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Sonnets from Manuscripts Circa 1934 1947
A trifling unit in a boundless plan Amidst the enormous insignificance Of the unpeopled cosmos’ fire-whirl dance, Earth, as by accident, engendered man,
A creature of his own grey ignorance, A mind half shadow and half gleam, a breath That wrestles, captive in a world of death, To live some lame brief years. Yet his advance,
Attempt of a divinity within, A consciousness in the inconscient Night, To realise its own supernal Light, Confronts the ruthless forces of the Unseen.
Aspiring to godhead from insensible clay He travels slow-footed towards the eternal day.
What opposites are here! A trivial life Specks the huge dream of Death called Matter; intense In its struggle of weakness towards omnipotence, A thinking mind starts from the unthinking strife
In the order of the electric elements. Immortal life breathed in that monstrous death, A mystery of Knowledge wore as sheath Matter’s mute nescience. Its enveloped sense
Or dumb somnambulist will obscurely reigns Driving the atoms in their cosmic course Whose huge unhearing movement serves perforce The works of a strange blind omniscience.
The world’s deep contrasts are but figures spun Draping the unanimity of the One.
Page – 593
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 those 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.
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.
Page – 594
A godhead moves us to unrealised things. Asleep in the wide folds of destiny, A world guarded by Silence’ rustling wings Shelters their fine impossibility:
But parting quiver the caerulean gates; Strange splendours look into our dreaming eyes; We bear proud deities and magnificent fates; Faces and hands come near from Paradise.
What shines above, waits darkling here in us: Bliss unattained our future’s birthright is, Beauty of our dim souls grows amorous, We are the heirs of infinite widenesses.
The impossible is our mask of things to be, Mortal the door to immortality.
All is not finished in the unseen decree; A Mind beyond our mind demands our ken, A life of unimagined harmony Awaits, concealed, the grasp of unborn men.
The crude beginnings of the lifeless earth, The mindless stirrings of the plant and tree Prepared our thought; thought for a godlike birth Broadens the mould of our mortality.
A might no human will nor force can gain, A knowledge seated in eternity, A bliss beyond our struggle and our pain Are the high pinnacles of our destiny.
O Thou who climb’dst to mind from the dull stone, Face now the miracled summits still unwon.
Page – 595
A dumb Inconscient drew life’s stumbling maze, A night of all things, packed and infinite: It made our consciousness a torch that plays Between the Abyss and a supernal Light.
Our mind was framed a lens of segment sight Piecing out inch by inch the world’s huge mass, And reason a small hard theodolite Measuring unreally the measureless ways.
Yet is the dark Inconscient whence came all The self-same Power that shines on high unwon: Our Night shall be a sky purpureal, Our torch transmute to a vast godhead’s sun.
Rooted in mire heavenward man’s nature grows, — His soul the dim bud of God’s flaming rose.
I saw the electric stream on which is run The world turned motes and spark-whirls of a Light, A Fire of which the nebula and sun Are glints and flame-drops, scattered, eremite;
And veiled by viewless Light worked other Powers, An Air of movement endless, unbegun, Expanding and contracting in Time’s hours And the intangible ether of the One.
The surface finds, the screen-phenomenon, Are Nature’s offered ransom, while behind Her occult mysteries lie safe, unknown, From the crude handling of the empiric Mind.
Our truths discovered are but dust and trace Of the eternal Energy in her race.
Page – 596
All here is Spirit self-moved eternally For Matter is its seeming or its form, A finite motion of Infinity Built up by energy’s electric storm,
A flux of solid instability Whirled into shape by a tremendous Force That labours out the world’s fabric endlessly, Creates and then destroys without remorse
Titan and worm, the dew-drop and the sea, Our fragile bodies like the aeoned star, But through it all remains immortally The secret spirit we for ever are.
Matter is Spirit’s semblance glamorous Self-woven for its own field and robe and house.
What points ascending Nature to her goal? ‘Tis not man’s lame transcribing intellect With its carved figures rigid and erect But the far subtle vision of his soul.
His instruments have served his weakness well But they must change to tread the paths of Fire That lead through his calm self immeasurable To the last rapture’s incandescent spire.
The spirit keeps for him its ample ways, A sense that takes the world into our being, A close illumined touch and intimate seeing, Wide Thought that is a god’s ensphering gaze,
A tranquil heart in sympathy with all, A will wide-winging, armed, imperial.
