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CANTO FOUR
THE VISION AND THE BOON
THEN suddenly there rose a sacred stir.
Amid the lifeless silence of the Void
In a solitude and an immensity
A sound came quivering like a loved footfall
Heard in the listening spaces of the soul;
A touch perturbed his fibres with delight.
An influence had approached the mortal range,
A boundless Heart was near his longing heart,
A mystic Form enveloped his earthly shape.
All at her contact broke from silence’ seal;
Spirit and body thrilled identified,
Linked in the grasp of an unspoken joy;
Mind, members, life were merged in ecstasy.
Intoxicated as with nectarous rain
His nature’s passioning stretches flowed to her
Flashing with lightnings, mad with luminous wine.
All was a limitless sea that heaved to the moon.
A divinising stream possessed his veins,
His body’s cells awoke to spirit sense,
Each nerve became a burning thread of joy:
Tissue and flesh partook beatitude.
Alight, the dun unplumbed subconscient caves
Thrilled with the prescience of her longed-for tread Page – 378 And filled with flickering crests and praying tongues. Even lost in slumber, mute, inanimate His very body answered to her power. The One he worshipped was within him now:
Flame-pure, ethereal-tressed a mighty Face
Appeared and lips moved by immortal words,
Lids, wisdom’s leaves, drooped over rapture’s orbs.
A marble monument of ponderings, shone
A forehead, sight’s crypt, and large like ocean’s gaze
Towards Heaven two tranquil eyes of boundless thought
Looked into man’s and saw the god to come.
A shape was seen on threshold Mind, a Voice
Absolute and wise in the heart’s chambers spoke:
"0 Son of Strength who climbst creation’s peaks,
No soul is thy companion in the light; Alone thou standest at the eternal doors. What thou hast won is thine, but ask no more. O Spirit aspiring in an ignorant frame, O Voice arisen from the Inconscient’s world, How shalt thou speak for men whose hearts are dumb, Make purblind earth the soul’s seer-vision’s home Or lighten the burden of the senseless globe? I am the Mystery beyond reach of mind, I am the goal of the travail of the suns; My fire and sweetness are the cause of life. But too immense my danger and my joy. Awake not the immeasurable descent, Speak not my secret name to hostile Time, Man is too weak to bear the Infinite’s weight. Truth born too soon might break the imperfect earth. Leave the all-seeing Power to hew its way: In thy single vast achievement reign apart
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Helping the world with thy great lonely days.
I ask thee not to merge thy heart of flame
In the Immobile’s wide uncaring bliss,
Turned from the fruitless motion of the years,
Deserting the fierce labour of the worlds,
Aloof from beings, lost in the Alone.
How shall thy mighty spirit brook repose
While Death is still unconquered on the earth
And Time a field of suffering and pain?
Thy soul was born to share the laden Force; Obey thy nature and fulfil thy fate:
Accept the difficulty and godlike toil,
For the slow-paced omniscient purpose live.
The Enigma’s knot is tied in human kind.
A lightning from the heights that think and plan,
Ploughing the air of life with vanishing trails,
Man, sole awake in an unconscious world,
Aspires in vain to change the cosmic dream.
Arrived from some half-luminous Beyond
He is a stranger in the mindless vasts; A traveller in his oft-shifting home Amid the tread of many infinitudes, He has pitched a tent of life in desert Space. Heaven’s fixed regard beholds him from above, In the house of Nature a perturbing guest, A voyager twixt Thought’s inconstant shores, A hunter of unknown and beautiful Powers, A nomad of the far mysterious Light, In the wide ways a little spark of God. Against his spirit all is in dire league, A Titan influence stops his Godward gaze. Around him hungers the unpitying Void,
Page – 380 The eternal Darkness seeks him with her hands, Inscrutable Energies drive him and deceive, Immense implacable deities oppose. An inert Soul and a somnambulist Force Have made a world estranged from life and thought, The Dragon of the dark foundations keeps Unalterable the law of Chance and Death, On his long way through Time and Circumstance The grey-hued riddling nether shadow-Sphinx, Her dreadful paws upon the swallowing sands, Awaits him armed with the soul-slaying word:
Across his path sits the dim camp of Night.
