-36_Poems in Quantitative Metres.htm

Poems

 in Quantitative Metres

 Ocean Oneness¹

Silence is round me, wideness ineffable;

White birds on the ocean diving and wandering;

A soundless sea on a voiceless heaven,

Azure on azure, is mutely gazing.

Identified with silence and boundlessness

My spirit widens clasping the universe

Till all that seemed becomes the Real,

One in a mighty and single vastness.

Someone broods there nameless and bodiless,

Conscious and lonely, deathless and infinite,

And, sole in a still eternal rapture,

Gathers all things to his heart for ever.

¹ Alcaics. Modulations are allowed, trochee or iamb in the first foot or a long monosyllable; an occasional anapaest in place of an iamb is permitted; an antibacchius can replace a dactyl.  

Page – 369

Trance of Waiting²

Lone on my summits of calm I have brooded with voices around me,

Murmurs of silence that steep mind in a luminous sleep,

Whispers from things beyond thought in the Secrecy flame-white for ever,

Unscanned heights that reply seek from the inconscient deep.

Distant below me the ocean of life with its passionate surges

Pales like a pool that is stirred by the wings of a shadowy bird.

Thought has flown back from its wheelings and stoopings, the nerve-beat of living

Stills; my spirit at peace bathes in a mighty release.

Wisdom supernal looks down on me, Knowledge mind cannot measure;

Light that no vision can render garments the silence with splendour.

Filled with a rapturous Presence the crowded spaces of being

Tremble with the Fire that knows, thrill with the might of repose.

Earth is now girdled with trance and Heaven is put round her for vesture.

Wings that are brilliant with fate sleep at Eternity's gate.

Time waits, vacant, the Lightning that kindles, the Word that transfigures;

Space is a stillness of God building his earthly abode.

All waits hushed for the fiat to come and the tread of the Eternal;

Passion of a bliss yet to be sweeps from Infinity's sea.

² Elegiacs, with rhyme in the pentameter. A syllable or two introducing the last hemistich of the pentameter is allowed, but this must not be made the rule. This licence, impossible in the strict cut of classical metre, comes in naturally in English and is therefore permissible.

Page – 370

Flame-Wind³

A flame-wind ran from the gold of the east,

Leaped on my soul with the breath of a sevenfold noon.

Wings of the angel, gallop of the beast!

Mind and body on fire, but the heart in swoon.

O flame, thou bringest the strength of the noon,

But where are the voices of morn and the stillness of eve?

Where the pale-blue wine of the moon?

Mind and life are in flower, but the heart must grieve.

Gold in the mind and the life-flame's red

Make of the heavens a splendour, the earth a blaze,

But the white and rose of the heart are dead.

Flame-wind, pass! I will wait for Love in the silent ways.

³ Dactylic tetrameter and pentameter catalectic; an additional foot in the last line; trochee or spondee freely admitted anywhere; first paeon, antibacchius, cretic can replace a dactyl. One or two extra syllables are allowed sometimes at the beginning of the line.  

Page – 371

The River⁴

 Wild river in thy cataract far-rumoured and rash rapids to sea hasting,

Far now is that birth-place mid abrupt mountains and slow dreaming of lone valleys

Where only with blue heavens was rapt converse or green orchards with fruit leaning

Stood imaged in thy waves and, content, listened to thy rhapsody's long murmur.

Vast now in a wide press and a dense hurry and mass movement of thronged waters

Loud-thundering, fast-galloping, might, speed is the stern message of thy spirit,

Proud violence, stark claim and the dire cry of the heart's hunger on God's barriers

Self-hurled, and a void lust of unknown distance, and pace reckless and free grandeur.

Calm yet shall release thee; an immense peace and a large streaming of white silence,

Broad plains shall be thine, greenness surround thee, and wharved cities and life's labour

Long thou wilt befriend, human delight help with the waves' coolness, with ships' furrows

Thrill, — last become, self losing, a sea-motion and joy boundless and blue laughter.

4 Ionic a majore pentameter catalectic. In one place an epitrite replaces the ionic.  

Page – 372

Journey's End⁵

The day ends lost in a stretch of even,

A long road trod — and the little farther.

Now the waste-land, now the silence;

A blank dark wall, and behind it heaven.

Page – 373

The Dream Boat⁶

Who was it that came to me in a boat made of dream-fire,

With his flame brow and his sun-gold body?

Melted was the silence into a sweet secret murmur,

"Do you come now? is the heart's fire ready?"

Hidden in the recesses of the heart something shuddered.

It recalled all that the life's joy cherished,

Imaged the felicity it must leave lost for ever,

And the boat passed and the gold god vanished.

Now within the hollowness of the world's breast inhabits —

For the love died and the old joy ended —

Void of a felicity that has fled, gone for ever,

And the gold god and the dream boat come not.

