Canto 13Trance of Waiting
Book 16. Part Seven - Pondicherry Circa 1927 – 1947
Ocean Oneness
Silence is round me, wideness ineffable;
White birds on the ocean diving and wandering;
A soundless sea on a voiceless heaven,
5Azure on azure, is mutely gazing.
Identified with silence and boundlessness
My spirit widens clasping the universe
Till all that seemed becomes the Real,
One in a mighty and single vastness.
10Someone 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.
Trance of Waiting
15Lone on my summits of calm I have brooded with voices around me,
Murmurs of silence that steep mind in a luminous sleep,
Whispers from things beyond thought in the Secrecy flame-white for
ever,
Unscanned heights that reply seek from the inconscient deep.
20Distant below me the ocean of life with its passionate surges
Pales like a pool that is stirred by the wings of a shadowy bird.
Thought has flown back from its wheelings and stoopings, the
nerve-beat of living
Stills; my spirit at peace bathes in a mighty release.
25Wisdom supernal looks down on me, Knowledge mind cannot
measure;
Light that no vision can render garments the silence with
splendour.
Filled with a rapturous Presence the crowded spaces of being