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her brightest stars are quenched in Night,

      Nourished by hardship and calamity

      And with pain for her body’s handmaid, masseuse, nurse,

      Her tortured invisible spirit continues still

      To toil though in darkness, to create though with pangs;

      She carries crucified God upon her breast.

      In chill insentient depths where joy is none,

      Immured, oppressed by the resisting Void

      Where nothing moves and nothing can become,

      Still she remembers, still invokes the skill

      The Wonder-worker gave her at her birth,

      Imparts to drowsy formlessness a shape,

      Reveals a world where nothing was before.

      In realms confined to a prone circle of death,

      To a dark eternity of Ignorance,

      A quiver in an inert inconscient mass,

      Or imprisoned in immobilised whorls of Force,

      By Matter’s blind compulsion deaf and mute

      She refuses motionless in the dust to sleep.

      Then, for her rebel waking’s punishment

      Given only hard mechanic Circumstance

      As the enginery of her magic craft,

      She fashions godlike marvels out of mud;

      In the plasm she sets her dumb immortal urge,

      Helps the live tissue to think, the closed sense to feel,

      Flashes through the frail nerves poignant messages,

      In a heart of flesh miraculously loves,

      To brute bodies gives a soul, a will, a voice.

      Ever she summons as by a sorcerer’s wand

      Beings and shapes and scenes innumerable,

      Torch-bearers of her pomps through Time and Space.

      This world is her long journey through the night,

      The suns and planets lamps to light her road,

      Our reason is the confidante of her thoughts,

      Our senses are her vibrant witnesses.

      There drawing her signs from things half true, half false,

      She labours to replace by realised dreams

      The memory of her lost eternity.

      These are her deeds in this huge world-ignorance:

      Till the veil is lifted, till the night is dead,

      In light or dark she keeps her tireless search;

      Time is her road of endless pilgrimage.

      One mighty passion motives all her works.

      Her eternal Lover is her action’s cause;

      For him she leaped forth from the unseen Vasts

      To move here in a stark unconscious world.

      Its acts are her commerce with her hidden Guest,

      His moods she takes for her heart’s passionate moulds;

      In beauty she treasures the sunlight of his smile.

      Ashamed of her rich cosmic poverty,

      She cajoles with her small gifts his mightiness,

      Holds with her scenes his look’s fidelity

      And woos his large-eyed wandering thoughts to dwell

      In figures of her million-impulsed Force.

      Only to attract her veiled companion

      And keep him close to her breast in her world-cloak

      Lest from her arms he turn to his formless peace,

      Is her heart’s business and her clinging care.

      Yet when he is most near, she feels him far.

      For contradiction is her nature’s law.

      Although she is ever in him and he in her,

      As if unaware of the eternal tie,

      Her will is to shut God into her works

      And keep him as her cherished prisoner

      That never they may part again in Time.

      A sumptuous chamber of the spirit’s sleep

      At first she made, a deep interior room,

      Where he slumbers as if a forgotten guest.

      But now she turns to break the oblivious spell,

      Awakes the sleeper on the sculptured couch;

      She finds again the Presence in the form

      And in the light that wakes with him recovers

      A meaning in the hurry and trudge of Time,

      And through this mind that once obscured the soul

      Passes a glint of unseen deity.

      Across a luminous dream of spirit-space

      She builds creation like a rainbow bridge

      Between the original Silence and the Void.

      A net is made of the mobile universe;

      She weaves a snare for the conscious Infinite.

      A knowledge is with her that conceals its steps

      And seems a mute omnipotent Ignorance.

      A might is with her that makes wonders true;

      The incredible is her stuff of common fact.

      Her purposes, her workings riddles prove;

      Examined, they grow other than they were,

      Explained, they seem yet more inexplicable.

      Even in our world a mystery has reigned

      Earth’s cunning screen of trivial plainness hides;

      Her larger levels are of sorceries made.

      There the enigma shows its splendid prism,

      There is no deep disguise of commonness;

      Occult, profound comes all experience,

      Marvel is ever new, miracle divine.

      There is a screened burden, a mysterious touch,

      There is a secrecy of hidden sense.

      Although no earthen mask weighs on her face,

      Into herself she flees from her own sight.

      All forms are tokens of some veiled idea

      Whose covert purpose lurks from mind’s pursuit,

      Yet is a womb of sovereign consequence.

      There every thought and feeling is an act,

      And every act a symbol and a sign,

      And every symbol hides a living power.

      A universe she builds from truths and myths,

      But what she needed most she cannot build;

      All shown is a figure or copy of the Truth,

      But the Real veils from her its mystic face.

      All else she finds, there lacks eternity;

      All is sought out, but missed the Infinite.

      A

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