A FIXED and narrow power with rigid forms,

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And little eager steps and little ways

And reptile wallowings in the dark and dust,

And the crouch and ignominy of creeping life.

A trepidant and motley multitude,

A strange pell-mell of magic artisans

Was seen moulding the plastic day of life,

An elfin brood, an elemental kind.

Astonished by the unaccustomed glow,

As if immanent in the shadows started up

Imps with wry limbs and carved beast visages,

Sprite prompters goblin-wizened or faery-small,

And genii fairer but unsouled and poor

And fallen beings, their heavenly portion lost,

And errant divinities trapped in Time's dust.

Ignorant,and dangerous wills but armed with power,

Half-animal, half-god their mood, their shape.

Out of the greyness of a dim background

Their whispers corne, an inarticulate force,

Awake in mind an echoing thought or word,

To their sting of impulse the heart's sanction draw,

And in that little Nature do their work

And ml its powers and creatures with unease.

Its seed of joy they curse with sorrow's fruit,

Put out with error's breath its scanty lights

And turn its surface truths to falsehood's ends,

Its small emotions spur, its passions drive

To the abyss or through the bog and mire:

Or else with a goad of hard dry lusts they prick,

To sport with good and evil is their law;

Luring to failure and meaningless success,

All models they corrupt, ail measures cheat,

Make knowledge a poison, virtue a pattern dull

And lead the endless cycles of desire

Through semblances of sad or happy chance

To an inescapable fatality.

Ail by their influence is enacted there.

Nor there alone is their empire or their role:

Wherever are soulless minds and guideless lives

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And in a small body self is ail that counts,

It speaks to us with the voices of the Night:

Our darkened lives to greater darkness move;

Our seekings listen to calamitous hopes.

This earth alone is not our teacher and nurse;

The powers of ail the worlds have entrance here.

And cherish the safety of a settled type;

On earth out of their changeless orbit thrown

Where ail asks order but is driven by Chance;

Strangers to earth-nature, they must learn earth's ways,

Aliens or opposites, they must unite:

They work and battle and with pain agree:

These join, those part, ail parts and joins anew,

But now the Light supreme is far away:

Our conscious life obeys the inconscience' laws;

To ignorant purposes and blind desires

Our hearts are moved by an ambiguous force;

Even our mind's conquests wear a battered crown.

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A mighty Hand then rolls mind's firmaments back,

Infinity takes up the finite's acts

And Nature steps into the eternal Light.

Then only ends this dream of nether life.

     At the outset of this enigmatic world

There was none there to see and none to feel;

Only the miraculous Inconscient,

A subtle wizard skilled, was at its task.

Inventing ways for' magical results,

Managing creation's marvellous device,

Marking mechanically dumb wisdom's points,

Using the unthought inevitable Idea,

It did the works of God's intelligence

Or wrought the will of some supreme Unknown.

Still consciousness was hidden in Nature's womb,

Unfelt was the Bliss whose rapture dreamed the worlds.

Being was an inert substance driven by Force.

At first was only an etheric Space:

Its huge vibrations circled round and round

Housing some unconceived initiative:

Upheld by a supreme original Breath

Into abstract emptiness brought clash and clasp:

Parent of an expanding universe

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In a matrix of disintegrating force,

By spending it conserved an endless sum.

On the hearth of Space it kindled a viewless Fire

That, scattering worlds as one might scatter seeds,

Whirled out the luminous order of the stars.

An ocean of electric Energy

Formlessly formed its strange wave-particles

Constructing by their dance this solid scheme,

Its mightiness in the atom shut to rest;

Masses were forged or feigned and visible shapes;

Light flung the photon's swift revealing spark

And showed, in the minuteness of its flash

Imaged, this cosmos of apparent things.

Thus has been made this real impossible world,

An obvious miracle or convincing show.

Or so it seems to man's audacious mind

Who seats his thought as the arbiter of truth,

His personal vision as impersonal fact,

As witnesses of an objective world

His erring sense and his instruments' artifice.

Thus must he work life's tangible riddle out

In a doubtful light, by error seize on Truth

And slowly part the visage and the veil.

Or else, forlorn of faith in mind and sense,

His knowledge a bright body of ignorance,

He sees in ail things strangely fashioned here

the unwelcome jest of a deceiving Force,

A parable of Maya and her might.

This vast perpetual motion caught and held

In the mysterious and unchanging change

Of the persistent movement we call Time

And ever renewing its recurrent beat,

These mobile rounds that stereotype a flux,

These static objects in the cosmic dance

That are but Energy's self-repeating whirls

Prolonged by the spirit of the brooding Void,

Awaited life and sense and waking Mind.

