| |
Silence
is round me, wideness ineffable;
White birds on the ocean diving and wandering;
A soundless sea on a voiceless heaven,
Azure on azure, is mutely gazing.
Identified with silence and boundlessness
My spirit widens clasping the universe
Till all that seemed becomes the Real,
One in a mighty and single vastness.
Someone broods there nameless and bodiless,
Conscious and lonely; deathless and infinite,
And, sole in a still eternal rapture,
Gathers all things to his heart for ever.
*
Alcaics. Modulations are allowed, trochee or iamb in the first foot or a long
monosyllable; an occasional anapaest in place of an iamb is permitted; a
bacchius can replace a dactyl.
Page – 557
Trance
of Waiting*
Lone on my summits of calm I have brooded with voices around me,
Murmurs of silence that steep mind in a luminous sleep,
Whispers from things beyond thought in the Secrecy flame-white for ever,
Unscanned heights that reply seek from the inconscient deep.
Distant below me the ocean of life with its passionate surges
Pales like a pool that is stirred by the wings of a shadowy bird.
Thought has flown back from its wheelings and stoopings, the nevve-beat
of living
Stills; my spirit at peace bathes in a mighty release.
Wisdom supernal looks down on me, Knowledge mind cannot measure;
Light that no vision can render garments the silence with splendour.
Filled with a rapturous Presence the crowded spaces of being
Tremble with the Fire that knows, thrill with the might of repose.
Earth is now girdled with trance and Heaven is put round her for vesture.
Wings that are brilliant with fate sleep at Eternity’s gate.
Time waits, vacant, the lightning that kindles, the Word that transfigures:
Space is a stillness of God building his earthly abode.
All waits hushed for the fiat to come and the tread of the Eternal;
Passion of a bliss yet to be sweeps from Infinity’s sea.
*Elegiacs, with rhyme in the pentameter. A syllable or two introducing the last
hemistich of the pentameter is allowed, but this must not be made the rule. This
license, impossible in the strict cut of classical metre, comes in naturally in
English and is therefore permissible.
Page
– 558
Flame-Wind*
A
flame-wind ran from the gold of the east,
Leaped on my soul with the breath of a sevenfold noon.
Wings of the angel, gallop of the beast!
Mind and body on fire, but the heart in swoon.
O flame, thou bringest the strength of the noon,
But where are the voices of morn and the stillness of eve?
Where the pale-blue wine of the moon?
Mind and life are in flower, but the heart must grieve.
Gold in the mind and the life-flame’s red
Make of the heavens a splendour, the earth a blaze,
But the white and rose of the heart are dead.
Flame-wind, pass! I will wait for Love in the silent ways.
*
Dactylic tetrameter and pentameter catalectic; an additional foot in the last
line; trochee or spondee freely admitted anywhere; first paeon, bacchius, cretic
can replace a dactyl. One or two extra syllables are allowed sometimes at the
beginning of the line.
Page – 559
The River*
Wild
river in thy cataract far-murmured and rash rapids to sea hasting
Far now is that birth-place mid abrupt mountains and slow dreaming of lone valleys
Where only with blue heavens was rapt converse or green orchards with fruit leaning
Stood imaged in thy waves and, content, listened to thy rhapsody’s long murmur.
Vast now in a wide press and a dense hurry and mass movement of thronged waters
Loud-thundering, fast-galloping, might, speed is the stern message of thy spirit
Proud violence, stark claim and the dire cry of the heart’s hunger on God’s’ barriers
Self-hurled, and a void lust of unknown distance, and pace reckless and free grandeur.
Calm yet shall release thee; an immense peace and a large streaming of white silence,
Broad plains shall be thine, greenness surround thee, and wharved cities and life’s labour
Long thou wilt befriend, human delight help with the waves’ coolness, with ship’s furrows
Thrill, – last become, self losing, a sea-motion and joy boundless and blue laughter.
*
Ionic a majore pentameter catalectic. In one place an epitrite replaces the
ionic.
Page-560
The
Dream Boat*
Who was it that came to me in a boat made of dream-fire,
With his flame brow and his sun-gold body?
