Book Eleven: The Book of Everlasting Day
Canto I: The Eternal Day: The Soul’s Choice and the Supreme Consummation
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… serene arches of translucent calm
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Arisen beneath a triple mystic heaven
The seven immortal earths were seen sublime
Homes of the blest released from death and sleep
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Lost in blue deeps of immortality
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Even Matter brought a close spiritual touch
All thrilled with the immanence of one divine
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… the wide travel hymn of timeless seas
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The murmurous rivers of felicity
Divinely rippled, honey-voiced desires
Mingling their sister eddies of delight
Then, widening to a pace of calm-lipped muse
Down many-glimmered estuaries of dream
Went whispering into lakes of liquid peace
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On a brink held of senseless ecstasy
And guarding an eternal poise of thought
Sat sculptured souls dreaming by rivers of sound
In changeless attitudes of marble bliss
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… cities cut like gems of conscious stone
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Songs thrilled of birds upon unfading boughs
The colours of whose plumage had been cought
From the rainbow of imagination’s wings
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Faery flower-masses looked with laughing eyes
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The crowding petal-glow of marvel’s tints
… float across the curtained lids of dream
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… a wordless tongue of things
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… rhythmic rocks in ever-foaming seas
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… the first lexicon of an infinite mind
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Form was a tenuous raiment of the soul
Colour was a visible tone of ecstasy
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Sunlight the soul’s vision and moonlight its dream
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Night the dim mask had grown a wonderful face
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As if the choric calyx of a flower
Aerial, visible on music’s waves
A lotus-petalled ecstasy
Took shape out of the tremulous heart of things
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There was no more the dark pretence of hate
The cruel ictus on Love’s altered face …
Passionate to take but knowing not how to give
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Objects are his letters, forces are his words
Events are the crowded history of his life
And sea and land are the pages of his tale
Matter is his means and his spiritual sign
He hangs the thought upon a lash’s lift
In the current of the blood makes flow the soul
His is the dumb will of atom and of clod …
… its body is the body of the Lord
And in its heart stands Virat, King of kings
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All from his stillness came as grows a tree
He is our seed and core, our head and base
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He sleeps in the atom and the burning star
He sleeps in man and god and beast and stone
Because he is there the Inconscient does its work
Because he is there the world forgets to die
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The nectar spilled by love with trembling hands
The joy the cup of Nature cannot hold
Had crowded to the beauty of his face
Were waiting in the honey of his laugh
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The secret whisper of the flower and star
Revealed its meaning in his fathomless look
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… divulged
The light of the ages in the mirth of the hours
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Then like an anthem from the heart’s lucent cave
A voice soared up whose magic sound could turn
The poignant weeping of the earth to sobs
Of rapture and her cry to spirit song
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In thee the secret sight man’s blindness missed
Has opened its view past Time, my chariot course
And death, my tunnel which I drive through life
To reach my unseen distances of bliss
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I am the inviolable Ecstasy
They who have looked on me shall grieve no more
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Heaven in its rapture dreams of perfect earth
Earth in its sorrow dreams of perfect heaven
The two longing to join yet walk apart
Idly divided by their vain conceits
They are kept from their oneness by enchanted fears
Sundered mysteriously by miles of thought
They gaze across the silent gulfs of sleep
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Arise, vindicate thy spirit’s conquered right
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A joy exceeding earth’s and heaven’s poured down
The bliss of an unknown eternity
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… the first beam of the morning sun
Rippled along two wakened lotus-pools
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Tempting his heart with the far lure of heaven
Testing his strength with the close touch of hell
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Earth is the chosen place of mightiest souls
Earth is the heroic spirit’s battlefield
The forge where the Arch-mason shapes his works
Thy servitudes on earth are greater, king
Than all the glorious liberties of heaven
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I too have wandered in star-jewelled groves
Paced sun-gold pastures and moon-silver swards
And heard the harping laughter of their streams
And lingered under branches dropping myrrh
I too have revelled in the fields of light
Touched by the ethereal raiment of the winds
Thy wonder-rounds of music I have trod
Lived in the rhyme of bright unlabouring thoughts
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Take not the warrior with his blow unstruck
Are there not still a million fights to wage …
Break not the lyre before the song is found
Are there not still unnumbered chants to weave
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Let not the inconscient gulf swallow man’s race
That through earth’s ignorance struggles towards the Light
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Heaven’s call is rare, rarer the heart that heeds
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… earth’s needs nail to earth the human mass
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In the stark economy of cosmic life
Each creature to its appointed task and place
Is bound by his nature’s form, his spirit’s force
If this were easily disturbed, it would break
