Canto Three
The
Glory and Fall of Life
An uneven broad
ascent now lured his feet.
Answering a greater
Nature's troubled call
He crossed the limits
of embodied Mind
And entered wide
obscure disputed fields
Where all was doubt
and change and nothing sure,
A world of search and
toil without repose.
As one who meets the
face of the Unknown,
A questioner with
none to give reply,
Attracted to a
problem never solved,
Always uncertain of
the ground he trod,
Always drawn on to an
inconstant goal
He travelled through
a land peopled by doubts
In shifting confines
on a quaking base.
In front he saw a
boundary ever unreached
And thought himself
at each step nearer now,—
A far retreating
horizon of mirage.
A vagrancy was there
that brooked no home,
A journey of
countless paths without a close.
Nothing he found to
satisfy his heart;
A tireless wandering
sought and could not cease.
There life is the
manifest incalculable,
A movement of unquiet
seas, a long
And venturement leap of
spirit into Space,
A vexed disturbance
in the eternal Calm,
An impulse and
passion of the Infinite.
Assuming whatever
shape her fancy wills,
Escaped from the
restraint of settled forms
She has left the
safety of the tried and known.
Unshepherded by the
fear that walks through Time,
Undaunted by Fate
that dogs and Chance that springs,
She accepts disaster
as a common risk;
Page – 116
Careless of
suffering, heedless of sin and fall,
She wrestles with
danger and discovery
In the unexplored
expanses of the Soul.
To be seemed only a
long experiment,
The hazard of a
seeking ignorant Force
That tries all truths
and, finding none supreme,
Moves on unsatisfied,
unsure of its end.
As saw some inner
mind, so life was shaped:
From thought to
thought she passed, from phase to phase,
Tortured by her own
powers or proud and blest,
Now master of
herself, now toy and slave.
A huge inconsequence
was her action's law,
As if all possibility
must be drained
And anguish and bliss
were pastimes of the heart.
In a gallop of
thunder-hooved vicissitudes
She swept through the
race-fields of Circumstance,
Or, swaying, she
tossed between her heights and deeps,
Uplifted or broken on
Time's incessant wheel.
Amid a tedious crawl
of drab desires
She writhed, a worm
mid worms in Nature's mud,
Then, Titan-statured,
took all earth for food,
Ambitioned the seas
for robe, for crown the stars
And shouting strode
from peak to giant peak,
Clamouring for worlds
to conquer and to rule.
Then wantonly
enamoured of Sorrow's face,
She plunged into the
anguish of the depths
And, wallowing, clung
to her own misery.
In dolorous converse
with her squandered self
She wrote the account
of all that she had lost,
Or sat with grief as
with an ancient friend.
A romp of violent
raptures soon was spent,
Or she lingered tied
to an inadequate joy
Missing the turns of
fate, missing life's goal.
A scene was planned
for all her numberless moods
Where each could be
the law and way of life,
But none could offer
a pure felicity;
Page – 117
Only a flickering
zest they left behind
Or the fierce lust
that brings a dead fatigue.
Amid her swift untold
variety
Something remained
dissatisfied ever the same
And in the new saw
only a face of the old,
For every hour
repeated all the rest
And every change
prolonged the same unease.
A spirit of her self
and aim unsure,
Tired soon of too
much joy and happiness,
She needs the spur of
pleasure and of pain
And the native taste
of suffering and unrest:
She strains for an
end that never can she win.
A perverse savour
haunts her thirsting lips:
For the grief she
weeps which came from her own choice,
For the pleasure
yearns that racked with wounds her breast;
Aspiring to heaven
she turns her steps towards hell.
Chance she has chosen
and danger for playfellows;
Fate's dreadful swing
she has taken for cradle and seat.
Yet pure and bright
from the Timeless was her birth,
A lost world-rapture
lingers in her eyes,
Her moods are faces
of the Infinite:
Beauty and happiness
are her native right,
And endless bliss is
her eternal home.
This now revealed its
antique face of joy,
A sudden disclosure
to the heart of grief
Tempting it to endure
and long and hope.
Even in changing
worlds bereft of peace,
In an air racked with
sorrow and with fear
And while his feet
trod on a soil unsafe,
He saw the image of a
happier state.
In an architecture of
hieratic Space
Circling and mounting
towards creation's tops,
At a blue height
which never was too high
For warm communion
between body and soul,
As far as heaven, as
near as thought and hope,
Page – 118
Glimmered the kingdom
of a griefless life.
Above him in a new
celestial vault
Other than the
heavens beheld by mortal eyes,
As on a fretted
ceiling of the gods,
An archipelago of
laughter and fire,
Swam stars apart in a
rippled sea of sky.
