The Adventure of the Apocalypse

  Poems


THE ADVENTURE OF THE APOCALYPSE



The Adventure

of

the Apocalypse

K. D. SETHNA

136 - 0002-1.jpg

SRI AUROBINDO CIRCLE

BOMBAY



First published in 1949 by

Sri Aurobindo Circle,

32 Rampart Row, Fort, Bombay 1

Printed in India

at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press, Pondicherry



All Rights Reserved


154/49/500

A personal preface

Between the heart-strain known as myocardial defect and the heart-strain, the cri du cwur, that is poetry no connection has been noted by either doctor or critic. But the story of the poems here collected has its beginning in a collapse due to over-tension of the poet's heart-muscle.


I was rushing about a good deal in order to manage certain financial ventures undertaken to meet demands with which pure literature is proverbially incapable of coping. On top of this were months of intensive research in the philosophical implications of modern physics. Making a close and wide study of relativity theory and quantum theory and trying to find what lay at the back of so many and often so conflicting interpretations was quite a tax on the mind, especially as even mathematical technicalities had to be attacked. The result of the physical exertion and this scientific exploration was a general tired feeling. Another result was the receding of whatever poetic faculty I had into the background.


Then came the sudden collapse—on the 8th of May, 1948. I was coming home after a rather strenuous morning. There was some fatigue, but nothing more unusual than was the order every day. However, when I reached home at nearly 3 p.m. ,and was climbing the hillock on which our house is perched, I found myself breathing very hard and suffering from a drained-out sensation in the middle of the chest. I had to make two or three halts. With difficulty I reached the gate and slowly, step after determined step, I got up to the first floor.


I was in no state either to cat or undress. With my habitual rashness I tried to do both. But I seemed to drip ice from my face and be forcibly bent and broken. So there was nothing else I could do except creep to bed and lie flat. The feeling of a hollow in my chest was growing deeper and deeper. So sucked in and dragged down I felt that I thought I would soon die. Various medicines were given me to keep me up. Yet the terrible sinking increased. It struck me that the only decisive help could be drawn by inwardly appealing to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, in whose Ashram at Pondicherry I had spent eight years and whose disciple I still was. With all my power of faith and aspiration I kept outstretching invisible hands to them, calling and calling. I pulled at the saving and healing light that is their Yogic consciousness and when I thought a blue sheen and a gold glow enveloped my heart I sensed a subtle supporting strength gradually taking outward effect.



A doctor had been summoned. By the time he came I had emerged to a considerable extent from the vacuity in the heart-region. He gave me an injection and advised complete rest, saying my heart had been strained. I lay for a couple of hours, safe now but still weary with the terrible passage. As the evening wore on I found my mind getting extraordinarily quiet and clear, until I seemed to look into a new dimension of things. Suddenly the whole universe appeared to be a great living being, a wonderful substance of Spirit, and every piece of matter tingled with a divine presence drawing my worship. I had an intense impulse to read that canto of Sri Aurobindo's Savitri, which is named The World-Soul. It is a thrilled cry of mystical insight bringing up image on strange yet apt image of some hidden Heart of Hearts which in its many-toned unity carries all experience transfigured into bliss. For the first time the entire canto came to me glowing with an absolute perfection. Not even a word anywhere was to my mind human and flawed. This impression extended then to the whole of Savitri and I could not help worshipping the Yogic power that was embodied in it.


Night came, but I was wide awake. I closed my eyes and in a short while could see right through their lids. I saw the whole room in a thin dark haze. I marked my wife's posture in the next bed and opened my eyes to verify the impression. The verification was complete. After a time a flood of poetry raced through my mind. Line after line, charged with spontaneous vision and symbol, ran before my shut eyes. I had the sense that I was composing and yet it would be equally true to say I was reading off the lines as they themselves appeared. The two processes were aspects of the same phenomenon. Composition was being rapidly done by a "me" which was more than myself; and the lines, as far as the habitual "I" was concerned, were like living creatures acting on their own. Whenever there was a slight pause in their appearance I applied a little pressure of attention, as it were, and the vivid phrases glimmered out. This went on and on. It may sound presumptuous but I felt as if a new canto of Savitri were being written. I have never in my life had such a flow of inspiration sustained through such a length of time. As the doctor had advised as much sleep as possible, I begged the sweet immortal presences that were seeming to be shaped into words, to withdraw for a while, though never to be lost. There was not the slightest heed taken of my appeal.


More and more lines streamed past as I lay in that state of in-drawn-ness. But it was difficult to remember them. I had to focus my mind on them to be able to retain a few and set them down. Every one or two minutes I would emerge out of the semi-trance and scribble verses on the back and cover and other blank pages of the copy of Savitri which, together with




a pencil to mark passages in it, I had near me in bed. I was writing in total darkness and with extreme rapidity. There was no time to halt and make sure about anything; I had to hurry because the moment I opened my eyes the lines started slipping away and because to get new lines I must return to my semi-trance which might not come if I waited awake too long. This continued up to four o' clock in the morning. Then I dozed off.


I got up again quite early without any sense of fatigue. Throughout the day there was no sleepy feeling. Two nights back I had kept awake similarly; but there had been no poetic inspiration. I had, however, been making inward contact again and again with Sri Aurobindo and the Mother and hearing what I hear in my best and calmest moods, a low universal croon, a far-away rhythm with a deep monotone overlaid with small variations: even the variations repeat one and the same softly trembling theme: some ultimate Mother Spirit seems to be gently singing to her child the cosmos.... The next morning I had felt absolutely fresh, just as I was now.


Almost the first thing I did on waking now was to go through the night's scrawl. It was in a jumble: several lines had been written over one another. Even those that stood legible were a series of snatches caught out of the night's flowing song. I willed them to cohere, and waited. Out of the many different strains one short ensemble was the first to result; whatever gaps had been there were filled by means of a conscious entering into the mood of the existing lines and creating a continuation. This conscious effort must have pulled at the inner being which had come into contact with the afflatus at night. For, soon two new poems quite apart from what had been scribbled took shape. They were in a different tempo, so to speak—more lyrical— but still with what appeared to me a living touch on the occult. The next day, some of the remaining lines from the semi-trance pieced together. And the rest became connected soon after. All of them (as also many written later) have a vein of surrealism though without, I hope, the capricious and the chaotic which usually mark surrealism in Europe and which strike one as rather the froth of the dream-consciousness than its true supra-physical profundity, its genuine plumbing of mysterious universes behind the one we know in ordinary waking moments.


I was now in a hypersensitive condition. Moliere's Monsieur Jourdain was surprised to find he had talked prose all his life: I was discovering that, when I talked prose, there came suddenly in the midst of commonplace language bright poetic phrases that led me away from the conversation along strange trails of image and rhythm. Or, out of the talk of others, some casual word would bring me vivid suggestions and set me off to write a poem. And at the oddest moments poetry would rush in: while being spongedj for



instance, I would be all lit up with ideas that ran into rhythmic expression. Poems would start also from words or phrases in the books I read. My reading was mainly of Savitri and it tended to keep my faculties at concert-pitch. A dip now and then into the first canto of The Ring and the Book by Browning struck, too, on some creative hints, but I could not abide Browning for long: he had a vigorously found felicity, yet not much lift. That extremely poetic and mystically pregnant novel by Elizabeth Myers, A Well Full of Leaves, was the only other reading-matter at my bedside. I tried on occasion to look at less congenial stuff, but so strong a "No" swept out from within my chest that I got most uncomfortable and had soon to drop it.


Day after day brought more and more poetry. I was writing with a kind of automatic energy. It was as if I were a mere gate through which poems strode out. Occasionally I had to pull them forth and also correct on afterthought, but there was little now of the piecemeal writing and the long and careful chiselling to which I had been accustomed in the old days of poetic composition. I seemed to be plastic in the hands of the inner being. As the heart-specialist called by my doctor had found my electro-cardiogram clearly indicative of muscular strain, I had been ordered to be in bed for at least eight weeks—until the "muffled first sound" (as medical jargon has it) should become normal. I had been asked to avoid even lifting my head up. I did not take this regime seriously and spent hours resting in a slanted position. I felt that if I could open myself to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother they would effect a cure much sooner than the doctor expected. I kept concentrating more and more intensely on them, feeling that a grip had broken loose in my chest, with no longer a dreadful hollow as in the experience on May 8, but a sweet warm restful wideness that held deeper and deeper their presence. The poetic inspiration and their presence were really one and the same thing—and after each poem had been written I could not help inwardly divesting myself of its authorship and offering it into their hands. This was like putting away from me the poetic power, but actually with each gesture of offering I found myself richer—a larger room grew in me for both spiritual and poetic experience.


I knew a happiness such as I had never known. The weeks I spent in bed, regularly taking injections and medicines, floated in a sea of bliss and light. I would not for anything have missed the heart-strain which brought so much inward nourishment and strength and so much poetic flowering. The doctor told me I would have to go easy for a long time and avoid doing a lot of things I used to. Nothing dampened my spirits. I was getting the best nursing imaginable from my wife;, so even the physical routine of being in bed was not irksome. I drank my bed-riddenness like pure nectar, though




never, of course, encouraging the suggestion of illness. I was eager to get well soon; but, while I lay unwell, there was no fretting—on the contrary, a happy realisation of how through the worst the best could come and how the Divine could utilise everything for a purpose beyond our calculation.


The poetic impulse kept me in an excitement which no doctor would have sanctioned—if he had seen what was happening. So vivid were the symbols that made their impact on my consciousness that my whole body appeared to live with them; almost automatically I would move my hands to feel the visions that dawned on me; my limbs would tend to act out a response to what they signified; it was as if the scenes and figures had been physically in my room and as they grew and found expression they kindled my eyes with wonder and drew exclamations from my lips. Often the words in which they got uttered would be found by me with forceful physical gestures. And several of the rhythms came plunging from some remote wideness and thundering out with a bursting sensation in my chest: the opening passage of the poem entitled The Two Crosses is a typical example. The heart would beat faster and I would be thrilled through and through and left somewhat exhausted. But behind all the excitement there was a great peace and every act of exertion brought in its wake an intense depth of contact with Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. What I did and experienced might not have been according to medical rules, yet it helped me immensely and kept me so cheerful that the doctor said he simply loved to visit me and have a chat with me and listen to my comments and jokes. The heart was improving —and every phase of its history I communicated by letter to the Mother. In fact I was writing to her every day and sending poem after poem. I was sure I was on the right lines in doing what I did and in believing that she would look after me and anyhow put me again on my feet. Her reply to one of my letters set the seal on my own conviction. She wrote: "My dear child, I quite agree with you that there is a power other and much more powerful than that of the doctors and the medicines and I am glad to see that you put your trust in it. Surely it will lead you throughout all difficulties and in spite of all catastrophic warnings. Keep your faith intact and all will be all right."


After eight weeks I was allowed to toddle about a little. The poetry did not cease when I left bed. It grew, however, a bit less abundant and towards the close of the third month there was marked diminution and I was afraid that soon the flow might stop. Stop it did—almost exactly at the termination of the third month. But it left me with a certain confidence I had always lacked even when during my stay in the Ashram I was writing poetry pretty often. I had wondered whether I should ever be able to write a long



poem. The present collection does not contain any really long poem, but a number of pieces have a distinct tendency to length, several took birth on one and the same day and I was conscious of an irresistible drive in nearly everything I wrote: all this has made me feel as though a whole sea of un-uttered song were waiting somewhere in the deep background of the being and might some day flow out if I opened myself sufficiently to the influence of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Till then, the present collection must stand as my most fluent and prolific art-experience of what a poem of mine calls the adventure of the apocalypse. I hope the three months' mass it forms, with its many moods simple or complex and its various turns of sight and speech, gives at least some promise that,' should the prayed-for outburst come, its quality would not lag too far behind its quantity.


K. D. SETHNA

Seated above

SEATED above in a measureless trance of truth—

A thunder wearing the lightning's streak of smile,

A lonely monolith of frozen fire,

Sole pyramid piercing to the vast of the One—

Waits Shiva throned on an all-supporting void.

Wing after wing smites to the cosmic sky.

Gathering flame-speed out of their own wild heart—

That tunnel of dream through the body's swoon of rock—

They find their home in this sweet silent Face

With the terrible brain that bursts to a hammer of heaven And deluges hell with mercies without end.

The abysmal night opens its secret smile And all the world cries out it is the dawn!


9-5-48

Page 1

Mirror and knowledge

All mirrors in which we seek the bliss

Of our small self are an abyss

At the bottom of whose night

Is a mockery of light,

A tiny stagnant pool

Where darkles the flattened face,

With gaping empty gaze,

Of the demon and the ghoul.


But when the Great Self glows

Like a golden cosmic rose,

The petals fanning out from one sweet core,

No strangeness anywhere

Remains for stare and stare

Seeking to itself a door

The central Eye of eyes

Can shut in all-repose,

For the Great Flower knows

Its perfume of paradise.


9-5-48


Page 2

Treasure

Treasure of the Infinite

Within a stretch of our hand!

But the key to the Infinite

Is hard to understand.


God's single Sun is lying,

Sealed in a trance of night—

Trickling one ray through the key-hole

To honey our twins of sight.


