[BNP/E3, 31A – 60]
Fiat Lux
___
(Set down 15-2-1915 but earlier, in part (January)
Into a vision before me the world
Flowered, and it as when a flag, unfurled,
Suddenly shows unknown colours and signs.[1]
Into an unknown meaning, evident
And unknown ever, it outspread its lines
Of horror on the air of my[2] wonderment.
The outward and the inward became one.
Feelings and thoughts were visible in shapes
And flowers and trees seemed feelings, thoughts. Great capes
Stood out of Soul, |jutted[3] into| conscious seas…
And on all this a dread sky[4] spoke its breeze.
Each thing was linked into each other thing
By links of wonder past imagining,
But visible now as if the skeleton
Were visible through flesh, and all were one[5]
There was no difference between a tree
And an idea. Seeing a river be
And the exterior river were one thing.
The bird's soul and the motion of its wing
Were an inextricable oneness made
And all this I saw, seeing not, dismayed
With the New God this vision told me of;
For this was aught I could not speak nor love
But some new sentiment not like all others,
Nought like the human feelings men are brothers
In feeling woke on my astonished spirit.
With a great suddenness did |God|[6] disinherit
That thought that looks through mine eyes of the pelf
Of ordered seeing that maketh it itself.
[60v]
O horror set with mad joy to appal…
Oh self‑transcendency of all,
O inner infinity of each thing that now
Suddenly was made visible and local, though
No manner of speech to speak these things in words[7]
Followed that vision. Sight whose sense absurds
Likeness of like and makes disparity
Contiguous innerly to unity!
How to express what seen, is not expressed
To the struck sight that sees it? How to know
What comes to senses' threshold to bestow
A |wider|[8] ignorance upon the knowing?
How to obey the analogy‑behest,
Community in unity to prove
The intellectual meaning of to love,
Shipwrecking difference upon the sight
Renewed from God to Inwards infinite?
Nothing: the exterior world inner expressed,
The flower of the whole vision of the world
Into its colour of absolutely meaning
In the night unfurled
Ah! new unfurling, abstract, that,
Vision self‑screening,
Patent invisible fact.
Nothing: all,
And I centre of to recall,
As if Seeing were a God.
The rest the presence of to see,
The world the unity
And all my being not souled to oneness trod
To fragments in my sight‑dishevelled sight.
This Light is Night.
[1] Suddenly shows unknown colours and signs. /Half shows half hides its colours with signs.\
[2] of my /to my passive\
[3] jutted /just\
[4] /man‑\sky
[5] through /, and the\ flesh, and all were one /round, all being one.\
[6] |God|/this\
[7] words /thoughts\
[8] |wider| /visible\
