Canto Four

The Kingdoms of the Little Life

A QUIVERING trepidant uncertain world

Born from that dolorous meeting and eclipse

Appeared in the emptiness where her feet had trod,

A quick obscurity, a seeking stir.

Hardly awakened from the Inconscient's sleep,

To find itself and find its hold on things.

Assailed by memories that fled when seized,

It strove with a blindness as of groping hands

Between earth-pain and the bliss from which Life fell.

Hunts for the joy that earth has failed to keep.

For peace to live on the inert solid globe:

It has given the law of craving to our lives,

An Influence entered mortal night and day,

In the troubled stream where leaps a blind heart-pulse

Dividing Matter's sleep from conscious Mind,

A Power beyond earth's scope has touched the earth;

A formless yearning passions in man's heart,

Page – 132

With the childlike pain-forgetting mind of beasts

The Might that came upon the earth to bless,

The infant laugh that rang through time is hushed:

And sorrow is his nurse of destiny.

Care and reflection burden his daily walk;

He is awake to the Invisible.

He has exhausted now life's surface acts,

He becomes a mind, he becomes a spirit and self;

In him Matter wakes from its long obscure trance,

An eyeless Power that sees no more its aim,

Life cast her seed in the body's indolent mould;

Compelling it to sense and seek and feel.

Perturbing with her dreams the vast routine

The mighty prisoner struggled for release.

In the heart she kindled a fire of passion and need,

Arose her great voice of toil and prayer and strife.

A guideless sense was given her for her road;

But all the unknown was hers to feel and clasp.

Page – 133

Out of her seal of insentient life she broke:

That cannot utter what its depths divine,

The chain that bound her she made her instrument;

And effort and growth and striving nescience.

Imposing on inconscience consciousness,

Her anguished claim to her lost sovereign right,

Her wandering unsure steps, her cry for change.

In her obscure cathedral of delight

But vain unending is the sacrifice,

Futile mutations in the altar's plan

A burden of transient gains weighs down her steps

But the hours cry to her, she travels on

Her greatest progress is a deepened need.

She conquers earth, her field, then claims the heavens.

The stumbling ages over her labour pass,

And no revealing rapture touched her fall.

Justifying the ambiguous providence

Or a dark clue to some diviner state.

Page – 134

In Ignorance she pursues the unfinished work,

Ascending slowly with unconscious steps,

Like a child-soul left near the gates of Hell

In this slow ascension he must follow her pace

So only can earth's last salvation come.

Of all that holds us back and baffles God

Along swift paths of fall through dangerous gates

Teeming with instincts from the mindless gulfs

Life here was intimate with Death and Night

She was their inmate and adopted waif.

A sojourner, she hoped not any more.

He saw the original seat, the separate birth

An unhappy face of falsity made true,

Indifferent to beauty and to light,

Unhelped by camouflage, brutal and bare,

Of her outcast force exiled from heaven and hope,

The grovel of a strength once half divine,

Page – 135

The naked body of her poverty.

Where she had lain inconscient, rigid, mute:

A darkness clung to her uneffaced by Light.

The upward look was alien to her sight,

Renounced was the glory and felicity,

Hardly she availed, wallowing, to bear and live.

A wide unquiet mist of seeking Space,

A rayless region swallowed in vague swathes,

A swaddled visionless and formless mind,

Its prayer denied, it fumbled after thought.

It opened into a weird and pigmy world

On dim confines where Life and Matter meet

Pursued by ungrasped beginnings and lost ends.

There was no solid ground, no constant drift;

Himself was dim to himself, half-felt, obscure,

In strange domains where all was living sense

Only a crude child-heart cried for toys of bliss,

And random shapeless energies drove towards form

Page – 136

Asking for light she followed darkness' clue.

Matter smitten by Matter glimmered to sense,

Of instinct from a cloaked subliminal bed,

Perception answered Nature's wakening blows

A jerk, a leap, a start in Nature's dream,

Heedless of every motion but their own

Free in a world of settled anarchy.

Engrossed the tense precarious moment's will

The gusts of Nature were the only law,

Only were achieved a nescient grasp and drive

Sense-pleasures and sense-pangs soon caught, soon lost,

It was a vain unnecessary world

And meaningless suffering and a grey unease.

But judged not so his spirit's wakened eye.

That burns apart, Light's lonely sentinel,

A single thinker in an aimless world

He saw the purpose in the works of Time.

Page – 137

The first writhings of the cosmic serpent Force

It raised its head in the warm air of life.

Or wear as yet mind's wonder-flecks and streaks,

Or stand erect in the blaze of spirit's sun.

