Canto Two

The Kingdom of Subtle Matter

IN THE impalpable field of secret self,

This little outer being's vast support

He came into a magic crystal air

A light that made visible immaterial things.

The kingdom of subtle Matter's faery craft

Leaping out of a splendour-trance and haze,

A world of lovelier forms lies near to ours,

All shapes are beautiful and all things true.

The eyes were doors to a celestial sense,

And the heart drew a deeper breath of power.

The perfect plans on which she moulds her works,

Repose in a framework of established fate.

Already were mapped and scheduled there the time

In the sumptuous lineaments traced by desire.

The riches unfound or still uncaught by our lives,

Abide in that pellucid atmosphere.

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Our finished ends anticipated live.

Intercepting the free boon of heaven's air,

Or fragrant circuits through gold lattices;

From deathless suns and the streaming of God's rain,

And bright dews drip from the Immortal's sky.

Occult behind this grosser Nature's walls,

Is hidden by a tapestry of dreams;

Its inner sight sustains this outer scene.

It has a tact our touch cannot attain,

Its intercession with the eternal Ray

At beauty and the perfect shape of things.

And early play of the eternal Child

Laved in a bright everlasting wonder's tints

Take dream-hued rest like birds on timeless trees

All that here seems has lovelier semblance there.

Some high original beauty forfeiting,

Whatever is here of visible charm and grace

All that is beautiful here is there divine.

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Bodies that have no earthly counterpart

And ravish the heart with their celestial tread

The future's marvels wander in its gulfs;

A carnival of beauty crowds the heights

In its antechambers of splendid privacy

Like lovers in a lonely secret place:

They join their strength and sweetness and delight

Intruder from the formless Infinite

The spirit's leap towards body touches ground.

Already it wears outlasting death and birth,

A covering of its immortality

Fit to endure the rub of Change and Time.

And Matter's substance of sign-burdened Force, —

An abstract phantasm mould of mental make, —

And is more real than this grosser frame.

Lightened is its weight to heighten its ascent;

It drops old patterned palls of denser stuff,

And bears the soul from world to higher world,

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The spirit's simplicity alone is left,

But when it must come back to its mortal load

Then its return resumes that heavier dress.

By the technique of the atomic Void,

Was woven round the secret spirit in things.

This wonder-world with all its radiant boon

Only for expression cares and perfect form;

Its light draws towards the verge of Nature's lapse;

And fascinating eyes to perilous Gods,

Its trance imposes earth's inconscience,

And authorises our mortality.

A vessel of its concealed autocracy,

It is the immutable in their mutable forms,

It guards the deathless type of perishing things:

Its thought invents our reasoned ignorance;

Our secret breath of untried mightier force,

Its fine suggestions are a covert fount

Touching things common with transfiguring hues

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And a glory gleams from the soul's decadence.

Its beauty dons our mud-mask ugliness,

A heaven of creative truths above,

A chaos of dissolving forms below,

Out of its fall our denser Matter came.

Thus taken was God's plunge into the Night.

This fallen world became a nurse of souls

A Being woke and lived in the meaningless void,

A Consciousness plucked out from mindless sleep.

Thus fallen, inconscient, frustrate, dense, inert,

Earth lay, a drudge of sleep, forced to create

Left from a happiness dead before she was born,

This mire must harbour the orchid and the rose,

A beauty that belongs to happier spheres.

As if a slain god left a golden trust

An immortal godhead's perishable parts

Reword from a document complete elsewhere

A residue her sole inheritance,

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In the slow tentative motion of her power

She has accepted as her nature's need

A labour to the gods impossible.

Its portion claims of immortality;

A mind that must recover a knowledge lost

And wearing still these countless knots of Law

A mighty kinship is this daring's cause.

Looks forward or looks back beyond Time's gloss

In an absolute creation's flawless skill.

To fix the eternal's touch in time-made things,

A fragment here is caught of heaven's design;

And ecstasy and glory could not be.

Even in this prison-house of outer form,

Is driven through gross walls of nerve and brain,

Earth's great dull barrier is removed awhile,

And we grow vessels of creative might.

Pervades our life, a mystic stir is felt,

A dream of beauty dances through the heart,

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A thought from the eternal Mind draws near,

Awaking from Infinity's sleep come down,

But soon the inert flesh responds no more,

The blaze of passion and the tide of power

Abides astonishing earth, imagined supreme,

Earth's eyes half-see, her forces half-create;

A radiance of a golden artifice,

Her forms hide what they house and only mime

That live for ever in the Eternal's gaze.

