(S 1)
ONWARD she passed seeking the soul’s mystic cave. EoS
(S 2)
At first she stepped into a night of God.
(S 3)
The light was quenched that helps the labouring world,
The power that struggles and stumbles in our life;
5 This inefficient mind gave up its thoughts,
The striving heart its unavailing hopes.
(S 4)
All knowledge failed and the Idea’s forms EoS
And Wisdom screened in awe her lowly head
Feeling a Truth too great for thought or speech,
10 Formless,ineffable, for ever the same.
(S 5)
An innocent and holy Ignorance
Adored like one who worships formless God
The unseen Light she could not claim nor own.
(S 6)
In a simple purity of emptiness
15 Her mind knelt down before the unknowable.
(S 7)
All was abolished save her naked self EoS
And the prostrate yearning of her surrendered heart:
There was no strength in her, no pride of force;
The lofty burning of desire had sunk
20 Ashamed, a vanity of separate self,
The hope of spiritual greatness fled,
Salvation she asked not nor a heavenly crown:
Humility seemed now too proud a state.
(S 8)
Her self was nothing, God alone was all,
25 Yet God she knew not but only knew he was.
(S 9)
A sacred darkness brooded now within,
The world was a deep darkness great and nude.
(S 10)
This void held more than all the teeming worlds,
This blank felt more than all that Time has borne,
30 This dark knew dumbly, immensely the Unknown.
(S 11)
But all was formless, voiceless, infinite.
As might a shadow walk in a shadowy scene,
A small nought passing through a mightier Nought,
A night of person in a bare outline
35 Crossing a fathomless impersonal Night,
Silent she moved, empty and absolute.
(S 12)
In endless Time her soul reached a wide end, EoS
The spaceless Vast became her spirit’s place.
(S 13)
At last a change approached, the emptiness broke;
40 A wave rippled within, the world had stirred;
Once more her inner self became her space.
(S 14)
There was felt a blissful nearness to the goal;
Heaven leaned low to kiss the sacred hill,
The air trembled with passion and delight.
(S 15)
45 A rose of splendour on a tree of dreams,
The face of Dawn out of mooned twilight grew.
(S 16)
Day came, priest of a sacrifice of joy
Into the worshipping silence of her world;
He carried immortal lustre as his robe,
50 Trailed heaven like a purple scarf and wore
As his vermilion casste-mark a red sun.
(S 17)
As if an old remembered dream come true, EoS
She recognised in her prophetic mind
The imperishable lustre of that sky,
55 The tremulous sweetness of that happy air
And, covered from mind’s view and life’s approach,
The mystic cavern in the sacred hill
And knew the dwelling of her secret soul.
(S 18)
As if in some Elysian occult depth, EoS
60 Truth’s last retreat from thought’s profaning touch,
As if in a rock-temple’s solitude hid,
God’s refuge from an ignorant worshipping world,
It lay withdrawn even from life’s inner sense,
Receding from the entangled heart’s desire.
(S 19)
65 A marvellous brooding twilight met the eyes EoS
And a holy stillness held that voiceless space.
(S 20)
An awful dimness wrapped the great rock-doors
Carved in the massive stone of Matter’s trance.
(S 21)
Two golden serpents round the lintel curled,
70 Enveloping it with their pure and dreadful strength,
Looked out with wisdom’s deep and luminous eyes.
(S 22)
An eagle covered it with wide conquering wings:
Flames of self-lost immobile reverie,
Doves crowded the grey musing cornices
75 Like sculptured postures of white-bosomed peace.
(S 23)
Across the threshold’s sleep she entered in
And found herself amid great figures of gods
Conscious in stone and living without breath,
Watching with fixed regard the soul of man,
80 Executive figures of the cosmic self,
World-symbols of immutable potency.
(S 24)
On the walls covered with significant shapes EoS
Looked at her the life-scene of man and beast
And the high meaning of the life of gods,
85 The power and necessity of these numberless worlds,
And faces of beings and stretches of world-space
Spoke the succinct and inexhaustible
Hieratic message of the climbing planes.
(S 25)
In their immensitude signing infinity EoS
90 They were the extension of the self of God
And housed,impassively receiving all,
His figures and his small and mighty acts
And his passion and his birth and life and death
And his return to immortality.
(S 26)
95 To the abiding and eternal is their climb,
To the pure existence everywhere the same,
To the sheer consciousness and the absolute force
And the unimaginable and formless bliss,
To the mirth in Time and the timeless mystery
100 Of the triune being who is all and one
And yet is no one but himself apart.
(S 27)
There was no step of breathing men, no sound,
Only the living nearness of the soul.
Yet all the worlds and God himself were there,
105 For every symbol was a reality
And brought the presence which had given it life.
(S 28)
All this she saw and inly felt and knew EoS
Not by some thought of mind but by the self.
(S 29)
A light not born of sun or moon or fire,
110 A light that dwelt within and saw within
Shedding an intimate visibility
Made secrecy more revealing than the word:
Our sight and sense are a fallible gaze and touch
And only the spirit’s vision is wholly true.
(S 30)
115 As thus she passed in that mysterious place EoS
Through room and room, through door and rock-hewn door,
She felt herself made one with all she saw.
(S 31)
A sealed identity within her woke;
She knew herself the Beloved of the Supreme:
120 These Gods and Goddesses were he and she:
The Mother was she of Beauty and Delight,
The Word in Brahma’s vast creating clasp,
The World-Puissance on almighty Shiva’s lap, —
The Master and the Mother of all lives
125 Watching the worlds their twin regard had made,
And Krishna and Radha for ever entwined in bliss,
The Adorer and Adored self-lost and one.
(S 32)
In the last chamber on a golden seat EoS
One sat whose shape no vision could define;
130 Only one felt the world’s unattainable fount,
A Power of which she was a straying Force,
An invisible Beauty, goal of the world’s desire,
A Sun of which all knowledge is a beam,
A Greatness without whom no life could be.
(S 33)
135 Thence all departed into silent self, EoS
And all became formless and pure and bare.
(S 34)
Then through a tunnel dug in the last rock
She came out where there shone a deathless sun.
(S 35)
A house was there all made of flame and light
140 And crossing a wall of doorless living fire
There suddenly she met her secret soul.