Collected Poems

I Walked Beside the Waters

I walked beside the waters of a world of light
On a gold ridge guarding two seas of high-rayed night.
One was divinely topped with a pale bluish moon
And swam as in a happy deep spiritual swoon
More conscious than earth's waking; the other's wide delight
Billowed towards an ardent orb of diamond white.
But where I stood, there joined in a bright marvellous haze
The miracled moons with the long ridge's golden blaze.
I knew not if two wakings or two mighty sleeps
Mixed the great diamond fires and the pale pregnant deeps,
But all my glad expanding soul flowed satisfied
Around me and became the mystery of their tide.
As one who finds his own eternal self, content,
Needing naught else beneath the spirit's firmament,
It knew not Space, it heard no more Time's running feet,
Termless, fulfilled, lost richly in itself, complete.
And so it might have lain for ever. But there came
A dire intrusion wrapped in married cloud and flame,

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Across the blue-white moon-hush of my magic seas
A sudden sweeping of immense peripheries
Of darkness ringing lambent lustres; shadowy-vast
A nameless dread, a Power incalculable passed
Whose feet were death, whose wings were immortality;
Its changing mind was time, its heart eternity.
All opposites were there, unreconciled, uneased,
Struggling for victory, by victory unappeased.
All things it bore, even that which brings undying peace,
But secret, veiled, waiting for some supreme release.
I saw the spirit of the cosmic Ignorance;
I felt its power besiege my gloried fields of trance.

But now its huge Enigma had a voice, a cry
That echoed through my oceans of felicity.

A Voice arose that was so sweet and terrible
It thrilled the heart with love and pain, as if all hell
Tuned with all heaven in one inextricable note.
Born from abysmal depths on highest heights to float,
It carried all sorrow that the souls of creatures share,
Yet hinted every rapture that the gods can bear.
"O Son of God who cam'st into my blackest Night
To sound and know its gulfs and bring the immortal light
Into the passion of its darkness, castst thou man's fate
For thy soul's freedom and its magic are forfeit,
Renouncing the high pain that gave thee mortal birth
And made thy soul a seeker on the common earth?
When first the Eternal cast Himself abroad to be
His own unimaginable multiplicity,
Expressing in Time and shape what timelessly was there,
The mighty Mother stood alone in diamond air
And took into her that Godhead streaming from above
And worlds of her endless beauty and delight and love
Leaped from her fathomless heart.

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