Is a slow toiling of unconscious Powers;

His genius born from an inconscient soil.

For when he strives for things surpassing earth,

And hardly with his heart's blood he achieves

His figure of a Time-inn for the Unborn.

And would bring down their dateless meanings here,

Beyond our reach the eternal marvels blaze.

Immaculate in the Spirit's deathless air,

And an unchanging muse of deep self-space.

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And joins us to the timeless and the true;

The godlike act, the thoughts that never die.

And travelling down the moment's vanishing route

As the mind's visitors or the heart's guests

Or seldom in some rare delivering glimpse

Although beginnings only and first attempts,

And the hidden miracle of our destiny.

Is imaged in a contact and a call.

Our nature's glass shows not our real self;

Earth's doubting future hides our heritage:

The Strength that visits us our comrade power;

The Imperishable burn through Matter's screen

The Spirit's greatness is our timeless source

A vast Unknown is round us and within;

A subtle link of union joins all life.

We are not left alone in a closed scheme

And an incommunicable Absolute.

Our being looks beyond its walls of mind

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There are brighter earths and wider heavens than ours.

It feels in its immense dynamic core

Cry for expression in the unshaped Vast:

The images of its everlasting Truth

As if to its own inner witness gaze

The power and passion of its timeless heart,

The grandeurs of its multitudinous might.

Into the prodigy of our nature's birth,

And dateless fount of all we hope to be.

Initiate of unspoken verities,

In its own native style and living tongue

Some vision seen in the omniscient Light,

Some rapture of the all-creating Bliss,

Worlds are there nearer to those absolute realms,

And spirit is not hampered by its frame

And delight and beauty are inhabitants

A finer substance in a subtler mould

Its strength can overtake joy's running feet;

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The rapid net of an intuitive clasp

A Nature lifted by a larger breath,

Answers the flaming Godhead's casual touch:

It hears the word to which our hearts are deaf,

And, traveller on the roads of line and hue,

Thus we draw near to the All-Wonderful

Beauty is his footprint showing us where he has passed,

Happiness the smile on his adorable face.

A genius of creative Immanence,

A fourth dimension of aesthetic sense

To the cosmic wideness re-aligns our souls.

The craftsman and the craft grown inly one

And passion of their close identity.

Or by long labour stumblingly evolve,

In us too the intuitive Fire can burn;

On the celestial levels is its home:

But rarely burns the flame nor burns for long;

Brings brief magnificent reminiscences

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But not the utter vision and delight.

Lest, captives of the beauty and the joy,

In that fair subtle realm behind our own

The inspiring Light plays in fine boundaries;

There liberty is perfection's guarantee:

Incarnate, the sheer spiritual ecstasy,

A fantasy of perfect line and rule.

A rich completeness is by limit made,

An intricate rapture riots in a small space:

Each line is perfect and inevitable,

All is enamoured of its own delight.

In a heaven-pleased self-glad immunity;

Here was not futile effort's broken heart:

Empty of opposition and of pain,

It had no grace of error or defeat,

Out of some packed self-bliss it drew at once

And the miracle of its rhythmic thoughts and acts,

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And glory of breathing bodies like our own.

He moved in a divine, yet kindred world

Yet perfect like the playthings of a god,

In their narrow and exclusive absolutes

It dreams not ever of what might have been;

In a supremeness bound to its own plan

No space for shadows of the immeasurable,

A captive of its own beauty and ecstasy,

The spirit stood back effaced behind its frame.

A blue horizon limited the soul;

The outer ideal's shallows its swim-range:

With the small happiness of the body's acts.

Attached to the safe paucity of her room,

And thought not of a greater work undone.

Forgetful of the heights to which she rose,

The beautiful body of a soul at ease,

Childlike she swung in her gold cradle of joy.

She had no wings for wide and dangerous flight,

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She knew no vistas and no mighty dreams,

A perfect picture in a perfect frame,

Only a moment's fine release it gave;

Our spirit tires of being's surfaces,

It turns to hidden powers and deeper states.

His soul's peak-climb abandoning in its rear

He left that fine material Paradise.

END OF CANTO TWO

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