Canto Four

The Vision and the Boon

THEN suddenly there rose a sacred stir.

Amid the lifeless silence of the Void

A sound came quivering like a loved footfall

A touch perturbed his fibres with delight.

A boundless Heart was near his longing heart,

All at her contact broke from silence' seal;

Linked in the grasp of an unspoken joy;

Intoxicated as with nectarous rain

Flashing with lightnings, mad with luminous wine.

A divinising stream possessed his veins,

Each nerve became a burning thread of joy:

Alight, the dun unplumbed subconscient caves

And filled with flickering crests and praying tongues.

His very body answered to her power.

Flame-pure, ethereal-tressed, a mighty Face

Lids, Wisdom's leaves, drooped over rapture's orbs.

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Towards Heaven, two tranquil eyes of boundless thought

A Shape was seen on threshold Mind, a Voice

"O Son of Strength who climbst creation's peaks,

Alone thou standest at the eternal doors.

O Spirit aspiring in an ignorant frame,

How shalt thou speak for men whose hearts are dumb,

Or lighten the burden of the senseless globe?

I am the goal of the travail of the suns;

But too immense my danger and my joy.

Speak not my secret name to hostile Time;

Truth born too soon might break the imperfect earth.

In thy single vast achievement reign apart

I ask thee not to merge thy heart of flame

Turned from the fruitless motion of the years,

Aloof from beings, lost in the Alone.

While Death is still unconquered on the earth

Thy soul was born to share the laden Force;

Accept the difficulty and godlike toil,

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The Enigma's knot is tied in humankind.

Ploughing the air of life with vanishing trails,

Aspires in vain to change the cosmic dream.

He is a stranger in the mindless vasts;

Amid the tread of many infinities,

Heaven's fixed regard beholds him from above,

A voyager twixt Thought's inconstant shores,

A nomad of the far mysterious Light,

Against his spirit all is in dire league,

Around him hungers the unpitying Void,

Inscrutable Energies drive him and deceive,

An inert Soul and a somnambulist Force

The Dragon of the dark foundations keeps

On his long way through Time and Circumstance

Her dreadful paws upon the swallowing sands,

Across his path sits the dim camp of Night.

He is the prey of the minutes and the hours.

Descended here unhappy and sublime,

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He knows not his own greatness nor his aim;

His spirit and his members are at war;

His mass is buried in the animal mire.

A riddle of opposites is made his field:

He has need of darkness to perceive some light

He has need of death to find a greater life.

He has no certain light by which to walk;

He seeks himself and from himself he runs;

Always he builds, but finds no constant ground,

He would guide the world, himself he cannot guide;

The light his soul had brought his mind has lost;

A sun to him seems the shadow of his thoughts,

Unknowing what he does or whither he tends

He has hitched his mortal error to Truth's star.

But never has he seen the face behind:

Assigned to meet the cosmic mystery

His passport of entry false and his personage,

He obeys the Inconscience he had come to rule

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Awakened from her lower driven forms

And painfully he guards the heavy trust;

Illumining breath to think and plasm to feel,

Helped by the reason's vacillating fires,

For knowledge to enter the darkness of the world

A mind impotent to reconcile heaven and earth

He lifts himself to be a conscious god.

When mind and spirit shed a grandiose ray

This alchemist's miracle from plasm and gas,

Lifts his thought-stature to the Immortal's heights,

His body he resigns to death and pain,

A thaumaturge sceptic of miracles,

By an unbelieving brain and credulous heart,

His work unfinished he claims a heavenly prize.

Half-way he stops his star of destiny:

An ill-served high conception doubtfully done,

A zigzag towards unknown dangerous ground

Ever retreating after marches long

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And hardiest victories without sure result,

In an ill-fitting and voluminous robe

A mighty blindness stumbles hoping on,

Because the human instrument has failed,

A spirit entangled in the forms it made.

Through all the slow mysterious march goes on:

A self-fulfilling transcendence treads man's road;

It knows its steps, its way is inevitable,

However man's mind may tire or fail his flesh,

The goal recedes, a bourneless vastness calls

There is no end to the world's stupendous march,

It must live on, describe all Time's huge curve.

Forbidding to him rest and earthly ease,

A Light there is that leads, a Power that aids;

Ignorant, he forms the All-Conscient in his depths,

A borrower of Supernature's gold,

The high gods look on man and watch and choose

His transience trembles with the Eternal's touch,

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The Ambassadors of the Unseen draw near.

Love passes through his heart, a wandering guest.

He has visits of a large revealing joy,

Enticing towards a glory ever in front

His mind is crossed by strange discovering fires,

To a moment's kinship with the eternal Word;

Perturbing him with glimpses half divine.

He communes sometimes with Eternity.

And immortality and spirit-room

Are this afflicted creature's mighty fate.

Foreshadowed in her dumb and fiery depths,

An alchemy of Heaven on Nature's base.

Leave not the light to die the ages bore,

Obey thy spirit's wide omnipotent urge.

It leaned compassionate from immortal calm

Assent to thy high self, create, endure.

No more can earthly limits pen thy force;

Traveller upon the bare eternal heights,

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Joining the cycles with its austere curve

My light shall be in thee, my strength thy force.

Ask not the imperfect fruit, the partial prize.

