Collected Poems
CONTENTS
Part One
England and Baroda 1883 1898| Poem Published in 1883 Light |
| Complete Narrative Poems Urvasie Canto Love and Death |
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Sonnets from Manuscripts, c. 1900 1901 |
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Poems from Ahana and Other Poems |
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Poems from Manuscripts, c. 1900 1906 |
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Satirical Poem Published in 1907 Reflections of Srinath Paul, Rai Bahadoor, on the Present Discontents |
| Two Poems in Quantitative Hexameters Ilion |
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Poems Written as Metrical Experiments |
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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 |
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Incomplete Poems from Manuscripts Circa 1927 1947
Thou art myself born from myself, O child. O thou who speakst art thou my greater self? And knowst my destiny and why I came Into the narrow limits of this form?
Vain, they have said, is the anguish of man and his labour diurnal, Vainly his caravans cross through the desert of Time to the Eternal. Thick and persistent the night confronts all his luminous longings; Dire death's sickle mows like a harvest his hosts and his throngings. Even if all life has failed, must it therefore be failure for ever? Are not the ages before us still for a grander endeavour? Have we not Beauty around in a dangerous world but enthralling, Courage inciting our steps and Thought to infinity calling?
Pururavus from converse held with Gods On unseen crests of Nature high, occult, Traversed the tumult of the flame-tossed seas That cast their fire between the spirit's poles. Alone like a bright star twixt earth and heaven, He reached the crossways of eternity. A Soul to our apparent life reborn
Page – 663 Out of the vastness of the original Self, Journeying in dim momentous solitude Led by the flickering of uncertain suns, He essayed the fringe of Night's tremendous home. Before him lay the subtle realm of light Our organed sense conceals, the light that gleams Across the sealless musings of the seer, A slumberless wide eye upon our scene. But destined to earth's darkly pregnant dream He tarried not on these mysterious shores, But still descending the divine abyss To new adventure in the eternal Night Transgressed the wonder-line of things beyond Abruptly into mortal space and time. A universe appeared of difficult birth, The labour of eclipsed and ignorant gods, An immortality of chance and change. Bridging the gulf between antagonist planes He saw the circles of Heaven's rash advance. Sun upon sun, God's sentinels in the void, Life's radiant and immeasurable camp Blazed in the order of the aeonic Will. But with the menace of the dragon depths The old blind vigilant Nescience stretched afar Hungering in serpent dumb infinitude, And her dark shade besieged the luminaries. Silence and Death opposed the invading Fire. And even before he broke into our pale There came on him a breath from tarnished worlds. Averse from an obscure material touch The images of the supernal field That he had left sank from the front of thought And held their session in the heart's dumb cave; The glory and grace, the light, the sacred life Receded as behind a burning door: Subliminal beneath the lid of mind The grandeur and the passion and the calm.
Page – 664 His mind became a beat of memory. Sight, hearing changed towards our diminished scale; The little views grew great, the great grew small. As yet some largeness was of inmost things And he remembered in the formless sense Proud kingdoms of intense and beautiful life And love left free to do his absolute will And dreams at once commuted into power. Affronting many starfields of our space And shortening ever the vast lens of Time He met a smaller movement of desire Prisoned in the orbit of a few pale globes And knew in front our little solar belt Hung casually among the giant stars. Our earth received him mid her living forms. Her deep inconscient motions packed and mute, Her darknesses more wise than her small lights Oppressed again his young divinity.
THE EARTH VOICES Arise now, tread out the fire! Scatter the ashes of a God through the stars. Forget to hope and aspire. Let us paint our prison, let us strengthen its bars.
Lo, now he is dead and the greatness that cumbered the world and Time's ways Has vanished like a golden shadow thrust out from the anguish of the ages; The glory and burden, the sunlight and the passion have left our days; Once more we can wear the grey livery of Death and gather in his wages.
Page – 665
All that drew back from his splendour fleeing as ashamed from the light and the beauty and invincible sweetness
Now returns vaunting their darkness and littleness, this fret of life's fever, its cruel and sad incompleteness.
Arise, tread out the fire,
Scatter the ashes of a god through the stars!
Forget to hope and aspire.
He is dead and his greatness that cumbered the world has vanished like a golden shadow from the ages.
The whip of glory, the splendid burden behind us are cast,
Earth is free from fire and stress, left to the joy of her
smallness, rid of his mighty spirit at last.
All that is false and wry and little are freed to follow their
nature once more.
Close time's brilliant pages!