Towered spirals,
magic rings of vivid hue
And gleaming spheres
of strange felicity
Floated through
distance like a symbol world.
On the trouble and
the toil they could not share,
On the unhappiness
they could not aid,
Impervious to life's
suffering, struggle, grief,
Untarnished by its
anger, gloom and hate,
Unmoved, untouched,
looked down great visioned planes
Blissful for ever in
their timeless right.
Absorbed in their own
beauty and content,
Of their immortal
gladness they live sure.
Apart in their
self-glory plunged, remote
Burning they swam in
a vague lucent haze,
An everlasting refuge
of dream-light,
A nebula of the
splendours of the gods
Made from the musings
of eternity.
Almost unbelievable
by human faith,
Hardly they seemed
the stuff of things that are.
As through a magic
television's glass
Outlined to some
magnifying inner eye
They shone like
images thrown from a far scene
Too high and glad for
mortal lids to seize.
But near and real to
the longing heart
And to the body's
passionate thought and sense
Are the hidden
kingdoms of beatitude.
In some close
unattained realm which yet we feel,
Immune from the harsh
clutch of Death and Time,
Escaping the search
of sorrow and desire,
In bright enchanted
safe peripheries
For ever wallowing in
bliss they lie.
Page – 119
In dream and trance
and muse before our eyes,
Across a subtle
vision's inner field,
Wide rapturous
landscapes fleeting from the sight,
The figures of the
perfect kingdom pass
And behind them leave
a shining memory's trail.
Imagined scenes or
great eternal worlds,
Dream-caught or
sensed, they touch our hearts with their depths;
Unreal-seeming yet
more real than life,
Happier than
happiness, truer than things true
If dreams these were
or captured images,
Dream's truth made
false earth's vain realities.
In a swift eternal
moment fixed there live
Or ever recalled come
back to longing eyes
Calm heavens of
imperishable Light,
Illumined continents
of violet peace,
Oceans and rivers of
the mirth of God
And griefless
countries under purple suns.
This, once a star of
bright remote idea
Or imagination's
comet trail of dream,
Took now a close
shape of reality.
The gulf between
dream-truth, earth-fact was crossed,
The wonder-worlds of
life were dreams no more;
His vision made all
they unveiled its own:
Their scenes, their
happenings met his eyes and heart
And smote them with
pure loveliness and bliss.
A breathless summit
region drew his gaze
Whose boundaries
jutted into a sky of Self
And dipped towards a
strange ethereal base.
The quintessence
glowed of Life's supreme delight.
On a spiritual and
mysterious peak
Only a miracle's high
transfiguring line
Divided life from the
formless Infinite
And sheltered Time
against eternity.
Out of that formless
stuff Time mints his shapes;
The Eternal's quiet
holds the cosmic act:
Page – 120
The protean images of
the World-Force
Have drawn the
strength to be, the will to last
From a deep ocean of
dynamic peace.
Inverting the
Spirit's apex towards life
She spends the
plastic liberties of the One
To cast in acts the
dreams of her caprice,
His wisdom's call
steadies her careless feet,
He props her dance
upon a rigid base,
His timeless still
immutability
Must standardise her
creation's miracle.
Out of the Void's
unseeing energies
Inventing the scene
of a concrete universe,
By his thought she
has fixed its paces, in its blind acts
She sees by flashes
of his all-knowing Light.
At her will the
inscrutable Supermind leans down
To guide her force
that feels but cannot know,
Its breadth of power
controls her restless seas
And life obeys the
governing Idea.
At her will, led by a
luminous Immanence
The hazardous
experimenting Mind
Pushes its way
through obscure possibles
Mid chance formations
of an unknowing world.
Our human ignorance
moves towards the Truth
That Nescience may
become omniscient:
Transmuted instincts
shape to divine thoughts,
Thoughts house
infallible immortal sight
And Nature climbs
towards God's identity.
The Master of the
worlds self-made her slave
Is the executor of
her fantasies:
She has canalised the
seas of omnipotence;
She has limited by
her laws the Illimitable.
The Immortal bound
himself to do her works;
He labours at the
tasks her Ignorance sets,
Hidden in the cape of
our mortality.
The worlds, the forms
her goddess fancy makes
Have lost their
origin on unseen heights:
Page – 121
Even severed,
straying from their timeless source,
Even deformed,
obscured, accursed and fallen,—
Since even fall has
its perverted joy
And nothing she
leaves out that serves delight,—
These too can to the
peaks revert or here
Cut out the sentence
of the spirit's fall,
Recover their
forfeited divinity.