O what shall turn in the grooves,

Set free the Orb of gold

And burst a noon of knowledge

From mysteries untold?


Vainly we grope for the key,

To the ends of the earth we run,

While just a fragile finger

Making the sign of the One


Can touch through the narrow tunnel

The spring of the secret cry

With which the lid breaks open

The all-seeing central Eye!


9-5-48


Page 3

Grace

Lord of the lampless lonelihoods of drowse,

Speak your calm thunder that fills the dark with dreams,

Stand a black angel athwart a sky all sun,

Our shield of mystery against sudden power,

A shadow like a benediction falling

On every crest of the surge of human sight.

Then, shutting my lids, I would see through a thin night-haze

All the world's outlines framing prisoner souls:

Each jagged boulder a god who groans to no ear.

Gulfs of divinity would gape in me,

Calling the glittering peaks of thought to plunge

Head downward in those quiet wisdom-wells.

Deep and more deep the blinded puissances

Hurl to the womb of some sweet mother-space—

Then birth out like a swarm of birds that shine

And, with soft croon and effortless pinion-song

Breasting the eternal Blue that all things are,

Meet in the merciless sun the face of a friend.


10-5-48


Page 4

Cosmic Rhythms

Now cosmic rhythms are a laughter in my pulse,

For the heart stands back immense and knows no aim,

Cool core of a body of tortuous paths to power.

My blood is the singing attar of that Rose

Rooted in rest beyond all universe.

Seraphs are crossing my brain that is wonder-wide

Smiling to see even here an Eye like the sun,

And, where they halt, my love's touch breaks out wings.

All is perfection, thought and word and tune,

Because the Ineffable shines through each interspace.


11-5-48


Page 5

Two moons

Over an endless groove that plunges and plunges,

The globed liberties of the silver Calm

Rejoice aloof from the all-engulfing pain.

Against the background of that mystic Moon

Roar the infinitude seas, the eternity hills

Volcano to the Hush. Mere mocks in our sky,

Stand the bare craters and the deep dry beds,

Children of the burning pallor of mortal love.


11-5-48


Page 6

Time

Mystery before and Mystery behind,

A nothing Now, a tremble and a fall—

God of the future, Devil of the past,

Man of the meaningless moment—here I stand.

Great thought is all; life is a shell by the sea.

When the great thought knows Him who moves in the deep,

Joining the Self to the Self across the Self,

come, Gone and Now are the Flame that licks up Time.


11-5-48


Page 7

The Signature: 136-0002-2.

Sharp-hewn yet undertoned with mystery,

A brief black sign from the Incommunicable

Making the Eternal's Night mix with our day

To deepen and deepen the shallow goldenness

We hug to our heart! Laughing whip-lash of love

That leaves a wonder-weal holding bright secrets

Within its snake whose coils are centuries

But whose straight sweep is the backbone of One Bliss!


The characters go flaming up and down

With all time's venture twixt two ecstatic ends.

Clutching with gentle finger our dumb desire

A slanting full-bodied soar loops a firm loop

Of light around some lone invisible peak—

Followed by steady twin strokes toward the same goal,

Yet smooth and statured close to the human's heart.

Then one curve-straightening gracefully girdled stance,

A peace and pulchritude and potency,

A slender pyramid chasing a viewless line

Within, to an upright noon that knows all truth.

Soon from the girdle a quick smiling leap

Across, spaced with a pair of vertical dreams

Still hinting unfallen heights, and then the term

Of all this labour and rapture in a full sweet circle,

Lackless, complete with godhead boundless in a point.

But, never a stagnant splendour, it casts a hook

Answering the curl before, with which the Name

Of the Nameless unwound in the hours, by a curl behind

Downward to dig and drag the dark Divine

Out of some heaven made hell, the Abyss that is All!


12-5-48

Page 8

Lament and rhapsody

Lost are the ancient mournings, the old mirths

Of Gods grown men, holding the world in their hearts

And breaking with its beauty and its bale

And washing with blood of roses every limb!

The epic's hurricane, the lyric's gurgle,

The pastoral's tremolo of bending reeds,

The drama's splendoured hells and darkling heavens—

And through them all the Voice without a name,

Crying beyond power, passion, pleasure, pang,

Hushing to an ecstasy that has blind eyes

And sees but through a hole suddenly shining

In the magic centre of the marbled brow!


Then were the Angels afloat, the Devils wore wings,

And even the tiny squeaks of insect lives

Came past the antennae's pitiable prayer

Like the Soul of all creation sobbing to the Blue.

Now the deep song sputters on a glutton's lip,

And the azure hungers drown in a drunken orb;

Only some glances parted by lids that quiver

Catch the Soul pinking through the world-vast sleep,

The Spirit Golding the streaks a-dream in the haze.

But the Gods are never dead; their flame is frozen

Till from the locked Inferno of their hearts

They burst to Purgatory and Paradise

And lick up earth with a tongue that sears with bliss.

One waits like a Sun eclipsed by His own Moon,

Soft face coronaed with infinitude,

Counting the hours till, thundering with light,


Page 9



His chant shall chariot through the universe.

O He shall nebula the body's night

And He shall darken the little day of the mind,

Quenching the cosmos in a nectar sea

One moment without shore, one moment strewn

With archipelagos of apocalypse!


The ancient ages looming like an eagle

Will seem a sparrow twittering the infancy

Of pygmy stars, twinkle on twinkle tossed

From eternity to eternity in a trice.

The Alchemic Touch what human heart can bear?

Prophets with burning beards cling round His feet;

They view all heaven's roses in a kingly nail

That with one touch can shatter the Winged Rock

Brooding upon the broken breast of Time.


O Master of Dragon and of Hippogriff,

Saviour of the luminous Toad's barbaric bass,

Planter of the Column that is all life's cry

From stone to utmost opal of ether's hush!

O diamond telescope into the Inane,

Deep after deep of crystal untorn by the suns,

And Thou that gemmest through ruby microscope

The pin-point universe with red chaoses!

Reach out to us that spraying fount of beams,

Thy palm of five great fires that burn as one.

Bless us true children of Thy Golden Self,

Crown us pure children of Thy Silvery Wife!


13-5-48


Page 10

Strange enemy

Coward who criest to lose a single soul,

Yellow heart lapped in the omnipotent sun,

Traitor who flingers' our loves to heavenly hands,

Fifth-columnist of fire, hooded in hush

To break a door of dreams through Matter's sleep

Or else to hide a time-bomb in our heart

For blowing up wife and child to eternity!

Torpedo to our lusts and luxuries,

Magnetic mine for shipwrecks of desire,

Diver with gold block-busters from the Inane,

Huge paratrooper out of primal Night,

Now have I caught Thy stratagem of the Unknown,

Broadcasting bliss from radios under earth,

Swooping, on the myriad cries that quiver and clash,

The supersonic doom of white V-l!

Sure shall Thy mystery burst through the Maginot Line

Of all things built secure by guardian thought,

Wall upon wall against the void of the Unseen.

Out of the timeless gap of the zero hour

Tanks thunder out truths, flame-throws of secrecies

Wound the smooth certitude-cemented forts.

Before, behind, below, above, around,

Ringing with raptures beyond birth and death—

Then, with a pincer-movement of Sun and Moon,

Plucking the blindness off the inmost Eye,

Comest Thou, sweet tiger and wolf, serpent and fox,

A lunge of lightning, a stab of sudden stars,

A crescent smile smiting from the Immense.

Take Thou my puny armours, drive in my breast

Thy hooved dictatorship of diamond and gold.

Make, as Thou wilt, of my small vacant life

Thy living space, Thy Space that lives and loves.

Warfare is futile, surrender sole defense:

Stript of the shades I stand, naked to Thy noon,

O Lord . .. O Lover .. . O Embrace of all the Blue!


14-5-48

Page 11

Fate of the psyche

Pierced by a shaft

Of golden ray

From a sky that laughed

Through endless day,


The human heart

Has hung impaled

Midway the dart

Come from the Unveiled


To the hidden house

Below the earth,

Where angels drowse,

Padlocked from mirth.


Like some bright key

To that lost room,

The pole's reverie

Wakes the God-gloom.


The captived cry

Of heaven to heaven

Lifts from hell's eye

Where time has striven


Vainly to reach

The eternal noon.

The silvering speech

Climbs—a festoon—


The silent bar

Planted upright

Between the sun-star

And the floor of night.


Page 12



Struggling with earth

The seraphs can wind

Upward through birth

From muteness to mind,


Never save through

The rose-heart hung,

Mortal in hue

With the wound far-flung!


No gate to the free

Zenith above,

But. through the plea

Of human love


Vigilling for God—

A lamp whose flame

Is a spurt of blood

To the azure Name!


And till the heat

Of the Honey-Cruse

Is won, the sweet

Mediator muse


Of the stricken, warm

Soul-core of man

Must ache to form

Night's door through the tan


Of twilight to the grot

Of gold on the height

Whence timeward fell shut

The splendourous Sight!


Page 13



O beautiful creature,

Child of Cod-past,

Fathering God-future,

How long shall last


Thy mournful Now?

Perchance a balm

Is set aflow

Out of high calm


To heal the old scar—

A serpent of grace

Slips down the bar

To bite ova more space


For the prisoner powers

More throngingly

To press up their flowers

Through the mystery


Of mortal hours,

And, by the increase

Of their leap to the Towers,

Bring swifter peace


To thy agelong watch . . .

Hast thou not seen

The summit-sun catch

A Mother's mien—


Merciful gaze.

Soft lips that assure,

Smile-curves which trace

That serpentine cure?


15-5-48


Page 14

Unbirthed

Agrip is broken loose

Within my chest—

Titan steel jointures part

Their deep-grey rest


In some blind cosmic plan

Solidding night

To crypt the fire that is man,

To dungeon the height


His dreamful mind remembers . . .

With a shining start,

Suddenly rapture-russet,

A hammer is the heart!


Golden beat upon beat

Wounds the black room,

Like a burst of rhythmic suns

Through vaulted gloom.


Ruined is the house of birth,

Time's steel is scrap,

And where the Shadow brooded

Is a glowing gap.


Eagles of truth sweep down

With their prophecies,

Doves of divine desire

Wing up white cries.


An odour of mystery blows

Purpling the air—

Out of wide nothingness

To wide nowhere.


Page 15



And through the music and colour

Looks forth a Vast,

In its own self reposing,

The Calm that is first and last.


Infinity is a love

That never runs,

Present in every place

With the Silver Ones!


And all that is great or little

Is a single light,

Myriadly crystalling,

Then sinking from sight.


Dawning, Noontide, Even

Kiss and embrace,

Weaving to threefold beauty

A spirit space.


Ecstasies curve like clouds

And their smiles are seven

For the house built without walls

From blue-print of heaven.


16-5-48


Page 16

My life

I live not from hour to hour

But in dream on dream of you, Sweet!

The dawn is the ten-petalled flower

Of your holy feet.


I am told that midday appears,

But the perfect globe of noon

Is made from the hemispheres

Of your breasts where shadows swoon.


I hark to a rumour of even,

But all that I know are your eyes

Drooping their gleams of heaven

To the deep where the child earth lies.


I have heard of an hour that is night;

O how should I tell, when I see

Nothing but your hair's hidden light

Break loose its mystery?


All time is the shine of your shape,

All space is the stretch of your soul;

When the truths of your silence undrape,

The rhythms of Creation roll!


17-5-48


Page 17

Here and now

Why, Soul, look ever ahead to the unborn Gods?

The flute of the future can pour its goldenest honey

Even now if the ear is tuned to the inmost hush.

The ecstatic end is each instant: here on thy brow

Sit all the epiphanies. Lustres that gather

Today are no flowerless path to paradise,

But a music and mystery hiding every heaven

Washed by the secret waves of prophecy.

Lovely the rainbowed horizon, the shimmery heart

Of the dreaming distance, but to live afar

Is blindness toward the deeps of wine within!. . .


Leaping below to unbuttoned bliss, the gap

Twixt throb and aching throb of the pulse of life

Crypts in a Calm that is mother of the worlds

The whole future's farness of the unblown rose!

Vast over thee the noon is everywhere:

An upward tunnel opens through the sun

To expanses that have never known a name

Nor broken with the faintest gossamer wing.

All the great Gods are waiting thy finger-flames

To rise and reach and taste with ten white tongues.

Straight runs the shaft of the flawless infinite hour

From pinnacle to abyss in a sheathed Now.

O the dark waste of this sweet pillar of gold,

A crystal python vertically hung

From burning mouth to burning tail, with a body

Plunging like groove on groove through endless light!

Timeless is the nectar laughing in that jar

Moment by moment: if never hast thou seen

That fullness flow in thy form, barren thy life

And a wide mirage the call of coming dawns.


17-5-48


Page 18

Beauty's Patting

What secrets suddenly peer

Through the flicker-point of beauty's parting

And the twinkled cry of its vanishing tear

But never through the laugh and light of its starting?. . .