Only one joy, to raise thy kind, desire.

Moveless there stands a high unchanging Will;

All things shall change in God's transfiguring hour."

August and sweet sank hushed that mighty Voice.

Nothing now moved in the vast brooding space:

A mute immensity of the Eternal's peace.

A cry amid the silence of the Vasts:

And the dull measure of terrestrial things,

The glory and the beauty of thy face?

How long shall our spirits battle with the Night

We who are vessels of a deathless Force

Or if it is thy work I do below

In the vague light of man's half-conscious mind,

Ever the centuries and millenniums pass.

Where is the thunder of thy victory's wings?

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Mapped out to backward and prophetic sight,

The cycles all rebuild and ever aspire.

All breaks and all renews and is the same.

The new-born ages perish like the old,

Till all is done for which this scene was made.

Too faint the light that steals through Nature's lids,

In a brute world that knows not its own sense,

The instruments of an impulse not our own

Half-knowledge, half-creations that soon tire.

Baffled and beaten back we labour still;

In anguish we labour that from us may rise

A golden vessel of the incarnate Truth,

Equipped to wear the earthly body of God,

I know that thy creation cannot fail:

Infallible are thy mysterious steps,

Hidden in the blind shifts of Fate she keeps

And the inviolate sequence of its will.

And adamantine is the evolving Law;

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This strange irrational product of the mire,

Is not the crown of thy miraculous world.

At one with Nature and at height with heaven,

And swept with ecstasy from invisible founts,

A Power arose out of my slumber's cell.

And the inconstant blink of mortal sight,

And intolerant flames the lone all-witnessing Eye

In the endless moment of Eternity,

Overpassed were the leaden formulas of the Mind,

The unfolding Image showed the things to come.

There was a thunder as of worlds that fall;

Clamouring to slay a world his hunger had made;

The Titan's battle-cry was in my ears,

I saw the Omnipotent's flaming pioneers

Come crowding down the amber stairs of birth;

Out of the paths of the morning star they came

I saw them cross the twilight of an age,

The great creators with wide brows of calm,

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And wrestlers with destiny in her lists of will,

The messengers of the Incommunicable,

Into the fallen human sphere they came,

Voices that communed still with the thoughts of God,

Carrying the magic word, the mystic fire,

Approaching eyes of a diviner man,

Feet echoing in the corridors of Time.

Discoverers of beauty's sunlit ways

And dancers within rapture's golden doors,

And justify the light on Nature's face.

And the work seems vain on which our heart's force was spent,

Even as of old man came behind the beast

Behind man's inefficient mortal pace,

He shall know what mortal mind barely durst think,

Inheritor of the toil of human time,

All heavenly light shall visit the earth's thoughts,

Earth's deeds shall touch the superhuman's height,

Heavy unchanged weighs still the imperfect world;

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Heavy and long are the years our labour counts

And weary is the ancient Mother's heart.

Voice of her mighty musings in shut heavens

O Wisdom-Splendour, Mother of the universe,

Linger not long with thy transmuting hand

As if Time dare not open its heart to God.

World-free and unattainable above,

While men seek thee outside and never find,

Incarnate the white passion of thy force,

One moment fill with thy eternity,

All-Knowledge wrap one mind in seas of light,

Immortal, treading the earth with mortal feet

Omnipotence, girdle with the power of God

Pack with the eternal might one human hour

Let a great word be spoken from the heights

His prayer sank down in the resisting Night

As if too weak to climb to the Supreme.

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Light floated round the marvellous Vision's brow

"O strong forerunner, I have heard thy cry.

Change Nature's doom by the lone spirit's power.

A sweet and violent heart of ardent calms

All mights and greatnesses shall join in her;

Delight shall sleep in the cloud-net of her hair,

Immortal Love shall beat his glorious wings.

The harps of the Perfect shall attune her voice,

Her lips shall be the honeycombs of God,

Her breasts the rapture-flowers of Paradise.

Strength shall be with her like a conqueror's sword

A seed shall be sown in Death's tremendous hour,

Nature shall overleap her mortal step;

As a flame disappears in endless Light

Vanished the splendour and was stilled the word.

The harmony journeyed towards some distant hush,

A cadence called by distant cadences,

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Forsaking nearness to the abandoned sense,

Lone, brilliant, vacant lay the inner fields;

Indifferent, waste, a desert of bright peace.

The warm-lipped sentient soft terrestrial wave,

Came gliding in upon white feet of sound.

The absolute unmoving stillnesses

Dissolving boundlessly the heavens of trance

Cast down its incommunicable lids

Behind the voiceless mystery of sleep.

Across the light of fast-receding planes

Compelled to fill its human house in Time

Of the vast business of created things.

Broad-based to bear the gods on fiery wheels,

The mortal stir received him in its midst.

Lifted by intimations from the heights

Touched by the thoughts that skim the fathomless surge

The eternal seeker in the aeonic field

Again was strong for great swift-footed deeds.

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He saw the unnumbered people of the stars

And toiled with the form-maker, measuring Mind.

Accomplishing the fate of transient things,

He raised his brow of conquest to the heavens

On Matter and its bounded universe

The Lord of Life resumed his mighty rounds

END OF BOOK THREE, CANTO FOUR

END OF PART ONE

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