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Lyrical Poems from Manuscripts Circa 1934 1947
Once again thou hast climbed, O moon, like a white fire on the glimmering edge, Floating up, floating up from the haunted verge of a foam-tremulous sea. Mystic-horned here crossing the grey-hued listless nights and days, Spirit-silver craft from the ports of eternity.
Overhead with thy plunging and swaying prow thou fleetest, O ship of the gods, Glorifying the clouds with thy halo, but our hearts with a rose-red rapture shed from the secret breasts of love; Almost thou seemest the very bliss that floats in opaline air over heaven’s golden roads, Embodied here to capture our human lives like a nectar face of light in the doubtful blue above.
Dumbly blithe, shuddering, the air is filled from thy cup of pale mysterious wine: Gleam quivers to longing gleam; and the faery torches lit for Night’s mysteries are set in her niches stark and deep; The inconscient gulfs stir and are vaguely thrilled, while their unheard voices cry to the Wonder-light new-seen Till descending its ray shall unlock with a wizard rod of fire the dumb recesses of sleep.
Bright and alone in a white-foam-glinted delicate dim-blue ocean of sky, Ever thou runst and thou floatest as a magic drifting bowl Flung by the hand of a drunken god in the river of Time goes tossing by, O icon and chalice of spiritual light whose spots are like Nature’s shadow stains on a white and immaculate soul.
How like one frail and haunted thou com’st, O white moon, at my lonely call from thy deep sky-covert heights, A voyager carrying through the myriad-isled archipelago of the spear-pointed questioning stars
Page – 631 The circle of the occult argent Yes of the Invisible to the dim query of the yearning witness lights That burn in the dense vault of Matter’s waking mind — innumerable, solitary and sparse. A disk of a greater Ray that shall come, a white-fire rapture and girdling rose of love, Timelessly thou driftest, O soundless silver boat that set out from the far Unknown, Moon-crystal of silver or gold of some spirit joy spun by Time in his dense aeonic groove, A messenger and bearer of an unembodied beauty and unseized bliss advancing over our life’s wan sea — significant, bright and alone.
(The Ishwara to the Ishwari)
In god-years yet unmeasured by a man’s thought or by the earth’s dance or the moon’s spin I have guarded the law of the Invisible for the sake of thy smile, O sweet; While lives followed innumerable winged lives, as if birds crossing a wide sea, I have watched on the path of the centuries for the light of thy running feet.
The earth’s dancing with the sun in his fire-robes, was it not thou circling my flame-soul, The gazings of the moon in its nectar-joy were my look questing for thee through Space? The world’s haste and the racing of the tense mind and the long gallop of fleet years Were my speed to arrive through the flux of things and to neighbour at last thy face.
Page – 632 The earth’s seeking is mine and the immense scope of the slow aeons my heart’s way; For I follow a secret and sublime Will and the steps of thy Mother-might. In the dim brute and the peering of man’s brain and the calm sight in a god’s eyes It is I questing in Life’s broken ways for thy laughter and love and light.
When Time moved not nor yet Space was unrolled wide, for thy game of the worlds I gave Myself to thy delightful hands of power to govern me and move and drive; To earth’s dumbness I fell for thy desire’s sport weaving my spirit stuff In a million pattern-shapes of souls made with me alive.
The worlds are only a playfield of Thou-I and a hued masque of the Two-One, I am in thee as thou art in me, O Love; we are closer than heart and breast; From thee I leaped forth struck to a spirit spark, I mount back in the soul’s fire; To our motion the stars whirl in the swing of Time, our oneness is Nature’s rest.
When Light first from the unconscious Immense burst to create nebula and sun ‘Twas the meeting of our hands through the empty Night that enkindled the fateful blaze; The huge systems abandoned their inert trance and this green crater of life rose That we might look on each other form on form from the depths of a living gaze.
The mind travelled in its ranges tier on tier with its wide-eyed or its rapt thought, My thought toiling laboured to know all myself in thee to our atoms and widths and deeps,
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My all yearns to thy all to be held close, to the heart heart and to self self,
As a sea with a sea joins or limbs with limbs, and as waking’s delight
with sleep’s.
When mind pinnacled is lost in thy Light-Vasts and the man drowns in the
wide god,
Thy Truth shall ungirdle its golden flames and thy diamond whiteness
blaze;
My souls lumined shall discover their joy-self, they shall clasp all in the
near One,
And the sorrow of the heart shall turn to bliss and thy sweetness
possess earth’s days.
Then shall Life be thy arms drawing thy own clasped to thy breast’s
rapture or calm peace,
With thy joy for the spirit’s immortal flame and thy peace for its
deathless base.
Our eyes meeting the long love shut in deep eyes and our beings held fast
and one,
I shall know that the game was well worth the toil whose end is thy
divine embrace.
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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.
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.
Page – 635 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 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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(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.
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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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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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.
(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.
Page – 639 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
Page – 640 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.
“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.”
Page – 641 “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.”
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
Page – 642 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.
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?
Page – 643 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.
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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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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