The settled balance of created things
The perpetual order of the universe
Would tremble, and a gap yawn in woven Fate
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If men were not and all were brilliant gods
The mediating stair would then be lost
By which the spirit awake in Matter winds
Acepting the circuits of the Middle Way
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As if a fond ignorant mother kept her child
Tied to her apron strings of Nescience
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The Inconscient could not read without man’s mind
The mystery of the world its sleep has made
Man is its key to unlock a conscious door
But still it holds him dangled in its grasp
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A high and dazzling limit shines above
A black and blinding border rules below
His mind is closed between two firmaments
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To raise the world to God in deathless Light
To bring God down to the world on earth we came
To change the earthly life to life divine
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What force condemned to birth and death and tears
These conscious creatures crawling on the globe
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To be is not a senseless paradox
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If man lives bound by his humanity
If he is tied for ever to his pain
Let a greater being then arise from man
The superhuman with the Eternal mate
And the Immortal shine through earthly forms
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Spirit foresess, Matter unfolds its thought
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Choired in calm seas she heard the eternal Thought
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A thousand doors of oneness was her heart
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The moments fell into eternity
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Limitless like ocean round a lonely isle
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Amorous of oneness without thought or sign
To cast down wall and fence, to strip heaven bare
See with the large eye of infinity
Unweave the stars and into silence pass
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I open the wide eye of solitude
To uncover the voiceless rapture of my bliss
Where in a pure and exquisite hush it lies
Motionless in its slumber of ecstasy
Resting from the sweet madness of the dance
Out of whose beat the throb of hearts was borne
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All shall be written out in destiny’s book
By my trustee of thought and plan and act
The executor of my will, eternal Time
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I lay my hands upon thy soul of flame
I lay my hands upon thy heart of love
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When all thy work in human time is done
The mind of earth shall be a home of light
The life of earth a tree growing towards heaven
The body of earth a tabernacle of God
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Thou shalt be hunted through the world by love
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Thou shalt not shrink from any brother soul
Thou shalt be attracted helplessly to all
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I will pour delight from thee as from a jar
I will whirl thee as my chariot through the ways
I will use thee as my sword and as my lyre
I will play on thee my minstrelsies of thought
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Who hunts and seizes me, my captive grows
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For ever love, O beautiful slave of God!
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O Mind, grow full of the eternal peace
O Word, cry out the immortal litany
Built is the golden tower, the flame-child born
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… my boundlessness cut by the curve of Space
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Yet shall there glow on mind like a horned moon
The spirit’s crescent splendour in pale skies
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Mind the thought-driven chariot of the soul
Carrying the luminous wanderer in the night
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There are greater destinies mind cannot surmise
Fixed on the summit of the evolving Path
The Traveller now treads in Ignorance
Unaware of his next step, not knowing his goal
Mind is not all his tireless climb can reach
There is a fire on the apex of the worlds
There is a house of the Eternal’s Light
There is an infinite truth, an absolute power
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The Mighty Mother shall take birth in Time
And God be born into the human clay
In forms made ready by your human lives
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There is a consciousness mind cannot touch
Its speech cannot utter nor its thought reveal
It has no home on earth, no centre in man
Yet is the source of all things thought and done
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Some shall be made the glory’s receptacles
And vehicles of the Eternal’s luminous power
These are the high forerunners, the heads of Time
The great deliverers of earth-bound mind
The high transfigurers of human clay
The first-born of a new supernal race
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The superman shall wake in mortal man
And manifest the hidden demi-god …
Revealing the secret deity in the cave
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Even the body shall remember God
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The end of Death, the death of Ignorance
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It shall make earth’s nescient ground Truth’s colony
Make even the Ignorance a transparent robe
Through which shall shine the brilliant limbs of Truth
And Truth shall be a sun on Nature’s head
And Truth shall be the guide of Nature’s steps
And Truth shall gaze out of her nether deeps
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The Spirit shall look out through Matter’s gaze
And Matter shall reveal the Spirit’s face
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The Truth shall be the leader of their lives
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Crowned as with peacock plumes of gorgeous hue
Framing a sapphire, whose heart-disturbing smile
Insatiably attracted to delight
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Like a flower hidden in the heart of spring
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A diamond light of the Eternal’s peace
A crimson seed of God’s felicity
A glance from the gaze fell of undying Love
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A key turned in a mystic lock of Time
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