Canto Fourteen

The World-Soul

A COVERT answer to his seeking came.

A glowing mouth was seen, a luminous shaft;

A veiled retreat and escape to mystery.

It fled into the bosom of the unknown,

It plunged as if a mystic groove of hope

To reach the last profound of the world's heart,

Pleading with some still impenetrable Mind,

As if a beckoning finger of secrecy

Pointing at him from some near hidden depth,

An intimation of a lurking joy

There shimmered stealing out into the Mind

A passion and delicacy of roseate fire.

Feels now the closeness of a waiting love,

That clasped him in from day and night's pursuit,

A murmur multitudinous and lone,

A hidden call to unforeseen delight

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But nameless to the unremembering mind,

The immortal cry ravished the captive ear.

It sank to a whisper circling round the soul.

That roamed along the shores of memory

A cricket's rash and fiery single note,

And beat upon a nerve of mystic sleep

A jingling silver laugh of anklet bells

Its dance solaced an eternal loneliness:

Or from a far harmonious distance heard

It seemed at times, or a vast forest's hymn,

A bee-croon honey-drunk in summer isles

Or the far anthem of a pilgrim sea.

A mystic happiness trembled in the breast

Assuming the sudden loveliness of a face

And the world change with the beauty of a smile.

The home of a passion without name or voice,

A nook was found that could embrace all worlds,

An hour eternal in the heart of Time.

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A Being lived, a Presence and a Power,

And cherished Nature's sweet and dangerous throbs

One who could love without return for love,

It healed the bitter cruelties of earth,

Intervening in the sorrowful paths of birth

And stilled all weeping with its hand of joy;

It turned racked falsehood into happy truth;

Infinite, coeval with the mind of God,

A seed from which the Eternal is new-born,

All grew to all kindred and self and near;

No veil was felt, no brute barrier inert,

A fire of passion burned in spirit-depths,

The throb of one adoration's single bliss

An inner happiness abode in all,

A measureless secure eternity

Here was the welling core of finite life;

All there was soul or made of sheer soul-stuff;

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Thought was not there but a knowledge near and one

A sympathy of self with other selves,

And being's look on being with inmost gaze

And the unanimity of seeing minds

Life was not there, but an impassioned force,

Felt as a subtle and spiritual power,

A mystic movement, a close influence,

Of being to being with no screen or check,

Body was not there, for bodies were needed not,

And met at once the touch of other souls

As when one walks in sleep through luminous dreams

Here where reality was its own dream,

As those who have lived long made one in love

He met and communed without bar of speech

There was a strange spiritual scenery,

A flow, a fixity in a soul-space,

And gardens that were flower-tracts of the spirit,

Air was the breath of a pure infinite.

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As if the scent and hue of all sweet flowers

Appealing to the soul and not the eye

There all was beautiful by its own right

All objects were like bodies of the Gods,

For world and self were one reality.

Immersed in voiceless internatal trance

The beings that once wore forms on earth sat there

Passed were the pillar-posts of birth and death,

Passed were the heavens and hells of their long road;

All now was gathered into pregnant rest:

In trance they gathered back their bygone selves,

Prophetic of new personality

Heirs of their past, their future's discoverers,

They waited for the adventure of new life.

Although the same for ever in many shapes

Assuming names unknown in unknown climes

A growing figure of its secret self,

Till it can see its truth alive and God.

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And thought and impulse lighting the blind act,

Through inner movements and external scenes

Into creation's centre he had come.

Finds here the silence of its starting-point

And brooding passion of the world of Soul.

The calm persistent vision of the One

Forces and lives and beings and ideas

There they remould their purpose and their drift,

Ever they change and changing ever grow,

And after long reconstituting sleep

Until their work in cosmic Time is done.

Here was the fashioning chamber of the worlds.

An interval was left twixt act and act,

A pause that gave new strength to do and be.

Mute birthplaces of light and hope and love,

In a slumber of the voices of the world

His knowledge stripped bare of the garbs of sense

His being saw itself without its veils,

Along a road of pure interior light,

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Under the watching eyes of nameless Gods,

Towards the end which ever begins again,

To the source of all things human and divine.

The figure of the deathless Two-in-One,

A diarchy of two united souls,

Their trance of bliss sustained the mobile world.

Who brought them forth from the Unknowable.

Watcher on the supreme unreachable peaks,

She guards the austere approach to the Alone.

Pervading with her power the cosmic suns

And thinker of the symbol of its scene.

The sole omnipotent Goddess ever-veiled

The ages are the footfalls of her tread,

And all creation is her endless act.

Mute in the fathomless passion of his will

Then in a sovereign answer to his heart

And from her raiment's lustrous mystery raised

A light appeared still and imperishable.

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Of the ravishing enigma of her eyes,

Overwhelmed by her implacable light and bliss,

Mastered by the honey and lightning of her power,

Drunk with a deep golden spiritual wine,

A cry of adoration and desire

And the self-giving of his silent heart.

END OF CANTO FOURTEEN

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