Across the path of the divine Event.
The huge foreboding mind of Night, alone
In her unlit temple of eternity,
Lay stretched immobile upon Silence' marge.
Almost one felt, opaque, impenetrable,
In the sombre symbol of her eyeless muse
The abysm of the unbodied Infinite;
A fathomless zero occupied the world.
-Book I, Canto I
The proud and conscious wideness and the bliss
She had brought with her into the human form,
The calm delight that weds one soul to all,
The key to the flaming doors of ecstasy.
-Book I, Canto I
A prodigal of her rich divinity,
Her self and all she was she had lent to men,
Hoping her greater being to implant
And in their body's lives acclimatise
That heaven might native grow on mortal soil.
-Book I, Canto I
Even her humanity was half divine:
Her spirit opened to the Spirit in all,
Her nature felt all Nature as its own.
Apart, living within, all lives she bore;
Aloof, she carried in herself the world.
-Book I, Canto I
A point she had reached where life must be in vain
Or, in her unborn element awake,
Her will must cancel her body's destiny.
Book I, Canto II
A once living story has prepared and made
Our present fate, child of past energies.
The fixity of the cosmic sequences
Fastened with hidden inevitable links
She must disrupt, dislodge by her soul's force
Her past, a block on the immortal's road,
Make a raised ground and shape anew her fate.
Book I, Canto II
Her being must confront the formless Cause,
Against the universe weigh the single self.
Book I, Canto II
No helper had she save the Strength within;
There was no witness of terrestrial eyes;
The Gods above and the Nature sole below
Were the spectators of that mighty strife.
Book I, Canto II
The white-fire dragon bird of endless bliss
Drifting with burning wings above her days.
-Book I, Canto II
For this she had accepted mortal breath;
To wrestle with the Shadow she had come
And must confront the riddle of man's birth
And life's brief struggle in dumb Matter's night.
Whether to bear with Ignorance and Death
Or hew the ways of Immortality,
To win or lose the godlike game for man,
Was her soul's issue thrown with Destiny's dice.
But not to submit and suffer was she born;
To lead, to deliver was her glorious part.
-Book I, Canto II
This slow and strange uneasy compromise
Of limiting Nature with a limitless Soul.
Book I, Canto II
Too high the fire spiritual dare not blaze.
If once it met the intense original Flame,
An answering touch might shatter all measures made
And earth sink down with the weight of the Infinite.
Book I, Canto II
Accustomed to the eternal and the true,
Her being conscious of its divine founts
Asked not from mortal frailty pain's relief,
Patched with failure bargain or compromise.
A work she had to do, a word to speak;
Writing the unfinished story of her soul
In thoughts and actions graved in Nature's book,
She accepted not to close the luminous page,
Cancel her commerce with eternity,
Or set a signature of weak assent
To the brute balance of the world's exchange.
Book I, Canto II
In her own self she found high recourse;
She matched with the iron law her sovereign right:
Her single will opposed the cosmic rule.
Book I, Canto II
She faced the engines of the universe;
A heart stood in the way of driving wheels:
Its giant workings paused in front of a mind,
Its stark conventions met the flame of a soul.
A magic leverage suddenly is caught
That moves the veiled Ineffable's timeless will:
A payer, a master act, a king idea
Can link man's strength to a transcendent Force.
Then miracle is made the common rule,
One mighty deed can change the course of things;
A lonely thought becomes omnipotent.
-Book I, Canto II
The World-Mother now in her arose:
A living choice reversed fate's cold dead turn,
Affirmed the spirit's tread on Circumstance,
Pressed back the senseless dire revolving Wheel
And stopped the mute march of Necessity.
-Book I, Canto II
The Craftsman of the magic stuff of self
Who labours at his high and difficult plan
In the wide workshop of the wonderful world,
Modelled in inward Time his rhythmic parts.
-Book I, Canto III
A world unseen, unknown by outward mind
Appeared in the silent spaces of the soul.
-Book I, Canto III
He lived in the mystic space where thought is born
And will is nursed by an ethereal Power
And fed on the white milk of the Eternal's strengths
Till it grows into the likeness of a god.
-Book I, Canto III
He gazed across the empty stillness
And heard the footsteps of the undreamed Idea
In the far avenues of the Beyond.
-Book I, Canto III
Each time he rose there was a larger poise,
A dwelling on a higher spirit plane;
The Light remained in him a larger space.
-Book I, Canto III
At last was won a firm spiritual poise,
A constant lodging in the Eternal's realm,
A safety in the Silence and the Ray,
A settlement in the Immutable.
