(S 1)
In this high signal moment of the gods
140 Answering earth’s yearning and her cry for bliss,
A greatness from our other countries came.
(S 2)
A silence in the noise of earthly things
Immutably revealed the secret Word,
A mightier influx filled the oblivious clay:
145 A lamp was lit, a sacred image made.
(S 3)
A mediating ray had touched the earth
Bridging the gulf between man’s mind and God’s;
Its brightness linked our transience to the Unknown.
(S 4)
A spirit of its celestial source aware
150 Translating heaven into a human shape
Descended into earth’s imperfect mould
And wept not fallen to mortality,
But looked on all with large and tranquil eyes.
(S 5)
One had returned from the transcendent planes
155 And bore anew the load of mortal breath,
Who had striven of old with our darkness and our pain;
She took again her divine unfinished task:
Survivor of death and the aeonic years,
Once more with her fathomless heart she fronted Time.
(S 6)
160 Again there was renewed, again revealed
The ancient closeness by earth-vision veiled,
The secret contact broken off in Time,
A consanguinity of earth and heaven,
Between the human portion toiling here
165 And an as yet unborn and limitless Force.
(S 7)
Again the mystic deep attempt began,
The daring wager of the cosmic game.
(S 8)
For since upon this blind and whirling globe
Earth-plasm first quivered with the illumining mind
170 And life invaded the material sheath
Afflicting Inconscience with the need to feel,
Since in Infinity’s silence woke a word,
A Mother-wisdom works in Nature’s breast
To pour delight on the heart of toil and want
175 And press perfection on life’s stumbling powers,
Impose heaven-sentience on the obscure abyss
And make dumb Matter conscious of its God.
(S 9)
Although our fallen minds forget to climb,
Although our human stuff resists or breaks,
180 She keeps her will that hopes to divinise clay;
Failure cannot repress, defeat o’erthrow;
Time cannot weary her nor the Void subdue,
The ages have not made her passion less;
No victory she admits of Death or Fate.
(S 10)
185 Always she drives the soul to new attempt;
Always her magical infinitude
Forces to aspire the inert brute elements;
As one who has all infinity to waste,
She scatters the seed of the Eternal’s strength
190 On a half-animate and crumbling mould,
Plants heaven’s delight in the heart’s passionate mire,
Pours godhead’s seekings into a bare beast frame,
Hides immortality in a mask of death.
(S 11)
Once more that Will put on an earthly shape.
(S 12)
195 A Mind empowered from Truth’s immutable seat
Was framed for vision and interpreting act
And instruments were sovereignly designed
To express divinity in terrestrial signs.
(S 13)
Outlined by the pressure of this new descent
200 A lovelier body formed than earth had known.
(S 14)
As yet a prophecy only and a hint,
The glowing arc of a charmed unseen whole,
It came into the sky of mortal life
Bright like the crescent horn of a gold moon
205 Returning in a faint illumined eve.
(S 15)
At first glimmering like an unshaped idea
Passive she lay sheltered in wordless sleep,
Involved and drowned in Matter’s giant trance,
An infant heart of the deep-caved world-plan
210 In cradle of divine inconscience rocked
By the universal ecstasy of the suns.
(S 16)
Some missioned Power in the half-wakened frame
Nursed a transcendent birth’s dumb glorious seed
For which this vivid tenement was made.
(S 17)
215 But soon the link of soul with form grew sure;
Flooded was the dim cave with slow conscient light,
The seed grew into a delicate marvellous bud,
The bud disclosed a great and heavenly bloom.
(S 18)
At once she seemed to found a mightier race.
(S 19)
220 Arrived upon the strange and dubious globe
The child remembering inly a far home
Lived guarded in her spirit’s luminous cell,
Alone mid men in her diviner kind.
(S 20)
Even in her childish movements could be felt
225 The nearness of a light still kept from earth,
Feelings that only eternity could share,
Thoughts natural and native to the gods.
(S 21)
As needing nothing but its own rapt flight
Her nature dwelt in a strong separate air
230 Like a strange bird with large rich-coloured breast
That sojourns on a secret fruited bough,
Lost in the emerald glory of the woods
Or flies above divine unreachable tops.
(S 22)
Harmoniously she impressed the earth with heaven.
(S 23)
235 Aligned to a swift rhythm of sheer delight
And singing to themselves her days went by;
Each minute was a throb of beauty’s heart;
The hours were tuned to a sweet-toned content
Which asked for nothing, but took all life gave
240 Sovereignly as her nature’s inborn right.
(S 24)
Near was her spirit to its parent Sun,
The Breath within to the eternal joy.
