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PART TWO BOOKS IV VIII
BOOK FOUR
The Book of Birth and Quest
Canto One
The Birth and Childhood of the Flame A MAENAD of the cycles of desire Around a Light she must not dare to touch, Hastening towards a far-off unknown goalEarth followed the endless journey of the Sun. A mind but half-awake in the swing of the voidOn the bosom of Inconscience dreamed out life And bore this finite world of thought and deedAcross the immobile trance of the Infinite. A vast immutable silence with her ran:Prisoner of speed upon a jewelled wheel, She communed with the mystic heart in Space.Amid the ambiguous stillness of the stars She moved towards some undisclosed eventAnd her rhythm measured the long whirl of Time. In ceaseless motion round the purple rimDay after day sped by like coloured spokes, And through a glamour of shifting hues of airThe seasons drew in linked significant dance The symbol pageant of the changing year.Across the burning languor of the soil Paced Summer with his pomp of violent noonsAnd stamped his tyranny of torrid light And the blue seal of a great burnished sky.Next through its fiery swoon or clotted knot Rain-tide burst in upon torn wings of heat,Startled with lightnings air's unquiet drowse, Lashed with life-giving streams the torpid soil,Overcast with flare and sound and storm-winged dark The star-defended doors of heaven's dim sleep,Or from the gold eye of her paramour Covered with packed cloud-veils the earth's brown face.
Page – 349 Armies of revolution crossed the time-field, The clouds' unending march besieged the world, Tempests' pronunciamentos claimed the skyAnd thunder drums announced the embattled gods. A traveller from unquiet neighbouring seas,The dense-maned monsoon rode neighing through earth's hours: Thick now the emissary javelins:Enormous lightnings split the horizon's rim And, hurled from the quarters as from contending camps,Married heaven's edges steep and bare and blind: A surge and hiss and onset of huge rain,The long straight sleet-drift, clamours of winged storm-charge, Throngs of wind-faces, rushing of wind-feetHurrying swept through the prone afflicted plains: Heaven's waters trailed and dribbled through the drowned land.Then all was a swift stride, a sibilant race, Or all was tempest's shout and water's fall.A dimness sagged on the grey floor of day, Its dingy sprawling length joined morn to eve,Wallowing in sludge and shower it reached black dark. Day a half darkness wore as its dull dress.Light looked into dawn's tarnished glass and met Its own face there, twin to a half-lit night's:Downpour and drip and seeping mist swayed all And turned dry soil to bog and reeking mud:Earth was a quagmire, heaven a dismal block. None saw through dank drenched weeks the dungeon sun.Even when no turmoil vexed air's sombre rest, Or a faint ray glimmered through weeping cloudsAs a sad smile gleams veiled by returning tears, All promised brightness failed at once deniedOr, soon condemned, died like a brief-lived hope. Then a last massive deluge thrashed dead mireAnd a subsiding mutter left all still, Or only the muddy creep of sinking floodsOr only a whisper and green toss of trees.
Page – 350 Earth's mood now changed; she lay in lulled repose, The hours went by with slow contented tread: A wide and tranquil air remembered peace,Earth was the comrade of a happy sun. A calmness neared as of the approach of God,A light of musing trance lit soil and sky And an identity and ecstasyFilled meditation's solitary heart. A dream loitered in the dumb mind of Space,Time opened its chambers of felicity, An exaltation entered and a hope:An inmost self looked up to a heavenlier height, An inmost thought kindled a hidden flameAnd the inner sight adored an unseen sun. Three thoughtful seasons passed with shining treadAnd scanning one by one the pregnant hours Watched for a flame that lurked in luminous depths,The vigil of some mighty birth to come. Autumn led in the glory of her moonsAnd dreamed in the splendour of her lotus pools And Winter and Dew-time laid their calm cool handsOn Nature's bosom still in a half sleep And deepened with hues of lax and mellow easeThe tranquil beauty of the waning year. Then Spring, an ardent lover, leaped through leavesAnd caught the earth-bride in his eager clasp; His advent was a fire of irised hues,His arms were a circle of the arrival of joy. His voice was a call to the Transcendent's sphereWhose secret touch upon our mortal lives Keeps ever new the thrill that made the world,Remoulds an ancient sweetness to new shapes And guards intact unchanged by death and TimeThe answer of our hearts to Nature's charm And keeps for ever new, yet still the same,The throb that ever wakes to the old delight
Page – 351 And beauty and rapture and the joy to live. His coming brought the magic and the spell; At his touch life's tired heart grew glad and young;He made joy a willing prisoner in her breast. His grasp was a young god's upon earth's limbs:Changed by the passion of his divine outbreak He made her body beautiful with his kiss.Impatient for felicity he came, High-fluting with the coil's happy voice, His peacock turban trailing on the trees; His breath was a warm summons to delight, The dense voluptuous azure was his gaze.A soft celestial urge surprised the blood Rich with the instinct of God's sensuous joys;Revealed in beauty, a cadence was abroad Insistent on the rapture-thrill in life:Immortal movements touched the fleeting hours. A godlike packed intensity of senseMade it a passionate pleasure even to breathe; All sights and voices wove a single charm.The life of the enchanted globe became A storm of sweetness and of light and song,A revel of colour and of ecstasy, A hymn of rays, a litany of cries:A strain of choral priestly music sang And, swung on the swaying censer of the trees,A sacrifice of perfume filled the hours. Asocas burned in crimson spots of flame,Pure like the breath of an unstained desire White jasmines haunted the enamoured air,Pale mango-blossoms fed the liquid voice Of the love-maddened coil, and the brown bee Muttered in fragrance mid the honey-buds. The sunlight was a great god's golden smile. All Nature was at beauty's festival.
