LITMIR.BIZ

      Canto Eleven

      The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Mind

      There ceased the limits of the labouring Power.

      But being and creation cease not there.

      For Thought transcends the circles of mortal mind,

      It is greater than its earthly instrument:

      The godhead crammed into mind’s narrow space

      Escapes on every side into some vast

      That is a passage to infinity.

      It moves eternal in the spirit’s field,

      A runner towards the far spiritual light,

      A child and servant of the spirit’s force.

      But mind too falls back from a nameless peak.

      His being stretched beyond the sight of Thought.

      For the spirit is eternal and unmade

      And not by thinking was its greatness born,

      And not by thinking can its knowledge come.

      It knows itself and in itself it lives,

      It moves where no thought is nor any form.

      Its feet are steadied upon finite things,

      Its wings can dare to cross the Infinite.

      Arriving into his ken a wonder space

      Of great and marvellous meetings called his steps,

      Where Thought leaned on a Vision beyond thought

      And shaped a world from the Unthinkable.

      On peaks imagination cannot tread,

      In the horizons of a tireless sight,

      Under a blue veil of eternity

      The splendours of ideal Mind were seen

      Outstretched across the boundaries of things known.

      Origin of the little that we are,

      Instinct with the endless more that we must be,

      A prop of all that human strength enacts,

      Creator of hopes by earth unrealised,

      It spreads beyond the expanding universe;

      It wings beyond the boundaries of Dream,

      It overtops the ceiling of life’s soar.

      Awake in a luminous sphere unbound by Thought,

      Exposed to omniscient immensities,

      It casts on our world its great crowned influences,

      Its speed that outstrips the ambling of the hours,

      Its force that strides invincibly through Time,

      Its mights that bridge the gulf twixt man and God,

      Its lights that combat Ignorance and Death.

      In its vast ambit of ideal Space

      Where beauty and mightiness walk hand in hand,

      The Spirit’s truths take form as living Gods

      And each can build a world in its own right.

      In an air which doubt and error cannot mark

      With the stigmata of their deformity,

      In communion with the musing privacy

      Of a truth that sees in an unerring light

      Where the sight falters not nor wanders thought,

      Exempt from our world’s exorbitant tax of tears,

      Dreaming its luminous creations gaze

      On the Ideas that people eternity.

      In a sun-blaze of joy and absolute power

      Above the Masters of the Ideal throne

      In sessions of secure felicity,

      In regions of illumined certitude.

      Far are those realms from our labour and yearning and call,

      Perfection’s reign and hallowed sanctuary

      Closed to the uncertain thoughts of human mind,

      Remote from the turbid tread of mortal life.

      But since our secret selves are next of kin,

      A breath of unattained divinity

      Visits the imperfect earth on which we toil;

      Across a gleaming ether’s golden laugh

      A light falls on our vexed unsatisfied lives,

      A thought comes down from the ideal worlds

      And moves us to new-model even here

      Some image of their greatness and appeal

      And wonder beyond the ken of mortal hope.

      Amid the heavy sameness of the days

      And contradicted by the human law,

      A faith in things that are not and must be

      Lives comrade of this world’s delight and pain,

      The child of the secret soul’s forbidden desire

      Born of its amour with eternity.

      Our spirits break free from their environment;

      The future brings its face of miracle near,

      Its godhead looks at us with present eyes;

      Acts deemed impossible grow natural;

      We feel the hero’s immortality;

      The courage and the strength death cannot touch

      Awake in limbs that are mortal, hearts that fail;

      We move by the rapid impulse of a will

      That scorns the tardy trudge of mortal time.

      These promptings come not from an alien sphere:

      Ourselves are citizens of that mother State,

      Adventurers, we have colonised Matter’s night.

      But now our rights are barred, our passports void;

      We live self-exiled from our heavenlier home.

      An errant ray from the immortal Mind

      Accepted the earth’s blindness and became

      Our human thought, servant of Ignorance.

      An exile, labourer on this unsure globe

      Captured and driven in Life’s nescient grasp,

      Hampered by obscure cell and treacherous nerve,

      It dreams of happier states and nobler powers,

      The natural privilege of unfallen gods,

      Recalling still its old lost sovereignty.

      Amidst earth’s mist and fog and mud and stone

      It still remembers its exalted sphere

      And the high city of its splendid birth.

      A memory steals in from lost heavens of Truth,

      A wide release comes near, a Glory calls,

      A might looks out, an estranged felicity.

      In glamorous passages of half-veiled light

      Wandering, a

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