-04_The Divine Hearing.htm

A LL sounds, all voices have become Thy voice:

       Music and thunder and the cry of birds,
Life’s babble¹ of her sorrows and her joys,

       Cadence of human speech and murmured words,

The laughter of the sea’s enormous mirth,

       The winged plane purring through the conquered² air,
The auto’s trumpet-song of speed to earth,

       The machine’s reluctant drone, the siren’s blare

Blowing upon the windy horn of Space

       A call of distance and of mystery,
Memories of sun-bright³ lands and ocean-ways,—

       All now are wonder-tones and themes of Thee.

A secret harmony steals⁴ through the blind heart
And all grows beautiful because Thou art.

       24.10.1937

¹ babbling
² silent
³ sun-.lit

⁴ smites

I CONTAIN the whole 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.

      15.7.1938

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 of¹ 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.

15.7.1938

¹to

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.

26.7.1938
21.3.1944

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.

26.7.1938
18.3.1944

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 a 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.

27.7.1938
22.3.1944

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 curls¹

     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.

27*.7.1938 
21.3.1944 

¹ restored  from an earlier version
*26 (?)    

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.

27.7.1938
21.3.1944

 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 its 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.

28.7.1938¹

¹ 26.7.1938 (?)

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.

8.8.1938
22.3.1944

T‘HY golden Light came down into my brain

       And the grey worms 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 come down into my feet
My earth is now thy playfield and thy seat.

8.8.1938
22.3.1944

ON the waters of a nameless Infinite

      My skiff is launched; I have left the human shore.

All fades behind me and I see before
      The unknown abyss and one pale pointing light.
An unseen Hand controls my rudder. Night

     Walls up the sea in a black corridor,—

An inconscient Hunger’s lion plaint and roar
     Or the ocean sleep of a dead Eremite.

I feel the greatness of the Power I seek

      Surround me; below me are its¹ giant deeps.

              Beyond, the invisible height no soul has trod.
I shall be merged in, the Lonely and Unique
       And wake into a sudden blaze of God,

              The marvel and rapture of the Apocalypse.

11.9.1939

¹the

 I AM held no more by life’s alluring cry,

       Her joy and grief, her charm, her laughter’s lute.

       Hushed are the magic moments of the flute,
And form and colour and brief ecstasy.
I would hear, in my spirit’s wideness solitary

       The Voice that speaks when mortal lips are mute;

        I seek the wonder of things absolute
Born from the silence of Eternity.

There is a need within the soul of man

       The splendours of the surface never sate;

                  For life and mind and their glory and debate
Are the slow prelude of a vaster theme,
       A sketch confused of a supernal plan,

                 A preface to the epic of the Supreme.

12.9.1939

Page -13  

‘T‘HERE is a wisdom like a brooding Sun,

      A Bliss in the heart’s crypt grown fiery white,
The heart of a world in which all hearts are one,

      A Silence on the mountains of delight,

A Calm that cradles Fate upon its knees;

      A wide Compassion leans to embrace earth’s pain;

A Witness dwells within our secrecies,

      The incarnate Godhead in the body of man.

Our mind is a glimmering curtain of that Ray,

      Our strength a parody of the Immortal’s power,
Our joy a dreamer on the Eternal’s way
      Hunting the fugitive¹ beauty of an hour.

Only on the heart’s veiled door the word of flame
Is written, the secret and tremendous Name.

12.9.1939

¹unseizable  

I SAT behind the dance of Danger’s hooves

       In the shouting street that seemed a futurist’s whim,
And suddenly felt, exceeding Nature’s grooves,

      In me, enveloping me the body of Him.

Above my head a mighty head was seen,
      A face with the calm of immortality
And an omnipotent gaze that held the scene

      In the vast circle of its sovereignty. 

His hair was mingled with the sun and breeze;

      The world was in His heart and He was I:

I housed in me the Everlasting’s peace,

      The strength of One whose substance cannot die.

The moment passed and all was as before;

Only that¹ deathless memory I bore.

13.9.1939

¹ its  

IN a town of gods, housed in a little shrine,    

      From sculptured limbs the Godhead looked at me,-
A living Presence deathless and divine,
     A Form that harboured all infinity.

The great World-Mother and her mighty will

     Inhabited the earth’s abysmal sleep,
Voiceless, omnipotent, inscrutable,

     Mute in the desert and the sky and deep.

Now veiled with mind she dwells and speaks no word,

     Voiceless, inscrutable, omniscient,
Hiding until our soul has seen, has heard

     The secret of her strange embodiment,

One in the worshipper and the immobile shape,
A beauty and mystery flesh or stone can drape.