His day is a moment in perpetual Time,
He is the prey of the minutes and the hours.
Assailed on earth and unassured of heaven,
Descended here unhappy and sublime,
A link between the demigod and the beast,
He knows not his own greatness nor his aim; He has forgotten why he has come and whence; His spirit and his members are at war;
His heights break off too low to reach the skies,
His mass is buried in the animal mire.
A strange antinomy is his nature’s rule.
A riddle of opposites is made his field:
Freedom he asks but needs to live in bonds,
He has need of darkness to perceive some light
And need of grief to feel a little bliss;
He has need of death to find a greater life.
All sides he sees and turns to every call; He has no certain light by which to walk; His life is a blind-man’s-buff, a hide and seek; He seeks himself and from himself he runs;
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Meeting himself, he thinks it other than he.
Always he builds, but finds no constant ground,
Always he journeys, but nowhere arrives,
He would guide the world, himself he cannot guide,
He would save his soul, his life he cannot save.
The light his soul has brought his mind has lost,
All he has learned is soon again in doubt;
A sun to him seems the shadow of his thoughts,
Then all is shadow again and nothing is true:
Unknowing what he does or whither he tends
He fabricates signs of the Real in Ignorance.
He has hitched his mortal error to Truth’s star.
Wisdom attracts him with her luminous masks,
But never has he seen the face behind: A giant Ignorance surrounds his lore. Assigned to meet the cosmic mystery In the dumb figure of a material world, His passport of entry false and his personage, He is compelled to be what he is not, He obeys the Inconscience he has come to rule And sinks in Matter to fulfil his soul. Awakened from her lower driven forms The Earth-Mother gave her forces to his hands And painfully he guards the heavy trust;
His mind is a lost torch-bearer on her roads.
Illumining breath to think and plasm to feel,
He labours with his slow and sceptic brain
Helped by the reason’s vacillating fires,
To make his thought and will a magic door
For knowledge to enter the darkness of the world
And love to rule a realm of strife and hate.
A mind impotent to reconcile heaven and earth
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And tied to Matter with a thousand bonds,
He lifts himself to. be a conscious god.
Even when a glory of wisdom crowns his brow,
When mind and spirit shed a grandiose ray
To exalt this product of the sperm and gene,
This alchemist’s miracle from plasm and gas,
And he who shared the animal’s run and crawl
Lifts his thought-stature to the Immortal’s heights,
His life still keeps the human middle way;
His body he resigns to death and pain,
Abandoning Matter, his too heavy charge.
A thaumaturge sceptic of miracles,
A spirit left sterile of its occult power
By an unbelieving brain and credulous heart
He leaves the world to end where it began:
His work unfinished he claims a heavenly prize.
Thus has he missed creation’s absolute.
Halfway he stops his star of destiny: A vast and vain long-tried experiment, An ill-served high conception doubtfully done, The world’s life falters on not seeing its goal,— A zigzag towards unknown dangerous ground Ever repeating its habitual walk, Ever retreating after marches long And hardiest victories without sure result, Drawn endlessly an inconclusive game. In an ill-fitting and voluminous robe A radiant purpose still conceals its face, A mighty blindness stumbles hoping on, Feeding its strength on gifts of luminous Chance. Because the human instrument has failed, The Godhead frustrate sleeps within its seed,
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A spirit entangled in the forms it made.
His failure is not failure whom God leads; Through all the slow mysterious march goes on: An immutable Power has made this mutable world; A self-fulfilling transcendence treads man’s road;
The driver of the soul upon its path,
It knows its steps, its way is inevitable,
And how shall the end be vain when God is guide?
However man’s mind may tire or fail his flesh,
A will prevails cancelling his conscious choice:
The goal recedes, a bourneless vastness calls
Retreating into an immense Unknown;
There is no end to the world’s stupendous march,
There is no rest for the embodied soul.
It must live on, describe all Time’s huge curve.
An Influx presses from the closed Beyond
Forbidding to him rest and earthly ease,
Till he has found himself he cannot pause.
