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Home  »  The Oxford Book of English Mystical Verse  »  218. The God Within

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

Edmond Gore Alexander Holmes (1850–1936)

218. The God Within

LIFE of my life! soul of my inmost soul!

Pure central point of everlasting light!

Creative splendour! Fountain-head and goal

Of all the rays that make the darkness bright—

And pierce the gloom of nothing more and more

And win new realms from the abyss of night!

O God, I veil my eyes and kneel before

Thy shrine of love and tremble and adore.

The unfathomable past is but the dawn

Of thee triumphant rising from the tomb;

And could we deem thy lamp of light withdrawn,

Back in an instant into primal gloom

All things that are, all things that time has wrought,

All that shall ever yet unseal the womb

Of elemental Chaos, swift as thought

Would melt away and leave a world of nought.

We gaze in wonder on the starry face

Of midnight skies, and worship and aspire,

Yet all the kingdoms of abysmal space

Are less than thy one point of inmost fire:

We dare not think of time’s unending way,

Yet present, past, and future would expire,

And all eternity would pass away

In thy one moment of intensest day.

Of old our fathers heard thee when the roll

Of midnight thunder crashed across the sky:

I hear thee in the silence of the soul—

Its very stillness is the majesty

Of thy mysterious voice, that moves me more

Than wrath of tempest as it rushes by,

Or booming thunder, or the surging roar

Of seas that storm a never-trodden shore.

And they beheld thee when the lightning shone,

And tore the leaden slumber of the storm

With vivid flame that was and then was gone,

Whose blaze made blind, whose very breath was warm:—

But I, if I would see thee, pray for grace

To veil my eyes to every outward form,

And in the darkness for a moment’s space

I see the splendour of thy cloudless face.

In thought I climb to Being’s utmost brink

And pass beyond the last imagined star,

And tremble and grow dizzy while I think—

But thou art yet more infinitely far,

O God, from me who breathe the air of sin,

And I am doomed to traverse worlds that are

More fathomless to fancy ere I win

The central altar of the soul within.

How shall I worship thee? With speechless awe

Of guilt that shrinks when innocence is near

And veils its face: with faith, that ever saw

Most when its eyes were clouded with a tear:

With hope, the breath of spirits that aspire:

Lastly, with love—the grave of every fear,

The fount of faith, the triumph of desire,

The burning brightness of thine own white fire.…

O God that dwellest in transcendent light

Beyond our dreams, who grope in darkness here,

Beyond imagination’s utmost flight,—

I bless thee most that sometimes when a tear

Of tender yearning rises unrepressed,

Lo! for an instant thou art strangely near—

Nearer to my own heart than I who rest

In speechless adoration on thy breast.