13.9.1939

AT last I find a meaning of soul’s birth

      Into this universe terrible and sweet,
I who have felt the hungry heart of earth

     Aspiring beyond heaven to Krishna’s feet.

I have seen the beauty of immortal eyes,

      And heard the passion of the Lover’s flute,
And known a deathless ecstasy’s surprise
      And sorrow in my heart for ever mute.

Nearer and nearer now the music draws,

      Life shudders with a strange felicity;

All Nature is a wide enamoured pause

      Hoping her lord to touch, to clasp, to be.

For this one moment lived the ages past;

The world now throbs fulfilled in me at last.

15.9.1939

ON the white summit of eternity

       A single Soul of bare infinities,

      Guarded he keeps by a fire-screen of peace
His mystic loneliness of nude ecstasy.
But, touched by an immense delight to be,

       He looks across unending depths and sees

       Musing amid the inconscient silences
The Mighty Mother’s dumb felicity.

Half now awake she rises to his glance;

        Then, moved to circling by her heart-beats’ will,

                The rhythmic worlds describe that passion-dance.
Life springs in her and Mind is born; her face
        She lifts to Him who is Herself, until

                 The Spirit leaps into the Spirit’s embrace.

16.9.1939

A BARE impersonal hush is now my mind,

      A world of sight clear and inimitable,
A volume of silence by a Godhead signed,

      A greatness pure of thought, virgin of will.

Once on its pages Ignorance could write

      In a scribble of intellect the blind guess of Time
And cast gleam-messages of ephemeral light,

      A food for souls that wander on Nature’s rim.

But now I listen to a greater Word

      Born from the mute unseen omniscient Ray:

The Voice that only Silence’ ear has heard

      Leaps missioned from an eternal glory of Day.

All turns from a wideness and unbroken peace
To a tumult of joy in a sea of wide release.

18-19.9.1939

 I HAVE become what before Time I was.
       A secret touch has quieted thought and sense:

All things by the agent Mind created pass
       Into a void and mute magnificence.

My life is a silence grasped by timeless hands;

       The world is drowned in an immortal gaze.
Naked my spirit from its vestures stands;

       I am alone with my own self for space.

My heart is a centre of infinity,

      My body a dot in the soul’s vast expanse.
All being’s huge abyss wakes under me,

     Once screened in a gigantic Ignorance.

A momentless immensity pure and bare,
I stretch to an eternal everywhere.

18-19.9.1939

THERE are two beings in my single self.

       A Godhead watches Nature from behind
At play in front with a brilliant surface elf,

       A time-born creature with a human mind.

Tranquil and boundless like a sea or sky,

       The Godhead knows himself Eternity’s son.
Radiant his mind and vast, his heart as free;

       His will is a sceptre of dominion.

The smaller self by Nature’s passions driven,

       Thoughtful and erring learns his human task;

All must be known and to that Greatness given

       This mind and life, the mirror and the mask.

As with the figure of a symbol dance
The screened Omniscient plays at Ignorance.

19.9.1939   

IN us is the thousandfold Spirit who is one,

       An eternal thinker calm and great and wise,
A seer whose eye is an all-regarding sun,
       A poet of the cosmic mysteries.

A critic Witness pieces everything a

      And binds the fragments in his brilliant sheaf;

A World-adventurer borne on Destiny’s wing

     Gambles with death and triumph, joy and grief.

A king of greatness and a slave of love,

      Host of the stars and guest in Nature’s inn,
A high spectator Spirit throned above,

      A pawn of passion in the game divine,

One who has made in sport the suns and seas
Mirrors in our being his immense caprice.

20.9.1939    

O THOU of whom I am the instrument,
      0 secret Spirit and Nature housed in me,
Let all my mortal being now be blent
      In Thy still glory of divinity.

I have given my mind to be dug Thy channel mind,

      I have offered up my will to be Thy will:

Let nothing of myself be left behind

      In our union mystic and unutterable.

My heart shall throb with the world-beats of Thy love;

      My body become Thy engine for earth-use;

In my nerves and veins Thy rapture’s streams shall move;

      My thoughts shall be hounds of Light for Thy power to loose.

Keep¹ only my soul to adore eternally
And meet Thee in each form and soul of Thee.

20.9.1939

¹ Leave  

I FACE earth’s happenings with an equal soul;

       In all are heard Thy steps: Thy unseen feet
Tread Destiny’s pathways in my front. Life’s whole
      Tremendous theorem is Thou complete.

No danger can perturb my spirit’s calm:

      My acts are Thine; I do Thy works and pass;

Failure is cradled on Thy deathless arm,

      Victory is Thy passage mirrored in Fortune’s glass.

In this rude combat with the fate of man

      Thy smile within my heart makes all my strength;

Thy Force in me labours at its grandiose plan,

       Indifferent to the Time-snake’s crawling length.