His heights of being lived in the still Self;
His mind could rest on a supernal ground
And look down on the magic and the play
Where the God-like child lies on the lap of Night and Dawn
And the Everlasting puts on Time's disguise.
To the Still heights and to the troubled depths
His equal spirit gave its vast assent:
A poised serenity of tranquil strength,
A wide unshaken look on Time's unrest
Faced all experience with unaltered peace.
-Book I, Canto III
Life made its home on the high tops of self;
His soul, mind, heart became a single sun;
Only life's lower reaches remained dim.
-Book I, Canto III
All-vision gathered into a single ray,
As when the eyes stare at an invisible point
Till through the intensity of one luminous spot
An apocalypse of a world of images
Enters into the kingdom of the seer.
-Book I, Canto III
A traveller between summit and abyss
She joined the distant ends, the viewless deeps,
Or streaked along the roads of Heaven and Hell
Pursuing all knowledge like a questing hound.
-Book I, Canto III
All was made wide above, all lit below.
In darkness' core she dug out wells of light,
On the undiscovered depths imposed a form,
Lent a vibrant cry to the unuttered vasts,
And through great shoreless, voiceless, starless breadths
Bore earthward fragments of revealing thought
Hewn from the silence of the Ineffable.
-Book I, Canto III
A vision vision lightened on the viewless heights,
A wisdom illumined from the voiceless depths:
A deeper interpretation greatened Truth
A grand reversal of Night and Day.
-Book I, Canto III
There are Two who are One and play in many worlds;
In knowledge and Ignorance they have spoken and met
And light an darkness are their eyes' interchange:
Our pleasure and pain are their wrestle and embrace,
Our deeds, our hopes are intimate to their tale;
They are married secretly in our thought and life.
-Book I, Canto IV
As one forgetting he searches for himself;
As if he had lost an inner light he seeks:
As a sojourner, lingering amid alien scenes
He journeys to a home he know no more.
His own self's truth he seeks who is the Truth;
He is the Player who became the play,
He is the thinker who became the thought;
He is the many who was the silent One.
In the symbol figures of the cosmic Force
And in her living and inanimate signs
And in her complex tracery of events
He explores the ceaseless miracles of himself
till the thousand fold enigma has been solved
In the single light of an all-witnessing Soul.
Book I, Canto IV
Author and actor with himself as scene,
He moves there as the Soul, as Nature she...
His soul, silent, support the world and her...
Her empire is the cosmos she has built,
He is governed by her subtle and mighty laws.
His consciousness is the babe upon her knees,
Her endless space is the vast playground of his thoughts,
His being a field of her vast experiment.
-Book I, Canto IV
In the wide signless ether of the Self,
In the unchanging Silence white and nude,
Aloof, resplendent, like gold dazzling suns
Veiled by the Ray no mortal eye can hear,
The Spirit's free and absolute potencies
Burned in the solitude of the thoughts of God.
-Book I, Canto IV
A breath comes down from a supernal air ,
A presence is borne, a guiding Light awakes,
A stillness falls upon the instruments:
Fixed sometimes like a marble monument,
Stone-calm, the body is a pedestal
Supporting a figure of eternal Peace.
-Book I, Canto IV
Author and actor with himself as scene,
He moves there as the Soul, as Nature she...
His soul, silent, support the world and her...
Her empire is the cosmos she has built,
He is governed by her subtle and mighty laws.
His consciousness is the babe upon her knees,
Her endless space is the vast playground of his thoughts,
His being a field of her vast experiment.
-Book I, Canto IV
In the wide signless ether of the Self,
In the unchanging Silence white and nude,
Aloof, resplendent, like gold dazzling suns
Veiled by the Ray no mortal eye can hear,
The Spirit's free and absolute potencies
Burned in the solitude of the thoughts of God.
-Book I, Canto IV
A breath comes down from a supernal air ,
A presence is borne, a guiding Light awakes,
A stillness falls upon the instruments:
Fixed sometimes like a marble monument,
Stone-calm, the body is a pedestal
Supporting a figure of eternal Peace.
-Book I, Canto IV
The symbol powers of number and of form,
And the secret code of the history of the world
And Nature's correspondence with the soul
Are written in the mystic heart of life
-Book I, Canto V
Its earthly dialect to God-language change,
In living symbols study Reality
And learn the logic of the Infinite.
The Ideal must be Nature's common truth,
The body illumined with the indwelling God,
A heart and mind feel one with all that is,
A conscious soul live in a conscious world.