A little the Dreamer changed his pose of stone.

But when the Inconscient's scrupulous work was done

And Chance coerced by fixed immutable laws,

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A scene was set for Nature's conscious play.

Then stirred the Spirit's mute immobile sleep;

the Force concealed broke dumbly, slowly out.

A dream of living woke in Matter's heart,

A will to live moved in the Inconscient's dust,

A freak of living startled vacant Time,

Ephemeral in a blank etemity,

Infinitesimal in a dead Infinite.

A subtler breath quickened dead Matter's forms;

the world's set rhythm changed to a conscious cry;

A serpent Power twinned the insensible Force.

Ignorant of the motives of its steps;

Ever inconstant, yet for ever the same,

It repeated the paradox that gave it birth:

Its restless and unstable stabilities

Waking and sleep lay locked in mutual arms;

Helpless and indistinct came pleasure and. pain

Yet broke into beauty signing some deep delight:

An inarticulate sensibility,

Throbs of the heart of an unknowing world,

Ran through its somnolent torpor and there stirred

A vague uncertain thrill, a wandering beat,

A dim unclosing as of secret eyes.

Infant self-feeling grew and birth was born.

A godhead woke but lay with dreaming limbs;

Her house refused to open its sealed doors.

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At first she raised no voice, no motion dared:

Charged with world-power, instinct with living force,

And put out tendril fingers of desire;

The strength in her yearning for sun and light

Felt not the embrace that made her breathe and live;

Absorbed she dreamed content with beauty and hue.

At last the charmed Immensity looked forth:

Astir, vibrant, hungering, she groped for mind;

Then slowly sense quivered and thought peered out;

She forced the reluctant mould to grow aware.

The magic was chiselled of a conscious form;

Its tranced vibrations rhythmed a quick response,

And luminous stirrings prompted brain and nerve,

Awoke in Matter spirit's identity

And in a body lit the miracle

Of the heart's love and the soul's witness-gaze.

Impelled by an unseen Will there could break out

Fragments of some vast impulse to become

And vivid glimpses of a secret self,

And the doubtful seeds and force of shapes to be

Awoke from the inconscient swoon of things.

An animal creation crept and ran

And flew and called between the earth and sky,

Hunted by death but hoping still to live

And glad to breathe if only for a while.

Then man was moulded from the original brute.

A thinking mind had come to lift life's moods,

A keen-edged tool of a Nature mixed and vague,

An intelligence half-witness, half-machine.

This seeming driver of her wheel of works

Missioned to motive and record her drift

And fix its law on her inconstant powers,

This master-spring of a delicate enginery,

Aspired to enlighten its user and refine

Lifting to a vision of the indwelling Power

the absorbed mechanic's crude initiative:

He raised his eyes; Heaven-light mirrored a Face.

Amazed at the works wrought in her mystic sleep,

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She looked upon the world that she had made:

Wondering now seized the great automaton;

She paused to understand her self and aim,

A visioned measure guided her rhythmic steps;

Thought bordered her instincts with a frame of will

On Matter's acts she imposed a patterned law;

She made a thinking body from chemic cells

To be what she was not inflamed her hope:

She turned her dream towards some high Unknown,

A quick celestial flash could sometimes come:

the illumined soul-ray fell on heart and flesh

Extinguished by a scanty breath of Time;

Joy that forgot mortality for a while

Came, a rare visitor who left betimes,

And made ail things seem beautiful for an hour,

Hopes that soon fade to drab realities

And passions that crumble to ashes while they blaze

Kindled the common earth with their brief flame.

A creature insignificant and small

Visited, uplifted by an unknown Power,

Man laboured on his little patch of earth

For means to last, to enjoy, to suffer and die.

A spirit that perished-not with the body and breath

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Was there like a shadow of the Unmanifest

     This huge world unintelligibly turns

In the shadow of a mused Inconscience;

It hides a key to inner meanings missed,

the mind learns and knows not, turning its back to truth;

It studies surface laws by surface thought,

Not seeing for what she acts or why we live;

It marks her tireless care of just device,

Her patient intricacy of fine detail,

the ingenious spirit's brave inventive plan

In her great futile mass of endless works,

Adds purposeful figures to her purposeless sum,

Its gabled storeys piles, its climbing roofs

On the close-carved foundations she has laid,

Imagined citadels reared in mythic air

Or mounts a stair of dream to a mystic moon:

Transient creations point and hit the sky:

A world-conjecture's scheme is laboured out

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Its harmonies are discords to our view,

Only the fringe of a wide surge we see;

Our instruments have not that greater light,

And only counts its waves and scans its foam;

It knows not whence these motions touch and pass,

It sees not whither sweeps the hurrying flood:

Only it strives to canalise its powers

And hopes to turn its course to human ends:

But all its means come from the Inconscient's store.

