INTERVAL - 3

I could not be thou, being yet not thou

Were I not God; so to God my thoughts go

(To reach thee, to possess from within

To possess from being not from seeing)

Because, substance of substance, He alone

Can love being all things, and all in each one.

Thus is my love (...) religion.

And by being born, not born; by being love

None; and by being made move, not made to move,

But, indefinable and indistinct,

Wearing no form nor purpose nor precinct

Of use, it hangs, with my soul in its wake

An interval between me and thee, between

Ourselves and God, between thou being but seen

And being loved, abstract absance of place

(...) that

Life, substance of thou being a living thing

Where thought and will and feeling are one thing.

Of the two parts of love, becoming other

And unbecoming self, I do one choose —

The unbecoming, and the other lose.

Yet, as to unbecome must be becoming

Some other thing, as the end for roaming

Makes the thing found where will no matter binds,

The unbecoming of me sure love finds.

Yet if it finds the loved thing, yet not thee,

What thing finds it, that it sought not to be?

What but love's own abstraction, interval

Between souls. And as aether is purest of all

Where filling the mere spaces between things,

Because the more unmixed, the love that clings

To my large disembodiment is best,

Because no object, save love, limits its

(…)

But here not aether but consciousness is

The universal substance, so in this

Less difference between this substance and

God is there — so, if right I understand,

This love which to obtain thee loses thee

And which to complete me uncompletes me,

Which the mere interval doth occupy

Whether neither thy soul nor my soul doth lie,

To which my mere love's force abstractly sends

My void outgoing, and there my being ends,

And so the ends my being had in going

Equally endeth — this love thus foregoing

The object and the subject to be done

By missing into pure Relation;

This love finds God by its internal force,

For when all things are lost God is the loss.

See then how I, starting from me to thee,

Have like a sailor that sets out i' th' sea

For some shore, and the winds drive him away

And this chance casts him on some better bay

Than his intention had been to discover.

Yet if discovering were intended, ever

By what discovered is, where it not willed,

The purpose of discovering is filled,

And if the unwilled discovery is better,

The loss is gam, and that which seemed to fetter

The original purpose, the harsh wind,

Does lead the unled to where he best can find.

Yet this is not the journey's end, for whence

The sailor now arrived, to recommence

He may begin his voyage original

And from the better to the worse recall

For as the original purpose, better less,

Is in the found included, he may thence

His foiled task recompose and now to miss

The purpose that his (...)

So I, from God, the better may go out

To thee, and from within thee, not about

Thy presence, enter into thee and be

The very personality of thee.