Canto 91In gleam Konarak

Book 16. Part Seven - Pondicherry Circa 1927 – 1947

Pondicherry, c. 1927–1947

What compelled thee, O Void, to create and labour,

Or who rose up in thee, a living Maker?

How could thought begin in thy vacant silence

5Measureless, dateless?

All these stars that spin in the fields of Nothing,

Tiny Time-fires lit in thy untoned darkness

Faintly hailing through the enormous distance

Aimless and lifeless, —

10Why were they made, for what are their wheels and

turnings,

Splendid desert-hearted disastrous burnings,

Mindless hopeless fierce inarticulate yearnings

Fruitless for ever?

15All these waves of forces that running circling

Leap by discontinuous starts through Nowhere,

Strangely born in quantums of causeless Matter

Wombed out of Nihil —

Each is a lawless entity chance-directed,

20Yet a law prevails in their sum of movement;

Is thy soul released in these particles formwards,

Thy thought that governs?

In gleam Konarak

In gleam Konarak — Konarak of the Gods

25A woman sits, her body a glimmering ray.

At her feet the moon trails its silvery dreams,

On her head is the sun and the purple day.

Always she sits there turning a wheel

Whose summit is lost in lights, its base in the abyss