Canto 147The Inconscient

Book 16. Part Seven - Pondicherry Circa 1927 – 1947

Artist of cosmos wrapped in thy occult shadow,

Godhead sole awake in the dreams of Matter,

Thee and thy truth men searching for ever vainly,

Find and are baffled.

5Always thou workst and seemst not to know thy workings,

Yet thy touch, Geometer, wide-wayed Builder,

Vastest things can shape and minutest, potent,

Patient, unerring.

All is thou or is thine but who art thou, Dreamer,

10Paradox ensouling the soulless spaces,

Self-creator weaving thy magic figures,

Mechanist Mystic?

Who thou art none knoweth, ungrasped thy nature,

Ever we see thee veiled by thy titan forces,

15Only some dim greatness we feel, a mute-eyed

Inscrutable Presence.

Ageless, formless, nameless and uncreated,

Lost in night where never was seed of living,

Ancient, mighty, lone is thy wordless spirit,

20Blind and immortal.

All at first was only thy giant shadow;

Time then was not, space was not yet imagined,

Thoughtless, soundless lay the inconscient ocean

Emptily brooding.

25What compelled thee, O Void, to create and labour,

Or who rose up in thee, a living Maker?

How could thought begin in thy vacant silence

Measureless, dateless?

All these stars that spin in the fields of Nothing,

30Tiny Time-fires lit in thy untoned darkness

Faintly hailing through the enormous distance

Aimless and lifeless, —

Why were they made, for what are their wheels and

turnings,

35Splendid desert-hearted disastrous burnings,

Mindless hopeless fierce inarticulate yearnings

Fruitless for ever?

All these waves of forces that running circling

Leap by discontinuous starts through Nowhere,

40Strangely born in quantums of causeless Matter

Wombed out of Nihil —

Each is a lawless entity chance-directed,

Yet a law prevails in their sum of movement;

Is thy soul released in these particles formwards,

45Thy thought that governs?