The secret crawl of consciousness to light

Beneath the body's crust of thickened self

The turbid yeast of Nature's passionate change,

A heavenly process donned this grey disguise,

Laboured to achieve its dumb unseemly work,

To release the glory of God in Nature's mud.

Could pierce through the grey phosphorescent haze

That animates these mute and solid cells

And the keen lust and hunger of its will.

And traced its acts to a miraculous fount.

Creator of this game of ray and shade

Asks from the body the soul's intimacies

Links its mechanic throbs to light and love.

Up from subconscient depths beneath Time's foam;

Page – 138

Oblivious of their flame of happy truth,

They come disguised as feelings and desires,

And rise and sink on a somnambulist tide.

Always a heaven-truth broods in life's deeps;

A touch of God's rapture in creation's acts,

Lurks still in the dumb roots of death and birth,

That rapture's smile is secret everywhere;

Its hued magnificence blooms in leaves and flowers.

That feels and suffers but cannot move or cry,

It made of the heart's rhythm its music's beat;

And ask for happiness and earn the pang

And quiver with pain and crave for ecstasy.

Too far from light, too close to being's core,

It presses on heart's core and vibrant nerve;

Our pain and pleasure have that sting for cause:

The soul's desire leaps out towards passing things.

Comes surging through the blood and quickened sense;

It turns in us to finite loves and lusts,

Page – 139

To battle and overcome and make one's own,

A yearning to possess and be possessed,

Here was its early brief attempt to be,

Whose stamp of failure haunts all ignorant life.

The phantom of a dark and evil start

Although on earth are firm established lives,

A steady repetition in the flux,

These passions are the stuff of which we are made.

It clings around us still and clamps the god.

In beast and reptile and in thinking man

This too was needed that breath and living might be.

Must rescue so its prisoned consciousness

From the Inconscient's sealed infinitude.

This Nature lives tied to her origin,

Out of unconscious depths her instincts leap;

Under this law an ignorant world was made.

In the enigma of the darkened Vasts,

In the passion and self-loss of the Infinite

Non-Being's night could never have been saved

Page – 140

Carrying with it its triple mystic cross.

Bliss changed to sorrow, knowledge made ignorant,

Can bring down heaven by their sacrifice.

The eternal, the divine Reality

Being became the Void and Conscious-Force

And Ecstasy took the figure of world-pain.

A Wisdom that prepares its far-off ends

A blindfold search and wrestle and fumbling clasp

A game of hide-and-seek in twilit rooms,

Continues in the nursery of mind

At last the struggling Energy can emerge

Then can they see and speak and, breast to breast,

The Two embrace and strive and each know each

Even in these formless coilings he could feel

In Nature he saw the mighty Spirit concealed,

Pursued the riddle of Godhead's tentative pace,

Then came a fierier breath of waking Life,

Page – 141

Existences half-real and half-dream.

Beings were born who perished without trace,

And actions driven by a blind creature will.

Patterns were built of love and joy and pain

An insect hedonism fluttered and crawled

And dragon raptures, python agonies

Huge armoured strengths shook a frail quaking ground,

And pigmy tribes imposed their small life-drift.

Nature now launched the extreme experience

Luminous result of her half-conscious climb

To massive from infinitesimal shapes,

To an order of intelligent littleness.

The kingdom of the animal self arose,

And the heart obeys a dumb unseen control.

Her animal experiment began,

But to the outward only were they alive,

And to the prick of need that drove their lives.

There lived and longed, had wrath and joy and grief;

Page – 142

As if a stranger or enemy at its door:

It captured not the spirit in the form,

It looked not for the power behind the act,

Nor strove to find the meaning of it all.

Absorbed they lived in the passion of the scene,

Content to breathe, to feel, to sense, to act,

And the stimulus and delight of outer things;

They worked for the body's wants, they craved no more.

Fixed not his inward eye upon himself

He saw the drama only and the stage.

The burden of reflection was not borne:

Adored her boons and feared her monstrous strokes.

It thirsted not for the secret wells of Truth,

And strung sensations on a vivid thread:

Or slothed inert in sunshine and soft air:

But only to feed the surface sense with bliss.

They could not feel behind the touch the soul.

To enjoy and to survive was all their care.

Page – 143

With things and creatures that could help and hurt:

Isolated, cramped in the vast unknown,

They made a tiny circle of defence

They preyed upon the world and were its prey,

Obeying the World-Power's hints and firm taboos

There was no conscious code and no life-plan:

Fixed a traditional behaviour's law.

