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tied into a knot

      And hung on a bulge of its environment,

      A little curve cut off in measureless Space,

      A little span of life in all vast Time.

      A thought was there that planned, a will that strove,

      But for small aims within a narrow scope,

      Wasting unmeasured toil on transient things.

      It knew itself a creature of the mud;

      It asked no larger law, no loftier aim;

      It had no inward look, no upward gaze.

      A backward scholar on logic’s rickety bench

      Indoctrinated by the erring sense,

      It took appearance for the face of God,

      For casual lights the marching of the suns,

      For heaven a starry strip of doubtful blue;

      Aspects of being feigned to be the whole.

      There was a voice of busy interchange,

      A market-place of trivial thoughts and acts:

      A life soon spent, a mind the body’s slave

      Here seemed the brilliant crown of Nature’s work,

      And tiny egos took the world as means

      To sate awhile dwarf lusts and brief desires,

      In a death-closed passage saw life’s start and end

      As though a blind alley were creation’s sign,

      As if for this the soul had coveted birth

      In the wonderland of a self-creating world

      And the opportunities of cosmic Space.

      This creature passionate only to survive,

      Fettered to puny thoughts with no wide range

      And to the body’s needs and pangs and joys,

      This fire growing by its fuel’s death,

      Increased by what it seized and made its own:

      It gathered and grew and gave itself to none.

      Only it hoped for greatness in its den

      And pleasure and victory in small fields of power

      And conquest of life-room for self and kin,

      An animal limited by its feeding-space.

      It knew not the Immortal in its house;

      It had no greater deeper cause to live.

      In limits only it was powerful;

      Acute to capture truth for outward use,

      Its knowledge was the body’s instrument;

      Absorbed in the little works of its prison-house

      It turned around the same unchanging points

      In the same circle of interest and desire,

      But thought itself the master of its jail.

      Although for action, not for wisdom made,

      Thought was its apex – or its gutter’s rim:

      It saw an image of the external world

      And saw its surface self, but knew no more.

      Out of a slow confused embroiled self-search

      Mind grew to a clarity cut out, precise,

      A gleam enclosed in a stone ignorance.

      In this bound thinking’s narrow leadership

      Tied to the soil, inspired by common things,

      Attached to a confined familiar world,

      Amid the multitude of her motived plots,

      Her changing actors and her million masks,

      Life was a play monotonously the same.

      There were no vast perspectives of the spirit,

      No swift invasions of unknown delight,

      No golden distances of wide release.

      This petty state resembled our human days

      But fixed to eternity of changeless type,

      A moment’s movement doomed to last through Time.

      Existence bridge-like spanned the inconscient gulfs,

      A half-illumined building in a mist,

      Which from a void of Form arose to sight

      And jutted out into a void of Soul.

      A little light in a great darkness born,

      Life knew not where it went nor whence it came.

      Around all floated still the nescient haze.

      End of Canto Four

      Canto Five

      The Godheads of the Little Life

      A fixed and narrow power with rigid forms,

      He saw the empire of the little life,

      An unhappy corner in eternity.

      It lived upon the margin of the Idea

      Protected by Ignorance as in a shell.

      Then, hoping to learn the secret of this world

      He peered across its scanty fringe of sight,

      To disengage from its surface-clear obscurity

      The Force that moved it and the Idea that made,

      Imposing smallness on the Infinite,

      The ruling spirit of its littleness,

      The divine law that gave it right to be,

      Its claim on Nature and its need in Time.

      He plunged his gaze into the siege of mist

      That held this ill-lit straitened continent

      Ringed with the skies and seas of ignorance

      And kept it safe from Truth and Self and Light.

      As when a searchlight stabs the Night’s blind breast

      And dwellings and trees and figures of men appear

      As if revealed to an eye in Nothingness,

      All lurking things were torn out of their veils

      And held up in his vision’s sun-white blaze.

      A busy restless uncouth populace

      Teemed in their dusky unnoted thousands there.

      In a mist of secrecy wrapping the world-scene

      The little deities of Time’s nether act

      Who work remote from Heaven’s controlling eye,

      Plotted, unknown to the creatures whom they move,

      The small conspiracies of this petty reign

      Amused with the small contrivings, the brief hopes

      And little eager steps and little ways

      And reptile wallowings in the dark and dust,

      And the crouch and ignominy of creeping life.

      A trepidant and motley multitude,

      A strange pell-mell of magic artisans,

      Was seen moulding the plastic clay of life,

      An elfin brood, an

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