There alone the aged Master silently is reasoning,
Leaning on his worn out elbows, lost in endless reckoning,
Lank and slender, bent and crookèd, shivering as he doth linger,
All the universe unmeasured resting on his little finger.
For there under his broad forehead past and future, all is clear,
The eternal night, vast spaces, all like problems solved appear;
And like Atlas who in old times bore the skies upon his shoulders,
So he all supports with numbers—the eternal world’s upholders.
While the moon shines on piled volumes, he returneth with his mind
In a twinkling over aeons, endless centuries behind.
First of all, in the beginning, in the utter nothingness,
With no being, no existence, lifeless, will-less, purposeless,
When there was no thought, no secret, and yet nothing was disclosed.
When, himself alone conceiving, sole the Unconceived reposed,
Was there nothing but a chasm filled with waters? An Abyss?
There was yet no world imagined, and no mind to think of this,
For there was an utter darkness, not the slightest ray of light,
Nothing to be seen whatever, not an eye to pierce with sight:
Shadows of things uncreated had not yet begun to creep,
Quiet, with itself contented, reigned calm peace, eternal sleep!
But at once a point, one only… it moved onward, fast and faster,
Chaos was its Mother; Father it became and world’s great master.
Weaker than from froth the bubble, this point, from which all things soared,
Moving on the world’s great vastness, it became the boundless lord.
Since then all that mist eternal, streak by streak, was soon dispelled,
Since then rose sun, moon, the whole world, elements their power held.
Since then up to this day always, colonies of worlds long lost
Through the deep grey vales of chaos are on unknown pathways tossed.
Springing forth like swarms effulgent, from the infinite come thronging,
They to life allured are driven by an unquenched thirst and longing.
And in that great world, we, nothings, children of this little one,
Build on earth our tiny ant-hills, heaping riches we have won;
Kings and emperors, hosts unnumbered, in successive generations,
We think marvellous, Great Powers, our poor microscopic nations;
Flies that live a day, forgetting, in a tiny network trapped,
That this world is but a twinkle, and in utter darkness wrapped.
Like the dust that dances gaily in the kingdom of a ray,
