Canto 85Pururavus
Book 16. Part Seven - Pondicherry Circa 1927 – 1947
Thou art myself
Thou art myself born from myself, O child.
O thou who speakst art thou my greater self?
And knowst my destiny and why I came
5Into the narrow limits of this form?
Vain, they have said
Vain, they have said, is the anguish of man and his labour
diurnal,
Vainly his caravans cross through the desert of Time to the
10Eternal.
Thick and persistent the night confronts all his luminous
longings;
Dire death’s sickle mows like a harvest his hosts and his
throngings.
15Even if all life has failed, must it therefore be failure for ever?
Are not the ages before us still for a grander endeavour?
Have we not Beauty around in a dangerous world but
enthralling,
Courage inciting our steps and Thought to infinity calling?
20Pururavus
Pururavus from converse held with Gods
On unseen crests of Nature high, occult,
Traversed the tumult of the flame-tossed seas
That cast their fire between the spirit’s poles.
25Alone like a bright star twixt earth and heaven,
He reached the crossways of eternity.
A Soul to our apparent life reborn
Pondicherry, c. 1927–1947
Out of the vastness of the original Self,
30Journeying in dim momentous solitude
Led by the flickering of uncertain suns,
He essayed the fringe of Night’s tremendous home.
Before him lay the subtle realm of light
Our organed sense conceals, the light that gleams
35Across the sealless musings of the seer,
A slumberless wide eye upon our scene.
But destined to earth’s darkly pregnant dream
He tarried not on these mysterious shores,
But still descending the divine abyss
40To new adventure in the eternal Night
Transgressed the wonder-line of things beyond
Abruptly into mortal space and time.
A universe appeared of difficult birth,
The labour of eclipsed and ignorant gods,
45An immortality of chance and change.
Bridging the gulf between antagonist planes
He saw the circles of Heaven’s rash advance.
Sun upon sun, God’s sentinels in the void,
Life’s radiant and immeasurable camp
50Blazed in the order of the aeonic Will.
But with the menace of the dragon depths
The old blind vigilant Nescience stretched afar
Hungering in serpent dumb infinitude,
And her dark shade besieged the luminaries.
55Silence and Death opposed the invading Fire.
And even before he broke into our pale
There came on him a breath from tarnished worlds.
Averse from an obscure material touch
The images of the supernal field
60That he had left sank from the front of thought
And held their session in the heart’s dumb cave;
The glory and grace, the light, the sacred life
Receded as behind a burning door:
Subliminal beneath the lid of mind
65The grandeur and the passion and the calm.