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Goddess
supreme, Mother of Dream, by thy ivory doors when thou standest,
Who are they then that come down unto
men in thy visions that troop,
group upon group, down the path of the shadows slanting?
Dream after dream, they flash and they gleam with the flame of the stars
still around them;
Shadows at thy side in a darkness ride where the wild fires dance, stars glow
and glance and the random meteor glistens;
There
are voices that cry to their kin who reply; voices sweet, at the
heart
they beat and ravish the soul as it
listens.
What then are these lands and these golden sands and these seas more
radiant than earth can imagine?
Who are those that pace by the purple waves that race to the cliff-bound
floor of thy jasper shore under skies in which mystery muses,
Lapped
in moonlight not of our night or plunged in sunshine that is not
diurnal?
Who are they coming thy Oceans roaming, with sails whose strands are not
made by hands, an unearthly wind
advances?
Why do they join in a mystic line with those on the sands linking hands in
strange and stately dances?
Thou in the air, with a flame in thy hair, the whirl of thy wonders watching,
Holdest the night in thy ancient right, Mother divine, hyacinthine, with a
girdle of beauty defended.
Sworded
with fire, attracting desire, thy
tenebrous kingdom thou keepest,
Starry-sweet, with the moon at thy feet, now hidden now seen the clouds
between in the gloom and the drift of thy tresses.
Only to those whom thy fancy
chose, O thou heart-free, is it given to see
thy witchcraft and feel thy
caresses.
Open the gate where thy children
wait in their world of a beauty undarkened.
High-throned on a cloud, victorious, proud I have espied Maghavan ride
when the armies of wind are behind him;
Food
has been given for my tasting from
heaven and fruit of immortal
sweetness;
I have drunk wine of the
kingdoms divine and have heard the change of
music strange from a lyre which
our
hands cannot master;
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Doors have swung wide in the chambers of pride where the Gods reside and
the Apsaras dance in their
circles faster and faster.
For thou art she whom we first can see when we pass the bounds
of the mortal,
There at the gates of the heavenly states thou hast planted thy wand enchanted
over the head of the Yogin
waving.
From thee are the dream and the shadows that seem and the fugitive
lights
that delude us;
Thine is the shade in which
visions are made; sped by thy hands from
celestial lands come the souls that rejoice for ever.
Into thy dream-worlds we pass or look
in thy magic glass, then beyond thee
we climb out of Space and Time to the peak of divine
endeavour.
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