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In the glow of the spirit's room of memories He could recover the luminous marginal notes Dotting with light the crabbed ambiguous scroll, Rescue the preamble and the saving clause Of the dark Agreement by which all is ruled That rises from material Nature's sleep To clothe the Everlasting in new shapes. He could re-read now and interpret new Its strange symbol letters, scattered abstruse signs, Resolve its oracle and its paradox, Its riddling phrases and its blindfold terms, The deep oxymoron of its truth's repliques, And recognise as a just necessity Its hard conditions for the mighty work,-- Nature's impossible Herculean toil Only her warlock-wisecraft could enforce, Its law of the opposition of the gods, Its list of inseparable contraries. The dumb great Mother in her cosmic trance Exploiting for creation's joy and pain Infinity's sanction to the birth of form, Accepts indomitably to execute The will to know in an inconscient world, The will to live under a reign of death, The thirst for rapture in a heart of flesh, And works out through the appearance of a soul By a miraculous birth in plasm and gas The mystery of God's covenant with the Night. Once more was heard in the still cosmic Mind The Eternal's promise to his labouring Force Inducing the world-passion to begin, The cry of birth into mortality And the opening verse of the tragedy of Time. Out of the depths the world's buried secret rose; He read the original ukase kept back In the locked archives of the spirit's crypt, 
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