Canto Six

The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Life

AS ONE who between dim receding walls

Towards the far gleam of a tunnel's mouth,

And feels approach a breath of wider air,

Into an ineffectual world he came,

Where being from non-being fled and dared

Above there gleamed a pondering brow of sky

Adventuring with a voice of roaming winds

Like blind souls looking for the selves they lost

Wings of vague questioning met the query of Space.

A hope of self and form and leave to live

And joy of the mind's hazard, the heart's choice,

And a touch of sure delight in unsure things:

Where consciousness played with unconscious self

A charm drew near that could not keep its spell,

A Chance that chose a strange arithmetic

A multitude that could not guard its sum

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That cared not to define its fleeting drift,

Denuded of her sweet magnificent suns.

A lingering glimmer on creation's verge,

To achieve would have destroyed that magic Space.

Full of a beauty strangely, vainly made,

Dim tokens of a Splendour sealed above,

Compelled belief on the enamoured thought

A magic flowed as if of moving scenes

Of sparing lines limned by an abstract art

On a silver background of incertitude.

A fire intense conceived but never lit,

The perfect longing for imperfection's charm,

Ethereal creatures drawn by body's lure

Came hungry for the joy of finite life

And share the fate of perishable things.

Arisen from a formless thought in the soul

Traversed the field of the pursuing gaze.

Life was a search but finding never came.

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Things seemed to be that never wholly are,

And symbols hid the sense they claimed to show,

The souls came there that vainly strive for birth,

Yet never find the truth by which they live.

Nothing was solid, nothing felt complete:

It seemed a realm of lives that had no base.

Then dawned a greater seeking, broadened sky,

A journey under wings of brooding Force.

A twilight beauty trembled under its spear

Then slowly rose a great and doubting sun

A spirit was there that sought for its own deep self,

And parts of living that belied the whole

Yet something seemed to be achieved at last.

A text of living and a graph of force,

Burdened with meanings fugitive from thought's grasp

Could write itself on the hearts of living things.

In Life and Matter's answer of delight,

That gave immortality to a moment's joy,

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Some hue of the Absolute could fall on life,

Some passion of the rapturous heart of Love.

Interned in an unseen spiritual sheath,

To feel the light and joy intangible,

Half captured a sealed sweetness of desire

Half manifested veiled Reality.

Could glimpse the true sense of a world of forms;

Upbuoyed by the heart's understanding flame,

The divinity of a symbol universe.

This realm inspires us with our vaster hopes;

Its forces have made landings on our globe,

It lends a sovereign movement to our fate,

All that we seek for is prefigured there

Which yet one day must be born in human hearts

Incarnate in the mystery of the days,

A mounting endless possibility

For ever in the Being's conscious trance.

An Energy of perpetual transience makes

The pilgrimage of Nature to the Unknown.

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She hoped to unroll all that could ever be,

A progress leap from sight to greater sight,

A caravan of the inexhaustible

Her timeless Power that lay once on the lap

Now severed from the Spirit's immortal bliss,

Compelling transient substance into shape,

To o'erleap sometimes the gulf she cannot fill,

Escape from the moment's prison of littleness

In the uncertain time-field portioned here.

She shuts eternity into an hour

The Immobile leans to the magic of her call;

Perceives the formless Dweller in all forms

Her task no ending knows; she serves no aim

That came from some unknowable formless Vast.

To catch the boundless in a net of birth,

To lend speech and thought to the Ineffable;

Yet by her skill the impossible has been done:

Invents devices of her magic art

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And images of the Unimaginable;

Even now herself she knows not what she has done.

A semblance other than its hidden truth

A feigned time-driven unreality,

In a body changing with the inhabitant.

On a great field of shapeless consciousness

An endless Truth she endlessly unfolds;

The greatness she has dreamed her acts have missed,

A rapture and pang, her glory and her curse;

Her mighty heart forbids her to desist.

Astonishing and foiling Reason's gaze,

A superb madness of the will to live,

This is her being's law, its sole resource;

Her hungry will to lavish everywhere

And thousand fashions of one Reality.

