Canto 5Hell and Heaven
Book 15. Part Six - Baroda and Pondicherry Circa 1902 – 1936
Baroda and Pondicherry, c. 1902–1936
Like flames to the kingdoms of Truth and Bliss:
Down a gold-red stairway wend
The radiant children of Paradise
5Clarioning darkness’ end.
A little more and the new life’s doors
Shall be carved in silver light
With its aureate roof and mosaic floors
In a great world bare and bright.
10I shall leave my dreams in their argent air,
For in a raiment of gold and blue
There shall move on the earth embodied and fair
The living truth of you.
Hell and Heaven
15In the silence of the night-time,
In the grey and formless eve,
When the thought is plagued with loveless
Memories that it cannot leave,
When the dawn makes sudden beauty
20Of a peevish clouded sky,
And the rain is sobbing slowly
And the wind makes weird reply,
Always comes her face before me
And her voice is in my ear,
25Beautiful and sad and cruel
With the azure eyes austere.
Cloudy figure once so luminous
With the light and life within
When the soul came rippling outwards
30And the red lips laughed at sin!
Poems Past and Present
Com’st thou with that marble visage
From what world instinct with pain
Where we pay the price of passion
35By a law our hearts disdain?
Cast it from thee, O thou goddess!
Earning with a smile release
From these sad imaginations,
Rise into celestial peace.
40Travel from the loveless places
That our mortal fears create,
Where thy natural heavens claim thee
And the Gods, thy brothers, wait.
Then descend to me grown radiant,
45Lighting up terrestrial ground
With the feet that brighten heaven
When the mighty dance goes round
And the high Gods beating measure
Tread the maze that keeps the stars
50Circling in their luminous orbits
Through the eternal thoroughfares.
All below is but confusion
Of desires that strive and cry,
Some forbidden, some achieving
55Anguish after ecstasy.
But above our radiant station
Is from which by doubt we fell,
Reaching only after Heaven
And achieving only Hell.