THEN could he see the hidden heart of Night:

The labour of its stark unconsciousness

A spiritless blank Infinity was there;

A Nature that denied the eternal Truth

There was no sovereign Guest, no witness Light;

Unhelped it would create its own bleak world.

Its mindless sentience quivered with fierce conceits;

Engendering a brute principle of life

Vast minds and lives without a spirit within:

Impatient architects of error's house,

Identified their sight with its blind stare:

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Accustomed to the unnatural dark, they saw

Unreality made real and conscious Night.

A violent, fierce and formidable world,

An ancient womb of huge calamitous dreams,

Coiled like a larva in the obscurity

That keeps it from the spear-points of Heaven's stars.

It was the gate of a false Infinite,

An eternity of disastrous absolutes,

An immense negation of spiritual things.

All once self-luminous in the spirit's sphere

Turned now into their own dark contraries:

Being collapsed into a pointless void

That yet was a zero parent of the worlds;

Inconscience swallowing up the cosmic Mind

Produced a universe from its lethal sleep;

Bliss into black coma fallen, insensible,

Engrafted his hypocrite blooms on native ill.

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All high things served their nether opposite:

The forms of Gods sustained a demon cult;

Heaven's face became a mask and snare of Hell.

In an enormous action's writhen core

He saw a shape illimitable and vague

     When nothing was save Matter without soul

Then Life first touched the insensible Abyss;

Awaking the stark Void to hope and grief

Her pallid beam smote the unfathomed Night .

In which God hid himself from his own view.

In all things she sought their slumbering mystic truth,

The unspoken Word that inspires unconscious forms;

She groped in his deeps for an invisible Law,

Fumbled in the dim subconscient for his mind

And strove to find a way for spirit to be.

But from the Night another answer came.

A seed was in that nether matrix cast,

A dumb unprobed husk of perverted truth,

A cell of an insentient infinite.

A monstrous birth prepared its cosmic form

In Nature's titan embryo. Ignorance.

Then in a fatal and stupendous hour

Something that sprang from the stark' Inconscient's sleep

Unwillingly begotten by the mute Void,

Lifted its ominous head against the stars;

Overshadowing earth with its huge body of Doom

It chilled the heavens with the menace of a face.

A nameless Power, a shadowy Will arose

Immense and alien to our universe.

In the inconceivable Purpose none can gauge

A vast Non-Being robed itself with shape,

The boundless Nescience of the unconscious depths

Covered eternity with Nothingness.

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A seeking Mind replaced the seeing Soul:

Life grew into a huge and hungry death,

A shadow fell across the simple Ray:

Obscured was the Truth-light in the cavern heart

Is laid on the mystic evolution's curve:

The tortuous line of her deceiving mind

The Gods see not and man is impotent;

Oppressing the God-spark within the soul

She forces back to the beast the human fall.

Yet in her formidable instinctive mind

She feels the One grow in the heart of Time

And sees the Immortal shine through the human mould.

Alarmed for her rule and full of fear and rage

She prowls around each light that gleams through the dark

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Casting its ray from the Spirit's lonely tent,

Hoping to enter with fierce stealth tread

And in the cradle slay the divine Child .

Incalculable are her strength and ruse,

Her touch is a fascination and a death;

She kills her victim with his own delight;

Even Good she makes a hook to drag to Hell.

For her the world runs to its agony.

Often the pilgrim on the Eternal's road

Ill-lit from clouds by the pale moon of Mind,

Or in devious by-ways wandering alone,

Or lost in deserts where no path is seen,

Falls overpowered by her lion leap,

A conquered captive under her dreadful paws.

Intoxicated by a burning breath

And amorous groan of a destroying mouth,

Once a companion of the sacred Fire,

The mortal perishes to God and Light,

An adversary governs heart and brain,

A Nature hostile to the Mother-force.

The self of life yields up its instruments

To Titan and demoniac agencies

That aggrandise earth-nature and disframe:

A cowled fifth-columnist is now thought's guide;

His subtle defeatist murmur slays the faith

And, lodged in the breast or whispering from outside,

A lying inspiration fell and dark

A new order substitutes for the divine.

A silence falls upon the spirit's heights,

From the veiled sanctuary the God retires,

Empty and cold is the chamber of the Bride;

The golden Nimbus now is seen no more,

A name is struck from the recording book;

A flame that sang in Heaven sinks quenched and mute,

When forfeited is the divine element

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And only a mind and body live to die.

     For terrible agencies the Spirit allows

His wisdom's oracles are made our bonds;

The doors of God they have locked with keys of creed

And intercept the caravans of Light;

Wherever the Gods act, they intervene.

A yoke is laid upon the world's dim heart;

Masked are its beats from the supernal Bliss,

Always the dark Adventurers seem to win;

Nature they fill with evil's institutes,

And load the dice of Doom with wizard lies;

The world's shrines they have occupied, usurped its thrones.

Invoking their dreadful presence in his breast:

Attributing to them the awful Name

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And summons the unseen communion's act,

Calm and secure in sunless privacy:

No wandering ray of Heaven can enter there.

