(S 1)
245 But here were worlds lifted half-way to heaven. EoS
(S 2)
The Veil was there but not the Shadowy Wall;
In forms not too remote from human grasp
Some passion of the inviolate purity
Broke through, a ray of the original Bliss.
(S 3)
250 Heaven’s joys might have been earth’s if earth were pure.
(S 4)
There could have reached our divinised sense and heart
Some natural felicity’s bright extreme,
Some thrill of Supernatures absolutes:
All strengths could laugh and sport on earth’s hard roads
255 And never feel her cruel edge of pain,
All love could play and nowhere Nature’s shame.
(S 5)
But she has stabled her dreams in Matter’s courts
And still her doors are barred to things supreme.
(S 6)
These worlds could feel God’s breath visiting their tops;
260 Some glimmer of the Transcendent’s hem was there.
(S 7)
Across the white aeonic silences
Immortal figures of embodied joy
Traversed wide spaces near to eternity’s sleep.
(S 8)
Pure mystic voices in beatitude’s hush EoS
265 Appealed to Love’s immaculate sweetnesses,
Calling his honeyed touch to thrill the worlds,
His blissful hands to seize on Nature’s limbs,
His sweet intolerant might of union
To take all beings into his saviour arms,
270 Drawing to his pity the rebel and the waif
To force on them the happiness they refuse.
(S 9)
A chant hymeneal to the unseen Divine,
A flaming rhapsody of white desire
Lured an immortal music into the heart
275 And woke the slumbering ear of ecstasy.
(S 10)
A purer, fierier sense had there its home,
A burning urge no earthly limbs can hold;
One drew a large unburdened spacious breath
And the heart sped from beat to rapturous beat.
(S 11)
280 The voice of Time sang of the Immortal’s joy; EoS
An inspiration and a lyric cry,
The moments came with ecstasy on their wings;
Beauty unimaginable moved heaven-bare
Absolved from boundaries in the vasts of dream;
285 The cry of the Birds of Wonder called from the skies
To the deathless people of the shores of Light.
(S 12)
Creation leaped straight from the hands of God;
Marvel and rapture wandered in the ways.
(S 13)
Only to be was a supreme delight,
290 Life was a happy laughter of the soul
And Joy was king with Love for minister.
(S 14)
The spirit’s luminousness was bodied there.
(S 15)
Life’s contraries were lovers or natural friends
And her extremes keen edges of harmony:
295 Indulgence with a tender purity came
And nursed the god on her maternal breast:
There none was weak, so falsehood could not live;
Ignorance was a thin shade protecting light,
Imagination the free-will of Truth,
300 Pleasure a candidate for heaven’s fire;
The intellect was Beauty’s worshipper,
Strength was the slave of calm spiritual law,
Power laid its head upon the breasts of Bliss.
(S 16)
There were summit-glories inconceivable, EoS
305 Autonomies of Wisdom’s still self-rule
And high dependencies of her virgin sun,
Illumined theocracies of the seeing soul
Throned in the power of the Transcendent’s ray.
(S 17)
A vision of grandeurs, a dream of magnitudes
310 In sun-bright kingdoms moved with regal gait:
Assemblies, crowded senates of the gods,
Life’s puissances reigned on seats of marble will,
High dominations and autocracies
And laurelled strengths and armed imperative mights.
(S 18)
315 All objects there were great and beautiful,
All beings wore a royal stamp of power.
(S 19)
There sat the oligarchies of natural Law,
Proud violent heads served one calm monarch brow:
All the soul’s postures donned divinity.
(S 20)
320 There met the ardent mutual intimacies EoS
Of mastery’s joy and the joy of servitude
Imposed by Love on Love’s heart that obeys
And Love’s body held beneath a rapturous yoke.
(S 21)
All was a game of meeting kinglinesses.. EoS
(S 22)
325 For worship lifts the worshipper’s bowed strength
Close to the god’s pride and bliss his soul adores:
The ruler there is one with all he rules;
To him who serves with a free equal heart
Obedience is his princely training’s school,
330 His nobility’s coronet and privilege,
His faith is a high nature’s idiom,
His service a spiritual sovereignty.
(S 23)
There were realms where Knowledge joined creative Power EoS
In her high home and made her all his own:
335 The grand Illuminate seized her gleaming limbs
And filled them with the passion of his ray
Till all her body was its transparent house
And all her soul a counterpart of his soul.
(S 24)
Apotheosised, transfigured by wisdom’s touch,
340 Her days became a luminous sacrifice;
An immortal moth in happy and endless fire,
She burned in his sweet intolerable blaze.
