AN uneven broad ascent now lured his feet.

Nothing he found to satisfy his heart;

A tireless wandering sought and could not cease.

There life is the manifest incalculable,

A movement of unquiet seas, a long

And venturesome leap of spirit into Space,

A vexed disturbance in the eternal Calm,

An impulse and passion of the Infinite.

Assuming whatever shape her fancy wills,

Escaped from the restraint of settled forms

She has left the safety of the tried and known.

Unshepherded by the fear that walks through Time,

Undaunted by Fate that dogs and Chance that springs,

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She accepts disaster as a common risk;

Careless of suffering, heedless of sin and fall,

She wrestles with danger and discovery

In the unexplored expanses of the Soul.

To be seemed only a long experiment,

The hazard of a seeking ignorant Force

That tries all truths and, finding none supreme,

Moves on unsatisfied, unsure of its end.

As saw some inner mind, so life was shaped:

From thought to thought she passed, from phase to phase,

Tortured by her own powers or proud and blest,

Now master of herself, now toy and slave.

A huge inconsequence was her action's law,

As if all possibility must be drained

And anguish and bliss were pastimes of the heart.

In a gallop of thunder-hooved vicissitudes

She swept through the race-fields of Circumstance,

Or, swaying, she tossed between her heights and deeps,

Uplifted or broken on Time's incessant wheel.

Amid a tedious crawl of drab desires

She writhed, a worm mid worms in Nature's mud,

Then, Titan-statured, took all earth for food,

Ambitioned the seas for robe, for crown the stars

And shouting strode from peak to giant peak,

Clamouring for worlds to conquer and to rule.

Then wantonly enamoured of Sorrow's face,

She plunged into the anguish of the depths

And, wallowing, clung to her own misery.

In dolorous converse with her squandered self

She wrote the account of all that she had lost,

Or sat with grief as with an ancient friend.

A romp of violent raptures soon was spent,

Or she lingered tied to an inadequate joy

Missing the turns of fate, missing life's goal.

A scene was planned for all her numberless moods

Where each could be the law and way of life,

But none could offer a pure felicity;

Only a nickering zest they left behind

Or the fierce lust that brings .a dead fatigue.

Amid her swift untold variety

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Something remained dissatisfied ever the same

And the native taste of suffering and unrest:

She strains for an end that never can she win.

A perverse savour haunts her thirsting lips:

For the grief she weeps which came from her own choice,

For the pleasure yearns that racked with wounds her breast;

Aspiring to heaven she turns her steps towards hell.

Chance she has chosen and danger for playfellows;

Fate's dreadful swing she has taken for cradle and seat.

Her moods are faces of the Infinite:

Beauty and happiness are her native right,

And endless bliss is her eternal home.

     This now revealed its antique face of joy,

Towered spirals, magic rings of vivid hue

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And gleaming spheres of strange felicity

Dream's truth made false earth's vain realities.

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In a swift eternal moment fixed there live

And griefless countries under purple suns.

     This, once a star of bright remote idea

The wonder-worlds of life were dreams no more;

His vision made all they unveiled its own:

Their scenes, their happenings met his eyes and heart

The Eternal's quiet holds the cosmic act:

'The protean images of the World-Force

At her will the inscrutable Supermind leans down

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To guide her force that feels but cannot know,

Its breadth of power controls her restless seas

And life obeys the governing Idea.

At her will, led by a luminous Immanence

The hazardous experimenting Mind

Pushes its way through obscure possibles

Mid chance formations of an unknowing world.

Our human ignorance moves towards the Truth

That Nescience may become omniscient:

Transmuted instincts shape to divine thoughts,

Is the executor other fantasies:

She has canalised the seas of omnipotence;

She has limited by her laws the Illimitable.

The Immortal bound himself to do her works;

He labours at the tasks her Ignorance sets,

Have lost their origin on unseen heights:

Even severed, straying from their timeless source,

Even deformed, obscured, accursed and fallen,

Since even, fall has its perverted joy

And nothing she leaves out that serves delight,

These too can to the peaks revert or here

Cut out the sentence of the spirit's fall,

Recover their forfeited divinity.

At once caught in an eternal vision's sweep

He saw her pride and splendour of highborn zones

And her regions crouching in the nether deeps.

Above was a monarchy of unfallen self,

Beneath was the gloomy trance of the abyss,

An opposite pole or dim antipodes.

There were vasts of the glory of life's absolutes:

All laughed in a safe immortality

And an eternal childhood of the soul

Before darkness came and pain and grief were born

Where all could dare to be themselves and one

And Wisdom played in sinless innocence

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With naked Freedom in Truth's happy sun.

There were worlds of her laughter and dreadful irony,

There were fields of her taste of toil and strife and tears;

Her head lay on the breast of amorous Death,

Sleep imitated awhile extinction's peace.

The light of God she has parted from his dark

To test the savour of bare opposites.

Here mingling in man's heart their tones and hues

Have woven his being's mutable design,

His life a forward-rippling stream in Time,

His nature's constant fixed mobility,

His soul a moving picture's changeful film,

His cosmos-chaos of personality.

The grand creatrix with her cryptic touch

Has turned to pathos and power being's self-dream,

Made a passion-play of its fathomless mystery,

     But here were worlds lifted half-way to heaven.

The Veil was there but not the Shadowy Wall;

In forms not too remote from human grasp

Some passion of the inviolate purity

Broke through, a ray of the original Bliss.

Heaven's joys might have been earth's if earth were pure.

There could have reached our divinised sense and heart

Some natural felicity's bright extreme,

Some thrill of supernature's absolutes:

All strengths could laugh and sport on earth's hard roads

These worlds could feel God's breath visiting their tops;

Some glimmer of the Transcendent's hem was there.

