Canto Four The Secret Knowledge On a height he stood that looked towards greater heights. Our early approaches to the Infinite Are sunrise splendours on a marvellous verge While lingers yet unseen the glorious sun. What now we see is a shadow of what must come. The earth's uplook to a remote unknown Is a preface only of the epic climb Of human soul from its flat earthly state To the discovery of a greater self And the far gleam of an eternal Light. This world is a beginning and a base Where Life and Mind erect their structured dreams; An unborn Power must build reality. A deathbound littleness is not

Canto Nine The Paradise of the Life-Gods Around him shone a great felicitous Day. A lustre of some rapturous Infinite, It held in the splendour of its golden laugh Regions of the heart's happiness set free, Intoxicated with the wine of God, Immersed in light, perpetually divine. A favourite and intimate of the Gods Obeying the divine command to joy, It was the sovereign of its own delight And master of the kingdoms of its force. Assured of the bliss for which all forms were made, Unmoved by fear and grief and the shocks of Fate And unalarmed by the breath of fleeting Time And unbesieged by adver

Canto Two The Adoration of the Divine Mother A stillness absolute, incommunicable, Meets the sheer self-discovery of the soul; A wall of stillness shuts it from the world, A gulf of stillness swallows up the sense And makes unreal all that mind has known, All that the labouring senses still would weave Prolonging an imaged unreality. Self's vast spiritual silence occupies space; Only the Inconceivable is left, Only the Nameless without space and time: Abolished is the burdening need of life: Thought falls from us, we cease from joy and grief; The ego is dead; we are free from being and care,

Canto Five The Godheads of the Little Life A fixed and narrow power with rigid forms, He saw the empire of the little life, An unhappy corner in eternity. It lived upon the margin of the Idea Protected by Ignorance as in a shell. Then, hoping to learn the secret of this world He peered across its scanty fringe of sight, To disengage from its surface-clear obscurity The Force that moved it and the Idea that made Imposing smallness on the Infinite, The ruling spirit of its littleness, The divine law that gave it right to be, Its claim on Nature and its need in Time. He plunged his gaze into the s

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

Canto Ten The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Little Mind This too must now be overpassed and left, As all must be until the Highest is gained In whom the world and self grow true and one: Till that is reached our journeying cannot cease. Always a nameless goal beckons beyond, Always ascends the zigzag of the gods And upward points the spirit's climbing Fire. This breath of hundred-hued felicity And its pure heightened figure of Time's joy, Tossed upon waves of flawless happiness, Hammered into single beats of ecstasy, This fraction of the spirit's integer Caught into a passionate greatn

Canto Four The Vision and the Boon Then suddenly there rose a sacred stir. Amid the lifeless silence of the Void In a solitude and an immensity A sound came quivering like a loved footfall Heard in the listening spaces of the soul; A touch perturbed his fibres with delight. An influence had approached the mortal range, A boundless Heart was near his longing heart, A mystic Form enveloped his earthly shape. All at her contact broke from silence' seal; Spirit and body thrilled identified, Linked in the grasp of an unspoken joy; Mind, members, life were merged in ecstasy. Intoxicated as with nectarous rain

Canto Eight The World of Falsehood, the Mother of Evil and the Sons of Darkness Then could he see the hidden heart of Night: The labour of its stark unconsciousness Revealed the endless terrible Inane. A spiritless blank Infinity was there; A Nature that denied the eternal Truth In the vain braggart freedom of its thought Hoped to abolish God and reign alone. There was no sovereign Guest, no witness Light; Unhelped it would create its own bleak world. Its large blind eyes looked out on demon acts, Its deaf ears heard the untruth its dumb lips spoke; Its huge misguided fancy took vast shapes, I

Canto Thirteen In the Self of Mind At last there came a bare indifferent sky Where Silence listened to the cosmic Voice, But answered nothing to a million calls; The soul's endless question met with no response. An abrupt conclusion ended eager hopes, A deep cessation in a mighty calm, A finis-line on the last page of thought And a margin and a blank of wordless peace. There paused the climbing hierarchy of worlds. He stood on a wide arc of summit Space Alone with an enormous Self of Mind Which held all life in a corner of its vasts. Omnipotent, immobile and aloof, In the world which sprang from it, it took

Canto Four The Kingdoms of the Little Life A quivering trepidant uncertain world Born from that dolorous meeting and eclipse Appeared in the emptiness where her feet had trod, A quick obscurity, a seeking stir. There was a writhing of half-conscious force Hardly awakened from inconscient sleep And tied to an instinct-driven Ignorance, To find itself and find its hold on things. Inheritor of poverty and loss, Assailed by memories that fled when seized, Haunted by a forgotten uplifting hope, It strove with a blindness as of groping hands To fill the aching and disastrous gap Between