Page – 374

Soul in the Ignorance⁷

Soul in the Ignorance, wake from its stupor.

Flake of the world-fire, spark of Divinity,

Lift up thy mind and thy heart into glory.

Sun in the darkness, recover thy lustre.

One, universal, ensphering creation,

Wheeling no more with inconscient Nature,

Feel thyself God-born, know thyself deathless.

Timeless return to thy immortal existence.

⁷ Dactylic tetrameter, usually catalectic, with the ordinary modulations.    

Page – 375

The Witness and the Wheel⁸

Who art thou in the heart comrade of man who sitst

August, watching his works, watching his joys and griefs,

Unmoved, careless of pain, careless of death and fate?

Witness, what hast thou seen watching this great blind world

Moving helpless in Time, whirled on the Wheel in Space,

That yet thou with thy vast Will biddest toil our hearts,

Mystic, — for without thee nothing can last in Time?

We too, when from the urge ceaseless of Nature turn

Our souls, far from the breast casting her tool, desire,

Grow like thee. In the front Nature still drives in vain

The blind trail of our acts, passions and thoughts and hopes;

Unmoved, calm, we look on, careless of death and fate,

Of grief careless and joy, — signs of a surface script

Without value or sense, steps of an aimless world.

Something watches behind, Spirit or Self or Soul,

Viewing Space and its toil, waiting the end of Time.

Witness, who then art thou, one with thee who am I,

Nameless, watching the Wheel whirl across Time and Space?

⁸ The metre is the little Asclepiad used by Horace in his Ode addressed to Maecenas, two choriambs between an initial spondee and a final iamb. Here modulations are admitted, trochee or iamb for the spondee, occasionally a spondee for the concluding iamb; an epitrite or ionic a minore can replace the choriamb.

Page – 376

Descent⁹

All my cells thrill swept by a surge of splendour,

Soul and body stir with a mighty rapture,

Light and still more light like an ocean billows

Over me, round me.

Rigid, stonelike, fixed like a hill or statue,

Vast my body feels and upbears the world's weight;

Dire the large descent of the Godhead enters

Limbs that are mortal.

Voiceless, thronged, Infinity crowds upon me;

Presses down a glory of power eternal;

Mind and heart grow one with the cosmic wideness;

Stilled are earth's murmurs.

Swiftly, swiftly crossing the golden spaces

Knowledge leaps, a torrent of rapid lightnings;

Thoughts that left the Ineffable's flaming mansions,

Blaze in my spirit.

Slow the heart-beats' rhythm like a giant hammer's;

Missioned voices drive to me from God's doorway

Words that live not save upon Nature's summits,

Ecstasy's chariots.

All the world is changed to a single oneness;

Souls undying, infinite forces, meeting,

Join in God-dance weaving a seamless Nature,

Rhythm of the Deathless.

⁹ Sapphics. But the second-foot spondee is very usually replaced by a trochee, the final trochee sometimes by a spondee; an antibacchius, cretic or molossus can replace the dactyl. In the fifteenth line elision is used; in a sapphic line there can be only one dactyl.   

Page – 377

Mind and heart and body, one harp of being,

Cry that anthem, finding the notes eternal, —

Light and might and bliss and immortal wisdom

Clasping for ever.  

Page – 378

The Lost Boat¹⁰

At the way's end when the shore raised up its dim line and remote lights from the port glimmered,

Then a cloud darkened the sky's brink and the wind's scream was the shrill laugh of a loosed demon

And the huge passion of storm leaped with its bright stabs and the long crashing of death's thunder;

As if haled by an unseen hand fled the boat lost on the wide homeless forlorn ocean.

Is it Chance smites? is it Fate's irony? dead workings or blind purpose of brute Nature?

Or man's own deeds that return back on his doomed head with a stark justice, a fixed vengeance?

Or a dread Will from behind Life that regards pain and salutes death with a hard laughter?

Is it God's might or a Force rules in this dense jungle of events, deeds and our thought's strivings?

Yet perhaps sank not the bright lives and their glad venturings foiled, drowned in the grey ocean,

But with long wandering they reached an unknown shore and a strange sun and a new azure,

Amid bright splendour of beast glories and birds' music and deep hues, an enriched Nature

And a new life that could draw near to divine meanings and touched close the concealed purpose.

Page – 379

In a chance happening, fate's whims and the blind workings or dead drive of a brute

Nature, In her dire Titan caprice, strength that to death drifts and to doom, hidden a Will labours.

Not with one moment of sharp close or the slow fall of a dim curtain the play ceases:

Yet is there Time to be crossed, lives to be lived out, the unplayed acts of the soul's drama.  

