The Two Languages

O body, modern tongue swayed by thought's flicker,

How shall you be the outbreak of God's fire

Whose tones are an ancient mystery beyond thought,

A luminous Sanskrit of the secret soul

Breathing a windless vastitudes within—

Singer and seer of the omnipresent dream

Lost by the fickle light of the arguer mind ?

To your many-mooded mutability

Dead is the language of the timeless One,

Which through wide harmonies of goldenness

Steadily thrills with yet a single cry

Echoing ecstatically everywhere!

Can ever your fluctuant form facilely leaning

To a hundred different lures and loves translate

The soul's truth-pledged intense Upanishad?

Not till your cherished liberties have grown

A reasonless rapture of ineffable faith!

Wavering no longer with time's glow and gloom,

Deaf to sun-mobile day, star-tremulous night,

Immerged in peace that seems a living tomb—

Thus only can you shrine the immortal blaze,

Burn with the deep originality

Of a loveliness unchangeable yet new!

Alone the superconscious sleep can wake

To the miracle-shades of the omniscient speech

Whose limitless undertone and overtone

Rhyme, through strange words that make a million worlds,

The Infinite to the self-same Infinite.

O body, restless with thought-jangled nerves,

Rein back response to clamouring multitudes:

Dissolve your sounds in measureless silences

To learn the rhythms of eternal life.

Let the loud thinker hold breath—a rapt muse

Withdrawing beyond birth. Time's quivering tongue,

Lie still an age if you would utter God!

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