Book 7 All Cantos

Book Seven
The Book of Yoga

Canto Two

The Parable of the Search for the Soul

[Savitri B-07 C-02 Canto Name]

Play Section One
[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-01]

As in the vigilance of the sleepless night

Through the slow heavy-footed silent hours,

Repressing in her bosom its load of grief,

She sat staring at the dumb tread of Time

And the approach of ever-nearing Fate,

A summons from her being's summit came,

A sound, a call that broke the seals of Night.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-01 F-01]

Above her brows where will and knowledge meet

A mighty Voice invaded mortal space.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-01 F-02]

It seemed to come from inaccessible heights

And yet was intimate with all the world

And knew the meaning of the steps of Time

And saw eternal destiny's changeless scene

Filling the far prospect of the cosmic gaze.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-01 F-03]

As the Voice touched, her body became a stark

And rigid golden statue of motionless trance,

A stone of God lit by an amethyst soul.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-01 F-04]

Around her body's stillness all grew still:

Her heart listened to its slow measured beats,

Her mind renouncing thought heard and was mute:

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-01 F-05]

“Why camest thou to this dumb deathbound earth,

This ignorant life beneath indifferent skies

Tied like a sacrifice on the altar of Time,

O spirit, O immortal energy,

If 'twas to nurse grief in a helpless heart

Or with hard tearless eyes await thy doom?

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-01 F-06]

Arise, O soul, and vanquish Time and Death.”

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-01 F-07]

But Savitri's heart replied in the dim night:

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-01 F-08]

“My strength is taken from me and given to Death.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-01 F-09]

Why should I lift my hands to the shut heavens

Or struggle with mute inevitable Fate

Or hope in vain to uplift an ignorant race

Who hug their lot and mock the saviour Light

And see in Mind wisdom's sole tabernacle,

In its harsh peak and its inconscient base

A rock of safety and an anchor of sleep?

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-01 F-10]

Is there a God whom any cry can move?

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-01 F-11]

He sits in peace and leaves the mortal's strength

Impotent against his calm omnipotent Law

And Inconscience and the almighty hands of Death.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-01 F-12]

What need have I, what need has Satyavan

To avoid the black-meshed net, the dismal door,

Or call a mightier Light into life's closed room,

A greater Law into man's little world?

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-01 F-13]

Why should I strive with earth's unyielding laws

Or stave off death's inevitable hour?

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-01 F-14]

This surely is best to pactise with my fate

And follow close behind my lover's steps

And pass through night from twilight to the sun

Across the tenebrous river that divides

The adjoining parishes of earth and heaven.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-01 F-15]

Then could we lie inarmed breast upon breast,

Untroubled by thought, untroubled by our hearts,

Forgetting man and life and time and its hours,

Forgetting eternity's call, forgetting God.”

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-01 F-16]

The Voice replied: “Is this enough, O spirit?

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-01 F-17]

And what shall thy soul say when it wakes and knows

The work was left undone for which it came?

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-01 F-18]

Or is this all for thy being born on earth

Charged with a mandate from eternity,

A listener to the voices of the years,

A follower of the footprints of the gods,

To pass and leave unchanged the old dusty laws?

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-01 F-19]

Shall there be no new tables, no new Word,

No greater light come down upon the earth

Delivering her from her unconsciousness,

Man's spirit from unalterable Fate?

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-01 F-20]

Cam'st thou not down to open the doors of Fate,

The iron doors that seemed for ever closed,

And lead man to Truth's wide and golden road

That runs through finite things to eternity?

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-01 F-21]

Is this then the report that I must make,

My head bowed with shame before the Eternal's seat,—

His power he kindled in thy body has failed,

His labourer returns, her task undone?”

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-01 F-22]

Then Savitri's heart fell mute, it spoke no word.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-01 F-23]

But holding back her troubled rebel heart,

Abrupt, erect and strong, calm like a hill,

Surmounting the seas of mortal ignorance,

Its peak immutable above mind's air,

A Power within her answered the still Voice:

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-01 F-24]

“I am thy portion here charged with thy work,

As thou myself seated for ever above,

Speak to my depths, O great and deathless Voice,

Command, for I am here to do thy will.”

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-01 F-25]

The Voice replied: “Remember why thou cam'st:

Find out thy soul, recover thy hid self,

In silence seek God's meaning in thy depths,

Then mortal nature change to the divine.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-01 F-26]

Open God's door, enter into his trance.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-01 F-27]

Cast Thought from thee, that nimble ape of Light:

In his tremendous hush stilling thy brain

His vast Truth wake within and know and see.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-01 F-28]

Cast from thee sense that veils thy spirit's sight:

In the enormous emptiness of thy mind

Thou shalt see the Eternal's body in the world,

Know him in every voice heard by thy soul,

In the world's contacts meet his single touch;

All things shall fold thee into his embrace.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-01 F-29]

Conquer thy heart's throbs, let thy heart beat in God:

Thy nature shall be the engine of his works,

Thy voice shall house the mightiness of his Word:

Then shalt thou harbour my force and conquer Death.”

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-01 F-30]

Then Savitri by her doomed husband sat,

Still rigid in her golden motionless pose,

A statue of the fire of the inner sun.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-01 F-31]

In the black night the wrath of storm swept by,

The thunder crashed above her, the rain hissed,

Its million footsteps pattered on the roof.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-01 F-32]

Impassive mid the movement and the cry,

Witness of the thoughts of mind, the moods of life,

She looked into herself and sought for her soul.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-01 F-33]

Play Section Two
[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-02]

A dream disclosed to her the cosmic past,

The crypt-seed and the mystic origins,

The shadowy beginnings of world-fate:

A lamp of symbol lighting hidden truth

Imaged to her the world's significance.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-02 F-01]

In the indeterminate formlessness of Self

Creation took its first mysterious steps,

It made the body's shape a house of soul

And Matter learned to think and person grew;

She saw Space peopled with the seeds of life

And saw the human creature born in Time.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-02 F-02]

At first appeared a dim half-neutral tide

Of being emerging out of infinite Nought:

A consciousness looked at the inconscient Vast

And pleasure and pain stirred in the insensible Void.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-02 F-03]

All was the deed of a blind World-Energy:

Unconscious of her own exploits she worked,

Shaping a universe out of the Inane.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-02 F-04]

In fragmentary beings she grew aware:

A chaos of little sensibilities

Gathered round a small ego's pin-point head;

In it a sentient creature found its poise,

It moved and lived a breathing, thinking whole.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-02 F-05]

On a dim ocean of subconscient life

A formless surface consciousness awoke:

A stream of thoughts and feelings came and went,

A foam of memories hardened and became

A bright crust of habitual sense and thought,

A seat of living personality

And recurrent habits mimicked permanence.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-02 F-06]

Mind nascent laboured out a mutable form,

It built a mobile house on shifting sands,

A floating isle upon a bottomless sea.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-02 F-07]

