Collected Poems
CONTENTS
Part One
England and Baroda 1883 1898| Poem Published in 1883 Light |
| Complete Narrative Poems Urvasie Canto Love and Death |
|
Sonnets from Manuscripts, c. 1900 1901 |
|
Poems from Ahana and Other Poems |
|
Poems from Manuscripts, c. 1900 1906 |
|
Satirical Poem Published in 1907 Reflections of Srinath Paul, Rai Bahadoor, on the Present Discontents |
| Two Poems in Quantitative Hexameters Ilion |
|
Poems Written as Metrical Experiments |
|
Incomplete Poems from Manuscripts, c. 1927 1947 The Inconscient and the Traveller Fire The Fire King and the Messenger I am filled with the crash of war In the silence of the midnight |
|
|
On the waters of a nameless Infinite My skiff is launched; I have left the human shore. All fades behind me and I see before The unknown abyss and one pale pointing light. An unseen Hand controls my rudder. Night Walls up the sea in a black corridor, — An inconscient Hunger's lion plaint and roar Or the ocean sleep of a dead Eremite.
I feel the greatness of the Power I seek Surround me; below me are its giant deeps, Beyond, the invisible height no soul has trod. I shall be merged in the Lonely and Unique And wake into a sudden blaze of God, The marvel and rapture of the Apocalypse.
I am held no more by life's alluring cry, Her joy and grief, her charm, her laughter's lute. Hushed are the magic moments of the flute, And form and colour and brief ecstasy. I would hear, in my spirit's wideness solitary, The Voice that speaks when mortal lips are mute: I seek the wonder of things absolute Born from the silence of Eternity.
There is a need within the soul of man The splendours of the surface never sate; For life and mind and their glory and debate Are the slow prelude of a vaster theme, A sketch confused of a supernal plan, A preface to the epic of the Supreme.
Page – 606
There is a wisdom like a brooding Sun, A Bliss in the heart's crypt grown fiery white, The heart of a world in which all hearts are one, A Silence on the mountains of delight,
A Calm that cradles Fate upon its knees; A wide Compassion leans to embrace earth's pain; A Witness dwells within our secrecies, The incarnate Godhead in the body of man.
Our mind is a glimmering curtain of that Ray, Our strength a parody of the Immortal's power, Our joy a dreamer on the Eternal's way Hunting the unseizable beauty of an hour.
Only on the heart's veiled door the word of flame Is written, the secret and tremendous Name.
I sat behind the dance of Danger's hooves In the shouting street that seemed a futurist's whim, And suddenly felt, exceeding Nature's grooves, In me, enveloping me the body of Him.
Above my head a mighty head was seen, A face with the calm of immortality And an omnipotent gaze that held the scene In the vast circle of its sovereignty.
His hair was mingled with the sun and breeze; The world was in His heart and He was I: I housed in me the Everlasting's peace, The strength of One whose substance cannot die.
The moment passed and all was as before; Only that deathless memory I bore.
Page – 607
In a town of gods, housed in a little shrine, From sculptured limbs the Godhead looked at me, — A living Presence deathless and divine, A Form that harboured all infinity.
The great World-Mother and her mighty will Inhabited the earth's abysmal sleep, Voiceless, omnipotent, inscrutable, Mute in the desert and the sky and deep.
Now veiled with mind she dwells and speaks no word, Voiceless, inscrutable, omniscient, Hiding until our soul has seen, has heard The secret of her strange embodiment,
One in the worshipper and the immobile shape, A beauty and mystery flesh or stone can drape.
At last I find a meaning of soul's birth Into this universe terrible and sweet, I who have felt the hungry heart of earth Aspiring beyond heaven to Krishna's feet.
I have seen the beauty of immortal eyes, And heard the passion of the Lover's flute, And known a deathless ecstasy's surprise And sorrow in my heart for ever mute.
Nearer and nearer now the music draws, Life shudders with a strange felicity; All Nature is a wide enamoured pause Hoping her lord to touch, to clasp, to be.
For this one moment lived the ages past; The world now throbs fulfilled in me at last.
Page – 608
On the white summit of eternity A single Soul of bare infinities, Guarded he keeps by a fire-screen of peace His mystic loneliness of nude ecstasy. But, touched by an immense delight to be, He looks across unending depths and sees Musing amid the inconscient silences The Mighty Mother's dumb felicity.
