Canto Three

The Glory and the Fall of Life

AN UNEVEN broad ascent now lured his feet.

Answering a greater Nature's troubled call

And entered wide obscure disputed fields

A world of search and toil without repose.

A questioner with none to give reply,

Always uncertain of the ground he trod,

He travelled through a land peopled by doubts

In front he saw a boundary ever unreached

A far retreating horizon of mirage.

A journey of countless paths without a close.

A tireless wandering sought and could not cease.

A movement of unquiet seas, a long

A vexed disturbance in the eternal Calm,

Assuming whatever shape her fancy wills,

She has left the safety of the tried and known.

Undaunted by Fate that dogs and Chance that springs,

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She wrestles with danger and discovery

To be seemed only a long experiment,

That tries all truths and, finding none supreme,

As saw some inner mind, so life was shaped:

Tortured by her own powers or proud and blest,

A huge inconsequence was her action's law,

And anguish and bliss were pastimes of the heart.

She swept through the race-fields of Circumstance,

Uplifted or broken on Time's inconstant wheel.

She writhed, a worm mid worms in Nature's mud,

Ambitioned the seas for robe, for crown the stars

Clamouring for worlds to conquer and to rule.

She plunged into the anguish of the depths

In dolorous converse with her squandered self

Or sat with grief as with an ancient friend.

Or she lingered tied to an inadequate joy

A scene was planned for all her numberless moods

But none could offer a pure felicity;

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Or the fierce lust that brings a dead fatigue.

Something remained dissatisfied, ever the same

For every hour repeated all the rest

A spirit of her self and aim unsure,

She needs the spur of pleasure and of pain

She strains for an end that never can she win.

For the grief she weeps which came from her own choice,

Aspiring to heaven she turns her steps towards hell.

Fate's dreadful swing she has taken for cradle and seat.

A lost world-rapture lingers in her eyes,

Beauty and happiness are her native right,

This now revealed its antique face of joy,

Tempting it to endure and long and hope.

In an air racked with sorrow and with fear

He saw the image of a happier state.

Circling and mounting towards creation's tops,

For warm communion between body and soul,

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Glimmered the kingdom of a griefless life.

Other than the heavens beheld by mortal eyes,

An archipelago of laughter and fire,

Towered spirals, magic rings of vivid hue

Floated through distance like a symbol world.

On the unhappiness they could not aid,

Untarnished by its anger, gloom and hate,

Blissful for ever in their timeless right.

Of their immortal gladness they live sure.

Burning they swam in a vague lucent haze,

A nebula of the splendours of the gods

Almost unbelievable by human faith,

As through a magic television's glass

They shone like images thrown from a far scene

But near and real to the longing heart

Are the hidden kingdoms of beatitude.

Immune from the harsh clutch of Death and Time,

In bright enchanted safe peripheries

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Across a subtle vision's inner field,

The figures of the perfect kingdom pass

Imagined scenes or great eternal worlds,

Unreal-seeming, yet more real than life,

If dreams these were or captured images,

In a swift eternal moment fixed there live

Calm heavens of imperishable Light,

Oceans and rivers of the mirth of God

This, once a star of bright remote idea

Took now a close shape of reality.

The wonder-worlds of life were dreams no more;

Their scenes, their happenings met his eyes and heart

A breathless summit region drew his gaze

And dipped towards a strange ethereal base.

On a spiritual and mysterious peak

Divided life from the formless Infinite

Out of that formless stuff Time mints his shapes;

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Have drawn the strength to be, the will to last

Inverting the spirit's apex towards life,

To cast in acts the dreams of her caprice,

He props her dance upon a rigid base,

Must standardise her creation's miracle.

Inventing the scene of a concrete universe,

She sees by flashes of his all-knowing Light.

To guide her force that feels but cannot know,

And life obeys the governing Idea.

The hazardous experimenting Mind

Mid chance formations of an unknowing world.

That Nescience may become omniscient,

Thoughts house infallible immortal sight

The Master of the worlds self-made her slave

She has canalised the seas of omnipotence;

The Immortal bound himself to do her works;

Hidden in the cape of our mortality.

Have lost their origin on unseen heights:

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Even deformed, obscure, accursed and fallen, —

And nothing she leaves out that serves delight, —

Cut out the sentence of the spirit's fall,

At once caught in an eternal vision's sweep

And her regions crouching in the nether deeps.

Beneath was the gloomy trance of the abyss,

There were vasts of the glory of life's absolutes:

And an eternal childhood of the soul

Where all could dare to be themselves and one

With naked Freedom in Truth's happy sun.

There were fields of her taste of toil and strife and tears;

Sleep imitated awhile extinction's peace.

To test the savour of bare opposites.

Have woven his being's mutable design,

His nature's constant fixed mobility,

His cosmos-chaos of personality.

Has turned to pathos and power being's self-dream,

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But here were worlds lifted half-way to heaven.

The Veil was there but not the Shadowy Wall;

Some passion of the inviolate purity

Heaven's joys might have been earth's if earth were pure.

Some natural felicity's bright extreme,

All strengths could laugh and sport on earth's hard roads

All love could play and nowhere Nature's shame.

And still her doors are barred to things supreme.

Some glimmer of the Transcendent's hem was there.