At once caught in an
eternal vision's sweep
He saw her pride and
splendour of highborn zones
And her regions
crouching in the nether deeps.
Above was a monarchy
of unfallen self,
Beneath was the
gloomy trance of the abyss,
An opposite pole or
dim antipodes.
There were vasts of
the glory of life's absolutes:
All laughed in a safe
immortality
And an eternal
childhood of the soul
Before darkness came
and pain and grief were born
Where all could dare
to be themselves and one
And Wisdom played in
sinless innocence
With naked Freedom in
Truth's happy sun.
There were worlds of
her laughter and dreadful irony,
There were fields of
her taste of toil and strife and tears;
Her head lay on the
breast of amorous Death,
Sleep imitated awhile
extinction's peace.
The light of God she
has parted from his dark
To test the savour of
bare opposites.
Here mingling in
man's heart their tones and hues
Have woven his
being's mutable design,
His life a
forward-rippling stream in Time,
His nature's constant
fixed mobility,
His soul a moving
picture's changeful film,
His cosmos-chaos of
personality.
The grand creatrix
with her cryptic touch
Has turned to pathos
and power being's self-dream,
Made a passion-play
of its fathomless mystery.
Page – 122
But here were worlds
lifted half-way to heaven.
The Veil was there
but not the Shadowy Wall;
In forms not too
remote from human grasp
Some passion of the
inviolate purity
Broke through, a ray
of the original Bliss.
Heaven's joys might
have been earth's if earth were pure.
There could have
reached our divinised sense and heart
Some natural
felicity's bright extreme,
Some thrill of
supernature's absolutes:
All strengths could
laugh and sport on earth's hard roads
And never feel her
cruel edge of pain,
All love could play
and nowhere Nature's shame.
But she has stabled
her dreams in Matter's courts
And still her doors
are barred to things supreme.
These worlds could
feel God's breath visiting their tops;
Some glimmer of the
Transcendent's hem was there.
Across the white
aeonic silences
Immortal figures of
embodied joy
Traversed wide spaces
near to eternity's sleep.
Pure mystic voices in
beatitude's hush
Appealed to Love's
immaculate sweetnesses,
Calling his honeyed
touch to thrill the worlds,
His blissful hands to
seize on Nature's limbs,
His sweet intolerant
might of union
To take all beings
into his saviour arms,
Drawing to his pity
the rebel and the waif
To force on them the
happiness they refuse.
A chant hymeneal to
the unseen Divine,
A flaming rhapsody of
white desire
Lured an immortal
music into the heart
And woke the
slumbering ear of ecstasy.
A purer, fierier
sense had there its home,
A burning urge no
earthly limbs can hold.
One drew a large
unburdened spacious breath
And the heart sped
from beat to rapturous beat.
The voice of time
sang of the Immortal's joy;
Page – 123
An inspiration and a
lyric cry,
The moments came with
ecstasy on their wings;
Beauty unimaginable
moved heaven-bare
Absolved from
boundaries in the vasts of dream;
The cry of the Birds
of Wonder called from the skies
To the deathless
people of the shores of Light.
Creation leaped
straight from the hands of God;
Marvel and rapture
wandered in the ways.
Only to be was a
supreme delight,
Life was a happy
laughter of the soul
And Joy was king with
Love for minister.
The spirit's
luminousness was bodied there.
Life's contraries
were lovers or natural friends
And her extremes keen
edges of harmony:
Indulgence with a
tender purity came
And nursed the god on
her maternal breast:
There none was weak,
so falsehood could not live;
Ignorance was a thin
shade protecting light,
Imagination the
free-will of Truth,
Pleasure a candidate
for heaven's fire;
The intellect was
Beauty's worshipper,
Strength was the
slave of calm spiritual law,
Power laid its head
upon the breasts of Bliss.
There were
summit glories inconceivable,
Autonomies of
wisdom's still self-rule
And high dependencies
of her virgin sun,
Illumined theocracies
of the seeing soul
Throned in the power
of the Transcendent's ray.
A vision of
grandeurs, a dream of magnitudes
In sun-bright
kingdoms moved with regal gait:
Assemblies, crowded
senates of the gods,
Life's puissances
reigned on seats of marble will,
High dominations and
autocracies
And laurelled
strengths and armed imperative mights.
All objects there
were great and beautiful,
All beings wore a
royal stamp of power.
Page – 124
There sat the
oligarchies of natural Law,
Proud violent heads
served one calm monarch brow:
All the soul's
postures donned divinity.
There met the ardent
mutual intimacies
Of mastery's joy and
the joy of servitude
Imposed by Love on
Love's heart that obeys
And Love's body held
beneath a rapturous yoke.
