Canto Two   The Gospel of Death and Vanity of the Ideal   THEN pealed the calm inexorable voice: Abolishing hope, cancelling life's golden truths, Fatal its accents smote the trembling air. That lovely world swam thin and frail, most like Some pearly evanescent farewell gleam On the faint verge of dusk in moonless eves. "Prisoner of Nature, many-visioned spirit, Thought's creature in the ideal's realm enjoying Thy unsubstantial immortality The subtle marvellous mind of man has feigned, This is the world from which thy yearnings came. When it would build eternity from the dust, Man's thought paints images illusion rounds; Pro

  Canto Two   The Adoration of the Divine Mother   A STILLNESS absolute, incommunicable, Meets the sheer self-discovery of the soul; A wall of stillness shuts it from the world, A gulf of stillness swallows up the sense And makes unreal all that mind has known, All that the labouring senses still would weave Prolonging an imaged unreality. Self's vast spiritual silence occupies Space; Only the Inconceivable is left, Only the Nameless without space and time: Abolished is the burdening need of life: Thought falls from us, we cease from joy and grief; The ego is dead; we are freed from being and care, We have done with b

  Canto Four   The Vision and the Boon   THEN suddenly there rose a sacred stir. Amid the lifeless silence of the Void In a solitude and an immensity A sound came quivering like a loved footfall Heard in the listening spaces of the soul; A touch perturbed his fibres with delight. An Influence had approached the mortal range, A boundless Heart was near his longing heart, A mystic Form enveloped his earthly shape. All at her contact broke from silence' seal; Spirit and body thrilled identified, Linked in the grasp of an unspoken joy; Mind, members, life were merged in ecstasy. Intoxicated as with nectarous rain His

  BOOK TWO   The Book of the Traveller of the Worlds Canto One   The World-Stair   ALONE he moved watched by the infinity Around him and the Unknowable above. All could be seen that shuns the mortal eye, All could be known the mind has never grasped; All could be done no mortal will can dare. A limitless movement filled a limitless peace. In a profound existence beyond earth's Parent or kin to our ideas and dreams Where Space is a vast experiment of the soul, In an immaterial substance linked to ours In a deep oneness of all things that are, The universe of the Unknown arose. A self-creation without e

  Canto Two   The Issue   AWHILE, withdrawn in secret fields of thought, Her mind moved in a many-imaged past That lived again and saw its end approach: Dying, it lived imperishably in her; Transient and vanishing from transient eyes, Invisible, a fateful ghost of self, It bore the future on its phantom breast. Along the fleeting event's far-backward trail Regressed the stream of the insistent hours, And on the bank of the mysterious flood Peopled with well-loved forms now seen no more And the subtle images of things that were, Her witness spirit stood reviewing Time. All that she once had hoped and dreame

  Canto Four   The Triple Soul-Forces   HERE from a low and prone and listless ground The passion of the first ascent began; A moon-bright face in a sombre cloud of hair, A Woman sat in a pale lustrous robe. A rugged and ragged soil was her bare seat, Beneath her feet a sharp and wounding stone. A divine pity on the peaks of the world, A spirit touched by the grief of all that lives, She looked out far and saw from inner mind This questionable world of outward things, Of false appearances and plausible shapes, This dubious cosmos stretched in the ignorant Void, The pangs of earth, the toil and speed of the stars And the diff

   Canto Nine   The Paradise of the Life-Gods   AROUND him shone a great felicitous Day. A lustre of some rapturous Infinite, It held in the splendour of its golden laugh Regions of the heart's happiness set free, Intoxicated with the wine of God, Immersed in light, perpetually divine. A favourite and intimate of the Gods Obeying the divine command to joy, It was the sovereign of its own delight And master of the kingdoms of its force. Assured of the bliss for which all forms were made, Unmoved by fear and grief and the shocks of Fate And unalarmed by the breath of fleeting Time And unbesieged by adver

Canto Two   The Journey in Eternal Night and the Voice of the Darkness   AWHILE on the chill dreadful edge of Night All stood as if a world were doomed to die And waited on the eternal silence' brink. Heaven leaned towards them like a cloudy brow Of menace through the dim and voiceless hush. As thoughts stand mute on a despairing verge Where the last depths plunge into nothingness And the last dreams must end, they paused; in their front Were glooms like shadowy wings, behind them, pale, The lifeless evening was a dead man's gaze. Hungry beyond, the night desired her soul. But still in its lone niche of templed strength

  Canto Seven   The Discovery of the Cosmic Spirit and the Cosmic Consciousness   IN THE little hermitage in the forest's heart, In the sunlight and the moonlight and the dark The daily human life went plodding on Even as before with its small unchanging works And its spare outward body of routine And happy quiet of ascetic peace. The old beauty smiled of the terrestrial scene; She too was her old gracious self to men. The Ancient Mother clutched her child to her breast Pressing her close in her environing arms, As if earth ever the same could for ever keep The living spirit and body in her clasp, As if death were

  Canto Eight   The World of Falsehood, the Mother of Evil and the Sons of Darkness   THEN could he see the hidden heart of Night: The labour of its stark unconsciousness Revealed the endless terrible Inane. A spiritless blank Infinity was there; A Nature that denied the eternal Truth In the vain braggart freedom of its thought Hoped to abolish God and reign alone. There was no sovereign Guest, no witness Light; Unhelped it would create its own bleak world. Its large blind eyes looked out on demon acts, Its deaf ears heard the untruth its dumb lips spoke; Its huge misguided fancy took vast shapes, Its min