Armoured, protected by their lethal masks,

As in a studio of creative Death

The giant sons of Darkness sit and plan

The. drama of the earth, their tragic stage.

All who would raise the fallen world must come

Under the dangerous arches of their power;

For even the radiant children of the gods

To darken their privilege is and dreadful right.

None can reach heaven who has not passed through hell.

     This too the traveller of the worlds must dare.

Peopled by souls who never had tasted bliss;

Ignorant like men born blind who know not light,

They could equate worst ill with highest good,

Virtue was to their eyes a face of sin

And evil and misery were their natural state.

A dire administration's penal code

Making of grief and pain the common law,

Decreeing universal joylessness

Had changed life into a stoic sacrament

And torture into a daily festival.

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An act was passed to chastise happiness;

Laughter and pleasure were banned as deadly sins:

A questionless mind was ranked as wise content,

A dull heart's silent apathy as peace:

Sleep was not there, torpor was the sole rest,

Ever he deeper probed that kingdom of pain;

Around him grew the terror of a world

Of agony followed by worse agony,

And in the terror a great wicked joy

Glad of one's own and others' calamity.

There thought and life were a long punishment,

The breath a burden and all hope a scourge,

The body a field of torment, a massed unease,

Repose was a waiting between pang and pang.

This was the law of things none dreamed to change:

A hard sombre heart, a harsh unsmiling mind

Rejected happiness like a cloying sweet;

Tranquillity was a tedium and ennui:

Only by suffering life grew colourful;

It needed the spice of pain, the salt of tears.

If one could cease to be, all would be well;

Else only fierce sensations gave some zest:

A fury of jealousy burning the gnawed heart,

The sting of murderous spite and hate and lust,

The whisper that lures to the pit and treachery's stroke

Threw vivid spots on the dull aching hours,

To watch the drama of infelicity,

The writhing of creatures under the harrow of doom

And sorrow's tragic gaze into the night

And horror and the hammering heart of fear

Were the ingredients in Time's heavy cup

That pleased and helped to enjoy its bitter taste.

Of such fierce stuff was made up life's long hell:

These were the threads of the dark spider's web

In which the soul was caught, quivering and wrapt;

This was religion, this was Nature's rule.

In a fell chapel of iniquity

To worship a black pitiless image of Power

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Kneeling one must cross hard-hearted stony courts,

A pavement like a floor of evil fate.

Each stone was a keen edge of ruthless force

And glued with the chilled blood from tortured breasts;

The dry gnarled trees stood up like dying men

A dateless sovereignty of terror and gloom:

This took the figure of a darkened God

Hatred with others' sorrow as its feast;

A bitter rictus curled the suffering mouth;

A tragic cruelty saw its ominous chance.

Hate was the black archangel of that realm;

It glowed, a sombre jewel in the heart

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Or they made themselves a fateful prison wall

Where men condemned wake through the creeping hours

Counted by the tollings of an ominous bell.

An evil environment worsened evil souls:

All things were conscious there and all perverse.

Its ancient privileged right and absolute force:

In Night he plunged to know her dreadful heart,

Its anguished gulfs opened in his own breast;

He listened to clamours of its crowded pain,

The heart-beats of its fatal loneliness.

Above was a chill deaf eternity.

In vague tremendous passages of Doom

He heard the goblin voice that guides to slay,

And faced the enchantments of the demon Sign,

And traversed the ambush of the opponent Snake.

In menacing tracts, in tortured solitudes

Companionless he roamed through desolate ways

Where the red Wolf waits by the fordless stream

And Death's black eagles scream to the precipice,

And met the hounds of bale who hunt men's hearts

Baying across the veldts of Destiny,

In footless battlefields of the Abyss

Fought shadowy combats in mute eyeless depths,

Assaults of Hell endured and Titan strokes

And bore the fierce inner wounds that are slow to heal.

A prisoner of a hooded magic Force,

Captured and trailed in Falsehood's lethal net

And often strangled in the noose of grief,

Or cast on the grim morass of swallowing doubt,

Or shut into pits of error and despair,

He drank her poison draughts till none was left.

In a world where neither hope nor joy could come

The ordeal he suffered of evil's absolute reign,

Yet kept intact his spirit's radiant truth.

Incapable of motion or of force,

In Matter's blank denial gaoled and blind,

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Pinned to the black inertia of our base

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And the articles of the bound soul's contract,

His swift intuitive calligraphy;

Earth's forms were made his divine documents,

The wisdom embodied mind could not reveal,

Inconscience chased from the world's voiceless breast,

Transfigured were the fixed schemes of reasoning Thought.

Arousing consciousness in things inert,

He imposed upon dark atom and dumb mass

The diamond script of the Imperishable,

Inscribed on the dim heart of fallen things

A paean-song of the free Infinite

And the Name, foundation of eternity,

And traced on the awake exultant cells

In the ideographs of the Ineffable

The lyric of the love that waits through Time

And the mystic volume of the Book of Bliss

And the message of the superconscient Fire.

Then Life beat pure in the corporeal frame;

The infernal Gleam died and could slay no more.

And sorrow could live no more in Nature's breast:

Division ceased to be, for God was there.

END OF CANTO BIGHT

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