Half of my inspiration I declare

Attributable to my easy-chair

On which the livelong day I love to sit

With eyelids closed, behind whose darkness, lit

With changing lights, dappled with changing shades,

A thousand pictures rise. . . . Life slowly fades

Into the faery twilight of the mind

Rememoried of beauty left behind

In childhood's realms, and all prophetic grown

Of future miracles already sown

In the Unconscious, Childhood lives again

In the awakened slumber of the brain,

The treasure-house of myriad memories, . . .

I see once more wild woodlands full of trees

And roaming butterflies behind the old

Romantic house, where noonday lavished gold

Upon the bleak bare rocks, and mornings came

Like elfin festivals of coloured flame

And sunset like red music came and went

Struck on some angel's magic instrument.

I still remember how we chased and caught

Warm butterflies, bright as a poet's thought,

Winged into lambent liberated flight

And shot courageously into the light;

And how we climbed the branches where we sat

And watched the grey and ruddy squirrels at

Their mid-day meal of fruit which seemed to wait

As though the rich fulfillment of their fate

Depended on their hunger; and I yet

Remember every grassblade dripping wet

At dawn with midnight dews which slipped and fell

Like slow dissolving diamonds in the dell

Marking the moments . . . remember well

The creaking bamboos margining the glade

Tall and unquiet, and the sounds they made

As though they mourned incalculable loss . . .

And then we watched the clouds like camels cross

Unending azure desert miles of heaven

Between the glowing noon and glimmering even.

They all come back to me: the bees, the doves,

The sky, the trees, the stones, my childhood's loves

To whom I have been loyal to this day . . .

All suddenly out of the far-away

Forgotten past they leap in recognition

Of me, their lover, when the hour of vision

Bridges eternity with time, the vast

Unhappened future with the happened past.

What else do I remember? The queer sense

Of indefinable Omnipotence

Hidden within all things I heard and saw,

Some vaguely-felt, imperishable law

In silent operation everywhere;

I trembled at the blueness of the air,

The whiteness in the lily and the sweet

Coming of rain which, falling in a sheet

Of Woven pearl, sent through my heart intense

And nervous tingles, coursing through each sense

Like scented splendour. Every bird which sang

Went through my being like a sudden pang

Of parting, but from whom, I could not tell!

Each thing of beauty was an urgent bell

Calling my heart to prayer, while childhood was

As beautiful and dreamy as the pause

Of light upon a hill just at the break

Of morning when the first bird is awake.

I yet remember how I used to thrill

When in the rainy time the light lay chill

Sombre and magical, quiet and cool

Upon white lotuses along a pool . . .

When overhead the heavy clouds appeared

Like heaven's drooping eyelids many-teared.

How the leaves trembled in the trembling wind

Like to sweet poems in a poet's mind,

Poems of life and death and joy and pain

In God's cool breath which blows before the rain

Of gathered inspiration . . . In a while

Each rainfed runnel was as good as Nile

Or Ganges on whose waves we set afloat

One carefully constructed paper boat

And then another boat and then another

Laden with news for our exiled brother

Living in Germany, a place that stood

According to us, in the neighbourhood,

Perhaps, a furlong from our gardened wood.

But then, invariably O evil luck;

Our boats in a few moments would be struck

Against rough pebbles in the way or stuck

In some obstructing branch lying across

The swollen runnel . . . O, our childhood's loss

Of paper boats . . . perchance, intenser than

The loss of real ones to grown-up man.

And when the sun came out again, the trees

Were loud with dark innumerable bees,

Purple reminders of the joy that lives

In never-failing Nature and forgives

The thrice unnatural wretchedness of man

Who hurts her harmony and pulls the plan

Of heavenwardness to pieces . . . man, the traitor

Of the original trust of the Creator

To whom creation with its fire and cloud

Bird, beast and man, bending in silence, vowed

Full, absolute obedience to His word

Ere they, out of travailing chaos, stirred

Into a perfect rhythm of intense

Self-mastery, exalted reticence.

All things and beings, save man, fulfill the vow:

The greeny yellow parrot on the bough,

The scarlet berry and each quivering leaf

Which, had not mortal coloured them with grief,

Had been unsullied rapture . . . In his pride

Of loathsome ignorance on every side

Man, hurling a blind challenge, wounds and draws

The blood of beauty, breaks the Law of laws

At every turn as easily as a flower . . .

Believing that he hath defied the power

Vanquishing It, because It humbly bows

In patience for a period and allows

His hands to trifle with the pledge and tamper

With Its virginity without a hamper.

Until at last in high retaliation

It rises in the wrath of all creation

Against his huge corruption and demands

Full compensation at his errant hands

For all the hideous ruin that they wrought . . .

Think you the offended Power remembers not

The offender? . . . Fool! the broken Law breaks him

Who breaks It . . . since It is both quiet and grim

And jealous of the wonder It has set

And never never never can forget.

I loved such placid stones as dwell and dream

In the clear silent flowing of the stream,

Stones that are dead to us whose mortal sight

Behold not in their greyness brimming light

Issuing from the womb of heaven which knows

No difference between a stone and rose,

Sweet equal nurslings in the Master's vision

At the still ancient hour when the division

Of fire and breath and colour was begun . . .

In the immortal scales the moon and sun

Weigh equally with worm and dust and herb,

And when man's inequalities disturb

The harmony, within a little while

The Maker with His unperturbed smile

Comes down to earth in His resistless form

Of retribution, blacker than a storm,

And under lightning's wrath and thunder's stress

Resuscitates the broken loveliness

Holding the scales again, and will not rest

Until all things responding to their test

Are equal to each other in the far

Unalterable balance where things are

Evasive essence, undecreed of earth,

Unmanacled of life and death and birth,

Unbondaged of the cyclic wheel which whirled

Incessantly sustains the visible world.

But on the surface of existence dwell

Combating contraries which make the hell

Of inequalities around our lives

Wherein harsh exploitation rules and strives

Relentlessly reducing Nature’s house

To a huge sepulchre; Death like a mouse

Lurks in Life's granaries and nibbles at

The gathered grain, and all the beauty that

Trembles outside of us is as a sleep

In which the canker never fails to keep

Its constant tryst, casting its ugly shade

On the world's blossom, making it afraid.

Escaped from Singlehood, from shape to shape,

Back to the Singlehood we must escape

Through death and devastation and disease

Inevitable threat of contraries

Continued through the ages . . . All that's born

By the sure shadow which it sheds is torn

And twisted into agony and dread

And at the fountains of its own blood fed

Under the fiery crimson-coloured pall

Of time's enormous shadow covering all.

The lizard pounces on the moth at night,

The kite upon the chicken in the light

Of morning red upon the cottage-yard;

Under the mobled midnight many-starred

The tiger leaps upon the tethered cow,

The serpent on the frog, and on the bough

The blue-black crow feasts on the weak white worm . . .

Since lo, life holds within itself the germ

Of secret death in which her safety lies . . .

Beauty is beauty all because she dies!

Through the dim portals of her myriad deaths,

Between the ceasing of her myriad breaths,

Her shadow into Time's bare garden thrown

Touches at length the feet of the Unknown.