All was a game of
meeting kinglinesses.
For worship lifts the
worshipper's bowed strength
Close to the god's
pride and bliss his soul adores:
The ruler there is
one with all he rules;
To him who serves
with a free equal heart
Obedience is his
princely training's school,
His nobility's
coronet and privilege,
His faith is a high
nature's idiom,
His service a
spiritual sovereignty.
There were realms
where Knowledge joined creative Power
In her high home and
made her all his own:
The grand Illuminate
seized her gleaming limbs
And filled them with
the passion of his ray
Till all her body was
its transparent house
And all her soul a
counterpart of his soul.
Apotheosised,
transfigured by wisdom's touch,
Her days became a
luminous sacrifice;
An immortal moth in
happy and endless fire,
She burned in his
sweet intolerable blaze.
A captive Life wedded
her conqueror.
In his wide sky she
built her world anew;
She gave to mind's
calm pace the motor's speed,
To thinking a need to
live what the soul saw,
To living an impetus
to know and see.
His splendour grasped
her, her puissance to him clung;
She crowned the Idea
a king in purple robes,
Put her magic serpent
sceptre in Thought's grip,
Made forms his inward
vision's rhythmic shapes
And her acts the
living body of his will.
Page – 125
A flaming thunder, a
creator flash,
His victor Light rode
on her deathless Force:
A centaur's mighty
gallop bore the god.
Life throned with
mind, a double majesty.
Worlds were there of
a happiness great and grave
And action tinged
with dream, laughter with thought,
And passion there
could wait for its desire
Until it heard the
near approach of God.
Worlds were there of
a childlike mirth and joy;
A carefree
youthfulness of mind and heart
Found in the body a
heavenly instrument;
It lit an aureate
halo round desire
And freed the deified
animal in the limbs
To divine gambols of
love and beauty and bliss.
On a radiant soil
that gazed at heaven's smile
A swift life-impulse
stinted not nor stopped:
It knew not how to
tire; happy were its tears.
There work was play
and play the only work,
The tasks of heaven a
game of godlike might:
A celestial bacchanal
for ever pure,
Unstayed by faintness
as in mortal frames
Life was an eternity
of rapture's moods:
Age never came, care
never lined the face.
Imposing on the
safety of the stars
A race and laughter
of immortal strengths,
The nude God-children
in their play-fields ran
Smiting the winds
with splendour and with speed;
Of storm and sun they
made companions,
Sported with the
white mane of tossing seas,
Slew distance
trampled to death under their wheels
And wrestled in the
arenas of their force.
Imperious in their
radiance like the suns
They kindled heaven
with the glory of their limbs
Flung like a divine
largesse to the world.
A spell to force the
heart to stark delight,
They carried the
pride and mastery of their charm
Page – 126
As if Life's banner
on the roads of Space.
Ideas were luminous
comrades of the soul;
Mind played with
speech, cast javelins of thought,
But needed not these
instruments' toil to know;
Knowledge was
Nature's pastime like the rest.
Investitured with the
fresh heart's bright ray,
An early
God-instinct's child inheritors,
Tenants of the
perpetuity of Time
Still thrilling with
the first creation's bliss,
They steeped
existence in their youth of soul.
An exquisite and
vehement tyranny,
The strong compulsion
of their will to joy
Poured smiling
streams of happiness through the world.
There reigned a
breath of high immune content,
A fortunate gait of
days in tranquil air,
A flood of universal
love and peace.
A sovereignty of
tireless sweetness lived
Like a song of
pleasure on the lips of Time.
A large spontaneous
order freed the will,
A sun-frank winging
of the soul to bliss,
The breadth and
greatness of the unfettered act
And the swift
fire-heart's golden liberty.
There was no
falsehood of soul-severance,
There came no
crookedness of thought or word
To rob creation of
its native truth;
All was sincerity and
natural force.
There freedom was
sole rule and highest law.
In a happy series
climbed or plunged these worlds:
In realms of curious
beauty and surprise,
In fields of grandeur
and of titan power,
Life played at ease
with her immense desires.
A thousand Edens she
could build nor pause;
No bound was set to
her greatness and to her grace
And to her heavenly
variety.
Awake with a cry and
stir of numberless souls,
Arisen from the
breast of some deep Infinite,
Page – 127
Smiling like a
new-born child at love and hope,
In her nature housing
the Immortal's power,
In her bosom bearing
the eternal Will,
No guide she needed
but her luminous heart:
No fall debased the
godhead of her steps,
No alien Night had
come to blind her eyes.
There was no use for
grudging ring or fence;
Each act was a
perfection and a joy.