A conscious being was by this labour made;

It looked around it on its difficult field

In the green wonderful and perilous earth;

It hoped in a brief body to survive,

Relying on Matter's false eternity.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-02 F-08]

It felt a godhead in its fragile house;

It saw blue heavens, dreamed immortality.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-02 F-09]

A conscious soul in the Inconscient's world,

Hidden behind our thoughts and hopes and dreams,

An indifferent Master signing Nature's acts

Leaves the vicegerent mind a seeming king.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-02 F-10]

In his floating house upon the sea of Time

The regent sits at work and never rests:

He is a puppet of the dance of Time;

He is driven by the hours, the moment's call

Compels him with the thronging of life's need

And the babel of the voices of the world.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-02 F-11]

This mind no silence knows nor dreamless sleep,

In the incessant circling of its steps

Thoughts tread for ever through the listening brain;

It toils like a machine and cannot stop.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-02 F-12]

Into the body's many-storeyed rooms

Endless crowd down the dream-god's messages.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-02 F-13]

All is a hundred-toned murmur and babble and stir,

There is a tireless running to and fro,

A haste of movement and a ceaseless cry.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-02 F-14]

The hurried servant senses answer apace

To every knock upon the outer doors,

Bring in time's visitors, report each call,

Admit the thousand queries and the calls

And the messages of communicating minds

And the heavy business of unnumbered lives

And all the thousandfold commerce of the world.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-02 F-15]

Even in the tracts of sleep is scant repose;

He mocks life's steps in strange subconscient dreams,

He strays in a subtle realm of symbol scenes,

His night with thin-air visions and dim forms

He packs or peoples with slight drifting shapes

And only a moment spends in silent Self.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-02 F-16]

Adventuring into infinite mind-space

He unfolds his wings of thought in inner air,

Or travelling in imagination's car

Crosses the globe, journeys beneath the stars,

To subtle worlds takes his ethereal course,

Visits the Gods on Life's miraculous peaks,

Communicates with Heaven, tampers with Hell.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-02 F-17]

This is the little surface of man's life.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-02 F-18]

He is this and he is all the universe;

He scales the Unseen, his depths dare the Abyss;

A whole mysterious world is locked within.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-02 F-19]

Unknown to himself he lives a hidden king

Behind rich tapestries in great secret rooms;

An epicure of the spirit's unseen joys,

He lives on the sweet honey of solitude:

A nameless god in an unapproachable fane,

In the secret adytum of his inmost soul

He guards the being's covered mysteries

Beneath the threshold, behind shadowy gates

Or shut in vast cellars of inconscient sleep.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-02 F-20]

The immaculate Divine All-Wonderful

Casts into the argent purity of his soul

His splendour and his greatness and the light

Of self-creation in Time's infinity

As into a sublimely mirroring glass.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-02 F-21]

Man in the world's life works out the dreams of God.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-02 F-22]

But all is there, even God's opposites;

He is a little front of Nature's works,

A thinking outline of a cryptic Force.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-02 F-23]

All she reveals in him that is in her,

Her glories walk in him and her darknesses.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-02 F-24]

Man's house of life holds not the gods alone:

There are occult Shadows, there are tenebrous Powers,

Inhabitants of life's ominous nether rooms,

A shadowy world's stupendous denizens.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-02 F-25]

A careless guardian of his nature's powers,

Man harbours dangerous forces in his house.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-02 F-26]

The Titan and the Fury and the Djinn

Lie bound in the subconscient's cavern pit

And the Beast grovels in his antre den:

Dire mutterings rise and murmur in their drowse.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-02 F-27]

Insurgent sometimes raises its huge head

A monstrous mystery lurking in life's deeps,

The mystery of dark and fallen worlds,

The dread visages of the adversary Kings.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-02 F-28]

The dreadful powers held down within his depths

Become his masters or his ministers;

Enormous they invade his bodily house,

Can act in his acts, infest his thought and life.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-02 F-29]

Inferno surges into the human air

And touches all with a perverting breath.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-02 F-30]

Grey forces like a thin miasma creep,

Stealing through chinks in his closed mansion's doors,

Discolouring the walls of upper mind

In which he lives his fair and specious life,

And leave behind a stench of sin and death:

Not only rise in him perverse drifts of thought

And formidable formless influences,

But there come presences and awful shapes:

Tremendous forms and faces mount dim steps

And stare at times into his living-rooms,

Or called up for a moment's passionate work

Lay a dire custom's claim upon his heart:

Aroused from sleep, they can be bound no more.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-02 F-31]

Afflicting the daylight and alarming night,

Invading at will his outer tenement,

The stark gloom's grisly dire inhabitants

Mounting into God's light all light perturb.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-02 F-32]

All they have touched or seen they make their own,

In Nature's basement lodge, mind's passages fill,

Disrupt thought's links and musing sequences,

Break through the soul's stillness with a noise and cry

Or they call the inhabitants of the abyss,

Invite the instincts to forbidden joys,

A laughter wake of dread demoniac mirth

And with nether riot and revel shake life's floor.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-02 F-33]

Impotent to quell his terrible prisoners,

Appalled the householder helpless sits above,

Taken from him his house is his no more.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-02 F-34]

He is bound and forced, a victim of the play,

Or, allured, joys in the mad and mighty din.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-02 F-35]

His nature's dangerous forces have arisen

And hold at will a rebel's holiday.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-02 F-36]

Aroused from the darkness where they crouched in the depths,

Prisoned from the sight, they can be held no more;

His nature's impulses are now his lords.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-02 F-37]

Once quelled or wearing specious names and vests

Infernal elements, demon powers are there.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-02 F-38]

Man's lower nature hides these awful guests.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-02 F-39]

Their vast contagion grips sometimes man's world.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-02 F-40]

An awful insurgence overpowers man's soul.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-02 F-41]

In house and house the huge uprising grows:

Hell's companies are loosed to do their work,

Into the earth-ways they break out from all doors,

Invade with blood-lust and the will to slay

And fill with horror and carnage God's fair world.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-02 F-42]

Death and his hunters stalk a victim earth;

The terrible Angel smites at every door:

An awful laughter mocks at the world's pain

And massacre and torture grin at Heaven:

All is the prey of the destroying force;

Creation rocks and tremble top and base.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-02 F-43]

This evil Nature housed in human hearts,

A foreign inhabitant, a dangerous guest:

The soul that harbours it it can dislodge,

Expel the householder, possess the house.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-02 F-44]

An opposite potency contradicting God,

A momentary Evil's almightiness

Has straddled the straight path of Nature's acts.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-02 F-45]

It imitates the Godhead it denies,

Puts on his figure and assumes his face.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-02 F-46]

A Manichean creator and destroyer,

This can abolish man, annul his world.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-02 F-47]

But there is a guardian power, there are Hands that save,

Calm eyes divine regard the human scene.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-02 F-48]

Play Section Three
[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-03]

