World Soul

Share yourself out into all times and places

In this most holy feast!

Tear yourself through the intervening spaces,

Fill up the All, released!

You glide now in unmeasurable distance,

In the gods’ blessed dream,

And shine anew in joyful coexistence

With that star-spangled stream.

Drive yourself then, like unresisted comets,

Away and yet away,

As through the labyrinth of suns and planets

You cut your headlong way.

You swiftly grasp for unformed earths to fashion,

And shape them, fresh and deep,

To fill them fecundly with life and passion,

In one great measured sweep.

Circling you trace out Time’s arcane florescence

Within the ether’s drift,

Prescribe to stone the splits that are its essence,

The strict forms of each rift.

Now all things with a heavenly volition

To find perfection strive:

The parched green seeks the water of fruition,

Each dust mote is alive.

*

Constrained within the loving paradoxes

Of night’s moist dews and steams,

Now Paradise, with tinted pomps and fluxes

Outstretched before you, gleams.

See how a host of opulent forms now rises

To find that light so fair,

And in the happy woods your eye surprises

The first love-smitten Pair.

And soon wild striving’s quenched in something holy,

Sweet glances mutual;

And life, most fair, with thanks receives most fully

The All back from the All.

1801