-Book I, Canto V
Indifferent to the little outpost Mind.
He dwelt in the wideness of the Eternal's reign.
His being now exceeded thinkable Space,
His boundless thought was neighbor to cosmic sight:
A universal light was in his eyes,
A golden influx flowed through heart and brain;
A force came down into his mortal limbs,
A current form eternal sea of Bliss;
He felt the invasion and the nameless joy.
Aware of his occult omnipotent Source,
Allured by the omniscient Ecstasy,
A living centre of the Illimitable
Widened to equate with the world's circumference,
He turned to his immense spiritual fate.
-Book I, Canto V
So now his spirit shone out wide, blank, pure:
His wakened mind became an empty slate
On which the Universal and Sole could write.
-Book I, Canto V
Beauty and happiness are her native right,
And endless Bliss is her eternal home.
-Book II, Canto III
The unfelt Self within is the guide,
The unknown Self above who is the goal.
-Book II, Canto V
Its earthly dialect to God-language change,
In living symbols study Reality
And learn the logic of the Infinite.
The Ideal must be Nature's common truth,
The body illumined with the indwelling God,
A heart and mind feel one with all that is,
A conscious soul live in a conscious world.
-Book I, Canto V
Indifferent to the little outpost Mind.
He dwelt in the wideness of the Eternal's reign.
His being now exceeded thinkable Space,
His boundless thought was neighbor to cosmic sight:
A universal light was in his eyes,
A golden influx flowed through heart and brain;
A force came down into his mortal limbs,
A current form eternal sea of Bliss;
He felt the invasion and the nameless joy.
Aware of his occult omnipotent Source,
Allured by the omniscient Ecstasy,
A living centre of the Illimitable
Widened to equate with the world's circumference,
He turned to his immense spiritual fate.
-Book I, Canto V
So now his spirit shone out wide, blank, pure:
His wakened mind became an empty slate
On which the Universal and Sole could write.
-Book I, Canto V
Beauty and happiness are her native right,
And endless Bliss is her eternal home.
-Book II, Canto III
The unfelt Self within is the guide,
The unknown Self above who is the goal.
-Book II, Canto V
In its vast ambit of ideal Space
Where beauty and mightiness walk hand in hand,
The Spirit's truths take form as living Gods
And each can build a world in its own right.
-Book II, Canto XI
In gleaming clarities of amethyst air
The chainless and omnipotent Spirit of Mind
Brooded on the blue lotus of the Idea.
The golden supernal sun of timeless Truth
Poured down the mystery of the eternal Ray
Through a silence quivering with the world of Light
On an endless ocean of discovery.
-Book II, Canto XI
Too far thy heavens for me from suffering men.
Imperfect is the joy not shared by all.
-Book II, Canto XI
Where beauty and mightiness walk hand in hand,
The Spirit's truths take form as living Gods
And each can build a world in its own right.
-Book II, Canto XI
In gleaming clarities of amethyst air
The chainless and omnipotent Spirit of Mind
Brooded on the blue lotus of the Idea.
The golden supernal sun of timeless Truth
Poured down the mystery of the eternal Ray
Through a silence quivering with the world of Light
On an endless ocean of discovery.
-Book II, Canto XI
Too far thy heavens for me from suffering men.
Imperfect is the joy not shared by all.
-Book II, Canto XI
All that escaped conception’s narrow noose
Vision descried and gripped; their seeing thoughts
Filled in the blanks left by the seeking sense.
High architects of possibility
And engineers of the impossible,
Mathematicians of the infinitudes
And theoricians of unknowable truths,
They formulate enigma’s postulates
And join the unknown to the apparent worlds.
Acolytes they wait upon the timeless Power,
The cycle of her works investigate;
Passing her fence of wordless privacy
Their mind could penetrate her occult mind
And draw the diagram of her secret thoughts;
They read the codes and ciphers she had sealed,
Copies they made of all her guarded plans,
For every turn of her mysterious course
Assigned a reason and unchanging rule.
The Unseen grew visible to student eyes,
Explained was the immense Inconscient’s scheme,
Audacious lines were traced upon the Void;
The Infinite was reduced to square and cube.
Arranging symbol and significance,
Tracing the curve of a transcendent Power,
They framed the cabbala of the cosmic Law,
The balancing line discovered of Life’s technique
And structured her magic and her mystery.
Book II, Canto XI
All there was soul or made of sheer soul-stuff:
A sky of soul covered a deep soul-ground.