Melted was the silence into a sweet secret murmur,
"Do you come now? is the heart’s fire ready?"
Hidden in the recesses of the heart something shuddered,
It recalled all that the life’s joy cherished,
Imaged the felicity it must leave lost for ever,
And the boat passed and the gold god vanished.
Now within the hollowness of the world’s breast inhabits -
For the love died and the old joy ended -
Void of a felicity that has fled, gone for ever,
And the gold. god and the dream boat come not.
*Lines
1, 3 dactyl, second paeon, ionic a minore, amphibrach (or antibacchius)
¯ ˘ ˘ | ˘ ¯ ˘ ˘ | ˘ ˘ ¯ ¯ | ˘ ¯
˘
˘ ¯ ¯
Lines 2, 4 two ionics a minore
with a closing trochee
˘ ˘ ¯ ¯ | ˘ ˘ ¯ ¯ | ¯ ˘ )
Page-561
The Witness and the Wheel *
Who
art thou in the heart comrade of man who sitst
August, watching his works, watching his joys and griefs,
Unmoved, careless of pain, careless of death and fate?
Witness, what hast thou seen watching this great blind world
Moving helpless in Time, whirled on the Wheel in Space,
That yet thou with thy vast Will biddest toil our hearts,
Mystic, – for without thee nothing can last in Time?
We too, when from the urge ceaseless of Nature turn
Our souls, far from the breast casting her tool, desire,
Grow like thee. In the front Nature still drives in vain
The blind trail of our acts, passions and thoughts and hopes;
Unmoved, calm, we look on, careless of death and fate,
Of grief careless and joy, – signs of a surface script
Without value or sense, steps of an aimless world.
Something watches behind, Spirit or Self or Soul,
Viewing Space and its toil, waiting the end of Time.
Witness, who then art thou, one with thee who am I,
Nameless, watching the Wheel whirl across Time and Space?
*
The metre is the little Asclepiad used by Horace in his Ode addressed to Maecenas, two choriambs between an initial spondee and a finai iamb. Here
modulations are admited, trochee or iamb for the spondee, occasionally a spondee
for the concluding iamb; an epitrite or ionic a minore can replace the choriamb.
Page-562
Descent*
All my cells thrill swept by a surge of splendour,
Soul and body stir with a mighty rapture,
Light and still more light like an ocean billows
Over
me, round me.
Rigid, stone-like, fixed like a hill or statue,
Vast my body feels and upbears the world’s weight;
Dire the large descent of the Godhead enters
Limbs
that are mortal.
Voiceless, thronged, Infinity crowds upon me;
Presses down a glory of power eternal;
Mind and heart grow one with the cosmic wideness;
Stilled
are earth’s murmurs.
Swiftly, swiftly crossing the golden spaces
Knowledge leaps, a torrent of rapid lightnings;
Thoughts that left the Ineffable’s, flaming mansions,
Blaze
in my spirit.
Slow the heart-beats’ rhythm like a giant hammer’s;
Missioned voices drive to me from God’s doorway
Words that live not save upon Nature’s summits,
Ecstasy’s chariots.
All the world is changed to a single oneness;
Souls undying, infinite forces, meeting,
Join in God-dance weaving a seamless Nature,
Rhythm
of the Deathless.
Mind and heart and body, one harp of being,
Cry that anthem, finding the notes eternal, -
Light and might and bliss and immortal wisdom
Clasping for ever.
*
Sapphics. But the second-foot spondee is very usually replaced by a trochee, the
final trochee sometimes by a spondee; a bacchius, cretic or molossus can replace
the dactyl. In the fifteenth line elision is used; in a Sapphic line there can
be only one dactyl.
Page-563
The
Lost Boat*
At the way’s end when the shore raised up its dim line and remote lights from the port glimmered,
Then a cloud darkened the sky’s brink and the wind’s scream was the shrill laugh of a loosed demon
And the huge passion of storm leaped with its bright stabs and the long crashing of death’s thunder;
As if haled by an unseen hand fled the boat lost in the wide homeless forlorn ocean.
Is it Chance smites? is it Fate’s irony? dead workings or blind purpose of brute Nature?
