Canto Nine

The Paradise of the Life-Gods

AROUND him shone a great felicitous Day.

A lustre of some rapturous Infinite,

Regions of the heart's happiness set free,

Immersed in light, perpetually divine.

Obeying the divine command to joy,

And master of the kingdoms of its force.

Unmoved by fear and grief and the shocks of Fate

And unbesieged by adverse circumstance,

Free from our body's frailty inviting death,

It needed not to curb its passionate beats;

And the swift wonder-rush and flame and cry

It lived in a jewel-rhythm of the laughter of God

Immune the unfettered Spirit of Delight

Along the lyric speed of griefless streams

A silence of felicity wrapped the heavens,

A murmur of inarticulate ravishment

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Repeating its sweet involuntary note

Advancing under an arch of glory and peace,

As one who sees in the World-Magician's glass

He traversed scenes of an immortal joy

Around him was a light of conscious suns

To meet him crowded plains of brilliant calm,

Deep glens of joy and crooning waterfalls

Below him lay like gleaming jewelled thoughts

Across the vibrant secrecies of Space

Smitten by unseen hands he heard heart-close

And voices of unearthly melody

In the white-blue-moonbeam air of Paradise.

Apart stood high Elysian nameless hills,

As if to some new unsearched profundity,

Their slopes through a hurry of laughter and voices sank,

Adoring blue heaven with their happy hymn,

Lifted into wide voiceless mystery

The shining Edens of the vital gods

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All things were perfect there that flower in Time;

Peace was a thrilled voluptuous purity.

And Strength her crowned and mighty reveries;

And Pleasure had the stature of the gods;

Sweet common things turned into miracles:

Smitten by a divine passion's alchemy,

Curing the antithesis twixt heaven and hell.

Her wandering hopes achieved, her aureate combs

Her burning guesses changed to ecstasied truths,

And liberated her immense desires.

No lower note could break the endless charm

Her steps are sure of their intuitive fall.

At length were found calm and celestial rest

Healed were his warrior nature's wounded limbs

That brooked no stain and feared not their own bliss.

Amid miraculous scents and wonder-hues

To music that can immortalise the mind

Listened, and captured the inaudible

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Out of the ineffable hush it hears them come

And thoughts too great and deep to find a voice,

A scale of sense that climbed with fiery feet

Recast his being's aura in joy-glow,

His gates to the world were swept with seas of light.

Harboured a power that needed now no more

And smuggle godhead into humanity.

Of an untired capacity for bliss,

And beauty and passion and the depths' reply

Where spirit and flesh in inner ecstasy join

It drew from sight and sound spiritual power,

It thrilled with the supernal influences

Earth-nature stood reborn, comrade of heaven.

Equalled with the godheads of the living Suns,

Heard whispers of the Player never seen

And draws it to the breast of God's desire,

Flow through his veins like the rivers of Paradise,

In sudden moments of revealing flame,

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He reached the rim of ecstasies unknown;

The clasp was remembered of the Wonderful,

Eternity drew close disguised as Love

A little gift comes from the Immensitudes,

All the untold Beyond is mirrored there.

Overwhelmed his limbs and round his soul became

He foundered drowned in sweet and burning vasts:

The rapture that the gods sustain he bore.

And turned his strength into undying power.

END OF CANTO NINE

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