All here was known by a spiritual sense:
Thought was not there but a knowledge near and one
Seized on all things by a moved identity,
A sympathy of self with other selves,
The touch of consciousness on consciousness
And being’s look on being with inmost gaze
And heart laid bare to heart without walls of speech
And the unanimity of seeing minds
In myriad forms luminous with one God.
Life was not there, but an impassioned force,
Finer than fineness, deeper than the deeps
Felt as a subtle and spiritual power,
A quivering out from soul to answering soul,
A mystic movement, a close influence,
A free and happy and intense approach
Of being to being with no screen or check,
Without which life and love could never have bee,
Body was not there, for bodies were needed not,
The soul itself was its own deathless form
And met at once the touch of other souls
Close, blissful, concrete, wonderfully true.
-Book II, Canto XIV
A Person persistent through the lapse of worlds,
Although the same for ever in many shapes
By the outward mind unrecognizable,
Assuming names unknown in known climes
Imprints through Time upon the earth's worn page
-Book II, Canto XIV
There knowledge called him to her mystic peaks
Where thought is held in a vast internal sense
And feeling swims across a sea of peace
And vision climbs beyond the reach of Time.
-Book II, Canto XV
All is too little that the world can give:
Its power and knowledge are the gifts of Time
And cannot fulfill the spirit's sacred thirst.
-Book III, Canto I
All that had been and all towards which he grew
Must now be left behind or else transform
Into a self of That which has no name.
-Book III, Canto I
A pure existence safe from thought and mood,
A consciousness of unshared immortal bliss,
It dwelt aloof in its bare infinite,
One and unique, unutterably sole,
A Being formless, featureless and mute,
That knew itself by its own timeless self,
Aware for ever in its motionless depths,
Uncreating, uncreated, and unborn.
The One by whom all live, who lives by none,
An immeasurable luminous secrecy
Guarded by the veils of the Unmanifest,
Above the changing cosmic interlude
Abode supreme, immutable the same,
A silent Cause occult, impenetrable,
Infinite, eternal, unthinkable, alone.
-Book III, Canto I
Across the silence of the ultimate Calm,
Out of a marvellous Transcendence' core,
A body of wonder and translucency
As if a sweet mystic summary of her self
Escaping into the original Bliss
Had come enlarged our of eternity,
Someone came infinite and Absolute.
A being of wisdom, power and delight,
Even a a mother draws her child to her arms,
Took to her breast Nature and world and soul.
-Book III, Canto II
She is the golden bridge, the wonderful fire.
The luminous heart of the Unknown is she,
A power of silence in the depths of God;
She is the Force, the inevitable Word,
The magnet of our difficult ascent,
The Sun from which we kindle all our suns,
The light that leans from the unrealized Vasts,
The joy that beckons from the impossible,
The Might of all that never yet came down.
-Book III, Canto II
-Book III, Canto II
Two beings he was, one wide and free above,
One struggling, bound, intense, its portion here.
A tie between them still could bridge two worlds.
-Book III, Canto III
Each lived for God in him and God in all,
Each soleness inexpressibly held the whole.
-Book III, Canto III
How shall I rest content with mortal days
And the dull measure of terrestrial things,
I who have seen behind the cosmic mask
The glory and the beauty of thy face?
-Book III, Canto IV
I sas the Omnipotent's flaming pioneers
Over the heavenly verge which turns toward life
Come crowding down the amber stairs of birth;
Forerunners of a divine multitude
Out of the paths of the morning star they came
Into the little room of mortal life.
I saw them cross the twilight of an age,
The sun-eyed children of a marvellous dawn,
The great creators with wide brows of calm,
The massive barrier-breakers of the world
And wrestlers with destiny in her lists of will,
The labourers in the quarries of the gods,
The messengers of the Incommunicable,
The architects of immortality.
In the fallen human sphere they came,
Faces that wore the Immortal's glory still,
Voice that communed still with the thoughts of God,
Bodies made beautiful by the Spirit's light,
Carrying the magic word, the mystic fire,
Carrying the Dionysian cup of joy,
Approaching eyes of a diviner man,
Lips changing an unknown anthem of the soul
Feet echoing in the corridors of Time.
High priests of wisdom, sweetness might and bliss,
Discoverers of beauty's sunlit ways
And swimmers of Love's laughing fiery floods
And dancers within rapture's golden doors,
Their tread one day shall change the suffering earth
And justify the light on Nature's face.
