Canto One

      The World-Stair

      Alone he moved watched by the infinity

      Around him and the Unknowable above.

      All could be seen that shuns the mortal eye,

      All could be known the mind has never grasped;

      All could be done no mortal will can dare.

      A limitless movement filled a limitless peace.

      In a profound existence beyond earth’s

      Parent or kin to our ideas and dreams

      Where Space is a vast experiment of the soul,

      In an immaterial substance linked to ours

      In a deep oneness of all things that are,

      The universe of the Unknown arose.

      A self-creation without end or pause

      Revealed the grandeurs of the Infinite:

      It flung into the hazards of its play

      A million moods, a myriad energies,

      The world-shapes that are fancies of its Truth

      And the formulas of the freedom of its Force.

      It poured into the Ever-stable’s flux

      A bacchic rapture and revel of Ideas,

      A passion and motion of everlastingness.

      There rose unborn into the Unchanging’s surge

      Thoughts that abide in their deathless consequence,

      Words that immortal last though fallen mute,

      Acts that brought out from Silence its dumb sense,

      Lines that convey the inexpressible.

      The Eternal’s stillness saw in unmoved joy

      His universal Power at work display

      In plots of pain and dramas of delight

      The wonder and beauty of her will to be.

      All, even pain, was the soul’s pleasure here;

      Here all experience was a single plan,

      The thousandfold expression of the One.

      All came at once into his single view;

      Nothing escaped his vast intuitive sight,

      Nothing drew near he could not feel as kin:

      He was one spirit with that immensity.

      Images in a supernal consciousness

      Embodying the Unborn who never dies,

      The structured visions of the cosmic Self

      Alive with the touch of being’s eternity

      Looked at him like form-bound spiritual thoughts

      Figuring the movements of the Ineffable.

      Aspects of being donned world-outline; forms

      That open moving doors on things divine,

      Became familiar to his hourly sight;

      The symbols of the Spirit’s reality,

      The living bodies of the Bodiless

      Grew near to him, his daily associates.

      The exhaustless seeings of the unsleeping Mind,

      Letterings of its contact with the invisible,

      Surrounded him with countless pointing signs;

      The voices of a thousand realms of Life

      Missioned to him her mighty messages.

      The heaven-hints that invade our earthly lives,

      The dire imaginations dreamed by Hell,

      Which if enacted and experienced here

      Our dulled capacity soon would cease to feel

      Or our mortal frailty could not long endure,

      Were set in their sublime proportions there.

      There lived out in their self-born atmosphere,

      They resumed their topless pitch and native power;

      Their fortifying stress upon the soul

      Bit deep into the ground of consciousness

      The passion and purity of their extremes,

      The absoluteness of their single cry

      And the sovereign sweetness or violent poetry

      Of their beautiful or terrible delight.

      All thought can know or widest sight perceive

      And all that thought and sight can never know,

      All things occult and rare, remote and strange

      Were near to heart’s contact, felt by spirit-sense.

      Asking for entry at his nature’s gates

      They crowded the widened spaces of his mind,

      His self-discovery’s