His blissful hands to seize on Nature's limbs,

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His sweet intolerant might of union

A flaming rhapsody of white desire

Lured an immortal music into the heart

The voice of rime sang of the Immortal's joy;

An inspiration and a lyric cry,

The moments came with ecstasy on their wings;

Beauty unimaginable moved heaven-bare

Absolved from boundaries in the vasts of dream;

The cry of the Birds of Wonder called from the skies

Creation leaped straight from the hands of God;

Marvel and rapture wandered in the ways.

And her extremes keen edges of harmony:

Indulgence with a tender purity came

And nursed the god on her maternal breast:

There none was weak, so falsehood could not live;

Ignorance was a thin shade protecting light,

Pleasure a candidate for heaven's fire;

The intellect was Beauty's worshipper,

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Throned in the power of the Transcendent's ray.

A vision of grandeurs, a dream of magnitudes

In sun-bright kingdoms moved with regal gait:

Assemblies, crowded senates of the gods,

Life's puissances reigned on seats of marble will,

High dominations and autocracies

And laurelled strengths and armed imperative mights.

All objects there were great and beautiful,

All beings wore a royal stamp of power.

There sat the oligarchies of natural Law,

Proud violent heads served one calm monarch brow:

All the soul's postures donned divinity.

There met the ardent mutual intimacies

Of mastery's joy and the joy of servitude

Imposed by Love on Love's heart that obeys

And Love's body held beneath a rapturous yoke.

All was a game of meeting kinglinesses.

For worship lifts the worshipper's bowed strength

Close to the god's pride and bliss his soul adores:

The ruler there is one with all he rules,

In her high home and made her all his own:

The grand Illuminate seized her gleaming limbs

Her days became a luminous sacrifice;

An immortal moth in happy and endless fire,

In his wide sky she built her world anew;

She gave to mind's calm pace the motor's speed,

To living an impetus to know and see.

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His splendour grasped her, her puissance to him clung;

She crowned the Idea a king in purple robes,

Worlds were there of a childlike mirth and joy;

A carefree youthfulness of mind and heart

Found in the body a heavenly instrument;

It lit an aureate halo round desire

A swift life-impulse stinted not nor stopped:

It knew not how to tire; happy were its tears.

The tasks of heaven a game of godlike might:

A celestial bacchanal for ever pure,

Life was an eternity of rapture's moods:

Age never came, care never lined the face.

Smiting the winds with splendour and with speed;

Of storm and sun they made companions,

Sported with the white mane of tossing seas,

Slew distance trampled to death under their wheels

And wrestled in the arenas of their force.

Imperious in their radiance like the suns

They kindled heaven with the glory of their limbs

Flung like a divine largesse to the world.

A spell to force the heart to stark delight,

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They carried the pride and mastery of their charm

Ideas were luminous comrades of the soul;

Mind played with speech, cast javelins of thought,

To rob creation of its native truth;

All was sincerity and natural force.

There freedom was sole rule and highest law.

In a happy series climbed or plunged these worlds:

In realms of curious beauty and surprise,

A thousand Edens she could build nor pause;

No bound was set to her greatness and to her grace

In her bosom bearing the eternal Will,

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No guide she needed but her luminous heart:.

There was no use for grudging ring or fence;

Each act was a perfection and a joy.

A Bacchant of creative ecstasy.

     This world of bliss he saw and felt its call,

And still it keeps the habit of its birth:

A dire duality is our way to be.

Identified with sea and sky and stone

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Her young gods yearned for the release of souls

A sleep in objects, vague, inanimate.

In that desolate grandeur, in that beauty bare,

In the deaf stillness, mid the unheeded sounds,

Heavy was the uncommunicated load

Of Godhead in a world that had no needs;

For none was there to feel or to receive.

This solid .mass which brooked no throb of sense

Could not contain their vast creative urge:

Immersed no more in Matter's harmony,

The Spirit lost its statuesque repose.

In the uncaring trance it groped for sight,

Passioned for the movements of a conscious heart,

Famishing for speech and thought and joy and love,

In the dumb insensitive wheeling day and night

Hungered for the beat of yearning and response.

The poised inconscience shaken with a touch,

The intuitive silence trembling with a name,

They cried to Life to invade the senseless mould

And in brute forms awake divinity.

A voice was heard on the mute rolling globe,

A murmur moaned in the unlistening Void.

A being seemed to breathe where once was none:

Something pent up in dead insentient depths,

Denied conscious existence, lost to joy,

Turned as if one asleep since dateless time.

Aware of its own buried reality,

Remembering its forgotten self and right,

It yearned to know, to aspire, to enjoy, to live.

Life heard the call and left her native light.

Overflowing from her bright magnificent plane

On the rigid coil and sprawl of mortal space,

Here too the gracious great-winged Angel poured

Her splendour and her sweetness and her bliss,

Hoping to fill a fair new world with joy.

As comes a goddess to a mortal's breast

And fills his days with her celestial clasp,

She stooped to make her home in transient shapes;

In Matter's womb she cast the Immortal's fire,

In the unfeeling Vast woke thought and hope,

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Smote with her charm and beauty flesh and nerve

A dim and dreadful muteness fell on her:

Abolished was her subtle mighty spirit

And slain her boon of child-god happiness,

And all her glory into littleness turned

And all her sweetness into a maimed desire.

To feed death with her works is here life's doom.

So veiled was her immortality that she seemed,

Inflicting consciousness on unconscious things,

An episode in an eternal death,

A myth of being that must for ever cease.

Such was the evil mystery of her change.

END OF CANTO THREE

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