The better to illustrate how, in Hindoo mythology, the ideas of _a
beautiful woman_, _the Moon_, _and the Sea_, dissolve and disappear
into one another, I have placed on the fly-leaf of this edition a
single stanza, drawn from another part of my MS., which
characteristically exemplifies that _dissolving view_: subjoining here,
for the benefit of the uninitiated, a literal translation:
_O thou lovely Incarnation of the Nectar-dropping Moon, come down from
Heaven to lighten our Darkness: Delight of the Race of Man: retaining
in thy Womanhood the dancing Play of the Waves of that Sea of Milk out
of which thou wert originally churned by the Gods: we the Three Worlds_
(_i.e. of Childhood, Manhood, and Age_) _do worship the Orb of thy
Bosom that possesses for us a Threefold Mystical Feminine Energy[1]
being a Pitcher of Milk for us, when we are Born: a Pillow for us, in
the Middle of the Path of Life: and a Shrine, in which we take refuge
to die at the last._
But we lose, in a literal prose version, the reverberation, and the
echo of the Sea, which undertones the meaning of the words like the
accompaniment to a song. This _sound_ we might make some attempt to
preserve, without doing violence to the _sense_, as follows;
Like a New MODE'S exquisite Incarnation,
In the Ebb and Flow of a Surging Sea,
Wave-breasted Beauty, the whole Creation
Wanes, and waxes, and rocks on thee!
For we rise and fall on thy Bosom's Billow
Whose heaving Swell is our Home Divine.
Our Chalice at Dawn, and our hot Noon's Pillow,
Our Evening's Shrine.
_Woolacombe Bay, April_ 29, 1901.
[1] The last lines contain recondite philosophical allusions to the
Creation, Preservation, and Destruction of the World, and other
matters, in technical terms which defy translation. Life in Hindoo
philosophy, as in that of the Middle Ages, carries about with it a
perfume of death: there is in its atmosphere something melancholy, and
even a little morbid, like the slow tolling of a bell.