Nectarous Night Make me thy child, wrap round thy viewless vault, Thy endlessly expanding ether's globe Cherishing in its depth globules of God. Star me within that sable mother-space, Hushfully heavened by thy enfolding dream Which without effort feeds all infant glows To brighten and broaden into kingly seers Thrilled with a universal harmony. Then will I reach behind my own self's light The Eternal who is birthless in things born, Equal to pin-point and infinity, Fused mother and child, one seer who is multiform, Merger of the whole cosmic consciousness In That which none can know but all can be! O leave me wingle

A PERSONAL PREFACE Between the heart-strain known as myocardial defect and the heart-strain, the cri du cwur, that is poetry no connection has been noted by either doctor or critic. But the story of the poems here collected has its beginning in a collapse due to over-tension of the poet's heart-muscle. I was rushing about a good deal in order to manage certain financial ventures undertaken to meet demands with which pure literature is proverbially incapable of coping. On top of this were months of intensive research in the philosophical implications of modern physics. Making a close and wide study of relativity theory and quantum theory and trying to find

Treasure Treasure of the Infinite Within a stretch of our hand! But the key to the Infinite Is hard to understand. God's single Sun is lying, Sealed in a trance of night— Trickling one ray through the key-hole To honey our twins of sight. O what shall turn in the grooves, Set free the Orb of gold And burst a noon of knowledge From mysteries untold? Vainly we grope for the key, To the ends of the earth we run, While just a fragile finger Making the sign of the One Can touch through the narrow tunnel The spring of the secret cry With which the lid breaks open The all-seeing central Eye!

Art of Arts Never through Angelo's eye, Beethoven's ear, Is caught the Timeless Wonder tense and sheer. Eternity comes outvasting all their art, An intimate blindness breaking in the heart To sudden seizure of a shadowless sky, Deep blue unheard, huge wind shutting the eye, And yet the music and magnificence A rapture that is everything at once, So colour is audible and symphony seen And both a plunging mystery too keen To rest on painter's canvas, player's score, As if an endless edge infinity wore, Cleaving a chasm of splendour and surprise From shaken brain down unto trembling thighs— A straight canal of dreaming opa

Infinitude Thought after thought bears up a storm of wings: Downward the sapphire Deep for ever flings Each thrill by a yonder to all ecstasies— Infinitude conquering mind with motionless ease! But when the titan wings fall back subdued, One secret Presence formless and alone Makes the whole sapphire sovereignty our own- Mind drawn within to a self-infinitude! 5-7-48 Page-101

My Life I live not from hour to hour But in dream on dream of you, Sweet! The dawn is the ten-petalled flower Of your holy feet. I am told that midday appears, But the perfect globe of noon Is made from the hemispheres Of your breasts where shadows swoon. I hark to a rumour of even, But all that I know are your eyes Drooping their gleams of heaven To the deep where the child earth lies. I have heard of an hour that is night; O how should I tell, when I see Nothing but your hair's hidden light Break loose its mystery? All time is the shine of your shape, All space is the stretch of your soul; W

The Eternal Vast Sunk in a gulf that seems to reach no close, Winged to a mountain climbing without end, Stretched till the heart has grown horizonless, We touch the Vast of the supracosmic Self. Night is not there, nor day; yet both lie dense For ever in a mighty measureless mood Coloured with That for which no word is born— A night where frozen is all mortal sound, A day that burns up every tongue of time! But though the earth-cry shrivels and falls away And human gaze is buried by the mass Of an infinite sun no sky can utter forth, A salamander of omniscient sleep Is laughing and dancing in the invisible blaze.

O Pygmy of Perfection!... When will I break through this blind stone of a breast? O warrior light caverned in my small heart, O dwarf with the hatchet forged in holy fire, Lift thy edged ecstasy and drive through clay The mystic fissure of a luminous laugh Answering the golden infinite of God's love! O pygmy of perfection, leap beyond To thy full stature of bliss that knows no birth! Then from the overarched eternities Come back time's king to trample the gilded roof Of the arrogant mind of me and plunge through thought With the cry of a thousand oceans pouring down Deep after deep of an inexhaustible truth! B

Above, Within This hour of dusk Thrills in my heart a cry for precious things: How wilt thou please, O life with so small wings, O thou great heap of straw and a grain of musk? Over me reigns The empire of a superhuman sleep Precious with secret plenitudes that keep A teeming twinkling infinite of musk-grains! Breathes far away That mystery measureless above all time. Will ever the Vast wake even here a chime Of heavenly gold transmuting common day? Heart within heart— Calls a wide garden sown in a mirrored sky, Deep day of some divine world-soul with eye On blossoming eye, dream-single though apart! O

Great Wings Great wings, one white and one of gold Our dreaming spirit must unfold, The wing of shadowless purity, The wing of power that cannot die. But life gains not this liberty Unless a wideness ever free Is the formless depth of what we are, A mystery standing near and far, An omnipresence of rapt air, No need to rush forth anywhere, An all-supporting breakless peace That makes the soul of form release Wings beyond earthly nights and days, And bears with cool invisible grace Their waft of gold-white victory: Godhead is only godhead by A soar of Self within Self-space. 9-6-48 Page-67