INNERMOST

Each form a dancer whose pure naked sheen

Mirrors serenity, a moving sleep

White-echoed out of some mysterious deep

Where fade life's clamouring red and blue and green—

The priestesses of virgin reverie

Sway through the cavern heart of consciousness.

A marble rapture fronting frozenly

The cry of mortal hunger and distress,

A love superb moulded to rocks of flame,

A ring of rhythmic statues worship-hewn

From the pale vistas of a perfect moon—

They guard with silences the unbreathable Name.

Sri Aurobindo's Comment

"Very fine throughout. It is a combined inspiration, Illumined Mind with an element of Higher Mind coming in to modify it and sometimes rising to touch Intuition—even what might be called Overmind Intuition. The last touch is strongest in lines 2, 3, there is something of it in lines 5,6, 7, a little in the last three lines.

"It is, I suppose, some Anandamaya rhythm of the divine inmost Silence lifted above the vital life, that is the significance of the image."

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