Nicholson & Lee, eds. The Oxford Book of English Mystical Verse. 1917.
Harold Monro (18791932)324. God
O
Of white desire, by its own ardour hurled,
Flashed out of infinite Desire, took form,
Strove, won, survived: and God became the world.
Within the bosom of that latest earth:
The spirit of an elemental love
Stirred outward from itself, and God was birth.
Savage from young and bursting blood of life,
Desire took form, and conquered, and anew
Strove, conquered, and took form: and God was strife
Flash upon flash, and purple morn on morn:
But always out of agony—delight;
And out of death—God evermore reborn,
Desiring his own spirit to possess,
Man of the bright eyes and the ardent dream
Saw paradise, and God was consciousness.
That Soul which, with infinity of pain,
Passes through revelation and through death
Onward and upward to itself again.
Out of the miracle of human thought,
Out of the songs of singers, God proceeds;
And of the soul of them his Soul is wrought.
Passes unaltered the eternal way,
Immerging in the everlasting One,
Who was the dayspring and who is the day.