Appendix Poems in Greek and in French Greek Epigram Lorsque rien n'existait Sur les grands sommets blancs Note on the Texts Index of Titles Index of First Lines

Part Six

Baroda and Pondicherry

Circa 1902 1936

Poems Past and Present

Musa Spiritus

O Word concealed in the upper fire,

Thou who hast lingered through centuries,

Descend from thy rapt white desire,

Plunging through gold eternities.

Into the gulfs of our nature leap,

Voice of the spaces, call of the Light!

Break the seals of Matter's sleep,

Break the trance of the unseen height.

In the uncertain glow of human mind,

Its waste of unharmonied thronging thoughts,

Carve thy epic mountain-lined

Crowded with deep prophetic grots.

Let thy hue-winged lyrics hover like birds

Over the swirl of the heart's sea.

Touch into sight with thy fire-words

The blind indwelling deity.

O Muse of the Silence, the wideness make

In the unplumbed stillness that hears thy voice;

In the vast mute heavens of the spirit awake

Where thy eagles of Power flame and rejoice.

Out, out with the mind and its candle flares,

Light, light the suns that never die.

For my ear the cry of the seraph stars

And the forms of the Gods for my naked eye!

Let the little troubled life-god within

Cast his veils from the still soul,

His tiger-stripes of virtue and sin,

His clamour and glamour and thole and dole;

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All make tranquil, all make free.

Let my heart-beats measure the footsteps of God

As He comes from His timeless infinity

To build in their rapture His burning abode.

Weave from my life His poem of days,

His calm pure dawns and His noons of force.

My acts for the grooves of His chariot-race,

My thoughts for the tramp of His great steeds' course!

Bride of the Fire

Bride of the Fire, clasp me now close, —

Bride of the Fire!

I have shed the bloom of the earthly rose,

I have slain desire.

Beauty of the Light, surround my life, —

Beauty of the Light!

I have sacrificed longing and parted from grief,

I can bear thy delight.

Image of ecstasy, thrill and enlace, —

Image of bliss!

I would see only thy marvellous face,

Feel only thy kiss.

Voice of Infinity, sound in my heart, —

Call of the One!

Stamp there thy radiance, never to part,

O living Sun.

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The Blue Bird

I am the bird of God in His blue;

Divinely high and clear

I sing the notes of the sweet and the true

For the god's and the seraph's ear.

I rise like a fire from the mortal's earth

Into a griefless sky

And drop in the suffering soil of his birth

Fire-seeds of ecstasy.

My pinions soar beyond Time and Space

Into unfading Light;

I bring the bliss of the Eternal's face

And the boon of the Spirit's sight.

I measure the worlds with my ruby eyes;

I have perched on Wisdom's tree

Thronged with the blossoms of Paradise

By the streams of Eternity.

Nothing is hid from my burning heart;

My mind is shoreless and still;

My song is rapture's mystic art,

My flight immortal will.

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A God's Labour

I have gathered my dreams in a silver air

Between the gold and the blue

And wrapped them softly and left them there,

My jewelled dreams of you.

I had hoped to build a rainbow bridge

Marrying the soil to the sky

And sow in this dancing planet midge

The moods of infinity.

But too bright were our heavens, too far away,

Too frail their ethereal stuff;

Too splendid and sudden our light could not stay;

The roots were not deep enough.

He who would bring the heavens here

Must descend himself into clay

And the burden of earthly nature bear

And tread the dolorous way.

Coercing my godhead I have come down

Here on the sordid earth,

Ignorant, labouring, human grown

Twixt the gates of death and birth.

I have been digging deep and long

Mid a horror of filth and mire

A bed for the golden river's song,

A home for the deathless fire.

I have laboured and suffered in Matter's night

To bring the fire to man;

But the hate of hell and human spite

Are my meed since the world began.

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For man's mind is the dupe of his animal self;

Hoping its lusts to win,

He harbours within him a grisly Elf

Enamoured of sorrow and sin.

The grey Elf shudders from heaven's flame

And from all things glad and pure;

Only by pleasure and passion and pain

His drama can endure.

All around is darkness and strife;

For the lamps that men call suns

Are but halfway gleams on this stumbling life

Cast by the Undying Ones.

Man lights his little torches of hope

That lead to a failing edge;

A fragment of Truth is his widest scope,

An inn his pilgrimage.

The Truth of truths men fear and deny,

The Light of lights they refuse;

To ignorant gods they lift their cry

Or a demon altar choose.

All that was found must again be sought,

Each enemy slain revives,

Each battle for ever is fought and refought

Through vistas of fruitless lives.

My gaping wounds are a thousand and one

And the Titan kings assail,

But I dare not rest till my task is done

And wrought the eternal will.

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How they mock and sneer, both devils and men!

"Thy hope is Chimera's head

Painting the sky with its fiery stain;

Thou shalt fall and thy work lie dead.

"Who art thou that babblest of heavenly ease

And joy and golden room

To us who are waifs on inconscient seas

And bound to life's iron doom?

"This earth is ours, a field of Night

For our petty flickering fires.

How shall it brook the sacred Light

Or suffer a god's desires?

