LITMIR.BIZ

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rhythm is kin to its environment,

      Each line is perfect and inevitable,

      Each object faultlessly built for charm and use.

      All is enamoured of its own delight.

      Intact it lives of its perfection sure

      In a heaven-pleased self-glad immunity;

      Content to be, it has need of nothing more.

      Here was not futile effort’s broken heart:

      Exempt from the ordeal and the test,

      Empty of opposition and of pain,

      It was a world that could not fear nor grieve.

      It had no grace of error or defeat,

      It had no room for fault, no power to fail.

      Out of some packed self-bliss it drew at once

      Its form-discoveries of the mute Idea

      And the miracle of its rhythmic thoughts and acts,

      Its clear technique of firm and rounded lives,

      Its gracious people of inanimate shapes

      And glory of breathing bodies like our own.

      Amazed, his senses ravished with delight,

      He moved in a divine, yet kindred world

      Admiring marvellous forms so near to ours

      Yet perfect like the playthings of a god,

      Deathless in the aspect of mortality.

      In their narrow and exclusive absolutes

      The finite’s ranked supremacies throned abide;

      It dreams not ever of what might have been;

      Only in boundaries can this absolute live.

      In a supremeness bound to its own plan

      Where all was finished and no widths were left,

      No space for shadows of the immeasurable,

      No room for the incalculable’s surprise,

      A captive of its own beauty and ecstasy,

      In a magic circle wrought the enchanted Might.

      The spirit stood back effaced behind its frame.

      Admired for the bright finality of its lines

      A blue horizon limited the soul;

      Thought moved in luminous facilities,

      The outer ideal’s shallows its swim-range:

      Life in its boundaries lingered satisfied

      With the small happiness of the body’s acts.

      Assigned as Force to a bound corner-Mind,

      Attached to the safe paucity of her room,

      She did her little works and played and slept

      And thought not of a greater work undone.

      Forgetful of her violent vast desires,

      Forgetful of the heights to which she rose,

      Her walk was fixed within a radiant groove.

      The beautiful body of a soul at ease,

      Like one who laughs in sweet and sunlit groves,

      Childlike she swung in her gold cradle of joy.

      The spaces’ call reached not her charmed abode,

      She had no wings for wide and dangerous flight,

      She faced no peril of sky or of abyss,

      She knew no vistas and no mighty dreams,

      No yearning for her lost infinitudes.

      A perfect picture in a perfect frame,

      This faery artistry could not keep his will:

      Only a moment’s fine release it gave;

      A careless hour was spent in a slight bliss.

      Our spirit tires of being’s surfaces,

      Transcended is the splendour of the form;

      It turns to hidden powers and deeper states.

      So now he looked beyond for greater light.

      His soul’s peak-climb abandoning in its rear

      This brilliant courtyard of the House of Days,

      He left that fine material Paradise.

      His destiny lay beyond in larger Space.

      End of Canto Two

      Canto Three

      The Glory and the Fall of Life

      An uneven broad ascent now lured his feet.

      Answering a greater Nature’s troubled call

      He crossed the limits of embodied Mind

      And entered wide obscure disputed fields

      Where all was doubt and change and nothing sure,

      A world of search and toil without repose.

      As one who meets the face of the Unknown,

      A questioner with none to give reply,

      Attracted to a problem never solved,

      Always uncertain of the ground he trod,

      Always drawn on to an inconstant goal

      He travelled through a land peopled by doubts

      In shifting confines on a quaking base.

      In front he saw a boundary ever unreached

      And thought himself at each step nearer now, –

      A far retreating horizon of mirage.

      A vagrancy was there that brooked no home,

      A journey of countless paths without a close.

      Nothing he found to satisfy his heart;

      A tireless wandering sought and could not cease.

      There life is the manifest Incalculable,

      A movement of unquiet seas, a long

      And venturous leap of spirit into Space,

      A vexed disturbance in the eternal Calm,

      An impulse and passion of the Infinite.

      Assuming whatever shape her fancy wills,

      Escaped from the restraint of settled forms

      She has left the safety of the tried and known.

      Unshepherded by the fear that walks through Time,

      Undaunted by Fate that dogs and Chance that springs,

      She accepts disaster as a common risk;

      Careless of suffering, heedless of sin and fall,

      She wrestles with danger and discovery

      In the unexplored expanses of the soul.

      To be seemed only a long experiment,

      The hazard of a seeking ignorant Force

      That tries all truths and, finding none supreme,

      Moves on unsatisfied, unsure of its end.

      As saw some inner mind, so life was shaped:

      From thought to thought she passed, from phase to phase,

      Tortured by her own powers or proud and blest,

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