The Adventure of the Apocalypse

Ideal

I crave not poised perfection in my words,

Jewelled complacence cut to a self-muse.

Song dense with such cool beauty is the goal

Of the mere finite, haloing its own heart,

Crystalling a godhead of the small and brief.

Beyond this beauty, above all perfect poise

Arches the Ineffable who is endless light,

A noon that has no dawn or sunsetting,

Yet every moment a fresh noon whose veil

Is the vast zenith which was white before:

Paradise on paradise ever new, He moves

In a myriad miracle of the measureless!

How shall the rapture of a gemmed repose,

Safe in locked luster, brilliantly blind,

Throbbing to no hush-haunted distances—

How shall so charmed a circle of content

Convey the heavenly homelessness of God?

Him would I win through words that strain afar,

Each sound a listening trance, self-unaware,

Flooding with a life that overflows all form,

Thrilling awhile to ethers older than time,

Spaces of shadowless superconscious sleep

Where star on star is effortlessly dreamed

Ere every dream is read through crooked eyes

By some clairvoyant buried in a cave

Of coiling darkness with a dragon's mouth!

This cave disgorged the world of our outgaze

To quiver between a dungeon and a dome.

Until the prime virginities shine down,

Breathing a rumour of the bourneless Womb,

Vain are our days—all songs that sing themselves

And never That which breaks through every song

Lure us with false perfections brightly caught

From magic realms hanging twixt earth and heaven

Spellbound: these neither pain nor ecstasy

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Purples with a yonder of undiscovered fire.

Here a strange smile, like sorrow never known

Yet bliss found never, dents a rocky face

Watching a million mirrors strangely smile back.

No rhythm of this thin rigid line I seek.

The soul in me is an abyss and a sky,

A chaos and a plumbless mystery.

O I would make my chaos the huge gap

Of a dumb door waiting to wake at last

Vibrant with a wind whose perfume has no end,

Golden with the glow whose name is Eternity.

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