Canto Two

The Issue

Her mind moved in a many-imaged past

Dying, it lived imperishably in her;

Invisible, a fateful ghost of self,

Along the fleeting event's far-backward trail

And on the bank of the mysterious flood

And the subtle images of things that were,

All that she once had hoped and dreamed and been,

As in a many-hued flaming inner dawn,

Lay mapped to her sun-clear recording view,

And the blue mountains of her soaring youth

To joy clutched under the silent shadow of doom

Twelve passionate months led in a day of fate.

On man sometimes when he draws near to God:

Forced out from the protecting Ignorance

He at length must cast from him his surface soul

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A point she had reached where life must be in vain

Her will must cancel her body's destiny.

Can lift the yoke imposed by birth in Time.

Can rase the fixed interminable line

These new oblivious personalities

The trail of old forgotten thoughts and deeds,

The burdensome heirship to our vanished forms

An episode in an unremembered tale,

A once living story has prepared and made

The fixity of the cosmic sequences

She must disrupt, dislodge by her soul's force

Make a rased ground and shape anew her fate.

Meeting upon the borders of the unknown,

Must be wrestled out on a dangerous dim background:

Against the universe weigh its single self.

And life has no sense and love no place to stand,

In the world's death-cave uphold life's helpless claim

Altered must be Nature's harsh economy;

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An old account of suffering exhaust,

And the heavy servitudes of the Karmic Gods,

And the deep need of universal pain

Out of a timeless barrier she must break,

Look into the lonely eyes of immortal Death

The great and dolorous moment now was close.

The last long days went by with heavy tramp,

Alone amid the many faces loved,

Her armoured spirit kept watch upon the hours

In the closed beauty of the inhuman wilds.

The world unknowing, for the world she stood:

There was no witness of terrestrial eyes;

Were the spectators of that mighty strife.

And the green murmurous broad deep-thoughted woods

A dense magnificent coloured self-wrapped life

And set with chequered sunbeams and blithe flowers

There had she grown to the stature of her spirit:

Steeping her soul in its wide loneliness

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And mated her with her environment.

With a background of the eternal and unique.

Reduced the heavy framework of man's days

To a first thin strip of simple animal wants,

And the brooding multitude of patient trees

And the solemn weight of the slowly-passing months

There was her drama's radiant prologue lived.

Set in the cloistral yearning of the woods

Appeared through an aureate opening in Time,

And the hours forgot to pass towards grief and change.

Repeating the marvel of the first descent,

Love came to her hiding the shadow, Death.

Since first the earth-being's heavenward growth began,

Never a rarer creature bore his shaft,

A lightning from the heights on our abyss.

Near to earth's wideness, intimate with heaven,

Voyaging through worlds of splendour and of calm

Ardent was her self-poised unstumbling will;

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Passionate in flow, had not one turbid wave.

A priestess of immaculate ecstasies

Moves in some prophet cavern of the gods,

Inhabited with rich creative beats

That seemed a niche for veiled divinity

Immortal rhythms swayed in her time-born steps;

Even in earth-stuff, and their intense delight

A wide self-giving was her native act;

Enveloped with its greatness all that came

Her kindly care was a sweet temperate sun,

As might a soul fly like a hunted bird,

And a quiet reach like a remembered breast,

One could drink life back in streams of honey-fire,

Feel her bright nature's glorious ambience,

A deep of compassion, a hushed sanctuary,

Love in her was wider than the universe,

The great unsatisfied godhead here could dwell:

Her mood could harbour his sublimer breath

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For even her gulfs were secrecies of light.

A continent of self-diffusing peace,

The strength, the silence of the gods were hers.

His high warm subtle ether he refound

In her he met his own eternity.

Till then no mournful line had barred this ray.

On the frail breast of this precarious earth,

Opening in sympathy with happier stars

Remembered beauty death-claimed lids ignore

Carried on canvas-strips of shimmering Time,

Although she leaned to bear the human load,

Earth's breath had failed to stain that brilliant glass:

It still reflected heaven's spiritual joy.

Her playmate in the sempiternal spheres

In her attracting advent's luminous wake,

Drifting with burning wings above her days:

A glowing orbit was her early term,

Her youth sat throned in calm felicity.

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That will not suffer long too glad a note.

The armed Immortal bore the snare of Time.

Assigner of the ordeal and the path

Death, fall and sorrow as the spirit's goads,

Lit up the chasm of the unfinished world

August and pitiless in his calm outlook,

He measured the difficulty with the might

Assailing her divinest elements,

And forced her strength to its appointed road.

To wrestle with the Shadow she had come

And life's brief struggle in dumb Matter's night.

Or hew the ways of Immortality,

Was her soul's issue thrown with Destiny's dice.

To lead, to deliver was her glorious part.

Fit for a day's use by busy careless Powers.

Half-animated for a passing show,

Flung to the eddies in a ruthless sport

A creature born to bend beneath the yoke,

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Or one more pawn who comes destined to be pushed

In the chess-play of the earth-soul with Doom, —

A conscious frame was here, a self-born Force.

This slow and strange uneasy compromise

Where all must move between an ordered Chance

Too high the fire spiritual dare not blaze.

An answering touch might shatter all measures made

A gaol is this immense material world:

At every gate the huge dim sentinels pace.

An Inquisition of the priests of Night

And the dual tables and the Karmic norm

Pain with its lash, joy with its silver bribe

A bond is put on the high-climbing mind,

Death stays the journeying discoverer, Life.

While the tardy coilings of the aeons pass

And the gold Hawk can cross the skies no more.

Arraigned by the dark Power that hates all bliss

Sentenced by the mechanic justicer

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To the afflicting penalty of man's hopes,

Baring her helpless heart to destiny's stroke.

Obedient to the statutes fixed of old,

In her the superhuman cast its seed.

Her spirit refused to hug the common soil,

Compound with earth, struck from the starry list,

Accustomed to the eternal and the true,

Asked not from mortal frailty pain's relief,

A work she had to do, a word to speak:

In thoughts and actions graved in Nature's book,

Cancel her commerce with eternity,

To the brute balance of the world's exchange.

Accomplishing in life the great world-plan,

Repugned to admit frustration's barren role,

Obey the government of the casual fact

In her own self she found her high recourse;

Her single will opposed the cosmic rule.

At the Unseen's knock upon her hidden gates

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It bore the stroke of That which kills and saves.

Barring its dreadful route no will can change,

A heart stood in the way of the driving wheels:

Its stark conventions met the flame of a soul.

That moves the veiled Ineffable's timeless will:

Can link man's strength to a transcendent Force.

One mighty deed can change the course of things;

All now seems Nature's massed machinery;

And long determination's rigid chain,

Her empire of unconscious deft device

He too is a machine amid machines;

A beating heart cuts out emotion's modes;

Or the figure of the world reveals the signs

In circles around Matter's binding-posts.

To which reason lends illusive sense, is here,

Or a vast ignorant mind's colossal work.

Then Nature's instrument crowns himself her king;

His soul steps back and sees the Light supreme.

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This truth broke in in a triumph of fire;

The deity revealed its hidden face.

A living choice reversed fate's cold dead turn,

Pressed back the senseless dire revolving Wheel

A flaming warrior from the eternal peaks

Smote from Death's visage its dumb absolute

END OF CANTO TWO

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