| IF thou would’st hear the Nameless, and wilt dive | |
| Into the Temple-cave of thine own self, | |
| There, brooding by the central altar, thou | |
| May’st haply learn the Nameless hath a voice, | |
| By which thou wilt abide, if thou be wise, | 5 |
| As if thou knewest, tho’ thou canst not know; | |
| For Knowledge is the swallow on the lake | |
| That sees and stirs the surface-shadow there | |
| But never yet hath dipt into the abysm, | |
| The Abysm of all Abysms, beneath, within | 10 |
| The blue of sky and sea, the green of earth, | |
| And in the million-millionth of a grain | |
| Which cleft and cleft again for evermore, | |
| And ever vanishing, never vanishes, | |
| To me, my son, more mystic than myself, | 15 |
| Or even than the Nameless is to me. | |
| And when thou sendest thy free soul thro’ heaven, | |
| Nor understandest bound nor boundlessness, | |
| Thou seest the Nameless of the hundred names. | |
| And if the Nameless should withdraw from all | 20 |
| Thy frailty counts most real, all thy world | |
| Might vanish like thy shadow in the dark. | |
| |
| ‘And since—from when this earth began— | |
| The Nameless never came | |
| Among us, never spake with man, | 25 |
| And never named the Name’— | |
| |
| Thou canst not prove the Nameless, O my son, | |
| Nor canst thou prove the world thou movest in, | |
| Thou canst not prove that thou art body alone, | |
| Nor canst thou prove that thou art spirit alone, | 30 |
| Nor canst thou prove that thou art both in one: | |
| Thou canst not prove thou art immortal, no | |
| Nor yet that thou art mortal—nay my son, | |
| Thou canst not prove that I, who speak with thee, | |
| Am not thyself in converse with thyself, | 35 |
| For nothing worthy proving can be proven, | |
| Nor yet disproven: wherefore thou be wise, | |
| Cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt, | |
| And cling to Faith beyond the forms of Faith | |
| She reels not in the storm of warring words, | 40 |
| She brightens at the clash of ‘Yes’ and ‘No’, | |
| She sees the Best that glimmers thro’ the Worst, | |
| She feels the Sun is hid but for a night, | |
| She spies the summer thro’ the winter bud, | |
| She tastes the fruit before the blossom falls, | 45 |
| She hears the lark within the songless egg, | |
| She finds the fountain where they wail’d ‘Mirage’! | |
