Canto Five

The Godheads of the Little Life

A FIXED and narrow power with rigid forms,

He saw the empire of the little life,

An unhappy corner in eternity.

It lived upon the margin of the Idea

Then, hoping to learn the secret of this world

To disengage from its surface-clear obscurity

Imposing smallness on the Infinite,

The divine law that gave it right to be,

He plunged his gaze into the siege of mist

Ringed with the skies and seas of ignorance

As when a searchlight stabs the Night's blind breast

As if revealed to an eye in Nothingness,

And held up in his vision's sun-white blaze.

Teemed in their dusky unnoted thousands there.

The little deities of Time's nether act

Plotted, unknown to the creatures whom they move,

Amused with the small contrivings, the brief hopes

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And the crouch and ignominy of creeping life.

A strange pell-mell of magic artisans,

An elfin brood, an elemental kind.

As if immanent in the shadows started up

Sprite-prompters goblin-wizened or faery-small,

And fallen beings, their heavenly portion lost,

Ignorant and dangerous wills but armed with power,

Out of the greyness of a dim background

Awake in mind an echoing thought or word,

And in that little Nature do their work

Its seed of joy they curse with sorrow's fruit,

And turn its surface truths to falsehood's ends,

To the abyss or through the bog and mire:

While jogs on devious ways that nowhere lead

To sport with good and evil is their law;

All models they corrupt, all measures cheat,

And lead the endless cycles of desire

To an inescapable fatality.

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Nor there alone is their empire or their role:

And in a small body self is all that counts,

These crooked fashioners take up their task.

Here too these godlings drive our human hearts,

Here too the darkened primitive heart obeys

That dogs our knowledge with misleading light

It speaks to us with the voices of the Night:

Our seekings listen to calamitous hopes.

And reason used by an irrational Force.

The powers of all the worlds have entrance here.

And cherish the safety of a settled type;

Their law is kept, lost their fixed form of things.

Where all asks order but is driven by Chance;

Aliens or opposites, they must unite:

These join, those part, all parts and joins anew,

Till all have found their divine harmony.

Our mind's unquiet search asks always light,

In the light of the Timeless and its spaceless home,

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But now the Light supreme is far away:

To ignorant purposes and blind desires

Even our mind's conquests wear a battered crown.

This is our doom until our souls are free.

Infinity takes up the finite's acts

Then only ends this dream of nether life.

At the outset of this enigmatic world

Which seems at once an enormous brute machine

In this revolving chamber without walls

As if unknown to himself and by us unseen

Yet is all here his action and his will.

The Spirit became Matter and lay in the whirl,

A mass phenomenon of visible shapes

Appeared in the eternal Consciousness

There was none there to see and none to feel;

A subtle wizard skilled, was at its task.

Managing creation's marvellous device,

Using the unthought inevitable Idea,

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Still consciousness was hidden in Nature's womb,

Being was an inert substance driven by Force.

Its huge vibrations circled round and round

Upheld by a supreme original Breath

Created touch and friction in the void,

Parent of an expanding universe

By spending it conserved an endless sum.

That, scattering worlds as one might scatter seeds,

An ocean of electric Energy

Constructing by their dance this solid scheme,

Masses were forged or feigned and visible shapes;

And showed, in the minuteness of its flash

Thus has been made this real impossible world,

Or so it seems to man's audacious mind

His personal vision as impersonal fact,

His erring sense and his instruments' artifice.

In a doubtful light, by error seize on Truth

Or else, forlorn of faith in mind and sense,

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He sees in all things strangely fashioned here

A parable of Maya and her might.

In the mysterious and unchanging change

And ever renewing its recurrent beat,

These static objects in the cosmic dance

Prolonged by the spirit of the brooding Void,

A little the Dreamer changed his pose of stone.

And Chance coerced by fixed immutable laws,

Then stirred the Spirit's mute immobile sleep;

A dream of living woke in Matter's heart,

A freak of living startled vacant Time,

Infinitesimal in a dead Infinite.

The world's set rhythm changed to a conscious cry;

Islands of living dotted lifeless Space

A Life was born that followed Matter's law,

Ever inconstant, yet for ever the same,

Its restless and unstable stabilities

And purposeful movements in unthinking forms

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Waking and sleep lay locked in mutual arms;

Trembling with the first faint thrills of a World-Soul.

Yet broke into beauty signing some deep delight:

Throbs of the heart of an unknowing world,

A vague uncertain thrill, a wandering beat,

Infant self-feeling grew and birth was born.

Her house refused to open its sealed doors.

The form, the act and not the imprisoned God,

A consciousness with mute stifled beats of sense,

An inert spirit that could only be.

Charged with world-power, instinct with living force,

Thrilled dumbly to the shocks of ray and breeze

The strength in her yearning for sun and light

Absorbed she dreamed content with beauty and hue.

Astir, vibrant, hungering, she groped for mind;

She forced the reluctant mould to grow aware.

Its tranced vibrations rhythmed a quick response,

Awoke in Matter spirit's identity

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Of the heart's love and the soul's witness gaze.