All the world's possibilities in man

Are waiting as the tree waits in its seed:

His past lives in him; it drives his future's pace;

His present's acts fashion his coming fate.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-03 F-01]

The unborn gods hide in his house of Life.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-03 F-02]

The daemons of the unknown overshadow his mind

Casting their dreams into live moulds of thought,

The moulds in which his mind builds out its world.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-03 F-03]

His mind creates around him its universe.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-03 F-04]

All that has been renews in him its birth;

All that can be is figured in his soul.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-03 F-05]

Issuing in deeds it scores on the roads of the world,

Obscure to the interpreting reason's guess,

Lines of the secret purpose of the gods.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-03 F-06]

In strange directions runs the intricate plan;

Held back from human foresight is their end

And the far intention of some ordering Will

Or the order of life's arbitrary Chance

Finds out its settled poise and fated hour.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-03 F-07]

Our surface watched in vain by reason's gaze,

Invaded by the impromptus of the unseen,

Helpless records the accidents of Time,

The involuntary turns and leaps of life.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-03 F-08]

Only a little of us foresees its steps,

Only a little has will and purposed pace.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-03 F-09]

A vast subliminal is man's measureless part.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-03 F-10]

The dim subconscient is his cavern base.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-03 F-11]

Abolished vainly in the walks of Time

Our past lives still in our unconscious selves

And by the weight of its hidden influences

Is shaped our future's self-discovery.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-03 F-12]

Thus all is an inevitable chain

And yet a series seems of accidents.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-03 F-13]

The unremembering hours repeat the old acts,

Our dead past round our future's ankles clings

And drags back the new nature's glorious stride,

Or from its buried corpse old ghosts arise,

Old thoughts, old longings, dead passions live again,

Recur in sleep or move the waking man

To words that force the barrier of the lips,

To deeds that suddenly start and o'erleap

His head of reason and his guardian will.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-03 F-14]

An old self lurks in the new self we are;

Hardly we escape from what we once had been:

In the dim gleam of habit's passages,

In the subconscient's darkling corridors

All things are carried by the porter nerves

And nothing checked by subterranean mind,

Unstudied by the guardians of the doors

And passed by a blind instinctive memory,

The old gang dismissed, old cancelled passports serve.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-03 F-15]

Nothing is wholly dead that once had lived;

In dim tunnels of the world's being and in ours

The old rejected nature still survives;

The corpses of its slain thoughts raise their heads

And visit mind's nocturnal walks in sleep,

Its stifled impulses breathe and move and rise;

All keeps a phantom immortality.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-03 F-16]

Irresistible are Nature's sequences:

The seeds of sins renounced sprout from hid soil;

The evil cast from our hearts once more we face;

Our dead selves come to slay our living soul.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-03 F-17]

A portion of us lives in present Time,

A secret mass in dim inconscience gropes;

Out of the inconscient and subliminal

Arisen, we live in mind's uncertain light

And strive to know and master a dubious world

Whose purpose and meaning are hidden from our sight.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-03 F-18]

Above us dwells a superconscient God

Hidden in the mystery of his own light:

Around us is a vast of ignorance

Lit by the uncertain ray of human mind,

Below us sleeps the Inconscient dark and mute.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-03 F-19]

But this is only Matter's first self-view,

A scale and series in the Ignorance.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-03 F-20]

This is not all we are or all our world.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-03 F-21]

Our greater self of knowledge waits for us,

A supreme light in the truth-conscious Vast:

It sees from summits beyond thinking mind,

It moves in a splendid air transcending life.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-03 F-22]

It shall descend and make earth's life divine.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-03 F-23]

Truth made the world, not a blind Nature-Force.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-03 F-24]

For here are not our large diviner heights;

Our summits in the superconscient's blaze

Are glorious with the very face of God:

There is our aspect of eternity,

There is the figure of the god we are,

His young unaging look on deathless things,

His joy in our escape from death and Time,

His immortality and light and bliss.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-03 F-25]

Our larger being sits behind cryptic walls:

There are greatnesses hidden in our unseen parts

That wait their hour to step into life's front:

We feel an aid from deep indwelling Gods;

One speaks within, Light comes to us from above.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-03 F-26]

Our soul from its mysterious chamber acts;

Its influence pressing on our heart and mind

Pushes them to exceed their mortal selves.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-03 F-27]

It seeks for Good and Beauty and for God;

We see beyond self's walls our limitless self,

We gaze through our world's glass at half-seen vasts,

We hunt for the Truth behind apparent things.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-03 F-28]

Our inner Mind dwells in a larger light,

Its brightness looks at us through hidden doors;

Our members luminous grow and Wisdom's face

Appears in the doorway of the mystic ward:

When she enters into our house of outward sense,

Then we look up and see, above, her sun.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-03 F-29]

A mighty life-self with its inner powers

Supports the dwarfish modicum we call life;

It can graft upon our crawl two puissant wings.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-03 F-30]

Our body's subtle self is throned within

In its viewless palace of veridical dreams

That are bright shadows of the thoughts of God.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-03 F-31]

In the prone obscure beginnings of the race

The human grew in the bowed apelike man.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-03 F-32]

He stood erect, a godlike form and force,

And a soul's thoughts looked out from earth-born eyes;

Man stood erect, he wore the thinker's brow:

He looked at heaven and saw his comrade stars;

A vision came of beauty and greater birth

Slowly emerging from the heart's chapel of light

And moved in a white lucent air of dreams.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-03 F-33]

He saw his being's unrealised vastnesses,

He aspired and housed the nascent demigod.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-03 F-34]

Out of the dim recesses of the self

The occult seeker into the open came:

He heard the far and touched the intangible,

He gazed into the future and the unseen;

He used the powers earth-instruments cannot use,

A pastime made of the impossible;

He caught up fragments of the Omniscient's thought,

He scattered formulas of omnipotence.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-03 F-35]

Thus man in his little house made of earth's dust

Grew towards an unseen heaven of thought and dream

Looking into the vast vistas of his mind

On a small globe dotting infinity.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-03 F-36]

At last climbing a long and narrow stair

He stood alone on the high roof of things

And saw the light of a spiritual sun.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-03 F-37]

Aspiring he transcends his earthly self;

He stands in the largeness of his soul new-born,

Redeemed from encirclement by mortal things

And moves in a pure free spiritual realm

As in the rare breath of a stratosphere;

A last end of far lines of divinity,

He mounts by a frail thread to his high source;

He reaches his fount of immortality,

He calls the Godhead into his mortal life.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-03 F-38]

All this the spirit concealed had done in her:

A portion of the mighty Mother came

Into her as into its own human part:

Amid the cosmic workings of the Gods

It marked her the centre of a wide-drawn scheme,

Dreamed in the passion of her far-seeing spirit

To mould humanity into God's own shape

And lead this great blind struggling world to light

Or a new world discover or create.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-03 F-39]

Earth must transform herself and equal Heaven

Or Heaven descend into earth's mortal state.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-03 F-40]

But for such vast spiritual change to be,

Out of the mystic cavern in man's heart

The heavenly Psyche must put off her veil

And step into common nature's crowded rooms

And stand uncovered in that nature's front

And rule its thoughts and fill the body and life.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-03 F-41]

Obedient to a high command she sat:

Time, life and death were passing incidents

Obstructing with their transient view her sight,

Her sight that must break through and liberate the god

Imprisoned in the visionless mortal man.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-03 F-42]

The inferior nature born into ignorance

Still took too large a place, it veiled her self

And must be pushed aside to find her soul.