Page – 597
Aroused from Matter’s sleep when Nature strove Into the half lights of the embodied mind She left not all imprisonment behind But trailed an ever lengthening chain, and the love
Of shadows and half lustres went with her. In timid mood were shaped our instruments; Horizon and surface barriered thought and sense, Forbidden to look too high, too deep to peer.
An algebra of signs, a scheme of sense, A symbol language without depth or wings, A power to handle deftly outward things Are our scant earnings of intelligence.
Yet towards a greater Nature paths she keeps Threading the grandeur of her climbing steeps.
In occult depths grow Nature’s roots unshown; Each visible hides its base in the unseen, Even the invisible guards what it can mean In a yet deeper invisible, unknown.
Man’s science builds abstractions cold and bare And carves to formulas the living whole; It is a brain and hand without a soul, A piercing eye behind our outward stare.
The objects that we see are not their form, A mass of forces is the apparent shape; Pursued and seized, their inner lines escape In a vast consciousness beyond our norm.
Follow and you shall meet abysses still, Infinite, wayless, mute, unknowable.
Page – 598
On a dire whirlpool in the hurrying river, A life-stilled statue naked, bronze, severe, He kept the posture of a deathless seer Unshaken by the mad water’s leap and shiver. Thought could not think in him, flesh could not quiver; The feet of Time could not adventure here; Only some unknown Power nude and austere, Only a Silence mighty to deliver.
His spirit world-wide and companionless, Seated above the torrent of the days On the deep eddy that our being forms, Silent sustained the huge creation’s stress, Unchanged supporting Nature’s rounds and norms, Immobile background of the cosmic race.
There is a kingdom of the spirit’s ease. It is not in this helpless swirl of thought, Foam from the world-sea or spray whispers caught, With which we build mind’s shifting symmetries, Nor in life’s stuff of passionate unease, Nor the heart’s unsure emotions frailly wrought Nor trivial clipped sense-joys soon brought to nought, Nor in this body’s solid transiences.
Wider behind than the vast universe Our spirit scans the drama and the stir, A peace, a light, an ecstasy, a power Waiting at the end of blindness and the curse That veils it from its ignorant minister The grandeur of its free eternal hour.
Page – 599
Now I have borne Thy presence and Thy light, Eternity assumes me and I am A vastness of tranquillity and flame, My heart a deep Atlantic of delight. My life is a moving moment of Thy might Carrying Thy vision’s sacred oriflamme Inscribed with the white glory of Thy name In the unborn silence of the Infinite.
My body is a jar of radiant peace, The days a line across my timelessness, My mind is made a voiceless breadth of Thee, A lyre of muteness and a luminous sea; Yet in each cell I feel Thy fire embrace, A brazier of the seven ecstasies.
The electron on which forms and worlds are built, Leaped into being, a particle of God. A spark from the eternal Energy spilt, It is the Infinite’s blind minute abode.
In that small flaming chariot Shiva rides. The One devised innumerably to be; His oneness in invisible forms he hides, Time’s tiny temples to eternity.
Atom and molecule in their unseen plan Buttress an edifice of strange onenesses, Crystal and plant, insect and beast and man, — Man on whom the World-Unity shall seize,
Widening his soul-spark to an epiphany Of the timeless vastness of Infinity.
Page – 600
I contain the wide world in my soul’s embrace: In me Arcturus and Belphegor burn. To whatsoever living form I turn I see my own body with another face.
All eyes that look on me are my sole eyes; The one heart that beats within all breasts is mine. The world’s happiness flows through me like wine, Its million sorrows are my agonies.
Yet all its acts are only waves that pass Upon my surface; inly for ever still, Unborn I sit, timeless, intangible: All things are shadows in my tranquil glass.
My vast transcendence holds the cosmic whirl; I am hid in it as in the sea a pearl.
All Nature is taught in radiant ways to move, All beings are in myself embraced. O fiery boundless Heart of joy and love, How art thou beating in a mortal’s breast!
It is Thy rapture flaming through my nerves And all my cells and atoms thrill with Thee; My body Thy vessel is and only serves As a living wine-cup of Thy ecstasy.
I am a centre of Thy golden light And I its vast and vague circumference; Thou art my soul great, luminous and white And Thine my mind and will and glowing sense.
