Canto 5In Horis Aeternum
Book 16. Part Seven - Pondicherry Circa 1927 – 1947
Six Poems
In Horis Aeternum
A far sail on the unchangeable monotone of a slow slumbering sea,
A world of power hushed into symbols of hue, silent unendingly;
5Over its head like a gold ball the sun tossed by the gods in their play
Follows its curve, — a blazing eye of Time watching the motionless
day.
Here or otherwhere, — poised on the unreachable abrupt,
snow-solitary ascent
10Earth aspiring lifts to the illimitable Light, then ceases broken and
spent,
Or on the glowing expanse, arid, fiery and austere, of the desert’s
hungry soul, —
A breath, a cry, a glimmer from Eternity’s face, in a fragment the
15mystic Whole.
Moment-mere, yet with all Eternity packed, lone, fixed, intense,
Out of the ring of these hours that dance and die caught by the spirit
in sense,
In the greatness of a man, in music’s outspread wings, in a touch, in
20a smile, in a sound,
Something that waits, something that wanders and settles not, a
Nothing that was all and is found.