“I”
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This strutting “I” of human self and pride Is a puppet built by Nature for her use, And dances as her strong compulsions bid, Forcefully feeble, brilliantly obtuse.
Our thinking is her leap of fluttering mind, We hear and see by her constructed sense; Our force is hers; her colours have combined Our fly-upon-the-wheel magnificence.
He sits within who turns on her machine These beings, portions of his mystery, Many dwarf beams of his great calm sunshine, A reflex of his sole infinity.
One mighty Self of cosmic act and thought Employs this figure of a unit nought.
He is in me, round me, facing everywhere. Self-walled in ego to exclude His right, I stand upon its boundaries and stare Into the frontiers of the Infinite.
Each finite thing I see is a façade; From its windows looks at me the Illimitable. In vain was my prison of separate body made; His occult presence burns in every cell.
He has become my substance and my breath; He is my anguish and my ecstasy. My birth is His eternity’s sign, my death A passage of His immortality.
My dumb abysses are His screened abode; In my heart’s chamber lives the unworshipped God. Page-152
My mind beholds1 its veiled subconscient base, All the dead obstinate symbols of the past, The hereditary moulds, the stamps of race Are upheld to sight, the old imprints effaced.
In a downpour of supernal light it reads The black Inconscient’s enigmatic script- Recorded in a hundred shadowy screeds An inert world’s obscure enormous drift;
All flames, is torn and burned and cast away. There slept the tab1es of the Ignorance, There the dumb dragon edicts of her sway, The scriptures of Necessity and Chance.
Pure is the huge foundation left2 and nude, A boundless mirror of God’s infinitude.
I walked on the high-wayed Seat of Solomon Where Shankaracharya’s tiny temple stands Facing Infinity from Time’s edge, alone On the bare ridge ending earth’s vain romance.
Around me was a formless solitude: All had become one strange Unnamable, An unborn sole Reality world-nude, Topless and fathomless, for ever still.
A Silence that was Being’s only word, The unknown beginning and the voiceless end Abolishing all things moment-seen or heard, On an incommunicable summit reigned,
A lonely Calm and void unchanging Peace On the dumb crest of Nature’s mysteries.
1 My soul regards 2 now Page-153
After unnumbered steps of a hill-stair I saw upon earth’s head brilliant with sun The immobile Goddess in her house of stone In a loneliness of meditating air. Wise were the human hands that set her there Above the world and Time’s dominion; The Soul of all that lives, calm, pure, alone, Revealed its boundless self mystic and bare.
Our body is an epitome of some Vast That masks its presence by our humanness. In us the secret Spirit can indite A page and summary of the Infinite, A nodus of Eternity expressed Live in an image and a sculptured face.
Because Thou art All-beauty and All-bliss, My soul blind and enamoured yearns for Thee; It bears Thy mystic touch in all that is And thrills with the burden of that ecstasy.
Behind all eyes I meet Thy secret gaze And in each voice I hear Thy magic tune: Thy sweetness haunts my heart through Nature’s ways; Nowhere it beats now from Thy snare immune.
It loves Thy body in all living things; Thy joy is there in every leaf and stone: The moments bring Thee on their fiery wings; Sight’s endless artistry is Thou alone.
Time voyages with Thee upon its prow – And all the future’s passionate hope is Thou. Page-154
Each sight is now immortal with Thy bliss: My soul through the rapt eyes has come to see; A veil is rent and they no more can miss The miracle of Thy world-epiphany.
Into an ecstasy of vision caught Each natural object is of Thee apart, A rapture-symbol from Thy substance wrought, A poem shaped in Beauty’s living heart,
A master-work of colour and design, A mighty sweetness borne on grandeur’s wings; A burdened wonder of significant line Reveals itself in even commonest things.
All forms are Thy dream-dialect of delight, O Absolute, O vivid Infinite.
Surely I take no more an earthly food But eat the fruits and plants of Paradise! For Thou hast changed my sense’s habitude From mortal pleasure to divine surprise.
Hearing and sight are now an ecstasy, And all the fragrances of earth disclose A sweetness matching in intensity Odour of the crimson marvel of the rose.
In every contact’s deep invading thrill, That lasts as if its source were infinite, I feel Thy touch; Thy bliss imperishable Is crowded into that moment of delight.
The body burns with Thy rapture’s sacred fire, Pure, passionate, holy, virgin of desire. Page-155
I have drunk deep of God’s own liberty From which an occult sovereignty derives: Hidden in an earthly garment that survives, I am the worldless being vast and free. A moment stamped with that supremacy Has rescued me from cosmic hooks and gyves; Abolishing death and time my nature lives In the deep heart of immortality.
God’s contract signed with Ignorance is torn; Time has become the Eternal’s endless year, My soul’s wide self of living infinite Space,1 Outlines its body luminous and unborn Behind the earth-robe; under the mask2 grows clear The mould of an imperishable face.
Man, the Despot of Contraries
I am greater than the greatness of the seas, A swift tornado of God-energy: A helpless flower that quivers in the breeze I am weaker than the reed one breaks with ease.
I harbour all the wisdom of the wise In my nature of stupendous Ignorance; On a flame of righteousness I fix my eyes While I wallow in sweet sin and join hell’s dance.
My mind is brilliant like a full-orbed moon, Its darkness is the caverned troglodyte’s. I gather long Time’s wealth and squander soon; I am an epitome of opposites.
I with repeated life death’s sleep surprise; I am a transience of the eternities.
1 My soul, the living self of infinite Space, 2 under the earth Page-156
I passed into a lucent still abode And saw as in a mirror crystalline An ancient Force ascending serpentine The unhasting spirals of the aeonic road. Earth was a cradle for the arriving god And man but a half-dark half-luminous sign Of the transition of the veiled Divine From Matter’s sleep and the tormented load Of ignorant life and death to the Spirit’s light. Mind liberated swam Light’s ocean vast, And life escaped from its grey tortured line; I saw Matter illumining its parent Night. The soul could feel into infinity cast Timeless God-bliss the heart incarnadine.
There is a godhead of unrealised things To which Time’s splendid gains are hoarded dross; A cry seems near, a rustle of silver wings Calling to heavenly joy by earthly loss.
All eye has seen and all the ear has heard Is a pale illusion by some greater voice And mightier vision; no sweet sound or word, No passion of hues that make the heart rejoice
Can equal these diviner ecstasies. A Mind beyond our mind has sole the ken Of those yet unimagined harmonies, The fate and privilege of unborn men.
As rain-thrashed mire the marvel of the rose, Earth waits that distant marvel to disclose. Page-157
There is a brighter ether than this blue Pretence of an enveloping heavenly vault, A deeper greenness than this laughing assault1 Of emerald rapture pearled with tears of dew. Immortal spaces of cerulean hue Are in our reach and fields without this fault Of drab brown earth and streams that never halt In their deep murmur which white flowers strew
Floating like stars upon a strip of sky. This world behind is made of truer stuff Than the manufactured tissue of earth’s grace. There we can walk and see the gods go by And sip from Hebe’s cup nectar enough To make for us heavenly limbs and deathless face.
1 Royaler investiture than this massed assault Page-158 |