[Savitri B-07 C-02 S-03 F-43]

Book Seven Canto Two End

The Parable of the Search for the Soul

[Savitri B-07 C-02 Canto End]

Savitri | a Legend and a Symbol

Book Seven
The Book of Yoga

Canto Three

The Entry into the Inner Countries

[Savitri B-07 C-03 Canto Name]

Play Section One
[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-01]

At first out of the busy hum of mind

As if from a loud thronged market into a cave

By an inward moment's magic she had come.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-01 F-01]

A stark hushed emptiness became her self:

Her mind unvisited by the voice of thought

Stared at a void deep's dumb infinity.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-01 F-02]

Her heights receded, her depths behind her closed;

All fled away from her and left her blank.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-01 F-03]

But when she came back to her self of thought,

Once more she was a human thing on earth,

A lump of Matter, a house of closed sight,

A mind compelled to think out ignorance,

A life-force pressed into a camp of works

And the material world her limiting field.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-01 F-04]

Amazed like one unknowing she sought her way

Out of the tangle of man's ignorant past

That took the surface person for the soul.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-01 F-05]

Then a Voice spoke that dwelt on secret heights:

“For man thou seekst, not for thyself alone.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-01 F-06]

Only if God assumes the human mind

And puts on mortal ignorance for his cloak

And makes himself the Dwarf with triple stride,

Can he help man to grow into the God.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-01 F-07]

As man disguised the cosmic Greatness works

And finds the mystic inaccessible gate

And opens the Immortal's golden door.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-01 F-08]

Man, human, follows in God's human steps.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-01 F-09]

Accepting his darkness thou must bring to him light,

Accepting his sorrow thou must bring to him bliss.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-01 F-10]

In Matter's body find thy heaven-born soul.”

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-01 F-11]

Then Savitri surged out of her body's wall

And stood a little span outside herself

And looked into her subtle being's depths

And in its heart as in a lotus-bud

Divined her secret and mysterious soul.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-01 F-12]

At the dim portal of the inner life

That bars out from our depths the body's mind

And all that lives but by the body's breath,

She knocked and pressed against the ebony gate.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-01 F-13]

The living portal groaned with sullen hinge:

Heavily reluctant it complained inert

Against the tyranny of the spirit's touch.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-01 F-14]

A formidable voice cried from within:

“Back, creature of earth, lest tortured and torn thou die.”

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-01 F-15]

A dreadful murmur rose like a dim sea;

The Serpent of the threshold hissing rose,

A fatal guardian hood with monstrous coils,

The hounds of darkness growled with jaws agape,

And trolls and gnomes and goblins scowled and stared

And wild beast roarings thrilled the blood with fear

And menace muttered in a dangerous tongue.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-01 F-16]

Unshaken her will pressed on the rigid bars:

The gate swung wide with a protesting jar,

The opponent Powers withdrew their dreadful guard;

Her being entered into the inner worlds.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-01 F-17]

In a narrow passage, the subconscient's gate,

She breathed with difficulty and pain and strove

To find the inner self concealed in sense.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-01 F-18]

Into a dense of subtle Matter packed,

A cavity filled with a blind mass of power,

An opposition of misleading gleams,

A heavy barrier of unseeing sight,

She forced her way through body to the soul.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-01 F-19]

Across a perilous border line she passed

Where Life dips into the subconscient dusk

Or struggles from Matter into chaos of mind,

Aswarm with elemental entities

And fluttering shapes of vague half-bodied thought

And crude beginnings of incontinent force.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-01 F-20]

At first a difficult narrowness was there,

A press of uncertain powers and drifting wills;

For all was there but nothing in its place.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-01 F-21]

At times an opening came, a door was forced;

She crossed through spaces of a secret self

And trod in passages of inner Time.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-01 F-22]

At last she broke into a form of things,

A start of finiteness, a world of sense:

But all was still confused, nothing self-found.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-01 F-23]

Soul was not there but only cries of life.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-01 F-24]

A thronged and clamorous air environed her.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-01 F-25]

A horde of sounds defied significance,

A dissonant clash of cries and contrary calls;

A mob of visions broke across the sight,

A jostled sequence lacking sense and suite,

Feelings pushed through a packed and burdened heart,

Each forced its separate inconsequent way

But cared for nothing but its ego's drive.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-01 F-26]

A rally without key of common will,

Thought stared at thought and pulled at the taut brain

As if to pluck the reason from its seat

And cast its corpse into life's wayside drain;

So might forgotten lie in Nature's mud

Abandoned the slain sentinel of the soul.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-01 F-27]

So could life's power shake from it mind's rule,

Nature renounce the spirit's government

And the bare elemental energies

Make of the sense a glory of boundless joy,

A splendour of ecstatic anarchy,

A revel mighty and mad of utter bliss.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-01 F-28]

This was the sense's instinct void of soul

Or when the soul sleeps hidden void of power,

But now the vital godhead wakes within

And lifts the life with the Supernal's touch.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-01 F-29]

But how shall come the glory and the flame

If mind is cast away into the abyss?

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-01 F-30]

For body without mind has not the light,

The rapture of spirit sense, the joy of life;

All then becomes subconscient, tenebrous,

Inconscience puts its seal on Nature's page

Or else a mad disorder whirls the brain

Posting along a ravaged nature's roads,

A chaos of disordered impulses

In which no light can come, no joy, no peace.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-01 F-31]

This state now threatened, this she pushed from her.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-01 F-32]

As if in a long endless tossing street

One driven mid a trampling hurrying crowd

Hour after hour she trod without release

Holding by her will the senseless meute at bay;

Out of the dreadful press she dragged her will

And fixed her thought upon the saviour Name;

Then all grew still and empty; she was free.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-01 F-33]

A large deliverance came, a vast calm space.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-01 F-34]

Awhile she moved through a blank tranquillity

Of naked Light from an invisible sun,

A void that was a bodiless happiness,

A blissful vacuum of nameless peace.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-01 F-35]

But now a mightier danger's front drew near:

The press of bodily mind, the Inconscient's brood

Of aimless thought and will had fallen from her.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-01 F-36]

Approaching loomed a giant head of Life

Ungoverned by mind or soul, subconscient, vast.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-01 F-37]