Page – 352 In this high signal moment of the gods Answering earth's yearning and her cry for bliss, A greatness from our other countries came.A silence in the noise of earthly things Immutably revealed the secret Word,A mightier influx filled the oblivious clay: A lamp was lit, a sacred image made.A mediating ray had touched the earth Bridging the gulf between man's mind and God's;Its brightness linked our transience to the Unknown. A spirit of its celestial source awareTranslating heaven into a human shape Descended into earth's imperfect mouldAnd wept not fallen to mortality, But looked on all with large and tranquil eyes.One had returned from the transcendent planes And bore anew the load of mortal breath,Who had striven of old with our darkness and our pain; She took again her divine unfinished task:Survivor of death and the aeonic years, Once more with her fathomless heart she fronted Time.Again there was renewed, again revealed The ancient closeness by earth-vision veiled,The secret contact broken off in Time, A consanguinity of earth and heaven,Between the human portion toiling here And an as yet unborn and limitless Force.Again the mystic deep attempt began, The daring wager of the cosmic game.For since upon this blind and whirling globe Earth-plasm first quivered with the illumining mindAnd life invaded the material sheath Afflicting Inconscience with the need to feel,Since in Infinity's silence woke a word, A Mother-wisdom works in Nature's breastTo pour delight on the heart of toil and want
Page – 353 And press perfection on life's stumbling powers, Impose heaven-sentience on the obscure abyss And make dumb Matter conscious of its God.Although our fallen minds forget to climb, Although our human stuff resists or breaks,She keeps her will that hopes to divinise clay; Failure cannot repress, defeat o'erthrow;Time cannot weary her nor the Void subdue, The ages have not made her passion less;No victory she admits of Death or Fate. Always she drives the soul to new attempt;Always her magical infinitude Forces to aspire the inert brute elements;As one who has all infinity to waste, She scatters the seed of the Eternal's strengthOn a half-animate and crumbling mould, Plants heaven's delight in the heart's passionate mire,Pours godhead's seekings into a bare beast frame, Hides immortality in a mask of death.Once more that Will put on an earthly shape. A Mind empowered from Truth's immutable seatWas framed for vision and interpreting act And instruments were sovereignly designedTo express divinity in terrestrial signs. Outlined by the pressure of this new descentA lovelier body formed than earth had known. As yet a prophecy only and a hint,The glowing arc of a charmed unseen whole, It came into the sky of mortal lifeBright like the crescent horn of a gold moon Returning in a faint illumined eve.At first glimmering like an unshaped idea Passive she lay sheltered in wordless sleep,Involved and drowned in Matter's giant trance, An infant heart of the deep-caved world-planIn cradle of divine inconscience rocked
Page – 354 By the universal ecstasy of the suns. Some missioned Power in the half-wakened frameNursed a transcendent birth's dumb glorious seed For which this vivid tenement was made.But soon the link of soul with form grew sure; Flooded was the dim cave with slow conscient light,The seed grew into a delicate marvellous bud, The bud disclosed a great and heavenly bloom.At once she seemed to found a mightier race. Arrived upon the strange and dubious globeThe child remembering inly a far home Lived guarded in her spirit's luminous cell,Alone mid men in her diviner kind. Even in her childish movements could be feltThe nearness of a light still kept from earth, Feelings that only eternity could share,Thoughts natural and native to the gods. As needing nothing but its own rapt flightHer nature dwelt in a strong separate air Like a strange bird with large rich-coloured breastThat sojourns on a secret fruited bough, Lost in the emerald glory of the woodsOr flies above divine unreachable tops. Harmoniously she impressed the earth with heaven.Aligned to a swift rhythm of sheer delight And singing to themselves her days went by;Each minute was a throb of beauty's heart; The hours were tuned to a sweet-toned contentWhich asked for nothing, but took all life gave Sovereignly as her nature's inborn right.Near was her spirit to its parent Sun, The Breath within to the eternal joy.The first fair life that breaks from Nature's swoon, Mounts in a line of rapture to the skies;Absorbed in its own happy urge it lives, Sufficient to itself, yet turned to all:
