LITMIR.BIZ

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Night.

      This fallen world became a nurse of souls

      Inhabited by concealed divinity.

      A Being woke and lived in the meaningless void,

      A world-wide Nescience strove towards life and thought,

      A Consciousness plucked out from mindless sleep.

      All here is driven by an insentient will.

      Thus fallen, inconscient, frustrate, dense, inert,

      Sunk into inanimate and torpid drowse

      Earth lay, a drudge of sleep, forced to create

      By a subconscient yearning memory

      Left from a happiness dead before she was born,

      An alien wonder on her senseless breast.

      This mire must harbour the orchid and the rose,

      From her blind unwilling substance must emerge

      A beauty that belongs to happier spheres.

      This is the destiny bequeathed to her,

      As if a slain god left a golden trust

      To a blind force and an imprisoned soul.

      An immortal godhead’s perishable parts

      She must reconstitute from fragments lost,

      Reword from a document complete elsewhere

      Her doubtful title to her divine Name.

      A residue her sole inheritance,

      All things she carries in her shapeless dust.

      Her giant energy tied to petty forms

      In the slow tentative motion of her power

      With only frail blunt instruments for use,

      She has accepted as her nature’s need

      And given to man as his stupendous work

      A labour to the gods impossible.

      A life living hardly in a field of death

      Its portion claims of immortality;

      A brute half-conscious body serves as means

      A mind that must recover a knowledge lost

      Held in stone grip by the world’s inconscience,

      And wearing still these countless knots of Law

      A spirit bound stand up as Nature’s king.

      A mighty kinship is this daring’s cause.

      All we attempt in this imperfect world,

      Looks forward or looks back beyond Time’s gloss

      To its pure idea and firm inviolate type

      In an absolute creation’s flawless skill.

      To seize the absolute in shapes that pass,

      To fix the eternal’s touch in time-made things,

      This is the law of all perfection here.

      A fragment here is caught of heaven’s design;

      Else could we never hope for greater life

      And ecstasy and glory could not be.

      Even in the littleness of our mortal state,

      Even in this prison-house of outer form,

      A brilliant passage for the infallible Flame

      Is driven through gross walls of nerve and brain,

      A Splendour presses or a Power breaks through,

      Earth’s great dull barrier is removed awhile,

      The inconscient seal is lifted from our eyes

      And we grow vessels of creative might.

      The enthusiasm of a divine surprise

      Pervades our life, a mystic stir is felt,

      A joyful anguish trembles in our limbs;

      A dream of beauty dances through the heart,

      A thought from the eternal Mind draws near,

      Intimations cast from the Invisible

      Awaking from Infinity’s sleep come down,

      Symbols of That which never yet was made.

      But soon the inert flesh responds no more,

      Then sinks the sacred orgy of delight,

      The blaze of passion and the tide of power

      Are taken from us and, though a glowing form

      Abides astonishing earth, imagined supreme,

      Too little of what was meant has left a trace.

      Earth’s eyes half-see, her forces half-create;

      Her rarest works are copies of heaven’s art.

      A radiance of a golden artifice,

      A masterpiece of inspired device and rule,

      Her forms hide what they house and only mime

      The unseized miracle of self-born shapes

      That live for ever in the Eternal’s gaze.

      Here in a difficult half-finished world

      Is a slow toiling of unconscious Powers;

      Here is man’s ignorant divining mind,

      His genius born from an inconscient soil.

      To copy on earth’s copies is his art.

      For when he strives for things surpassing earth,

      Too rude the workman’s tools, too crude his stuff,

      And hardly with his heart’s blood he achieves

      His transient house of the divine Idea,

      His figure of a Time-inn for the Unborn.

      Our being thrills with high far memories

      And would bring down their dateless meanings here,

      But, too divine for earthly Nature’s scheme,

      Beyond our reach the eternal marvels blaze.

      Absolute they dwell, unborn, immutable,

      Immaculate in the Spirit’s deathless air,

      Immortal in a world of motionless Time

      And an unchanging muse of deep self-space.

      Only when we have climbed above ourselves,

      A line of the Transcendent meets our road

      And joins us to the timeless and the true;

      It brings to us the inevitable word,

      The godlike act, the thoughts that never die.

      A ripple of light and glory wraps the brain,

      And travelling down the moment’s vanishing route

      The figures of eternity arrive.

      As the mind’s visitors or the heart’s guests

      They espouse our mortal brevity awhile,

      Or seldom in some rare delivering glimpse

      Are caught by our vision’s delicate surmise.

      Although beginnings only and first attempts,

      These glimmerings point to the secret of our birth

      And the hidden miracle of our destiny.

      What

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