God-Grades Space is the infinite of God's witness Self Permitting the endless will of God that is time; But still the twin near glories shine apart. Beyond them burns a mingle of mysteries— Divinity reaches every goal at once And a boundless Eye draws into its living deeps The distances of future and of past— Time merged in space through a supracosmic fire. Beyond even this intense totality Is the freedom of an all-forgetting light: No space, no time, no four-dimensional muse. Yet the pure Being rapt in its own immense Marks not the sovereign term. Outtopping each Grade, dwells a lustre of absolute victory: Three golden faces o

Not Far Enough Not far enough our mystic soul has strained. Above thought's flicker, the mind—a trance of truth— Grows a white ether which embraces all; Still higher a life of lone beatitude That knows all things by knowing its own self; But highest a calm secret more intense Than mind's epiphany, life's apocalypse, Than infinite truth or timeless ecstasy— Sheer God, at once eternity and earth! In this ineffable extreme our soul Finds the pure substance of the undying One, Catches the power that proves the deepest gloom A veiled beauty brighter than widest day, And comes back with the alchemic touch that turns Even fl

Cosmic Rhythms Now cosmic rhythms are a laughter in my pulse, For the heart stands back immense and knows no aim, Cool core of a body of tortuous paths to power. My blood is the singing attar of that Rose Rooted in rest beyond all universe. Seraphs are crossing my brain that is wonder-wide Smiling to see even here an Eye like the sun, And, where they halt, my love's touch breaks out wings. All is perfection, thought and word and tune, Because the Ineffable shines through each interspace. 11-5-48 Page-5

Mystic Mountains The Alps soar to lone pinnacles of light, Intensities of isolated trance, An upward rush of separate sanctities The mind can cherish in its narrow sight And worship with its flitting wonderment. But O the thought-bewildering wall of white Outrunning the extremes of human gaze, Vanishing to the right, fading to the left And lifting a universe of dreaming ice, A vast virginity with no gap in God To let the world's familiar face yearn through— All life plucked from its level loiterings To one dense danger of divinity, A sheer leap everywhere of soul made rock Of rapture unperturbable by time—

The Terror and the Tyranny A demon's grip is the wide universe— Unending space and termless time, yet each Distance and day hold ever the same heart-break! Sunlight falls like a fire-whip on the flesh: From pulse-throb to small quivering pulse-throb Our life keeps running neath that titan stroke. And every star opens a wound of dream In the unescapable gloom that is our soul. Even beauty is a rainbow hung on tears. . . . But through the terror and the tyranny And yet the blind defiance by our blood A wondrous word steals out in lonely calms When on itself man's mind looks with long gaze And broods on the secret

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