-95_In the silence of midnight.htm

In the silence of midnight, in the light of dawn or noontide
I have heard the flutings of the Infinite, I have seen the sun-wings of the seraphs.
On the boundless solitude of the mountains, on the shoreless roll of ocean
Something is felt of God's vastness, floating touches of the Absolute;
Momentary and immeasurable smiled the sense nature free from its limits,-
A brief glimpse, a hint, it passes but the soul grows deeper, wider:
God has set his mark upon the creature.

In the flash or flutter of flight of bird and insect, in the passion of winged cry on the treetops;
In the golden feathers of the eagle, in the maned and tawny glory of the lion,
In the voiceless hierophants of Nature with their hieratic script of colour,
Orchid, tulip and narcissus, rose and nenuphar and lotus,
Something of eternal beauty seizes on the soul and nerves and heartstrings...
 

Seer deep-hearted

Seer deep-hearted, divine King of the secrecies,
Occult fountain of love sprung from the heart of God,
Ways thou knewest no feet ever in time had trod.
Words leaped shining (flashing), the flame-billows of wisdom's seas,
Vast in thy soul was a tide washing the coasts of heaven,
Thoughts broke burning and bare crossing the human night,
White star-scripts of the gods born from the presses of Light
Page by page to the dim children of earth were given.

Page-603

Death and the Traveller Fire

    DEATH

Flame that ¹ invadest my empire of sorrow wordless and sombre,
    Arrow of azure light, golden-winged barbed with delight,
Who was it aimed thee into my ² crucified Soul that forever
    Passions and beats in the womb of a universe built for its tomb?

I who am Death and live in the boundless cavern of Nature³,
    I am Death who cannot die. A Shadow of Eternity,-
Vainly I throb in the stars that err through the void without feature,
    Scintillant forms in a Nought vast without life, without thought.

O these stars⁴  that glitter and wander, God has devised them
    Burning nails in my heart, stones of my prisonhouse. God
Architect griefless relentless and mighty built and raised them,
    Clamped with them Time, His road to⁵  Nothingness, Death's grim abode.

Fire of God, I passioned for life and have gathered but ashes -
    Life so that Death might die. Yea, was it life that He gave me?
Glow of my darkness, reflex and nerve-beat devoured the ⁶ devourer,
    Tortured by the flame an obscure will in me kindled to save me.

Life was⁷ () a sorrowful throb of this Matter teaching it anguish,
    Teaching it hope and desire trod out too soon in the mire,
Life the frail joy that regrets its briefness, life the long sorrow,
    Love the close kinsman to hate and its freedom but bedfellows⁸ of Fate.

Then in my anguish I reached out for knowledge, light on my midnight,
    Light on its symbols of dream, strength of the thought to redeem,
Yea, was it light He permitted, this thought that is tangled in darkness?
    Ignorance sees by its own record of sense and of stone.

¹ Fire who   ²  the   ³  Matter  ⁴ All these worlds  ⁵ towards   ⁶ its ⁷  is   ⁸ comrade

(Alternative Stanza)
Boons for a shortlived sweetness were given me - hours that were tortures,
Hope more blind than my night, desire for deadly delight,
Joy that outlasts not its moment, vivid and barren,
Love a close kinsman to hate, freedom a minister of Fate.

Page-604

Ignorance building its schemes and its dreams on a basis of error,
    This was the mind I had sought fashioned out of His nought.
Alphabet hieroglyphs of the reflexes life had engendered,
    Spasms of matter caught in a luminous figment of thought.

Lo, is not God but myself, Death's euphemism fictioned immortal,
    Nothing eternalised bare, yet as if one who is None,
Death yet for ever alive, an Inconscient troubled with seemings,
    Matter tormented with life, a Void with its forces at strife?

0 by my thought to escape from myself out of thought into Nothing,
    Thus I had hoped to dissolve, rapt in some featureless Bliss,
Rending the illusion I made to be immutable and formless and timeless,
    This dream too now I leave, long not even to cease.

Into numb discontent I have lapsed of a universe barren,
    Goalless, condemned to survive, a spiral of matter in pain,
Now have I known myself as thy boundless finite, thy darkness without end
    Shadowily self-lit, grown content to strive and in vain.

Fire that travellest from immortality, spark of the Timeless,
    Why hast thou come to my night, unbearable Idol of Light,
Ah, from what happier universe strayedst thou kindling my torpor?
    Pass, 0 spirit of Light, now perturb not my vastness of Night.