Thy spirit’s infinite breath I feel in me; My life is a throb of Thy eternity.
Page – 601
I dwell in the spirit’s calm nothing can move And watch the actions of Thy vast world-force, Its mighty wings that through infinity move And the Time-gallopings of the deathless Horse.
This mute stupendous Energy that whirls The stars and nebulae in its long train, Like a huge Serpent through my being curls With its diamond hood of joy and fangs of pain.
It rises from the dim inconscient deep Upcoiling through the minds and hearts of men, Then touches on some height of luminous sleep The bliss and splendour of the eternal plane.
All this I bear in me, untouched and still, Assenting to Thy all-wise inscrutable will.
However long Night’s hour, I will not dream That the small ego and the person’s mask Are all that God reveals in our life-scheme, The last result of Nature’s cosmic task.
A greater Presence in her bosom works; Long it prepares its far epiphany: Even in the stone and beast the godhead lurks, A bright Persona of eternity.
It shall burst out from the limit traced by Mind And make a witness of the prescient heart; It shall reveal even in this inert blind Nature, long veiled in each inconscient part,
Fulfilling the occult magnificent plan, The world-wide and immortal spirit in man.
Page – 602
I made an assignation with the Night; In the abyss was fixed our rendezvous: In my breast carrying God’s deathless light I came her dark and dangerous heart to woo.
I left the glory of the illumined Mind And the calm rapture of the divinised soul And travelled through a vastness dim and blind To the grey shore where her ignorant waters roll.
I walk by the chill wave through the dull slime And still that weary journeying knows no end; Lost is the lustrous godhead beyond Time, There comes no voice of the celestial Friend.
And yet I know my footprints’ track shall be A pathway towards Immortality.
I have wrapped the wide world in my wider self And Time and Space my spirit’s seeing are. I am the god and demon, ghost and elf, I am the wind’s speed and the blazing star.
All Nature is the nursling of my care, I am the struggle and the eternal rest; The world’s joy thrilling runs through me, I bear The sorrow of millions in my lonely breast.
I have learned a close identity with all, Yet am by nothing bound that I become; Carrying in me the universe’s call I mount to my imperishable home.
I pass beyond Time and life on measureless wings, Yet still am one with born and unborn things.
Page – 603
I have thrown from me the whirling dance of mind And stand now in the spirit’s silence free; Timeless and deathless beyond creature kind, The centre of my own eternity.
I have escaped and the small self is dead; I am immortal, alone, ineffable; I have gone out from the universe I made, And have grown nameless and immeasurable.
My mind is hushed in wide and endless light, My heart a solitude of delight and peace, My sense unsnared by touch and sound and sight, My body a point in white infinities.
I am the one Being’s sole immobile Bliss: No one I am, I who am all that is.
Out of a seeming void and dark-winged sleep Of dim inconscient infinity A Power arose from the insentient deep, A flame-whirl of magician Energy.
Some huge somnambulist Intelligence Devising without thought process and plan Arrayed the burning stars’ magnificence, The living bodies of beasts and the brain of man.
What stark Necessity or ordered Chance Became alive to know the cosmic whole? What magic of numbers, what mechanic dance Developed consciousness, assumed a soul?
The darkness was the Omnipotent’s abode, Hood of omniscience, a blind mask of God.
Page – 604
I housed within my heart the life of things, All hearts athrob in the world I felt as mine; I shared the joy that in creation sings And drank its sorrow like a poignant wine.
I have felt the anger in another’s breast, All passions poured through my world-self their waves; One love I shared in a million bosoms expressed. I am the beast man slays, the beast he saves. I spread life’s burning wings of rapture and pain; Black fire and gold fire strove towards one bliss: I rose by them towards a supernal plane Of power and love and deathless ecstasies.
A deep spiritual calm no touch can sway Upholds the mystery of this Passion-play.
Thy golden Light came down into my brain And the grey rooms of mind sun-touched became A bright reply to Wisdom’s occult plane, A calm illumination and a flame.
Thy golden Light came down into my throat, And all my speech is now a tune divine, A paean song of Thee my single note; My words are drunk with the Immortal’s wine.
Thy golden Light came down into my heart Smiting my life with Thy eternity; Now has it grown a temple where Thou art And all its passions point towards only Thee.
Thy golden Light came down into my feet; My earth is now Thy playfield and Thy seat.
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