A Light there is that leads, a Power that aids; Unmarked, unfelt it sees in him and acts:
Ignorant, he forms the All-conscient in his depths,
Human, looks up to superhuman peaks: A borrower of Supernature’s gold, He paves his road to Immortality. - The high gods look on man and watch and choose Today’s impossibles for the future’s base. His transience trembles with the Eternal’s touch, His barriers cede beneath the Infinite’s tread; The Immortals have their entries in his life: The Ambassadors of the Unseen draw near;
A Splendour sullied by the mortal air,
Love passes through his heart, a wandering guest,
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Beauty surrounds him for a magic hour,
He has visits of a large revealing joy,
Brief widenesses release him from himself,
Enticing towards a glory ever in front
Hopes of a deathless sweetness lure and leave.
His mind is crossed by strange discovering fires,
Rare intimations lift his stumbling speech
To a moment’s kinship with the eternal Word;
A masque of wisdom circles through his brain
Perturbing him with glimpses half-divine.
He lays his hands sometimes on the Unknown; He communes sometimes with Eternity A strange and grandiose symbol was his birth And immortality and spirit-room And pure perfection and a shadowless bliss Are this afflicted creature’s mighty fate. In him the Earth-Mother sees draw near the change Foreshadowed in her dumb and fiery depths, A godhead drawn from her transmuted limbs, An alchemy of Heaven on Nature’s base. Adept of the self-born unfailing line, Leave not the light to die the ages bore, Help still humanity’s blind and suffering life:
Obey thy spirit’s wide omnipotent urge.
A witness to God’s parley with the Night,
It leaned compassionate from immortal calm
And housed desire, the troubled seed of things.
Assent to thy high self, create, endure.
Cease not from knowledge, let thy toil be vast,
No more in earthly limits pen thy force;
Equal thy work with long unending Time’s.
Traveller upon the bare eternal heights, Page – 385
Tread still the difficult and dateless path
Joining the cycles with its austere curve
Measured for man by the initiate Gods.
My light shall be in thee, my strength thy force.
Let not the impatient Titan drive thy heart,
Ask not the imperfect fruit, the partial prize.
Only one boon, to greaten thy spirit, demand;
Only one joy, to raise thy kind, desire.
Above blind fate and the antagonist powers
Moveless there stands a high unchanging Will;
To its omnipotence leave thy work’s result.
All things shall change in God’s transfiguring hour."
August and sweet sank hushed that mighty Voice.
Nothing now moved in the vast brooding space:
A stillness came upon the listening world,
A mute immensity of the Eternal’s peace.
But Aswapathy’s heart replied to her,
A cry amid the silence of the Vasts: "How shall I rest content with mortal day And the dull measure of terrestrial things, I who have seen behind the cosmic mask The glory and the beauty of thy face? Hard is the doom to which thou bindst thy sons! How long shall our spirits battle with the Night And bear defeat and the brute yoke of Death, We who are vessels of a deathless Force And builders of the godhead of the race? Or if it is thy work I do below Amid the error and waste of human life In the vague light of man’s half-conscious mind, Why breaks not in some distant gleam of thee?
Page – 386 Ever the centuries and millenniums pass. Where in the greyness is thy coming’s ray? Where is the thunder, of thy victory’s wings? Only we hear the feet of passing gods. A plan in the occult eternal Mind Mapped out to backward and prophetic sight, The aeons ever repeat their changeless round, The cycles all rebuild and ever aspire. All we have done is ever still to do. All breaks and all renews and is the same. Huge revolutions of life’s fruitless gyre, The new-born ages perish like the old, As if the sad Enigma kept its right Till all is done for which this scene was made. Too little the strength that now with us is born, Too faint the light that steals through Nature’s lids, Too scant the joy with which she buys our pain. In a brute world that knows not its own sense, Thought-racked upon the wheel of birth we live, The instruments of an impulse not our own Moved to achieve with our heart’s blood for price Half-knowledge, half-creations that soon tire. A foiled immortal soul in perishing limbs, Baffled and beaten back we labour still, Annulled, frustrated, spent, we still survive. In anguish we labour that from us may rise A larger-seeing man with nobler heart, A golden vessel of the incarnate Truth, The executor of the divine attempt Equipped to wear the earthly body of God, Communicant and prophet and lover and king. I know that thy creation cannot fail.
