Initiation at Midnight

Night's noon! Does mystery reveal a rent

When the peak hour of sable loneliness

Strikes on the tranquil space of the unseen?

A bolt of superhuman secrecy

Drops in my brain as if a veil were torn

By that intensest point of Vigilling gloom!

Has some dense word of power shot suddenly down

Out of rapt overarching widenesses?—

Word like a strange shut eye that views all things

By brooding on some inward glow of truth,

So dark and day of mortal sight are one

To this omniscience that transcends our time—

Word travelling through my body to the ground—

Message of the high immense to the dumb deep

From whose heart rose our hunger for the sky!

Have now at last drawn close the calm extremes

Betwixt which glimmer and grope our little lives?

But, O brief passage of immortal bliss,

Keen answer come to agelong questionings

Whether my mortal mood shall know God's touch,

Thou leapest like a dire descent of doom,

With my whole body crying round thy laugh!

Only a hidden cave, where all the lines

Of consciousness trembling along the nerves

Have their joint source and goal, has a smiling mouth

That whispers like a sage and child at once:

"Doom hurls down ever when life's dream must climb

Out of small self towards self which is world-vast:

Under the invisible shock of a lost heaven

Each dwarf death breaks to a new and greater birth,

Until behind all birth and death wakes up Life to its own divinity's endless day!"

18-6-48

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