These clamours still;

For I would hear the eternal voice and know

The eternal Will.

This brilliant show

Cumbering the threshold of eternity

Dispel,  —  bestow

The undimmed eye,

The heart grown young and clear. Rebuke in me

These hopes that cry

So deafeningly,

Remove my sullied centuries, restore

My purity.

O hidden door

Of Knowledge, open! Strength, fulfil thyself!

Love, outpour!

Rebirth

Not soon is God's delight in us completed,

Nor with one life we end;

Termlessly in us are our spirits seated,

A termless joy intend.

Our souls and heaven are of an equal stature

And have a dateless birth;

The unending seed, the infinite mould of Nature,

They were not made on earth,

Nor to the earth do they bequeath their ashes,

But in themselves they last.

An endless future brims beneath thy lashes,

Child of an endless past.

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Old memories come to us, old dreams invade us,

Lost people we have known,

Fictions and pictures; but their frames evade us,  —

They stand out bare, alone.

Yet all we dream and hope are memories treasured,

Are forecasts we misspell,

But of what life or scene he who has measured

The boundless heavens can tell.

Time is a strong convention; future and present

Were living in the past;

They are one image that our wills complaisant

Into three schemes have cast.

Our past that we forget, is with us deathless,

Our births and later end

Already accomplished. To a summit breathless

Sometimes our souls ascend,

Whence the mind comes back helped; for there emerges

The ocean vast of Time

Spread out before us with its infinite surges,

Its symphonies sublime;

And even from this veil of mind the spirit

Looks out sometimes and sees

The bygone aeons that our lives inherit,

The unborn centuries:

It sees wave-trampled realms expel the Ocean,  —

From the vague depths uphurled

Where now Himâloy  stands, the flood's huge motion

Sees measuring half the world;

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Or else the web behind us is unravelled

And on its threads we gaze,  —

Past motions of the stars, scenes long since travelled

In Time's far-backward days.

The Triumph-Song of Trishuncou

I shall not die.

Although this body, when the spirit tires

Of its cramped residence, shall feed the fires,

My house consumes, not I.

Leaving that case

I find out ample and ethereal room.

My spirit shall avoid the hungry tomb,

Deceiving death's embrace.

Night shall contain

The sun in its cold depths; Time too must cease;

The stars that labour shall have their release.

I cease not, I remain.

Ere the first seeds

Were sown on earth, I was already old,

And when now unborn planets shall grow cold

My history proceeds.

I am the light

In stars, the strength of lions and the joy

Of mornings; I am man and maid and boy,

Protean, infinite.

I am a tree

That stands out singly from the infinite blue;

I am the quiet falling of the dew

And am the unmeasured sea.

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I hold the sky

Together and upbear the teeming earth.

I was the eternal thinker at my birth

And shall be, though I die.

Life and Death

Life, death,  —  death, life; the words have led for ages

Our thought and consciousness and firmly seemed

Two opposites; but now long-hidden pages

Are opened, liberating truths undreamed.

Life only is, or death is life disguised,  —

Life a short death until by life we are surprised.

Evening

A golden evening, when the thoughtful sun

Rejects its usual pomp in going, trees

That bend down to their green companion

And fruitful mother, vaguely whispering,  —  these

And a wide silent sea. Such hour is nearest God,  —

Rich like old age when the long ways have all been trod.

Parabrahman

These wanderings of the suns, these stars at play

In the due measure that they chose of old,

Nor only these, but all the immense array

Of objects that long Time, far Space can hold,

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Are divine moments. They are thoughts that form,

They are vision in the Self of things august

And therefore grandly real. Rule and norm

Are processes that they themselves adjust.

The Self of things is not their outward view,

A Force within decides. That Force is He;

His movement is the shape of things we knew,

Movement of Thought is Space and Time. A free

And sovereign master of His world within,

He is not bound by what He does or makes,

He is not bound by virtue or by sin,

Awake who sleeps and when He sleeps awakes.

He is not bound by waking or by sleep;

He is not bound by anything at all.

Laws are that He may conquer them. To creep

Or soar is at His will, to rise or fall.

One from of old possessed Himself above

Who was not anyone nor had a form,

Nor yet was formless. Neither hate nor love

Could limit His perfection, peace nor storm.

He is, we cannot say; for Nothing too

Is His conception of Himself unguessed.

He dawns upon us and we would pursue,

But who has found Him or what arms possessed?

He is not anything, yet all is He;

He is not all but far exceeds that scope.

Both Time and Timelessness sink in that sea:

Time is a wave and Space a wandering drop.

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Within Himself He shadowed Being forth,

Which is a younger birth, a veil He chose

To half-conceal Him, Knowledge, nothing worth

Save to have glimpses of its mighty cause,

And high Delight, a spirit infinite,

That is the fountain of this glorious world,

Delight that labours in its opposite,

Faints in the rose and on the rack is curled.

This was the triune playground that He made

And One there sports awhile. He plucks His flowers

And by His bees is stung; He is dismayed,

Flees from Himself or has His sullen hours.

The Almighty One knew labour, failure, strife;

Knowledge forgot divined itself again:

He made an eager death and called it life,

He stung Himself with bliss and called it pain.

God

Thou who pervadest all the worlds below,

Yet sitst above,

Master of all who work and rule and know,

Servant of Love!

Thou who disdainest not the worm to be

Nor even the clod,

Therefore we know by that humility

That thou art God.

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The Fear of Death

Death wanders through our lives at will, sweet Death

Is busy with each intake of our breath.

Why do you fear her? Lo, her laughing face

All rosy with the light of jocund grace!

A kind and lovely maiden culling flowers

In a sweet garden fresh with vernal showers,

This is the thing you fear, young portress bright

Who opens to our souls the worlds of light.

Is it because the twisted stem must feel

Pain when the tenderest hands its glory steal?

Is it because the flowerless stalk droops dull

And ghastly now that was so beautiful?

Or is it the opening portal's horrid jar

That shakes you, feeble souls of courage bare?

Death is but changing of our robes to wait

In wedding garments at the Eternal's gate.

Seasons

Day and night begin, you tell me,

When the sun may choose to set or rise.

Well, it may be; but for me their changing

Is determined only by her eyes.

Summer, spring, the fruitless winter

Hinge, you say, upon the heavenly sun?

Oh, but I have known a yearlong winter!

Spring was by her careless smiles begun.

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