Lyrical Poems

The life of a tree, The life in a clod, To the Life of all life That men call God.

My heart climbs up towards thee, O unimaginable Wonder and Resplendence, In a striving for the caress of thy Light and for the embrace of thy Presence.

All He loves, all He moves, all are His, all are He

Gold in the mind and the life-flame’s red Make of the heavens a splendour, the earth a blaze, But the white and rose of the heart are dead. Flame-wind, pass! I will wait for Love in the silent ways.

Man’s numberless misdeeds and rare good deeds take place within my single self. I am the beast he slays, the bird he feeds and saves. The thoughts of unknown minds exalt me with their thrill, I carry the sorrow of millions in my lonely breast.

The Light was still around me When I came back to earth Bringing the Immortal’s knowledge Into man’s cave of birth. 

An animal creature wonderfully human, A charm and miracle of fur-footed Brahman, Whether she is spirit, woman or a cat, Is now the problem I am wondering at.

Thus driven he must stride on conquering all, Threatening and clamouring, brutal, invincible, Until he meets upon his storm-swept road A greater devil — or thunderstroke of God.

We are the javelins of Destiny, we are the children of Wotan, We are the human Titans, the supermen dreamed by the sage. A cross of the beast and demoniac with the godhead of power and will, We were born in humanity’s sunset, to the Night is our pilgrimage.

Someone broods there nameless and bodiless, Conscious and lonely, deathless and infinite, And, sole in a still eternal rapture, Gathers all things to his heart for ever.

Who was it that came to me in a boat made of dream-fire, With his flame brow and his sun-gold body?

Calm yet shall release thee; an immense peace and a large streaming of white silence, Broad plains shall be thine, greenness surround thee, and wharved cities and life’s labour

Now the waste-land, now the silence; A blank dark wall, and behind it heaven.

"Feel thyself God-born, know thyself deathless. Timeless return to thy immortal existence."

Something watches behind, Spirit or Self or Soul, Viewing Space and its toil, waiting the end of Time.

All my cells thrill swept by a surge of splendour, Soul and body stir with a mighty rapture, Light and still more light like an ocean billows Over me, round me.

Not with one moment of sharp close or the slow fall of a dim curtain the play ceases: Yet is there Time to be crossed, lives to be lived out, the unplayed acts of the soul’s drama.

To the lives sundered can Time bring rejoining, Love that was slain be reborn with the body? In the mind null, from the heart’s chords rejected, Lost to the sense, but the spirit remembers!