Collected Poems - Sri Aurobindo Ashram

Ilion – Book VIII 461
Glad of the tread divine and bright with her more than with sunbeams.
King Agamemnon she found and smiling on Sparta’s levies
Mixed unseen with the far-glinting spears of haughty Mycenae.
Then to the Mighty who tranquil abode and august in his regions
Zeus, while his gaze over many forms and high-seated godheads
Passed like a swift-fleeing eagle over the peaks and the glaciers
When to his eyrie he flies alone through the vastness and silence:
“Artemis, child of my loins and you, O legioned immortals,
All you have heard. Descend, O ye gods, to your sovereign stations,
Labour rejoicing whose task is joy and your bliss is creation;
Shrink from no act that Necessity asks from your luminous natures.
Thee I have given no part in the years that come, O my daughter,
Huntress swift of the worlds who with purity all things pursuest.
Yet not less is thy portion intended than theirs who o’erpass thee:
Helped are the souls that wait more than strengths soon fulfilled and
exhausted.
Archeress, brilliance, wait thine hour from the speed of the ages.”
So they departed, Artemis leading lightning-tasselled.
Ancient Themis remained and awful Dis and Ananke.
Then mid these last of the gods who shall stand when all others have
perished,
Zeus to the Silence obscure under iron brows of that goddess, —
Griefless, unveiled was her visage, dire and unmoved and eternal:
“Thou and I, O Dis, remain and our sister Ananke.
That which the joyous hearts of our children, radiant heaven-moths
Flitting mid flowers of sense for the honey of thought have not captured,
That which Poseidon forgets mid the pomp and the roar of his waters,
We three keep in our hearts. By the Light that I watch for unsleeping,
By thy tremendous consent to the silence and darkness, O Hades,
By her delight renounced and the prayers and the worship of mortals
Making herself as an engine of God without bowels or vision, —
Yet in that engine are only heart-beats, yet is her riddle
Only Love that is veiled and pity that suffers and slaughters, —
We three are free from ourselves, O Dis, and free from each other.
Do then, O King of the Night, observe then with Time for thy servant
Not my behest, but What she and thou and I are for ever.”
Mute the Darkness sat like a soul unmoved through the aeons,