Page – 387 For even through the mists of mortal thought Infallible are thy mysterious steps, And, though Necessity dons the garb of Chance, Hidden in the blind shifts of Fate she keeps The slow calm logic of Infinity’s pace And the inviolate sequence of its will. All life is fixed in an ascending scale And adamantine is the evolving Law;
In the beginning is prepared the close.
This strange irrational product of the mire,
This compromise between the beast and God,
Is not the crown of thy miraculous world.
I know there shall inform the inconscient cells,
At one with Nature and at height with heaven,
A spirit vast as the containing sky
And swept with ecstasy from invisible founts,
A god come down and greater by the fall.
A power arose out of my slumber’s cell.
Abandoning the tardy limp of the hours
And the inconstant blink of mortal sight,
There where the Thinker sleeps in too much light
And intolerant flames the lone all-witnessing Eye
Hearing the word of Fate from Silence’ heart
In the endless moment of Eternity,
It saw from timelessness the works of Time.
Overpassed were the leaden formulas of the Mind,
Overpowered the obstacle of mortal Space:
The unfolding Image showed the things to come.
A giant dance of Shiva tore the past,
There was a thunder as of worlds that fall,
Earth was o’errun with fire and the roar of Death
Clamouring to slay a world his hunger had made;
Page – 388 There was a clangour of Destruction’s wings:
The Titan’s battle-cry was in my ears,
Alarm and rumour shook the armoured Night.
I saw the Omnipotent’s naming pioneers
Over the heavenly verge which turns towards life
Come crowding down the amber stairs of birth; Forerunners of a divine multitude Out of the paths of the morning star they came Into the little room of mortal life. I saw them cross the twilight of an age, The sun-eyed children of a marvellous dawn, The great creators with wide brows of calm, The massive barrier-breakers of the world And wrestlers with destiny in her lists of will, The labourers in the quarries of the gods, The messengers of the Incommunicable, The architects of immortality. Into the fallen human sphere they came, Faces that wore the Immortal’s glory still, Voices that communed still with the thoughts of God, Bodies made beautiful by the Spirit’s light, Carrying the magic word, the mystic fire, Carrying the Dionysian cup of joy, Approaching eyes of a diviner man, Lips chanting an unknown anthem of the soul, Feet echoing in the corridors of Time. High priests of wisdom, sweetness, might and bliss, Discoverers of beauty’s sunlit ways And swimmers of Love’s laughing fiery floods And dancers within rapture’s golden doors, Their tread one day shall change the suffering earth And justify the light on Nature’s face.
Page – 389 Although Fate lingers in the high Beyond And the work seems vain on which our heart’s force was spent, All shall be done for which our pain was borne. Even as of old man came behind the beast This high divine successor surely shall come Behind man’s inefficient mortal pace, Behind his vain labour, sweat and blood and tears:
He shall know what mortal mind barely durst think,
He shall do what the heart of the mortal could not dare.
Inheritor of the toil of human time
He shall take on him the burden of the gods;
All heavenly light shall visit the earth’s thoughts,
The might of heaven shall fortify earthly hearts; Earth’s deeds shall touch the superhuman’s height, Earth’s seeing widen into the infinite. Heavy unchanged weighs still the imperfect world; The splendid youth of Time has passed and failed; Heavy and long are the years our labour counts And still the seals are firm upon man’s soul And weary is the ancient Mother’s heart. O Truth defended in thy secret sun, Voice of her mighty musings in shut heavens On things withdrawn within her luminous depths, O Wisdom-Splendour, Mother of the universe, Creatrix, the Eternal’s artist Bride, Linger not long with thy transmuting hand Pressed vainly on one golden bar of Time, As if Time dare not open its heart to God. O radiant fountain of the world’s delight World-free and unattainable above, O Bliss who ever dwellst deep hid within While men seek thee outside and never find,
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Mystery and Muse with hieratic tongue,
Incarnate the white passion of thy force,
Mission to earth some living form of thee.
