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the preamble and the saving clause

      Of the dark Agreement by which all is ruled

      That rises from material Nature’s sleep

      To clothe the Everlasting in new shapes.

      He could re-read now and interpret new

      Its strange symbol letters, scattered abstruse signs,

      Resolve its oracle and its paradox,

      Its riddling phrases and its blindfold terms,

      The deep oxymoron of its truth’s repliques,

      And recognise as a just necessity

      Its hard conditions for the mighty work, –

      Nature’s impossible Herculean toil

      Only her warlock-wisecraft could enforce,

      Its law of the opposition of the gods,

      Its list of inseparable contraries.

      The dumb great Mother in her cosmic trance

      Exploiting for creation’s joy and pain

      Infinity’s sanction to the birth of form,

      Accepts indomitably to execute

      The will to know in an inconscient world,

      The will to live under a reign of death,

      The thirst for rapture in a heart of flesh,

      And works out through the appearance of a soul

      By a miraculous birth in plasm and gas

      The mystery of God’s covenant with the Night.

      Once more was heard in the still cosmic Mind

      The Eternal’s promise to his labouring Force

      Inducing the world-passion to begin,

      The cry of birth into mortality

      And the opening verse of the tragedy of Time.

      Out of the depths the world’s buried secret rose;

      He read the original ukase kept back

      In the locked archives of the spirit’s crypt,

      And saw the signature and fiery seal

      Of Wisdom on the dim Power’s hooded work

      Who builds in Ignorance the steps of Light.

      A sleeping deity opened deathless eyes:

      He saw the unshaped thought in soulless forms,

      Knew Matter pregnant with spiritual sense,

      Mind dare the study of the Unknowable,

      Life its gestation of the Golden Child.

      In the light flooding thought’s blank vacancy,

      Interpreting the universe by soul signs

      He read from within the text of the without:

      The riddle grew plain and lost its catch obscure.

      A larger lustre lit the mighty page.

      A purpose mingled with the whims of Time,

      A meaning met the stumbling pace of Chance

      And Fate revealed a chain of seeing Will;

      A conscious wideness filled the old dumb Space.

      In the Void he saw throned the Omniscience supreme.

      A Will, a hope immense now seized his heart,

      And to discern the superhuman’s form

      He raised his eyes to unseen spiritual heights,

      Aspiring to bring down a greater world.

      The glory he had glimpsed must be his home.

      A brighter heavenlier sun must soon illume

      This dusk room with its dark internal stair,

      The infant soul in its small nursery school

      Mid objects meant for a lesson hardly learned

      Outgrow its early grammar of intellect

      And its imitation of Earth-Nature’s art,

      Its earthly dialect to God-language change,

      In living symbols study Reality

      And learn the logic of the Infinite.

      The Ideal must be Nature’s common truth,

      The body illumined with the indwelling God,

      The heart and mind feel one with all that is,

      A conscious soul live in a conscious world.

      As through a mist a sovereign peak is seen,

      The greatness of the eternal Spirit appeared,

      Exiled in a fragmented universe

      Amid half-semblances of diviner things.

      These now could serve no more his regal turn;

      The Immortal’s pride refused the doom to live

      A miser of the scanty bargain made

      Between our littleness and bounded hopes

      And the compassionate Infinitudes.

      His height repelled the lowness of earth’s state:

      A wideness discontented with its frame

      Resiled from poor assent to Nature’s terms,

      The harsh contract spurned and the diminished lease.

      Only beginnings are accomplished here;

      Our base’s Matter seems alone complete,

      An absolute machine without a soul.

      Or all seems a misfit of half ideas,

      Or we saddle with the vice of earthly form

      A hurried imperfect glimpse of heavenly things,

      Guesses and travesties of celestial types.

      Here chaos sorts itself into a world,

      A brief formation drifting in the void:

      Apings of knowledge, unfinished arcs of power,

      Flamings of beauty into earthly shapes,

      Love’s broken reflexes of unity

      Swim, fragment-mirrorings of a floating sun.

      A packed assemblage of crude tentative lives

      Are pieced into a tessellated whole.

      There is no perfect answer to our hopes;

      There are blind voiceless doors that have no key;

      Thought climbs in vain and brings a borrowed light,

      Cheated by counterfeits sold to us in life’s mart,

      Our hearts clutch at a forfeited heavenly bliss.

      There is provender for the mind’s satiety,

      There are thrills of the flesh, but not the soul’s desire.

      Here even the highest rapture Time can give

      Is a mimicry of ungrasped beatitudes,

      A mutilated statue of ecstasy,

      A wounded happiness that cannot live,

      A brief felicity of mind or sense

      Thrown by the World-Power to her body-slave,

      Or a simulacrum of enforced delight

      In the seraglios of

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