Give back to man's life the old tables, its dull ease, its bowed greyness restore.
The Inconscient and the Traveller Fire
THE INCONSCIENT
Flame that invadest my empire of sorrow wordless and sombre,
Arrow of azure light golden-winged, barbed with delight,
Who was it aimed thee into this crucified Soul that for ever
Passions and beats in the womb of a universe built for its tomb?
Lo, I am Death and I live in the boundless cavern of Nature,
Death who cannot die, Shadow of Eternity,
Vainly I burn in stars as they err through a Void without feature,
Scintillant forms of my Nought vast without life, without thought.
Page – 666
O all my worlds, you who glitter and wander, God has devised you
Burning nails in my heart, stones of my prisonhouse. God,
Architect tranquil relentless and mighty, built and incised you,
Clamped with you Time, his road towards Nothingness, Death's deep
abode.
I the Inconscient have passioned for life and its beat and its
glory, —
Life that Death might die. O, was it life that He gave me?
Pulse of my darkness, reflex and nerve-beat! More hopeless I suffer,
Racked by the flame an obscure will in me kindled to save me.
Life? or a sorrowful throb of my Matter teaching it anguish,
Teaching it hope and desire trod down by Time in the mire?
Life? this joy that weeps for its briefness, this foot-path for sorrow?
Life, this embrace of a death treasuring some transient breath?
Boons of a shortlived sweetness twisted and turned into torture,
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Hope more blind than my Night, desire and its deadly delight,
Bliss that is small on the wings of a moment, vivid and fragile,
Love grown a kinsman to hate, will made an engine of Fate.
Torn with my anguish I cried out for knowledge, light on my midnight,
Light on my symbols of dream and a power in the Light to redeem.
Yea, was it knowledge He gave me, this thought that is tangled in darkness,
Ignorance reading its own record in sense and in stone?
Ignorance tracing its plans and its dreams on a canvas of error!
Mind this half-light in me born, like the glow of a morrowless morn?
Autographs, hieroglyphs of the reflexes life has engendered,
Spasms of matter caught into luminous figments of thought.
Nay, is not God but myself, Death's euphemism fictioned immortal,
Nothing eternalised, bare, yet as if one who is None,
Death yet for ever alive, an Inconscient troubled with seemings,
Matter tormented with life, a Void with its forces at strife?
Page – 667
O by my thought to escape from myself out of thought into Nothing —
Thus I had hoped to dissolve, rapt in some tensionless Bliss,
Rending the Illusion I made to be immobile and formless and timeless —
This dream too now I leave, long not even to cease.
Into my numb discontent I have lapsed of a universe barren,
Goalless, condemned to survive, a spirit of matter in pain.
Now have I known myself as this boundless finite, this darkness
Shadowily self-lit, grown content to strive without end and in vain.
Fire that travellest from immortality, spark of the Timeless,
Why hast thou come to my night, an unbearable Idol of Light?
Ah from what happier universe strayedst thou kindling my torpor?
Thou, O spirit of Light, perturb not my vastness of Night.
I walked beside the waters of a world of light
On a gold ridge guarding two seas of high-rayed night.
One was divinely topped with a pale bluish moon
And swam as in a happy deep spiritual swoon
More conscious than earth's waking; the other's wide delight
Billowed towards an ardent orb of diamond white.
But where I stood, there joined in a bright marvellous haze
The miracled moons with the long ridge's golden blaze.
I knew not if two wakings or two mighty sleeps
Mixed the great diamond fires and the pale pregnant deeps,
But all my glad expanding soul flowed satisfied
Around me and became the mystery of their tide.
As one who finds his own eternal self, content,
Needing naught else beneath the spirit's firmament,
It knew not Space, it heard no more Time's running feet,
Termless, fulfilled, lost richly in itself, complete.
And so it might have lain for ever. But there came
A dire intrusion wrapped in married cloud and flame,
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Across the blue-white moon-hush of my magic seas
A sudden sweeping of immense peripheries
Of darkness ringing lambent lustres; shadowy-vast
A nameless dread, a Power incalculable passed
Whose feet were death, whose wings were immortality;
Its changing mind was time, its heart eternity.
All opposites were there, unreconciled, uneased,
Struggling for victory, by victory unappeased.
All things it bore, even that which brings undying peace,
But secret, veiled, waiting for some supreme release.
I saw the spirit of the cosmic Ignorance;
I felt its power besiege my gloried fields of trance.
But now its huge Enigma had a voice, a cry
That echoed through my oceans of felicity.