No power can slay my soul; it lives in Thee.
Thy presence is my immortality.

20.9.1939

I HAVE discovered my deep deathless being:

       Masked by my front of mind, immense, serene
It meets the world with an Immortal’s seeing,

       A god-spectator of the human scene.

No pain and sorrow of the heart and flesh

      Can tread that pure and voiceless sanctuary.
Danger and fear, Fate’s hounds, slipping their leash

      Rend body and nerve,—the timeless Spirit is free.

Awake, God’s ray and witness in my breast,

      In the undying substance of my soul
Flamelike, inscrutable the almighty Guest.

      Death nearer comes and Destiny takes her toll;

He hears the blows that shatter Nature’s house:

Calm sits he, formidable, luminous.

21.9.1939

NOW more and more the Epiphany within
      Affirms on Nature’s soil His sovereign rights.
My mind has left its prison-camp of brain;

       It pours, a luminous sea from spirit heights.

A tranquil splendour, waits my Force of Life

      Couched in my heart, to do what He shall bid,
Poising wide wings like a great hippogriff

      On which the gods of the empyrean ride.

My senses change into gold gates of bliss;

      An ecstasy thrills through touch and sound and sight
Flooding the blind material sheath’s dull ease:

      My darkness answers to His call of light.

Nature in me one day like Him shall sit
Victorious, calm, immortal, infinite.

22.9.1939

ONE dreamed and saw a gland write Hamlet, drink

        At the Mermaid, capture immortality;

A committee of hormones on the Aegean’s brink
       Composed the Iliad and the Odyssey.

A thyroid, meditating almost nude

       Under the Bo-tree, saw the eternal Light
And, rising from its mighty solitude,

      Spoke of the Wheel and eightfold Path all right.

A brain by a disordered stomach driven

      Thundered through Europe, conquered, ruled and fell.
From St. Helena went, perhaps, to Heaven.

      Thus wagged on the surreal world, until

A scientist played with atoms and blew out
The universe before God had time to shout.

25.9.1939   

A LL Nature is taught in radiant ways to move,

      All beings are in myself embraced.
0 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.

25.9.19381
21.3.1944

¹ 25.7.1938 (?)

I SAW my soul a traveller through Time;

      From life to life the cosmic ways it trod,
Obscure in the depths and on the heights sublime,

      Evolving from the worm into the god.

A spark of the eternal Fire,  it came

      To build a house in Matter for the Unborn.
The inconscient sunless Night received the flame,

      In the brute seed of things dumb and forlorn

Life stirred and Thought outlined a gleaming shape

     Till on the stark inanimate earth could move,
Born  to    somnambulist Nature in her sleep,

     A thinking creature who can hope and love.

Still by slow steps the miracle goes on,
The Immortal’s gradual birth mid mire and stone.

27-29.9.1939

‘THIS body which was once my universe,

      Is now a pittance carried by the soul,—
Its Titan’s motion bears this scanty purse,

      Pacing through vastness to a vaster goal.

Too small was it to meet the giant need

      That only infinitude can satisfy:

He keeps it still, for-in the folds is hid

      His secret passport to eternity.

In his front an endless Time and Space deploy

      The landscape of their golden happenings;

His heart is filled with sweet and violent joy,

       His mind is upon great and distant things.

How grown with all the world conterminous
Is the little dweller in this narrow house!

2.10.1939

My mind, my soul grow larger than all Space;

       Time founders in that vastness glad and nude:

The body fades, an outline, a dim trace,

       A memory in the spirit’s solitude.

This universe is a vanishing circumstance

       In the glory of a white infinity,
Beautiful and bare for the Immortal’s dance,

      House-room of my immense felicity.

In the thrilled happy giant void within

      Thought lost in light and passion drowned in bliss,
Changing into a stillness hyaline,

      Obey the edict of the Eternal’s peace.

Life’s now the Ineffable’s dominion;

Nature is ended and the spirit alone.

2-3.10.1939

LIGHT, endless Light? darkness has room no more.
      Life’s ignorant gulfs give up their secrecy:

The huge inconscient depths unplumbed before
      Lie glimmering in vast expectancy.

Light, timeless Light immutable and apart!

      The holy sealed mysterious doors unclose.
Light, burning Light from the Infinite’s diamond heart

      Quivers in my heart where blooms the deathless rose.

Light in its rapture leaping through the nerves! .

      Light, brooding Light! each smitten passionate cell
In a mute blaze of ecstasy preserves

       A living sense of the Imperishable.

I move in an ocean of stupendous Light
Joining my depths to His eternal height.

3-4.10.1939

I HAVE sailed the golden ocean

      And crossed the silver bar;

I have reached the Sun of knowledge

      The earth-self’s midnight star.

