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Canto One

The Pursuit of the Unknowable

All is too little that the world can give:

Its power and knowledge are the gifts of Time

And cannot fill the spirit’s sacred thirst.

Although of One these forms of greatness are

And by its breath of grace our lives abide,

Although more near to us than nearness’ self,

It is some utter truth of what we are;

Hidden by its own works, it seemed far-off,

Impenetrable, occult, voiceless, obscure.

The Presence was lost by which all things have charm,

The Glory lacked of which they are dim signs.

The world lived on made empty of its Cause,

Like love when the beloved’s face is gone.

The labour to know seemed a vain strife of Mind;

All knowledge ended in the Unknowable:

The effort to rule seemed a vain pride of Will;

A trivial achievement scorned by Time,

All power retired into the Omnipotent.

A cave of darkness guards the eternal Light.

A silence settled on his striving heart;

Absolved from the voices of the world’s desire,

He turned to the Ineffable’s timeless call.

A Being intimate and unnameable,

A wide compelling ecstasy and peace

Felt in himself and all and yet ungrasped,

Approached and faded from his soul’s pursuit

As if for ever luring him beyond.

Near, it retreated; far, it called him still.

Nothing could satisfy but its delight:

Its absence left the greatest actions dull,

Its presence made the smallest seem divine.

When it was there, the heart’s abyss was filled;

But when the uplifting Deity withdrew,

Existence lost its aim in the Inane.

The order of the immemorial planes,

The godlike fullness of the instruments

Were turned to props for an impermanent scene.

But who that mightiness was he knew not yet.

Impalpable, yet filling all that is,

It made and blotted out a million worlds

And took and lost a thousand shapes and names.

It wore the guise of an indiscernible Vast,

Or was a subtle kernel in the soul:

A distant greatness left it huge and dim,

A mystic closeness shut it sweetly in:

It seemed sometimes a figment or a robe

And seemed sometimes his own colossal shade.

A giant doubt overshadowed his advance.

Across a neutral all-supporting Void

Whose blankness nursed his lone immortal spirit,

Allured towards some recondite Supreme,

Aided, coerced by enigmatic Powers,

Aspiring and half-sinking and upborne,

Invincibly he ascended without pause.

Always a signless vague Immensity

Brooded, without approach, beyond response,

Condemning finite things to nothingness,

Fronting him with the incommensurable.

Then to the ascent there came a mighty term.

A height was reached where nothing made could live,

A line where every hope and search must cease

Neared some intolerant bare Reality,

A zero formed pregnant with boundless change.

On a dizzy verge where all disguises fail

And human mind must abdicate in Light

Or die like a moth in the naked blaze of Truth,

He stood compelled to a tremendous choice.

All he had been and all towards which he grew

Must now be left behind or else transform

Into a self of That which has no name.

Alone and fronting an intangible Force

Which offered nothing to the grasp of Thought,

His spirit faced the adventure of the Inane.

Abandoned by the worlds of Form he strove.

A fruitful world-wide Ignorance foundered here;

Thought’s long far-circling journey touched its close

And ineffective paused the actor Will.

The symbol modes of being helped no more,

The structures Nescience builds collapsing failed,

And even the spirit that holds the universe

Fainted in luminous insufficiency.

In an abysmal lapse of all things built

Transcending every perishable support

And joining at last its mighty origin,

The separate self must melt or be reborn

Into a Truth beyond the mind’s appeal.

All glory of outline, sweetness of harmony,

Rejected like a grace of trivial notes,

Expunged from Being’s silence nude, austere,

Died into a fine and blissful Nothingness.

The Demiurges lost their names and forms,

The great schemed worlds that they had planned and wrought

Passed, taken and abolished one by one.

The universe removed its coloured veil,

And at the unimaginable end

Of the huge riddle of created things

Appeared the far-seen Godhead of the whole,

His feet firm-based on Life’s stupendous wings,

Omnipotent, a lonely seer of Time,

Inward, inscrutable, with diamond gaze.

Attracted by the unfathomable regard

The unsolved slow cycles to their fount returned

To rise again from that invisible sea.

All from his puissance born was now undone;

Nothing remained the cosmic Mind conceives.

Eternity prepared to fade and seemed

A hue and imposition on the Void,

Space was the fluttering of a dream that sank

Before its ending into Nothing’s deeps.

The spirit that dies not and the Godhead’s self

Seemed myths projected from the Unknowable;

From It all sprang, in It is called to cease.

But what That was, no thought nor sight could tell.

Only a formless Form of self was left,

A tenuous ghost of something that had been,

The last experience of a lapsing wave

Before it sinks into a bourneless sea, –

As if it kept even on the brink of Nought

Its bare feeling of the ocean whence it came.

A Vastness brooded free from sense of Space,

An Everlastingness cut off from Time;

A strange sublime inalterable Peace

Silent rejected from it world and soul.

A stark companionless Reality

Answered at last to his soul’s passionate search:

Passionless, wordless, absorbed in its fathomless hush,

Keeping the mystery none would ever pierce,

It brooded inscrutable and intangible

Facing him with its dumb tremendous calm.

It had no kinship with the universe:

There was no act, no movement in its Vast:

Life’s question met by its silence died on her lips,

The world’s effort ceased convicted of ignorance

Finding no sanction of supernal Light:

There was no mind there with its need to know,

There was no heart there with its need to love.

All person perished in its namelessness.

There was no second, it had no partner or peer;

Only itself was real to itself.

A pure existence safe from thought and mood,

A consciousness of unshared immortal bliss,

It dwelt aloof in its bare infinite,

One and unique, unutterably sole.

A Being formless, featureless and mute

That knew itself by its own timeless self,

Aware for ever in its motionless depths,

Uncreating, uncreated and unborn,

The One by whom all live, who lives by none,

An immeasurable luminous secrecy

Guarded by the veils of the Unmanifest,

Above the changing cosmic interlude

Abode supreme, immutably the same,

A silent Cause occult, impenetrable, –

Infinite, eternal, unthinkable, alone.

End of Canto One