A Voice arose that was so sweet and terrible
It thrilled the heart with love and pain, as if all hell
Tuned with all heaven in one inextricable note.
Born from abysmal depths on highest heights to float,
It carried all sorrow that the souls of creatures share,
Yet hinted every rapture that the gods can bear.
"O Son of God who cam'st into my blackest Night
To sound and know its gulfs and bring the immortal light
Into the passion of its darkness, castst thou man's fate
For thy soul's freedom and its magic are forfeit,
Renouncing the high pain that gave thee mortal birth
And made thy soul a seeker on the common earth?
When first the Eternal cast Himself abroad to be
His own unimaginable multiplicity,
Expressing in Time and shape what timelessly was there,
The mighty Mother stood alone in diamond air
And took into her that Godhead streaming from above
And worlds of her endless beauty and delight and love
Leaped from her fathomless heart.
Page – 669
A strong son of lightning came down to the earth with fire-feet
of swiftness splendid;
Light was born in a womb and thunder's force filled a
human frame.
The calm speed of heaven, the sweet greatness, pure passion,
winged power had descended;
All the gods in a mortal body dwelt, bore a single name.
A wide wave of movement stirred all the dim globe in each glad and dreaming fold.
Life was cast into grandeur, ocean hands took the wheels of Time.
Man's soul was again a bright charioteer of days hired by gods impetuous, bold,
Hurled by One on His storm-winged ways, a shaft aimed at heights sublime.
The old tablets clanging fell, ancient slow Nature's dead wall was rent asunder,
God renewed himself in a world of young beauty, thought and flame:
Divine voices spoke on men's lips, the heart woke to white dawns of gleaming wonder,
Air a robe of splendour, breath a joy, life a godlike game.
I made danger my helper and chose pain for thy black anvil my strength hammering to sheen,
And have reckoned the snare and the pit as nought for the hope of one lonely ray;
I turned evil into good, drew out of grief force and returned love to the hate in men:
Page – 670
I have dared the abyss, I have climbed the night, I have cloven the perfect Way.
Artist of cosmos wrapped in thy occult shadow,
Godhead sole awake in the dreams of Matter,
Thee and thy truth men searching for ever vainly, Find and are baffled.
Always thou workst and seemst not to know thy workings,
Yet thy touch, Geometer, wide-wayed Builder,
Vastest things can shape and minutest, potent, Patient, unerring.
All is thou or is thine but who art thou, Dreamer, Paradox ensouling the soulless spaces, Self-creator weaving thy magic figures, Mechanist Mystic?
Who thou art none knoweth, ungrasped thy nature, Ever we see thee veiled by thy titan forces, Only some dim greatness we feel, a mute-eyed Inscrutable Presence.
Ageless, formless, nameless and uncreated, Lost in night where never was seed of living, Ancient, mighty, lone is thy wordless spirit, Blind and immortal.
All at first was only thy giant shadow; Time then was not, space was not yet imagined, Thoughtless, soundless lay the inconscient ocean Emptily brooding.
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What compelled thee, O Void, to create and labour,
Or who rose up in thee, a living Maker?
How could thought begin in thy vacant silence Measureless, dateless?
All these stars that spin in the fields of Nothing, Tiny Time-fires lit in thy untoned darkness Faintly hailing through the enormous distance Aimless and lifeless, —
Why were they made, for what are their wheels and turnings, Splendid desert-hearted disastrous burnings, Mindless hopeless fierce inarticulate yearnings Fruitless for ever?
All these waves of forces that running circling Leap by discontinuous starts through Nowhere, Strangely born in quantums of causeless Matter Wombed out of Nihil — Each is a lawless entity chance-directed, Yet a law prevails in their sum of movement; Is thy soul released in these particles formwards, Thy thought that governs?
In gleam Konarak — Konarak of the Gods A woman sits, her body a glimmering ray. At her feet the moon trails its silvery dreams, On her head is the sun and the purple day.
Always she sits there turning a wheel Whose summit is lost in lights, its base in the abyss
Page – 672 In the temple she sits of the wide white sun That burns unsetting in an immortal space beyond Time. Around her chant the world-poem the deathless Nine And the feet of the Fates dance out the rhyme.
Bugles of Light, bugles of Light, blare through the mist and the darkness! Children of Immortality, we march through the Abyss and the Shadow, Over us hustle the feet of the Fates and the wings of Erinnys, In front is the screech of the Death horn, behind the red-eyed monster hunts and howls the tornado. Our steps search for the road and find the morass and the pitfall. Follow the Gleam, follow the Gleam to the city of God and the pavements of Dream! Bugles of Light, bugles of Light, shatter the heart of the Darkness!
