SONNETS
Undated Sonnets
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Transformation
My breath runs in a subtle rhythmic stream; It fills my members with a might divine: I have drunk the Infinite like a giant’s wine. Time is my drama or my pageant dream. Now are my illumined cells joy’s flaming scheme And changed my thrilled and branching nerves to fine Channels of rapture opal and Hyaline For the influx of the Unknown and the Supreme.
I am no more a vassal of the flesh, A slave to Nature and her leaden rule; I am caught no more in the senses’ narrow mesh. My soul unhorizoned widens to measureless sight, My body is God’s happy living tool, My spirit a vast sun of deathless light.
All is abolished but the mute Alone. The mind from thought released, the heart from grief Grow inexistent now beyond belief; There is no I, no Nature, known-unknown. The city, a shadow picture without tone, Floats, quivers unreal; forms without relief Flow, a cinema’s vacant shapes; like a reef Foundering in shoreless gulfs the world is done.
Only the illimitable Permanent Is here. A Peace stupendous, featureless, still, Replaces all, – what once was I, in It A silent unnamed emptiness content Either .to fade in the Unknowable Or thrill with the luminous seas of the Infinite. Page-161
An irised multitude of hills and seas, And glint of brooks in the green wilderness, And trackless stars, and miracled symphonies Of hues that float in ethers shadowless, A dance of fire-flies in the fretted gloom, In a pale midnight the moon’s silver flare, Fire-importunities of scarlet bloom And bright suddenness of wings in a golden air, Strange bird and animal forms like memories cast On the rapt silence of unearthly woods, Calm faces of the gods on backgrounds vast Bringing the marvel of the infinitudes, Through glimmering veils of wonder and delight World after world bursts on the awakened sight.
What opposites are here! A trivial life Specks the huge dream of Death called Matter; intense In its struggle of weakness towards omnipotence, A thinking mind starts from the unthinking strife In the order of the electric elements. Immortal life breathed in that monstrous death, A mystery of Knowledge wore as sheath Matter’s mute nescience. Its enveloped sense Or dumb somnambulist will obscurely reigns. Driving the atoms in their cosmic course Whose huge unhearing movement serves perforce The works of a strange blind omniscience. The world’s deep contrasts are but figures spun Draping the unanimity of the One. Page-162 Man, the Thinking Animal
A trifling unit in a boundless plan Amidst the enormous insignificance Of the unpeopled cosmos’ fire-whirl dance, Earth, as by accident, engendered man:
A creature of his own grey ignorance, A mind half-shadow and half-gleam, a breath. That wrestles, captive in a world of death, To live some lame brief years. Yet his advance,
Attempt of a divinity within, A consciousness in the inconscient Night, To realise its own supernal Light Confronts the ruthless forces of the Unseen.
Aspiring to godhead from insensible clay He travels slow-footed towards the eternal day.
The Dumb Inconscient
The dumb Inconscient drew life’s stumbling maze; A night of all things, packed and infinite, It made our consciousness a torch that plays Between the abyss1 and a supernal Light;
It framed2 our mind a lens of segment sight, Piecing out inch by inch the world’s huge mass, And reason a small hard theodolite Measuring unreally the measureless ways.
Yet is the dark Inconscient whence come all, The self-same Power that shines on high unwon; Our night shall be a sky purpureal,
The torch transmute to a vast godhead’s sun. His soul the dim bud of God’s flaming rose.
1 its night 2 made Page-163 The Infinitesimal Infinite
Out of a still Immensity all came! These million universes were to it The Poor light-bubbles of a trivial game, A fragile glimmer in the Infinite.
It could not find its soul in all that vast: It drew itself into, a little speck Infinitesimal, ignobly cast, Out of earth’s mud and slime strangely awake, -
A tiny plasm on a little globe In the small, system of a dwarflike sun, A little life wearing the flesh for robe, A little mind winged through wide space to run!