All day the sun is glorious thunder,

But taking his opalescent leave

After the last wine-flush of wonder—

Hinting the mother-of-pearl that is eve,


He puts on our lip a finger that closes

All speech—and mysteries tremble and wake

In the wink of an instant!. . .The star-spotted snake

Coil after indigo coil unlooses


And our eyes are crowded with peace or power

But the touch beyond thinking is gone—till the hour

When the gloom has slid, and the tip of its tail

Quivers with an ultimate fleck of white.

Then through a moment of fugitive night

Once more the wordless wizardries wail!...


Great is the splendour of vision breaking

In the songs the gold-hearted poets hurl,

But when the wide wings flutter and furl

And the ear its final thirst is slaking,


A tiny ember of time is haunted

By a spark the minstrel scarcely saw

But which through the passion of lips that chaunted

Was aching to utter its dream without flaw.

Only the ending's hush-haloed sound

Touches and drops what the lilt never found!...

18-5-48


Page 19

Soul of song

I have been quiet a long while

To fill my singing smile

With a magic beyond the lips of man.

And very quiet will I be

After the burst of minstrelsy

To find at the close

The light with which my tune began.

Glowing behind

The singer's mind,

A mystery journeys forth to meet

Across the rapture of rhyming feet

Its own unplumbed repose.

Come then, O listeners, with a tranquil mood

To feel far more than the loud heart knows;

Or else the King who moves through the common word

Shall never be heard

And keep unseen the strange infinitude

He bears above our mortal woes,

The purple of his dream divine.

Look deep for his true royalty's sign:

Haloed with hush he enters, coronaed with calm he goes!


18-5-48

Page 20

Lotus-Lamp

As the lotus of a lamp

Swims in one place

On the gutter's gurgle and jump

And scurry without grace—


As that cool blossom floats

Like a silver stain

Made by deep organ-notes

On a painter's brain—


Trembling a little and breaking

Yet clinging as one,

Stamped on the water's waking

Like a dream-sun


That nothing of crude clay

Can touch or move—

So, fixed though far away,

Some haloed Love


Shines down its secret soul,

Flame-flower with no root,

Which life with its slushy roll

Leaves still and mute,


A birth-mark out of a womb

Deeper than thought,

Flinging a godlike doom

From a golden grot


Hung virgin above the tosst

Wave of time's dirt,

The crown of a steel-post

Vigilling inert,


Page 21



Withdrawn from snaky swirl

Of mortal cries,

True to the mother-of-pearl

Lustre that lies


Immovable though thin

On each desire

Winding its froth within

The walls of mire


Which build the body of man. . .

O might I feel—

Through dreams that hushward run—

A Self of steel,


Upright and hurtless and high,

Then hiddenly climb

To the lotus-lamp of the Eye ,

That is lord of time!


19-5-48

Page 22

Veilless word

Mine be the Veilless word,

Pure spirit grown!

No more in the mould of stone

Blindly bestirred

At the foot of the mountain-muse

Galling to its peak

The chasmed cries and hues

That wander and seek—-

No more in the dusky bark

Built round dream-day,

Or even the quivering coat

Of bright and dark

Hungers for unseen prey.

To free the stainless note

Each swathe must fall aswoon;

Nor must the glorious skin

Whose passionate pores outbreathe

The splendoured soul within

Be left—the very last

Subtlest and gauziest sheath

Has keenly to be cast

Down if the hidden glow

Would bare the deathless tune

That lay like a floating moon

In the pool of night below!

Stripped of all vesture-sign

And symbol-robe,

Sheer sense of the Divine

Must burn and throb,

Etching with naked flame

The immortal summit-name

Whose heaven unheard

Awoke the abysm's word!

20-5-48


Page 23

The two crosses

O wide-winged crucifixion in the sky,

Floating in a light of sempiternal ease,

Singing in a fire of incorruptible joy—

Bird with full stretch of golden reverie

Spanning thy own vast soul and breaking forth

To sapphire liberties of the Unknown!


O same bright body that on blinded earth

Liest pinned by steely spikes of mortal law,

With human hands thrown out in time's fatigue,

Palms bearing the dark boon of torn life-blood,

Nails frozen to a sky's blue cut and crushed!


O supine sorrowful creature, lift thy gaze

There where the invisible cross creating all

And speeding all to the Space-Self's four extremes—

Rapt Being, locked Knowledge, poised Ecstasy,

Gigantic Rhythm of oneness millionfold—

Is an omnipresent moving mystery,

With those white pinions of thy Archetype

Held ever unfurled beneath the viewless power

In deep suspense yet wide discovery!


Mirror in thy inmost heart the apocalypse

That hangs above thee as thy timeless truth.

Then, like a miracled lightning which at once

Shoots down and up, thou'It catch to a single fate

Of freedom there and freedom here, in a bliss of the All,

Thy pulse of beauty cloven now in two

By a cross of heaven and a cross of hell!


21-5-48


Page 24

Without and within

Why should I fear the body's burning siege,

Deeming its colour a war on eternity?

The secrecy within now feels scorched ash,

Since still unknown is the salamander soul,

The immune indweller of the blaze of time,

Outpassioning passion by its cry for God.

This soul is native to the crimson throb:

It archetypes all animal ecstasy:

Body is its own dream half-realised yet.

When wakes that reveller of the alchemic deep,

Whose golden eyes see heaven everywhere,

The peace that plumbs the Immutable's mystery

Finds in those leaping tongues of the fire of form

No hell blaspheming with a hundred mouths.

The singing chaos that ensheathes the spirit

Grows suddenly a rapture-drunk embrace

Of the hidden God by a God who bursts to flame!

The loves of earth are stained with sin no more.

They turn a crystal jar of deathless wine

Shedding an aura through each glassy wall

To envelop the whole universe and touch

The seraph's secret smile on every face!

22-5-48


Page 25

Eternity

Vain is the immensity of the one God

If all that vast is but intolerance

Of time and life and earth's long cry for love!

No laughter crosses with its rippling light

Monotonies of measureless Self-space

Where Being broods on Being evermore

And heaven seeks not heaven in a hundred shapes.

Undepthed of the One the many are futile foam;

But losing the love-smite of soul on soul

The single God is a darkness in full noon!

O we must shatter the walls of mortal mind,

Grow white waves of the universal sea,

Win our true selves by loss in the breakless All;

But how shall loss of narrow humanhood—

The small snake with its tail in its own mouth—

Gain freedom in existence without end

If still the wide mouth grips its own wide tail?

The Eternal is not bound by being sole;

His unity is not blind to its sun-face—

Starved with abysses of unfathomed honey:

He drains them through the multi-flaming touch

Of seraph meeting seraph, breast to breast,

Or through heart answering to angel heart

From star and star unthinkably aloof-

Countless caprices of communion.

The Eternal is not bound by millionness;

Crystalling to unnumbered forms apart,

His rapture is innumerably nude—

Wonder to wonder shouting its inmost glow

And seizing every shout like a rhythm found

By the sheer harking to one's own blood-tune.

Extinction with no faintest hue of the hours

Left wavering like a rainbow glimpsed in sleep,

Nirvana dense with the unscrutable Void—

And yet a termless marvel of new birth,


Page 26



A goalless galaxy of all-viewing Eyes!

Gigantic calm feeding each glimmery mote

With a packed omnipresence till that spark

Flowers out a universe of aureole

To capture all things in a magic net—

And every mote a master and a slave!

A lonely throb which echoes everywhere

And learns a myriad lore of lonelihoods—

Beat upon beat of bliss ever the same

Yet ringing infinite tones of goldenness—

A solitary word self-scattering

To illimitable multitudes of sound

That swell like dawns and sink like eventides,

Chameleons of a thousand fugitive truths,

Clingings and clashings of reckless nectar-deeps,

Unbarriered rhapsodies that have no aim,

Musics magnificent with meanings lost,

Weaving a maze that sings all thought aswoon,

A shining chaos of unquenchable chords

Each calling from the unknown to the unknown,

Straining as if the heart could never speak,

Quivering as if no passion could be heard,

Bursting as if no dream could find a voice

And, by that teeming nameless miracle,

Uttering the unutterable Secrecy! . . .

Such is the Eternal who fulfils all time.


23-5-48


Page 27

Saviour-guide

So many ways I had gone,

Called by the hues

Of a myriad thronging dreams

That never could fuse.


You showed the one white path;

Treading its calm, all else

I saw as a leap of sand

Away from the magic wells


That seem so faint and far

Through the wandering haze

Which now at last I know

As the outward human gaze.


Gone is the straining look;

Blissfully blind

With love of the Secret Crescent

Whose vanishing point is the mind,


I walk a pearly roadstead

Beyond all drossy days—

A curve to heaven drawn by

That Silver Smile of Your face.


Deep and more deep within,

I am guided to my rest

Where the wells of deathless nectar

Hide in each mortal breast.

24-5-48


Page 28

Single without a second

Breath of the boundless blue,

Throb of the perfect gold,

'Poise of the peak that is purple,

Green wideness rapture-rolled—


Streak of new moon that trickles

Some immortality,

Trance-touch of stars like a love

Whose depth no man can see—


All these are felt by us,

Our aching eyes are called

To many a far wood-gloom

Fairily waterfalled—


Our trembling hand bares heaven

With a tiny stroke of the brush,

Or through the quill's faint quiver

Eagles of ecstasy rush—


Wonders are all about,

Wonders well up within,

A gurgle sweeter than any name,

A deep unworded din.


Yet with so rich a scatter

Of moment-miracles,

A pang and a poverty

Darken our pulse.


O passing the paradises,

Till we have gone

Behind the myriad marvels

To the Marvellous One!


Page 29



Haphazard are the jewels

The brief hours bring,

Unless they hold together

On a timeless string.


A gap of gloom will ever

Haunt flashes of mere mind,

Ere in some Whole of infinite fire

Our little flames go blind.


How shall the unchanging bliss's

Ether be known,

If the gods who throng conceal

The God who is alone—


Single without a second,

The unbroken master-mood,

With no beyond to ache for,

The peace of plenitude—


No fear of foeman's ambush,

Each hidden face

A deep of self-disclosure,

A secret of self-gaze!


Him must we find in the blue,

The gold, the purple, the green,

The silver and even the shadow—

A light that is unseen!


One ray of Him can pierce

All mortal misery,

And every lock of the universe

Shall open to this Key.

25-5-48


Page 30

The eternal vast

Sunk in a gulf that seems to reach no close,

Winged to a mountain climbing without end,

Stretched till the heart has grown horizonless,

We touch the Vast of the supracosmic Self.

Night is not there, nor day; yet both lie dense

For ever in a mighty measureless mood

Coloured with That for which no word is born—

A night where frozen is all mortal sound,

A day that burns up every tongue of time!

But though the earth-cry shrivels and falls away

And human gaze is buried by the mass

Of an infinite sun no sky can utter forth,

A salamander of omniscient sleep

Is laughing and dancing in the invisible blaze.

Body that calls with eyes that are beyond,

He bears the smile that makes all things divine,

His stainless fingers touch truth everywhere.

Ear cannot seize his rhythm of deathless life,

But if deep calm can drown the universe

The rapt enchanter slips into our soul

And through his own self-hearing reverie

We learn the secret of the eternal Vast.


25-5-48


Page 31

Triumph is all

I build Thee not on golden dreams

Nor on the wide world's winsomeness:

Deeper than all I set my love—

A faith that is foundationless!


Not only where Thy silver steps

Twinkle a night of nenuphars,

But everywhere I see Thy heaven:

I love the night between the stars.


O mine the smiling power to feel

A secret sun with blinded eyes,

And through a dreaming worship bear

As benediction wintry skies.


For ever in my heart I hear

A time-beat of eternal bliss.

White Omnipresence! where is fear?

The mouth of hell can be Thy kiss.


The whole world is my resting-place:

Thy beauty is my motherland:

Sweet enemies are wounds of age—

My body breaks but by Thy hand.


Triumph is all—as though beneath

An unseen flag of rapture's red

A beating of great drums went on

With every giant drummer dead!

26-5-48


Page 32

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


Page 33



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.


28-5-48


Page 34

Europe takes a look

A rove all time he towers . . . Voronoff

Will ask: "How can the Omnipotent have no lust,

When lust is the sole sign of potency?"

Herr Freud will find the eternity in his eyes

Haunted by memories of his mother's womb—

And the oneness with the Ancient of Days

An outrage dreamed upon his grandmother!

Then Doctor Bates will say, "He blinks so well—

Perfectly simple why he sees all truth!"

And face-cream makers want his recipe

Of the skin growing fairer with Light's touch.

When rhythms like singing flames break from his mouth

Even though his beard is chilled with age's snow,

The Faculty of Science wonders what

Complex of Vitamins A, B or C

Is the food of his sun-thought—-they never guess

The Alpha and the Omega of the world

Can from beyond the cries of birth and death

Vitamin him with the Golden Word made flesh.

A miracle of glandular therapy

He seems, when laughing at the grave's deep threat

As at the silly gape of a vast fool:

How shall they see the ductlessness divine

Hidden like lotuses of a viewless moon,

Secreting nectars that can keep the clay

Hormoned with blissful immortality?

And if he lays the hand which heals the heart

Of chronic sorrow and acute desire,

They call him hypnotist sending brain-waves

To drown in cool oblivion: do they know

That he awakes with benediction's palm

Sudden remembrance of the ecstatic soul

Lost in the uniustred labyrinth of the limbs

And seeking vainly for its godlike crown? . . .