It tossed all power into a single drive,

It made its power a might of dangerous seas.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-01 F-38]

Into the stillness of her silent self,

Into the whiteness of its muse of Space

A spate, a torrent of the speed of Life

Broke like a wind-lashed driven mob of waves

Racing on a pale floor of summer sand;

It drowned its banks, a mountain of climbing waves.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-01 F-39]

Enormous was its vast and passionate voice.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-01 F-40]

It cried to her listening spirit as it ran,

Demanding God's submission to chainless Force.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-01 F-41]

A deaf force calling to a status dumb,

A thousand voices in a muted Vast,

It claimed the heart's support for its clutch at joy,

For its need to act the witness Soul's consent,

For its lust of power her neutral being's seal.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-01 F-42]

Into the wideness of her watching self

It brought a grandiose gust of the Breath of Life;

Its torrent carried the world's hopes and fears,

All life's, all Nature's dissatisfied hungry cry,

And the longing all eternity cannot fill.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-01 F-43]

It called to the mountain secrecies of the soul

And the miracle of the never-dying fire,

It spoke to some first inexpressible ecstasy

Hidden in the creative beat of Life;

Out of the nether unseen deeps it tore

Its lure and magic of disordered bliss,

Into earth-light poured its maze of tangled charm

And heady draught of Nature's primitive joy

And the fire and mystery of forbidden delight

Drunk from the world-libido's bottomless well,

And the honey-sweet poison-wine of lust and death,

But dreamed a vintage of glory of life's gods,

And felt as celestial rapture's golden sting.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-01 F-44]

The cycles of the infinity of desire

And the mystique that made an unrealised world

Wider than the known and closer than the unknown

In which hunt for ever the hounds of mind and life,

Tempted a deep dissatisfied urge within

To long for the unfulfilled and ever far

And make this life upon a limiting earth

A climb towards summits vanishing in the void,

A search for the glory of the impossible.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-01 F-45]

It dreamed of that which never has been known,

It grasped at that which never has been won,

It chased into an Elysian memory

The charms that flee from the heart's soon lost delight;

It dared the force that slays, the joys that hurt,

The imaged shape of unaccomplished things

And the summons to a Circean transmuting dance

And passion's tenancy of the courts of love

And the wild Beast's ramp and romp with Beauty and Life.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-01 F-46]

It brought its cry and surge of opposite powers,

Its moments of the touch of luminous planes,

Its flame-ascensions and sky-pitched vast attempts,

Its fiery towers of dream built on the winds,

Its sinkings towards the darkness and the abyss,

Its honey of tenderness, its sharp wine of hate,

Its changes of sun and cloud, of laughter and tears,

Its bottomless danger-pits and swallowing gulfs,

Its fear and joy and ecstasy and despair,

Its occult wizardries, its simple lines

And great communions and uplifting moves,

Its faith in heaven, its intercourse with hell.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-01 F-47]

These powers were not blunt with the dead weight of earth,

They gave ambrosia's taste and poison's sting.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-01 F-48]

There was an ardour in the gaze of Life

That saw heaven blue in the grey air of Night:

The impulses godward soared on passion's wings.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-01 F-49]

Mind's quick-paced thoughts floated from their high necks,

A glowing splendour as of an irised mane,

A parure of pure intuition's light;

Its flame-foot gallop they could imitate:

Mind's voices mimicked inspiration's stress,

Its ictus of infallibility,

Its speed and lightning heaven-leap of the Gods.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-01 F-50]

A trenchant blade that shore the nets of doubt,

Its sword of discernment seemed almost divine.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-01 F-51]

Yet all that knowledge was a borrowed sun's;

The forms that came were not heaven's native births:

An inner voice could speak the unreal's Word;

Its puissance dangerous and absolute

Could mingle poison with the wine of God.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-01 F-52]

On these high shining backs falsehood could ride;

Truth lay with delight in error's passionate arms

Gliding downstream in a blithe gilded barge:

She edged her ray with a magnificent lie.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-01 F-53]

Here in Life's nether realms all contraries meet;

Truth stares and does her works with bandaged eyes

And Ignorance is Wisdom's patron here:

Those galloping hooves in their enthusiast speed

Could bear to a dangerous intermediate zone

Where Death walks wearing a robe of deathless Life.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-01 F-54]

Or they enter the valley of the wandering Gleam

Whence, captives or victims of the specious Ray,

Souls trapped in that region never can escape.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-01 F-55]

Agents, not masters, they serve Life's desires

Toiling for ever in the snare of Time.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-01 F-56]

Their bodies born out of some Nihil's womb

Ensnare the spirit in the moment's dreams,

Then perish vomiting the immortal soul

Out of Matter's belly into the sink of Nought.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-01 F-57]

Yet some uncaught, unslain, can warily pass

Carrying Truth's image in the sheltered heart,

Pluck Knowledge out of error's screening grip,

Break paths through the blind walls of little self,

Then travel on to reach a greater life.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-01 F-58]

All this streamed past her and seemed to her vision's sight

As if around a high and voiceless isle

A clamour of waters from far unknown hills

Swallowed its narrow banks in crowding waves

And made a hungry world of white wild foam:

Hastening, a dragon with a million feet,

Its foam and cry a drunken giant's din,

Tossing a mane of Darkness into God's sky,

It ebbed receding into a distant roar.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-01 F-59]

Then smiled again a large and tranquil air:

Blue heaven, green earth, partners of Beauty's reign,

Lived as of old, companions in happiness;

And in the world's heart laughed the joy of life.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-01 F-60]

All now was still, the soil shone dry and pure.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-01 F-61]

Through it all she moved not, plunged not in the vain waves.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-01 F-62]

Out of the vastness of the silent self

Life's clamour fled; her spirit was mute and free.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-01 F-63]

Play Section Two
[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-02]

Then journeying forward through the self's wide hush

She came into a brilliant ordered Space.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-02 F-01]

There Life dwelt parked in an armed tranquillity;

A chain was on her strong insurgent heart.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-02 F-02]

Tamed to the modesty of a measured pace,

She kept no more her vehement stride and rush;

She had lost the careless majesty of her muse

And the ample grandeur of her regal force;

Curbed were her mighty pomps, her splendid waste,

Sobered the revels of her bacchant play,

Cut down were her squanderings in desire's bazaar,

Coerced her despot will, her fancy's dance,

A cold stolidity bound the riot of sense.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-02 F-03]

A royalty without freedom was her lot;

The sovereign throned obeyed her ministers:

Her servants mind and sense governed her house:

Her spirit's bounds they cast in rigid lines

And guarding with a phalanx of armoured rules

The reason's balanced reign, kept order and peace.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-02 F-04]

Her will lived closed in adamant walls of law,

Coerced was her force by chains that feigned to adorn,

Imagination was prisoned in a fort,

Her wanton and licentious favourite;

