Canto Fourteen

The World-Soul

A covert answer to his seeking came.

In a far shimmering background of Mind-Space

A glowing mouth was seen, a luminous shaft;

A recluse gate it seemed, musing on joy,

A veiled retreat and escape to mystery.

Away from the unsatisfied surface world

It fled into the bosom of the unknown,

A well, a tunnel of the depths of God.

It plunged as if a mystic groove of hope

Through many layers of formless voiceless self

To reach the last profound of the world’s heart,

And from that heart there surged a wordless call

Pleading with some still impenetrable Mind,

Voicing some passionate unseen desire.

As if a beckoning finger of secrecy

Outstretched into a crystal mood of air,

Pointing at him from some near hidden depth,

As if a message from the world’s deep soul,

An intimation of a lurking joy

That flowed out from a cup of brooding bliss,

There shimmered stealing out into the Mind

A mute and quivering ecstasy of light,

A passion and delicacy of roseate fire.

As one drawn to his lost spiritual home

Feels now the closeness of a waiting love,

Into a passage dim and tremulous

That clasped him in from day and night’s pursuit,

He travelled led by a mysterious sound.

A murmur multitudinous and lone,

All sounds it was in turn, yet still the same.

A hidden call to unforeseen delight

In the summoning voice of one long-known, well-loved,

But nameless to the unremembering mind,

It led to rapture back the truant heart.

The immortal cry ravished the captive ear.

Then, lowering its imperious mystery,

It sank to a whisper circling round the soul.

It seemed the yearning of a lonely flute

That roamed along the shores of memory

And filled the eyes with tears of longing joy.

A cricket’s rash and fiery single note,

It marked with shrill melody night’s moonless hush

And beat upon a nerve of mystic sleep

Its high insistent magical reveille.

A jingling silver laugh of anklet bells

Travelled the roads of a solitary heart;

Its dance solaced an eternal loneliness:

An old forgotten sweetness sobbing came.

Or from a far harmonious distance heard

The tinkling pace of a long caravan

It seemed at times, or a vast forest’s hymn,

The solemn reminder of a temple gong,

A bee-croon honey-drunk in summer isles

Ardent with ecstasy in a slumbrous noon,

Or the far anthem of a pilgrim sea.

An incense floated in the quivering air,

A mystic happiness trembled in the breast

As if the invisible Beloved had come

Assuming the sudden loveliness of a face

And close glad hands could seize his fugitive feet

And the world change with the beauty of a smile.

Into a wonderful bodiless realm he came,

The home of a passion without name or voice,

A depth he felt answering to every height,

A nook was found that could embrace all worlds,

A point that was the conscious knot of Space,

An hour eternal in the heart of Time.

The silent Soul of all the world was there:

A Being lived, a Presence and a Power,

A single Person who was himself and all

And cherished Nature’s sweet and dangerous throbs

Transfigured into beats divine and pure.

One who could love without return for love,

Meeting and turning to the best the worst,

It healed the bitter cruelties of earth,

Transforming all experience to delight;

Intervening in the sorrowful paths of birth

It rocked the cradle of the cosmic Child

And stilled all weeping with its hand of joy;

It led things evil towards their secret good,

It turned racked falsehood into happy truth;

Its power was to reveal divinity.

Infinite, coeval with the mind of God,

It bore within itself a seed, a flame,

A seed from which the Eternal is new-born,

A flame that cancels death in mortal things.

All grew to all kindred and self and near;

The intimacy of God was everywhere,

No veil was felt, no brute barrier inert,

Distance could not divide, Time could not change.

A fire of passion burned in spirit-depths,

A constant touch of sweetness linked all hearts,

The throb of one adoration’s single bliss

In a rapt ether of undying love.

An inner happiness abode in all,

A sense of universal harmonies,

A measureless secure eternity

Of truth and beauty and good and joy made one.

Here was the welling core of finite life;

A formless spirit became the soul of form.

All there was soul or made of sheer soul-stuff;

A sky of soul covered a deep soul-ground.

All here was known by a spiritual sense:

Thought was not there but a knowledge near and one

Seized on all things by a moved identity,

A sympathy of self with other selves,

The touch of consciousness on consciousness

And being’s look on being with inmost gaze

And heart laid bare to heart without walls of speech

And the unanimity of seeing minds

In myriad forms luminous with the one God.

Life was not there, but an impassioned force,

Finer than fineness, deeper than the deeps,

Felt as a subtle and spiritual power,

A quivering out from soul to answering soul,

A mystic movement, a close influence,

A free and happy and intense approach

Of being to being with no screen or check,

Without which life and love could never have been.

Body was not there, for bodies were needed not,

The soul itself was its own deathless form

And met at once the touch of other souls

Close, blissful, concrete, wonderfully true.

As when one walks in sleep through luminous dreams

And, conscious, knows the truth their figures mean,

Here where reality was its own dream,

He knew things by their soul and not their shape:

As those who have lived long made one in love

Need word nor sign for heart’s reply to heart,

He met and communed without bar of speech

With beings unveiled by a material frame.

