Canto 65In a mounting as of sea-tides
Book 16. Part Seven - Pondicherry Circa 1927 – 1947
Pondicherry, c. 1927–1947
A body beloved
And a body slain.
Yet both were the bodies
5Of One in their pain.
In a mounting as of sea-tides
In a mounting as of sea-tides, in a rippling as of invisible waters,
On a cry in me my soul is uplifted, in a passion of my nature
My heart climbs up towards thee, O unimaginable Wonder and
10Resplendence,
In a striving for the caress of thy Light and for the embrace of thy Presence.
If once given were but a touch of thy feet on the thrilled bosom of my longing,
But a glance of thy eyes mingling with mine in the recesses and the silence,
Such a rapture would envelop me, such a fire of transfiguring effulgence,
15I could never again be as a man upon this earth, but one immortal.
For my mind would be dissolved in a sun-glory of God-vision and of
knowledge,
And my heart would be made suddenly more pure and illumined and
self-tranquil,
20And my nerves and my body would transmute into an ethereal divineness,
A fit vesture for the godhead thou buildst in me, for the immortal thy adorer.
O thou Life of my life and the unseen heart of its ecstasy and its beating,
O Face that was disclosed in the beginning of the worlds amid the
immenseness,
25Let thy Flame-wisdom leap down upon the coilings of our python
inconscience,
Let the Love-wine be poured out in thy chalice, let me be drunk with it for
ever.
I shall meet thee in the ocean of thy stillness, in the ether of thy splendour,
30Thy Force shall be in my veins like the ichor in the Unaging who are deathless;
My soul shall be as one breath with thy soul and thy infinity around thee,
And shall quiver with the vision of thy beauty and the marvel of thy
sweetness.