Poems
THEME/S
THE ADVENTURE OF THE APOCALYPSE
The Adventure
of
the Apocalypse
K. D. SETHNA
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
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.
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!
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Page 1
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.
Page 2
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!
Page 3
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.
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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.
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Page 5
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.
Page 6
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.
Page 7
The Signature:
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!
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Page 8
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!
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Page 10
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!
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Page 11
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?
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Page 14
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.
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Page 16
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!
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Page 17
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.
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!...
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Page 19
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!
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!
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Page 22
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!
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Page 23
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!
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Page 24
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!
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Page 25
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.
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Page 27
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.
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Page 28
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.
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Page 30
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.
Page 31
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!
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Page 32
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.
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Page 34
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!
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Page 36
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!
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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!
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Page 40
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!
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Page 42
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!
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Page 43
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.
Page 44
A myriad voices
Quiver and leap
Out of our being's
Myriad deep.
How shall we gather
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.
Page 48
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!
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Page 50
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!
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Page 51
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!"
Page 53
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.
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Page 55
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!
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Page 56
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.
Page 58
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!
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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.
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Page 61
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.
Page 63
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!
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!
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Page 66
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.
Page 67
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!
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Page 69
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!
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Page 70
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!
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Page 72
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!
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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.. .
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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
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!"
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Page 77
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!
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Page 79
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!
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Page 81
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!
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Page 82
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!
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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!
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Page 85
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! . . .
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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!
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Page 89
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!
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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!
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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!
Page 93
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!
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Page 94
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?. . .
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Page 96
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.
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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!
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Page 99
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.
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Page 100
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!
Page 101
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!
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Page 102
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!
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Page 103
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!
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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
.
Page 105
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!
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Page 106
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!
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Page 107
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.
Page 108
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!
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Page 109
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!
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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.
Page 111
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!
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Page 113
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.
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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!
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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.
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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!
Page 118
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!
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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.
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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!
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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!
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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.
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