A world cast into a dream of what it seeks,

It lingered not like the earth-mind hemmed in

It dared to trust the dream-mind and the soul.

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A hunter of spiritual verities

It seized in imagination and confined

This greater life is enamoured of the Unseen;

It can feel the Silence that absolves the soul;

Beauty and good and truth its godheads are.

A direr darkness than man's life can bear:

A strange enthusiasm has moved its heart;

It hunts for the perfect word, the perfect shape,

For by the form the Formless is brought close

A child of heaven who never saw his home,

It can only near and touch, it cannot hold;

Its greatness is to seek and to create.

On every plane, this Greatness must create.

On earth, in heaven, in hell she is the same;

A guardian of the fire that lights the suns,

Opposed, oppressed she bears God's urge to be born:

World-force outlasts world-disillusion's shock:

Here fallen, a slave of death and ignorance,

And moved to know even the Unknowable.

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Housed in the atom, buried in the clod,

Inconscience is her long gigantic pause,

Time-born, she hides her immortality;

Even with the Light denied that sent her forth

Even when her brightest stars are quenched in Night,

And with pain for her body's handmaid, masseuse, nurse,

To toil though in darkness, to create though with pangs;

In chill insentient depths where joy is none,

Where nothing moves and nothing can become,

The Wonder-worker gave her at her birth,

Reveals a world where nothing was before.

To a dark eternity of Ignorance,

Or imprisoned in immobilised whorls of Force,

She refuses motionless in the dust to sleep.

Given only hard mechanic Circumstance

She fashions godlike marvels out of mud;

Helps the live tissue to think, the closed sense to feel,

In a heart of flesh miraculously loves,

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Ever she summons as by a sorcerer's wand

Torch-bearers of her pomps through Time and Space.

The suns and planets lamps to light her road,

Our senses are her vibrant witnesses.

She labours to replace by realised dreams

These are her deeds in this huge world-ignorance:

In light or dark she keeps her tireless search;

One mighty passion motives all her works.

For him she leaped forth from the unseen Vasts

Its acts are her commerce with her hidden Guest,

In beauty she treasures the sunlight of his smile.

She cajoles with her small gifts his mightiness,

And woos his large-eyed wandering thoughts to dwell

Only to attract her veiled companion

Lest from her arms he turn to his formless peace,

Yet when he is most near, she feels him far.

Although she is ever in him and he in her,

Her will is to shut God into her works

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That never they may part again in Time.

At first she made, a deep interior room,

But now she turns to break the oblivious spell,

She finds again the Presence in the form

A meaning in the hurry and trudge of Time,

Passes a glint of unseen deity.

She builds creation like a rainbow bridge

A net is made of the mobile universe;

A knowledge is with her that conceals its steps

A might is with her that makes wonders true;

Her purposes, her workings riddles prove;

Explained, they seem yet more inexplicable.

Earth's cunning screen of trivial plainness hides;

There the enigma shows its splendid prism,

Occult, profound comes all experience,

There is a screened burden, a mysterious touch,

Although no earthen mask weighs on her face,

All forms are tokens of some veiled idea

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Yet is a womb of sovereign consequence.

And every act a symbol and a sign,

A universe she builds from truths and myths,

All shown is a figure or copy of the Truth,

All else she finds, there lacks eternity;

A consciousness lit by a Truth above

It caught the Idea and built from it a world;

Yet something true and inward harboured there.

Tenants of a larger air and freer space,

A deeper living was their seat of self.

Objects dwell as companions of the soul;

The surface rendering of a life within.

And thought and body as her handmaids move.

All feel the cosmic movement in their acts

Or their own self they make their universe.

A voice of unborn things whispers to the ear,

Aspiration shows the image of a crown:

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Each is a greatness growing towards the heights

In circling ripples of concentric power

Even of that largeness many a cabin make;

They live content with some small greatness won.

To be a figure in their private world

And satisfy their life-motives and life-wants

A steward of the Person and his fate.

