The Secret Splendour

(Before returning permanently to the Ashram)

1

Poise of the tense noon, tremulous between

 Passion and worship, warm flesh and bare soul!

 One touch of heat, and the whole heart breaks out

To clasp the body of earth—drunk, blind to heaven.

One touch of light, and love leaps all within—

The entire seducing greenness flecked with gold

 Quivers to draw beyond its own bright curves

The hungry heart to the Unseen the Unheard,

 And with elusive farness wakens deep

On sudden deep in the mute dazzled mind.

Hermaphrodite hour, disclose my nature's truth,

So I may learn to catch ere evening's end

White Venus's wonder-word or plumb through night

A superhuman space of secrecies.

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2

"O give me chastity, but not too soon!"

Saint would I be and live a lone y star,

But now that my heart heaves to the intimate moon

Let not the immeasurable mystery mar

The splendour of close kisses and locked limbs.

Yet grant this mercy that, ere body dims,

I wake to the viewless Beauty by whose call

Of solitude and superhuman sleep

We strain from light to light and, through each small

Loveliness see some infinite rapture leap

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To plunge our souls in work -oblivion....

 Burn me pure gold at last, O secret Sun!

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3

The unreachable horizon is my love—

All other marvels, delicate or vast,

End with the embracing: here alone the arms

Stand full for ever with the rapturous

 Failure to exhaust the body of the Beyond.

O haunting line of infinite ocean-tone,

Touched by the luminous quiet of the sky,

Draw me aloof from lips that sing no surge

Of the homeless heart to bourneless mystery!

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4

Above my head 1 am one with God's huge gold,

Within my heart God's white-fire depth am I;

But both these freedoms like far dreams 1 hold,

Wonderful futures caught n a cryptic eye—

A light without lids—suspended timelessly

Twixt flickering glimpses cf mortality.

I am they and yet no part of body or mind

Shares in their splendour: a nameless strength alone

Possesses every limb: a block of stone

Dead to all hungers, void of smile or sigh,

The outer self endures the strokes of time,

But feels each stroke flash from beyond, behind

The world of man, a smite of the God on high

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And the God within to wake from the packed peace

Of that stone-block a shapeliness; sublime

Which shall be God to the very finger-tips

By the falling of brute superfluities.

Treasuring that sculpture yet unborn, I wait

For the luminous outflowering of my fate—

Blindness that is a locked apocalypse!

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5

A viewless Will, an undiscovered sun,

Fixed in an ether of trance above my brain!

These feet may stumble into night, these hands

Let fall the flambeau: still, in that happy blue,

Flickerless the gold of God masters all Time.

There is no failure save forgetfulness

Of the omnipotent Light whose spark is our soul.

The Eternal One whose word is victory

Is now the unpierceable secret of my life:

Nothing can draggle His epiphany,

None else than He can lift me from the mire,

His Will alone is my serenity.

While He enhaloes the summit of the mind

And His dazzle is caught in the cavern of the heart

And all my limbs are a grope for His world-vast love.

Can mortal hungers hold me paradised?

Some giant loneliness breaks through each embrace!...

My faltering steps are a truth to human eyes,

But already the great sun-sight overhead

Has burnt it to ashes in the future's fire.

I wear mortality like a fading mask:

The white decree in the brooding spirit-space

Shall stop not till the immortal Sun is my face.

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