BOOK TEN

The Book of the Double Twilight

Canto One

The Dream Twilight of the Ideal

ALL STILL was darkness dread and desolate;

There was no change nor any hope of change.

A walk to Nowhere in a land of Nought,

Gloom led to worse gloom, depth to an emptier depth,

Through formless wastes dumb and unknowable.

Through the despairing darkness dogged their steps

Even while it grew, it seemed unreal there,

Unquenchable, perpetual, lonely, null,

It was as if she must pay now her debt,

To some brilliant Maya that conceived her soul.

Her deep original sin, the will to be

That, made of dust, equalled itself with heaven,

Condemned ephemeral, born from Nature's dream,

The claim to be a living fire of God,

In that tremendous darkness heavy and bare

The error of the consciousness of Time,

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The peace and silence of the Nothingness

Appeared in a vanity of imagined Space

A great Negation was the Real's face

And when there is no world, no creature more,

It shall last, unbodied, saved from thought, at peace.

Condemned to live for ever empty of bliss,

Her spirit, guilty of being, wandered doomed,

But Maya is a veil of the Absolute;

The Eternal's wisdom and self-knowledge act

The Inconscient is the Superconscient's sleep.

Invents creation's paradox profound;

Unseen it throws out a dumb energy

All here is a mystery of contraries:

Suffering some secret rapture's tragic mask

Although Death walks beside us on Life's road,

And a last judgment on man's futile works,

Death is a stair, a door, a stumbling stride

A grey defeat pregnant with victory,

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The inconscient world is the spirit's self-made room,

Night is not our beginning nor our end;

Safe from too swift a waking to world-pain.

By Light we live and to the Light we go.

In the heart of everlasting Nothingness

Its faint infiltration drilled the blind deaf mass;

That housed the phantom of an aureate Sun

A golden fire came in and burned Night's heart;

The Inconscient conscious grew, Night felt and thought.

The intolerant Darkness paled and drew apart

But on a failing edge of dumb lost space

Adversary of the slow struggling Dawn

It trailed its coils through the dead martyred air

There is a morning twilight of the gods;

And God's long nights are justified by dawn.

And hue-winged visions stray across the lids,

The dreaming deities look beyond the seen

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That once had lodged in some abysmal heart.

And all the sorrow of the night was dead:

Like one who wakes to find his dreams were true,

Where all ran after light and joy and love

And deep anticipations of delight,

Were never grasped, yet breathed strange ecstasy.

An air that dared not suffer too much light.

Vague scenes dim-hearted in a drifting haze;

Vague spirits wandered with a bodiless cry,

Into harmonious distances unseized;

Wishing no goal for their unearthly course

Or floated without footing or their walk

Or they paced to the mighty measure of their thoughts

A ripple of gleaming wings crossed the far sky;

With low disturbing voices of desire,

As if the Sun-god's brilliant kine were there

These fugitive beings, these elusive shapes

The natural inhabitants of that world.

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No mortal feet could rest upon that soil,

In that fine chaos joy fled dancing past

And hid its sense in mysteries of hue;

And gave the sense of an enduring world;

And the same thoughts were constant passers-by

Alluring ever the expectant heart

Like the recurrence of a haunting rhyme.

A skirt of worlds invisibly divine.

There showered upon the floating atmosphere

That called to follow into a magic heaven,

There was the voice of an unrealised bliss.

A spirit of purity, an elusive presence

Whose momentary and escaping thrill,

And brief even in imperishableness,

Earth or all-conquering heaven can ever give.

Delay the heart by immobility:

Their bold formations are too absolute;

They stand up sculptured on the eternal hills,

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Win immortality by perfect form.

Vessels of infinite significances,

No mist or shadow soothes the vanquished sight,

These only touched a golden hem of bliss,

The flying feet of exquisite desires.

They shone like visitants from the morning star,

Tremulous imaginings of a heavenly world:

Thrilled with a spray of joy too slight to tire.

Like faces leaping on a fan of fire

Like fugitive landscapes painting silver mists.

And sound sought refuge from the ear's surprise,

The joys here snatched were half-forbidden things,

As when a goddess' bosom dimly moves

A glimmering Eden crossed by faery gleams,

But nothing is familiar yet with bliss.

In a fleeting gladness of untired delight,

Past vanishing hedges, hurrying hints of fields,

Journeying she wished no end: as one through clouds

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Travels upon a mountain ridge and hears

Sound of invisible streams, she walked besieged

A charm of bodiless touches felt and heard

Calling like travellers upon seeking winds

As if a music old yet ever new,

Thoughts that no habitation found, yet clung

Desires that hurt not, happy only to live

Sang in the breast like a celestial lyre.

In this beauty as of mind made visible,

Before her seemed the centre of its charm,

And captain of the fancies of her soul.

And its sombre sadness could not darken nor slay

The sombre Shadow sullen, implacable

Enhanced by his grey, joy grew more bright and dear;

Deepened unuttered meanings to the heart;

And transience immortality's floating hem,

Its antithesis sharpening her divinity.

By a moon-bright face a brilliant moment drawn,

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Amid the white inward musings of the soul.

Awhile she moved on an enchantment's soil,

Above, her spirit in its mighty trance

Immutable like a fixed eternal star.

END OF CANTO ONE

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