Who art thou that camest

Who art thou that camest

Bearing the occult Name,

Wings of regal darkness,

Eyes of an unborn flame?

Like the august uprising

Of a forgotten sun

Out of the caverned midnight

Fire-trails of wonder run.

Captured the heart renouncing

Tautness of passion-worn strings

Allows the wide-wayed sweetness

Of free supernal things.

One

The mind of a man

And the mind in a stone.

But the Mind of minds

Sits bright and alone.

The life of a tree,

The life in a clod,

To the Life of all life

That men call God.

The heart of a beast

And a seraph's heart,  —

But the Heart of all hearts

Throbs ever apart.

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A body beloved

And a body slain.

Yet both were the bodies

Of One in their pain.

In a mounting as of sea-tides

In a mounting as of sea-tides, in a rippling as of invisible waters,

On a cry in me my soul is uplifted, in a passion of my nature

My heart climbs up towards thee, O unimaginable Wonder and Resplendence,

In a striving for the caress of thy Light and for the embrace of thy Presence.

If once given were but a touch of thy feet on the thrilled bosom of my longing,

But a glance of thy eyes mingling with mine in the recesses and the silence,

Such a rapture would envelop me, such a fire of transfiguring effulgence,

I could never again be as a man upon this earth, but one immortal.

For my mind would be dissolved in a sun-glory of God-vision and of knowledge,

And my heart would be made suddenly more pure and illumined and self-tranquil,

And my nerves and my body would transmute into an ethereal divineness,

A fit vesture for the godhead thou buildst in me, for the immortal thy adorer.

O thou Life of my life and the unseen heart of its ecstasy and its beating,

O Face that was disclosed in the beginning of the worlds amid the immenseness,

Let thy Flame-wisdom leap down upon the coilings of our python inconscience,

Let the Love-wine be poured out in thy chalice, let me be drunk with it for ever.

I shall meet thee in the ocean of thy stillness, in the ether of thy splendour,

Thy Force shall be in my veins like the ichor in the Unaging who are deathless;

My soul shall be as one breath with thy soul and thy infinity around thee,

And shall quiver with the vision of thy beauty and the marvel of thy sweetness.

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Krishna

(Cretics)

O immense Light and thou, O spirit-wide boundless Space,

Whom have you clasped and hid, deathless limbs, gloried face?

Vainly lie Space and Time, "Void are we, there is none."

Vainly strive Self and World crying "I, I alone."

One is there, Self of self, Soul of Space, Fount of Time,

Heart of hearts, Mind of minds, He alone sits, sublime.

Oh no void Absolute self-absorbed, splendid, mute,

Hands that clasp hold and red lips that kiss blow His flute.

All He loves, all He moves, all are His, all are He;

Many limbs sate His whims, bear His sweet ecstasy.

Two in One, Two who know difference rich in sense,

Two to clasp, One to be, this His strange mystery.

The Cosmic Man

I look across the world and no horizon walls my gaze;

I see Tokyo and Paris and New York,

I see the bombs bursting on Barcelona and on Canton streets.

Man's numberless misdeeds and small good deeds take place within my single self;

I am the beast he slays, the bird he feeds and saves;

The thoughts of unknown minds exalt me with their thrill;

I carry the sorrow of millions in my lonely breast.

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The Island Sun

I have sailed the golden ocean

And crossed the silver bar;

I have reached the Sun of knowledge,

The earth-self's midnight star.

Its fields of flaming vision,

Its mountains of bare might,

Its peaks of fiery rapture,

Its air of absolute light,

Its seas of self-oblivion,

Its vales of Titan rest,

Became my soul's dominion,

Its Island of the Blest.

Alone with God and silence,

Timeless it lived in Time;

Life was His fugue of music,

Thought was Truth's ardent rhyme.

The Light was still around me

When I came back to earth

Bringing the Immortal's knowledge

Into man's cave of birth.

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Despair on the Staircase

Mute stands she, lonely on the topmost stair,

An image of magnificent despair;

The grandeur of a sorrowful surmise

Wakes in the largeness of her glorious eyes.

In her beauty's dumb significant pose I find

The tragedy of her mysterious mind.

Yet is she stately, grandiose, full of grace.

A musing mask is her immobile face.

Her tail is up like an unconquered flag;

Its dignity knows not the right to wag.

An animal creature wonderfully human,

A charm and miracle of fur-footed Brahman,

Whether she is spirit, woman or a cat,

Is now the problem I am wondering at.

The Dwarf Napoleon

(Hitler. October 1939)

Behold, by Maya's fantasy of will

A violent miracle takes sudden birth,

The real grows one with the incredible.

In the control of her magician wand

The small achieves things great, the base things grand.

This puny creature would bestride the earth

Even as the immense colossus of the past.

Napoleon's mind was swift and bold and vast,

His heart was calm and stormy like the sea,

His will dynamic in its grip and clasp.

His eye could hold a world within its grasp

And see the great and small things sovereignly.

A movement of gigantic depth and scope

He seized and gave coherence to its hope.

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Far other this creature of a nether clay,

Void of all grandeur, like a gnome at play,

Iron and mud his nature's mingled stuff,

A little limited visionary brain

Cunning and skilful in its narrow vein,

A sentimental egoist poor and rough,

Whose heart was never sweet and fresh and young,

A headlong spirit driven by hopes and fears,

Intense neurotic with his shouts and tears,

Violent and cruel, devil, child and brute,

This screaming orator with his strident tongue,

This prophet of a scanty fixed idea,

Plays now the leader of our human march;

His might shall build the future's triumph arch.

Now is the world for his eating a ripe fruit.

His shadow falls from London to Corea.

Cities and nations crumble in his course.

A terror holds the peoples in its grip:

World-destiny waits upon that foaming lip.

