LITMIR.BIZ

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      A celestial bacchanal for ever pure,

      Unstayed by faintness as in mortal frames

      Life was an eternity of rapture’s moods:

      Age never came, care never lined the face.

      Imposing on the safety of the stars

      A race and laughter of immortal strengths,

      The nude god-children in their play-fields ran

      Smiting the winds with splendour and with speed;

      Of storm and sun they made companions,

      Sported with the white mane of tossing seas,

      Slew distance trampled to death under their wheels

      And wrestled in the arenas of their force.

      Imperious in their radiance like the suns

      They kindled heaven with the glory of their limbs

      Flung like a divine largess to the world.

      A spell to force the heart to stark delight,

      They carried the pride and mastery of their charm

      As if Life’s banner on the roads of Space.

      Ideas were luminous comrades of the soul;

      Mind played with speech, cast javelins of thought,

      But needed not these instruments’ toil to know;

      Knowledge was Nature’s pastime like the rest.

      Investitured with the fresh heart’s bright ray,

      An early God-instinct’s child inheritors,

      Tenants of the perpetuity of Time

      Still thrilling with the first creation’s bliss,

      They steeped existence in their youth of soul.

      An exquisite and vehement tyranny,

      The strong compulsion of their will to joy

      Poured smiling streams of happiness through the world.

      There reigned a breath of high immune content,

      A fortunate gait of days in tranquil air,

      A flood of universal love and peace.

      A sovereignty of tireless sweetness lived

      Like a song of pleasure on the lips of Time.

      A large spontaneous order freed the will,

      A sun-frank winging of the soul to bliss,

      The breadth and greatness of the unfettered act

      And the swift fire-heart’s golden liberty.

      There was no falsehood of soul-severance,

      There came no crookedness of thought or word

      To rob creation of its native truth;

      All was sincerity and natural force.

      There freedom was sole rule and highest law.

      In a happy series climbed or plunged these worlds:

      In realms of curious beauty and surprise,

      In fields of grandeur and of titan power,

      Life played at ease with her immense desires.

      A thousand Edens she could build nor pause;

      No bound was set to her greatness and to her grace

      And to her heavenly variety.

      Awake with a cry and stir of numberless souls,

      Arisen from the breast of some deep Infinite,

      Smiling like a new-born child at love and hope,

      In her nature housing the Immortal’s power,

      In her bosom bearing the eternal Will,

      No guide she needed but her luminous heart:

      No fall debased the godhead of her steps,

      No alien Night had come to blind her eyes.

      There was no use for grudging ring or fence;

      Each act was a perfection and a joy.

      Abandoned to her rapid fancy’s moods

      And the rich coloured riot of her mind,

      Initiate of divine and mighty dreams,

      Magician builder of unnumbered forms

      Exploring the measures of the rhythms of God,

      At will she wove her wizard wonder-dance,

      A Dionysian goddess of delight,

      A Bacchant of creative ecstasy.

      This world of bliss he saw and felt its call,

      But found no way to enter into its joy;

      Across the conscious gulf there was no bridge.

      A darker air encircled still his soul

      Tied to an image of unquiet life.

      In spite of yearning mind and longing sense,

      To a sad Thought by grey experience formed

      And a vision dimmed by care and sorrow and sleep

      All this seemed only a bright desirable dream

      Conceived in a longing distance by the heart

      Of one who walks in the shadow of earth-pain.

      Although he once had felt the Eternal’s clasp,

      Too near to suffering worlds his nature lived,

      And where he stood were entrances of Night.

      Hardly, too close beset by the world’s care,

      Can the dense mould in which we have been made

      Return sheer joy to joy, pure light to light.

      For its tormented will to think and live

      First to a mingled pain and pleasure woke

      And still it keeps the habit of its birth:

      A dire duality is our way to be.

      In the crude beginnings of this mortal world

      Life was not nor mind’s play nor heart’s desire.

      When earth was built in the unconscious Void

      And nothing was save a material scene,

      Identified with sea and sky and stone

      Her young gods yearned for the release of souls

      Asleep in objects, vague, inanimate.

      In that desolate grandeur, in that beauty bare,

      In the deaf stillness, mid the unheeded sounds,

      Heavy was the uncommunicated load

      Of Godhead in a world that had no needs;

      For none was there to feel or to receive.

      This solid mass which brooked no throb of sense

      Could not contain their vast creative urge:

      Immersed no more in Matter’s harmony,

      The Spirit lost its statuesque repose.

      In the uncaring trance it groped for sight,

      Passioned for the movements of a conscious heart,

      Famishing for speech and thought and joy and love,

      In the dumb insensitive wheeling day and night

      Hungered

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