Canto 54Adwaita
Book 16. Part Seven - Pondicherry Circa 1927 – 1947
Sonnets
The Inconscient Foundation
My soul regards its veiled subconscient base;
All the dead obstinate symbols of the past,
5The hereditary moulds, the stamps of race
Are upheld to sight, the old imprints effaced.
In a downpour of supernal light it reads
The black Inconscient’s enigmatic script —
Recorded in a hundred shadowy screeds
10An inert world’s obscure enormous drift;
All flames, is torn and burned and cast away.
Here slept the tables of the Ignorance,
There the dumb dragon edicts of her sway,
The scriptures of Necessity and Chance.
15Pure is the huge foundation now and nude,
A boundless mirror of God’s infinitude.
Adwaita
I walked on the high-wayed Seat of Solomon
Where Shankaracharya’s tiny temple stands
20Facing Infinity from Time’s edge, alone
On the bare ridge ending earth’s vain romance.
Around me was a formless solitude:
All had become one strange Unnameable,
An unborn sole Reality world-nude,
25Topless and fathomless, for ever still.
A Silence that was Being’s only word,
The unknown beginning and the voiceless end
Abolishing all things moment-seen or heard,
On an incommunicable summit reigned,
30A lonely Calm and void unchanging Peace
On the dumb crest of Nature’s mysteries.