LITMIR.BIZ

      Canto Ten

      The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Little Mind

      This too must now be overpassed and left,

      As all must be until the Highest is gained

      In whom the world and self grow true and one:

      Till That is reached our journeying cannot cease.

      Always a nameless goal beckons beyond,

      Always ascends the zigzag of the gods

      And upward points the spirit’s climbing Fire.

      This breath of hundred-hued felicity

      And its pure heightened figure of Time’s joy,

      Tossed upon waves of flawless happiness,

      Hammered into single beats of ecstasy,

      This fraction of the spirit’s integer

      Caught into a passionate greatness of extremes,

      This limited being lifted to zenith bliss,

      Happy to enjoy one touch of things supreme,

      Packed into its sealed small infinity,

      Its endless time-made world outfacing Time,

      A little output of God’s vast delight.

      The moments stretched towards the eternal Now,

      The hours discovered immortality,

      But, satisfied with their sublime contents,

      On peaks they ceased whose tops half-way to Heaven

      Pointed to an apex they could never mount,

      To a grandeur in whose air they could not live.

      Inviting to their high and exquisite sphere,

      To their secure and fine extremities

      This creature who hugs his limits to feel safe,

      These heights declined a greater adventure’s call.

      A glory and sweetness of satisfied desire

      Tied up the spirit to golden posts of bliss.

      It could not house the wideness of a soul

      Which needed all infinity for its home.

      A memory soft as grass and faint as sleep,

      The beauty and call receding sank behind

      Like a sweet song heard fading far away

      Upon the long high road to Timelessness.

      Above was an ardent white tranquillity.

      A musing spirit looked out on the worlds

      And like a brilliant clambering of skies

      Passing through clarity to an unseen Light

      Large lucent realms of Mind from stillness shone.

      But first he met a silver-grey expanse

      Where Day and Night had wedded and were one:

      It was a tract of dim and shifting rays

      Parting Life’s sentient flow from Thought’s self-poise.

      A coalition of uncertainties

      There exercised uneasy government

      On a ground reserved for doubt and reasoned guess,

      A rendezvous of Knowledge with Ignorance.

      At its low extremity held difficult sway

      A mind that hardly saw and slowly found;

      Its nature to our earthly nature close

      And kin to our precarious mortal thought

      That looks from soil to sky and sky to soil

      But knows not the below nor the beyond,

      It only sensed itself and outward things.

      This was the first means of our slow ascent

      From the half-conscience of the animal soul

      Living in a crowded press of shape-events

      In a realm it cannot understand nor change;

      Only it sees and acts in a given scene

      And feels and joys and sorrows for a while.

      The ideas that drive the obscure embodied spirit

      Along the roads of suffering and desire

      In a world that struggles to discover Truth,

      Found here their power to be and Nature-force.

      Here are devised the forms of an ignorant life

      That sees the empiric fact as settled law,

      Labours for the hour and not for eternity

      And trades its gains to meet the moment’s call:

      The slow process of a material mind

      Which serves the body it should rule and use

      And needs to lean upon an erring sense,

      Was born in that luminous obscurity.

      Advancing tardily from a limping start,

      Crutching hypothesis on argument,

      Throning its theories as certitudes,

      It reasons from the half-known to the unknown,

      Ever constructing its frail house of thought,

      Ever undoing the web that it has spun.

      A twilight sage whose shadow seems to him self,

      Moving from minute to brief minute lives;

      A king dependent on his satellites

      Signs the decrees of ignorant ministers,

      A judge in half-possession of his proofs,

      A voice clamant of uncertainty’s postulates,

      An architect of knowledge, not its source.

      This powerful bondslave of his instruments

      Thinks his low station Nature’s highest top,

      Oblivious of his share in all things made

      And haughtily humble in his own conceit

      Believes himself a spawn of Matter’s mud

      And takes his own creations for his cause.

      To eternal light and knowledge meant to rise,

      Up from man’s bare beginning is our climb;

      Out of earth’s heavy smallness we must break,

      We must search our nature with spiritual fire:

      An insect crawl preludes our glorious flight;

      Our human state cradles the future god,

      Our mortal frailty an immortal force.

      At

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