Fragments of some vast impulse to become

And the doubtful seeds and force of shapes to be

An animal creation crept and ran

Hunted by death but hoping still to live

Then man was moulded from the original brute.

The keen-edged tool of a Nature mixed and vague,

This seeming driver of her wheel of works

And fix its law on her inconstant powers,

Aspired to enlighten its user and refine

The absorbed mechanic's crude initiative:

Amazed at the works wrought in her mystic sleep,

Wondering now seized the great automaton;

Pondering she learned to act by conscious rule,

Thought bordered her instincts with a frame of will

On her mass of impulses, her reflex acts,

And mystery of unthinking accurate steps

A living idol of disfigured spirit;

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On Matter's acts she imposed a patterned law;

And moulded a being out of a driven force.

She turned her dream towards some high Unknown;

An opening looked up to spheres above

The passing figures of immortal things;

The illumined soul-ray fell on heart and flesh

The stuff of which our earthly dreams are made.

Ego's moth-wings to lift the seraph soul,

Extinguished by a scanty breath of Time;

Came, a rare visitor who left betimes,

Hopes that soon fade to drab realities

Kindled the common earth with their brief flame.

Visited, uplifted by an unknown Power,

For means to last, to enjoy, to suffer and die.

Was there like a shadow of the Unmanifest

But claimed not yet this earthly embodiment.

Watching the works of his own Ignorance,

And nothing shows the Glory that is here.

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It sees the hurrying crowd of moments stream

This huge world unintelligibly turns

It hides a key to inner meanings missed,

An enigmatic labour of the spirit,

An art and ingenuity without sense,

For ever plays its motiveless symphonies.

It studies surface laws by surface thought,

Not seeing for what she acts or why we live;

Her patient intricacy of fine detail,

In her great futile mass of endless works,

Its gabled storeys piles, its climbing roofs

Imagined citadels reared in mythic air

Transient creations point and hit the sky:

On the dim floor of mind's incertitude,

Impenetrable, a mystery recondite

Its harmonies are discords to our view

Inscrutable work the cosmic agencies.

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Our will tunes not with the eternal Will,

Impotent to share in Nature's mystic tact,

Our reason cannot sound life's mighty sea

It knows not whence these motions touch and pass,

Only it strives to canalise its powers

But all its means come from the Inconscient's store.

And only trickles and currents are our share.

Catching at little fragments of the Truth

Our lives are inlets of an ocean's force.

But with those shadowy seats no converse hold;

Our acts emerge from a crypt our minds ignore.

Even our body is a mystery shop;

So lie unseen our roots of mind and life.

Our souls are moved by powers behind the wall.

A puissance acts and recks not what it means;

It is the cause of what we think and feel.

Ill-trained slow stammering interpreters

And busy with the record in our cells,

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Mid an obscure occult machinery,

Transmits the messages of the cosmic Force.

And echoes from the dun subconscient caves,

Answers and tissue and nerve obey the call.

All is the commerce of a secret Power.

A thinking puppet is the mind of life:

Its choice is the work of elemental strengths

And glimpse not the immense intent they serve.

Yet filled with poignant small ignoble things,

And feels the push but not the hands that drive.

To whom our figure-selves are marionettes,

Our passionate strife an entertainment's scene.

They play their part in the enormous whole.

Spirits obscure and moving things obscure,

Ananke's engines organising Chance,

Tools of the Unknown who use us as their tools,

Into the actions mortals think their own

Or make a doom of Time's slipshod caprice

In an inconsequent and devious game.

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Only to Titan force their will lies prone.

In all our nature's turns they intervene.

And engineers of interest and desire,

And coarse reactions of material nerve

And the ill-lighted mansions of our thought,

Surround the beautiful temple of the soul.

They set the mosaic of our comedy

Arrange the deed, combine the circumstance

These unwise prompters of man's ignorant heart

Movers of petty wraths and lusts and hates

These slight illusion-makers with their masks,

And nimble scene-shifters of the human play,

Ourselves incapable to build our fate

Until the piece is done and we pass off

Thus they inflict their little pigmy law

Then his too scanty walk with death they close.

This is the ephemeral creature's daily life.

As long as the human animal is lord

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Serves earthy interest and creature joys,

Ever since consciousness was born on earth,

Its stuff unchanged, its way the common route.

And thought is added and more tangled cares,

Still even in man the plot is mean and poor.

His small successes are failures of the soul,

Hardship and toil are the heavy price he pays

An inertia sunk towards inconscience,

A puny splendour of creative force

Which yet outlast their brief creator's breath.

And sees the Dionysian gesture pass, —

If through his failing limbs and fainting heart

Trivial amusements stimulate and waste

His little hour is spent in little things.

A little love and jealousy and hate,

Draw his heart-plan on life's diminutive map.

To reveal its zenith tension of delight,

Art's brilliant gleam is a pastime for his eyes,

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Amidst his harassed toil and welter of cares,

He draws sometimes around his aching brow

He is saved by her silence from his rack of self;

A new life dawns, he looks out from vistas wide;

His strength was not made to hold that puissant guest.