Book III, Canto IV
Intuitive knowledge leaping into speech,
hearing the subtle voice that clothes the heavens,
Carrying the splendour that has lit the suns,
They sang Infinity's names and deathless powers
In metres that reflect the moving worlds,
Sight's sound-waves breaking from the soul's great deeps.
-Book IV, Canto IV
As a star, unaccompanied, moves in heaven
Unastonished by the immensities of space,
Travelling infinity by its own light,
The great are strongest when they stand alone.
The God-given might of being is their force,
A ray from self's solitude of light the guide;
The soul that can live alone with itself meets God;
Its lonely universe is their rendezvous.
-Book VI, Canto II
A conscious soul in the Inconscient's world.
-Book VII, Canto II
And on our shoulders carry the struggling world.
This is in us the godhead small and marred;
-Book VII, Canto II
Our soul from its mysterious chamber acts;
Its influence pressing on our heart and mind
Pushes them to exceed their mortal selves.
-Book VII, Canto II
Earth must transform herself and equal Heaven
Or Heaven descend into earth's mortal state.
But for such vast spiritual change to be,
Out of the mystic cavern in man's heart
The heavenly Psyche must pull off her veil
And step into common nature's crowded rooms
And stand uncovered in that nature's front
And rule its thoughts and fill the body and life.
-Book VII, Canto II
An inner law of beauty shapes our lives;
Our words become the natural speech of Truth,
Each thought is a ripple on a sea of Light.
-Book VII, Canto V
In a simple purity of emptiness
Her mind knelt down before the unknowable.
All was abolished save her naked self
And the prostrate yearning of her surrendered heart.
-Book VII, Canto V
The superconscient was her native air,
Infinity was her movements' natural space;
Eternity looked out from her own Time.
-Book VII, Canto VII
Then suddenly there came on her the change
Which in tremendous moments of our lives
Can overtake sometimes the human soul
And hold it up towards its luminous source.
-Book IX, Canto I
I bow not to thee, O huge mask of Death,
Black lie of night the cowed soul of man,
Unreal, inescapable end of things,
Thou grim jest played with the immortal spirit.
Conscious of immortality I walk.
-Book IX, Canto II
World-spirit, I was thy equal spirit born.
I am immortal in my mortality.
I tremble not before the immobile gaze
Of the unchanging marble hierarchies
That look with the stone eyes of Law and Fate.
My soul can meet them with its living fire.
-Book IX, Canto II
Thoughts that no habitation found, yet clung
With passionate repetition to her mind,
Desires that hurt not, happy only to live
Always the same and always unfulfilled
Sang in the breast like a celestial lyre.
Thus all could last, yet nothing ever be.
-Book X, Canto I
My heart is stronger than thy bonds, O Death.
It sees and feels the one Heart beat in all,
It feels the high Transcendent's sunlike hands,
It sees the cosmic Spirit at its work:
In the dim Night it lies alone with God.
My heart's strength can carry the grief of the universe
And never falter from its luminous track,
Its white tremendous orbit through God's peace.
It can drink up the sea of All-Delight
And never lose the white spiritual touch,
The Calm that broods in the deep Infinite.
-Book X, Canto III
The Power that from her being’s summit reigned,
The Presence chambered in lotus secrecy,
Came down and held the centre in her brow
Where the mind’s Lord in his control-room sits;
There throned on concentration’s native seat
He opens that third mysterious eye in man,
The Unseen’s eye that looks at the unseen,
When Light with a golden ecstasy fills his brain
And the Eternal’s wisdom drives his choice
And eternal Will seizes the mortal’s will.
-Book X, Canto IV
To raise the world to God in deathless Light,
To bring God down to the world on earth we came,
To change the earthly life to life divine.
-Book XI, Canto I
Earth shall be my work-chamber and my house,
My garden of life to plant a seed divine.
When all thy work in human time is done,
The mind of earth shall be a home of light,
The life of earth a tree growing towards heaven
The body of earth a tabernacle of God.
Book XI, Canto I
The Superman shall wake in mortal man
And manifest the hidden demi-god
Or grow into the God-light and God-Force
Revealing the secret deity in the cave.
-Book XI, Canto I
A power dwelt in her soul too great for earth,
A bliss lived in her heart too large for heaven,
Light too intense for thought and love too boundless
For earth's emotions lit her skies of mind
And spread through her deep and happy seas of soul.
-Book XII, Canto I
Night, splendid with the moon dreaming in heaven
In silver peace, possessed her luminous reign.
She brooded through her stillness on a thought
Deep-guarded by her mystic folds of light,
And in her bosom nursed a greater dawn.
-Book XII, Epilogue
