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by the unaccustomed glow,

      As if immanent in the shadows started up

      Imps with wry limbs and carved beast visages,

      Sprite-prompters goblin-wizened or faery-small,

      And genii fairer but unsouled and poor

      And fallen beings, their heavenly portion lost,

      And errant divinities trapped in Time’s dust.

      Ignorant and dangerous wills but armed with power,

      Half-animal, half-god their mood, their shape.

      Out of the greyness of a dim background

      Their whispers come, an inarticulate force,

      Awake in mind an echoing thought or word,

      To their sting of impulse the heart’s sanction draw,

      And in that little Nature do their work

      And fill its powers and creatures with unease.

      Its seed of joy they curse with sorrow’s fruit,

      Put out with error’s breath its scanty lights

      And turn its surface truths to falsehood’s ends,

      Its small emotions spur, its passions drive

      To the abyss or through the bog and mire:

      Or else with a goad of hard dry lusts they prick,

      While jogs on devious ways that nowhere lead

      Life’s cart finding no issue from ignorance.

      To sport with good and evil is their law;

      Luring to failure and meaningless success,

      All models they corrupt, all measures cheat,

      Make knowledge a poison, virtue a pattern dull

      And lead the endless cycles of desire

      Through semblances of sad or happy chance

      To an inescapable fatality.

      All by their influence is enacted there.

      Nor there alone is their empire or their role:

      Wherever are soulless minds and guideless lives

      And in a small body self is all that counts,

      Wherever love and light and largeness lack,

      These crooked fashioners take up their task.

      To all half-conscious worlds they extend their reign.

      Here too these godlings drive our human hearts,

      Our nature’s twilight is their lurking-place:

      Here too the darkened primitive heart obeys

      The veiled suggestions of a hidden Mind

      That dogs our knowledge with misleading light

      And stands between us and the Truth that saves.

      It speaks to us with the voices of the Night:

      Our darkened lives to greater darkness move;

      Our seekings listen to calamitous hopes.

      A structure of unseeing thoughts is built

      And reason used by an irrational Force.

      This earth is not alone our teacher and nurse;

      The powers of all the worlds have entrance here.

      In their own fields they follow the wheel of law

      And cherish the safety of a settled type;

      On earth out of their changeless orbit thrown

      Their law is kept, lost their fixed form of things.

      Into a creative chaos they are cast

      Where all asks order but is driven by Chance;

      Strangers to earth-nature, they must learn earth’s ways,

      Aliens or opposites, they must unite:

      They work and battle and with pain agree:

      These join, those part, all parts and joins anew,

      But never can we know and truly live

      Till all have found their divine harmony.

      Our life’s uncertain way winds circling on,

      Our mind’s unquiet search asks always light,

      Till they have learned their secret in their source,

      In the light of the Timeless and its spaceless home,

      In the joy of the Eternal sole and one.

      But now the Light supreme is far away:

      Our conscious life obeys the Inconscient’s laws;

      To ignorant purposes and blind desires

      Our hearts are moved by an ambiguous force;

      Even our mind’s conquests wear a battered crown.

      A slowly changing order binds our will.

      This is our doom until our souls are free.

      A mighty Hand then rolls mind’s firmaments back,

      Infinity takes up the finite’s acts

      And Nature steps into the eternal Light.

      Then only ends this dream of nether life.

      At the outset of this enigmatic world

      Which seems at once an enormous brute machine

      And a slow unmasking of the spirit in things,

      In this revolving chamber without walls

      In which God sits impassive everywhere

      As if unknown to himself and by us unseen

      In a miracle of inconscient secrecy,

      Yet is all here his action and his will.

      In this whirl and sprawl through infinite vacancy

      The Spirit became Matter and lay in the whirl,

      A body sleeping without sense or soul.

      A mass phenomenon of visible shapes

      Supported by the silence of the Void

      Appeared in the eternal Consciousness

      And seemed an outward and insensible world.

      There was none there to see and none to feel;

      Only the miraculous Inconscient,

      A subtle wizard skilled, was at its task.

      Inventing ways for magical results,

      Managing creation’s marvellous device,

      Marking mechanically dumb wisdom’s points,

      Using the unthought inevitable Idea,

      It did the works of God’s intelligence

      Or wrought the will of some supreme Unknown.

      Still consciousness was hidden in Nature’s womb,

      Unfelt was the Bliss whose rapture dreamed the worlds.

      Being was an inert substance driven by Force.

      At first was only an etheric Space:

      Its huge vibrations circled round and round

      Housing some unconceived initiative:

      Upheld by a supreme original Breath

      Expansion and contraction’s

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