Page 35



O pack of learned dolts who waste your eyes

Looking for body, body everywhere,

Will you feel never that He who made clay-form

Can make Himself a little form of clay

To unveil the Infinite which has fathered all

By skill beyond the ape-grafting Voronoff

And far above the power Jung can grant

The beast in us to sit in mind's bright cage,

Mating with dreams instead of female folk?

O gropers for the key to physical secrets,

Might not the physical open like a door

Through which the Eternal comes out of the unknown?

If you would gauge the grandeur of this Man,

Look deep within yourselves while watching him:

Not by the probing knife or microscope

Or psycho-analysis' small prurient prick

But by the ineffable trance you'll touch the abyss

Of the shining Seed that flowers in the Avatar!


29-5-48


Page 36

White stallion

White stallion champing the barley

Of silent bliss—

Gathering into thy heart's

Vermilion abyss


A power outrunning time,

As if to a witching west

Out of a wizard east

Racing were one with rest,


A calm that suddenly views

Here grown to There,

A wide-awake sleep devouring

Aeons with a single stare!


Fastest of all the flames

Born of the Cave beyond sight,

Bringing on starry nostrils

A neigh that is night—


Carrier of immortality

Between blue wings,

Yet hooved with a hurry to spurn

Imperishable things—


On all the tracks of truth

Speed without peer,

But unappeased by winning

God's Derby every year!


O never-ageing stallion,

Down to lean-breasted earth

Thou comest like a lover

Through the low gate of birth,


Page 37



Renouncing the vast triumphs,

Graciously gone to stud

For mixing nameless nectar

With sobbing mortal blood!


Alone among the godheads

Thy soul was never drunk

With self-infinitudes,

But saw the Den far-sunk


Where weak yet restive fetlocks

Were secrets without keys,

Unknowing why for all the weakness

The running would not cease—


Why the dim quiver of fatigue

Was a tremble of blind joy

As if behind the fallen ears

There rose a heavenly "Hoy!"


Thou on thy thunderous hill

Couldst hear the strange despair

In those four tottering mysteries

Of the black-bodied mare.


Many a groping steed

Sought her for dam

Of darkling colts and fillies,

But like an oriflamme


The mane on her neck of night

Fluttered to a wind of dream,

And never from her heart ran forth

The future's shadowy stream.


Page 38



But now the lives to come

Take singing start

In the crimson distances

Of the deep heart.


The laugh of the mountain Cave,

The sigh of the Den below

Have married their mystic sounds:

Their children shall grow


A wonder-dappled pack,

Love's rich surpris

Even to the gaze of grandeur

That is paradise!


30-5-48


Page 39

When ?

When shall my heart be broken

By the horizon-pull of the witcheried waves of twilight

Or the world-silencing slaughter that is sunset?


Till then the god is unwoken

Who dreams in the crushing splendour or the shy light

And grips the heart flame-gold or distantly duns it.


O ears, sink deep when you listen

To the downward sighing spiral of dead leaves

Or the waterfall dragging the mountain away!


Lose, little eyes, your glisten:

All shimmers, grandeurs, far plunges and near heaves

Find their own secrets in the nameless Night-Day


Wearing a crown that dazzles time aswoon,

Bearing a robe that darkens space asleep—

Locked in the heart, till a stifled sob is the moon

And the sun a tear we strive in vain to weep:


A pang of beauty thrown back from lips and eyes

To a Cave within that knows self-paradise!


31-5-48


Page 40

Art of arts

Never through Angelo's eye, Beethoven's ear,

Is caught the Timeless Wonder tense and sheer.

Eternity comes outvasting all their art,

An intimate blindness breaking in the heart

To sudden seizure of a shadowless sky,

Deep blue unheard, huge wind shutting the eye,

And yet the music and magnificence

A rapture that is everything at once,

So colour is audible and symphony seen

And both a plunging mystery too keen

To rest on painter's canvas, player's score,

As if an endless edge infinity wore,

Cleaving a chasm of splendour and surprise

From shaken brain down unto trembling thighs—

A straight canal of dreaming opaline,

Shot through the darkness of the mortal spine

For tryst of God below with God above

In spark on lotus-spark of deathless love! . . .


Colour is a burst of rhythm which cannot move,

Tune is a fire whose tongue is never still,

And both go yearning with a wordless will.

A different art must passion, a strange skill

To pluck miraculous signs from God's intent

Power and peace that pledge their hearts away

Each to the other in everlasting play

And, striking heart on heart, ring forth a call

To unborn universes, a rise and fall

And rise again of lion thunders fraught

With lightning-bolts of brief yet boundless thought

Uttering the mystic ocean, the magic land

In shining speech the seraphs understand,

Words that are more than tune, words that make mind

Crystallise from the Unknowable behind

And give a shape to elusive secrecy


Page 41



That silver moments for the ear and eye

May spring like stars to rumour the immense

Sable of Spirit devouring intelligence!


The echoer of the Eternal's master-mood—

Plumbing more truly His infinitude

Than the bright seer brush-fixed in heaven's court

Or the vast somnambuie of the pianoforte

Wandering from key to key of ivory gates—

Is the art where sight and sound mingle their fates

By symbol and by rhythm sharing one birth

Out of that deepest thrill of beauty's mirth,

The million-meaninged wonderment of name

The poets bring God's ether and God's flame!


1-6-48


Page 42

Art beyond art

O where in painter's hue, musician's tone

Is the marvel touch of the myriadly Alone

Whom without hands our hunger has to seek

And whose clairaudient cave and prophet peak

Are found like a burst of self-discovery

Blotting the mind with hushed eternity?

How shall tense poet or keen sculptor know

The vault of wonder stunning all below—

A never-resting never-moving sky,

Huge mouth unheard, far sun outvasting the eye?


Only the vigil of the worshipping heart

Carries the one apocalyptic art,

The power to fashion the whole body anew,

Mirroring the All-Beautiful, echoing the All-True!


2-6-48


Page 43

Vision splendid

Magic gem-cutter, lapidary of light,

Transmuter of the crystalling consciousness,

Swiftly converting each dull bead of glass

To flawless and omniscient Koh-I-Noor!

Soon may thy plan scintillate into sight,

A myriad divinity of diamond

Set in a sable vast of silences,

A heart of unified humanity

Immense with the invisible muse of the One,

Wakeful within to numberless life-beats

Silvering out in the abysm of clay

Star-moments of a paradisal peace!

An adamantine energy shall break

Each mortal bound, yet seem for ever still,

Even as Arcturus and his fiery hosts

Hurl with undreamable speed through infinite space

Yet hang firm-fixed for earth's astronomy.

All movements of that energy take rise

In the farness of a supracosmic sleep

And the most gorgeous plunging forth of flame

Knows no fatigue, no shattering of cool rest,

Since one sole Being stretches everywhere,

Leaping through time from self to deathless self.


2-6-48

Page 44

The tone of the true

A myriad voices

Quiver and leap

Out of our being's

Myriad deep.


How shall we gather

The tone of the true

From such a chaos

Of the heart's hue?


Mind cannot gauge

Vermilion,

Carmine or scarlet,

Damask or dun,


Shades of desire

Self-uttering—

Strange heavens and hells

That suddenly fling


Reasonless reveries

Longing to make

Our body their crater

Of fierce flame-break.


One colour of colours

That cry from the dark

Is the song all time

Has waited to hark;


But sly are the powers

Burning within

And well can they wear

The angel's mien


Page 45



To drive the pilgrim

Along rock-ways

Where the feet seeking

The Perfect Face


Forgotten by earth

Are bled to a halt

And lost for ever

Is the lure of the Vault!


Only when mind

Puts reasoning by

And with an abrupt

Shutting of eye


Draws back from the brain

To a Self that is mute,

We hear in the distance

The call of a flute,


A pang of roses,

An attar-flow,

A liquid dawn

Whose trembling glow


Lifts from a deathless

Alchemy

Hiding its sun

In mortality!


This tune of rapture

Can never be found

Until we give it

That calm background.


Page 46



Alone its ardour

Can breathe in the peace

While all other passions

Flicker and cease


At touch of the vast

Virginity

Behind the thinker's

Small ache to see


What pleasures are locked

In clay-born things.

Alone the hunger

Which Truth outsings


From the human heart

Quivers more bright

Its fiery tongue

On tasting such white.


For only this love

Is pure in its cry,

Reddening to clasp

Though none reply.


Torn by no jealous

Self-concern,

Steadily throbbing

Its beauties burn.


And, always a craving

Winsomely wild,

It shoots up a mingle

Of lover and child.


Page 47



And into their fervence

A wisdom is wrought,

The red heat verging

On the white-hot!


Warm and wise

And innocent

The cherub flies

To the firmament,


Offering its all,

Quenchlessly keen—

Age after age—

For the Face unseen.


2-6-48



Page 48

Words

Let me not utter five things in five words,

But by one word of densest diamond

Pack five things to a shining secrecy

That gathers a deep truth missed by them all;

Or else with five words capture one sole thing,

Pluck from it fires that light up earth's abysm—

Fires that were veiled by being locked together,

But now a fourfold seizure from without

Of splendours and terrors ruling time and space

And then a sudden self-sight, a fifth flame

That knows by a sheer eternity within! . . .


Words have not come to measure things that are;

They plunge to the unheard, leap to the unseen,

Being ear and eye a chaos of surprise

Till through a dark delight of consciousness

Huge nebulas swirl out dream-distances,

Stretching the soul to a rapt infinity! . . .


Words are the shadows of enhaloed hawks:

The shadows cling to clay and seem clay-born,

But he who marks their moving mystery

Feels how a strange spontaneous quiver wings

Their passage here and how intangible

They float for all their close and massive shapes.

Alone the poet looks up to the Inane,

Sees the gold wanderers of the boundless blue,

Catches the radiant rhythms each burning heart

Puts forth in every line of the wide form

Spanning the silences with pinion-song.

Thus in his scheme of shades from the vast throng

Haunting the earth-mind he shows across brief thought

Glimmers immortal, throbbings of the bliss

That reels through heaven a drunkard of Truth's sun.

Or, in rare moment quick with dawn and noon


Page 49



And eve at once, our little human dreams

Love with such far-flung eyes the undying birds

That the large lust comes swooping down for prey

And, where the shadows mystically shone,

Falls—crushing, piercing, ravishing every sense—

The living body and beauty and blaze of God!


3-6-48


Page 50

Nectarous night

Make me thy child, wrap round thy viewless vault,

Thy endlessly expanding ether's globe

Cherishing in its depth globules of God.

Star me within that sable mother-space,

Hushfully heavened by thy enfolding dream

Which without effort feeds all infant glows

To brighten and broaden into kingly seers

Thrilled with a universal harmony.

Then will I reach behind my own self's light

The Eternal who is birthless in things born,

Equal to pin-point and infinity,

Fused mother and child, one seer who is multiform,

Merger of the whole cosmic consciousness

In That which none can know but all can be!


O leave me wingless on the earth no more;

Bird me in thy dark dawning overhead,

Invisible ere the heart burns up, a love

Hungering to lose its life in the unknown!

How shall I laugh in the dust clouding my gaze

To the bliss beyond, whose quiet is new birth

Of every mortal dream as truth's gold fire?

Iraise to thee my flickering hands of clay,

Lean from thy dome of diamond secrecies,

Quench the pale longing of my dwarf despair,

Blow a great wind of mystery on small eyes,

Drive my diffuse blood-heat to the hidden heart

For one intensest ache to plunge in thee,

O nectarous night of superhuman trance!

4-6-48


Page 51

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


Page 52



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


Page 53

Let the ear read

Read not with eye alone,

Let the ear read:

Then shall you see the lines

Of rhythmic speed


Gather and curve to form

Bodies of gold—

A glory that can never

To the eye unfold


Unless a hush, intent

With wondering,

Hears that unearthly sweetness

Goldenly ring!


Sight is the surface mind,

Sound the deep heart:

Until you catch in the poet's

Magical art


The throb and thrill and throe.

Of this profound,

The gods of unbearable beauty

Are never found.


Not when the brain goes dreaming,

But when we kiss

A night unknown and the heart

Breaks with blind bliss,


Our tunes are suddenly born

Out of a calm

Vaster than all the world

And in our palm


Page 54



Is felt a quenchless fire

And our fingers are flames,

Bright tongues that quiver out

Revealing names


For all they touch on earth,

Names echoing

Secrets aglow behind

Each mortal thing.


Thus do we bear to you

With every word

Thoughts that seem tangible

As soon as heard—


Thoughts that can open eyes

To search within,

Where souls uncrossed by shadow,

Shapes without sin


Await in smiling slumber

The dawn-hour when

Their immortalities

Shall wake in men.



But eyes will never see them

If ears cannot hark

The wind of a mystery

Divinely dark,


The ageless all-creative

Ecstatic Breath

Which blew the rhythm of life

Through chaos and death.


5-6-48


Page 55

Height and depth

The Archangels burn before the Perfect Face—

Lighting all deeds from the Omnipotent's gaze.

