Canto 1The Bird of Fire
Book 16. Part Seven - Pondicherry Circa 1927 – 1947
Gold-white wings a throb in the vastness, the bird of flame went
glimmering over a sunfire curve to the haze of the west,
Skimming, a messenger sail, the sapphire-summer waste of a
soundless wayless burning sea.
5Now in the eve of the waning world the colour and splendour
returning drift through a blue-flicker air back to my breast,
Flame and shimmer staining the rapture-white foam-vest of the
waters of Eternity.
Gold-white wings of the miraculous bird of fire, late and slow have
10you come from the Timeless. Angel, here unto me
Bringst thou for travailing earth a spirit silent and free or His
crimson passion of love divine, —
White-ray-jar of the spuming rose-red wine drawn from the vats
brimming with light-blaze, the vats of ecstasy,
15Pressed by the sudden and violent feet of the Dancer in Time
from his sun-grape fruit of a deathless vine?
White-rose-altar the eternal Silence built, make now my nature
wide, an intimate guest of His solitude,
But golden above it the body of One in Her diamond sphere
20with Her halo of star-bloom and passion-ray!
Rich and red is thy breast, O bird, like blood of a soul climbing the
hard crag-teeth world, wounded and nude,
A ruby of flame-petalled love in the silver-gold altar-vase of
moon-edged night and rising day.
25O Flame who art Time’s last boon of the sacrifice, offering-flower
held by the finite’s gods to the Infinite,
O marvel bird with the burning wings of light and the unbarred
lids that look beyond all space,
One strange leap of thy mystic stress breaking the barriers of mind
30and life, arrives at its luminous term thy flight;
Invading the secret clasp of the Silence and crimson Fire thou
frontest eyes in a timeless Face.