186. The Secret of the Universe

AN ODE
(By a Western Spinning Dervish)

I SPIN, I spin, around, around,

And close my eyes,

And let the bile arise

From the sacred region of the soul’s Profound;

Then gaze upon the world; how strange! how new!

The earth and heaven are one,

The horizon-line is gone,

The sky how green! the land how fair and blue!

Perplexing items fade from my large view,

And thought which vexed me with its false and true

Is swallowed up in Intuition; this,

This is the sole true mode

Of reaching God,

And gaining the universal synthesis

Which makes All—One; while fools with peering eyes

Dissect, divide, and vainly analyse.

So round, and round, and round again!

How the whole globe swells within my brain,

The stars inside my lids appear,

The murmur of the spheres I hear

Throbbing and beating in each ear;

Right in my navel I can feel

The centre of the world’s great wheel.

Ah peace divine, bliss dear and deep,

No stay, no stop,

Like any top

Whirling with swiftest speed, I sleep.

O ye devout ones round me coming,

Listen! I think that I am humming;

No utterance of the servile mind

With poor chop-logic rules agreeing

Here shall ye find,

But inarticulate burr of man’s unsundered being.

Ah, could we but devise some plan,

Some patent jack by which a man

Might hold himself ever in harmony

With the great whole, and spin perpetually,

As all things spin

Without, within,

As Time spins off into Eternity,

And Space into the inane Immensity,

And the Finite into God’s Infinity,

Spin, spin, spin, spin.