With heads upon His breast the Seraphim

Tune their whole lives to the heavenly heart of Him.

The cherubs laugh within His lap and play

On faultless harps their rhythms of night and day.

What shall we mortals do? O ours to meet

With worshipping brow the flowers of His feet!


Keen are the raptures of the sky-born host,

Raptures with not one glorioled reverie lost.

We that have known the abyss of blinded birth,

How can we share those vastitudes of mirth?

Yet, through the passion of frail feet which stray,

A peace beyond all peace, a gold through grey

Felt goldener, the quiet and the height

Come to our wanderer love's upturning sight,

And by the bowed surrender of our mind

Deepest the immortal Secret is divined!


Archangels, Seraphim and Cherubs, you

Shall suddenly discover the All-True,

The All-Beautiful, a dark you cannot scan—

A Mystery that wears the face of man!


6-6-48


Page 56

Earth's roof

Earth's roof is heaven's floor—

The dome of mind

Must bear a trampling terror

Before we find


Through a sudden gap the mythic

Eternity alive!

It cannot reach our body

Ere hard heels drive


Deep into gilded dreams

Arching a false

Heaven for life's sad longing.

Secretly calls


The true infinitude—

Gong of God's day

Or bells of unknown bliss

Tintinning far away.


But who shall ever answer

The bourneless blue

Unless the proud dome break

Its stony hue


Under an unseen dancer's

Timeless foot—

Rapture whose rhythms are

A tearing of thought?


Some drunkenness on high

Demands the whole

Destruction of each fresco

Made of the soul

Page 57



On the ceiling intellect,

Where never a chink has drawn

Out of the sun of Truth

The dimmest dawn!


Not for a smooth confirming

Of coloured guess,

But for an all-surprising

New loveliness


The mind must strain—a curve

Pulled more and more intent

With a hush that has no name,

Till one sheer rent


Aches forth the marvel word

Whose quiverings make

Each deathless mystery

Timeward awake!


Alone this burst of love,

The crumbling cry

Of earth's rich roof, can bring

The apocalypt sky.


6-6-48


Page 58

The great face

O we must plunge to the Great Face behind

The myriad vanity of our mortal look.

Not in that house of mirrors, the small mind,

Dwells the Great Face. Never this glory took

Pleasure of glory. The golden eyes are blind

To their immortal preciousness: they find

Paradise through the deep discovery

Of their sweet self-forgetfulnesses by

The aching gaze of man which suddenly

Recalling them forgets for ever all ache!

Here lives a light that knows life's secret source—

Omniscience with no single shadow-break—

Yet here too is the thoughtless rain that pours

In crystal quavers deaf to their rich tone,

The hill dawn-crimsoning like some angel's birth

But dark to its own epiphany on earth,

The well-water sunk far from cool self-taste,

A sleeping sweetness, or the wonder-waste

Of emerald innocent of its green allure.

Divinity is quick flesh and vague stone,

Arms stretched in a lost attitude of trance,

Palpitant marble rapt in giving grace

Of radiant love to every tear-filled glance,

Perfection's breathing statue unconcerned

With the luminous line all ages come to adore:

Ever for others the white peace has burned!

A power beyond all lack, yet slave to a sigh

From lips that pray or to frail lifting hands—

Heart like the sun shining without demands—

Hunger which finds appeasement when void days

Of the world's hunger brim—God is intense

With bliss undying that would gladly die

If one time-creature's gold might never grey.

His splendour flows and flows with the same dense

Desire to every depth: He will not shrink


Page 59



From making His whole wine the desert's drink!

The abyss He built from His magnificence

That He might hurl into its vacant stare

His Being's heaven—of heaven unaware

Except when hurled below. How shall He stay

An inexhaustible love? God is immense

To have immensity to throw away!


7-6-48


Page 60

Front 8th May to 8th June

A month has flown like some Archangel's form

Dripping a light of God-drunk reverie.

And I have lain aloof and still to see

The truth-gold pinions of that singing storm.

Men move with days; but I have reached a rest

From where I view days moving wondrously

Out of an east of crimson gaiety

Unto a violet wisdom in the west!


Even in the drowsy hours that ever fade

Far and more far into a black beyond,

The same Archangel's secret heart-beats chime,

A dimness of divinest diamond.

Rapture is all, because my mind is made

One with a Mother Mystery above time.


8-6-48


Page 61

Lord of dream-love

Eyes like blue lotuses,

Figure and face of gold,

Each finger-nail a gem—

The seers behold


The Perfect and Eternal,

Past wonderings:

Moved by His glorious calm

The whole heart sings!


With halo of silver hair

Out-timing time—

Beard like a starless night,

Secret sublime


Of a young infinity—

The nameless One

Is waiting and Vigilling

Yet calling none.


Love ocean-deep, sky-high,

Dreams in that gaze;

Tongues of a fire of love,

The arms upraise


Their gold to the unknown

From which He came

For showing the dull earth

How to be flame!


Not through a lust to win

His glowing grace

But through an ache to be

That formless Space


Page 62



He draws the heart of man:

Lacking void peace—

Support of utter freedom—

Form can release


No conqueror energy,

Outfiowering

From weary broken shoulders

Wing and vast wing.


So never does He shine

His own appeal,

But makes the mind of the seers

Inwardlv feel

Profound on dim profound

Where they must fall

To echo the overarching

Unseen beyond all


And from that chasm of trance

Wake to new birth,

Discovering in their bodies

A heaven of earth,


An image of the Shape

Burning above,

The omnipotently tranquil

Lord of dream-love.


8-6-48


Page 63

Mystic mountains

The Alps soar to lone pinnacles of light,

Intensities of isolated trance,

An upward rush of separate sanctities

The mind can cherish in its narrow sight

And worship with its flitting wonderment.

But O the thought-bewildering wall of white

Outrunning the extremes of human gaze,

Vanishing to the right, fading to the left

And lifting a universe of dreaming ice,

A vast virginity with no gap in God

To let the world's familiar face yearn through—

All life plucked from its level loiterings

To one dense danger of divinity,

A sheer leap everywhere of soul made rock

Of rapture unperturbable by time—

The Himalaya's immense epiphany!


No thin melodic themes drawn to high hush

Which yet weighs never the ineffable on earth's ear

Nor wipes out the earth's eye with infinite blank:

Here an all-instrumental harmony

Sweeps to a multitudinous peace beyond—

Both ear and eye numb with eternal snow,

Stunned by an adamant absolute of height,

Until new senses burst from the unknown—

A vision of the farthest truth above,

Around, below: a hearing of heaven's heart

Behind each pulse-throb of mortality!

Too often have we adored the Alpine mood,

Submitted to the cleavage between crests,

Followed the peak of love or peak of power

Or wisdom rising to a silver summit.

The uttermost of each hangs still ungrasped:

Life is a breakless cry: without the whole

Self towering up in massive mystic sleep


Page 64



How shall it wear the crown of the endless sky?. ..

O wanderer soul, drunkard of distances,

Perfection's pilgrim, touch with votive brow

The foot of the one transcendent Himalaya!


8-6-48


Page 65

Beneath , Above

My dawn's first look, the last look of my night

Are a small window framing one slim tree,

The mid-trunk visible, a groping brown,

The top and base a secret to my sight.

One pace from bed, in the morning of the mind

Or in the heart's nocturnal glimmer and grey,

Shows me the stem below, the leaves on high,

A birth in clay, in void air a long search.


But there's a cry from some great window lost:

"Look not for truth without, truth lives within!". .

Across the lonely strangenesses of sleep

Looms a far vision that is night nor day:

Between my drowse and my awakening,

The tree is an Omniscience at blind play—

Not from beneath but from above it grows,

The murmurous leaves a power of green gloom

Hurled downward for new self-discovery,

The roots a rapture sucking the infinite sky!


9-6-48


Page 66

Great wings

Great wings, one white and one of gold

Our dreaming spirit must unfold,

The wing of shadowless purity,

The wing of power that cannot die.


But life gains not this liberty

Unless a wideness ever free

Is the formless depth of what we are,

A mystery standing near and far,

An omnipresence of rapt air,

No need to rush forth anywhere,

An all-supporting breakless peace

That makes the soul of form release

Wings beyond earthly nights and days,

And bears with cool invisible grace

Their waft of gold-white victory:

Godhead is only godhead by

A soar of Self within Self-space.


9-6-48


Page 67

The adventure of the apocalypse

We deem the darkness and the throe

True measure of each ecstasy's glow:

Only the background of huge night

Reveals our drama of delight.

We are enamoured of each fall

That high winds of the mountain's call

May kiss the sweeter. How shall we

Grave sorrowless divinity?

Wanderer of gleam and gloom, man's orb

Of vision never can absorb

The adventure of the apocalypse—

Until his passion inward dips

Where hides, behind both dazzle and dark,

Perfection's pygmy, the soul-spark

Plunged in the abyss to grow by strange

Cry of contraries, chequer and change

Of pain and pleasure, to the bliss

Whose utter sky the utter abyss

Wagered to mirror and manifest.

That flaming finger can attest

The paradox of eternity,

The endless smile that knows no sigh,

Yet in the peace and plenitude

Keeps every sting of the restless mood.

The ethers of Perfection are

No loss of sight that strains afar.

Nothing those glories lack, yet bear

New wonders kindling everywhere

God is two colours of one light,

A heavenly hermaphrodite—

Calm husband, master of all life,

Radiant incalculable wife—

Magic caprice without a lull,

Joined to a wisdom ever full

With secret of each sudden flash


Page 68



Yet feeling the bright laughter-lash

As if the Unknown's epiphany

Could take the Unknown's self unaware!

Hush that is infinitely bare

Only to catch an infinite voice—

A love that thrills from here to there

With a hundred hearts of reverie

Though holding by a vast of space

All glimmering goals in one embrace—

A rose-break of dawn after dawn

Despite a sunflower's zenith poise

Of noon that never is withdrawn—

Burst of vermilion surprise

Even to gold omniscient eyes—

Such is the Godhead whose sublime

Fusion of two fires strokes of time

Have split to joys and miseries—

Such is the Godhead of our fears:

Treasuring short-lived smiles and tears,

We shun the grandeur-smite that hurls

Away small rubies and brief pearls!


10-6-48

Page 69

the master

Bard rhyming earth to paradise,

Time-conqueror with prophet eyes,

Body of upright flawless fire,

Star-strewing hands that never tire—

In Him at last earth-groupings reach

Omniscient calm, omnipotent speech,

Love omnipresent without ache!


Does still a stone that cannot wake

Keep hurling through your mortal mind

Its challenge at the epiphany?

If you would see this blindness break,

Follow the heart's humility—

Question not with your shallow gaze

The Infinite focussed in that face,

But, when the unshadowed limbs go by,

Touch with your brow the white footfall:

A rhythm profound shall silence all!


11-6-48


Page 70

Demi-monde

In a deep dusk between the known

Day and the night which broods alone,

There moves—with primrose-sparkles thrown

Across—the shady-pathed beyond

Of a superhuman demi-monde.

That wayward mystery we outcast,

Deeming its free heart-flame too fast,

Too wandering and too multiform:

We love the mind's clear-bodied norm

And not this wile of distant hue

Across a shimmer of nectar-dew—

Strange lure of the unnamable,

Soliciting our lips to cease

Their oaths of rigid loyalties

And mutely summoning us to break

Out of the marriage of thought and speech

Towards the thought no word can reach,

No cry of intellect overtake,

But only the heart's wide discontent

Catches in a sudden throb and thrill!

The demi-monde of the half-divine

Is a wondrous weakness of the will,

Striving for a vague firmament,

Letting the tangible earth far-fall.

It offers but a fickle shine

Of raptures never thine or mine,

Dim ecstasies that are conjoint,

Each moment a new magic mood

Of piercing brief beatitude, I

nfinity's touch by paradise-point,

Giving its miracle to all

Who pay the passionate pangful price

Of near things precious in our eyes—

Self-pride, wealth-hoard, home-life, world-fame.

But, save through the soul's demi-monde


Page 71



Where time is stripped of every shame

Of being drunk with the unseen voice

Of some eternal liberty,

There never can be a true bond

Between earth's shallow wakeful joys

And high Perfection's stellar poise

Of measureless secrecy above.

The extremes are drawn close only by

This Venus-lit horizonry,

This dream-dusk of unfettered love!


12-6-48


Page 72

Above, within

This hour of dusk

Thrills in my heart a cry for precious things:

How wilt thou please, O life with so small wings,

O thou great heap of straw and a grain of musk?


Over me reigns

The empire of a superhuman sleep

Precious with secret plenitudes that keep

A teeming twinkling infinite of musk-grains!


Breathes far away

That mystery measureless above all time.

Will ever the Vast wake even here a chime

Of heavenly gold transmuting common day?


Heart within heart—

Calls a wide garden sown in a mirrored sky,

Deep day of some divine world-soul with eye

On blossoming eye, dream-single though apart!


O roses, bright

With love of a calm space that is all sun!

O space of calm, miraculously one

With each rose by a limitless love-light!


14-6-48


Page 73

O vastness waiting for my small heart's touch

To bare the beat of your colossal heart

Hidden behind that hush of mountain-rock!

