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million species follow one mute Law.

      A huge inertness is the world’s defence,

      Even in change is treasured changelessness;

      Into inertia revolution sinks,

      In a new dress the old resumes its role;

      The Energy acts, the stable is its seal:

      On Shiva’s breast is stayed the enormous dance.

      A fiery spirit came, next of the three.

      A hunchback rider of the red Wild-Ass,

      A rash Intelligence leaped down lion-maned

      From the great mystic Flame that rings the worlds

      And with its dire edge eats at being’s heart.

      Thence sprang the burning vision of Desire.

      A thousand shapes it wore, took numberless names:

      A need of multitude and uncertainty

      Pricks it for ever to pursue the One

      On countless roads across the vasts of Time

      Through circuits of unending difference.

      It burns all breasts with an ambiguous fire.

      A radiance gleaming on a murky stream,

      It flamed towards heaven, then sank, engulfed, towards hell;

      It climbed to drag down Truth into the mire

      And used for muddy ends its brilliant Force;

      A huge chameleon gold and blue and red

      Turning to black and grey and lurid brown,

      Hungry it stared from a mottled bough of life

      To snap up insect joys, its favourite food,

      The dingy sustenance of a sumptuous frame

      Nursing the splendid passion of its hues.

      A snake of flame with a dull cloud for tail,

      Followed by a dream-brood of glittering thoughts,

      A lifted head with many-tinged flickering crests,

      It licked at knowledge with a smoky tongue.

      A whirlpool sucking in an empty air,

      It based on vacancy stupendous claims,

      In Nothingness born to Nothingness returned,

      Yet all the time unwittingly it drove

      Towards the hidden Something that is All.

      Ardent to find, incapable to retain,

      A brilliant instability was its mark,

      To err its inborn trend, its native cue.

      At once to an unreflecting credence prone,

      It thought all true that flattered its own hopes;

      It cherished golden nothings born of wish,

      It snatched at the unreal for provender.

      In darkness it discovered luminous shapes;

      Peering into a shadow-hung half-light

      It saw hued images scrawled on Fancy’s cave;

      Or it swept in circles through conjecture’s night

      And caught in imagination’s camera

      Bright scenes of promise held by transient flares,

      Fixed in life’s air the feet of hurrying dreams,

      Kept prints of passing Forms and hooded Powers

      And flash-images of half-seen verities.

      An eager spring to seize and to possess

      Unguided by reason or the seeing soul

      Was its first natural motion and its last,

      It squandered life’s force to achieve the impossible:

      It scorned the straight road and ran on wandering curves

      And left what it had won for untried things;

      It saw unrealised aims as instant fate

      And chose the precipice for its leap to heaven.

      Adventure its system in the gamble of life,

      It took fortuitous gains as safe results;

      Error discouraged not its confident view

      Ignorant of the deep law of being’s ways

      And failure could not slow its fiery clutch;

      One chance made true warranted all the rest.

      Attempt, not victory, was the charm of life.

      An uncertain winner of uncertain stakes,

      Instinct its dam and the life-mind its sire,

      It ran its race and came in first or last.

      Yet were its works nor small and vain nor null;

      It nursed a portion of infinity’s strength

      And could create the high things its fancy willed;

      Its passion caught what calm intelligence missed.

      Insight of impulse laid its leaping grasp

      On heavens high Thought had hidden in dazzling mist,

      Caught glimmers that revealed a lurking sun:

      It probed the void and found a treasure there.

      A half-intuition purpled in its sense;

      It threw the lightning’s fork and hit the unseen.

      It saw in the dark and vaguely blinked in the light,

      Ignorance was its field, the unknown its prize.

      Of all these Powers the greatest was the last.

      Arriving late from a far plane of thought

      Into a packed irrational world of Chance

      Where all was grossly felt and blindly done,

      Yet the haphazard seemed the inevitable,

      Came Reason, the squat godhead artisan,

      To her narrow house upon a ridge in Time.

      Adept of clear contrivance and design,

      A pensive face and close and peering eyes,

      She took her firm and irremovable seat,

      The strongest, wisest of the troll-like Three.

      Armed with her lens and measuring-rod and probe,

      She looked upon an object universe

      And the multitudes that in it live and die

      And the body of Space and the fleeing soul of Time,

      And took the earth and stars into her hands

      To try what she could make of these strange things.

      In her strong purposeful laborious mind,

      Inventing her scheme-lines of reality

      And the geometric curves of her time-plan,

      She multiplied her slow half-cuts at Truth:

      Impatient of enigma and the unknown,

      Intolerant of the lawless and the unique,

      Imposing reflection on the march of Force,

      Imposing clarity on the unfathomable,

      She strove to reduce to rules the mystic world.

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