LITMIR.BIZ

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heavens of imperishable Light,

      Illumined continents of violet peace,

      Oceans and rivers of the mirth of God

      And griefless countries under purple suns.

      This, once a star of bright remote idea

      Or imagination’s comet trail of dream,

      Took now a close shape of reality.

      The gulf between dream-truth, earth-fact was crossed,

      The wonder-worlds of life were dreams no more;

      His vision made all they unveiled its own:

      Their scenes, their happenings met his eyes and heart

      And smote them with pure loveliness and bliss.

      A breathless summit region drew his gaze

      Whose boundaries jutted into a sky of Self

      And dipped towards a strange ethereal base.

      The quintessence glowed of Life’s supreme delight.

      On a spiritual and mysterious peak

      Only a miracle’s high transfiguring line

      Divided life from the formless Infinite

      And sheltered Time against eternity.

      Out of that formless stuff Time mints his shapes;

      The Eternal’s quiet holds the cosmic act:

      The protean images of the World-Force

      Have drawn the strength to be, the will to last

      From a deep ocean of dynamic peace.

      Inverting the spirit’s apex towards life,

      She spends the plastic liberties of the One

      To cast in acts the dreams of her caprice,

      His wisdom’s call steadies her careless feet,

      He props her dance upon a rigid base,

      His timeless still immutability

      Must standardise her creation’s miracle.

      Out of the Void’s unseeing energies

      Inventing the scene of a concrete universe,

      By his thought she has fixed its paces, in its blind acts

      She sees by flashes of his all-knowing Light.

      At her will the inscrutable Supermind leans down

      To guide her force that feels but cannot know,

      Its breath of power controls her restless seas

      And life obeys the governing Idea.

      At her will, led by a luminous Immanence

      The hazardous experimenting Mind

      Pushes its way through obscure possibles

      Mid chance formations of an unknowing world.

      Our human ignorance moves towards the Truth

      That Nescience may become omniscient,

      Transmuted instincts shape to divine thoughts,

      Thoughts house infallible immortal sight

      And Nature climb towards God’s identity.

      The Master of the worlds self-made her slave

      Is the executor of her fantasies:

      She has canalised the seas of omnipotence;

      She has limited by her laws the Illimitable.

      The Immortal bound himself to do her works;

      He labours at the tasks her Ignorance sets,

      Hidden in the cape of our mortality.

      The worlds, the forms her goddess fancy makes

      Have lost their origin on unseen heights:

      Even severed, straying from their timeless source,

      Even deformed, obscure, accursed and fallen, –

      Since even fall has its perverted joy

      And nothing she leaves out that serves delight, –

      These too can to the peaks revert or here

      Cut out the sentence of the spirit’s fall,

      Recover their forfeited divinity.

      At once caught in an eternal vision’s sweep

      He saw her pride and splendour of highborn zones

      And her regions crouching in the nether deeps.

      Above was a monarchy of unfallen self,

      Beneath was the gloomy trance of the abyss,

      An opposite pole or dim antipodes.

      There were vasts of the glory of life’s absolutes:

      All laughed in a safe immortality

      And an eternal childhood of the soul

      Before darkness came and pain and grief were born

      Where all could dare to be themselves and one

      And Wisdom played in sinless innocence

      With naked Freedom in Truth’s happy sun.

      There were worlds of her laughter and dreadful irony,

      There were fields of her taste of toil and strife and tears;

      Her head lay on the breast of amorous Death,

      Sleep imitated awhile extinction’s peace.

      The light of God she has parted from his dark

      To test the savour of bare opposites.

      Here mingling in man’s heart their tones and hues

      Have woven his being’s mutable design,

      His life a forward-rippling stream in Time,

      His nature’s constant fixed mobility,

      His soul a moving picture’s changeful film,

      His cosmos-chaos of personality.

      The grand creatrix with her cryptic touch

      Has turned to pathos and power being’s self-dream,

      Made a passion-play of its fathomless mystery.

      But here were worlds lifted half-way to heaven.

      The Veil was there but not the Shadowy Wall;

      In forms not too remote from human grasp

      Some passion of the inviolate purity

      Broke through, a ray of the original Bliss.

      Heaven’s joys might have been earth’s if earth were pure.

      There could have reached our divinised sense and heart

      Some natural felicity’s bright extreme,

      Some thrill of Supernature’s absolutes:

      All strengths could laugh and sport on earth’s hard roads

      And never feel her cruel edge of pain,

      All love could play and nowhere Nature’s shame.

      But she has stabled her dreams in Matter’s courts

      And still her doors are barred to things supreme.

      These worlds could feel God’s breath visiting their tops;

      Some glimmer of the Transcendent’s hem was there.

      Across

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