Canto Fifteen

      The Kingdoms of the Greater Knowledge

      After a measureless moment of the soul

      Again returning to these surface fields

      Out of the timeless depths where he had sunk,

      He heard once more the slow tread of the hours.

      All once perceived and lived was far away;

      Himself was to himself his only scene.

      Above the Witness and his universe

      He stood in a realm of boundless silences

      Awaiting the Voice that spoke and built the worlds.

      A light was round him wide and absolute,

      A diamond purity of eternal sight;

      A consciousness lay still, devoid of forms,

      Free, wordless, uncoerced by sign or rule,

      For ever content with only being and bliss;

      A sheer existence lived in its own peace

      On the single spirit’s bare and infinite ground.

      Out of the sphere of Mind he had arisen,

      He had left the reign of Nature’s hues and shades;

      He dwelt in his self’s colourless purity.

      It was a plane of undetermined spirit

      That could be a zero or round sum of things,

      A state in which all ceased and all began.

      All it became that figures the absolute,

      A high vast peak whence Spirit could see the worlds,

      Calm’s wide epiphany, wisdom’s mute home,

      A lonely station of Omniscience,

      A diving-board of the Eternal’s power,

      A white floor in the house of All-Delight.

      Here came the thought that passes beyond Thought,

      Here the still Voice which our listening cannot hear,

      The Knowledge by which the knower is the known,

      The Love in which beloved and lover are one.

      All stood in an original plenitude,

      Hushed and fulfilled before they could create

      The glorious dream of their universal acts;

      Here was engendered the spiritual birth,

      Here closed the finite’s crawl to the Infinite.

      A thousand roads leaped into Eternity

      Or singing ran to meet God’s veilless face.

      The Known released him from its limiting chain;

      He knocked at the doors of the Unknowable.

      Thence gazing with an immeasurable outlook

      One with self’s inlook into its own pure vasts,

      He saw the splendour of the spirit’s realms,

      The greatness and wonder of its boundless works,

      The power and passion leaping from its calm,

      The rapture of its movement and its rest,

      And its fire-sweet miracle of transcendent life,

      The million-pointing undivided grasp

      Of its vision of one same stupendous All,

      Its inexhaustible acts in a timeless Time,

      A space that is its own infinity.

      A glorious multiple of one radiant Self,

      Answering to joy with joy, to love with love,

      All there were moving mansions of God-bliss;

      Eternal and unique they lived the One.

      There forces are great outbursts of God’s truth

      And objects are its pure spiritual shapes;

      Spirit no more is hid from its own view,

      All sentience is a sea of happiness

      And all creation is an act of light.

      Out of the neutral silence of his soul

      He passed to its fields of puissance and of calm

      And saw the Powers that stand above the world,

      Traversed the realms of the supreme Idea

      And sought the summit of created things

      And the almighty source of cosmic change.

      There Knowledge called him to her mystic peaks

      Where thought is held in a vast internal sense

      And feeling swims across a sea of peace

      And vision climbs beyond the reach of Time.

      An equal of the first creator seers,

      Accompanied by an all-revealing light

      He moved through regions of transcendent Truth

      Inward, immense, innumerably one.

      There distance was his own huge spirit’s extent;

      Delivered from the fictions of the mind

      Time’s triple dividing step baffled no more;

      Its inevitable and continuous stream,

      The long flow of its manifesting course,

      Was held in spirit’s single wide regard.

      A universal beauty showed its face:

      The invisible deep-fraught significances,

      Here sheltered behind form’s insensible screen,

      Uncovered to him their deathless harmony

      And the key to the wonder-book of common things.

      In their uniting law stood up revealed

      The multiple measures of the upbuilding force,

      The lines of the World-Geometer’s technique,

      The enchantments that uphold the cosmic web

      And the magic underlying simple shapes.

      On peaks where Silence listens with still heart

      To the rhythmic metres of the rolling worlds,

      He