Reality's poise and reason's symmetry

Were set in its place sentinelled by marshalled facts,

They gave to the soul for throne a bench of Law,

For kingdom a small world of rule and line:

The ages' wisdom, shrivelled to scholiast lines,

Shrank patterned into a copy-book device.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-02 F-05]

The Spirit's almighty freedom was not here:

A schoolman mind had captured life's large space,

But chose to live in bare and paltry rooms

Parked off from the too vast dangerous universe,

Fearing to lose its soul in the infinite.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-02 F-06]

Even the Idea's ample sweep was cut

Into a system, chained to fixed pillars of thought

Or rivetted to Matter's solid ground:

Or else the soul was lost in its own heights:

Obeying the Ideal's high-browed law

Thought based a throne on unsubstantial air

Disdaining earth's flat triviality:

It barred reality out to live in its dreams.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-02 F-07]

Or all stepped into a systemed universe:

Life's empire was a managed continent,

Its thoughts an army ranked and disciplined;

Uniformed they kept the logic of their fixed place

At the bidding of the trained centurion mind.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-02 F-08]

Or each stepped into its station like a star

Or marched through fixed and constellated heavens

Or kept its feudal rank among its peers

In the sky's unchanging cosmic hierarchy.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-02 F-09]

Or like a high-bred maiden with chaste eyes

Forbidden to walk unveiled the public ways,

She must in close secluded chambers move,

Her feeling in cloisters live or gardened paths.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-02 F-10]

Life was consigned to a safe level path,

It dared not tempt the great and difficult heights

Or climb to be neighbour to a lonely star

Or skirt the danger of the precipice

Or tempt the foam-curled breakers' perilous laugh,

Adventure's lyrist, danger's amateur,

Or into her chamber call some flaming god,

Or leave the world's bounds and where no limits are

Meet with the heart's passion the Adorable

Or set the world ablaze with the inner Fire.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-02 F-11]

A chastened epithet in the prose of life,

She must fill with colour just her sanctioned space,

Not break out of the cabin of the idea

Nor trespass into rhythms too high or vast.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-02 F-12]

Even when it soared into ideal air,

Thought's flight lost not itself in heaven's blue:

It drew upon the skies a patterned flower

Of disciplined beauty and harmonic light.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-02 F-13]

A temperate vigilant spirit governed life:

Its acts were tools of the considering thought,

Too cold to take fire and set the world ablaze,

Or the careful reason's diplomatic moves

Testing the means to a prefigured end,

Or at the highest pitch some calm Will's plan

Or a strategy of some High Command within

To conquer the secret treasures of the gods

Or win for a masked king some glorious world,

Not a reflex of the spontaneous self,

An index of the being and its moods,

A winging of conscious spirit, a sacrament

Of life's communion with the still Supreme

Or its pure movement on the Eternal's road.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-02 F-14]

Or else for the body of some high Idea

A house was built with too close-fitting bricks;

Action and thought cemented made a wall

Of small ideals limiting the soul.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-02 F-15]

Even meditation mused on a narrow seat;

And worship turned to an exclusive God,

To the Universal in a chapel prayed

Whose doors were shut against the universe;

Or kneeled to the bodiless Impersonal

A mind shut to the cry and fire of love:

A rational religion dried the heart.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-02 F-16]

It planned a smooth life's acts with ethics' rule

Or offered a cold and flameless sacrifice.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-02 F-17]

The sacred Book lay on its sanctified desk

Wrapped in interpretation's silken strings:

A credo sealed up its spiritual sense.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-02 F-18]

Play Section Three
[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-03]

Here was a quiet country of fixed mind,

Here life no more was all nor passion's voice;

The cry of sense had sunk into a hush.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-03 F-01]

Soul was not there nor spirit but mind alone;

Mind claimed to be the spirit and the soul.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-03 F-02]

The spirit saw itself as form of mind,

Lost itself in the glory of the thought,

A light that made invisible the sun.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-03 F-03]

Into a firm and settled space she came

Where all was still and all things kept their place.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-03 F-04]

Each found what it had sought and knew its aim.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-03 F-05]

All had a final last stability.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-03 F-06]

There one stood forth who bore authority

On an important brow and held a rod;

Command was incarnate in his gesture and tone;

Tradition's petrified wisdom carved his speech,

His sentences savoured the oracle.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-03 F-07]

“Traveller or pilgrim of the inner world,

Fortunate art thou to reach our brilliant air

Flaming with thought's supreme finality.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-03 F-08]

O aspirant to the perfect way of life,

Here find it; rest from search and live at peace.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-03 F-09]

Ours is the home of cosmic certainty.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-03 F-10]

Here is the truth, God's harmony is here.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-03 F-11]

Admitted by the sanction of the few,

Adopt thy station of knowledge, thy post in mind,

Thy ticket of order draw in Life's bureau

And praise thy fate that made thee one of ours.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-03 F-12]

All here, docketed and tied, the mind can know,

All schemed by law that God permits to life.

This is the end and there is no beyond.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-03 F-13]

Here is the safety of the ultimate wall,

Here is the clarity of the sword of Light,

Here is the victory of a single Truth,

Here burns the diamond of flawless bliss.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-03 F-14]

A favourite of Heaven and Nature live.”

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-03 F-15]

But to the too satisfied and confident sage

Savitri replied casting into his world

Sight's deep release, the heart's questioning inner voice:

For here the heart spoke not, only clear daylight

Of intellect reigned here, limiting, cold, precise.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-03 F-16]

“Happy are they who in this chaos of things,

This coming and going of the feet of Time,

Can find the single Truth, the eternal Law:

Untouched they live by hope and doubt and fear.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-03 F-17]

Happy are men anchored on fixed belief

In this uncertain and ambiguous world,

Or who have planted in the heart's rich soil

One small grain of spiritual certitude.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-03 F-18]

Happiest who stand on faith as on a rock.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-03 F-19]

But I must pass leaving the ended search,

Truth's rounded outcome firm, immutable

And this harmonic building of world-fact,

This ordered knowledge of apparent things.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-03 F-20]

Here I can stay not, for I seek my soul.”

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-03 F-21]

None answered in that bright contented world,

Or only turned on their accustomed way

Astonished to hear questioning in that air

Or thoughts that could still turn to the Beyond.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-03 F-22]

But some murmured, passers-by from kindred spheres:

Each by his credo judged the thought she spoke.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-03 F-23]

“Who then is this who knows not that the soul

Is a least gland or a secretion's fault

Disquieting the sane government of the mind,

Disordering the function of the brain,

Or a yearning lodged in Nature's mortal house

Or dream whispered in man's cave of hollow thought

Who would prolong his brief unhappy term

Or cling to living in a sea of death?”

