What opposites are here! A trivial life
Specks the huge dream of Death called Matter; intense
In its struggle of weakness towards omnipotence,
A thinking mind starts from the unthinking strife
In the order of the electric elements.
Immortal life breathed in that monstrous death,
A mystery of Knowledge wore as sheath
Matter’s mute nescience. Its enveloped sense
Or dumb somnambulist will obscurely reigns
Driving the atoms in their cosmic course
Whose huge unhearing movement serves perforce
The works of a strange blind omniscience.
The world’s deep contrasts are but figures spun
Draping the unanimity of the One.
Notes on Text
Contrasts. Circa 1934. Five handwritten manuscripts and one typed manuscript, the earliest contemporaneous with close-to-final drafts of “Transformation” and “The Other Earths”.