Abandoned to her
rapid fancy's moods
And the rich coloured
riot of her mind,
Initiate of divine
and mighty dreams,
Magician builder of
unnumbered forms
Exploring the
measures of the rhythms of God,
At will she wove her
wizard wonder-dance,
A Dionysian goddess
of delight,
A Bacchant of
creative ecstasy.
This world of bliss
he saw and felt its call,
But found no way to
enter into its joy;
Across the conscious
gulf there was no bridge.
A darker air
encircled still his soul
Tied to an image of
unquiet life.
In spite of yearning
mind and longing sense,
To a sad Thought by
grey experience formed
And a vision dimmed
by care and sorrow and sleep
All this seemed only
a bright desirable dream
Conceived in a
longing distance by the heart
Of one who walks in
the shadow of earth-pain.
Although he once had
felt the Eternal's clasp,
Too near to suffering
worlds his nature lived,
And where he stood
were entrances of Night.
Hardly, too close
beset by the world's care,
Can the dense mould
in which we have been made
Return sheer joy to
joy, pure light to light.
For its tormented
will to think and live
First to a mingled
pain and pleasure woke
Page – 128
And still it keeps
the habit of its birth:
A dire duality is our
way to be.
In the crude
beginnings of this mortal world
Life was not nor
mind's play nor heart's desire.
When earth was built
in the unconscious Void
And nothing was save
a material scene,
Identified with sea
and sky and stone
Her young gods
yearned for the release of souls
Asleep in objects,
vague, inanimate.
In that desolate
grandeur, in that beauty bare,
In the deaf
stillness, mid the unheeded sounds,
Heavy was the
uncommunicated load
Of Godhead in a world
that had no needs;
For none was there to
feel or to receive.
This solid mass which
brooked no throb of sense
Could not contain
their vast creative urge:
Immersed no more in
Matter's harmony,
The Spirit lost its
statuesque repose.
In the uncaring
trance it groped for sight,
Passioned for the
movements of a conscious heart,
Famishing for speech
and thought and joy and love,
In the dumb
insensitive wheeling day and night
Hungered for the beat
of yearning and response.
The poised
inconscience shaken with a touch,
The intuitive silence
trembling with a name,
They cried to Life to
invade the senseless mould
And in brute forms
awake divinity.
A voice was heard on
the mute rolling globe,
A murmur moaned in
the unlistening Void.
A being seemed to
breathe where once was none:
Something pent up in
dead insentient depths,
Denied conscious
existence, lost to joy,
Turned as if one
asleep since dateless time.
Aware of its own
buried reality,
Remembering its
forgotten self and right,
It yearned to know,
to aspire, to enjoy, to live.
Page – 129
Life heard the call
and left her native light.
Overflowing from her
bright magnificent plane
On the rigid coil and
sprawl of mortal space,
Here too the gracious
great-winged Angel poured
Her splendour and her
sweetness and her bliss,
Hoping to fill a fair
new world with joy.
As comes a goddess to
a mortal's breast
And fills his days
with her celestial clasp,
She stooped to make
her home in transient shapes;
In Matter's womb she
cast the Immortal's fire,
In the unfeeling Vast
woke thought and hope,
Smote with her charm
and beauty flesh and nerve
And forced delight on
earth's insensible frame.
Alive and clad with
trees and herbs and flowers
Earth's great brown
body smiled towards the skies,
Azure replied to
azure in the sea's laugh;
New sentient
creatures filled the unseen depths,
Life's glory and
swiftness ran in the beauty of beasts,
Man dared and thought
and met with his soul the world.
But while the magic
breath was on its way,
Before her gifts
could reach our prisoned hearts,
A dark ambiguous
Presence questioned all.
The secret Will that
robes itself with Night
And offers to spirit
the ordeal of the flesh,
Imposed a mystic mask
of death and pain.
Interned now in the
slow and suffering years
Sojourns the winged
and wonderful wayfarer
And can no more
recall her happier state,
But must obey the
inert Inconscient's law,
Insensible foundation
of a world
In which blind limits
are on beauty laid
And sorrow and joy as
struggling comrades live.
A dim and dreadful
muteness fell on her:
Abolished was her
subtle mighty spirit
And slain her boon of
child-god happiness,
And all her glory
into littleness turned
Page – 130
And all her sweetness
into a maimed desire.
To feed death with
her works is here life's doom.
So veiled was her
immortality that she seemed,
Inflicting
consciousness on unconscious things,
An episode in an
eternal death,
A myth of being that
must for ever cease.
Such was the evil
mystery of her change.
End of Canto Three
Page – 131
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