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it rose.

      Only a gleam was there of symbol facts

      That shroud the mystery lurking in their glow,

      And falsehoods based on hidden realities

      By which they live until they fall from Time.

      Our mind is a house haunted by the slain past,

      Ideas soon mummified, ghosts of old truths,

      God’s spontaneities tied with formal strings

      And packed into drawers of reason’s trim bureau,

      A grave of great lost opportunities,

      Or an office for misuse of soul and life

      And all the waste man makes of heaven’s gifts

      And all his squanderings of Nature’s store,

      A stage for the comedy of Ignorance.

      The world seemed a long aeonic failure’s scene:

      All sterile grew, no base was left secure.

      Assailed by the edge of the convicting beam

      The builder Reason lost her confidence

      In the successful sleight and turn of thought

      That makes the soul the prisoner of a phrase.

      Its highest wisdom was a brilliant guess,

      Its mighty structured science of the worlds

      A passing light on being’s surfaces.

      There was nothing there but a schema drawn by sense,

      A substitute for eternal mysteries,

      A scrawl figure of reality, a plan

      And elevation by the architect Word

      Imposed upon the semblances of Time.

      Existence’ self was shadowed by a doubt;

      Almost it seemed a lotus-leaf afloat

      On a nude pool of cosmic Nothingness.

      This great spectator and creator Mind

      Was only some half-seeing’s delegate,

      A veil that hung between the soul and Light,

      An idol, not the living body of God.

      Even the still spirit that looks upon its works

      Was some pale front of the Unknowable;

      A shadow seemed the wide and witness Self,

      Its liberation and immobile calm

      A void recoil of being from Time-made things,

      Not the self-vision of Eternity.

      Deep peace was there, but not the nameless Force:

      Our sweet and mighty Mother was not there

      Who gathers to her bosom her children’s lives,

      Her clasp that takes the world into her arms

      In the fathomless rapture of the Infinite,

      The Bliss that is creation’s splendid grain

      Or the white passion of God-ecstasy

      That laughs in the blaze of the boundless heart of Love.

      A greater Spirit than the Self of Mind

      Must answer to the questioning of his soul.

      For here was no firm clue and no sure road;

      High-climbing pathways ceased in the unknown;

      An artist Sight constructed the Beyond

      In contrary patterns and conflicting hues;

      A part-experience fragmented the Whole.

      He looked above, but all was blank and still:

      A sapphire firmament of abstract Thought

      Escaped into a formless Vacancy.

      He looked below, but all was dark and mute.

      A noise was heard, between, of thought and prayer,

      A strife, a labour without end or pause;

      A vain and ignorant seeking raised its voice.

      A rumour and a movement and a call,

      A foaming mass, a cry innumerable

      Rolled ever upon the ocean surge of Life

      Along the coasts of mortal Ignorance.

      On its unstable and enormous breast

      Beings and forces, forms, ideas like waves

      Jostled for figure and supremacy,

      And rose and sank and rose again in Time;

      And at the bottom of the sleepless stir,

      A Nothingness parent of the struggling worlds,

      A huge creator Death, a mystic Void,

      For ever sustaining the irrational cry,

      For ever excluding the supernal Word,

      Motionless, refusing question and response,

      Reposed beneath the voices and the march

      The dim Inconscient’s dumb incertitude.

      Two firmaments of darkness and of light

      Opposed their limits to the spirit’s walk;

      It moved veiled in from Self’s infinity

      In a world of beings and momentary events

      Where all must die to live and live to die.

      Immortal by renewed mortality,

      It wandered in the spiral of its acts

      Or ran around the cycles of its thought,

      Yet was no more than its original self

      And knew no more than when it first began.

      To be was a prison, extinction the escape.

      End of Canto Thirteen

      Canto Fourteen

      The World-Soul

      A covert answer to his seeking came.

      In a far shimmering background of Mind-Space

      A glowing mouth was seen, a luminous shaft;

      A recluse gate it seemed, musing on joy,

      A veiled retreat and escape to mystery.

      Away from the unsatisfied surface world

      It fled into the bosom of the unknown,

      A well, a tunnel of the depths of God.

      It plunged as if a mystic groove of hope

      Through many layers of formless voiceless self

      To reach the last profound of the world’s heart,

      And from that heart there surged a wordless call

      Pleading with some still impenetrable Mind,

      Voicing some passionate unseen desire.

      As if a beckoning finger of secrecy

      Outstretched into a crystal mood of air,

      Pointing at him from some near hidden depth,

      As if a message from the world’s deep soul,

      An intimation of a lurking joy

      That flowed out from a cup of brooding bliss,

      There

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