A first immigration into heavenliness,

These are the kinsmen of our earthly race;

This wider world our greater movements gives,

Its creatures are our brighter replicas,

And are securely what we strive to be.

Entire, not pulled as we by contrary tides,

Their lives obey the inner nature's law.

The soul is the watchful builder of its fate;

They choose their side, they see the god they adore.

A pilgrimage sets out to the divine Light.

And shines with the lustre of a distant star;

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And Nature comes to them as a conscious force.

Aspiring to the monarchy of the sun

Hold her incarnate in their daily acts

And shape their lives into her breathing form,

Or to the truth of Darkness they subscribe;

Warriors of Good, they serve a shining cause

For evil and good an equal tenure keep

All powers of Life towards their godhead tend

Each builds its temple and expands its cult,

Affirming the beauty and splendour of her law

Assumes the world's throne or dons the papal robe:

A red-tiaraed Falsehood they revere,

Admit the black Idea that twists the brain

A mastering virtue statuesques the pose,

At Wisdom's altar they are kings and priests

Or Beauty shines on them like a wandering star;

In Art and life they catch the All-Beautiful's ray

Even common figures are with marvel robed;

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Awakes the joy which sleeps in all things made.

A throne in heaven or a pit in hell,

And marked their souls with her tremendous seal:

Something they have done, something they have been, they live.

In a contrary balance to earth's truth of things

On inner values hangs the outer plan.

As yearns the act with the passion of the soul

Looks vibrant back to some interior might.

Gave figures to the spirit's imponderables,

And turned into the body's concrete thrill

Powers here subliminal that act unseen

Came out in front uncovering their face.

A covert turn and shouldered the unknown;

In the communion of two meeting minds

Emotion clasped emotion in two hearts,

Or melted each in each and grew immense

Hate grappled hate and love broke in on love,

Others' sensations passing through like waves

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Their anger rushed galloping in brute attack,

One felt another's grief invade the breast,

Hearts could draw close through distance, voices near

There beat a throb of living interchange:

And consciousness replied to consciousness.

There was a separateness of soul from soul:

An armour of conscious might protect and shield;

One could remain apart in self, alone.

All was imperfect still, half-known, half-done:

The miracle of the Superconscient still,

Looked down on them, origin of all they were.

As names lived of a nameless Eternity.

A middle term worked unexplained, abrupt:

They were figures crowding an unfinished sum.

Or the Reality living there enshrined:

Out of the secret Supermind's huge store.

Uncertain they lived in a great climbing Space;

A riddling answer met the riddle of things.

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Himself was soon a riddle to himself;

Across the leaping springs of death and birth

A hunter on the spirit's creative track,

Pursuing her sealed formidable delight

At first no aim appeared in those large steps:

Looking towards a wider source beyond.

A tenser drag was felt from the Unknown,

Drove her towards marvel and discovery;

A mightier image of desire and hope,

Ever she circled towards some far-off Light:

But tied to some immediate sight and will

Till stripped of their infinite meaning they became

Armed with a magical and haunted bow

And ever deemed remote though always near.

The key-book of a crabbed magician text,

And the screened difficult theorem of her clues,

The thread beginnings of her titan works,

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Read the No-gestures of her silhouettes,

And strove to capture in their burdened drift

Escaping into rhythmic mystery,

In the labyrinth pattern of her thoughts and hopes

In the complex corners crowded with her dreams

A wanderer straying amid fugitive scenes,

Ever he met key-words, ignorant of their key.

A luminous enigma's brilliant hood

A dim large trance showed to the night her stars.

He read by lightning-flash on crowding flash

Of the soul's search for lost Reality

Her caprices and conceits and meanings locked,

The magnificent wrappings of her secrecy

The strange significant forms woven on her robe,

He saw, her false transparencies of thought-hue,

And mutable masks and broideries of disguise.

Looked at him from her forms with unknown eyes

Spoke from the figures of her masquerade,

And subtle splendour of her draperies.

