FIAT LUX

Into a vision before me the world

Flowered, and it as when a flag, unfurled,

Suddenly shows unknown colours and signs.

        Into an unknown meaning, evident

And unknown ever, it outspread its lines

        Of meaning to my passive wonderment.

The outward and the inward became one.

Feelings and thoughts were visible in shapes,

And flowers and trees as feelings, thoughts. Great capes

Stood out of Soul, thrust into conscious seas,

And on all this a man‑sky spoke its breeze.

Each thing was linked into each other thing

By links of being past imagining,

But visible, as if the skeleton

Were visible and the flesh round it, each one

As if a separate thing visibly alone.

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 a 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 this disinherit

That thought that looks through mine eyes of the pelf

Of ordered seeing that maketh it itself.

O horror set with mad joy to appal!

O 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

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 visible 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,

And therefore nought 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,

Hollow self‑sensed infinity,

        And all my being‑not‑souled‑to‑oneness trod

To fragments in my sight‑dishevelled sight.

This Night is Light.