Half now awake she rises to his glance; Then, moved to circling by her heart-beats' will, The rhythmic worlds describe that passion-dance. Life springs in her and Mind is born; her face She lifts to Him who is Herself, until The Spirit leaps into the Spirit's embrace.
A bare impersonal hush is now my mind, A world of sight clear and inimitable, A volume of silence by a Godhead signed, A greatness pure of thought, virgin of will.
Once on its pages Ignorance could write In a scribble of intellect the blind guess of Time And cast gleam-messages of ephemeral light, A food for souls that wander on Nature's rim.
But now I listen to a greater Word Born from the mute unseen omniscient Ray: The Voice that only Silence' ear has heard Leaps missioned from an eternal glory of Day.
All turns from a wideness and unbroken peace To a tumult of joy in a sea of wide release.
Page – 609
I have become what before Time I was. A secret touch has quieted thought and sense: All things by the agent Mind created pass Into a void and mute magnificence.
My life is a silence grasped by timeless hands; The world is drowned in an immortal gaze. Naked my spirit from its vestures stands; I am alone with my own self for space.
My heart is a centre of infinity, My body a dot in the soul's vast expanse. All being's huge abyss wakes under me, Once screened in a gigantic Ignorance.
A momentless immensity pure and bare, I stretch to an eternal everywhere.
There are two beings in my single self. A Godhead watches Nature from behind At play in front with a brilliant surface elf, A time-born creature with a human mind.
Tranquil and boundless like a sea or sky, The Godhead knows himself Eternity's son. Radiant his mind and vast, his heart as free; His will is a sceptre of dominion.
The smaller self by Nature's passions driven, Thoughtful and erring learns his human task; All must be known and to that Greatness given His mind and life, the mirror and the mask.
As with the figure of a symbol dance The screened Omniscient plays at Ignorance.
Page – 610
In us is the thousandfold Spirit who is one, An eternal thinker calm and great and wise, A seer whose eye is an all-regarding sun, A poet of the cosmic mysteries.
A critic Witness pieces everything And binds the fragments in his brilliant sheaf; A World-adventurer borne on Destiny's wing Gambles with death and triumph, joy and grief.
A king of greatness and a slave of love, Host of the stars and guest in Nature's inn, A high spectator spirit throned above, A pawn of passion in the game divine,
One who has made in sport the suns and seas Mirrors in our being his immense caprice.
O Thou of whom I am the instrument, O secret Spirit and Nature housed in me, Let all my mortal being now be blent In Thy still glory of divinity.
I have given my mind to be dug Thy channel mind, I have offered up my will to be Thy will: Let nothing of myself be left behind In our union mystic and unutterable.
My heart shall throb with the world-beats of Thy love, My body become Thy engine for earth-use; In my nerves and veins Thy rapture's streams shall move; My thoughts shall be hounds of Light for Thy power to loose.
Keep only my soul to adore eternally And meet Thee in each form and soul of Thee.
Page – 611
I face earth's happenings with an equal soul; In all are heard Thy steps: Thy unseen feet Tread Destiny's pathways in my front. Life's whole Tremendous theorem is Thou complete.
No danger can perturb my spirit's calm: My acts are Thine; I do Thy works and pass; Failure is cradled on Thy deathless arm, Victory is Thy passage mirrored in Fortune's glass.
In this rude combat with the fate of man Thy smile within my heart makes all my strength; Thy Force in me labours at its grandiose plan, Indifferent to the Time-snake's crawling length.
No power can slay my soul; it lives in Thee. Thy presence is my immortality.
I have discovered my deep deathless being: Masked by my front of mind, immense, serene It meets the world with an Immortal's seeing, A god-spectator of the human scene.
No pain and sorrow of the heart and flesh Can tread that pure and voiceless sanctuary. Danger and fear, Fate's hounds, slipping their leash Rend body and nerve, — the timeless Spirit is free.
Awake, God's ray and witness in my breast, In the undying substance of my soul Flamelike, inscrutable the almighty Guest. Death nearer comes and Destiny takes her toll;
He hears the blows that shatter Nature's house: Calm sits he, formidable, luminous.
Page – 612
Now more and more the Epiphany within Affirms on Nature's soil His sovereign rights. My mind has left its prison-camp of brain; It pours, a luminous sea from spirit heights.
