Canto 26Contrasts
Book 16. Part Seven - Pondicherry Circa 1927 – 1947
Man the Thinking Animal
A trifling unit in a boundless plan
Amidst the enormous insignificance
Of the unpeopled cosmos’ fire-whirl dance,
5Earth, as by accident, engendered man,
A creature of his own grey ignorance,
A mind half shadow and half gleam, a breath
That wrestles, captive in a world of death,
To live some lame brief years. Yet his advance,
10Attempt of a divinity within,
A consciousness in the inconscient Night,
To realise its own supernal Light,
Confronts the ruthless forces of the Unseen.
Aspiring to godhead from insensible clay
15He travels slow-footed towards the eternal day.
Contrasts
What opposites are here! A trivial life
Specks the huge dream of Death called Matter; intense
In its struggle of weakness towards omnipotence,
20A thinking mind starts from the unthinking strife
In the order of the electric elements.
Immortal life breathed in that monstrous death,
A mystery of Knowledge wore as sheath
Matter’s mute nescience. Its enveloped sense
25Or dumb somnambulist will obscurely reigns
Driving the atoms in their cosmic course
Whose huge unhearing movement serves perforce
The works of a strange blind omniscience.
The world’s deep contrasts are but figures spun
30Draping the unanimity of the One.