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Inexpressive sounds became veridical,

Voices that came from unseen waiting worlds

To clothe the body of the mystic Word,

Sealed some precise unreadable harmony,

The herald blazon of Time's secret things.

In her thickets of joy where danger clasps delight,

A glimmer of blue and gold and scarlet fire.

And by her singing rivulets and calm lakes

And the beauty of her flowers of dream and muse.

He watched in the alchemist radiance of her suns

On the tree-of-sacrifice of spiritual love.

A perpetual repetition through the hours,

That skim but never test its murmurs' race,

Running as if to escape from longed-for hands,

Amidst live symbols of her occult power

In that life more concrete than the lives of men

Embodied was there what we but think and feel,

A comrade of Silence on her austere heights

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He stood with her on meditating peaks

Offered to the Reality beyond,

Her hooded eagles of significance,

Identified in soul-vision and soul-sense,

All he became that she was or longed to be,

Lived with her breath and scanned all with her eyes

A witness overmastered by his scene,

And the marvels of her rich and delicate craft,

Impassioned he bore the sorceries of her might,

Her hands that knead fate in their violent grasp,

But this too he saw, her soul that wept within,

Her hopes whose sombre gaze mates with despair,

The trouble and rapture of her yearning breasts,

Her heart that captures not the one Beloved.

An exiled goddess building mimic heavens,

Ever he felt near a spirit in her forms:

This sole is real in apparent things,

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Its stamp on her acts is undiscoverable.

Only sometimes is caught a shadowy line

Life stared at him with vague confused outlines

A story that was yet not written there.

Life's meanings fled from the pursuing eye.

Life's secret sense is written within, above.

It is not seen in its half-finished design.

Or find the word of the half-played charade.

Is found, is hinted some interpreting word

Something was seen at last that looked like truth.

The eye that looks at the dark half of truth

And peering through a mist of subtle tints

Bewildered by the world in which he moved,

Attracted to strange far-off shimmerings,

He sought his way amid life's laughter and call

Towards some total deep infinitude.

At hazard he read by arrow-leaps of Thought

Her changing coloured road-lights of idea

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The hieroglyphs of her symbol pageantries

In her mazes of approach and of retreat

But drawn too near escapes from his embrace;

Allured by the many-toned marvel of her chant,

And moved by her casual touch to joy and grief,

A fugitive paradise smiles at him from her eyes:

He dreams of his mastery her limbs shall bear,

In her illumined script, her fanciful

He thinks to read the Scripture Wonderful,

But the Word of Life is hidden in its script,

Unseen, a captive in a house of sound,

Listens to a thousand-voiced illusion's ode.

Or a fiery magic tints her tones and hues,

A vagrant march struck by the wanderer Time,

Or wallow in ravishments of mind and sense,

A blind heart-throb that reaches joy through tears,

An ecstasy of unfulfilled desire

Transmuted are past suffering's memories

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Turned are her tears to gems of diamond pain,

Brief are her snatches of felicity

A lost remembrance echoes in her depths,

A prisoner in the mortal's limiting world,

A cherished suffering is her deepest cry.

Along the roads of sound a frustrate voice

Astray in the echo caverns of Desire,

And keeps alive the voice of perished things

Hunting for pleasure in the heart of pain.

And the intrusion of a troubled strain

That guides unheard the surface cadences.

And joy to love and labour though all fails,

And all on which we lean betrays our trust;

A passionate memory haunts with ecstasy's fire.

For nothing is truly vain the One has made:

And victory's star still lights our desperate road;

This to Life's music gives its anthem swell.

Heaven's raptures whisper to her heart and pass,

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Alone the God-given hymn escapes her art

But stopped half-way and failed, a silent word

A murmur suspended in eternity's hush:

A sumptuous interlude occupies the ear

An evanescent music it repeats

A tremolo of the voices of the hours

The self-embodying spirit came to play

Only a mighty murmur here and there

Or Beauty's touch transfiguring heart and sense,

Recalls the strength and sweetness heard no more.

