I who had sought afar from earth
        The faery land to greet,
Now find content within its girth,
        And wonder nigh my feet.

To-day a nearer love I choose
        And seek no distant sphere,
For aureoled by faery dews
        The dear brown breasts appear.

With rainbow radiance come and go
        The airy breaths of day,
And eve is all a pearly glow
        With moonlit winds a-play.

The lips of twilight burn my brow,
        The arms of night caress: 
Glimmer her white eyes drooping now
        With grave old tenderness.

I close mine eyes from dream to be
        The diamond-rayed again,
As in the ancient hours ere we
        Forgot ourselves to men.

And all I thought of heaven before
        I find in earth below,
A sunlight in the hidden core
        To dim the noon-day glow.

And with the Earth my heart is glad,
        I move as one of old,
With mists of silver I am clad
        And bright with burning gold.

—­February 1896

Duality

“From me spring good and evil.” 
Who gave thee such a ruby flaming heart,
And such a pure cold spirit?  Side by side
I know these must eternally abide
In intimate war, and each to each impart
Life from their pain, with every joy a dart
To wound with grief or death the self-allied. 
Red life within the spirit crucified,
The eyes eternal pity thee, thou art
Fated with deathless powers at war to be,
Not less the martyr of the world than he
Whose thorn-crowned brow usurps the due of tears
We would pay to thee, ever ruddy life,
Whose passionate peace is still to be at strife,
O’erthrown but in the unconflicting spheres.

—­March 15, 1896 (This is unsigned, but in AE’s “Collected Poems”)

The Element Language

In a chapter in the Secret Doctrine dealing with the origin of language, H.P.  Blavatsky makes some statements which are quoted here and which should be borne well in mind in considering what follows.  “The Second Race had a ‘Sound Language,’ to wit, chant-like sounds composed of vowels alone.”  From this developed “monosyllabic speech which was the vowel parent, so to speak, of the monosyllabic languages mixed with hard consonants still in use among the yellow races which are known to the anthropologist.  The linguistic characteristics developed into the agglutinative languages....  The inflectional speech, the root of the Sanskrit, was the first language (now the mystery tongue of the Initiates) of the Fifth Race.”