The Fire King and the Messenger
THE FIRE KING O soul who com'st fire-mantled from the earth Into the silence of the seven skies, Art thou an heir of the spiritual birth? Art thou an ancient guest of Paradise?
THE MESSENGER I am the Messenger of the human race, I am a Pioneer from death and night. I am the nympholept of Beauty's face, I am the hunter of the immortal Light.
Page – 673 THE FIRE KING What flame wearst thou that wraps thee with its power Protecting from the Guardians of the Way? What wanderer born from the eternal Hour? What fragment of the inconceivable Ray?
THE MESSENGER It is the fire of an awakened soul Aspiring from death to reach Eternity, The wings of sacrifice flaming to their goal, The burning godhead of humanity.
THE FIRE KING What seekst thou here, child of the transient ways? Wouldst thou be free and still in endless peace? Or gaze for ever on the Eternal's face, Hushed in an incommunicable release?
THE MESSENGER I claim for men the peace that shall not fail, I claim for earth the unwounded timeless bliss, I seek God-strength for souls that suffer in hell, God-light to fill the ignorant abyss.
THE FIRE KING Ascend no more with thy presumptuous prayer But safe return to the forsaken globe, Wake not heaven's Lightning from its slumber's lair To clothe thee with the anguish of its robe.
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God to thy greatness Of utter sedateness Has given a name That fills it with light Of His sovereign might. He has lavished a flame Of passionate fleetness On thy stillness and sweetness. His ecstasies seven, O daughter of Heaven, Have seized thy limbs That were motionless dreams.
Silver foam in the dim East And blood red in the brilliant Western sun. Silver foam and a birth unseen, Blood red and the long death begun.
Torn are the walls and the borders carved by a miserly Nature, I now have burst into limitless kingdoms of sweetness and wonder. Breaking the fences of Matter's gods and their form and their feature, Fall'n are the barriers schemed and the vetoes are shattered asunder.
Page – 675
O ye Powers of the Supreme and of the Mother, the Divine, I have come to you initiate, a bearer of the sign. For I carry the Name in me that nothing can efface. I have breathed in an illimitable spiritual Space And my soul through the unfathomable stillnesses has heard The god-voices of knowledge and the marvels of the Word. It has listened to the secret that was hidden in the night Of the inconscient infinities first when by His might He arose out of the caverns of the darkness self-enwrapped And the nebulae were churned up like to foam-froth and were shaped Till these millions of universes mystical upbuoyed Were outsprinkled as if stardust on the Dragon of the Void. I was there then in the infinitesimal and obscure As a seed soul in the fire seeds of the energies that endure. I have learned now to what purpose I have loitered as His spark In the midnight of earth Matter like a glow-worm in the dark And my spirit was imprisoned in the muteness of a stone, A soul thoughtless and left voiceless and impuissant and alone.
Hail to the fallen, the fearless! hail to the conquered, the noble! I out of ancient India great and unhappy and deathless, I in a loftiest nation though subject born, salute thee, Thou too great and unfortunate! All is not given by Nature Only to Force and the strong and the violent. Courage and wisdom, Steadfast will and the calm magnificent dream of thy spirit Crown thee for ever, O Emperor! Fiercely by Destiny broken, Cast from thy throne and defeated, forsaken, a wandering exile, Far from the hills of thy land and thy fallen and vanquished nation, Yet has thy glory overtopped and the deathless pride of thy laurel Conquered the conqueror's, Haile Selassie, Lion of Judah.
Page – 676 France for her southern borders fearing spared the aggressor. England the sea-queen, England the fortunate, England the victor Fled like a dog from the whip of his menace yelping for succour, Loudly to Frank and to Greek and to Turk and to Yugoslav calling "Help me! I dare not alone; he will shatter my fleet and my empire," You did not cower, O African people, you did not tremble. Armed but with rifle and spear you fronted the legions of Caesar.
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Statesman wise and beneficent, emperor, patriot, hero, King of the Amharas, Haile Selassie, Lion of Judah. Man is but man and the weapons of Hell are too fierce for his spirit, Forged by the scientist burrowing deep in the bowels of Nature, Death and destruction to draw from her torn from her anguished entrails, Death for his kind, the destruction of earth and her high-aiming peoples, Engines for Satan to handle, tools for the mischief of Ate.
