LITMIR.BIZ

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labour of an unaccomplished Force

      Tied to its acts in a dim eternity.

      There is no end or none can yet be seen:

      Although defeated, life must struggle on;

      Always she sees a crown she cannot grasp;

      Her eyes are fixed beyond her fallen state.

      There quivers still within her breast and ours

      A glory that was once and is no more,

      Or there calls to us from some unfulfilled beyond

      A greatness yet unreached by the halting world.

      In a memory behind our mortal sense

      A dream persists of larger happier air

      Breathing around free hearts of joy and love,

      Forgotten by us, immortal in lost Time.

      A ghost of bliss pursues her haunted depths;

      For she remembers still, though now so far,

      Her realm of golden ease and glad desire

      And the beauty and strength and happiness that were hers

      In the sweetness of her glowing paradise,

      In her kingdom of immortal ecstasy

      Half-way between God’s silence and the Abyss.

      This knowledge in our hidden parts we keep;

      Awake to a vague mystery’s appeal,

      We meet a deep unseen Reality

      Far truer than the world’s face of present truth:

      We are chased by a self we cannot now recall

      And moved by a Spirit we must still become.

      As one who has lost the kingdom of his soul,

      We look back to some god-phase of our birth

      Other than this imperfect creature here

      And hope in this or a diviner world

      To recover yet from Heaven’s patient guard

      What by our mind’s forgetfulness we miss,

      Our being’s natural felicity,

      Our heart’s delight we have exchanged for grief,

      The body’s thrill we bartered for mere pain,

      The bliss for which our mortal nature yearns

      As yearns an obscure moth to blazing Light.

      Our life is a march to a victory never won.

      This wave of being longing for delight,

      This eager turmoil of unsatisfied strengths,

      These long far files of forward-striving hopes

      Lift worshipping eyes to the blue Void called heaven

      Looking for the golden Hand that never came,

      The advent for which all creation waits,

      The beautiful visage of Eternity

      That shall appear upon the roads of Time.

      Yet still to ourselves we say rekindling faith,

      “Oh, surely one day he shall come to our cry,

      One day he shall create our life anew

      And utter the magic formula of peace

      And bring perfection to the scheme of things.

      One day he shall descend to life and earth,

      Leaving the secrecy of the eternal doors,

      Into a world that cries to him for help,

      And bring the truth that sets the spirit free,

      The joy that is the baptism of the soul,

      The strength that is the outstretched arm of Love.

      One day he shall lift his beauty’s dreadful veil,

      Impose delight on the world’s beating heart

      And bare his secret body of light and bliss.”

      But now we strain to reach an unknown goal:

      There is no end of seeking and of birth,

      There is no end of dying and return;

      The life that wins its aim asks greater aims,

      The life that fails and dies must live again;

      Till it has found itself it cannot cease.

      All must be done for which life and death were made.

      But who shall say that even then is rest?

      Or there repose and action are the same

      In the deep breast of God’s supreme delight.

      In a high state where ignorance is no more,

      Each movement is a wave of peace and bliss,

      Repose God’s motionless creative force,

      Action a ripple in the Infinite

      And birth a gesture of Eternity.

      A sun of transfiguration still can shine

      And Night can bare its core of mystic light;

      The self-cancelling, self-afflicting paradox

      Into a self-luminous mystery might change,

      The imbroglio into a joyful miracle.

      Then God could be visible here, here take a shape;

      Disclosed would be the spirit’s identity;

      Life would reveal her true immortal face.

      But now a termless labour is her fate:

      In its recurrent decimal of events

      Birth, death are a ceaseless iteration’s points;

      The old question-mark margins each finished page,

      Each volume of her effort’s history.

      A limping Yes through the aeons journeys still

      Accompanied by an eternal No.

      All seems in vain, yet endless is the game.

      Impassive turns the ever-circling Wheel,

      Life has no issue, death brings no release.

      A prisoner of itself the being lives

      And keeps its futile immortality;

      Extinction is denied, its sole escape.

      An error of the gods has made the world.

      Or indifferent the Eternal watches Time.

      End of Canto Six

      Canto Seven

      The Descent into Night

      A mind absolved from life, made calm to know,

      A heart divorced from the blindness and the pang,

      The seal of tears, the bond of ignorance,

      He turned to find that wide world-failure’s cause.

      Away he looked from Nature’s visible face

      And sent his gaze into the viewless Vast,

      The formidable unknown Infinity,

      Asleep behind the endless coil of things,

      That carries the universe in its timeless breadths

      And

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