Unseen here act dim huge world-energies

And Only trickles and currents are our share.

Our mind lives far off from the authentic Light

Catching at little fragments of the Truth,

In a small corner of infinity,

Our lives are inlets of an ocean's force.

Our conscious movements have sealed origins

But with those shadowy seats no converse hold;

No understanding binds our comrade parts; .

Our acts emerge from a crypt our minds ignore.

Our deepest depths are ignorant of themselves,

Even our body is a mystery shop,

As our earth's roots lurk screened below our earth,

So lie unseen our roots of mind and life.

Our springs are kept close hid beneath, within;

Our souls are moved by powers behind the wall.

In the subterranean reaches of the spirit

A puissance acts and recks not what it means;

Using unthinking monitors and scribes,

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Concealed in the subliminal secrecies

Mid an obscure occult machinery,

Capture the mystic Morse whose measured lilt

Transmits the messages of the cosmic Force.

A whisper falls into life's inner ear

And echoes from the dun subconscient caves,

Speech leaps, thought quivers, the heart vibrates, the will

Answers and tissue and nerve obey the call.

Our lives translate these subtle intimacies;

All is the commerce of a secret Power.

     A thinking puppet is the mind of life:

Its choice is the work of elemental strengths

Against ail higher Truth their stuff rebels;

Only to Titan force their will lies prone.

In ail our nature's turns they intervene.

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Insignificant architects of low-built lives

And engineers of interest and desire,

Out of crude earthiness and muddy thrills

And coarse reactions of material nerve

They build our huddled structures of self-will

And the ill-lighted mansions of our thought,

Or with the ego's factories and marts

Surround the beautiful temple of the soul.

Artists minute of the hues of littleness,

They set the mosaic of Life's comedy

Or plan the trivial tragedy of our days,

Arrange the deed, combine the circumstance

And the fantasia of the moods costume.

These unwise prompters of man's ignorant heart

And tutors of his stumbling speech and will,

Movers of petty wraths and lusts and hates

And changeful thoughts and shallow emotion's starts,.

These slight illusion-makers with their masks,

Painters of the decor of a dull-hued stage

And nimble scene-shifters of the human play,

Ever are busy with this ill-lit scene.

Ourselves incapable to build our fate

Only as actors speak and strut our parts

Until the piece is done and we pass off

Into a brighter Time and subtler Space.

Thus they inflict their little pigmy law

And curb the mounting slow uprise of man,

Then his too scanty walk with death they close.

      This is the ephemeral creature's daily life.

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If little by little it wears a brighter face,

A gross content prolongs his fallen state;

His small successes are failures of the soul,

His little pleasures punctuate frequent griefs:

Hardship and toil are the heavy price he pays

And sees the Dionysian gesture pass,ﾗ

the sweet and joyful mighty madness swept:

Trivial amusements stimulate and waste

He is saved by her silence from his rack of self;

In her tranquil beauty is his purest bliss.

A new life dawns, he looks out from vistas wide;

the Spirit's breath moves him but soon retires:

His strength was not made to hold that puissant guest.

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His days are tinged with the red hue of strife

And lust's hot glare and passion's crimson stain;

Battle and murder are his tribal game.

His motion on too short an axis wheels;

He cannot soar but creeps on his long road

His heart that runs soon pants and tires and sinks;

Or he walks ever on and finds no end.

His knowledge dwells in the house of Ignorance;

His force nears not even once the Omnipotent,

Breaks out in him in a small joy of life:

This scanty grace is his persistent stay;

It lightens the burden of his many ills

He is satisfied with his common average kind;

Tomorrow's hopes and his old rounds of thought,

Defending his small life from the Invisible;

His being's kinship to infinity

In a little drama on a petty stage;

In a narrow plot he has pitched his tent of life

He is the crown of ail that has been done:

Thus is creation's labour justified,

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To the Light that made the worlds, the Cause of things,

At times ail looks unreal and remote:

We seem to live in a fiction of our thoughts

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And mathematises her huge external world,

To Reason bound within the circle of sense,

Or in Thought's broad impalpable Exchange

A speculator in tenuous vast ideas,

Abstractions in the void her currency

We know not with what firm values for its base.