Its fields of flaming vision,

      Its mountains of bare might,
Its peaks of fiery rapture,

      Its air of absolute light,

Its seas of self-oblivion,

      Its vales of Titan rest,
Became my soul’s dominion,

     Its Island of the Blest.

Alone with God and silence,

      Timeless it lived in Time;

Life was His fugue of music,

      Thought was Truth’s ardent rhyme.

The Light was still around me

      When I came back to earth
Bringing the Immortal’s knowledge

      Into man’s cave of birth.

3.10.19391

  ¹13.10-. 1939 (?)  

HE said, "I am egoless, spiritual, free,"

       Then swore because his dinner was not ready.
I asked him why. He said, "It is not me,

       But the belly’s hungry god who gets unsteady."

I asked him why. He said, "It is his play.

       I am unmoved within, desireless, pure.
I care not what may happen day by day."

       I questioned him, "Are you so very sure?"

He answered, "I can understand your doubt.

      But to be free is all. It does not matter
How you may kick and howl and rage and shout,

      Making a row over your daily platter.

To be aware of self is liberty,
Self I have got and, having self, am free."

15.10.1939

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 facade;

      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

17.10.1939

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.

19.10.1939

A FTER 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.

21.10.1939

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.

25.10.1939

E ACH 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 a part,
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,
0 Absolute, 0 vivid Infinite.

26.10.1939

A RISEN to voiceless unattainable peaks

        I meet no end, for all is boundless He,
An absolute joy the wide-winged spirit seeks
        A Might, a Presence, an Eternity.

In the inconscient dreadful dumb Abyss

        Are heard the heart-beats of the Infinite.
The insensible midnight veils His trance of bliss,

        A fathomless sealed astonishment of Light.

In His ray that dazzles our vision everywhere,

       Our half-closed eyes seek fragments of the One:

Only the eyes of Immortality dare

       To look unblinded on that living Sun.

Yet are our souls the Immortal’s selves within,
Comrades and powers and children of the Unseen.

October 1939

MUTE stands she, lonely on the topmost stair,
An image of magnificent despair;

The grandeur of a sorrowful surmise
Wakes in the largeness of her glorious eyes.
In her beauty’s dumb significant pose I find
The tragedy of her mysterious mind.
Yet is she stately, grandiose, full of grace.
A musing mask is her immobile face.
Her tail is up like an unconquered flag;

Its dignity knows not the right to wag.
An animal creature wonderfully human,
A charm and miracle of fur-footed Brahman,
Whether she is spirit, woman or a cat,
Is now the problem I am wondering at.

October 1939

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.

1.11.1939

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.

29.7.1940  

WHERE is the end of your armoured march, 0 children of Wotan?

Earth shudders with fear at your tread, the death-flame laughs in your eyes."
"We have seen the sign of Thor and the hammer of new creation,
A seed of blood on the soil, a flower of blood in the skies.
We march to make of earth a hell and call it heaven.
The heart of mankind we have smitten with the whip of the sorrows seven;

The Mother of God lies bleeding in our black and gold sunrise."

"I hear the cry of a broken world, 0 children of Wotan."
"Question the volcano when it burns, chide the fire and bitumen!
Suffering is the food of our strength and torture the bliss of our entrails.
We are pitiless, mighty and glad, the gods fear our laughter inhuman.
Our hearts are heroic and hard; we wear the belt of Orion:

Our will has the edge of the thunderbolt, our acts the claws of the lion.
We rejoice in the pain we create as a man in the kiss of a woman."

"Have you seen your fate in the scales of God, 0 children of Wotan,

And the tail of the Dragon lashing the foam in far-off seas? "

"We mock at God, we have silenced the mutter of priests at his altar.

Our leader is master of Fate, medium of her mysteries.

We have made the mind a cypher, we have strangled Thought with a cord;

Dead now are pity and honour, strength only is Nature’s lord.
We build a new world-order; our bombs shout Wotan’s peace.

We are the javelins of Destiny, we are the children of Wotan,
We are the human Titans, the supermen dreamed by the sage.
A cross of the beast and demoniac with the godhead of power and will,
"We are born in humanity’s sunset, to the Night is our pilgrimage.
On the bodies of perishing nations, mid the cry of the cataclysm coming
0 a presto of bomb and shell and the aeroplanes’ fatal humming,
"We march, lit by Truth’s death-pyre, to the world’s satanic age."

     1940   August

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.

23.3.44

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 -  46

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 advancer      

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.

I PASSED into a lucent still abode
       And saw as in a mirror crystalline
      An ancient Force ascending serpentine
0f the ascending¹ 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.

22.3.1944

¹ unhasting