Sonnets

Three Sonnets

Man the Enigma

A deep enigma is the soul of man.

His conscious life obeys the Inconscient's rule,

His need of joy is learned in sorrow's school,

His heart is a chaos and an empyrean.

His subtle Ignorance borrows Wisdom's plan;

His mind is the Infinite's sharp and narrow tool.

He wades through mud to reach the Wonderful,

And does what Matter must or Spirit can.

All powers in his living's soil take root

And claim from him their place and struggling right:

His ignorant creature mind crawling towards light

Is Nature's fool and Godhead's candidate,

A demigod and a demon and a brute,

The slave and the creator of his fate.

The Infinitesimal Infinite

Out of a still immensity we came.

These million universes were to it

The poor light-bubbles of a trivial game,

A fragile glimmer in the Infinite.

It could not find its soul in all that Vast:

It drew itself into a little speck

Infinitesimal, ignobly cast

Out of earth's mud and slime strangely awake,  —

A tiny plasm upon a casual globe

In the small system of a dwarflike sun,

A little life wearing the flesh for robe,

A little mind winged through wide space to run.

It lived, it knew, it saw its self sublime,

Deathless, outmeasuring Space, outlasting Time.

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The Cosmic Dance

(Dance of Krishna, Dance of Kali)

Two measures are there of the cosmic dance.

Always we hear the tread of Kali's feet

Measuring in rhythms of pain and grief and chance

Life's game of hazard terrible and sweet.

The ordeal of the veiled Initiate,

The hero soul at play with Death's embrace,

Wrestler in the dread gymnasium of Fate

And sacrifice a lonely path to Grace,

Man's sorrows made a key to the Mysteries,

Truth's narrow road out of Time's wastes of dream,

The soul's seven doors from Matter's tomb to rise,

Are the common motives of her tragic theme.

But when shall Krishna's dance through Nature move,

His mask of sweetness, laughter, rapture, love?

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