Canto Eleven

The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Mind

THERE ceased the limits of the labouring Power.

But being and creation cease not there.

It is greater than its earthly instrument:

Escapes on every side into some vast

It moves eternal in the spirit's field,

A child and servant of the spirit's force.

His being stretched beyond the sight of Thought.

And not by thinking was its greatness born,

It knows itself and in itself it lives,

Its feet are steadied upon finite things,

Arriving into his ken a wonder space

Where Thought leaned on a Vision beyond thought

On peaks imagination cannot tread,

Under a blue veil of eternity

Outstretched across the boundaries of things known.

Instinct with the endless more that we must be,

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It spreads beyond the expanding universe;

It overtops the ceiling of life's soar.

Exposed to omniscient immensities,

Its speed that outstrips the ambling of the hours,

Its mights that bridge the gulf twixt man and God,

In its vast ambit of ideal Space

The Spirit's truths take form as living Gods

In an air which doubt and error cannot mark

In communion with the musing privacy

Where the sight falters not nor wanders thought,

Dreaming its luminous creations gaze

In a sun-blaze of joy and absolute power

In sessions of secure felicity,

Far are those realms from our labour and yearning and call,

Closed to the uncertain thoughts of human mind,

But since our secret selves are next of kin,

Visits the imperfect earth on which we toil;

A light falls on our vexed unsatisfied lives,

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And moves us to new-model even here

And wonder beyond the ken of mortal hope.

And contradicted by the human law,

Lives comrade of this world's delight and pain,

Born of its amour with eternity.

The future brings its face of miracle near,

Acts deemed impossible grow natural;

The courage and the strength death cannot touch

We move by the rapid impulse of a will

These promptings come not from an alien sphere:

Adventurers, we have colonised Matter's night.

We live self-exiled from our heavenlier home.

Accepted the earth's blindness and became

An exile, labourer on this unsure globe

Hampered by obscure cell and treacherous nerve,

The natural privilege of unfallen gods,

Amidst earth's mist and fog and mud and stone

And the high city of its splendid birth.

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A wide release comes near, a Glory calls,

In glamorous passages of half-veiled light

This quick uncertain leader of blind gods,

Hired by a mind and body for earth-use

It recovers its renounced imperial right,

And knows itself the Ideal's seer and king,

Heir to delight and immortality.

In our unknown depths sleeps their reserve of truth,

In thought and muse trailing their robes of light.

Admit not the celestial visitants:

Or guarded in our secret self unseen

Hide from our lives their greatness, beauty, power.

Our future strives towards their luminous thrones:

Immortal footfalls in mind's corridors sound:

The breadths from which they came can be our home.

The Thinker entered the immortals' air

Immutable in rhythmic calm and joy

The unfallen planes, the thought-created worlds

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And Matter is of thinking substance made,

Answers Truth's call as to a parent's voice,

And Will is a conscious chariot of the Gods,

Carries the voices of the mystic Suns.

There runs in its flow honeying the bosom of Space

And the unfathomed Joy of timelessness,

And the breath of an unseen Infinity.

The chainless and omnipotent Spirit of Mind

A gold supernal sun of timeless Truth

Through a silence quivering with the word of Light

Far-off he saw the joining hemispheres.

Great stairs of thought climbed up to unborn heights

And Nature speaks to the spirit's absolute.

A triple realm of ordered thought came first,

A small beginning of immense ascent:

A packed and endless soar as if sky pressed sky

The highest strove to neighbour eternity,

But though immortal, mighty and divine,

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A fragment of their puissance can be ours:

These heights were not too high for human hope.

Although abrupt for common strengths to tread,

On a slant not too precipitously steep

To commune with the mortal's universe.

Who intercede with the all-creating Word,

Holding the thousand keys of the Beyond

And filled the life with Thought's immensities.

The flame-bright hierarchs of the divine Truth,

They bring the immortal fire to mortal men.