Or man’s own deeds that return back on his doomed head with a stark justice, a fixed vengeance
Or a dread Will from behind Life that regards pain and salutes death with a hard laughter?
Is it God’s might or a Force rules in this dense jungle of events, deeds and our thought’s strivings?
Yet perhaps sank not the bright lives and their glad venturings foiled, drowned in the grey ocean,
But with long wandering they reached an unknown shore and a strage sun and a new azure,
Amid bright splendour of beast glories and birds’ music and deep hues, an enriched Nature
And a new life that could draw near to divine meanings and touched close the concealed purpose.
In a chance happening, fate’s whims and the blind workings or dead drive of a brute Nature,
In her dire Titan caprice, strength that to death drifts and to doom, hidden a Will labours.
Not with one moment of sharp close or the slow fall of a dim curtain the play ceases:
Yet is there Time to be crossed, lives to be lived out, the unplayed acts of soul’s drama.
1Ionic
a minore pentameter with an overflow of one short syllable
˘ ˘ ¯ ¯ | ˘ ˘ ¯ ¯ | ˘ ˘ ¯ ¯ | ˘ ˘ ¯ ¯ | ˘ ˘ ¯ ¯ | ˘
Page-564
Renewal*
When the heart tires and the throb stills recalling
Things that were once and again can be never,
When the bow falls and the drawn string is broken,
Hands that were clasped, yet for ever are parted,
When the soul passes to new births and bodies,
Lands never seen and meetings with new faces,
Is the bow raised and the fall’n arrow fitted,
Acts that were vain rewedded to the Fate-curve?
To the lives sundered can Time bring rejoining,
Love that was slain be reborn with the body?
In the mind null, from the heart’s chords rejected,
Lost to the sense, but the spirit remembers!
(Lines
1, 3 two ionies a minore with adinal amphibrach,
˘ ˘ ¯ ¯ | ˘ ˘ ¯ ¯ | ˘ ¯ ˘
Lines 2, 4 choriamb, paeon, bacchius (or sometimes antibacchius or amphibrach),
¯ ˘ ˘ ¯ | ˘ ˘ ¯ ˘ | ¯ ¯ ˘
˘ ˘ ¯ ˘ | ˘ ¯ ¯
Page-565
Soul’s
Scene*
The clouds lain on forlorn spaces of sky, weary and lolling,
Watch grey waves of a lost sea wander sad, reckless and rolling,
A bare anguish of black beaches made
mournful with the breath of the Northwind,
And a huddle of melancholy hills in the distance.
The blank hour in some vast mood of a Soul lonely in Nature
On earth’s face puts a mask pregnantly carved, cut to misfeature,
And man’s heart and his stilled mind react hushed in a
spiritual passion
Imitating the contours of her desolate
waiting.
Impassible she waits long for the sun’s gold and the azure,
The sea’s song with its slow happy refrain’s plashes of pleasure, -
As man’s soul in its depths waits the outbreaking of the
light and the godhead
And the bliss that God felt when he created his image.
*Lines
1, 2 three antispasts (or in the first foot a second pacon), amphibrach,
˘ ¯ ¯ ˘ | ˘ ¯ ¯ ˘ | ˘ ¯ ¯ ˘ | ˘ ¯
˘
˘ ¯ ˘ ˘
Line 3 two antispasts, ionic a majore, second pacon, trochee
˘ ¯ ¯ ˘ | ˘ ¯ ¯ ˘ | ˘ ¯ ¯ ˘ | ˘ ¯ ¯
˘ | ¯ ˘ .
Line 4 three paeons, trochee, but the middle paeon can be replaced by an
antispast or an ionic a majore; a double iamb once replaces the third paeon.)
Page-566
ASCENT*
The
Silence
Into the Silence, into the Silence,
Arise, O Spirit immortal,
Away from the turning Wheel, breaking the magical Circle.
Ascend, single and deathless:
Care no more for the whispers and the shoutings in the darkness.
Pass from the sphere of the grey and the little,
Leaving the cry and the struggle,
Into the Silence for ever.
