LITMIR.BIZ

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youth sat throned in calm felicity.

      But joy cannot endure until the end:

      There is a darkness in terrestrial things

      That will not suffer long too glad a note.

      On her too closed the inescapable Hand:

      The armed Immortal bore the snare of Time.

      One dealt with her who meets the burdened great.

      Assigner of the ordeal and the path

      Who chooses in this holocaust of the soul

      Death, fall and sorrow as the spirit’s goads,

      The dubious godhead with his torch of pain

      Lit up the chasm of the unfinished world

      And called her to fill with her vast self the abyss.

      August and pitiless in his calm outlook,

      Heightening the Eternal’s dreadful strategy,

      He measured the difficulty with the might

      And dug more deep the gulf that all must cross.

      Assailing her divinest elements,

      He made her heart kin to the striving human heart

      And forced her strength to its appointed road.

      For this she had accepted mortal breath;

      To wrestle with the Shadow she had come

      And must confront the riddle of man’s birth

      And life’s brief struggle in dumb Matter’s night.

      Whether to bear with Ignorance and death

      Or hew the ways of Immortality,

      To win or lose the godlike game for man,

      Was her soul’s issue thrown with Destiny’s dice.

      But not to submit and suffer was she born;

      To lead, to deliver was her glorious part.

      Here was no fabric of terrestrial make

      Fit for a day’s use by busy careless Powers.

      An image fluttering on the screen of Fate,

      Half-animated for a passing show,

      Or a castaway on the ocean of Desire

      Flung to the eddies in a ruthless sport

      And tossed along the gulfs of Circumstance,

      A creature born to bend beneath the yoke,

      A chattel and a plaything of Time’s lords,

      Or one more pawn who comes destined to be pushed

      One slow move forward on a measureless board

      In the chess-play of the earth-soul with Doom, –

      Such is the human figure drawn by Time.

      A conscious frame was here, a self-born Force.

      In this enigma of the dusk of God,

      This slow and strange uneasy compromise

      Of limiting Nature with a limitless Soul,

      Where all must move between an ordered Chance

      And an uncaring blind Necessity,

      Too high the fire spiritual dare not blaze.

      If once it met the intense original Flame,

      An answering touch might shatter all measures made

      And earth sink down with the weight of the Infinite.

      A gaol is this immense material world:

      Across each road stands armed a stone-eyed Law,

      At every gate the huge dim sentinels pace.

      A grey tribunal of the Ignorance,

      An Inquisition of the priests of Night

      In judgment sit on the adventurer soul,

      And the dual tables and the Karmic norm

      Restrain the Titan in us and the God:

      Pain with its lash, joy with its silver bribe

      Guard the Wheel’s circling immobility.

      A bond is put on the high-climbing mind,

      A seal on the too large wide-open heart;

      Death stays the journeying discoverer, Life.

      Thus is the throne of the Inconscient safe

      While the tardy coilings of the aeons pass

      And the Animal browses in the sacred fence

      And the gold Hawk can cross the skies no more.

      But one stood up and lit the limitless flame.

      Arraigned by the dark Power that hates all bliss

      In the dire court where life must pay for joy,

      Sentenced by the mechanic justicer

      To the afflicting penalty of man’s hopes,

      Her head she bowed not to the stark decree

      Baring her helpless heart to destiny’s stroke.

      So bows and must the mind-born will in man

      Obedient to the statutes fixed of old,

      Admitting without appeal the nether gods.

      In her the superhuman cast its seed.

      Inapt to fold its mighty wings of dream

      Her spirit refused to hug the common soil,

      Or, finding all life’s golden meanings robbed,

      Compound with earth, struck from the starry list,

      Or quench with black despair the God-given light.

      Accustomed to the eternal and the true,

      Her being conscious of its divine founts

      Asked not from mortal frailty pain’s relief,

      Patched not with failure bargain or compromise.

      A work she had to do, a word to speak:

      Writing the unfinished story of her soul

      In thoughts and actions graved in Nature’s book,

      She accepted not to close the luminous page,

      Cancel her commerce with eternity,

      Or set a signature of weak assent

      To the brute balance of the world’s exchange.

      A force in her that toiled since earth was made,

      Accomplishing in life the great world-plan,

      Pursuing after death immortal aims,

      Repugned to admit frustration’s barren role,

      Forfeit the meaning of her birth in Time,

      Obey the government of the casual fact

      Or yield her high destiny up to passing Chance.

      In her own self she found her high recourse;

      She matched with the iron law her sovereign right:

      Her single will opposed the cosmic rule.

      To stay the wheels of Doom this greatness rose.

      At the Unseen’s knock upon her hidden gates

      Her strength made greater by the lightning’s touch

      Awoke from

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