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Home  »  The Oxford Book of English Mystical Verse  »  114. Knowledge

Nicholson & Lee, eds. The Oxford Book of English Mystical Verse. 1917.

Philip James Bailey (1816–1902)

114. Knowledge

THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD is the wisdom of man—

This is the end of Being, wisdom; this

Of wisdom, action; and of action, rest;

And of rest, bliss; that by experience sage

Of good and ill, the diametric powers

Which thwart the world, the thrice-born might discern

That death divine alone can perfect both,

The mediate and initiate; that between

The Deity and nothing, nothing is.

The Atlantean axis of the world

And all the undescribed circumference,

Where earth’s thick breath thins off to blankest space

Uniting with inanity, this truth

Confess, the sun-sire and the death-world too,

And undeflected spirit pure from Heaven,

That He who makes, destroying, saves the whole.

The Former and Re-Former of the world

In wisdom’s holy spirit all renew.

To know this, is to read the runes of old,

Wrought in the time-outlasting rock; to see

Unblinded in the heart of light; to feel

Keen through the soul, the same essential strain,

Which vivifies the clear and fire-eyed stars,

Still harping their serene and silvery spell

In the perpetual presence of the skies,

And of the world-cored calm, where silence sits

In secret light all hidden; this to know—

Brings down the fiery unction from on high,

The spiritual chrism of the sun,

Which hallows and ordains the regnant soul—

Transmutes the splendid fluid of the frame

Into a fountain of divine delight,

And renovative nature;—shows us earth,

One with the great galactic line of life

Which parts the hemispheral palm of Heaven;

This with all spheres of Being makes concord

As at the first creation, in that peace

Premotional, pre-elemental, prime,

Which is the hope of earth, the joy of Heaven,

The choice of the elect, the grace of life,

The blessing and the glory of our God.

And—as the vesper hymn of time precedes

The starry matins of Eternity,

And daybreak of existence in the Heavens,—

To know this, is to know we shall depart

Into the storm-surrounding calm on high,

The sacred cirque, the all-central infinite

Of that self-blessedness wherein abides

Our God, all-kind, all-loving, all-beloved;—

To feel life one great ritual, and its laws,

Writ in the vital rubric of the blood,

Flow in, obedience, and flow out, command,

In sealike circulation; and be here

Accepted as a gift by Him who gives

An empire as an alms, nor counts it aught,

So long as all His creatures joy in Him,

The great Rejoicer of the Universe,

Whom all the boundless spheres of Being bless.