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-03 F-24]

But others, “Nay, it is her spirit she seeks.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-03 F-25]

A splendid shadow of the name of God,

A formless lustre from the Ideal's realm,

The Spirit is the Holy Ghost of Mind;

But none has touched its limbs or seen its face.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-03 F-26]

Each soul is the great Father's crucified Son,

Mind is that soul's one parent, its conscious cause,

The ground on which trembles a brief passing light,

Mind, sole creator of the apparent world.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-03 F-27]

All that is here is part of our own self;

Our minds have made the world in which we live.”

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-03 F-28]

Another with mystic and unsatisfied eyes

Who loved his slain belief and mourned its death,

“Is there one left who seeks for a Beyond?

Can still the path be found, opened the gate?”

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-03 F-29]

Play Section Four
[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-04]

So she fared on across her silent self.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-04 F-01]

To a road she came thronged with an ardent crowd

Who sped brilliant, fire-footed, sunlight-eyed,

Pressing to reach the world's mysterious wall,

And pass through masked doorways into outer mind

Where the Light comes not nor the mystic voice,

Messengers from our subliminal greatnesses,

Guests from the cavern of the secret soul.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-04 F-02]

Into dim spiritual somnolence they break

Or shed wide wonder on our waking self,

Ideas that haunt us with their radiant tread,

Dreams that are hints of unborn Reality,

Strange goddesses with deep-pooled magical eyes,

Strong wind-haired gods carrying the harps of hope,

Great moon-hued visions gliding through gold air,

Aspiration's sun-dream head and star-carved limbs,

Emotions making common hearts sublime.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-04 F-03]

And Savitri mingling in that glorious crowd,

Yearning to the spiritual light they bore,

Longed once to hasten like them to save God's world;

But she reined back the high passion in her heart;

She knew that first she must discover her soul.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-04 F-04]

Only who save themselves can others save.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-04 F-05]

In contrary sense she faced life's riddling truth:

They carrying the light to suffering men

Hurried with eager feet to the outer world;

Her eyes were turned towards the eternal source.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-04 F-06]

Outstretching her hands to stay the throng she cried:

“O happy company of luminous gods,

Reveal, who know, the road that I must tread,—

For surely that bright quarter is your home,—

To find the birthplace of the occult Fire

And the deep mansion of my secret soul.”

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-04 F-07]

One answered pointing to a silence dim

On a remote extremity of sleep

In some far background of the inner world.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-04 F-08]

“O Savitri, from thy hidden soul we come.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-04 F-09]

We are the messengers, the occult gods

Who help men's drab and heavy ignorant lives

To wake to beauty and the wonder of things

Touching them with glory and divinity;

In evil we light the deathless flame of good

And hold the torch of knowledge on ignorant roads;

We are thy will and all men's will towards Light.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-04 F-10]

O human copy and disguise of God

Who seekst the deity thou keepest hid

And livest by the Truth thou hast not known,

Follow the world's winding highway to its source.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-04 F-11]

There in the silence few have ever reached,

Thou shalt see the Fire burning on the bare stone

And the deep cavern of thy secret soul.”

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-04 F-12]

Then Savitri following the great winding road

Came where it dwindled into a narrow path

Trod only by rare wounded pilgrim feet.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-04 F-13]

A few bright forms emerged from unknown depths

And looked at her with calm immortal eyes.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-04 F-14]

There was no sound to break the brooding hush;

One felt the silent nearness of the soul.

[Savitri B-07 C-03 S-04 F-15]

Book Seven Canto Three End

The Entry into the Inner Countries

[Savitri B-07 C-03 Canto End]

Savitri | a Legend and a Symbol

Book Seven
The Book of Yoga

Canto Four

The Triple Soul-Forces

[Savitri B-07 C-04 Canto Name]

Play Section One
[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-01]

Here from a low and prone and listless ground

The passion of the first ascent began;

A moon-bright face in a sombre cloud of hair,

A Woman sat in a pale lustrous robe.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-01 F-01]

A rugged and ragged soil was her bare seat,

Beneath her feet a sharp and wounding stone.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-01 F-02]

A divine pity on the peaks of the world,

A spirit touched by the grief of all that lives,

She looked out far and saw from inner mind

This questionable world of outward things,

Of false appearances and plausible shapes,

This dubious cosmos stretched in the ignorant Void,

The pangs of earth, the toil and speed of the stars

And the difficult birth and dolorous end of life.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-01 F-03]

Accepting the universe as her body of woe,

The Mother of the seven sorrows bore

The seven stabs that pierced her bleeding heart:

The beauty of sadness lingered on her face,

Her eyes were dim with the ancient stain of tears.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-01 F-04]

Her heart was riven with the world's agony

And burdened with the sorrow and struggle in Time,

An anguished music trailed in her rapt voice.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-01 F-05]

Absorbed in a deep compassion's ecstasy,

Lifting the mild ray of her patient gaze,

In soft sweet training words slowly she spoke:

“O Savitri, I am thy secret soul.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-01 F-06]

To share the suffering of the world I came,

I draw my children's pangs into my breast.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-01 F-07]

I am the nurse of the dolour beneath the stars;

I am the soul of all who wailing writhe

Under the ruthless harrow of the Gods.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-01 F-08]

I am woman, nurse and slave and beaten beast;

I tend the hands that gave me cruel blows.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-01 F-09]

The hearts that spurned my love and zeal I serve;

I am the courted queen, the pampered doll,

I am the giver of the bowl of rice,

I am the worshipped Angel of the House.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-01 F-10]

I am in all that suffers and that cries.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-01 F-11]

Mine is the prayer that climbs in vain from earth,

I am traversed by my creatures' agonies,

I am the spirit in a world of pain.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-01 F-12]

The scream of tortured flesh and tortured hearts

Fall'n back on heart and flesh unheard by Heaven

Has rent with helpless grief and wrath my soul.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-01 F-13]

I have seen the peasant burning in his hut,

I have seen the slashed corpse of the slaughtered child,

Heard woman's cry ravished and stripped and haled

Amid the bayings of the hell-hound mob,

I have looked on, I had no power to save.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-01 F-14]

I have brought no arm of strength to aid or slay;

God gave me love, he gave me not his force.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-01 F-15]

I have shared the toil of the yoked animal drudge

Pushed by the goad, encouraged by the whip;

I have shared the fear-filled life of bird and beast,

Its long hunt for the day's precarious food,

Its covert slink and crouch and hungry prowl,

Its pain and terror seized by beak and claw.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-01 F-16]

I have shared the daily life of common men,

Its petty pleasures and its petty cares,

Its press of troubles and haggard horde of ills,

Earth's trail of sorrow hopeless of relief,

The unwanted tedious labour without joy,

And the burden of misery and the strokes of fate.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-01 F-17]

I have been pity, leaning over pain

And the tender smile that heals the wounded heart

And sympathy making life less hard to bear.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-01 F-18]

Man has felt near my unseen face and hands;

I have become the sufferer and his moan,

I have lain down with the mangled and the slain,

I have lived with the prisoner in his dungeon cell.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-01 F-19]

Heavy on my shoulders weighs the yoke of Time:

Nothing refusing of creation's load,

I have borne all and know I still must bear:

Perhaps when the world sinks into a last sleep,

I too may sleep in dumb eternal peace.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-01 F-20]

I have borne the calm indifference of Heaven,

Watched Nature's cruelty to suffering things

While God passed silent by nor turned to help.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-01 F-21]

Yet have I cried not out against his will,

Yet have I not accused his cosmic Law.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-01 F-22]

Only to change this great hard world of pain

A patient prayer has risen from my breast;

A pallid resignation lights my brow,

Within me a blind faith and mercy dwell;

I carry the fire that never can be quenched

And the compassion that supports the suns.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-01 F-23]

I am the hope that looks towards my God,

My God who never came to me till now;

His voice I hear that ever says ‘I come’:

I know that one day he shall come at last.”

