CANTO THREE   THE CALL TO THE QUEST   A MORN that seemed a new creation's front, Bringing a greater sunlight, happier skies, Came, burdened with a beauty moved and strange Out of the changeless origin of things. An ancient longing struck again new roots. The air drank deep of unfulfilled desire, The high trees trembled with a wandering wind Like souls that quiver at the approach of joy, And in a bosom of green secrecy For ever of its one love-note untired A lyric coil cried among the leaves. Away from the terrestrial murmur tu

  CANTO THREE   THE GLORY AND FALL OF LIFE   AN uneven broad ascent now lured his feet. Answering a greater Nature's troubled call He crossed the limits of embodied Mind And entered wide obscure disputed fields Where all was doubt and change and nothing sure, A world of search and toil without repose. As one who meets the face of the Unknown, A questioner with none to give reply, Attracted to a problem never solved, Always uncertain of the ground he trod, Always drawn on to an inconstant goal He travelled through a land peopled by doubts In shifting confines on a quaking base

  CANTO TWO   THE KINGDOM OF SUBTLE MATTER   IN the impalpable field of secret self, This little outer being's vast support Parted from vision by earth's solid fence, He came into a magic crystal air And found a life that lived not by the flesh, A light that made visible immaterial things. A fine degree in wonder's hierarchy, The kingdom of subtle Matter's faery craft Outlined against a sky of vivid hues, Leaping out of a splendour-trance and haze, The wizard revelation of its front. A world of lovelier forms lies near to ours, Where, undisguised by earth's deforming sight, All shape

  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 ecsta

  CANTO TWELVE   THE HEAVENS OF THE IDEAL   ALWAYS the Ideal beckoned from afar. Awakened by the touch of the Unseen, Deserting the boundary of things achieved, Aspired the strong discoverer, tireless Thought, Revealing at each step a luminous world. It left known summits for the unknown peaks: Impassioned, it sought the lone unrealised Truth, It longed for the Light that knows not death and birth. Each stage of the soul's remote ascent was built Into a constant heaven felt always here. At each pace of the journey marvellous A new degree of wonder and of bliss, A new rung formed in

  PART THREE Books IX-XII BOOK NINE The Book of Eternal Night CANTO ONE   TOWARDS THE BLACK VOID   SO was she left alone in the huge wood, Surrounded by a dim unthinking world, Her husband's corpse on her forsaken breast. She measured not her loss with helpless thoughts, Nor rent with tears the marble seals of pain: She rose not yet to face the dreadful god. Over the body she loved her soul leaned out In a great stillness without stir or voice, As if her mind had died with Satyavan. But still the human heart in her beat on. Aware still of his being near to hers, Closel

  CANTO NINE   THE PARADISE OF THE LIFE-GODS   A ROUND 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

  PART ONE Books I - III BOOK ONE The Book of Beginnings CANTO ONE   THE SYMBOL DAWN   IT was the hour before the Gods awake, Across the path of the divine Event The huge foreboding mind of Night, alone In her unlit temple of eternity, Lay stretched immobile upon Silence' marge. Almost one felt, opaque, impenetrable, In the sombre symbol of her eyeless muse The abysm of the unbodied Infinite, A fathomless zero occupied the world. A power of fallen boundless self awake Between the first and the last Noth

  BOOK TEN The Book of the Double Twilight CANTO ONE   THE DREAM TWILIGHT OF THE IDEAL   ALL still was darkness dread and desolate; There was no change nor any hope of change. In this black dream which was a house of Void, A walk to Nowhere in a land of Nought, Ever they drifted without aim or goal; Gloom led to worse gloom, death to an emptier death, In some positive Non-Being's purposeless Vast Through formless wastes dumb and unknowable. An ineffectual beam of suffering light Through the despairing darkness dogged their steps Like the remembrance of a glory lost; E

  CANTO TWO   THE ISSUE   A WHILE, withdrawn in secret fields of thought, Her mind moved in a many-imaged past That lived again and saw its end approach: Dying, it lived imperishably in her; Transient and vanishing from transient eyes, Invisible, a fateful ghost of self, It bore the future on its phantom breast. Along the fleeting event's far-backward trail Regressed the stream of the insistent hours, And on the bank of the mysterious flood Peopled with well-loved forms now seen no more And the subtle images of things that were, Her witness spirit stood reviewing Time. All that she once