Piled with an ageless love is your grey poise,

But all a dreaming distance till we stretch

Our hands with a cry no granite gloom can crush;

Then like an echo million times rolled back

Come the same yearning tones and the aloof

Eternities enfold the limbs that die...


Now life is a circling sea of skies afloat,

Chanting one truth whose rhythms are numberless,

Each wave a dragon of the Infinite

Waking from the sleep that is omniscience

Plunged in its own abyss of nectar-light.

And though to all gaze I am rooted in silent trance

I reach on the vast embraces of God's deep

A golden shore of immortality,

Earth's secret Self lost by the shallows of mind.. .


15-6-48


Page 74

Beyond Both Grief and- Joy

Joy is the homing luminous,

Grief is the brightness flown from us,

Eluding mortal limbs that tire—

Both are a single song of fire

Whose everlasting harmonies

We lose because the strokes of time,

Waking for transient things desire,

Have split the one creative chime.

In God we keep poised fulgencies

By travelling with each flame that flies

And, through a Self of boundless skies,

Conquer the distance that is pain,

So winning a more golden gain

Than pleasure flickeringly caught

Between small hands by feeble thought.

In God both pain and pleasure rhyme—

A single seizure of sublime

Radiance beyond both grief and joy:

A wide white peace without alloy,

Which moves so quick it's everywhere,

One infinite life no hungers tear!


15-6-48.


Page 75

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

Initiation at midnight

Night's noon! Does mystery reveal a rent

When the peak hour of sable loneliness

Strikes on the tranquil space of the unseen?

A bolt of superhuman secrecy

Drops in my brain as if a veil were torn

By that intensest point of Vigilling gloom!

Has some dense word of power shot suddenly down

Out of rapt overarching widenesses?—

Word like a strange shut eye that views all things

By brooding on some inward glow of truth,

So dark and day of mortal sight are one

To this omniscience that transcends our time—

Word travelling through my body to the ground—

Message of the high immense to the dumb deep

From whose heart rose our hunger for the sky!

Have now at last drawn close the calm extremes

Betwixt which glimmer and grope our little lives?

But, O brief passage of immortal bliss,

Keen answer come to agelong questionings

Whether my mortal mood shall know God's touch,

Thou leapest like a dire descent of doom,

With my whole body crying round thy laugh!

Only a hidden cave, where all the lines

Of consciousness trembling along the nerves

Have their joint source and goal, has a smiling mouth

That whispers like a sage and child at once:

"Doom hurls down ever when life's dream must climb

Out of small self towards self which is world-vast:

Under the invisible shock of a lost heaven

Each dwarf death breaks to a new and greater birth,

Until behind all birth and death wakes up Life to its own divinity's endless day!"

18-6-48


Page 77

Suns

The golden sphere of the sun in earthly skies

Echoes a globe of God whose self is light

Hung over mortal mind in a blue of bliss.

Even as the soil's cry feels in the warm day

A wonder-seed within whose circled deep

Glows a great life which answers all its need,

So the mind's longing sees in that far Eye

All knowledge rounded to a rapturous whole.

Rishis have risen there and borne bright news

Back to the multitudes weeping in the dark

And time has thought the immortal hour was won.

But when the touch of this high burning orb

Lay on the gross and heavy heart of man

Each throb wras a white flash, yet in between

The flashes gaped the gloom of an abyss.

The utter alchemy no dream called down.

A sun beyond this sun above the mind

Waits in a mystery beyond the blue:

A night more vast than the blind distances

Between our reveries and the flame they reach

Is spread between that flame and fathomless truth's

Gigantic star seen like one diamond speck

Lost in a time-transcending loneliness.

Remote from the globed sun is that strange blaze—

It rounds not human knowledge but reveals

A gold in which mind's glimmering bents are drawn

Straight by a pattern holding God's full self

Of being and consciousness, delight and power

In a gathering of the immense to the intense,

A foursquare sun focussing eternity,

Formless perfection caught in perfect form!

Here is the all-creating primal Face

Veiled by its own projected rondure of fire

Midway the enormous gap twixt earth and heaven.

Here is the all-transmuting final Face

Page 78



Which shall remove that fire and make heaven earth.

That fire is man wearing the mask of God:

Here is God wearing the true face of man!


19-6-48


Page 79

Forest cathedrals

The forest cathedrals are tolling their loud leaves.

A blue wind blows through the green towers of trance,

Waking them to a song of secrecies

Between the dark earth and the dazzling sun.

What name is murmered by those trembling bells

That move to no religion of man's heart?

We of the fetterless feet are homeless ever.

We quest a paradise that looms beyond.

Our ache is an Infinite afar and above.

Away from the soil we strain, leaving behind

The dumb deep whence our clay has sprung towards heaven.

Our souls have cut us free from the earth's dream:

Rootless our bodies roam, answering their will,

And when the souls step out into the unknown

Our bodies drop back, careless if they fail.

But here in the wood-glooms a reverie

That craves no earth-escape stands Vigilling.

Here too is failure of the body's strength

Unless some vast elixir of ecstasy

Falls in the future from the implored Inane;

Yet every branch's call, the whole sap's cry

And the tense yearning of the knotted bole

Drag with relentless roots the earth to the sky!

Or else the sky is sought with a hundred arms

For no response of saviour grace to lift

The striving life apart from the dull dust

And merge it in a timeless quietude:

Those seeking arms fling high their wide embrace

To draw the spirit of ether and of fire

Down into earth through the root's plunging power. . .


O blue wind, blow your most awaking breath,

O green leaves, toll loudest your mystery,

O blind clay, send up your profoundest pull,


Page 80



O bright sun, slip like a seed most intense

Into our hearts that a new truth may spring

Like a great tree whose love wants heaven for earth!


20-6-48


Page 81

Milk in almighty breasts

Milk in almighty breasts for the magic babe

Born of the cave of trance is the Light beyond!

From teats of mystery to a tiny mouth

Pass all the mantras: sages who burn wide

Shrink to a blinded bliss in giant arms

To drain the Whiteness hid in the highest blue!

One breast the nectarous truth of eternity,

One breast the honeyed secret of all time—

Huge hemispheres that make a rapturous whole

Of knowledge in the child-heart sucking both

And rhyming its small throb to the vast thrill

Of the single Heart behind two fullnesses!

A gloom of God strewn with a million stars

The sages view in silence above thought:

How shall the largest wonder of man's mind

Treasure that luminous sprinkle of the Immense?

Not by large dream but by intense self-loss

In one all-gathering point of the deep soul

Are pierced the utter abysses of the Unknown

Where hang those million stars together drawn

In a mother-bosom—drop on drop divine

Of ecstasy's elixir massed by two

Heavenly halves of passion and of peace—

Life-mastering sun and life-forgetting moon!

Weak with a wondrous innocence, our will

Must cling in rapt surrender to this sweet

Nourishing Supernature's deathless love.

This mother-bosom holds Infinity's

Ultimate revelation, last reply

To mortal hungers, and the marvellous gate

To its glory lies through a mystic heart within,

An aureoled agelessness that knows to gain

Omnipotence by helpless infancy!


21-6-48


Page 82

The blind bellow

O the blind bellow in the pit of sleep!

galloping strength lifts a huge neck of night

To utter some lost luminosity

But breaks into a blank of raptureless roar.

Eyes that are suns covered with lids that are rock

Yearn for a lightning-stroke from thunderous heavens

Where power is one self-lustered harmony.

No answer flashes down to the vague cry.

The burning heart is beating ecstasy's rhythm

Yet the broad tongue is a grey bitterness;

The ears are deaf to the bright truth within.

The wild breath seeks rose-pastured paradise—

All that it wins are grasses without sap,

Rare tufts fringing relentless crooked stones.

Far is each thought; fool feet run round and round. . .


Eternal seems the doom burying in the brute

A god's soul, but the bellow never ends.

Fallen lover of the glimmering herds on the hill,

Beast of immortal beauty that is blocked

From bursting back into beatitude

By a dense body built of gross desire,

Shall he not struggle with the enfolding deep

That ever would oblivion the gold grace

Lingering a thin white memory in his gloom?

O some great noon will blaze to draw him high.

He shall be plucked up if he keeps his dream

Aloft—pale arms of prayer from the abyss,

Horns of a crescent on a black bull's head!


22-6-48


Page 83

"O Moslem Men..."

"O moslem men, keep all your gazes down!"

Cries the firm law to the fire-heart of love:

The dusky earth shall ease the crimson ache

And pull the outflung arms to a limp rest.

But ever the dawn-break of woman's smile

Calls us to pink horizons of delight,

And vain the stern will of the moralist

Who, chaining thought to the soil's reticence,

Would curb the flame within from leaping far!

How shall such fetter soothe life's huge desire?

No cure is here for those wide open wounds,

The eyes smitten with wonder and witchery.


Alone the mystic comes with healing hands.

Uplifting them, he shows the true release.

Dawn-break of woman's smile is a prelude thrown

Over time's edge by hidden eternity

And colour makes a vast crescendoed day

Of the Divine. Beyond all human gleam

Light largens to a nakedness of noon,

One omnipresence of apocalypse,

Intensest love poised on a peak of trance!

Slowly the rhythm of golden amplitude

Draws then the eyes lower with cadences

Of orange and of carmine and of rose

Till a mauve mood's magic and mystery

Shimmering with unknown raptures plunges all

Our mind in a deathless deep whose veil is earth.

Now too the sight falls, but no rigid chain

Holds it: a free surrender's worshipping

Humility before high heaven calms

The fire-heart, gathering its whole outblaze

To a houseful point of self-discovery

By whose rapt knowledge every truth is known.

Oblivioned is the smile whose lure was fought


Page 84



With fear's loud cry to keep all gazes down.

If down must drop man's beauty-drunken eyes

Without revolt for loss of ecstasy,

Up first from face of woman must we burn:

"Above! Above!" must ever be the call.

O Moslem men, cast all your gazes high!


23-6-48


Page 85

Vanishing edges

All forms have vanishing edges!

Colour and line now seem

To shade off ;a the farness

Of an infinite dream!


The mind awakes to a presence

No eye can see—

Enfolding every earth-shape

With aura of mystery.


Time-figures have grown portions

Of a hidden world

Ruling by utter quiet:

Shiningly swirled


In spaces which are viewless,

They cry to me, "O sweep,

Beyond our little thrillings,

To the all-creative Deep,


Breakless and self-complete—

Bliss free of bound—

One whole of truth forever,

Needing no sound


To relish its own nectar

Of knowledge immense

That never can be fathomed

By the brief sense


You read in forms about you

As if were conned

Life's secret, without feeling

The vast beyond!"


Page 86



This cry bespells my body;

It tingles on vague nerves,

And a mystic gleam goes stealing

Along the clay-built curves.


Suddenly that strange twilight

Flickering on my skin

Draws to a conscious rapture

Some greatness locked within.


Through a gold-grey reverie

I largens out of space:

Birthless and deathless, I am playing

With a mask of human face! . . .


24-6-48


Page 87

Greatness of Earth

G reatnessof earth—high mountain, ocean deep—

God's solar zenith, watching it, shall find

No difference ' twixt small thinker and huge mind!

Between sea-level andthe Himalaya's leap,

Between shore-level and the Pacific's plunge,

Full five miles stretch-five miles that ever sound

Marvellous, the earth's sublime, the earth's profound,

But a mere nought the astronomers expunge

From calculation of the grandeured gap

Across which throws the pure transcendent noon

Its shadow-banishing universal boon

As if the uneven earth were a single lap!


The Glory and the Power beyond all clay,

Poised in a mystic vacancy of trance—

The eternal Seerhood of one golden glance

Piercing each darkness with its infinite day—

Laughs at our wonder and terror of great men.

If some soar high and some strike deep, pride goes

With them to its pinnacle or self-thought grows

A larger hollow. In the Ethereal's ken

Their victories within earth's own domain

Are trifles: the undimmable truth-star

Millions and millions of dreaming miles afar

From mortal mights which never without stain

Reach their Himalayan or Pacific mood—

How shall this Splendour, with all dross consumed,

Care for such triumph? Every might is gloomed

To littleness when so divinely viewed.

Not human greatness but the ungauged soul

Widening in superhuman secrecy

And catching with no mountainous sweep the eye,

Calling the ear with no oceanic roll—

The light within that wakes when mortals sleep—

Is measured the true majesty—a rhyme


Page 88



To eternity's sun-heart by earth-heart's time!

Therefore the Grace Supreme shall never keep

The surface-judgments by which depth or height

We mark: it nulls them with its nameless law,

Moulds by swift miracles that none foresaw

History's long curve: its crowning favours slight

Our vision's winnowing of the great and small:

Even gambler, sinner, weakling, fool or waif

It picks out, leading the lost wanderer safe

Where every life attains the ecstatic All!


25-6-48


Page 89

The two languages

O body, modern tongue swayed by thought's flicker,

How shall you be the outbreak of God's fire

Whose tones are an ancient mystery beyond thought,

A luminous Sanskrit of the secret soul

Breathing a windless vastitudes within—

Singer and seer of the omnipresent dream

Lost by the fickle light of the arguer mind ?

