374. A Meditation

‘THE SELF is Peace; that Self am I.

The Self is Strength; that Self am I.’

What needs this trembling strife

With phantom threats of Form and Time and Space?

Could once my Life

Be shorn of their illusion, and efface

From its clear heaven that stormful imagery,

My Self were seen

An Essence free, unchanging, strong, serene.

The Self is Peace. How placid dawns

The Summer’s parent hour

Over the dewy maze that drapes the fields,

Each drooped wild flower,

Or where the lordship of the garden shields

Select Court beauties and exclusive lawns!

’Tis but the show

And fitful dream of Peace the Self can know.

The Self is Strength. Let Nature rave,

And tear her maddened breast,

Now doom the drifting ship, with blackest frown,

Or now, possessed

With rarer frenzy, wreck the quaking town,

And bury quick beneath her earthy wave—

She cannot break

One fibre of that Strength, one atom shake.

The Self is one with the Supreme

Father in fashioning,

Though clothed in perishable weeds that feel

Pain’s mortal sting,

The unlifting care, the wound that will not heal;

Yet these are not the Self—they only seem.

From faintest jar

Of whirring worlds the true Self broods afar.

Afar he whispers to the mind

To rest on the Good Law,

To know that naught can fall without its range,

Nor any flaw

Of Chance disturb its reign, or shadow of Change;

That what can bind the life the Law must bind—

Whatever hand

Dispose the lot, it is by that Command;

To know no suffering can beset

Our lives, that is not due,

That is not forged by our own act and will;

Calmly to view

Whate’er betide of seeming good or ill.

The worst we can conceive but pays some debt

Or breaks some seal,

To free us from the bondage of the Wheel.

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