LITMIR.BIZ

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for the beat of yearning and response.

      The poised inconscience shaken with a touch,

      The intuitive Silence trembling with a name,

      They cried to Life to invade the senseless mould

      And in brute forms awake divinity.

      A voice was heard on the mute rolling globe,

      A murmur moaned in the unlistening Void.

      A being seemed to breathe where once was none:

      Something pent up in dead insentient depths,

      Denied conscious existence, lost to joy,

      Turned as if one asleep since dateless time.

      Aware of its own buried reality,

      Remembering its forgotten self and right,

      It yearned to know, to aspire, to enjoy, to live.

      Life heard the call and left her native light.

      Overflowing from her bright magnificent plane

      On the rigid coil and sprawl of mortal Space,

      Here too the gracious great-winged Angel poured

      Her splendour and her swiftness and her bliss,

      Hoping to fill a fair new world with joy.

      As comes a goddess to a mortal’s breast

      And fills his days with her celestial clasp,

      She stooped to make her home in transient shapes;

      In Matter’s womb she cast the Immortal’s fire,

      In the unfeeling Vast woke thought and hope,

      Smote with her charm and beauty flesh and nerve

      And forced delight on earth’s insensible frame.

      Alive and clad with trees and herbs and flowers

      Earth’s great brown body smiled towards the skies,

      Azure replied to azure in the sea’s laugh;

      New sentient creatures filled the unseen depths,

      Life’s glory and swiftness ran in the beauty of beasts,

      Man dared and thought and met with his soul the world.

      But while the magic breath was on its way,

      Before her gifts could reach our prisoned hearts,

      A dark ambiguous Presence questioned all.

      The secret Will that robes itself with Night

      And offers to spirit the ordeal of the flesh,

      Imposed a mystic mask of death and pain.

      Interned now in the slow and suffering years

      Sojourns the winged and wonderful wayfarer

      And can no more recall her happier state,

      But must obey the inert Inconscient’s law,

      Insensible foundation of a world

      In which blind limits are on beauty laid

      And sorrow and joy as struggling comrades live.

      A dim and dreadful muteness fell on her:

      Abolished was her subtle mighty spirit

      And slain her boon of child-god happiness,

      And all her glory into littleness turned

      And all her sweetness into a maimed desire.

      To feed death with her works is here life’s doom.

      So veiled was her immortality that she seemed,

      Inflicting consciousness on unconscious things,

      An episode in an eternal death,

      A myth of being that must for ever cease.

      Such was the evil mystery of her change.

      End of Canto Three

      Canto Four

      The Kingdoms of the Little Life

      A quivering trepidant uncertain world

      Born from that dolorous meeting and eclipse

      Appeared in the emptiness where her feet had trod,

      A quick obscurity, a seeking stir.

      There was a writhing of half-conscious force

      Hardly awakened from the Inconscient’s sleep,

      Tied to an instinct-driven Ignorance,

      To find itself and find its hold on things.

      Inheritor of poverty and loss,

      Assailed by memories that fled when seized,

      Haunted by a forgotten uplifting hope,

      It strove with a blindness as of groping hands

      To fill the aching and disastrous gap

      Between earth-pain and the bliss from which Life fell.

      A world that ever seeks for something missed,

      Hunts for the joy that earth has failed to keep.

      Too near to our gates its unappeased unrest

      For peace to live on the inert solid globe:

      It has joined its hunger to the hunger of earth,

      It has given the law of craving to our lives,

      It has made our spirit’s need a fathomless gulf.

      An Influence entered mortal night and day,

      A shadow overcast the time-born race;

      In the troubled stream where leaps a blind heart-pulse

      And the nerve-beat of feeling wakes in sense

      Dividing Matter’s sleep from conscious Mind,

      There strayed a call that knew not why it came.

      A Power beyond earth’s scope has touched the earth;

      The repose that might have been can be no more;

      A formless yearning passions in man’s heart,

      A cry is in his blood for happier things:

      Else could he roam on a free sunlit soil

      With the childlike pain-forgetting mind of beasts

      Or live happy, unmoved, like flowers and trees.

      The Might that came upon the earth to bless,

      Has stayed on earth to suffer and aspire.

      The infant laugh that rang through time is hushed:

      Man’s natural joy of life is overcast

      And sorrow is his nurse of destiny.

      The animal’s thoughtless joy is left behind,

      Care and reflection burden his daily walk;

      He has risen to greatness and to discontent,

      He is awake to the Invisible.

      Insatiate seeker, he has all to learn:

      He has exhausted now life’s surface acts,

      His being’s hidden realms remain to explore.

      He becomes a mind, he becomes a spirit and self;

      In his fragile tenement he grows Nature’s lord.

      In him Matter wakes from its long obscure trance,

      In

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