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

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.