A Titan Power upholds this pigmy man,

The crude dwarf instrument of a mighty Force.

Hater of the free spirit's joy and light,

Made only of strength and skill and giant might,

A Will to trample humanity into clay

And unify earth beneath one iron sway,

Insists upon its fierce enormous plan.

Trampling man's mind and will into one mould

Docile and facile in a dreadful hold,

It cries its demon slogans to the crowd.

But if its tenebrous empire were allowed,

That mastery would prepare the dismal hour

When the Inconscient shall regain its right,

And man who emerged as Nature's conscious power,

Shall sink into the deep original night

Sharing like all her forms that went before

The doom of the mammoth and the dinosaur.

It is the shadow of the Titan's robe

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That looms across the panic-stricken globe.

In his high villa on the fatal hill

Alone he listens to that sovereign Voice,

Dictator of his action's sudden choice,

The tiger leap of a demoniac skill.

An energy his body cannot invest,  —

Too small and human for that dreadful guest,

A tortured channel, not a happy vessel,  —

Drives him to think and act and cry and wrestle.

Thus driven he must stride on conquering all,

Threatening and clamouring, brutal, invincible,

Until he meets upon his storm-swept road

A greater devil  —  or thunderstroke of God.

The Children of Wotan

1940

"Where is the end of your armoured march, O children of Wotan?

Earth shudders with fear at your tread, the death-flame laughs in your eyes."

"We have seen the sign of Thor and the hammer of new creation,

A seed of blood on the soil, a flower of blood in the skies.

We march to make of earth a hell and call it heaven.

The heart of mankind we have smitten with the whip of the sorrows seven;

The Mother of God lies bleeding in our black and gold sunrise."

"I hear the cry of a broken world, O children of Wotan."

"Question the volcano when it burns, chide the fire and bitumen!

Suffering is the food of our strength and torture the bliss of our entrails.

We are pitiless, mighty and glad, the gods fear our laughter inhuman.

Our hearts are heroic and hard; we wear the belt of Orion:

Our will has the edge of the thunderbolt, our acts the claws of the lion.

We rejoice in the pain we create as a man in the kiss of a woman."

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"Have you seen your fate in the scales of God, O children of Wotan,

And the tail of the Dragon lashing the foam in far-off seas?"

"We mock at God, we have silenced the mutter of priests at his altar.

Our leader is master of Fate, medium of her mysteries.

We have made the mind a cypher, we have strangled Thought with a cord;

Dead now are pity and honour, strength only is Nature's lord.

We build a new world-order; our bombs shout Wotan's peace.

"We are the javelins of Destiny, we are the children of Wotan,

We are the human Titans, the supermen dreamed by the sage.

A cross of the beast and demoniac with the godhead of power and will,

We were born in humanity's sunset, to the Night is our pilgrimage.

On the bodies of perishing nations, mid the cry of the cataclysm coming,

To a presto of bomb and shell and the aeroplane's fatal humming,

We march, lit by Truth's death-pyre, to the world's satanic age."

The Mother of God

A conscious and eternal Power is here

Behind unhappiness and mortal birth

And the error of Thought and blundering trudge of Time.

The mother of God, his sister and his spouse,

Daughter of his wisdom, of his strength the mate,

She has leapt from the Transcendent's secret breast

To build her rainbow worlds of mind and life.

Between the superconscient absolute Light

And the Inconscient's vast unthinking toil,

In the rolling and routine of Matter's sleep

And the somnambulist motion of the stars

She forces on the cold unwilling Void

Her adventure of life, the passionate dreams of her heart.

Amid the work of darker Powers she is here

To heal the evils and mistakes of Space

And change the tragedy of the ignorant world

Into a Divine Comedy of joy

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And the laughter and the rapture of God's bliss.

The Mother of God is mother of our souls;

We are the partners of his birth in Time,

Inheritors we share his eternity.

The End?

Is this the end of all that we have been,

And all we did or dreamed,  —

A name unremembered and a form undone,  —

Is this the end?

A body rotting under a slab of stone

Or turned to ash in fire,

A mind dissolved, lost its forgotten thoughts,  —

Is this the end?

Our little hours that were and are no more,

Our passions once so high

Dying mocked by the still earth and calm sunshine,  —

Is this the end?

Our yearnings for the human Godward climb

Passing to other hearts

Deceived, while sinks towards death and hell the world,  —

Is this the end?

Fallen is the harp; shattered it lies and mute;

Is the unseen player dead?

Because the tree is felled where the bird sang,

Must the song too hush?

One in the mind who planned and willed and thought,

Worked to reshape earth's fate,

One in the heart who loved and yearned and hoped,

Does he too end?

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The Immortal in the mortal is his Name;

An artist Godhead here

Ever remoulds himself in diviner shapes,

Unwilling to cease

Till all is done for which the stars were made,

Till the heart discovers God

And soul knows itself. And even then

There is no end.

Silence is all

1

Silence is all, say the sages.

Silence watches the work of the ages;

In the book of Silence the cosmic Scribe has written his cosmic pages:

Silence is all, say the sages.

2

What then of the word, O speaker?

What then of the thought, O thinker?

Thought is the wine of the soul and the word is the beaker;

Life is the banquet-table as the soul of the sage is the drinker.

3

What of the wine, O mortal?

I am drunk with the wine as I sit at Wisdom's portal,

Waiting for the Light beyond thought and the Word immortal.

Long I sit in vain at Wisdom's portal.

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4

How shalt thou know the Word when it comes, O seeker?

How shalt thou know the Light when it breaks, O witness?

I shall hear the voice of the God within me and grow wiser and meeker;

I shall be the tree that takes in the light as its food, I shall drink its nectar of sweetness.

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