Only religion in this bankruptcy

Presents its dubious riches to our hearts

Or signs unprovisioned cheques on the Beyond:

Our poverty shall there have its revenge.

Death's passport into immortality.

Yet was this only a provisional scheme,

That looks at truths unseen and scans the Unknown;

Then ail assumes a new and marvellous face.

the world quivers with a God-light at its core,

In Time's deep heart high purposes move and live,

Life's borders crumble and join infinity.

This broad, confused, yet rigid scheme becomes

A magnificent imbroglio of the Gods,

A game, a work ambiguousiy divine.

Our seekings are short-lived experiments

Made by a wordless and inscrutable Power

Testing its issues from inconscient Night

To meet its luminous self of Truth and Bliss.

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It peers at the Real through the apparent form;

It labours in our mortal mind and sense;

Amid the figures of the Ignorance,

It seeks the truth to which ail figures point;

It looks for the source of Light with vision's lamp;

It works to find the doer of ail works,

All is not here a blinded Nature's task:

A Word, a Wisdom watches us from on high,

An Eye unseen in the unseeing vast;

There is an Influence from a Light above,

Our lives a deeper mystery than we have dreamed;

Our minds are starters in the race to God,

Our souls deputed selves bf the Supreme.

Across the cosmic field through narrow lanes '

Asking a scanty dole from Fortune's hands

And garbed in beggar's robes there walks the One.

Even in the theatre of these small lives

Behind the act a secret sweetness breathes,

An urge of miniature divinity.

A mystic passion from the wells of God

Flows through the guarded spaces of the soul;

A force that helps, supports the suffering earth,

An unseen nearness and a hidden joy.

There are muffled throbs of laughter's undertones,

the murmur of an occult happiness,

An exultation in the depths of sleep,

A heart of bliss within a world of pain.

An Infant nursed on Nature's covert breast,

An Infant playing in the magic woods,

Fluting to rapture by the Spirit's streams

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Awaits the hour when we shall turn to his call.

In this investiture of fleshly life

A soul that is a spark of God survives

And sometimes it breaks through the sordid screen

And kindles a fire that makes us half-divine.

In our body's cells there sits a hidden Power

That sees the unseen and plans eternity,

Our smallest parts have room for deepest needs;

There too the golden Messengers can come:

A door is out in the mud wall of self;

Across the lowly threshold with bowed heads

Angels of ecstasy and self-giving pass,

And lodged in an inner sanctuary of dream

the makers of the image of deity live.

Pity is there and fire-winged sacrifice,

And flashes of sympathy and tenderness

Cast heaven-lights from the heart's secluded shrine.

A work is done in the deep silences;

A glory and wonder of spiritual sense,

Inhabit the mystery of the untouched gulfs;

Lulled by Time's beats eternity sleeps in us.

In the sealed hermetric heart, the happy core,

Unmoved behind this outer shape of death

the eternal Entity prepares within

Its matter of divine felicity,

Its reign of heavenly phenomenon.

Even in our sceptic mind of ignorance

A foresight comes of some immense release,

Our will lifts towards it slow and shaping hands.

Each part in us desires its absolute:

Our thoughts covet the everlasting Light,

Our strength derives from an omnipotent Force,

And since from a veiled God-joy the worlds were made

And since eternal beauty asks for form

Even here where ail is made of being's dust,

Our hearts are captured by ensnaring shapes,

Our very senses blindly seek for bliss.

Our error crucifies Reality

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To force its birth and divine body here,

Compelling, incarnate in a human form

And breathing in limbs this one can touch and clasp,

Its knowledge to rescue ancient Ignorance,

Its saviour light the inconscient universe.

And when that greater Self comes sea-like down

To fill this image of our transience,

Ail shall be captured by delight, transformed:

In waves of undreamed ecstasy shall roll

And climb to summits beyond mind's half-sleep;

Our hearts we must inform with heavenly strength,

Calling the powers of a bright hemisphere,

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We shall shed the discredit of our mortal state,

     Adventuring once more in the natal mist

Of glimmering points in a vague immensity;

A bodiless murmur travelled at his side

In the wounded gloom complaining against light.

A huge obstruction its immobile heart,

the watching opacity multiplied as he moved

Its hostile mass of dead and staring eyes,

the darkness glimmered like a dying torch.

Around him an extinguished phantom glare

Peopled with shadowy and misleading shapes

The vague Inconscients dark and measureless cave.

His only sunlight was his spirit's flame.

END OF CANTO FIVE

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