"Come, let us slay him and end his course!

Then shall our hearts have release

From the burden and call of his glory and force

And the curb of his wide white peace."

But the god is there in my mortal breast

Who wrestles with error and fate

And tramples a road through mire and waste

For the nameless Immaculate.

A voice cried, "Go where none have gone!

Dig deeper, deeper yet

Till thou reach the grim foundation stone

And knock at the keyless gate."

I saw that a falsehood was planted deep

At the very root of things

Where the grey Sphinx guards God's riddle sleep

On the Dragon's outspread wings.

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I left the surface gauds of mind

And life's unsatisfied seas

And plunged through the body's alleys blind

To the nether mysteries.

I have delved through the dumb Earth's dreadful heart

And heard her black mass' bell.

I have seen the source whence her agonies part

And the inner reason of hell.

Above me the dragon murmurs moan

And the goblin voices flit;

I have pierced the Void where Thought was born,

I have walked in the bottomless pit.

On a desperate stair my feet have trod

Armoured with boundless peace,

Bringing the fires of the splendour of God

Into the human abyss.

He who I am was with me still;

All veils are breaking now.

I have heard His voice and borne His will

On my vast untroubled brow.

The gulf twixt the depths and the heights is bridged

And the golden waters pour

Down the sapphire mountain rainbow-ridged

And glimmer from shore to shore.

Heaven's fire is lit in the breast of the earth

And the undying suns here burn;

Through a wonder cleft in the bounds of birth

The incarnate spirits yearn

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Like flames to the kingdoms of Truth and Bliss:

Down a gold-red stairway wend

The radiant children of Paradise

Clarioning darkness' end.

A little more and the new life's doors

Shall be carved in silver light

With its aureate roof and mosaic floors

In a great world bare and bright.

I shall leave my dreams in their argent air,

For in a raiment of gold and blue

There shall move on the earth embodied and fair

The living truth of you.

Hell and Heaven

In the silence of the night-time,

In the grey and formless eve,

When the thought is plagued with loveless

Memories that it cannot leave,

When the dawn makes sudden beauty

Of a peevish clouded sky,

And the rain is sobbing slowly

And the wind makes weird reply,

Always comes her face before me

And her voice is in my ear,

Beautiful and sad and cruel

With the azure eyes austere.

Cloudy figure once so luminous

With the light and life within

When the soul came rippling outwards

And the red lips laughed at sin!

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Com'st thou with that marble visage

From what world instinct with pain

Where we pay the price of passion

By a law our hearts disdain?

Cast it from thee, O thou goddess!

Earning with a smile release

From these sad imaginations,

Rise into celestial peace.

Travel from the loveless places

That our mortal fears create,

Where thy natural heavens claim thee

And the Gods, thy brothers, wait.

Then descend to me grown radiant,

Lighting up terrestrial ground

With the feet that brighten heaven

When the mighty dance goes round

And the high Gods beating measure

Tread the maze that keeps the stars

Circling in their luminous orbits

Through the eternal thoroughfares.

All below is but confusion

Of desires that strive and cry,

Some forbidden, some achieving

Anguish after ecstasy.

But above our radiant station

Is from which by doubt we fell,

Reaching only after Heaven

And achieving only Hell.

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Let the heart be king and master,

Let the brain exult and toil;

Disbelieve in good and evil,

God with Nature reconcile.

Therefore, O rebellious sweetness,

Thou tookst arms for joy and love.

There achieve them! Take possession

Of our radiant seats above.

Kamadeva

When in the heart of the valleys and hid by the roses

The sweet Love lies,

Has he wings to rise to his heavens or in the closes

Lives and dies?

On the peaks of the radiant mountains if we should meet him

Proud and free,

Will he not frown on the valleys? Would it befit him

Chained to be?

Will you then speak of the one as a slave and a wanton,

The other too bare?

But God is the only slave and the only monarch

We declare.

It is God who is Love and a boy and a slave for our passion

He was made to serve;

It is God who is free and proud and the limitless tyrant

Our souls deserve.

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Life

Mystic daughter of Delight,

Life, thou ecstasy,

Let the radius of thy flight

Be eternity.

On thy wings thou bearest high

Glory and disdain,

Godhead and mortality,

Ecstasy and pain.

Take me in thy bold embrace

Without weak reserve,

Body dire and unveiled face;

Faint not, Life, nor swerve.

All thy bliss I would explore,

All thy tyranny.

Cruel like the lion's roar,

Sweet like springtide be.

Like a Titan I would take,

Like a God enjoy,

Like a man contend and make,

Revel like a boy.

More I will not ask of thee,

Nor my fate would choose;

King or conquered let me be,

Vanquish, Life, or lose.

Even in rags I am a god;

Fallen, I am divine;

High I triumph when down-trod,

Long I live when slain.

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One Day

The Little More

One day, and all the half-dead is done,

One day, and all the unborn begun;

A little path and the great goal,

A touch that brings the divine whole.

Hill after hill was climbed and now,

Behold, the last tremendous brow

And the great rock that none has trod:

A step, and all is sky and God.

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