| Nicholson & Lee, eds. The Oxford Book of English Mystical Verse. 1917. |
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| 186. The Secret of the Universe |
| By Edward Dowden (1843–1913) |
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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! | 5 |
| 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 | 10 |
| 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 | 15 |
| 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 | 20 |
| 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, | 25 |
| 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 | 30 |
| 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 | 35 |
| 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, | 40 |
| And Space into the inane Immensity, | |
| And the Finite into God’s Infinity, | |
| Spin, spin, spin, spin. | |
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