Vast and immobile, formless and marvellous,
Higher than Heaven, wider than the universe,
In a pure glory of being,
In a bright stillness of self-seeing,
Communing with a boundlessness voiceless and intimate,
Make thy knowledge to high for thought, thy joy too deep for emotion;
At
rest in the unchanging Light, mute with the wordless self vision,
Spirit, pass out of thyself; Soul, escape from the clutch of Nature.
All thou hast seen cast from thee, O Witness.
Turn to the Alone and the Absolute, turn to the Eternal:
Be only eternity, peace and silence,
O world-transcending nameless Oneness,
Spirit immortal.
*Free
quantitative verse with a predominant dactylic movement.
Page-567
2
Beyond
the Silence
Out from the Silence, out from the Silence,
Carrying with thee the ineffable Substance,
Carrying with thee the splendour and wideness,
Ascend, O Spirit immortal.
Assigning to Time its endless meaning,
Blissful enter into the clasp of the Timeless.
Awake in the living Eternal, taken to the bosom of love of the Infinite,
Live self-found in his endless completeness,
Drowned in his joy and his sweetness,
Thy heart close to the heart of the Godhead for ever.
Vast, God-possessing, embraced by the Wonderful,
Lifted by the All-Beautiful into his infinite beauty,
Love shall envelop thee endless and fathomless,
Joy unimaginable, ecstasy illimitable,
Knowledge omnipotent, Might omniscient,
Light without darkness, Truth that is dateless.
One with the Transcendent, calm, universal,
Single and free, yet innumerably living,
All in thyself and thyself in all dwelling,
Act in the world with thy being beyond it.
Soul, exceed life’s boundaries; Spirit, surpass the universe.
Outclimbing the summits of Nature,
Transcending and uplifting the soul of the finite,
Rise with the world in thy bosom,
0 Word gathered into the heart of the Ineffable.
One with the Eternal, live in his infinity,
Drowned in the Absolute, found in the Godhead,
Swan of the supreme and spaceless ether wandering winged through the universe,
Spirit immortal.
Page-568
The
Tiger and the Deer*
Brilliant,
crouching, slouching, what crept through the green heart of the forest,
Gleaming eyes and mighty chest and soft soundless paws of grandeur and murder?
The wind slipped through the leaves as if afraid lest its voice and the noise of its steps perturb the pitiless Splendour,
Hardly daring to breathe. But the great beast crouched and crept, and crept and crouched a last time, noiseless, fatal,
Till suddenly death leaped on the beautiful wild deer as it drank
Unsuspecting from the great pool in the forest’s coolness and shadow,
And it fell and, torn, died remembering its mate left sole in the deep woodland, -
Destroyed, the mild harmless beauty by the strong cruel beauty in Nature.
But a day may yet come when the tiger crouches and leaps no more in the dangerous heart of the forest,
As the mammoth shakes no more the plains of Asia;
Still then shall the beautiful wild deer drink from the coolness of great pools in the leaves’ shadow.
The mighty perish in their might;
The slain survive the slayer.
*Free
quantitative verse, left to find out its own line by line rhythm and unity.
Page-569
Soul
in the Ignorance*
Soul in the Ignorance, wake from its stupor.
Flake of the world-fire, spark of Divinity;
Lift up thy mind and thy heart into glory.
Sun in the darkness, recover thy lustre.
One, universal, ensphering creation,
Wheeling no more with inconscient Nature,
Feel thyself God-born, know thyself deathless.
Timeless return to thy immortal existence.
Journey’s End**
The day ends lost in a stretch of even,
A long road trod – and the little farther.
Now the waste-land, now the silence;
A blank dark wall, and behind it heaven.
*Dactylic tetrameter, usually catalectic, with the ordinary modulations.
**(Lines
1, 2, 4 epitrite, third paeon, trochee
˘ ¯ ¯ ¯ | ˘ ˘ ¯ ˘ | ¯ ˘
. In line 3 two double trochees
¯ ˘ ¯ ˘ | ¯ ˘ ¯ ˘ |
Page-570
The
Bird of Fire
Gold-white wings a-throb in the vastness, the bird of flame went
glimmering over a sunfire curve to the haze of the west,
Skimming, a messenger sail, the sapphire-summer waste of a
soundless wayless burning sea.