There was a strange spiritual scenery,

A loveliness of lakes and streams and hills,

A flow, a fixity in a soul-space,

And plains and valleys, stretches of soul-joy,

And gardens that were flower-tracts of the spirit,

Its meditations of tinged reverie.

Air was the breath of a pure infinite.

A fragrance wandered in a coloured haze

As if the scent and hue of all sweet flowers

Had mingled to copy heaven’s atmosphere.

Appealing to the soul and not the eye

Beauty lived there at home in her own house,

There all was beautiful by its own right

And needed not the splendour of a robe.

All objects were like bodies of the Gods,

A spirit symbol environing a soul,

For world and self were one reality.

Immersed in voiceless internatal trance

The beings that once wore forms on earth sat there

In shining chambers of spiritual sleep.

Passed were the pillar-posts of birth and death,

Passed was their little scene of symbol deeds,

Passed were the heavens and hells of their long road;

They had returned into the world’s deep soul.

All now was gathered into pregnant rest:

Person and nature suffered a slumber change.

In trance they gathered back their bygone selves,

In a background memory’s foreseeing muse

Prophetic of new personality

Arranged the map of their coming destiny’s course:

Heirs of their past, their future’s discoverers,

Electors of their own self-chosen lot,

They waited for the adventure of new life.

A Person persistent through the lapse of worlds,

Although the same for ever in many shapes

By the outward mind unrecognisable,

Assuming names unknown in unknown climes

Imprints through Time upon the earth’s worn page

A growing figure of its secret self,

And learns by experience what the spirit knew,

Till it can see its truth alive and God.

Once more they must face the problem-game of birth,

The soul’s experiment of joy and grief

And thought and impulse lighting the blind act,

And venture on the roads of circumstance,

Through inner movements and external scenes

Travelling to self across the forms of things.

Into creation’s centre he had come.

The spirit wandering from state to state

Finds here the silence of its starting-point

In the formless force and the still fixity

And brooding passion of the world of Soul.

All that is made and once again unmade,

The calm persistent vision of the One

Inevitably re-makes, it lives anew:

Forces and lives and beings and ideas

Are taken into the stillness for a while;

There they remould their purpose and their drift,

Recast their nature and re-form their shape.

Ever they change and changing ever grow,

And passing through a fruitful stage of death

And after long reconstituting sleep

Resume their place in the process of the Gods

Until their work in cosmic Time is done.

Here was the fashioning chamber of the worlds.

An interval was left twixt act and act,

Twixt birth and birth, twixt dream and waking dream,

A pause that gave new strength to do and be.

Beyond were regions of delight and peace,

Mute birthplaces of light and hope and love,

And cradles of heavenly rapture and repose.

In a slumber of the voices of the world

He of the eternal moment grew aware;

His knowledge stripped bare of the garbs of sense

Knew by identity without thought or word;

His being saw itself without its veils,

Life’s line fell from the spirit’s infinity.

Along a road of pure interior light,

Alone between tremendous Presences,

Under the watching eyes of nameless Gods,

His soul passed on, a single conscious power,

Towards the end which ever begins again,

Approaching through a stillness dumb and calm

To the source of all things human and divine.

There he beheld in their mighty union’s poise

The figure of the deathless Two-in-One,

A single being in two bodies clasped,

A diarchy of two united souls,

Seated absorbed in deep creative joy;

Their trance of bliss sustained the mobile world.

Behind them in a morning dusk One stood

Who brought them forth from the Unknowable.

Ever disguised she awaits the seeking spirit;

Watcher on the supreme unreachable peaks,

Guide of the traveller of the unseen paths,

She guards the austere approach to the Alone.

At the beginning of each far-spread plane

Pervading with her power the cosmic suns

She reigns, inspirer of its multiple works

And thinker of the symbol of its scene.

Above them all she stands supporting all,

The sole omnipotent Goddess ever-veiled

Of whom the world is the inscrutable mask;

The ages are the footfalls of her tread,

Their happenings the figure of her thoughts,

And all creation is her endless act.

His spirit was made a vessel of her force;

Mute in the fathomless passion of his will

He outstretched to her his folded hands of prayer.

Then in a sovereign answer to his heart

A gesture came as of worlds thrown away,

And from her raiment’s lustrous mystery raised

One arm half-parted the eternal veil.

A light appeared still and imperishable.

Attracted to the large and luminous depths

Of the ravishing enigma of her eyes,

He saw the mystic outline of a face.

Overwhelmed by her implacable light and bliss,

An atom of her illimitable self

Mastered by the honey and lightning of her power,

Tossed towards the shores of her ocean-ecstasy,

Drunk with a deep golden spiritual wine,

He cast from the rent stillness of his soul

A cry of adoration and desire

And the surrender of his boundless mind

And the self-giving of his silent heart.

He fell down at her feet unconscious, prone.

End of Canto Fourteen