Canto Five

The Finding of the Soul

ONWARD she passed seeking the soul's mystic cave.

At first she stepped into a night of God.

The power that struggles and stumbles in our life;

The striving heart its unavailing hopes.

And Wisdom screened in awe her lowly head

Formless, ineffable, for ever the same.

Adored like one who worships formless God

In a simple purity of emptiness

All was abolished save her naked self

There was no strength in her, no pride of force;

Ashamed, a vanity of separate self,

Salvation she asked not nor a heavenly crown:

Her self was nothing, God alone was all,

A sacred darkness brooded now within,

This void held more than all the teeming worlds,

This dark knew dumbly, immensely the Unknown.

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A small nought passing through a mightier Nought,

Crossing a fathomless impersonal Night,

In endless Time her soul reached a wide end,

At last a change approached, the emptiness broke;

Once more her inner self became her space.

Heaven leaned low to kiss the sacred hill,

A rose of splendour on a tree of dreams,

Day came, priest of a sacrifice of joy

He carried immortal lustre as his robe,

As his vermilion caste-mark a red sun.

She recognised in her prophetic mind

The tremulous sweetness of that happy air

The mystic cavern in the sacred hill

As if in some Elysian occult depth,

As if in a rock-temple's solitude hid,

It lay withdrawn even from life's inner sense,

A marvellous brooding twilight met the eyes

An awful dimness wrapped the great rock-doors

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Two golden serpents round the lintel curled,

Looked out with wisdom's deep and luminous eyes.

Flames of self-lost immobile reverie,

Like sculptured postures of white-bosomed peace.

And found herself amid great figures of gods

Watching with fixed regard the soul of man,

World-symbols of immutable potency.

Looked at her the life-scene of man and beast

The power and necessity of these numberless worlds,

Spoke the succinct and inexhaustible

In their immensitude signing infinity

And housed, impassively receiving all,

And his passion and his birth and life and death

To the abiding and eternal is their climb,

To the sheer consciousness and the absolute force

To the mirth in Time and the timeless mystery

And yet is no one but himself apart.

Only the living nearness of the soul.

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Yet all the worlds and God himself were there,

And brought the presence which had given it life.

Not by some thought of mind but by the self.

A light that dwelt within and saw within

Made secrecy more revealing than the word:

And only the spirit's vision is wholly true.

Through room and room, through door and rock-hewn door,

A sealed identity within her woke;

These Gods and Goddesses were he and she:

The Word in Brahma's vast creating clasp,

The Master and the Mother of all lives

And Krishna and Radha for ever entwined in bliss,

In the last chamber on a golden seat

Only one felt the world's unattainable fount,

An invisible Beauty, goal of the world's desire,

A Greatness without whom no life could be.

And all became formless and pure and bare.

She came out where there shone a deathless sun.

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There suddenly she met her secret soul.

A being stood immortal in transience,

Deathless dallying with momentary things,

Which pity and sorrow could not abrogate

Observer of the silent steps of the hours,

And the passing scenes of the Everlasting's play.

In the Divine Comedy a participant,

God's delegate in our humanity,

She had come into the mortal body's room

A joy in the world her master movement here,

A smile on her lips welcomed earth's bliss and grief,

All things she saw as a masquerade of Truth

Crossing the years to immortality;

But since she knows the toil of mind and life

She puts forth a small portion of herself,

Into a hidden region of the heart

To share the suffering and endure earth's wounds

This in us laughs and weeps, suffers the stroke,

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It takes on itself their anguish and defeat,

Yet is the unwounded and immortal self

Through this she sends us her glory and her powers,

She gives us strength to do our daily task

And the little strength we have to help our race,

Acting itself out in a slight human shape

This is in us the godhead small and marred;

She seats the greatness of the Soul in Time

Till on a heavenly peak it stands, a king.

It climbs stumbling, held up by an unseen hand,

Here in this chamber of flame and light they met;

The secret deity and its human part,

Then with a magic transformation's speed

Once more she was human upon earthly soil

And the rude cottage where she sat in trance:

Behind the sun-veil of the inner sight.

Had bloomed and stood disclosed to the earthly ray;

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No mystic fence guarding from the claims of life.

As if on concentration's marble seat,

To make this earthly tenement her house.

A living image of the original Power,

And made of it its temple and pure abode.

A mighty movement rocked the inner space

Out of the Inconscient's soulless mindless night

It rose billowing its coils and stood erect

It touched her centres with its flaming mouth;

They bloomed and laughed surcharged with light and bliss.

In the flower of the head, in the flower of Matter's base,

It held together the mystic stream which joins

The string of forts that make the frail defence

Our lines of self-expression in its Vast.

Wearing the mighty Mother's form and face.

Whose occult might no magic can imitate,

A saviour gesture stretched her lifted arm,

A sacred beast lay prone below her feet,

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All underwent a high celestial change:

Effacing the circles of the Ignorance,

Each part of the being trembling with delight

And saw her hand in every circumstance

In the country of the lotus of the head

In the castle of the lotus twixt the brows

In the passage of the lotus of the throat

And the heart's impulse run towards word and act,

The immortal's thoughts displaced our bounded view,

All things now bore a deeper heavenlier sense.

Reset the balance and measures of the world.

God's meaning in it for which it was made

A channel of the mighty Mother's choice,

Our blind or erring government of life;

Then bowed to the uncertain sovereign mind,

And every act became an act of God.

Love chanting its pure hymeneal hymn

And all the emotions gave themselves to God.

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Its proud ambitions and its master lusts

To do a work of God on earthly soil.

Its childish game of daily dwarf desires

A romp of little gods with life in Time.

There came a grip on Matter's giant powers

A firm ground was made for Heaven's descending might.

Casting aside its veil of Ignorance,

It built the harmony of its human state;

Only she obeyed her sole supreme behest

A secret soul behind supporting all

Admits the Person's look and Nature's role.

Then the veiled king steps out in Nature's front;

Its heavy painful knot loosens its grasp:

And life a hue and figure of the soul.

A divine Puissance then takes Nature's place

Possessor of our passionate hopes and dreams,

She streams into us with her unbound force,

An inner law of beauty shapes our lives;

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Each thought is a ripple on a sea of Light.

They struggle no more in our delivered hearts:

Or serve the rule of a supernal Right.

Forsake their stations in fierce disarray

Then lifts the mind a cry of victory:

Within we have found the kingdom here of God,

Our life is entrenched between two rivers of Light,

And made the body a Capitol of bliss.

In the slow process of the evolving spirit,

A first perfection's stage is reached at last;

A temple is shaped where the high gods could live.

One man's perfection still can save the world.

A first betrothal of the Earth to Heaven,

A camp of God is pitched in human time.

END OF CANTO FIVE

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