joy,

A burst of some unbearable secrecy

That turns the slow limbs to a lava of light

Blotting all greeds and burying all glooms

And burning through the jungles of mortal mind

A wide and virgin way to eternity!

Standing I am seen, a mountain-muse apart;

Never is known the mystical mahout,

The invisible sun of my own timeless Self

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Under a canopy of infinitude

Hung with star-bells that ring to a single bliss

The present and the future and the past.

He rides the rapt volcano of my brain—

His goad is the breaking of life's boundaries!"

4-6-48

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