Tied to a mechanism of unchanging lives

They turned in grooves of animal desire.

Did by a banded selfishness a small good

On sentient lives and thought they did no ill.

And gorged with slaughter, plunder, rape and fire,

A drove of captives led to lifelong woe,

Mocking or thrilled by their torn victims' pangs;

Proudly they sang their high and glorious deeds

An animal in the instinctive herd

Each in his own kind saw his ego's glass;

Those like himself, by blood or custom kin,

Page – 144

His personal nebula's constituent stars,

A master of his life's environment,

Herding for safety on a dangerous earth,

To make a common front against the world,

As a fortress for his undefended heart,

In others than his kind he sensed a foe,

A stranger and adversary to hate and slay.

At war with all he bore his single fate.

None thought to look beyond the hour's gains,

Or felt some touch divine surprise his heart.

The desire grasped, the bliss, the experience won,

And bodily longings shared and quarrel and play,

In war and clasp these life-wants joined the All-Life,

Inflicting mutual grief and happiness

Arming its creatures with delight and hope

To know by sight and touch the outside of things.

The past lived on as in a bottomless sea:

She felt around for truth with fumbling hands,

Page – 145

And put aside in her subconscient cave.

And rise to his higher destiny at last,

And learn by failure and progress by fall

By suffering discover his deep soul

Half-way she stopped and found her path no more.

Yet finished seemed the circle of her force.

Only the life could think and not the mind,

Only was lit some heat of the flame of Life,

All was an impetus of half-conscious Force,

A vague self grasping at the shape of things.

A first raw vintage of the grapes of God,

Intoxicating the stupefied soul and mind

Dim, uncast yet into spiritual form,

An unborn godhead's will, a mute Desire.

A third creation now revealed its face.

A mould of body's early mind was made.

It dowered a driven world with the seeing Idea

A small thinking being watched the works of Time.

Page – 146

Else this great, blind inconscient universe

Or even in blinkers worked in beast and man

At first he saw a dim obscure mind-power

A current thin, it streamed in life's vast flow

Amid the surge and glimmering tremulous wash,

In the deep midst of an insentient world

Pressing and eddying through a narrow strait,

It flowed emerging into upper light

To reach some high existence still unknown.

All was unorganised stress and seekings vague.

Sensations, stabs and edges of desire

A casual colloquy of flesh with flesh,

Glimmerings of knowledge with no shape of thought

All was dim sparkle on a foaming top:

On an inconscient flood of Force in Time.

That drew all into a dancing turbid mass

Centre of reference in a conscious field,

It lit the impulse of the half-sentient flood,

Page – 147

As if a sea could serve as a firm soil.

It forced on flux a limit and a shape,

Drew lines to snare the spirit's formlessness.

The answer of the reptile and the fish,

A finite movement of the Infinite

A march of knowledge moved in Nescience

Its right to be immortal it reserved,

And threw a hook to clutch eternity.

A little ordered world broke into view

A floor to walk, a clear but scanty range.

And a restricted clamped intelligence

Its seeking; it tied the thought to visible things,

And the soul's tread through unknown infinities.

Illumined life to know and fix its field,

And the inconclusive purpose of its walk

In the allotted boundaries of its fate.

This little being tied into a knot

A little curve cut off in measureless Space,

Page – 148

A little span of life in all vast Time.

But for small aims within a narrow scope,

It knew itself a creature of the mud;

It had no inward look, no upward gaze.

Indoctrinated by the erring sense,

For casual lights the marching of the suns,

Aspects of being feigned to be the whole.

A market-place of trivial thoughts and acts:

Here seemed the brilliant crown of Nature's work,

To sate awhile dwarf lusts and brief desires,

As though a blind alley were creation's sign,

In the wonderland of a self-creating world

This creature passionate only to survive,

And to the body's needs and pangs and joys,

Increased by what it seized and made its own:

Only it hoped for greatness in its den

And conquest of life-room for self and kin,

It knew not the Immortal in its house;

Page – 149

Acute to capture truth for outward use,

Absorbed in the little works of its prison-house

In the same circle of interest and desire,

Although for action, not for wisdom made,

It saw an image of the external world

Out of a slow confused embroiled self-search

A gleam enclosed in a stone ignorance.

Tied to the soil, inspired by common things,

Amid the multitude of her motived plots,

Life was a play monotonously the same.

No swift invasions of unknown delight,

This petty state resembled our human days

A moment's movement doomed to last through Time.

A half-illumined building in a mist,

And jutted out into a void of Soul.

Life knew not where it went nor whence it came.

END OF CANTO FOUR

Page – 150