Eternity

Vain is the immensity of the one God

If all that vast is but intolerance

Of time and life and earth's long cry for love!

No laughter crosses with its rippling light

Monotonies of measureless Self-space

Where Being broods on Being evermore

And heaven seeks not heaven in a hundred shapes.

Undepthed of the One the many are futile foam;

But losing the love-smite of soul on soul

The single God is a darkness in full noon!

O we must shatter the walls of mortal mind,

Grow white waves of the universal sea,

Win our true selves by loss in the breakless All;

But how shall loss of narrow humanhood—

The small snake with its tail in its own mouth—

Gain freedom in existence without end

If still the wide mouth grips its own wide tail?

The Eternal is not bound by being sole;

His unity is not blind to its sun-face—

Starved with abysses of unfathomed honey:

He drains them through the multi-flaming touch

Of seraph meeting seraph, breast to breast,

Or through heart answering to angel heart

From star and star unthinkably aloof-

Countless caprices of communion.

The Eternal is not bound by millionness;

Crystalling to unnumbered forms apart,

His rapture is innumerably nude—

Wonder to wonder shouting its inmost glow

And seizing every shout like a rhythm found

By the sheer harking to one's own blood-tune.

Extinction with no faintest hue of the hours

Left wavering like a rainbow glimpsed in sleep,

Nirvana dense with the unscrutable Void—

And yet a termless marvel of new birth,

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A goalless galaxy of all-viewing Eyes!

Gigantic calm feeding each glimmery mote

With a packed omnipresence till that spark

Flowers out a universe of aureole

To capture all things in a magic net—

And every mote a master and a slave!

A lonely throb which echoes everywhere

And learns a myriad lore of lonelihoods—

Beat upon beat of bliss ever the same

Yet ringing infinite tones of goldenness—

A solitary word self-scattering

To illimitable multitudes of sound

That swell like dawns and sink like eventides,

Chameleons of a thousand fugitive truths,

Clingings and clashings of reckless nectar-deeps,

Unbarriered rhapsodies that have no aim,

Musics magnificent with meanings lost,

Weaving a maze that sings all thought aswoon,

A shining chaos of unquenchable chords

Each calling from the unknown to the unknown,

Straining as if the heart could never speak,

Quivering as if no passion could be heard,

Bursting as if no dream could find a voice

And, by that teeming nameless miracle,

Uttering the unutterable Secrecy! . . .

Such is the Eternal who fulfils all time.

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