Or a fierce excitement brings him vivid joys:

And lust's hot glare and passion's crimson stain;

Time has he none to turn his eyes within

His motion on too short an axis wheels;

Or if, impatient of the trudge of Time,

His heart that runs soon pants and tires and sinks;

Hardly a few can climb to greater life.

His knowledge dwells in the house of Ignorance;

Rare are his visits of heavenly ecstasy.

Breaks out in him in a small joy of life:

It lightens the burden of his many ills

He is satisfied with his common average kind;

His old familiar interests and desires

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Defending his small life from the Invisible;

He has shut away from him into inmost self,

His being was formed to play a trivial part

In a narrow plot he has pitched his tent of life

He is the crown of all that has been done:

This is the world's result, Nature's last poise!

If what now seems were the whole of what must be,

On our road from Matter to eternal Self,

Well might interpret our mind's limited view

Illusion or phenomenon or freak,

Which moves between unreal opposites,

Matter that chanced to read itself by Mind,

At times all looks unreal and remote:

Pieced from sensation's fanciful traveller's tale,

A figment or circumstance in cosmic sleep.

An image of ego treads through an ignorant dream

In a false perspective of effect and cause,

It drifts incessantly from scene to scene,

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All here is dreamed or doubtfully exists,

Is still unknown or only a shadowy guess.

Insufficient for the mightiness of our stage.

Of the orbit of a soulless universe,

A mind looks out from a small casual globe

And yet to some interned subjective sight

A pointillage minute of little self

Such is our scene in the half-light below.

This the weird purport of the picture shown

As she pores on the record of her close survey

To Reason bound within the circle of sense,

A speculator in tenuous vast ideas,

We know not with what firm values for its base.

Presents its dubious riches to our hearts

Our poverty shall there have its revenge.

Into the blank unknown or with them take

Yet was this only a provisional scheme,

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An early attempt, a first experiment.

But knowledge ends not in these surface powers

And dare not look into the dangerous depths

There is a deeper seeing from within

A greater vision meets us on the heights

At last there wakes in us a witness Soul

Then all assumes a new and marvellous face:

In Time's deep heart high purposes move and live,

This broad, confused, yet rigid scheme becomes

A game, a work ambiguously divine.

Made by a wordless and inscrutable Power

To meet its luminous self of Truth and Bliss.

It labours in our mortal mind and sense;

In the symbol pictures drawn by word and thought,

It looks for the source of Light with vision's lamp;

The unfelt Self within who is the guide,

All is not here a blinded Nature's task:

A Witness sanctioning her will and works,

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An Eye unseen in the unseeing vast;

There are thoughts remote and sealed eternities;

In this passage from a deaf unknowing Force

A mighty Supernature waits on Time.

Our lives a deeper mystery than we have dreamed;

Our souls deputed selves of the Supreme.

Asking a scanty dole from Fortune's hands

Even in the theatre of these small lives

An urge of miniature divinity.

Flows through the guarded spaces of the soul;

An unseen nearness and a hidden joy.

The murmur of an occult happiness,

A heart of bliss within a world of pain.

An Infant playing in the magic woods,

Awaits the hour when we shall turn to his call.

A soul that is a spark of God survives

And kindles a fire that makes us half-divine.

That sees the unseen and plans eternity,

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A door is cut in the mud wall of self;

Angels of ecstasy and self-giving pass,

The makers of the image of deity live.

And flashes of sympathy and tenderness

A work is done in the deep silences;

A laughter in beauty's everlasting space

Inhabit the mystery of the untouched gulfs;

In the sealed hermetic heart, the happy core,

The eternal Entity prepares within

Its reign of heavenly phenomenon.

A foresight comes of some immense release,

Each part in us desires its absolute.

Our strength derives from an omnipotent Force,

And since eternal Beauty asks for form

Our hearts are captured by ensnaring shapes,

Our error crucifies Reality

Compelling, incarnate in a human form

Its Knowledge to rescue an ancient Ignorance,

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And when that greater Self comes sea-like down

All shall be captured by delight, transformed:

Our mind and life and sense and laugh in a light

The body's tissues thrill apotheosised,

This little being of Time, this shadow soul,

Out of its traffic in petty dreams shall rise.

Divested of this mortal travesty,

New-made in the image of the eternal Guest,

And, flaming with the paradisal touch

In the red passion of its infinite change,

As if reversing a deformation's spell,

Renouncing servitude to the dim Abyss,

And seized with marvel in the adoring heart

Trembling with beauty and delight and love.

Out of the chasm from which our nature rose.

And climb to summits beyond mind's half-sleep;

Surprise the animal with the occult god.

Calling the powers of a bright hemisphere,

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Make the abysm a road for Heaven's descent,

And cleave the darkness with the mystic Fire.

Adventuring once more in the natal mist

Across the dangerous haze, the pregnant stir,

Mid the grey faces of its demon gods,

Besieged by sorceries of its fluent force.

Tending he knows not where nor with what hope,

And journeyed in stone strength to a fugitive end.

Of glimmering points in a vague immensity;

In the wounded gloom complaining against light.

The watching opacity multiplied as he moved

The darkness glimmered like a dying torch.

Peopled with shadowy and misleading shapes

His only sunlight was his spirit's flame.

END OF CANTO FIVE

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