Immortal figures of embodied joy

Pure mystic voices in beatitude's hush

Calling his honeyed touch to thrill the worlds,

His sweet intolerant might of union

Drawing to his pity the rebel and the waif

A chant hymeneal to the unseen Divine,

Lured an immortal music into the heart

A purer, fierier sense had there its home,

One drew a large unburdened spacious breath

The voice of Time sang of the Immortal's joy;

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The moments came with ecstasy on their wings;

Absolved from boundaries in the vasts of dream;

To the deathless people of the shores of Light.

Marvel and rapture wandered in the ways.

Life was a happy laughter of the soul

The spirit's luminousness was bodied there.

And her extremes keen edges of harmony:

And nursed the god on her maternal breast:

Ignorance was a thin shade protecting light,

Pleasure a candidate for heaven's fire;

Strength was the slave of calm spiritual law,

There were summit-glories inconceivable,

And high dependencies of her virgin sun,

Throned in the power of the Transcendent's ray.

In sun-bright kingdoms moved with regal gait:

Life's puissances reigned on seats of marble will,

And laurelled strengths and armed imperative mights.

All beings wore a royal stamp of power.

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Proud violent heads served one calm monarch brow:

There met the ardent mutual intimacies

Imposed by Love on Love's heart that obeys

All was a game of meeting kinglinesses.

Close to the god's pride and bliss his soul adores:

To him who serves with a free equal heart

His nobility's coronet and privilege,

His service a spiritual sovereignty.

In her high home and made her all his own:

And filled them with the passion of his ray

And all her soul a counterpart of his soul.

Her days became a luminous sacrifice;

She burned in his sweet intolerable blaze.

In his wide sky she built her world anew;

To thinking a need to live what the soul saw,

His splendour grasped her, her puissance to him clung;

Put her magic serpent sceptre in Thought's grip,

And her acts the living body of his will.

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His victor Light rode on her deathless Force;

Life throned with mind, a double majesty.

And action tinged with dream, laughter with thought,

Until it heard the near approach of God.

A carefree youthfulness of mind and heart

It lit an aureate halo round desire

To divine gambols of love and beauty and bliss.

A swift life-impulse stinted not nor stopped:

There work was play and play the only work,

A celestial bacchanal for ever pure,

Life was an eternity of rapture's moods:

Imposing on the safety of the stars

The nude god-children in their play-fields ran

Of storm and sun they made companions,

Slew distance trampled to death under their wheels

Imperious in their radiance like the suns

Flung like a divine largess to the world.

They carried the pride and mastery of their charm

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Ideas were luminous comrades of the soul;

But needed not these instruments' toil to know;

Investitured with the fresh heart's bright ray,

Tenants of the perpetuity of Time

They steeped existence in their youth of soul.

The strong compulsion of their will to joy

There reigned a breath of high immune content,

A flood of universal love and peace.

Like a song of pleasure on the lips of Time.

A sun-frank winging of the soul to bliss,

And the swift fire-heart's golden liberty.

There came no crookedness of thought or word

All was sincerity and natural force.

In a happy series climbed or plunged these worlds:

In fields of grandeur and of titan power,

A thousand Edens she could build nor pause;

And to her heavenly variety.

Arisen from the breast of some deep Infinite,

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In her nature housing the Immortal's power,

No guide she needed but her luminous heart:

No alien Night had come to blind her eyes.

Each act was a perfection and a joy.

And the rich coloured riot of her mind,

Magician builder of unnumbered forms

At will she wove her wizard wonder-dance,

A Bacchant of creative ecstasy.

This world of bliss he saw and felt its call,

But found no way to enter into its joy;

A darker air encircled still his soul

In spite of yearning mind and longing sense,

And a vision dimmed by care and sorrow and sleep

Conceived in a longing distance by the heart

Although he once had felt the Eternal's clasp,

And where he stood were entrances of Night.

Can the dense mould in which we have been made

For its tormented will to think and live

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And still it keeps the habit of its birth:

In the crude beginnings of this mortal world

When earth was built in the unconscious Void

Identified with sea and sky and stone

Asleep in objects, vague, inanimate.

In the deaf stillness, mid the unheeded sounds,

Of Godhead in a world that had no needs;

This solid mass which brooked no throb of sense

Immersed no more in Matter's harmony,

In the uncaring trance it groped for sight,

Famishing for speech and thought and joy and love,

Hungered for the beat of yearning and response.

The intuitive Silence trembling with a name,

And in brute forms awake divinity.

A murmur moaned in the unlistening Void.

Something pent up in dead insentient depths,

Turned as if one asleep since dateless time.

Remembering its forgotten self and right,

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Overflowing from her bright magnificent plane

Here too the gracious great-winged Angel poured

Hoping to fill a fair new world with joy.

And fills his days with her celestial clasp,

In Matter's womb she cast the Immortal's fire,

Smote with her charm and beauty flesh and nerve

Alive and clad with trees and herbs and flowers

Azure replied to azure in the sea's laugh;

Life's glory and swiftness ran in the beauty of beasts,

But while the magic breath was on its way,

A dark ambiguous Presence questioned all.

And offers to spirit the ordeal of the flesh,

Interned now in the slow and suffering years

And can no more recall her happier state,

Insensible foundation of a world

And sorrow and joy as struggling comrades live.

Abolished was her subtle mighty spirit

And all her glory into littleness turned

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To feed death with her works is here life's doom.

Inflicting consciousness on unconscious things,

A myth of being that must for ever cease.

END OF CANTO THREE

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