Now in the eve of the waning world the colour and splendour re-
turning drift through a blue-flicker air back to my breast,
Flame and shimmer staining the rapture-white foam-vest of
the waters of Eternity.
Gold-white wings of the miraculous bird of fire, late and slow
have you come from the Timeless. Angel, here unto me
Bringst thou for travailing earth a spirit silent and free or
His crimson passion of love divine, -
White-ray-jar of the spuming rose-red wine drawn from the vats
brimming with light-blaze, the vats of ecstasy,
Pressed by the sudden and violent feet of the Dancer in Time
from his sun-grape fruit of a deathless vine?
White-rose-altar the eternal Silence built, make now my nature
wide, an intimate guest of His solitude,
But golden above it the body of One in her diamond sphere
with Her halo of star-blooql and passion-ray!
Rich and red is thy breast, 0 bird, like blood of a soul climbing
the hard crag-teeth world, wounded and nude,
A ruby of flame-petalled love in the silver-gold altar-vase
of moon-edged night and rising day.
0 Flame who art Time’s last boon of the sacrifice, offering-flower
held by the finite’s gods to the Infinite,
0 marvel bird with the burning wings of light and the unbarred
lids that look beyond all space,
One strange leap of thy mystic stress breaking the barriers of mind
and life, arrives at its luminous term thy flight;
Invading the secret clasp of the Silence and crimson Fire
thou frontest eyes in a timeless Face.
Page-571
Trance
A naked and silver-pointed star
Floating near the halo of the moon;
A storm-rack, the pale sky’s fringe and bar,
Over waters stilling into swoon.
My mind is awake in stirless trance,
Hushed my heart, a burden of delight;
Dispelled is the senses’ flicker-dance,
Mute the body aureate with light.
0 star of creation pure and free,
Halo-moon of ecstasy unknown,
Storm-breath of the soul-change yet to be,
Ocean-self enraptured and alone!
Page-572
Shiva
THE INCONSCIENT
CREATOR
A face on the cold dire mountain peaks
Grand and still; its lines white and austere
Match with the unmeasured snowy streaks
Cutting heaven, implacable and sheer.
Above it a mountain of matted hair
Aeon-coiled on that deathless and lone head
In its solitude huge of lifeless air
Round, above illimitably spread.
A moon-ray on the forehead, blue and pale,
Stretched afar its finger of still light
Illumining emptiness. Stern and male
Mask of peace indifferent in might!
But out from some Infinite born now came
Over giant snows and the still face
A quiver and colour of crimson flame,
Fire-point in immensities of space.
Light-spear-tips revealed the mighty shape,
Tore the secret veil of the heart’s hold;
In that diamond heart the fires undrape,
Living core, a brazier of gold.
This was the closed mute and burning source
Whence were formed the worlds and their star-dance;
Life sprang a self-rapt inconscient Force,
Love, a blazing seed, from the flame-trance;.
Page-573
The
Life Heavens
A life of intensities wide, immune
Floats behind the earth and her life-fret,
A magic of realms mastered by spell and rune,
Grandiose, blissful, coloured, increate.
A music there wanders mortal ear
Hears not, seizing, intimate, remote,
Wide-winged in soul-spaces, fire-clear,
Heaping note on enrapturing new note.
Forms deathless there triumph, hues divine
Thrill with nets of glory the moved air;
Each sense is an ecstasy, love the sign
Of one outblaze of godhead that two share.
The peace of the senses, the senses’ stir
On one harp are joined mysteries; pain
Transmuted is ravishment’s minister,
A high note and a fiery refrain.
All things are a harmony faultless, pure;
Grief is not nor stain-wound of desire;
The heart-beats are a cadence bright and sure
Of Joy’s quick steps, too invincible to tire.
A Will there, a Force, a magician Mind
Moves, and builds at once its delight-norms,
The marvels it seeks for surprised, outlined,
Hued, alive, a cosmos of fair forms.
