Canto 11Rebirth
Book 3. Part Three - Baroda and Bengal Circa 1900 – 1909
Poems from Ahana and Other Poems
These clamours still;
For I would hear the eternal voice and know
The eternal Will.
5This brilliant show
Cumbering the threshold of eternity
Dispel, — bestow
The undimmed eye,
The heart grown young and clear. Rebuke in me
10These hopes that cry
So deafeningly,
Remove my sullied centuries, restore
My purity.
O hidden door
15Of Knowledge, open! Strength, fulfil thyself!
Love, outpour!
Rebirth
Not soon is God’s delight in us completed,
Nor with one life we end;
20Termlessly in us are our spirits seated,
A termless joy intend.
Our souls and heaven are of an equal stature
And have a dateless birth;
The unending seed, the infinite mould of Nature,
25They were not made on earth,
Nor to the earth do they bequeath their ashes,
But in themselves they last.
An endless future brims beneath thy lashes,
Child of an endless past.
30Baroda and Bengal, c. 1900–1909
Old memories come to us, old dreams invade us,
Lost people we have known,
Fictions and pictures; but their frames evade us, —
They stand out bare, alone.
35Yet all we dream and hope are memories treasured,
Are forecasts we misspell,
But of what life or scene he who has measured
The boundless heavens can tell.
Time is a strong convention; future and present
40Were living in the past;
They are one image that our wills complaisant
Into three schemes have cast.
Our past that we forget, is with us deathless,
Our births and later end
45Already accomplished. To a summit breathless
Sometimes our souls ascend,
Whence the mind comes back helped; for there emerges
The ocean vast of Time
Spread out before us with its infinite surges,
50Its symphonies sublime;
And even from this veil of mind the spirit
Looks out sometimes and sees
The bygone aeons that our lives inherit,
The unborn centuries:
55It sees wave-trampled realms expel the Ocean, —
From the vague depths uphurled
Where now Himˆaloy stands, the flood’s huge motion
Sees measuring half the world;