Here is the gap, here stops or sinks life's force;

This deficit paupers the magician's skill:

A half-sight draws the horizon of her acts:

But the mind has forgotten or the heart mistakes:

In knowledge to sum up omniscience,

To create her Creator here was her heart's conceit,

Toiling to transform the still far Absolute

Into an utterance of the Ineffable,

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Marry with a sky of calm a sea of bliss.

Make body's joy as vivid as the soul's,

Labours life to equate with the Supreme

Her pragmatism of the transcendent Truth

But in the cry the single Voice is lost.

A life of gods in heaven she sees above,

Is all she can in our mortal element.

This greater life wavers twixt earth and sky.

Her hooded energy moves an ignorant world

In her embrace it cannot turn to its source.

Astray is its significance and lost.

The law and journeying curve of all things born

On a soil of yearning tread her sumptuous hours.

Her power oppresses the being with its garbs,

A sense of limit haunts her masteries

For all the depth and beauty of her work

An old and faded charm had now her face

His wide soul asked a deeper joy than hers.

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But neither gate of horn nor ivory

There was no issue from that dreamlike space.

Death helps us not, vain is the hope to cease;

Our life's repose is in the Infinite;

Death is a passage, not the goal of our walk:

Our souls are dragged as with a hidden leash,

Our acts prolong after the body's fall

No silent peak is found where Time can rest.

However far he went, wherever turned,

Always a farther task was left to do.

For ever grew in that unquiet world;

All was contrivance and unceasing stir.

A sameness that assumed a thousand forms

And made new things that soon were like the old.

And novel values furbished ancient themes

A different picture that was still the same

Only another labyrinthine house

A city of the traffic of bound souls,

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Was offered to the labouring mind and heart.

Is dubbed the forward and eternal march

Each final scheme leads to a sequel plan.

Inspired evangel, theory's ultimate peak,

Or carrying thought in its ultimate zenith flight

Each brief idea, a structure perishable,

Its claim to be the perfect form of things,

But nothing has been achieved of infinite worth:

Piled always half-attempts on lost attempts

In the aimless mounting total of things done

A wrestle of eternal opposites

A play without denouement or idea,

Or, written on a bare blackboard of Space,

A hope that failed, a light that never shone,

Tied to its acts in a dim eternity.

Although defeated, life must struggle on;

Her eyes are fixed beyond her fallen state.

A glory that was once and is no more,

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Or there calls to us from some unfulfilled beyond

In a memory behind our mortal sense

Breathing around free hearts of joy and love,

A ghost of bliss pursues her haunted depths;

Her realm of golden ease and glad desire

In the sweetness of her glowing paradise,

Half-way between God's silence and the Abyss.

Awake to a vague mystery's appeal,

Far truer than the world's face of present truth:

And moved by a Spirit we must still become.

We look back to some god-phase of our birth

And hope in this or a diviner world

What by our mind's forgetfulness we miss,

Our heart's delight we have exchanged for grief,

The bliss for which our mortal nature yearns

Our life is a march to a victory never won.

This eager turmoil of unsatisfied strengths,

Lift worshipping eyes to the blue Void called heaven

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The beautiful visage of Eternity

Yet still to ourselves we say rekindling faith,

One day he shall create our life anew

And bring perfection to the scheme of things.

Leaving the secrecy of the eternal doors,

And bring the truth that sets the spirit free,

The strength that is the outstretched arm of Love.

Impose delight on the world's beating heart

But now we strain to reach an unknown goal:

There is no end of dying and return;

The life that fails and dies must live again;

All must be done for which life and death were made.

Or there repose and action are the same

In a high state where ignorance is no more,

Repose God's motionless creative force,

And birth a gesture of Eternity.

And Night can bare its core of mystic light;

Into a self-luminous mystery might change,

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Then God could be visible here, here take a shape;

Life would reveal her true immortal face.

In its recurrent decimal of events

The old question-mark margins each finished page,

A limping Yes through the aeons journeys still

All seems in vain, yet endless is the game.

Life has no issue, death brings no release.

And keeps its futile immortality;

An error of the gods has made the world.

END OF CANTO SIX

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