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      Where dawn-sheen gambolled with the native dusk

      And helped the Day to grow and Night to fail,

      Escaping over a wide and shimmering bridge,

      He came into a realm of early Light

      And the regency of a half-risen sun.

      Out of its rays our mind’s full orb was born.

      Appointed by the Spirit of the Worlds

      To mediate with the unknowing depths,

      A prototypal deft Intelligence

      Half-poised on equal wings of thought and doubt

      Toiled ceaselessly twixt being’s hidden ends.

      A Secrecy breathed in life’s moving act;

      A covert nurse of Nature’s miracles,

      It shaped life’s wonders out of Matter’s mud:

      It cut the pattern of the shapes of things,

      It pitched mind’s tent in the vague ignorant Vast.

      A master Magician of measure and device

      Has made an eternity from recurring forms

      And to the wandering spectator thought

      Assigned a seat on the inconscient stage.

      On earth by the will of this Arch-Intelligence

      A bodiless energy put on Matter’s robe;

      Proton and photon served the imager Eye

      To change things subtle into a physical world

      And the invisible appeared as shape

      And the impalpable was felt as mass:

      Magic of percept joined with concept’s art

      And lent to each object an interpreting name:

      Idea was disguised in a body’s artistry,

      And by a strange atomic law’s mystique

      A frame was made in which the sense could put

      Its symbol picture of the universe.

      Even a greater miracle was done.

      The mediating light linked body’s power,

      The sleep and dreaming of the tree and plant,

      The animal’s vibrant sense, the thought in man,

      To the effulgence of a Ray above.

      Its skill endorsing Matter’s right to think

      Cut sentient passages for the mind of flesh

      And found a means for Nescience to know.

      Offering its little squares and cubes of word

      As figured substitutes for reality,

      A mummified mnemonic alphabet,

      It helped the unseeing Force to read her works.

      A buried consciousness arose in her

      And now she dreams herself human and awake.

      But all was still a mobile Ignorance;

      Still Knowledge could not come and firmly grasp

      This huge invention seen as a universe.

      A specialist of logic’s hard machine

      Imposed its rigid artifice on the soul;

      An aide of the inventor intellect,

      It cut Truth into manageable bits

      That each might have his ration of thought-food,

      Then new-built Truth’s slain body by its art:

      A robot exact and serviceable and false

      Displaced the spirit’s finer view of things:

      A polished engine did the work of a god.

      None the true body found, its soul seemed dead:

      None had the inner look which sees Truth’s whole;

      All glorified the glittering substitute.

      Then from the secret heights a wave swept down,

      A brilliant chaos of rebel light arose;

      It looked above and saw the dazzling peaks,

      It looked within and woke the sleeping god.

      Imagination called her shining squads

      That venture into undiscovered scenes

      Where all the marvels lurk none yet has known:

      Lifting her beautiful and miraculous head,

      She conspired with inspiration’s sister brood

      To fill thought’s skies with glimmering nebulae.

      A bright Error fringed the mystery-altar’s frieze;

      Darkness grew nurse to wisdom’s occult sun,

      Myth suckled knowledge with her lustrous milk;

      The infant passed from dim to radiant breasts.

      Thus worked the Power upon the growing world;

      Its subtle craft withheld the full-orbed blaze,

      Cherished the soul’s childhood and on fictions fed

      Far richer in their sweet and nectarous sap

      Nourishing its immature divinity

      Than the staple or dry straw of Reason’s tilth,

      Its heaped fodder of innumerable facts,

      Plebeian fare on which today we thrive.

      Thus streamed down from the realm of early Light

      Ethereal thinkings into Matter’s world;

      Its gold-horned herds trooped into earth’s cave-heart.

      Its morning rays illume our twilight’s eyes,

      Its young formations move the mind of earth

      To labour and to dream and new-create,

      To feel beauty’s touch and know the world and self:

      The Golden Child began to think and see.

      In those bright realms are Mind’s first forward steps.

      Ignorant of all but eager to know all,

      Its curious slow enquiry there begins;

      Ever its searching grasps at shapes around,

      Ever it hopes to find out greater things.

      Ardent and golden-gleamed with sunrise fires,

      Alert it lives upon invention’s verge.

      Yet all it does is on an infant’s scale,

      As if the cosmos were a nursery game,

      Mind, life the playthings of a Titan’s babe.

      As one it works who builds a mimic fort

      Miraculously stable for a while,

      Made of the sands upon a bank of Time

      Mid an occult eternity’s shoreless sea.

      A small keen instrument the great Puissance chose,

      An arduous pastime passionately pursues;

      To teach the Ignorance is her difficult charge,

      Her thought starts from an original nescient Void

      And what she teaches she herself

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