Page – 380

Renewal¹¹

When the heart tires and the throb stills recalling

Things that were once and again can be never,

When the bow falls and the drawn string is broken,

Hands that were clasped, yet for ever are parted,

When the soul passes to new births and bodies,

Lands never seen and meetings with new faces,

Is the bow raised and the fall'n arrow fitted,

Acts that were vain rewedded to the Fate-curve?

To the lives sundered can Time bring rejoining,

Love that was slain be reborn with the body?

In the mind null, from the heart's chords rejected,

Lost to the sense, but the spirit remembers!

Page – 381

Soul's Scene¹²

The clouds lain on forlorn spaces of sky, weary and lolling,

Watch grey waves of a lost sea wander sad, reckless and rolling,

A bare anguish of bleak beaches made mournful with the breath of the Northwind

And a huddle of melancholy hills in the distance.

The blank hour in some vast mood of a Soul lonely in Nature

On earth's face puts a mask pregnantly carved, cut to misfeature,

And man's heart and his stilled mind react hushed in a spiritual passion

Imitating the contours of her desolate waiting.

Impassible she waits long for the sun's gold and the azure,

The sea's song with its slow happy refrain's plashes of pleasure, —

As man's soul in its depths waits the outbreaking of the light and the godhead

And the bliss that God felt when he created his image.

Page – 382

Ascent¹³

(1) The Silence

Into the Silence, into the Silence,

Arise, O Spirit immortal,

Away from the turning Wheel, breaking the magical Circle.

Ascend, single and deathless:

Care no more for the whispers and the shoutings in the darkness,

Pass from the sphere of the grey and the little,

Leaving the cry and the struggle,

Into the Silence for ever.

Vast and immobile, formless and marvellous,

Higher than Heaven, wider than the universe,

In a pure glory of being,

In a bright stillness of self-seeing,

Communing with a boundlessness voiceless and intimate,

Make thy knowledge too high for thought, thy joy too deep for emotion;

At rest in the unchanging Light, mute with the wordless self-vision,

Spirit, pass out of thyself; Soul, escape from the clutch of Nature.

All thou hast seen cast from thee, O Witness.

Turn to the Alone and the Absolute, turn to the Eternal:

Be only eternity, peace and silence,

O world-transcending nameless Oneness,

Spirit immortal.

¹³ Free quantitative verse with a predominant dactylic movement.  

Page – 383

(2) Beyond the Silence

Out from the Silence, out from the Silence,

Carrying with thee the ineffable Substance,

Carrying with thee the splendour and wideness,

Ascend, O Spirit immortal.

Assigning to Time its endless meaning,

Blissful enter into the clasp of the Timeless.

Awake in the living Eternal, taken to the bosom of love of the Infinite,

Live self-found in his endless completeness,

Drowned in his joy and his sweetness,

Thy heart close to the heart of the Godhead for ever.

Vast, God-possessing, embraced by the Wonderful,

Lifted by the All-Beautiful into his infinite beauty,

Love shall envelop thee endless and fathomless,

Joy unimaginable, ecstasy illimitable,

Knowledge omnipotent, Might omniscient,

Light without darkness, Truth that is dateless.

One with the Transcendent, calm, universal,

Single and free, yet innumerably living,

All in thyself and thyself in all dwelling,

Act in the world with thy being beyond it.

Soul, exceed life's boundaries; Spirit, surpass the universe.

Outclimbing the summits of Nature,

Transcending and uplifting the soul of the finite,

Rise with the world in thy bosom,

O Word gathered into the heart of the Ineffable.

One with the Eternal, live in his infinity,

Drowned in the Absolute, found in the Godhead,

Swan of the supreme and spaceless ether wandering winged through the universe,

Spirit immortal.  

Page – 384

The Tiger and the Deer¹⁴

Brilliant, crouching, slouching, what crept through the green heart of the forest,

Gleaming eyes and mighty chest and soft soundless paws of grandeur and murder?

The wind slipped through the leaves as if afraid lest its voice

and the noise of its steps perturb the pitiless Splendour,

Hardly daring to breathe. But the great beast crouched and

crept, and crept and crouched a last time, noiseless, fatal,

Till suddenly death leaped on the beautiful wild deer as it drank

Unsuspecting at the great pool in the forest's coolness and shadow,

And it fell and, torn, died remembering its mate left sole in the deep woodland, —

Destroyed, the mild harmless beauty by the strong cruel beauty in Nature.

But a day may yet come when the tiger crouches and leaps no more in the dangerous heart of the forest,

As the mammoth shakes no more the plains of Asia;

Still then shall the beautiful wild deer drink from the coolness of great pools in the leaves' shadow.

The mighty perish in their might;

The slain survive the slayer.

¹⁴ Free quantitative verse, left to find out its own line by line rhythm and unity.   

Page – 385

CONTINUE