Sounds, colours, joy-flamings. Life lies here
Dreaming, bound to the heavens of its goal,
In the clasp of a Power that enthrals to sheer
Bliss and beauty body and rapt soul.
My spirit sank drowned in the wonder surge:
Screened, withdrawn was the greatness it had sought;
Lost was the storm-stress and the warrior urge,
Lost the titan winging of the thought.
Page-574
It
lay at ease in a sweetness of heaven-sense
Delivered from grief, with no need left to aspire,
Free, self-dispersed in voluptuous innocence,
Lulled and borne into roseate cloud-fire.
But suddenly there soared a dateless cry,
Deep as Night, imperishable as Time;
It seemed Death’s dire appeal to Eternity,
Earth’s outcry to the limitless Sublime.
"O high seeker of immortality,
Is there not, ineffable, a bliss
Too vast for. these finite harmonies,
Too divine for the moment’s unsure kiss?
"Arms taking to a voiceless supreme delight,
Life that meets the Eternal with close breast,
An unwalled mind dissolved in the Infinite,
Force one with unimaginable rest?
"I, Earth, have a deeper power than Heaven;
My lonely sorrow surpasses its rose-joys,
A red and bitter seed of the raptures seven; -
My dumbness fills with echoes of a far Voice.
"By me the last finite, yearning, strives
To reach the last infinity’s unknown,
The Eternal is broken into fleeting lives
And Godhead pent in the mite and the stone."
Dissolving the kingdoms of happy ease
Rocked and split and faded their dream-chime.
All vanished; ungrasped eternities
Sole survived and Timelessness seized Time.
Earth’s heart was felt beating below me stilI,
Veiled, immense, unthinkable above
My consciousness climbed like a topless hilI,
Crossed seas of Light to epiphanies of Love.
Page-575
Jivanmukta
There is a silence greater than any known
To earth’s dumb spirit, motionless in the soul
That has become Eternity’s foothold,
Touched by the infinitudes for ever.
A Splendour is here, refused to the earthward sight,
That floods some deep flame-covered all-seeing eye;
Revealed it wakens when God’s stillness
Heavens the ocean of moveless Nature.
A Power descends no Fate can perturb or vanquish,
Calmer than mountains, wider than marching waters,
A single might of luminous quiet
Tirelessly bearing the worlds and ages.
A bliss surrounds with ecstasy everlasting,
An absolute high-seated immortal rapture
Possesses, sealing love to bneness
In the grasp of the All-beautiful,
All-beloved.
He who from Time’s dull motion escapes and thrills
Rapt thoughtless, wordless into the Eternal’s breast,
Unrolls the form and sign of being,
Seated above in the omniscient Silence.
Although consenting here to a mortal body,
He is the Undying; limit and bond he knows not;
For him the aeons are a playground,
Life and its deeds are his splendid
shadow.
Only to bring God’s forces to waiting Nature,
To help with wide-winged Peace her tormented labour
And heal with joy her ancient sorrow,
Casting down light on the inconscient
darkness,
He acts and lives. Vain things are mind’s smaller motives
To one whose soul enjoys for its high possession
Infinity and the sempiternal
All is his guide and beloved and refuge.
Page-576
In
Horis Aeternum
A far sail on the unchangeable monotone of a slow slumbering sea,
A world of power hushed into symbols of hue, silent unendingly;
Over its head like a gold ball the sun tossed by the gods in their play
Follows its curve, – a blazing eye of Time watching the motionless day.
Here or otherwhere, – poised on the unreachable abrupt snow-solitary
ascent
Earth aspiring lifts to the illimitable Light, then ceases broken and spent,
Or in the glowing expanse, arid, fiery and austere, of the desert’s hungry
soul, -
A breath, a cry, a glimmer from Eternity’s face, in a fragment the mystic
Whole.
Moment-mere, yet with all eternity packed, lone, fixed, intense,
Out of the ring of these hours that dance and die, caught by the spirit in
sense,
In the greatness of a man, in music’s outspread wings, in a touch, in a smile,
in a sound,
Something that waits, something that wanders and settles not, a Nothing
that was all and is found.
Page-577
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