This is the knot that ties together the stars: EoS
The Two who are one are the secret of all power,
The Two who are one are the might and right in things.
(S 2)
620 His soul, silent, supports the world and her, EoS
His acts are her commandment’s registers.
(S 3)
Happy, inert, he lies beneath her feet:
EoS
His breast he offers for her cosmic dance
Of which our lives are the quivering theatre,
625
And none could bear but for his strength within,
Yet none would leave because of his delight.
(S 4)
His works, his thoughts have been devised by her,
His being is a mirror vast of hers:
Active, inspired by her he speaks and moves;
630
His deeds obey her heart’s unspoken demands:
Passive, he bears the impacts of the world
As if her touches shaping his soul and life:
His journey through the days is her sun-march;
He runs upon her roads; hers is his course.
(S 5)
635
A witness and student of her joy and dole,
A partner in her evil and her good,
He has consented to her passionate ways,
He is driven by her sweet and dreadful force.
(S 6)
His sanctioning name initials all her works;
640 His silence is his signature to her deeds;
In the execution of her drama’s scheme,
In her fancies of the moment and its mood,
In the march of this obvious ordinary world
Where all is deep and strange to the eyes that see
645
And Nature’s common forms are marvel-wefts,
She through his witness sight and motion of might
Unrolls the material of her cosmic Act,
Her happenings that exalt and smite the soul,
EoS
Her force that moves, her powers that save and slay,
650
Her Word that in the silence speaks to our hearts,
Her silence that transcends the summit Word,
Her heights and depths to which our spirit moves,
Her events that weave the texture of our lives
And all by which we find or lose ourselves,
655
Things sweet and bitter, magnificent and mean,
Things terrible and beautiful and divine.
(S 7)
Her empire in the cosmos she has built,
He is governed by her subtle and mighty laws.
(S 8)
His consciousness is a babe upon her knees,
660 His being a field of her vast experiment,
Her endless space is the playground of his thoughts;
She binds to knowledge of the shapes of Time
And the creative error of limiting mind
And chance that wears the rigid face of fate
665
And her sport of death and pain and Nescience,
His changed and struggling immortality.
(S 9)
His soul is a subtle atom in a mass,
His substance a material for her works.
(S 10)
His spirit survives amid the death of things, EoS
670 He climbs to eternity through being’s gaps,
He is carried by her from Night to deathless Light.
(S 11)
This grand surrender is his free-will’s gift,
His pure transcendent force submits to hers.
(S 12)
In the mystery of her cosmic ignorance, EoS
675
In the insoluble riddle of her play,
A creature made of perishable stuff,
In the pattern she has set for him he moves,
He thinks with her thoughts, with her trouble his bosom heaves;
He seems the thing that she would have him seem,
680 He is whatever her artist will can make.
(S 13)
Although she drives him on her fancy’s roads,
At play with him as with her child or slave,
To freedom and the Eternal’s mastery
And immortality’s stand above the world,
685 She moves her seeming puppet of an hour.
(S 14)
Even in his mortal session in body’s house,
An aimless traveller between birth and death,
Ephemeral dreaming of immortality,
To reign she spurs him. He takes up her powers;
690
He has harnessed her to the yoke of her own law.
(S 15)
His face of human thought puts on a crown.
(S 16)
Held in her leash, bound to her veiled caprice,
He studies her ways if so he may prevail
Even for an hour and she work out his will;
695
He makes of her his moment passion’s serf:
To obey she feigns, she follows her creature’s lead:
For him she was made, lives only for his use.
(S 17)
But conquering her, then is he most her slave;
EoS
He is her dependent, all his means are hers;
700
Nothing without her he can, she rules him still.
(S 18)
At last he wakes to a memory of Self: EoS
He sees within the face of deity,
The Godhead breaks out through the human mould:
Her highest heights she unmasks and is his mate.
(S 19)
705 Till then he is a plaything in her game;
Her seeming regent, yet her fancy’s toy,
A living robot moved by her energy’s springs,
He acts as in the movements of a dream,
An automaton stepping in the grooves of Fate,
710
He stumbles on driven by her whip of Force:
His thought labours, a bullock in Time’s fields;
His will he thinks his own, is shaped in her forge.
(S 20)
Obedient to World-Nature’s dumb control,
Driven by his own formidable Power,
715 His chosen partner in a titan game,
Her will he has made the master of his fate,
Her whim the dispenser of his pleasure and pain;
He has sold himself into her regal power
EoS
For any blow or boon that she may choose:
720 Even in what is suffering to our sense,
He feels the sweetness of her mastering touch,
In all experience meets her blissful hands;
On his heart he bears the happiness of her tread
And the surprise of her arrival’s joy
725 In each event and every moment’s chance.
(S 21)
All she can do is marvellous in his sight:
He revels in her, a swimmer in her sea,
A tireless amateur of her world-delight,
He rejoices in her every thought and act
730 And gives consent to all that she can wish;
Whatever she desires he wills to be:
The Spirit, the innumerable One, EoS
He has left behind his lone eternity,
He is an endless birth in endless Time,
735
Her finite’s multitude in an infinite Space.