(S 25)
The first fair life that breaks from Nature’s swoon,
Mounts in a line of rapture to the skies;
245 Absorbed in its own happy urge it lives,
Sufficient to itself, yet turned to all:
It has no seen communion with its world,
No open converse with surrounding things.
(S 26)
There is a oneness native and occult
250 That needs no instruments and erects no form;
In unison it grows with all that is.
(S 27)
All contacts it assumes into its trance,
Laugh-tossed consents to the wind’s kiss and takes
Transmutingly the shocks of sun and breeze:
255 A blissful yearning riots in its leaves,
A magic passion trembles in its blooms,
Its boughs aspire in hushed felicity.
(S 28)
An occult godhead of this beauty is cause,
The spirit and intimate guest of all this charm,
260 This sweetness’s priestess and this reverie’s muse.
(S 29)
Invisibly protected from our sense
The Dryad lives drenched in a deeper ray
And feels another air of storms and calms
And quivers inwardly with mystic rain.
(S 30)
265 This at a heavenlier height was shown in her.
(S 31)
Even when she bent to meet earth’s intimacies
Her spirit kept the stature of the gods;
It stooped but was not lost in Matter’s reign.
(S 32)
A world translated was her gleaming mind,
270 And marvel-mooned bright crowding fantasies
Fed with spiritual sustenance of dreams
The ideal goddess in her house of gold.
(S 33)
Aware of forms to which our eyes are closed,
Conscious of nearnesses we cannot feel,
275 The Power within her shaped her moulding sense
In deeper figures than our surface types.
(S 34)
An invisible sunlight ran within her veins
And flooded her brain with heavenly brilliances
That woke a wider sight than earth could know.
(S 35)
280 Outlined in the sincerity of that ray
Her springing childlike thoughts were richly turned
Into luminous patterns of her soul’s deep truth,
And from her eyes she cast another look
On all around her than man’s ignorant view.
(S 36)
285 All objects were to her shapes of living selves
And she perceived a message from her kin
In each awakening touch of outward things.
(S 37)
Each was a symbol power, a vivid flash
In the circuit of infinities half-known;
290 Nothing was alien or inanimate,
Nothing without its meaning or its call.
(S 38)
For with a greater Nature she was one.
(S 39)
As from the soil sprang glory of branch and flower,
As from the animal’s life rose thinking man,
295 A new epiphany appeared in her.
(S 40)
A mind of light, a life of rhythmic force,
Prepared an image of the coming god;
And when the slow rhyme of the expanding years
300 And the rich murmurous swarm-work of the days
Had honey-packed her sense and filled her limbs,
Accomplishing the moon-orb of her grace,
Self-guarded in the silence of her strength
Her solitary greatness was not less.
(S 41)
305 Nearer the godhead to the surface pressed,
A sun replacing childhood’s nebula
Sovereign in a blue and lonely sky.
(S 42)
Upward it rose to grasp the human scene:
The strong Inhabitant turned to watch her field.
(S 43)
310 A lovelier light assumed her spirit brow
And sweet and solemn grew her musing gaze;
Celestial-human deep warm slumbrous fires
Woke in the long fringed glory of her eyes
Like altar-burnings in a mysteried shrine.
(S 44)
315 Out of those crystal windows gleamed a will
That brought a large significance to life.
(S 45)
Holding her forehead’s candid stainless space
Behind the student arch a noble power
Of wisdom looked from light on transient things.
(S 46)
320 A scout of victory in a vigil tower,
Her aspiration called high destiny down;
A silent warrior paced in her city of strength
Inviolate, guarding Truth’s diamond throne.
(S 47)
A nectarous haloed moon her passionate heart
325 Loved all and spoke no word and made no sign,
But kept her bosom’s rapturous secrecy
A blissful ardent moved and voiceless world.
(S 48)
Proud, swift and joyful ran the wave of life
Within her like a stream in Paradise.
(S 49)
330 Many high gods dwelt in one beautiful home;
Yet was her nature’s orb a perfect whole,
Harmonious like a chant with many tones,
Immense and various like a universe.
(S 50)
The body that held this greatness seemed almost
335 An image made of heaven’s transparent light.
(S 51)
Its charm recalled things seen in vision’s hours,
A golden bridge spanning a faery flood,
A moon-touched palm-tree single by a lake
Companion of the wide and glimmering peace,
340 A murmur as of leaves in Paradise
Moving when feet of the Immortals pass,
A fiery halo over sleeping hills,
A strange and starry head alone in Night.