Seer deep-hearted, divine king of the secrecies, Occult fountain of love sprung from the heart of God, Ways thou knewest no feet ever in Time had trod. Words leaped flashing, the flame-billows of wisdom's seas. Vast thy soul was a tide washing the coasts of heaven. Thoughts broke burning and bare crossing the human night, White star-scripts of the gods born from the book of Light Page by page to the dim children of earth were given.
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Soul, my soul, re-ascend over the edge of life, — Far, far out of the din burn into tranquil skies. Cross bright ranges of mind murmurless, visioned, white; Thoughts sail down as if ships carrying bales of light, Truth's form-robes by the Seers woven from spirit threads, From wide havens above luminous argosies, Gold-robed Wisdom's divine traffic and merchandise. But then pause not but go far beyond Space and Time Where thy natural home motionless vast and mute Waits thy tread; on a throne facing infinity Thought-nude, void of the world, one with the silence be. Sole, self-poised and unmoved thou shalt behold below Hierarchies and domains, godheads and potencies, Titans, demons and men each in his cosmic role: Midst all these in the live centre of forces spun, Fate there under thy feet turning the wheels of Time, The World Law thou shalt view mapped in its codes sublime, Yet thyself shalt remain ruleless, eternal, free.
Soul, my soul, yet ascend crossing the marge of life: Mount out far above Time, reach to the golden end, Mind-belt's verge and the vague Infinite's spirit seas. Crossed by sails of the gods, luminous argosies, Silence reigns and the pure vastness of Self alone, Fulgent, shadowless, white, limitless, signless, one. God-light brooding above, spreading eternal wings, Free, held high above thought, void of the form of things, Live there lost in God space, rapturous, vacant, mute, Sun-bright, timeless, immense, single and absolute.
Page – 678 I am filled with the crash of war
I am filled with the crash of war and the shout of Cain, Victories and marchings and agonised retreats, I feel the bombs burst and the cries of pain In Barcelona and in Canton streets.
In the silence of the midnight
In the silence of the midnight, in the light of dawn or noontide I have heard the flutings of the Infinite, I have seen the sun-wings of the seraphs. On the boundless solitude of the mountains, on the shoreless roll of ocean, Something is felt of God's vastness, fleeting touches of the Absolute Momentary and immeasurable smite the sense nature free from its limits, — A brief glimpse, a hint, it passes, but the soul grows deeper, wider: God has set his mark upon the creature.
In the flash or flutter of flight of bird and insect, in the passion of wing and cry on treetops, In the golden feathers of the eagle, in the maned and tawny glory of the lion, In the voiceless hierophants of Nature with their hieratic script of colour, Orchid, tulip and narcissus, rose and nenuphar and lotus, Something of eternal beauty seizes on the soul and nerves and heartstrings.
Page – 679 Here in the green of the forest
Here in the green of the forest, lost in the stillness of Nature Long like lovers together alone with our hearts we had wandered, Hands linked, thoughts linked, listening mute to the voices of Silence, Light of the spaces, sovereign beauty, comrade of rapture. Golden the tresses that fell on her shoulders, a mantle of sunlight, Golden the thoughts came cast from her lips like jewels of wonder, Golden the smile in her heart and her radiant ripple of laughter. First in the silence we knew each other; the eyes were the gateways Opening soul into soul and spirit was bare to the spirit. Speech only covers the mind and the heart when it strives to reveal them! Silence, the wizard interpreter, drew us closer to oneness, First in the silence we felt our heart-throbs beating together.
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As in the body a man and a woman marry and mingle, Hearts locked, limbs locked, twisted to one by the serpent of passion, So our spirits were locked in each other, hurled into oneness, Hurtled and hurled on a rapid and violent ocean of rapture.
Page – 680
Voice of the summits, leap from thy peaks of ineffable splendour, Wisdom's javelin cast, leonine cry of the Vast. Voice of the summits, arrow of gold from a bow-string of silence! Leap down into my heart, blazing and clangorous dart! Here where I struggle alone unheeded of men and unaided, Here by the darkness down-trod, here in the midnight of God.
I have come down from the heights and the outskirts of Heaven Into the gulfs of God's sleep, into the inconscient Deep. All I had won that the mind can win of the Word and the wordless, Knowledge sun-bright for ever and the spiritual crown of endeavour, Share in the thoughts of the cosmic Self and its orders to Nature, Cup of its nectar of bliss, dreams on the breast of its peace.
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