The guardians of the Eternal's bright degrees

Afar they seemed a symbol imagery,

In which our sight transcribes the ideal Ray,

But, nearer, Gods and living Presences.

Fantastically ornate and richly small,

Symbols minute of its perfection's joy,

And, wakened to the wonder of his role,

And objects the fine coin of Beauty's reign;

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In front of the ascending epiphany

The Masters of things actual, lords of the hours,

Creators of Matter by hid stress of Mind

And guide the fantasy of brute events,

King-children born on Wisdom's early plane,

Archmasons of the eternal Thaumaturge,

They have made their plan of the concealed and known

Obeying the Eternal's deep command

This wide world-kindergarten of young souls

To read the letters of the cosmic script

And search for the secret meaning of the whole.

Persuading Nature into visible moods

Each power that leaps from the Unmanifest

They seized and held by their precisian eye

Its free caprice they bound by rhythmic laws

In the wizardry of an ordered universe.

Oneness was carved into units measurable,

Unending Space was beaten into a curve,

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The infinitesimal massed to keep secure

Invincibly their craft devised for use

Design's miraculous potency was caught

And by the determining mandate of their gaze

In an inextricable identity.

And its trust and charge of burdened circumstance;

At each moment willed or adventure of the soul,

A line foreseen of an immutable plan,

A term was set for every eager Power

A groove of bronze prescribed for force and act

Forewilled inalterably in the spiral

Inevitable their thoughts like links of Fate

And on the frail fortuitous flux of life

Immutable cause and adamant consequence.

To which it was born and now traced out instead

Immortal once, now tied to birth and end,

Knowledge was rebuilt from cells of inference

Thus bound it grew, but could not last and broke

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A cage for the Infinite's great-eyed seraphim Thoughts

And hedged into a curt horizon's arc

A timeless Spirit was made the slave of the hours;

To make a world that Mind could grasp and rule.

That the created might grow Nature's lord

They tied to date and norm and finite scope

Above stood ranked a subtle archangel race

A light of liberating knowledge shone

They lived in the mind and knew truth from within;

Could pierce behind the screen of Time's results

All that escaped conception's narrow noose

Filled in the blanks left by the seeking sense.

And engineers of the impossible,

And theoricians of unknowable truths,

And join the unknown to the apparent worlds.

The cycle of her works investigate;

Their mind could penetrate her occult mind

They read the codes and ciphers she had sealed,

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Copies they made of all her guarded plans,

Assigned a reason and unchanging rule.

Explained was the immense Inconscient's scheme,

The Infinite was reduced to square and cube.

Tracing the curve of a transcendent Power,

The balancing line discovered of Life's technique

Imposing schemes of knowledge on the Vast

The free logic of an infinite Consciousness,

Critiqued the plot of the drama of the worlds,

The psycho-analysis of cosmic Self

The unknown pathology of the Unique.

The hazard of fleeing possibilities,

Necessity's logarithmic tables drawn,

Unveiled, the abrupt invisible multitude

Seemed to obey some vast imperative:

A wisdom read their mind to themselves unknown,

And from their giant randomness of Force,

Distinguishing each faintest line and stroke

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Derived the calculus of Destiny.

Mind's knowledge overtopped the Omniscient's power:

Surprised in their untracked empyrean

Each mysteried God forced to revealing form,

Zigzagged at the gesture of a chess-player Will

In the wide sequence of Necessity's steps

Its values weighed by the accountant Mind,

Lost its divine aspect of miracle

The mighty Mother's whims and lightning moods

In the freedom of her sweet and passionate breast,

An idol of bronze replaced her mystic shape

In the sketch precise of an ideal face

Carrying on their curve infinity's dreams,

The surging wave-throbs of her vast sea-heart

Her deep designs which from herself she had veiled

For the birth and death of the worlds they fixed a date,

Measured the distant arc of the unseen heights

Till all seemed known that in all time could be.

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Nothing was left untold, incalculable.

Truths they could find and hold but not the one Truth:

By knowing too much they missed the whole to be known:

And the Transcendent kept its secrecy.