To your many-mooded mutability

Dead is the language of the timeless One,

Which through wide harmonies of goldenness

Steadily thrills with yet a single cry

Echoing ecstatically everywhere!

Can ever your fluctuant form facilely leaning

To a hundred different lures and loves translate

The soul's truth-pledged intense Upanishad?

Not till your cherished liberties have grown

A reasonless rapture of ineffable faith!

Wavering no longer with time's glow and gloom,

Deaf to sun-mobile day, star-tremulous night,

Immerged in peace that seems a living tomb—

Thus only can you shrine the immortal blaze,

Burn with the deep originality

Of a loveliness unchangeable yet new!

Alone the superconscious sleep can wake

To the miracle-shades of the omniscient speech

Whose limitless undertone and overtone

Rhyme, through strange words that make a million worlds,

The Infinite to the self-same Infinite.

O body, restless with thought-jangled nerves,

Rein back response to clamouring multitudes:

Dissolve your sounds in measureless silences

To learn the rhythms of eternal life.

Let the loud thinker hold breath—a rapt muse

Withdrawing beyond birth. Time's quivering tongue,

Lie still an age if you would utter God!


26-6-48


Page 90

What is Truth ?

A gelong the query, "What is truth?"

To catch on an ecstatic tongue

The answer that keeps men ever young,

Men lose their youth!


Wrinkling and gray, we lapse to the ground—

Eyes dim, mouth pale, hands helpless grown.

The answer that brings all rapture's tone

Is never found....


Never—until the eyelids drop,

The mouth falls silent suddenly:

Alone the hands, a blind dumb cry,

Are lifted up,


As though to explore strange voids of sleep

Hanging beyond all universe,

Calm spaces no astronomer's

Long glass can sweep—


Invisible infinity

Where dream, like perfect stars, the pure

And vast originals of the unsure

Time-throbs we see.


Waking in them a quiver of ruth

Those hands of hushful prayer below

Draw down to the heart a deathless glow—

And this is truth!


28-6-48

Page 91

Turn Your Bach

Turn your back on everything

Utterly—

There's no other way to gain

Infinity.


Spirit's grandeur cannot brook

Compromise—

Once for all you must surrender

To the skies.


But when all earth fades behind

Soul's firm back,

It has not become for soul

One huge black.


By a magic most divine,

Things we spurn

For the sake of Spirit's ether

Always turn


Part of the same mystery

That we quest,

But within that near Unknown

None can rest:


O this Wonder will not tear

Its wide veil

Ere we first in the beyond

Learn to hail


The one Marvel which shall give

Soul release:

We must fly afar from little

Poignancies,


Page 92



Merge in quiets that are never

Bound by birth,

Then with eyes of dreaming distance

Look on earth:


Like a many-mooded mirror

Time shall be,

And in each hour's hue shall wake

Eternity!


28-6-48


Page 93

Not far enough

Not far enough our mystic soul has strained.

Above thought's flicker, the mind—a trance of truth—

Grows a white ether which embraces all;

Still higher a life of lone beatitude

That knows all things by knowing its own self;

But highest a calm secret more intense

Than mind's epiphany, life's apocalypse,

Than infinite truth or timeless ecstasy—

Sheer God, at once eternity and earth!

In this ineffable extreme our soul

Finds the pure substance of the undying One,

Catches the power that proves the deepest gloom

A veiled beauty brighter than widest day,

And comes back with the alchemic touch that turns

Even flesh a dense gold grip of divinity!

29-6-48

Page 94

Altamira

In the cave of Altamira, hidden afar

On walls of ancient rock, lie the dawn-streaks

Of art, the painter soul's awakening

To animal beauty and animal energy—

Bison for ever caught by primitive hands!


But older than this cave, a secrecy

Hung between earth and eternity, is the rapt

Room of the inmost reverie within man.

Here hides a power of world-creating art,

Here dawns the ultimate simplicity

From whose omniscient oneness springs the birth

Of the million moods that make our universe.

The truth-soul Vigilling through time's changing tones

Writes, on the walls of this profound of trance,

Visions which archetype the animal heart-

Miraculous strengths fighting mortality!

Both seer and child is that ecstatic soul,

For this deep cave is a mother-mystery,

A paradising wisdom-wondrous womb.

But we who broke from it have lost the smile

Dreaming eternally on its magic mouth.

Wanderers are we, blind to the mountain-poise

Where heavenly inwardness delights itself!

Once more the womb must take us. Far withdrawn

From fragmentary Lustres, scattered loves,

We through a shining sleep above the mind

Must gather back the prime beatitude,

Awake again to our own divinity

And come new-born, wearing an aura of gold.

But O some voice of grace from heights occult

Must tune us to the path silvery straining,

Behind life's veil, towards the lone harmony!

What mantra shall draw down that guiding grace?

Sublime and sweet Source of all lovely light,


Page 95



Goddess! how should we name Thee, by what prayer

For clay's perfection call Thy word of help

From the hill-cave of Thy omnipotent calm!

Shall we from Altamira learn to invoke

Thy spirit as Mira of the Altitudes?. . .

30-6-48


Page 96

Name after name

Name after name I give to God:

Sublime or sweet are they—

More magical than birth of stars,

Mightier than death of day.


Like some great lion stretched below

The horizon of the west,

His gold magnificence I see,

Dazzling itself to rest.


Like some huge harmony of swans

Sprung from a sable sleep,

Hangs the far vigil of white love

His infinite mysteries keep.


He stands, a rapture-haunted hill

From which vast perfume blows—

A hill upon whose summit drops

A sky that is all rose.


He calls, a sea whose thunder is light,

A truth-revealing sound,

As though the abyss of a million dreams

Explored its own profound. . . .


Name after name!—when close to me

Come out of distances

The grandeur and the grace of Him

Through time's intensities.


But O the all-submerging shock

When He and I are the same

Eternity's changeless marvel!

Then How blind and bare each name.


1-7-48


Page 97

God is Asleep!

God is asleep!

The great eyes keep

No watch on us:

Love-luminous

Are they with the gleam

Of a magic dream

In which they behold

Man's heart a gold

Of deathless light:

Never they sight

The sobbing dark

We hark and hark

Within our breast.

Vainly we quest

Power from that glance

Of lonely trance

To change our own

Life's trembling tone.

O we must break

The trance awake

And free the dense

Omnipotence,

Making it know

The world is woe

And not the bliss

God's dream-abyss

Kindles to Him!

Until the gaze

Of God outblaze

To catch the dim

Misery below,

There can be no

Earth-alchemy.

Prayer after prayer

Must cleave the air,


Page 98



An ocean-cry

To shake the sky:

All life must yearn

Without one stop:

Then suddenly

The high gold hue

Of eternity

Shall time ward drop

And God's dream turn

Dazzlingly true!


4-7-48

Page 99

The sleeper on the serpent

Eternal rest, the Almighty's deepest power—

Unchanging Self that makes all beings one

And draws together the uttermost extremes

With never the smallest break in motionless peace—

Sleeper on the serpent of infinity,

The ever-still Lord of the universe

Ruling all time from those gigantic coils

That keep a single folded secrecy

In which no past and future stretch away

But the far tail lies gripped in the far mouth,

A circled calm of packed omniscience!


We toil to gain brief riches of repose

Or tiny treasures of uncertain lore:

Tranquillity here is wealth for ever full,

Intense gold hush won by no heave of breath

But winning every truth our toil has missed.

The immense world-energies bear us in their sweep

And toss from life to death, from death to life,

While here that multitudinous tyranny

Is conquered by a silence effortless:

It swims like a smooth fish in a poised bowl—

The imperturbable Sleeper's docile dream,

A shadowy play within white quietudes.



O luminous liberty of unending ease,

We strain our hands to thy transcendent gaze

Rapt inward from the turbulence of time;

But ever we forget thou list aloof

And free because spread under thee as couch

Is the whole turbulence of time controlled,

A concentrated python's Vigilling,

A dense divinity holding each world-force,

Ring within ring of centuries caught and calmed.

Nought save such infinite mastery can support

The Almighty's deepest power, eternal rest.

5-7-48


Page 100

Infinitude

Thought after thought bears up a storm of wings:

Downward the sapphire Deep for ever flings

Each thrill by a yonder to all ecstasies—

Infinitude conquering mind with motionless ease!


But when the titan wings fall back subdued,

One secret Presence formless and alone

Makes the whole sapphire sovereignty our own-

Mind drawn within to a self-infinitude!


5-7-48


Page 101

Wondrous chameleon

No creature of rare moments white and gold

Nor powered with a few flashes of wizardry

But claiming each life-light as heaven's own,

The soul sits smiling in the heart of time.

Wondrous chameleon equal to all hues,

Spurning no mood as void of the perfect dream,

It breaks forth everywhere the epiphany:

Out of its miracled deep it can lay bare

With selfsame beauty of omnipotent ease

The aureate Eternal, the argent Infinite,

The grey God and the black Beatitude!

Stainless, it makes of the most shadowy tones

Ineffable mysteries of a deathless fire. . . .


Each gaze divine, it leaps to every lure:

No delicate fantast, no austere recluse,

A universal hunger out of heaven,

It has come to lick up with ecstatic tongue

The whole domain of time's brief fluttering,

The insect-instants that are man's heart-beats!

Let then all hours grow one great harmony

Of paradise plucked from both dark and day—

Let all the moth-thrills of mortality

Lose separate insignificant smallnesses

To feed from strength to strength the magical

Chameleon at life's core, that many-coloured

Artist of the single-selfed apocalypse!


7-7-48


Page 102

From 8th may to 8th july

Two months of song have swept my soul

Out to the very nerves of sense

And with the body's vehemence

I have taken to myself the whole

Wonder of the timeless Secrecy!

Visions of day and dreams of night

Have thrilled with a single master-tone

Healing the broken world to one

Great globe of truth-illumined Eye

Behind the flickers of human sight.

My ear has caught a harmony

Like some huge gloriole of sound

Circling infinities around

The blindly beating heart of me.

With every breath I have inhaled

A perfume of eternal peace

From all the fluttering transiencies.

And my ten fingers, like ten rays

Sprung out of hidden knowledge, move,

Awaking everywhere a love

Whose deathless heat was lying veiled

By matter's blank unfeeling face.

But deeper than the eye or ear,

Breathing or touching, is the sheer

Sense of immortal bliss within

When, through each song whose rhythms fill

With nectar-waves of trance, I win

A taste of the Ineffable!


8-7-48


Page 103

Goddess earth

O I am earth's idolater! Truth's peak

Is here when the head bows, touching dense clay:

In the blue beyond are time's foundations laid,

Downward the mystery of the Eternal plunges,

Inverted pyramid whose triumphant top

Of absolute all-penetrating force

Is clay—source of deep hurt, peril to life—

Smallest among God's self-disclosing deeds—

Because sheer point and acme of miracle!


Blind are we, dreading or despising earth.

She comes so dense by concentrated dream.

Grandeur and grace of granite—fearful strength—

But O the unbreakable beatitude

That is God's grip when rapture is all rock!

A dumbness and a deafness and a dark-

Intensity of ignorance—till with eyes

Deep-shut we search for the deathless Self within:

Then our lost limbs measure the earth's profound!


Therefore I ever kneel and wait the Eternal's

Fullest epiphany with dust-worshipping brow:

Pitiless packed matter presses truth most near

And the vague clods are the Infinite's utmost power—

Divinity calm though trampled by human feet!


10-7-48


Page 104

God's Whole Secret

The strokes of time have left no scar on her:

Death after death upbuilt a fairer face:

Now God's whole secret buried within earth

Laughs in the two sunflowers of her gaze.


Out of a heaven haloing each hour

She wakes the truth-gold in our limbs of lust:

Intense with a glowing absolute of life

She brings even dust the glory of being dust

.

10-7-48

Page 105

Full moon

The full moon comes to make all life complete,

But ever a shadow on the broad white disk

Mars the one perfect and entire dream

Earth-nature strives to reach through changing lights—

High beauty haunted by a nameless lack!


I look within and bear the same bliss-break.

The full moon like some mighty mirror hangs

And the shadow answers a gap in my own heart:

Splendour of song and lustre of love—yet loss

Of the one all-consummating harmony!


O soul of man, O spirit of the universe,

That sable touch on time's intensest hour

Is the mystery of the God forgotten in you!


11-7-48


Page 106

Hidden apocalypt

Not the cool mind blinking with a million eyes

But the hungry heart that struggles to see once

With as intense a sight as its blindness now,

Is the blaze that catches time and eternity.

All things in a single glow suddenly break

To an infinite harmony in the human breast:

When the heart's hidden apocalypt cracks his cave

Vision is no delight of heavens hung far—

To see is to devour divinity!

Through one great gaze the whole universe of truth

Is drawn within by a tyranny of love

That brooks no distance betwixt seer and seen.

Colour becomes a laugh of inmost life—

Red rapture, blue bliss, yellow ecstasy,

A multi-mooded nectar tasting its own

Immortal deep and finding its self-taste man!


13-7-48


Page 107

Artist almighty

How shall mortality's grey golden to God?. . .

Behind earth's law a luminous liberty laughs.

O it can break a lotus from blind stone,

A sun from voidnesses of midnight's black!