Page – 355 It has no seen communion with its world, No open converse with surrounding things. There is a oneness native and occultThat needs no instruments and erects no form; In unison it grows with all that is.All contacts it assumes into its trance, Laugh-tossed consents to the wind's kiss and takesTransmutingly the shocks of sun and breeze: A blissful yearning riots in its leaves,A magic passion trembles in its blooms, Its boughs aspire in hushed felicity.An occult godhead of this beauty is cause, The spirit and intimate guest of all this charm,This sweetness's priestess and this reverie's muse. Invisibly protected from our senseThe Dryad lives drenched in a deeper ray And feels another air of storms and calmsAnd quivers inwardly with mystic rain. This at a heavenlier height was shown in her.Even when she bent to meet earth's intimacies Her spirit kept the stature of the gods;It stooped but was not lost in Matter's reign. A world translated was her gleaming mind,And marvel-mooned bright crowding fantasies Fed with spiritual sustenance of dreamsThe ideal goddess in her house of gold. Aware of forms to which our eyes are closed,Conscious of nearnesses we cannot feel, The Power within her shaped her moulding senseIn deeper figures than our surface types. An invisible sunlight ran within her veinsAnd flooded her brain with heavenly brilliances That woke a wider sight than earth could know.Outlined in the sincerity of that ray Her springing childlike thoughts were richly turnedInto luminous patterns of her soul's deep truth,
Page – 356 And from her eyes she cast another look On all around her than man's ignorant view. All objects were to her shapes of living selvesAnd she perceived a message from her kin In each awakening touch of outward things.Each was a symbol power, a vivid flash In the circuit of infinities half-known;Nothing was alien or inanimate, Nothing without its meaning or its call.For with a greater Nature she was one. As from the soil sprang glory of branch and flower,As from the animal's life rose thinking man, A new epiphany appeared in her.A mind of light, a life of rhythmic force, A body instinct with hidden divinityPrepared an image of the coming god; And when the slow rhyme of the expanding yearsAnd the rich murmurous swarm-work of the days Had honey-packed her sense and filled her limbs,Accomplishing the moon-orb of her grace, Self-guarded in the silence of her strengthHer solitary greatness was not less. Nearer the godhead to the surface pressed,A sun replacing childhood's nebula Sovereign in a blue and lonely sky.Upward it rose to grasp the human scene: The strong Inhabitant turned to watch her field.A lovelier light assumed her spirit brow And sweet and solemn grew her musing gaze;Celestial-human deep warm slumbrous fires Woke in the long fringed glory of her eyesLike altar-burnings in a mysteried shrine. Out of those crystal windows gleamed a willThat brought a large significance to life. Holding her forehead's candid stainless spaceBehind the student arch a noble power
Page – 357 Of wisdom looked from light on transient things. A scout of victory in a vigil tower, Her aspiration called high destiny down;A silent warrior paced in her city of strength Inviolate, guarding Truth's diamond throne.A nectarous haloed moon her passionate heart Loved all and spoke no word and made no sign,But kept her bosom's rapturous secrecy A blissful ardent moved and voiceless world.Proud, swift and joyful ran the wave of life Within her like a stream in Paradise.Many high gods dwelt in one beautiful home; Yet was her nature's orb a perfect whole,Harmonious like a chant with many tones, Immense and various like a universe.The body that held this greatness seemed almost An image made of heaven's transparent light.Its charm recalled things seen in vision's hours, A golden bridge spanning a faery flood,A moon-touched palm-tree single by a lake Companion of the wide and glimmering peace,A murmur as of leaves in Paradise Moving when feet of the Immortals pass,A fiery halo over sleeping hills, A strange and starry head alone in Night.
END OF CANTO ONE
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