In a sublimer and more daring soar

To the wide summit of the triple stairs

Burning their way to a pure absolute sky.

Have made of Space their wide all-seeing gaze

A breadth of all-containing Consciousness

Intercessors with a luminous Unseen,

The imperatives of the creator Self

Their thoughts are partners in its vast control.

And Mind unwitting serves a higher Power;

The cosmos is no accident in Time;

There is a freedom in each face of Fate.

A Truth-gaze shapes its beings and events;

Voice of the Eternal in the temporal spheres,

Sows the Idea's significance in Form

On peaks beyond our ken the All-Wisdom sits:

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A silent touch from the supernal's air

The secret power in the inconscient depths,

Determining Necessity's nude dance

And vanishes from the chase of finite eyes

The unseizable forces of the cosmic whirl

Of an original foresight that is Fate.

Our struggling ego cannot change her course:

A seed-idea is parent of our acts

Infallibly by Truth's directing gaze

Forced to become what in themselves they hide.

And the slow Godhead shut within the cell

But hidden, but denied to mortal grasp,

Unspoken, caught only by the spirit's eye.

It looks through light to ever greater light

This greater Truth is foreign to our thoughts;

Or we only see a tripping game of Chance

An absolutism of dumb unthinking Power.

These dared to grasp with their thought Truth's absolute;

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By a percept nude, intolerant of forms,

And hoped to conquer Truth's supernal base.

Architectonic and inevitable

A silver-winged fire of naked subtle sense,

Discovered the seed-sounds of the eternal Word,

And seized in things the bodiless Will to be.

And traced the last formula of limited things,

The Timeless made accountable to Time

To park and hedge the ungrasped infinitudes

And made a vacuum to hold the One.

A mighty space of cold and sunlit air.

Which cannot bear the nakedness of the Vast,

In negation found the meaning of the All

A single law simplessed the cosmic theme,

Their titan labour made all knowledge one,

An abstract of the living Divinity.

For nothing more was left to think or know:

And took its vast silence for the Ineffable.

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This was the play of the bright gods of Thought.

Attracting into time the timeless Light,

This they have planned, to snare the feet of Truth

And keep her captive for the thinker's joy

There must she dwell mured in the human mind,

Adored and pure and still on his heart's throne,

In the wall of silence of his secret muse,

The same for ever and for ever one,

Or else, a faithful consort of his mind

She sanctions and inspires his words and acts

Companion and recorder of his march

Carved out of the eternity of Time.

Her godhead servitor to a crowned Idea,

A warrant for his deeds and his beliefs,

Or as a lover clasps his one beloved,

Icon of his heart's sole idolatry,

She has invaded him with her sudden bliss,

An allurement, a caught ravishing miracle.

The one joy of his body and his soul:

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Her immense possession an undying thrill,

The passion of her self-revealing moods,

Makes ever new her body to his eyes,

The luminous rapture of her mystic breasts

Of throbbing new discovery without end.

A new charm brings back the old extreme delight:

Truth smiled upon the gracious golden game.

The great and boundless Goddess feigned to yield

Incarnating her beauty in his clasp

And drew to her bosom one glorified mortal head:

In a human breast her occult presence lived;

She shaped her body to a mind's embrace.

Her greatness she has suffered to be pressed

The closed room of a lonely thinker's grasp:

And dazzled our lids with her celestial gaze.

And thinks himself beyond mortality blest,

To her possessor in the field of Time

The one true light, her beauty's glowing whole.

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The whole world lives in a lonely ray of her sun.

The vanity of our shut mortal mind

But only we play with our own brilliant bonds;

In our hypnosis by one luminous point

We feel not her inspiring boundlessness,

Thus is it even with the seer and sage;

Out of our thoughts we must leap up to sight,

Her simple vast supremacy confess,

Then the Unmanifest reflects his form

The timeless Ray descends into our hearts

For Truth is wider, greater than her forms.

And find her in the idols they adore;

END OF CANTO ELEVEN

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