(S 1)
This was the play of the bright gods of Thought.
(S 2)
500 Attracting into time the timeless Light,
Imprisoning eternity in the hours,
This they have planned, to snare the feet of Truth
In an aureate net of concept and of phrase
And keep her captive for the thinker’s joy
505 In his little world built of immortal dreams:
There must she dwell mured in the human mind,
An empress prisoner in her subject’s house,
Adored and pure and still on his heart’s throne,
His splendid property cherished and apart
510 In the wall of silence of his secret muse,
Immaculate in white virginity,
The same for ever and for ever one,
His worshipped changeless Goddess through all time.
(S 3)
Or else, a faithful consort of his mind
515 Assenting to his nature and his will,
She sanctions and inspires his words and acts
Prolonging their resonance through the listening years,
Companion and recorder of his march
Crossing a brilliant tract of thought and life
520 Carved out of the eternity of Time.
(S 4)
A witness to his high triumphant star,
Her godhead servitor to a crowned Idea,
He shall dominate by her a prostrate world;
A warrant for his deeds and his beliefs,
525 She attests his right divine to lead and rule.
(S 5)
Or as a lover clasps his one beloved,
Godhead of his life’s worship and desire,
Icon of his heart’s sole idolatry,
She now is his and must live for him alone:
530 She has invaded him with her sudden bliss,
An exhaustless marvel in his happy grasp,
An allurement, a caught ravishing miracle.
(S 6)
Her now he claims after long rapt pursuit,
The one joy of his body and his soul:
535 Inescapable is her divine appeal,
Her immense possession an undying thrill,
An intoxication and an ecstasy:
The passion of her self-revealing moods,
A heavenly glory and variety,
540 Makes ever new her body to his eyes,
Or else repeats the first enchantment’s touch,
The luminous rapture of her mystic breasts
And beautiful vibrant limbs a living field
Of throbbing new discovery without end.
(S 7)
545 A new beginning flowers in word and laugh,
A new charm brings back the old extreme delight:
He is lost in her, she is his heaven here.
(S 8)
Truth smiled upon the gracious golden game.
(S 9)
Out of her hushed eternal spaces leaned
550 The great and boundless Goddess feigned to yield
The sunlit sweetness of her secrecies.
(S 10)
Incarnating her beauty in his clasp
She gave for a brief kiss her immortal lips
And drew to her bosom one glorified mortal head:
555 She made earth her home, for whom heaven was too small.
(S 11)
In a human breast her occult presence lived;
He carved from his own self his figure of her:
She shaped her body to a mind’s embrace.
(S 12)
Into thought’s narrow limits she has come;
560 Her greatness she has suffered to be pressed
Into the little cabin of the Idea,
The closed room of a lonely thinker’s grasp:
She has lowered her heights to the stature of our souls
And dazzled our lids with her celestial gaze.
(S 13)
565 Thus each is satisfied with his high gain
And thinks himself beyond mortality blest,
A king of truth upon his separate throne.
(S 14)
To her possessor in the field of Time
A single splendour caught from her glory seems
570 The one true light, her beauty’s glowing whole.
(S 15)
But thought nor word can seize eternal Truth:
The whole world lives in a lonely ray of her sun.
(S 16)
In our thinking’s close and narrow lamp-lit house
The vanity of our shut mortal mind
575 Dreams that the chains of thought have made her ours;
But only we play with our own brilliant bonds;
Tying her down, it is ourselves we tie.
(S 17)
In our hypnosis by one luminous point
We see not what small figure of her we hold;
580 We feel not her inspiring boundlessness,
We share not her immortal liberty.
(S 18)
Thus is it even with the seer and sage;
For still the human limits the divine:
Out of our thoughts we must leap up to sight,
585 Breathe her divine illimitable air,
Her simple vast supremacy confess,
Dare to surrender to her absolute.
(S 19)
Then the Unmanifest reflects his form
In the still mind as in a living glass;
590 The timeless Ray descends into our hearts
And we are rapt into eternity.
(S 20)
For Truth is wider, greater than her forms.
(S 21)
A thousand icons they have made of her
And find her in the idols they adore;
595 But she remains herself and infinite.