A tranquil splendour, waits my Force of Life Couched in my heart, to do what He shall bid, Poising wide wings like a great hippogriff On which the gods of the empyrean ride.
My senses change into gold gates of bliss; An ecstasy thrills through touch and sound and sight Flooding the blind material sheath's dull ease: My darkness answers to His call of light.
Nature in me one day like Him shall sit Victorious, calm, immortal, infinite.
Since Thou hadst all eternity to amuse, O sculptor of the living shapes of earth, O dramatist of death and life and birth, World-artist revelling in forms and hues,
Hast Thou shaped the marvel of the whirling spheres, A scientist passing Nature through his tubes, And played with numbers, measures, theorems, cubes, O mathematician Mind that never errs,
Building a universe from Thy theories? Protean is Thy spirit of delight, Craftsman minute and architect of might, World-adept of a thousand mysteries.
Or forged some deep Necessity, not Thy whim, Fate and Inconscience and the net of Time?
Page – 613
One dreamed and saw a gland write Hamlet, drink At the Mermaid, capture immortality; A committee of hormones on the Aegean's brink Composed the Iliad and the Odyssey.
A thyroid, meditating almost nude Under the Bo-tree, saw the eternal Light And, rising from its mighty solitude, Spoke of the Wheel and eightfold Path all right.
A brain by a disordered stomach driven Thundered through Europe, conquered, ruled and fell, From St Helena went, perhaps, to Heaven. Thus wagged on the surreal world, until
A scientist played with atoms and blew out The universe before God had time to shout.
Often, in the slow ages' wide retreat On Life's long bridge through Time's enormous sea, I have accepted death and borne defeat If by my fall some gain were clutched for Thee.
To this world's inconscient Power Thou hast given the right To oppose the shining passage of my soul: She levies on each step the tax of Night. Doom, her unjust accountant, keeps the roll.
Around my way the Titan forces press; This earth is theirs, they hold the days in fee, I am full of wounds and the fight merciless: Is it not yet Thy hour of victory?
Even as Thou wilt! What still to Fate Thou owest, O Ancient of the worlds, Thou knowest, Thou knowest.
Page – 614
This puppet ego the World-Mother made, This little profiteer of Nature's works, Her trust in his life-tenancy betrayed, Makes claim on claim, all debt to her he shirks.
Each movement of our life our ego fills; Inwoven in each thread of being's weft, When most we vaunt our selflessness, it steals A sordid part; no corner void is left.
One way lies free, our heart and soul to give, Our body and mind to Thee and every cell, And steeped in Thy world-infinity to live. Then lost in light, shall fade the ignoble spell.
Nature, of her rebellion quit, shall be A breath of the spirit's vast serenity.
I saw my soul a traveller through Time; From life to life the cosmic ways it trod, Obscure in the depths and on the heights sublime, Evolving from the worm into the god.
A spark of the eternal Fire, it came To build a house in Matter for the Unborn. The inconscient sunless Night received the flame, In the brute seed of things dumb and forlorn
Life stirred and Thought outlined a gleaming shape Till on the stark inanimate earth could move, Born to somnambulist Nature in her sleep, A thinking creature who can hope and love.
Still by slow steps the miracle goes on, The Immortal's gradual birth mid mire and stone.
Page – 615
I am swallowed in a foam-white sea of bliss, I am a curving wave of God's delight, A shapeless flow of happy passionate light, A whirlpool of the streams of Paradise. I am a cup of His felicities, A thunderblast of His golden ecstasy's might, A fire of joy upon creation's height; I am His rapture's wonderful abyss.
I am drunken with the glory of the Lord, I am vanquished by the beauty of the Unborn; I have looked alive on the Eternal's face. My mind is cloven by His radiant sword, My heart by His beatific touch is torn, My life is a meteor-dust of His flaming Grace.
If perfect moments on the peak of things, These tops of knowledge, greatness, ecstasy, Are only moments, this too enough might be. I have put on the rapid flaming wings Of souls whom the Ignorance black-robed Nature brings And the frail littleness of mortality Can bind not always. A high sovereignty Makes them awhile creation's radiant kings.
These momentary upliftings of the soul Prepare the spirit's glorious permanence. The peace of God, a mighty transience, Is now my spirit's boundless atmosphere. All parts are gathered into a timeless whole; All moments blaze in an eternal year.
Page – 616 |