A STILLNESS absolute, incommunicable,

Meets the sheer self-discovery of the soul;

A wall of stillness shuts it from the world,

Self's vast spiritual silence occupies space;

Only the Inconceivable is left,

Only the Nameless without space and time:

Abolished is the burdening need of life:

Thought falls from us, we cease from joy and grief;

The ego is dead; we are free from being and care,

Thou hast leaped into a glad divine abyss;

But where hast thou thrown self's mission and self's power?

And stared into thy eyes and killed thy heart:

But where is the Lover's everlasting Yes,

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The symboled OM, the great assenting Word,

The mighty shadow of the omniscient Lord;

But who has lifted up the veil of light

Unsolved the riddle of the unfinished Play;

The cosmic Player laughs within his mask,

And still the last inviolate secret hides

Behind the human glory of a Form,

Behind the gold eidolon of a Name.

A large white line has figured as a goal,

But far beyond the ineffable suntracks blaze.

What seemed the source and end was a wide gate,

A last bare step into eternity.

An eye has opened upon timelessness,

Infinity takes back the forms it gave,

And through God's darkness or his naked light

His million rays return into the Sun.

There is a zero sign of the Supreme;

Nature left nude and still uncovers God.

But in her grandiose nothingness all is there:

When her strong garbs are torn away from us,

In absolute silence sleeps an absolute Power.

And in the ray reveal the parent sun:

It can make the world a vessel of Spirit's force,

It can fashion in the clay God's perfect shape.

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To free the self is but one radiant pace,

     Even while he stood on being's naked edge

Was felt in the unconscious universe;

It made the breath a happy mystery

And brought a love sustaining pain with joy;

A love that bore the cross of pain with joy,

Eudaemonised the sorrow of the world,

Made happy the weight of long unending Time,

The secret caught of God's felicity.

Affirming in life a hidden ecstasy

It held the spirit to its miraculous course;

Carrying immortal values to the hours

It justified the labour of the suns.

For one was there supreme behind the God.

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A Mother Might brooded upon the world;

A Consciousness revealed its marvellous front

Transcending all that is, denying none:

Imperishable above our fallen heads

The covering Nescience was unmasked and slain;

Its mind of error was stripped off from things

Knowledge and Ignorance could strive no more;

No longer could the titan Opposites,

Antagonist poles of the world's artifice,

Impose the illusion of their twofold screen

Throwing their figures between us and her.

The Wisdom was near, disguised by its own works,

Of which the darkened universe is the robe.

No more existence seemed an aimless fall,

Extinction was no more the sole release.

The hidden Word was found, the long-sought clue,

Revealed was the meaning of our spirit's birth,

Condemned to an imperfect body and mind,

In the inconscience of material things

And the indignity of mortal life.

A Heart was felt in the spaces wide and bare,

A burning Love from white spiritual founts

Annulled the sorrow of the ignorant depths;

Suffering was lost in her immortal smile.

A Life from beyond grew conqueror here of Death;

To err no more was natural to mind;

Wrong could not come where all was light and love.

The Formless and the Formed were joined in her.

Immensity was exceeded by a look,

A Face revealed the crowded Infinite.

Incarnating inexpressibly in her limbs

The boundless joy the blind world-forces seek,

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Her body of beauty mooned the seas of bliss.

In their slow round the cycles, turn to her call;

Alone her hands can change Time's dragon base.

Hers is the mystery the Night conceals;

The spirit's alchemist energy is hers;

She is the golden bridge, the wonderful fire.

A power of silence in the depths of God;

She is the Force, the inevitable Word,

All contraries prepare her harmony;

Towards her our knowledge climbs, our passion gropes,

In her miraculous rapture we shall dwell,

Her clasp will turn to ecstasy our pain.

Our self shall be one self with all through her.

In her confirmed because transformed in her,

Our life shall find in its fulfilled response

Above, the boundless hushed beatitudes,

Below, the wonder of the embrace divine.

This known as in a thunder-flash of God,

The rapture of things eternal filled his limbs;

Amazement fell upon his ravished sense;

His spirit was caught in her intolerant flame.

All aims in her were lost, then found in her;

His base was gathered into one pointing spire.

     Thus was a seed cast into endless Time.

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A moment sees, the ages toil to express.

All he had done was to prepare a field;

His small beginnings asked for a mighty end:

For all that he had been must now new-shape

But now his being was too wide for self;

His heart's demand had grown immeasurable:

His single freedom could not satisfy,

To break earth's seal of ignorance and death;

His nature's might seemed now an infant's grasp;

Heaven is too high for outstretched hands to seize.

This Light comes not by struggle or by thought;

In the mind's silence the Transcendent acts

And the hushed heart hears the unuttered Word.

A vast surrender was his only strength.

A Power that lives upon the heights must act,

Bring into life's closed room the Immortal's air

And fill the finite with the Infinite.

All that denies must be torn out and slain

And crushed the many longings for whose sake

We lose the One for whom our lives were made.

Now other claims had hushed in him their cry:

Only he longed to draw her presence and power

Into his heart and mind and breathing frame;

Only he yearned to call for ever down

END OF CANTO TWO

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