SONNETS Undated Sonnets Transformation My breath runs in a subtle rhythmic stream; It fills my members with a might divine: I have drunk the Infinite like a giant’s wine. Time is my drama or my pageant dream. Now are my illumined cells joy’s flaming scheme And changed my thrilled and branching nerves to fine Channels of rapture opal and Hyaline For the influx of the Unknown and the Supreme. I am no more a vassal of the flesh, A slave to Nature and her leaden rule; I am caught no more in the senses’ narrow mesh. My soul unhorizoned widens to measureless sight, My body is God’s happy liv

The Spring Child ON BASANTI’S BIRTHDAY - JYESTHA 1900 Of Spring is her name for whose bud and blooming We praise today the Giver, — Of Spring, and its sweetness clings about her For her face is Spring and Spring’s without her, As loth to leave her. See, it is summer; the brilliant sunlight Lies hard on stream and plain, And all things wither with heats diurnal; But she! how vanished things and vernal In her remain. And almost indeed we repine and marvel To watch her bloom and grow; For half we had thought our sweet bud could never Bloom out, but must surely remain for ever The child we kno

Answer to a Criticism * Milford accepts the rule that two consonants after a short vowel make the short vowel long, even if they are outside the word and come in another word following it. To my mind that is an absurdity. I shall go on pronouncing the y of frosty as short whether it has two consonants after it or only one or none; it remains "frosty whether it is a frosty scalp or frosty top or a frosty anything. In no case have I pronounced it or could I consent to pronounce it as frostee. My hexameters are intended to be read naturally as one would read any English sentence. But if you admit a short syllable to be long whenever there are two consonants after i

Life Mystic Miracle, daughter of Delight,           Life, thou ecstasy, Let the radius of thy flight           Be eternity. On thy wings thou bearest high           Glory and disdain, Godhead and mortality,           Ecstasy and pain. Take me in thy wild embrace           Without weak reserve Body dire and unveiled face;            Faint not, Life, nor swerve. All thy bliss I would explore,           All thy tyranny. Cruel like the lion’s roar,           Sweet like springtide be. Like a Titan I would take,           Like a God enjoy, Like a man contend and make,           Revel like a bo

To the Sea O grey wild sea, Thou hast a message, thunderer, for me. Their huge wide backs Thy monstrous billows raise, abysmal cracks Dug deep between. One pale boat flutters over them, hardly seen. I hear thy roar Call me, “Why dost thou linger on the shore With fearful eyes Watching my tops visit their foam-washed skies? This trivial boat Dares my vast battering billows and can float. Death if it find, Are there not many thousands left behind? Dare my wide roar, Nor cling like cowards to the easy shore. Come down and know What rapture lives in danger and o’erthrow.” Yes, thou great sea, I am more mighty and outbil

Thought the Paraclete As some bright archangel in vision flies Plunged in dream-caught spirit immensities, Past the long green crests of the seas of life, Past the orange skies of the mystic mind Flew my thought self-lost in the vasts of God. Sleepless wide great glimmering wings of wind Bore the gold-red seeking of feet that trod Space and Time's mute vanishing ends. The face Lustred, pale-blue-lined of the hippogriff, Eremite, sole, daring the bourneless ways, Over world-bare summits of timeless being Gleamed; the deep twilights of the world-abyss Failed below. Sun-realms of supernal seeing, Crimson-white mooned oceans of pauseless bliss Dre

Revelation Someone leaping from the rocks Past me ran with wind-blown locks Like a startled bright surmise Visible to mortal eyes,– Just a cheek of frightened rose That with sudden beauty glows, Just a footstep like the wind And a hurried glance behind, And then nothing, – as a thought Escapes the mind ere it is caught. Someone of the heavenly rout From behind the veil ran out. A Tree A tree beside the sandy river-beach Holds up its topmost boughs Like fingers towards the skies they cannot reach, Earth-bound, heaven-amorous. This is the soul of man. Body and brain Hungry for earth

The Dwarf Napoleon HITLER, OCTOBER 1939 Behold, by Maya’s fantasy of will A violent miracle takes sudden birth, The real grows one with the incredible. In the control of her magician wand The small achieves things great, the base things grand. This puny creature would bestride the earth Even as the immense colossus of the past. Napoleon’s mind was swift and bold and vast, His heart was calm and stormy like the sea, His will dynamic in its grip and clasp. His eye could hold a world within its grasp And see the great and small things sovereignly. A movement of enormous1depth and scope He seized and g

The Blue Bird I am the bird of God in His blue; Divinely high and clear I sing the notes of the sweet and the true For the god’s and the seraph’s ear. I rise like a fire from the mortal’s earth Into a griefless sky And drop in the suffering soil of his birth Fire-seeds of ecstasy. My pinions soar beyond Time and Space Into unfading Light; I bring the bliss of the Eternal’s face, And the boon of the Spirit’s sight. I measure the worlds with my ruby eyes; I have perched on Wisdom’s tree Thronged with the blossoms of Paradise By the streams of Eternity. Nothing is hid from my burning heart; My mind is shoreless and stil

Who In the blue of the sky, in the green of the forest, Whose is the hand that has painted the glow? When the winds were asleep in the womb of the ether, Who was it roused them and bade them to blow? He is lost in the heart, in the cavern of Nature, He is found in the brain where He builds up the thought: In the pattern and bloom of the flowers He is woven, In the luminous net of the stars He is caught. In the strength of a man, in the beauty of woman, In the laugh of a boy, in the blush of a girl; The hand that sent Jupiter spinning through heaven, Spends all its cunning to fashion a curl. These are His works and His veils and