It lived, it knew, it saw its self sublime, Deathless, outmeasuring Space, outlasting Time.
Evolution
All is not finished in the Unseen’s decree! A mind beyond our mind demands our ken; A life of unimagined harmony Awaits, concealed, the grasp of unborn men.
The crude beginnings of the lifeless earth And mindless stirrings of the plant and tree Prepared our thought; thought for a godlike birth Broadens the mould of our mortality.
A might no human will or force could gain, A knowledge seated in eternity, A joy1 beyond our struggle and our pain Is this earth-hampered creature’s destiny.
O Thou who climbedst to mind from the dull stone, Turn to the mirac1ed summits yet unwon.
1 bliss Page-164 The One Self
All are deceived, do what the One Power dictates, Yet each thinks his own will his nature moves; The hater knows not ’tis himself he hates, The lover knows not ’tis himself he 1oves.
In all is one being many bodies bear, There Krishna flutes upon the forest mood, There Shiva sits ash-smeared, with matted hair. But Shiva and Krishna are the single God.
In us too Krishna seeks for love and joy, In us too Shiva struggles with the world’s grief. One Self in all of us endures annoy, Cries in his pain and asks his fate’s relief.
My rival’s downfall is my own disgrace, I look on my enemy and see Krishna’s face.
Our godhead calls us
Our godhead calls us in unrealised things. Asleep in the wide fields of destiny, A world guarded by Silence’ rustling wings Sheltered their fine impossibility.
But part, but quiver the cerulean gates, Close splendours look into our dreaming eyes, We bear proud deities and magnificent fates; Faces and hands come near from Paradise.
What shone thus far above is here in us; Bliss unattained our future’s birthright is; Beauty of our dim soul is amorous; We are the heirs of infinite widenesses.
The impossible is the hint of what shall be, Mortal the door to immortality. Page-165 Discoveries of Science I
Only by electric hordes your1 world is run? But they are motes and spark-whirls of a Light, A Fire of which your nebula and your sun Are glints and flame-drops scattered eremite.
Veiled2 by the unseen Light act other Powers, An Air of endless movement unbegun Expanding and contracting in Time-hours, And the intangible ether of the One.
These surface findings - screen-phenomenon –3 Are Nature’s offered reasons but behind Her occult mysteries lurk safe unknown To the crude handling of the empiric Mind.
All yet4 discovered are but mire and trace Of the eternal Energy in her race.
1 the 2 And veiled 3 These things, a front, a screen-phenomenon 4 Your truths Page-166 Discoveries of Science II
How shall ascending nature near her goal? 1 Not through man’s stumbling tardy intellect Patient all forms and powers 2 to dissect But by the surer vision of his soul.
An algebra of mind, a scheme of sense, A symbol language without depth or wings, A power to handle deftly outward things Are our scant earnings3 of intelligence.
The Truth 4 is greater and asks5 deeper ways. A sense that gathers all in its own being,6 A close and luminous touch,7 an intimate seeing, A Thought flung free from the words’ daedal maze,8
A tranquil heart in sympathy with all, A will one-pointed, wide, imperial.
1 How shall earth’s evolution find its goal? 2 Godheads 3 Is our poor booty 4 Our Spirit / The Soul. 5 has 6 into our being, 7 A luminous touch direct, 8 A Thought that is a god’s all-seeing gaze, Page-167
Our science is an abstract cold and, brief That cuts in formulas the living whole. It has a brain and head but not a soul: It sees all things in outward carved relief.
But how without its depths can the world be known? The visible has its roots in the unseen And each invisible hides what it can mean In a yet deeper invisible, unshown.
The objects that you probe are not their form. Each is a mass of forces thrown in shape. The forces caught, their inner-lines escape In a fathomless consciousness beyond mind’s norm.
Probe it and you shall meet a Being1 still Infinite, nameless, mute, unknowable.
1 abysses Page-168 |
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