Canto 87The Inconscient and the Traveller Fire
Book 16. Part Seven - Pondicherry Circa 1927 – 1947
Pondicherry, c. 1927–1947
All that drew back from his splendour fleeing as ashamed from
the light and the beauty and invincible sweetness
Now returns vaunting their darkness and littleness, this fret of
5life’s fever, its cruel and sad incompleteness.
The Death of a God [2]
Arise, tread out the fire,
Scatter the ashes of a god through the stars!
Forget to hope and aspire.
10He is dead and his greatness that cumbered the world has
vanished like a golden shadow from the ages.
The whip of glory, the splendid burden behind us are cast,
Earth is free from fire and stress, left to the joy of her
smallness, rid of his mighty spirit at last.
15All that is false and wry and little are freed to follow their
nature once more.
Close time’s brilliant pages!
Give back to man’s life the old tables, its dull ease, its bowed
greyness restore.
20The Inconscient and the Traveller Fire
THE INCONSCIENT
Flame that invadest my empire of sorrow wordless and sombre,
Arrow of azure light golden-winged, barbed with delight,
Who was it aimed thee into this crucified Soul that for ever
25Passions and beats in the womb of a universe built for its tomb?
Lo, I am Death and I live in the boundless cavern of Nature,
Death who cannot die, Shadow of Eternity,
Vainly I burn in stars as they err through a Void without feature,
Scintillant forms of my Nought vast without life, without thought.
30Incomplete Poems
O all my worlds, you who glitter and wander, God has devised you
Burning nails in my heart, stones of my prisonhouse. God,
Architect tranquil relentless and mighty, built and incised you,
Clamped with you Time, his road towards Nothingness, Death’s deep
35abode.
I the Inconscient have passioned for life and its beat and its glory, —
Life that Death might die. O, was it life that He gave me?
Pulse of my darkness, reflex and nerve-beat! More hopeless I suffer,
Racked by the flame an obscure will in me kindled to save me.
40Life? or a sorrowful throb of my Matter teaching it anguish,
Teaching it hope and desire trod down by Time in the mire?
Life? this joy that weeps for its briefness, this foot-path for sorrow?
Life, this embrace of a death treasuring some transient breath?
Boons of a shortlived sweetness twisted and turned into torture, —
45Hope more blind than my Night, desire and its deadly delight,
Bliss that is small on the wings of a moment, vivid and fragile,
Love grown a kinsman to hate, will made an engine of Fate.
Torn with my anguish I cried out for knowledge, light on my midnight,
Light on my symbols of dream and a power in the Light to redeem.
50Yea, was it knowledge He gave me, this thought that is tangled in darkness,
Ignorance reading its own record in sense and in stone?
Ignorance tracing its plans and its dreams on a canvas of error!
Mind this half-light in me born, like the glow of a morrowless morn?
Autographs, hieroglyphs of the reflexes life has engendered,
55Spasms of matter caught into luminous figments of thought.
Nay, is not God but myself, Death’s euphemism fictioned immortal,
Nothing eternalised, bare, yet as if one who is None,
Death yet for ever alive, an Inconscient troubled with seemings,
Matter tormented with life, a Void with its forces at strife?