(S 1)
THERE ceased the limits of the labouring Power.
(S 2)
But being and creation cease not there.
(S 3)
For Thought transcends the circles of mortal mind,
It is greater than its earthly instrument:
5 The godhead crammed into mind’s narrow space
Escapes on every side into some vast
That is a passage to infinity.
(S 4)
It moves eternal in the spirit’s field,
A runner towards the far spiritual light,
10 A child and servant of the spirit’s force.
(S 5)
But mind too falls back from a nameless peak.
(S 6)
His being stretched beyond the sight of Thought.
(S 7)
For the spirit is eternal and unmade
And not by thinking was its greatness born,
15 And not by thinking can its knowledge come.
(S 8)
It knows itself and in itself it lives,
It moves where no thought is nor any form.
(S 9)
Its feet are steadied upon finite things,
Its wings can dare to cross the Infinite.
(S 10)
20 Arriving into his ken a wonder space
Of great and marvellous meetings called his steps,
Where Thought leaned on a Vision beyond thought
And shaped a world from the Unthinkable.
(S 11)
On peaks imagination cannot tread,
25 In the horizons of a tireless sight,
Under a blue veil of eternity
The splendours of ideal Mind were seen
Outstretched across the boundaries of things known.
(S 12)
Origin of the little that we are,
30 Instinct with the endless more that we must be,
A prop of all that human strength enacts,
Creator of hopes by earth unrealised,
It spreads beyond the expanding universe;
It wings beyond the boundaries of Dream,
35 It overtops the ceiling of life’s soar.
(S 13)
Awake in a luminous sphere unbound by Thought,
Exposed to omniscient immensities,
It casts on our world its great crowned influences,
Its speed that outstrips the ambling of the hours,
40 Its force that strides invincibly through Time,
Its mights that bridge the gulf twixt man and God,
Its lights that combat Ignorance and Death.
(S 14)
In its vast ambit of ideal Space
Where beauty and mightiness walk hand in hand,
45 The Spirit’s truths take form as living Gods
And each can build a world in its own right.
(S 15)
In an air which doubt and error cannot mark
With the stigmata of their deformity,
In communion with the musing privacy
50 Of a truth that sees in an unerring light
Where the sight falters not nor wanders thought,
Exempt from our world’s exorbitant tax of tears,
Dreaming its luminous creations gaze
On the Ideas that people eternity.
(S 16)
55 In a sun-blaze of joy and absolute power
Above the Masters of the Ideal throne
In sessions of secure felicity,
In regions of illumined certitude.
(S 17)
Far are those realms from our labour and yearning and call,
60 Perfection’s reign and hallowed sanctuary
Closed to the uncertain thoughts of human mind,
Remote from the turbid tread of mortal life.
(S 18)
But since our secret selves are next of kin,
A breath of unattained divinity
65 Visits the imperfect earth on which we toil;
Across a gleaming ether’s golden laugh
A light falls on our vexed unsatisfied lives,
A thought comes down from the ideal worlds
And moves us to new-model even here
70 Some image of their greatness and appeal
And wonder beyond the ken of mortal hope.
(S 19)
Amid the heavy sameness of the days
And contradicted by the human law,
A faith in things that are not and must be
75 Lives comrade of this world’s delight and pain,
The child of the secret soul’s forbidden desire
Born of its amour with eternity.
(S 20)
Our spirits break free from their environment;
The future brings its face of miracle near,
80 Its godhead looks at us with present eyes;
Acts deemed impossible grow natural;
We feel the hero’s immortality;
The courage and the strength death cannot touch
Awake in limbs that are mortal, hearts that fail;
85 We move by the rapid impulse of a will
That scorns the tardy trudge of mortal time.
(S 21)
These promptings come not from an alien sphere:
Ourselves are citizens of that mother State,
Adventurers, we have colonised Matter’s night.
(S 22)
90 But now our rights are barred, our passports void;
We live self-exiled from our heavenlier home.
(S 23)
An errant ray from the immortal Mind
Accepted the earth’s blindness and became
Our human thought, servant of Ignorance.
(S 24)
95 An exile, labourer on this unsure globe
Captured and driven in Life’s nescient grasp,
Hampered by obscure cell and treacherous nerve,
It dreams of happier states and nobler powers,
The natural privilege of unfallen gods,
100 Recalling still its old lost sovereignty.
(S 25)
Amidst earth’s mist and fog and mud and stone
It still remembers its exalted sphere
And the high city of its splendid birth.
(S 26)
A memory steals in from lost heavens of Truth,
105 A wide release comes near, a Glory calls,
A might looks out, an estranged felicity.
(S 27)
In glamorous passages of half-veiled light
Wandering, a brilliant shadow of itself,
This quick uncertain leader of blind gods,
110 This tender of small lamps, this minister serf
Hired by a mind and body for earth-use
Forgets its work mid crude realities;
It recovers its renounced imperial right,
It wears once more a purple robe of thought
115 And knows itself the Ideal’s seer and king,
Communicant and prophet of the Unborn,
Heir to delight and immortality.
(S 28)
All things are real that here are only dreams,
In our unknown depths sleeps their reserve of truth,
120 On our unreached heights they reign and come to us
In thought and muse trailing their robes of light.
(S 29)
But our dwarf will and cold pragmatic sense
Admit not the celestial visitants:
Awaiting us on the Ideal’s peaks
125 Or guarded in our secret self unseen
Yet flashed sometimes across the awakened soul,
Hide from our lives their greatness, beauty, power.
(S 30)
Our present feels sometimes their regal touch,
Our future strives towards their luminous thrones:
130 Out of spiritual secrecy they gaze,
Immortal footfalls in mind’s corridors sound:
Our souls can climb into the shining planes,
The breadths from which they came can be our home.
(S 31)
His privilege regained of shadowless sight
135 The Thinker entered the immortals’ air
And drank again his pure and mighty source.
(S 32)
Immutable in rhythmic calm and joy
He saw, sovereignly free in limitless light,
The unfallen planes, the thought-created worlds
140 Where Knowledge is the leader of the act
And Matter is of thinking substance made,
Feeling, a heaven-bird poised on dreaming wings,
Answers Truth’s call as to a parent’s voice,
Form luminous leaps from the all-shaping beam
145 And Will is a conscious chariot of the Gods,
And Life, a splendour stream of musing Force,
Carries the voices of the mystic Suns.
(S 33)
A happiness it brings of whispered truth;
There runs in its flow honeying the bosom of Space
150 A laughter from the immortal heart of Bliss,
And the unfathomed Joy of timelessness,
The sound of Wisdom’s murmur in the Unknown
And the breath of an unseen Infinity.
(S 34)
In gleaming clarities of amethyst air
155 The chainless and omnipotent Spirit of Mind
Brooded on the blue lotus of the Idea.
(S 35)
A gold supernal sun of timeless Truth
Poured down the mystery of the eternal Ray
Through a silence quivering with the word of Light
160 On an endless ocean of discovery.
(S 36)
Far-off he saw the joining hemispheres.
(S 37)
On meditation’s mounting edge of trance
Great stairs of thought climbed up to unborn heights
Where Time’s last ridges touch eternity’s skies
165 And Nature speaks to the spirit’s absolute.