Our life is a divine desire's domain:

Over us lords a splendouring secrecy—

Eternal wizard of the absolute eye,

Artist almighty, colour's infinite Czar.

Within him all things grow one single self:

The universal harmony of his heart

Gives him the power to paint man's body anew:

He keeps the bright salvation of our clay.

But 'twixt his freedom and our fixities

A vast blank washing each time-hue away

Hangs its miraculous sleep for magic dreams

To bring unmarred their alchemies to our mind.

Deep in a trance of world-forgetfulness

Each mood must plunge: the despot of life's dye

Comes then to wake God's gold in mortal grey.


13-7-48


Page 108

God-grades

Space is the infinite of God's witness Self

Permitting the endless will of God that is time;

But still the twin near glories shine apart.

Beyond them burns a mingle of mysteries—

Divinity reaches every goal at once

And a boundless Eye draws into its living deeps

The distances of future and of past—

Time merged in space through a supracosmic fire.

Beyond even this intense totality

Is the freedom of an all-forgetting light:

No space, no time, no four-dimensional muse.

Yet the pure Being rapt in its own immense

Marks not the sovereign term. Outtopping each

Grade, dwells a lustre of absolute victory:

Three golden faces of a single bliss

In which the whole time-drama and space-sight—

With changing mood or mood unchangeable—

Are lost for ever yet for ever found:

The kindling cosmos, the fused flaming All

Blaze without break from a timeless spaceless glow—

Brahma outstretching omnipresent life,

Vishnu upholding one omniscient truth,

Shiva sustaining both by omnipotent peace!


14-7-48

Page 109

The terror and the tyranny

A demon's grip is the wide universe—

Unending space and termless time, yet each

Distance and day hold ever the same heart-break!

Sunlight falls like a fire-whip on the flesh:

From pulse-throb to small quivering pulse-throb

Our life keeps running neath that titan stroke.

And every star opens a wound of dream

In the unescapable gloom that is our soul.

Even beauty is a rainbow hung on tears. . . .


But through the terror and the tyranny

And yet the blind defiance by our blood

A wondrous word steals out in lonely calms

When on itself man's mind looks with long gaze

And broods on the secret of mortality.

Too vast the doom of boundless space and time

Seems for so tiny a creature and too keen

For a pygmy such denial of defeat!

Are then the monster hours a wizard's wand

Smiting to wake up some veiled heaven within—

Challenge to charm out lost omnipotence?

O freedom to gold freedom calls across

The iron infinite of a world of woe!

Pain eats up joy that we may crave God's deep,

Fate drives us to a quest of God's immense,

We bleed that God in us may break through clay.

And the whole tyranny and terror we face

Are a perilous pressure of God on His own self

To smile from blankest sleep. But once we wake

The superhuman light behind our eyes

All that we dread laughs suddenly divine!


15-7-48


Page 110

Voice front the Wideness

A voice of myriad raptures with one soul,

Hum of a measureless bee drunk with all flowers,

Borne by a secret wind through night and day,

Thrills from the wideness of the universe

To an inmost silence lifting hands of prayer.

The multitudinous call of transient things

Comes perfumed now from an eternal deep

And grows the breath of some far silver flute

Playing a dream of earth's divinity.

From everywhere it blows, yet like a word

Brought delicately on a smile of trance

By some vast lover to the loved one's ear—

No name, but the rumour of a nameless fire,

A tremulous tongue of golden mystery

Whispering beatitudes beyond time's ken.

A beauty breaking from behind all life,

A luster falling from above all mind,

It laughs like the meeting of two hidden heavens

That suddenly shine out their single truth.

Softest of tones, yet infinite in its sweep,

Sovereign it circles, soothing every pain,

Conqueror of mortal grief by the touch of a kiss.

The primal Heart's creative song is here:

A mother-croon cradles a cosmic child

And rhythms its body with the Omnipotent's will.


15-7-48

Page 111

Wondrous waking

If the whole cosmic utterance suddenly ceased,

The ocean's roar died down nor even came

The vague and wavering whisper of thin leaves,

The deepest slumber would be struck awake

By that immeasurable surprise of hush!

So too the gloom of ignorant mortal mind,

That ever-present sleep with open eyes,

Breaks under a vast pressure of potent peace

When all a sudden the multitudinous lure

Of transient things wafts never more its call

And the heart is left with fathomless secrecies.

Time washed in vast white waters of inwardness

Throbs through still space a cosmic chastity—

The universe moves divine with no desire,

Impelled by a truth in love with its own light,

Following no need but only a rapturous will

Flamed by God's vision of His myriad Self.

This is the world whose magic moods are we

In a wondrous waking to our soul's profound;

And, when we thrill there, clamourous common day

Vanishes or else lingers the ghost of a dream

Like one small fish haunting an infinite sea.

But whoso with a golden gurgle drowns

In eternity's pacific splendences

Makes of their dazzle a blinding sleep once more.

Bearing the new-found nectarous wakefulness

Like a cool aura clinging to our clay

We through the old eyes cleansed of ignorance

Must turn the intense inlook a God's outview,

Catch in the million lures of things that die

Flash after flash of an immortal fire

And, drawing from their fugitive strengths a stuff

Of brightness to build up a new life's core,

Hold in our heart the glamours of the dust


Page 112



Transfigured to a breakless beauty and power,

Innumerably faceted yet one,

A diamond of earth's divinity!


16-7-48


Page 113

The missing touch

Evening The west is a giant Tamburlaine

Bannering with a sky of blood the marching main.

The east, a hush of white world-witchery,

Is some unveiled supreme Zenocraté.

Yet one transfiguring touch both marvels miss,

Touch that would bring an infinite of bliss,

And in that one touch lost by sun sublime

And moon intense are all the tears of time!


Dream after mystic dream my painter heart

Mixes to erase the tiny shadow and smart

Spoiling earth's mightiest mood of loveliness.

Vain are all dreams—for O the little less

That kills perfection, blinds eternity,

Is the puny spot of self I grasp as me!

If I could feel no more a speck self-dense

But a point of vacant peace, Omnipotence

Would shine through and the finishing touch be given

To make, of earth's light, harmonies of heaven.


19-7-48


Page 114

O Who Shall Tame the Tarpan?*

A who shall tame the tarpan,

Horse of wild Tartary?

No word of wisdom in his ear

Blows out the fire in his eye!


He tosses off the saddle,

He never brooks the bit—

His snort at the earth comes clamouring

For a freedom infinite.


Out of the wastes of passion

He brings within his soul

A brutal beauty none can break:

Earth-life is not his goal.


He shakes up all our slumber,

He tramples on our light;

So deep his hoof-prints that they seem

A scorn of heaven's height.


But the vast and pathless places

He longs for are a love

Lost when he wandered into earth:

Wideness now waits above.


So, like a scorching chaos

He gallops through our mind,

And who shall teach him to forget

The abyss he has left behind?


We try to make him serve us;

But how can ever the pale

Gleams that we catch of infinite truth

Outshine his scarlet gale?


*"Tarpan": accent on the first syllable; "a" in the first syllable sounded as in "far," in the second as in "man".


Page 115



O there must come a luster

Blown like a golden wind

To bear down his own fury of flame

And dazzle his beauty blind!


Alone a giant splendour

Beyond the soul that is man's,

A limitless liberty that falls

Out of the untracked trance


Which overhangs the little

Seizures of human thought,

Can leap secure on that bare back:

Suddenly, secretly caught


By a strength from unknown summits,

Dropping with stunning weight,

The thunderous magnificence

Is led unto our gate.


The burning beast and radiant

Rider grow one surprise

Of rapturous harmony that rhymes

Hell's heat with paradise.


But never can this marvel

Suffuse our common day

Until the safeties and the shames

We treasure are thrown away.


For here is naked beauty,

Stark impulse with no fright,

And here truth naked of all mind,

The Eternal's pure self-sight!


20-7-48


Page 116

I Bring a Song. . .

Fingers of light fall on my vague heart-strings.

They wake a tremble that glimmers and is gone.

A little secrecy shines out in each tune,

But in that shining moment is no end

Of the power that falls and the passion that flies up.

A small bird with seven colours on its throat

Lifts on wide wings that are invisible

With quivers of a rapture infra-red

Rhyming to a wisdom ultra-violet.

Those black fires merging in a mystic sky

Bear in their beat a burthen of measureless bliss:

Sounds that are wonder-vast with things undreamed

Call to the ear from far beyond the eye.

A music whose meanings never can be seen

Throbs to be deeply felt and suddenly known

As if truth's light were grown one's utter self ! . . .

I bring a song that shows the mind's outgaze

Colours of a beauty fading with strange cry

To thrill in the soul an intimate Infinite.


25-7-48


Page 117

O Pygmy of Perfection!...

When will I break through this blind stone of a breast?

O warrior light caverned in my small heart,

O dwarf with the hatchet forged in holy fire,

Lift thy edged ecstasy and drive through clay

The mystic fissure of a luminous laugh

Answering the golden infinite of God's love!

O pygmy of perfection, leap beyond

To thy full stature of bliss that knows no birth!

Then from the overarched eternities

Come back time's king to trample the gilded roof

Of the arrogant mind of me and plunge through thought

With the cry of a thousand oceans pouring down

Deep after deep of an inexhaustible truth!

Brim this whole body with one will ever white

And through each pore burst into the universe

To -drown it in a measureless Self that turns

All touches God discovering God anew!


25-7-48

Page 118

The absolute dream

Most heart-consuming, most intensely cold,

A statue of unbearable loveliness

Above all intimate warm divinity,

Stands the white figure of the Absolute Dream

Breaking us with a bliss no life can hold.

Each heaven falls back from this Ineffable.

That smiling mouth is sealed, those great eyes locked,

The beatific limbs stay gestureless;

But by their sovereign secrecy of stone

All splendour is shaken to exceed itself:

We are drawn to a depth of trance that has no end,

We are lured into eternal distances,

We yearn for ever on from light to light

Since no reply the marble mystery makes.

So beautiful that, moveless, it moves all,

So still that beauty grows a vast beyond,

This is the fathomless strength by which we gauge

The paradise after paradise that is God—

This is the omnipotent support of the whole

Boundless adventure of the apocalypse—

Implacable lord of truth's infinity!


27-7-48


Page 119

Mystic marriage

Two are the mystic makers of earth's life.

Their passion is for ever and their joy

Is the breaking forth of the hidden truth of time.

But while the ages sing out of their lips

The eyes are lost beyond both life and love:

Like hierophants feeding a temple fire

With silent sweetnesses of sandalwood,

They offer the two rapturous bodies and breaths

To a single sun of omnipresent mind

That knows all by sheer sense of its own gold.

This glory keeps the lovers statue-pure;

An absolute hush in an eternal poise

Contains the keen creative ecstasy—

No hunger runs from face to shining face,

No lust quivers in the heart-revealing touch:

Here is not union of fragmented flesh

Nor strife to merge divided dreams: the. Alone

Magically quaffs the nectar of being twain!

Ever a shadowless identity

With no call even for tiniest flicker of a kiss,

These two have joined with lackless souls for a new

Burst of the deep self-light in which they are one.

28-7-48


Page 120

Goddess

A goddess rapt in the sun of her timeless self

Waits ever aloof with shut eyes and lips sealed,

Both arms lifted to a bodiless blue beyond.

A mystery burns that I can never grasp:

I search and search through void eternities

And my blood is a song in the dark with drift unknown.

But, while that face is a superhuman dream

And the figure a farness of transcendent bliss,

The feet touch earth and give themselves to me—

Feet that are standing still, yet with a calm

As of all boundaries reached and journeys done:

Here time lies conquered neath a weight of trance.

Light has come down—a heaven close to clay

Keeps offering to my bewildered brow

A strength to rest on, to my longing lips

A warmth of love to kiss. By refuge here

My heart feels in its own brief blinded cry

The overture of some "crescendoed life

Through which mortality shall kindle up

And seize truth's perfect form with minstrel hands!

5-8-48


Page 121

The golden hand

A golden hand has plucked the deep heart's string

To outward space, but a dark hand has kept

It ever drawn away from the inward rest.

How shall it tremble into melody

If never the grip lets go? The plucking power

Was meant for music, not for the outward's spell . . .

Nor must the string be loosened to fall asleep

After one ravishing note uttering all heaven:

The rapturous rest was made to be pulled forth,

Since not else God can grow world-harmony.

A traffic to and fro 'twixt heaven and earth

And not earth-tension or heaven-calm is the goal.

Music for ever, music above all,

Music to marry the two extremes of Self,

Is the aim of time and the game of eternity.

O let soul live uncaught without or within

And the golden hand fulfil its perfect dream!


4-8-48

Page 122

From 8th may to 8th august

Forsake me not, Sweet Power!

Make my life music with Thy kiss—

I pray that if one hour

Be without breath of Thy blue bliss,

Let it be like the stop of a flute

Where a master finger turns mute

The magic air, that air may stream

A perfect shape of the heart's dream

Through other stops, and with each stifle free

More subtle tones of the Infinite Mystery.


9-8-48


Page 123









Let us co-create the website.

Share your feedback. Help us improve. Or ask a question.

Image Description
Connect for updates