A LONE he moved watched by the infinity

Revealed the grandeurs of the Infinite:

It flung into the hazards of its play

A million moods, a myriad energies,

The world-shapes that are fancies of its Truth

And the formulas of the freedom of its Force.

It poured into the Ever-stable's flux

A bacchic rapture and revel of Ideas,

A passion and motion of everlastingness.

There rose unborn into the Unchanging's surge

Thoughts that abide in their deathless consequence,

Words that immortal last though fallen mute,

Acts that brought out from Silence its dumb sense,

Lines that convey the inexpressible.

The Eternal's stillness saw in unmoved joy

His universal Power at work display

In plots of pain and dramas of delight

The wonder and beauty of her will to be.

All, even pain, was the soul's pleasure here,

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Here all experience was a single plan,

All came at once into his single view;

Nothing escaped his vast intuitive sight,

Nothing drew near he could not feel as kin:

He was one spirit with that immensity.

Became familiar to his hourly sight;

The symbols of the Spirit's reality,

Surrounded him with countless pointing signs;

The voices of a thousand realms of Life

They resumed their topless pitch and native power;

Their fortifying stress upon the soul

Bit deep into the ground of consciousness

The passion and purity of their extremes,

The absoluteness of their single cry

And the sovereign sweetness or violent, poetry

Of their beautiful or terrible delight.

All thought can know or widest sight perceive

And all that thought and sight can never know,

All things occult and rare, remote and strange

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Were near to heart's contact, felt by spirit-sense.

Or the embroidered tissue of his sense:

These took the place of intimate human things

And moved as close companions of his thoughts,

Or were his soul's natural environment.

Tireless the heart's adventure of delight,

Endless the kingdoms of the Spirit's bliss,

Unnumbered tones struck from one harmony's strings,

Each to its wide-winged universal poise,

Its fathomless feeling of the All in one,

Brought notes of some perfection yet unseen,

Its single retreat into Truth's secrecies,

Its happy sidelight on the Infinite.

All was found there the Unique had dreamed and made

Tinging with ceaseless rapture and surprise

And an opulent beauty of passionate difference

The recurring beat that moments God in Time.

Only was missing the sole timeless Word

That carries eternity in its lonely sound,

The Idea self-luminous key to all ideas,

The integer of the Spirit's perfect sum

That equates the unequal All to the equal One,

The single sign interpreting every sign,

The absolute index to the Absolute.

     There walled apart by its own innerness

Climbing with foam-maned waves to the Supreme

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Ascended towards breadths immeasurable;

It hoped to soar into the Ineffable's reign:

A hundred levels raised it to the Unknown.

Its spire touches the apex of the world;

Mounting into great voiceless stillnesses

Out of our long self-loss in Nature's deeps;

Planted on earth it holds in it all realms:

It is a brief compendium of the Vast.

To think and feel and to react to joy;

It models in us our diviner parts,

Lifts mortal mind into a greater air,

Makes yearn this life of flesh to intangible aims,

Links the body's death with immortality's call:

Out of the swoon of the Inconsdence

Thought could not be nor life-delight's response:

Only material forms could then be her guests

Driven by an inanimate world-force.

Earth by this golden superfluity

Bore thinking man and more than man shall bear;

This higher scheme of being is our cause

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And holds the key to our ascending fate;

It calls out of our dense mortality

The conscious spirit nursed in Matter's house.

The living symbol of these conscious planes,

Its influences and godheads of the unseen,

Its unthought logic of Reality's acts

Arisen from the unspoken truth in things,

Have fixed our inner life's slow-scaled degrees.

Its steps are paces of the soul's return

From the deep adventure of material birth,

A ladder of delivering ascent

And rungs that Nature climbs to deity.

Once in the vigil of a deathless gaze

These grades had marked her giant downward plunge,

The wide and prone leap of a godhead's fall.

Our life is a holocaust of the Supreme.

The great World-Mother by her sacrifice

Has made her soul the body of our state,

Accepting sorrow and unconsciousness

Divinity's lapse from its own splendours wove

The many-patterned ground of all we are.

An idol of self is our mortality.

Our earth is a fragment and a residue;

Her power is packed with the stuff of greater worlds

And steeped in their colour-lustres dimmed by her drowse;

An atavism of higher births is hers,

Unsatisfied forces in her bosom move;

They are partners of her greater growing fate

And her return to immortality;

They consent to share her doom of birth and death;

They kindle partial gleams of the All and drive

Her blind laborious spirit to compose

A. meagre image of the mighty Whole.

The calm and luminous Intimacy within

Approves her work and guides the unseeing Power.

His vast design accepts a puny start.

An attempt, a drawing half-done is the world's life;

Its lines doubt their concealed significance,

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Its curves join not their high-intended dose.

A cube and union crystal of the gods;

A Mind shall think behind Nature's mindless mask,

An eternal negative, a matrix Nought:

Into its forms the Child is ever born

A slow reversal's movement then took place:

A gas belched out from some invisible Fire,

Of its dense rings were formed these million stars;

Upon earth's new-born soil God's tread was heard.

Across the thick smoke of earth's ignorance

A Mind began to see and look at forms

And groped for knowledge in the nescient Night:

Caught in a blind stone-grip Force worked its plan

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A spirit dreamed in the crude cosmic whirl,

Mind flowed unknowing in the sap of life

And Matter's breasts suckled the divine Idea

A miracle of the Absolute was born,

Infinity put on a finite soul,

All ocean lived within a wandering drop,

A time-made body housed the Illimitable.

To live this Mystery out our souls came here.

     A Seer within who knows the ordered plan

Concealed behind our momentary steps,

Inspires our ascent to viewless heights

As once the abysmal leap to birth and life.

His call had reached the Traveller in Time.

Apart in an unfathomed loneliness,

He travelled in his mute and single strength

Bearing the burden of the world's desire.

A formless Stillness called, a nameless Light.

Above him was the white immobile Ray,

Around him the eternal Silences.

No term was fixed to the high-pitched attempt;

World after world disclosed its guarded powers,

Heaven after heaven its deep beatitudes,

But still the invisible Magnet drew his soul.

A figure sole on Nature's giant stair,

He mounted towards an indiscernible end

On the bare summit of created things.

END OF CANTO ONE

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