Torn are the walls

Torn are the walls and the borders carved by a miserly Nature,
    I have burst into limitless kingdoms of sweetness and wonder.
Breaking the fences of Matter's gods arid their form and their feature,
    Fall'n are the barriers schemed and the vetoes are shattered asunder.

Page-605

The Fire-King and the Messenger

        THE FIRE-KING

0 soul who com'st fire-mantled from the earth
Into the silence of the seven skies,
Art thou an heir of the spiritual birth ?
Art thou an ancient guest of Paradise?

        THE MESSENGER

I am the Messenger of the human race,
I am the Pioneer from death and night.
I am the nympholept of Beauty's face,
I am the hunter of the immortal Light.

        THE FIRE-KING

What wearest thou that wraps thee with its power
Protecting from the Guardians of the Way?
What wanderer born from the eternal Hour?
What fragment of the inconceivable Ray?

        THE MESSENGER

It is the fire of an awakened soul
Aspiring from death to reach Eternity,
The wings of sacrifice flaming to their goal,
The burning godhead of humanity.

        THE FIRE-KING

What seekst thou here, child of the transient ways?
Wouldst thou be free and still in deathless peace
Or gaze for ever on the Eternal's face
Hushed in an incommunicable release?

Page-606

        THE MESSENGER

I claim for men the peace that shall not fail,
I claim for earth the unsorrowing timeless bliss,
I seek God-strength for souls that suffer in hell,
God-light to fill the ignorant Abyss.

        THE FIRE-KING

Ascend no more with thy presumptuous prayer,
But safe return to the forsaken globe,
Wake not heaven's Lightning from its slumber's lair
To clothe thee with the anguish of its robe.

 Silver foam

Silver foam in the dim East
    And blood red in the brilliant Western sun.
Silver foam and a birth unseen,
    Blood red and the long death begun.

Page-607

Vast-winged the wind

Vast-winged the wind ran, violent, black-cowled waves
    O'er-topped with fierce green eyes the deck,
        Huge heads upraised.
Death-hunted, wound-weary, groaned like a whipped beast the ship
    Shrank, cowered, sobbed, each blow like Fate's
        Despairing felt.

Tiresias

Sole in the meadows of Thebes Tiresias sat by the Dirce,
Blind Tiresias lonely and old. The song of the river
Moaned in his ears and the scent of the flowers afflicted his spirit
Wandering naked and chill in the winds of the world and its greyness.
Silent awhile, then he smote on the ground with the stay of his blindness,
Calling "0 murmuring waters of Dirce, loved by my childhood,
Waters of murmuring Dirce, flowers that were dear to the lover,
Then was your perfume a sweetness, then were your voices a carol;
Now you are dark to me, scents that hurt; you are dirges, 0 waters.

                    We are weary of sorrow,
Sated with salt of human tears; and the throned oppressor
Seems not divine to our eyes, but a worm that stings and is happy-
Groans of the sad oppressed have no tone for our ears any longer.
Death we have taken in horror, the anguish of others afflicts us
And with the pangs of an alien heart are we shaken and troubled.
Lo, I am born by a woman's sobs that come up in the midnight.

Page-608

Oh ye Powers

Oh ye Powers of the Supreme and of the Mother, the Divine,
I have come to you initiate, a bearer of the sign.
For I carry the name in me that nothing can efface.
I have breathed in an illimitable spiritual Space
And my soul through the unfathomable stillnesses has heard
The god-voices of Knowledge and the marvels of the Word.
It has listened to the secret that was hidden in the night ¹
Of the inconscient infinities foreshadowing His might.
He arose out of the caverns of the darknesses self-enwrapped
And the nebulae were churned up like to foam-froth and were shaped
Till the millions of universes mystical upbuoyed
Were outsprinkled as if stardust on the Dragon of the Void.
I was borne(Tentative reading) then in the infinitesimal and obscure
As a seed soul in the fire seeds of the energies that endure.
I have learned now to what purpose I have laboured as His spark
In the midnight of Matter² like a glow-worm in the dark,
And my spirit was imprisioned in the muteness of a stone,
A soul thoughtless and left³  voicless and impuissant and alone.

God to thy greatness

        God to thy greatness
        Of utter sedateness
Has given a name
        That fills it with light
        Of His sovereign might.
He has lavished a flame
        Of passionate fleetness
        On thy stillness and sweetness.
His ecstasies seven,
0 'daughter of Heaven,
        Have seized thy limbs
        That were mateless dreams.

¹ Tentative reading ²  Earth ³  Tentative reading

Page-609