AN ODE <br />(By a Western Spinning Dervish) <br /> <br /> <br />I SPIN, I spin, around, around, <br /> And close my eyes, <br /> And let the bile arise <br />From the sacred region of the soul’s Profound; <br />Then gaze upon the world; how strange! how new! <br /> The earth and heaven are one, <br /> The horizon-line is gone, <br />The sky how green! the land how fair and blue! <br />Perplexing items fade from my large view, <br />And thought which vexed me with its false and true <br />Is swallowed up in Intuition; this, <br /> This is the sole true mode <br /> Of reaching God, <br />And gaining the universal synthesis <br />Which makes All—One; while fools with peering eyes <br />Dissect, divide, and vainly analyse. <br />So round, and round, and round again! <br />How the whole globe swells within my brain, <br />The stars inside my lids appear, <br />The murmur of the spheres I hear <br />Throbbing and beating in each ear; <br />Right in my navel I can feel <br />The centre of the world’s great wheel. <br />Ah peace divine, bliss dear and deep, <br /> No stay, no stop, <br /> Like any top <br />Whirling with swiftest speed, I sleep. <br />O ye devout ones round me coming, <br />Listen! I think that I am humming; <br /> No utterance of the servile mind <br />With poor chop-logic rules agreeing <br /> Here shall ye find, <br />But inarticulate burr of man’s unsundered being. <br />Ah, could we but devise some plan, <br />Some patent jack by which a man <br />Might hold himself ever in harmony <br />With the great whole, and spin perpetually, <br /> As all things spin <br /> Without, within, <br />As Time spins off into Eternity, <br />And Space into the inane Immensity, <br />And the Finite into God’s Infinity, <br /> Spin, spin, spin, spin.<br /><br />Edward Dowden<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-secret-of-the-universe/
