PART TWO

BOOKS IV ­ VIII

BOOK FOUR

The Book of Birth and Quest

Canto One

The Birth and Childhood of the Flame

A MAENAD of the cycles of desire

Around a Light she must not dare to touch,

Earth followed the endless journey of the Sun.

On the bosom of Inconscience dreamed out life

Across the immobile trance of the Infinite.

Prisoner of speed upon a jewelled wheel,

Amid the ambiguous stillness of the stars

And her rhythm measured the long whirl of Time.

Day after day sped by like coloured spokes,

The seasons drew in linked significant dance

Across the burning languor of the soil

And stamped his tyranny of torrid light

Next through its fiery swoon or clotted knot

Startled with lightnings air's unquiet drowse,

Overcast with flare and sound and storm-winged dark

Or from the gold eye of her paramour

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The clouds' unending march besieged the world,

And thunder drums announced the embattled gods.

The dense-maned monsoon rode neighing through earth's hours:

Enormous lightnings split the horizon's rim

Married heaven's edges steep and bare and blind:

The long straight sleet-drift, clamours of winged storm-charge,

Hurrying swept through the prone afflicted plains:

Then all was a swift stride, a sibilant race,

A dimness sagged on the grey floor of day,

Wallowing in sludge and shower it reached black dark.

Light looked into dawn's tarnished glass and met

Downpour and drip and seeping mist swayed all

Earth was a quagmire, heaven a dismal block.

Even when no turmoil vexed air's sombre rest,

As a sad smile gleams veiled by returning tears,

Or, soon condemned, died like a brief-lived hope.

And a subsiding mutter left all still,

Or only a whisper and green toss of trees.

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The hours went by with slow contented tread:

Earth was the comrade of a happy sun.

A light of musing trance lit soil and sky

Filled meditation's solitary heart.

Time opened its chambers of felicity,

An inmost self looked up to a heavenlier height,

And the inner sight adored an unseen sun.

And scanning one by one the pregnant hours

The vigil of some mighty birth to come.

And dreamed in the splendour of her lotus pools

On Nature's bosom still in a half sleep

The tranquil beauty of the waning year.

And caught the earth-bride in his eager clasp;

His arms were a circle of the arrival of joy.

Whose secret touch upon our mortal lives

Remoulds an ancient sweetness to new shapes

The answer of our hearts to Nature's charm

The throb that ever wakes to the old delight

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His coming brought the magic and the spell;

He made joy a willing prisoner in her breast.

Changed by the passion of his divine outbreak

Impatient for felicity he came,

High-fluting with the coil's happy voice,

His peacock turban trailing on the trees;

His breath was a warm summons to delight,

A soft celestial urge surprised the blood

Revealed in beauty, a cadence was abroad

Immortal movements touched the fleeting hours.

Made it a passionate pleasure even to breathe;

The life of the enchanted globe became

A revel of colour and of ecstasy,

A strain of choral priestly music sang

A sacrifice of perfume filled the hours.

Pure like the breath of an unstained desire

Pale mango-blossoms fed the liquid voice

Of the love-maddened coil, and the brown bee

Muttered in fragrance mid the honey-buds.

The sunlight was a great god's golden smile.

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In this high signal moment of the gods

Answering earth's yearning and her cry for bliss,

A silence in the noise of earthly things

A mightier influx filled the oblivious clay:

A mediating ray had touched the earth

Its brightness linked our transience to the Unknown.

Translating heaven into a human shape

And wept not fallen to mortality,

One had returned from the transcendent planes

Who had striven of old with our darkness and our pain;

Survivor of death and the aeonic years,

Again there was renewed, again revealed

The secret contact broken off in Time,

Between the human portion toiling here

Again the mystic deep attempt began,

For since upon this blind and whirling globe

And life invaded the material sheath

Since in Infinity's silence woke a word,

To pour delight on the heart of toil and want

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Impose heaven-sentience on the obscure abyss

Although our fallen minds forget to climb,

She keeps her will that hopes to divinise clay;

Time cannot weary her nor the Void subdue,

No victory she admits of Death or Fate.

Always her magical infinitude

As one who has all infinity to waste,

On a half-animate and crumbling mould,

Pours godhead's seekings into a bare beast frame,

Once more that Will put on an earthly shape.

Was framed for vision and interpreting act

To express divinity in terrestrial signs.

A lovelier body formed than earth had known.

The glowing arc of a charmed unseen whole,

Bright like the crescent horn of a gold moon

At first glimmering like an unshaped idea

Involved and drowned in Matter's giant trance,

In cradle of divine inconscience rocked

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By the universal ecstasy of the suns.

Nursed a transcendent birth's dumb glorious seed

But soon the link of soul with form grew sure;

The seed grew into a delicate marvellous bud,

At once she seemed to found a mightier race.

The child remembering inly a far home

Alone mid men in her diviner kind.

The nearness of a light still kept from earth,

Thoughts natural and native to the gods.

Her nature dwelt in a strong separate air

That sojourns on a secret fruited bough,

Or flies above divine unreachable tops.

Aligned to a swift rhythm of sheer delight

Each minute was a throb of beauty's heart;

Which asked for nothing, but took all life gave

Near was her spirit to its parent Sun,

The first fair life that breaks from Nature's swoon,

Absorbed in its own happy urge it lives,

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No open converse with surrounding things.

That needs no instruments and erects no form;

All contacts it assumes into its trance,

Transmutingly the shocks of sun and breeze:

A magic passion trembles in its blooms,

An occult godhead of this beauty is cause,

This sweetness's priestess and this reverie's muse.

The Dryad lives drenched in a deeper ray

And quivers inwardly with mystic rain.

Even when she bent to meet earth's intimacies

It stooped but was not lost in Matter's reign.

And marvel-mooned bright crowding fantasies

The ideal goddess in her house of gold.

Conscious of nearnesses we cannot feel,

In deeper figures than our surface types.

And flooded her brain with heavenly brilliances

Outlined in the sincerity of that ray

Into luminous patterns of her soul's deep truth,

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On all around her than man's ignorant view.

And she perceived a message from her kin

Each was a symbol power, a vivid flash

Nothing was alien or inanimate,

For with a greater Nature she was one.

As from the animal's life rose thinking man,

A mind of light, a life of rhythmic force,

Prepared an image of the coming god;

And the rich murmurous swarm-work of the days

Accomplishing the moon-orb of her grace,

Her solitary greatness was not less.

A sun replacing childhood's nebula

Upward it rose to grasp the human scene:

A lovelier light assumed her spirit brow

Celestial-human deep warm slumbrous fires

Like altar-burnings in a mysteried shrine.

That brought a large significance to life.

Behind the student arch a noble power

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A scout of victory in a vigil tower,

A silent warrior paced in her city of strength

A nectarous haloed moon her passionate heart

But kept her bosom's rapturous secrecy

Proud, swift and joyful ran the wave of life

Many high gods dwelt in one beautiful home;

Harmonious like a chant with many tones,

The body that held this greatness seemed almost

Its charm recalled things seen in vision's hours,

A moon-touched palm-tree single by a lake

A murmur as of leaves in Paradise

A fiery halo over sleeping hills,

END OF CANTO ONE

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