One moment fill with thy eternity,
Let thy infinity in one body live,
All-Knowledge wrap one mind in seas of light,
All-Love throb single in one human heart.
Immortal, treading the earth with mortal feet
All heaven’s beauty crowd in earthly limbs!
Omnipotence, girdle with the power of God
Movements and moments of a mortal will,
Pack with the eternal might one human hour
And with one gesture change all future time.
Let a great word be spoken from the heights
And one great act unlock the doors of Fate."
His prayer sank down in the resisting Night
Oppressed by the thousand forces that deny,
As if too weak to climb to the Supreme.
But there arose a wide consenting Voice,
The spirit of beauty was revealed in sound:
Light floated round the marvellous Vision’s brow
And on her lips the Immortal’s joy took shape.
"O strong forerunner, I have heard thy cry.
One shall descend and break the iron Law,
Change Nature’s doom by the lone Spirit’s power.
A limitless Mind that can contain the world,
A sweet and violent heart of ardent calms
Moved by the passions of the gods shall come.
All mights and greatnesses shall join in her,
Beauty shall walk celestial on the earth,
Delight shall sleep in the cloud-net of her hair
Page – 391 And in her body as on his homing tree Immortal Love shall beat his glorious wings. A music of griefless things shall weave her charm;
The harps of the Perfect shall attune her voice,
The streams of Heaven shall murmur in her laugh,
Her lips shall be the honeycombs of God,
Her limbs his golden jars of ecstasy,
Her breasts the rapture-flowers of Paradise.
She shall bear Wisdom in her voiceless bosom,
Strength shall be with her like a conqueror’s sword
And from her eyes the Eternal’s bliss shall gaze.
A seed shall be sown in Death’s tremendous hour,
A branch of heaven transplant to human soil,
Nature shall overleap her mortal step; Fate shall be changed by an unchanging will."
As a flame disappears in endless Light
Immortally extinguished in its source,
Vanished the splendour and was stilled the word.
An echo of delight that once was close,
The harmony journeyed towards some distant hush,
A music failing in the ear of trance,
A cadence called by distant cadences,
A voice that trembled into strains withdrawn.
Her form retreated from the longing earth
Forsaking nearness to the abandoned sense,
Ascending to her unattainable home.
Lone, brilliant, vacant lay the inner fields;
All was unfilled inordinate spirit space,
Indifferent, waste, a desert of bright peace.
Then a line moved on the far edge of calm: The warm-lipped sentient soft terrestrial wave,
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A quick and many-murmured moan and laugh,
Came gliding in upon white feet of sound.
Unlocked was the deep glory of Silence’ heart; The absolute unmoving stillnesses Surrendered to the breath of mortal air, Dissolving boundlessly the heavens of trance Collapsed to waking mind. Eternity Cast down its incommunicable lids Over its solitudes remote from ken Behind the voiceless mystery of sleep. The grandiose respite failed, the wide release. Across the light of fast-receding planes That fled from him as from a falling star, Compelled to fill his human house in Time His soul drew back into the speed and noise Of the vast business of created things. A chariot of the marvels of the heavens Broad-based to bear the gods on fiery wheels, Flaming he swept through the spiritual gates. The mortal stir received him in its midst. Once more he moved amid material scenes, Lifted by intimations from the heights And twixt the pauses of the building brain Touched by the thoughts that skim the fathomless surge Of Nature and wing back to hidden shores. The eternal seeker in the aeonic field Besieged by the intolerant press of hours Again was strong for great swift-footed deeds. Awake beneath the ignorant vault of Night, He saw the unnumbered people of the stars And heard the questioning of the unsatisfied flood And toiled with the form-maker, measuring Mind.
Page – 393 A wanderer from the occult invisible suns Accomplishing the fate’ of transient things, A god in the figure of the arisen beast, He raised his brow of conquest to the heavens Establishing the empire of the soul On Matter and its bounded universe As on a solid rock in infinite seas. The Lord of Life resumed his mighty rounds In the scant field of the ambiguous globe.
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