(S 25)
A captive Life wedded her conqueror. EoS
(S 26)
In his wide sky she built her world anew;
345 She gave to mind’s calm pace the motor’s speed,
To thinking a need to live what the soul saw,
To living an impetus to know and see.
(S 27)
His splendour grasped her, her puissance to him clung;
She crowned the Idea a king in purple robes,
350 Put her magic serpent sceptre in Thought’s grip,
Made forms his inward vision’s rhythmic shapes
And her acts the living body of his will.
(S 28)
A flaming thunder, a creator flash, EoS
His victor Light rode on her deathless Force;
355 A centaur’s mighty gallop bore the god.
(S 29)
Life throned with mind, a double majesty.
(S 30)
Worlds were there of a happiness great and grave
And action tinged with dream, laughter with thought,
And passion there could wait for its desire
360 Until it heard the near approach of God.
(S 31)
Worlds were there of a childlike mirth and joy;
A carefree youthfulness of mind and heart
Found in the body a heavenly instrument;
It lit an aureate halo round desire
365 And freed the deified animal in the limbs
To divine gambols of love and beauty and bliss.
(S 32)
On a radiant soil that gazed at heaven’s smile
A swift life-impulse stinted not nor stopped:
It knew not how to tire; happy were its tears.
(S 33)
370 There work was play and play the only work,
The tasks of heaven a game of godlike might:
A celestial bacchanal for ever pure,
Unstayed by faintness as in mortal frames
Life was an eternity of rapture’s moods:
375 Age never came, care never lined the face.
(S 34)
Imposing on the safety of the stars EoS
A race and laughter of immortal strengths,
The nude god-children in their play-fields ran
Smiting the winds with splendour and with speed;
380 Of storm and sun they made companions,
Sported with the white mane of tossing seas,
Slew distance trampled to death under their wheels
And wrestled in the arenas of their force.
(S 35)
Imperious in their radiance like the suns
385 They kindled heaven with the glory of their limbs
Flung like a divine largess to the world.
(S 36)
A spell to force the heart to stark delight,
They carried the pride and mastery of their charm
As if Life’s banner on the roads of Space.
(S 37)
390 Ideas were luminous comrades of the soul; EoS
Mind played with speech, cast javelins of thought,
But needed not these instruments’ toil to know;
Knowledge was Nature’s pastime like the rest.
(S 38)
Investitured with the fresh heart’s bright ray,
395 An early God-instinct’s child inheritors,
Tenants of the perpetuity of Time
Still thrilling with the first creation’s bliss,
They steeped existence in their youth of soul.
(S 39)
An exquisite and vhement tyranny, EoS
400 The strong compulsion of their will to joy
Poured smiling streams of happiness through the world.
(S 40)
There reigned a breath of high immune content,
A fortunate gait of days in tranquil air,
A flood of universal love and peace.
(S 41)
405 A sovereignty of tireless sweetness lived
Like a song of pleasure on the lips of Time.
(S 42)
A large spontaneous order freed the will, EoS
A sun-frank winging of the soul to bliss,
The breadth and greatness of the unfettered act
410 And the swift fire-heart’s golden liberty.
(S 43)
There was no falsehood of soul-severance,
There came no crookedness of thought or word
To rob creation of its native truth;
All was sincerity and natural force.
(S 44)
415 There freedom was sole rule and highest law.
(S 45)
In a happy series climbed or plunged these worlds:
In realms of curious beauty and surprise,
In fields of grandeur and of titan power,
Life played at ease with her immense desires.
(S 46)
420 A thousand Edens she could build nor pause;
No bound was set to her greatness and to her grace
And to her heavenly variety.
(S 47)
Awake with a cry and stir of numberless souls, EoS
Arisen from the breast of some deep Infinite,
425 Smiling like a new-born child at love and hope,
In her nature housing the Immortal’s power,
In her bosom bearing the eternal Will,
No guide she needed but her luminous heart:
No fall debased the godhead of her steps,
430 No alien Night had come to blind her eyes.
(S 48)
There was no use for grudging ring or fence;
Each act was a perfection and a joy.
(S 49)
Abandoned to her rapid fancy’s moods
And the rich coloured riot of her mind,
435 Initiate of divine and mighty dreams,
Magician builder of unnumbered forms
Exploring the measures of the rhythms of God,
At will she wove her wizard wonder-dance,
A Dionysian goddess of delight,
440 A Bacchant of creative ecstasy.