(S 1)
620 “O mortal who complainst of death and fate,
Accuse none of the harms thyself hast called;
This troubled world thou hast chosen for thy home,
Thou art thyself the author of thy pain.
(S 2)
Once in the immortal boundlessness of Self,
625 In a vast of Truth and Consciousness and Light
The soul looked out from its felicity.
(S 3)
It felt the Spirit’s interminable bliss,
It knew itself deathless, timeless, spaceless, one,
It saw the Eternal, lived in the Infinite.
(S 4)
630 Then, curious of a shadow thrown by Truth,
It strained towards some otherness of self,
It was drawn to an unknown Face peering through night.
(S 5)
It sensed a negative infinity,
A void supernal whose immense excess
635 Imitating God and everlasting Time
Offered a ground for Nature’s adverse birth
And Matter’s rigid hard unconsciousness
Harbouring the brilliance of a transient soul
That lights up birth and death and ignorant life.
640 A Mind arose that stared at Nothingness
Till figures formed of what could never be;
It housed the contrary of all that is.
(S 6)
A Nought appeared as Being’s huge sealed cause,
Its dumb support in a blank infinite,
645 In whose abysm spirit must disappear:
A darkened Nature lived and held the seed
(S 7)
Eternal Consciousness became a freak
Of an unsouled almighty Inconscient
650 And, breathed no more as spirit’s native air,
Bliss was an incident of a mortal hour,
A stranger in the insentient universe.
(S 8)
As one drawn by the grandeur of the Void
The soul attracted leaned to the Abyss:
655 It longed for the adventure of Ignorance
And the marvel and surprise of the Unknown
And the endless possibility that lurked
In the womb of Chaos and in Nothing’s gulf
Or looked from the unfathomed eyes of Chance.
(S 9)
660 It tired of its unchanging happiness,
It turned away from immortality:
It was drawn to hazard’s call and danger’s charm,
It yearned to the pathos of grief, the drama of pain,
Perdition’s peril, the wounded bare escape,
665 The music of ruin and its glamour and crash,
The savour of pity and the gamble of love
And passion and the ambiguous face of Fate.
(S 10)
A world of hard endeavour and difficult toil,
And battle on extinction’s perilous verge,
670 A clash of forces, a vast incertitude,
The joy of creation out of Nothingness,
Strange meetings on the roads of Ignorance
And the companionship of half-known souls
Or the solitary greatness and lonely force
675 Of a separate being conquering its world,
Called it from its too safe eternity.
(S 11)
A huge descent began, a giant fall:
For what the spirit sees, creates a truth
And what the soul imagines is made a world.
(S 12)
680 A Thought that leaped from the Timeless can become,
Indicator of cosmic consequence
And the itinerary of the gods,
A cyclic movement in eternal Time.
(S 13)
Thus came, born from a blind tremendous choice,
685 This great perplexed and discontented world,
This haunt of Ignorance, this home of Pain:
There are pitched desire’s tents, grief’s headquarters.
(S 14)
A vast disguise conceals the Eternal’s bliss.”