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-01 F-24]

She ceased, and like an echo from below

Answering her pathos of divine complaint

A voice of wrath took up the dire refrain,

A growl of thunder or roar of angry beast,

The beast that crouching growls within man's depths,—

Voice of a tortured Titan once a God.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-01 F-25]

“I am the Man of Sorrows, I am he

Who is nailed on the wide cross of the universe;

To enjoy my agony God built the earth,

My passion he has made his drama's theme.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-01 F-26]

He has sent me naked into his bitter world

And beaten me with his rods of grief and pain

That I might cry and grovel at his feet

And offer him worship with my blood and tears.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-01 F-27]

I am Prometheus under the vulture's beak,

Man the discoverer of the undying fire,

In the flame he kindled burning like a moth;

I am the seeker who can never find,

I am the fighter who can never win,

I am the runner who never touched his goal:

Hell tortures me with the edges of my thought,

Heaven tortures me with the splendour of my dreams.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-01 F-28]

What profit have I of my animal birth;

What profit have I of my human soul?

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-01 F-29]

I toil like the animal, like the animal die.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-01 F-30]

I am man the rebel, man the helpless serf;

Fate and my fellows cheat me of my wage.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-01 F-31]

I loosen with my blood my servitude's seal

And shake from my aching neck the oppressor's knees

Only to seat new tyrants on my back:

My teachers lesson me in slavery,

I am shown God's stamp and my own signature

Upon the sorry contract of my fate.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-01 F-32]

I have loved, but none has loved me since my birth;

My fruit of works is given to other hands.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-01 F-33]

All that is left me is my evil thoughts,

My sordid quarrel against God and man,

Envy of the riches that I cannot share,

Hate of a happiness that is not mine.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-01 F-34]

I know my fate will ever be the same,

It is my nature's work that cannot change:

I have loved for mine, not for the beloved's sake,

I have lived for myself and not for others' lives.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-01 F-35]

Each in himself is sole by Nature's law.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-01 F-36]

So God has made his harsh and dreadful world,

So has he built the petty heart of man.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-01 F-37]

Only by force and ruse can man survive:

For pity is a weakness in his breast,

His goodness is a laxity in the nerves,

His kindness an investment for return,

His altruism is ego's other face:

He serves the world that him the world may serve.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-01 F-38]

If once the Titan's strength could wake in me,

If Enceladus from Etna could arise,

I then would reign the master of the world

And like a god enjoy man's bliss and pain.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-01 F-39]

But God has taken from me the ancient Force.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-01 F-40]

There is a dull consent in my sluggish heart,

A fierce satisfaction with my special pangs

As if they made me taller than my kind;

Only by suffering can I excel.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-01 F-41]

I am the victim of titanic ills,

I am the doer of demoniac deeds;

I was made for evil, evil is my lot;

Evil I must be and by evil live;

Nought other can I do but be myself;

What Nature made me, that I must remain.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-01 F-42]

I suffer and toil and weep; I moan and hate.”

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-01 F-43]

And Savitri heard the voice, the echo heard

And turning to her being of pity spoke:

“Madonna of suffering, Mother of grief divine,

Thou art a portion of my soul put forth

To bear the unbearable sorrow of the world.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-01 F-44]

Because thou art, men yield not to their doom,

But ask for happiness and strive with fate;

Because thou art, the wretched still can hope.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-01 F-45]

But thine is the power to solace, not to save.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-01 F-46]

One day I will return, a bringer of strength,

And make thee drink from the Eternal's cup;

His streams of force shall triumph in thy limbs

And Wisdom's calm control thy passionate heart.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-01 F-47]

Thy love shall be the bond of humankind,

Compassion the bright key of Nature's acts:

Misery shall pass abolished from the earth;

The world shall be freed from the anger of the Beast,

From the cruelty of the Titan and his pain.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-01 F-48]

There shall be peace and joy for ever more.”

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-01 F-49]

Play Section Two
[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-02]

On passed she in her spirit's upward route.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-02 F-01]

An ardent grandeur climbed mid ferns and rocks,

A quiet wind flattered the heart to warmth,

A finer perfume breathed from slender trees.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-02 F-02]

All beautiful grew, subtle and high and strange.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-02 F-03]

Here on a boulder carved like a huge throne

A Woman sat in gold and purple sheen,

Armed with the trident and the thunderbolt,

Her feet upon a couchant lion's back.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-02 F-04]

A formidable smile curved round her lips,

Heaven-fire laughed in the corners of her eyes;

Her body a mass of courage and heavenly strength,

She menaced the triumph of the nether gods.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-02 F-05]

A halo of lightnings flamed around her head

And sovereignty, a great cestus, zoned her robe

And majesty and victory sat with her

Guarding in the wide cosmic battlefield

Against the flat equality of Death

And the all-levelling insurgent Night

The hierarchy of the ordered Powers,

The high changeless values, the peaked eminences,

The privileged aristocracy of Truth,

And in the governing Ideal's sun

The triumvirate of wisdom, love and bliss

And the sole autocracy of the absolute Light.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-02 F-06]

August on her seat in the inner world of Mind,

The Mother of Might looked down on passing things,

Listened to the advancing tread of Time,

Saw the irresistible wheeling of the suns

And heard the thunder of the march of God.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-02 F-07]

Amid the swaying Forces in their strife

Sovereign was her word of luminous command,

Her speech like a war-cry rang or a pilgrim chant.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-02 F-08]

A charm restoring hope in failing hearts

Aspired the harmony of her puissant voice:

“O Savitri, I am thy secret soul.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-02 F-09]

I have come down into the human world

And the movement watched by an unsleeping Eye

And the dark contrariety of earth's fate

And the battle of the bright and sombre Powers.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-02 F-10]

I stand upon earth's paths of danger and grief

And help the unfortunate and save the doomed.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-02 F-11]

To the strong I bring the guerdon of their strength,

To the weak I bring the armour of my force;

To men who long I carry their coveted joy:

I am fortune justifying the great and wise

By the sanction of the plaudits of the crowd,

Then trampling them with the armed heel of fate.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-02 F-12]

My ear is leaned to the cry of the oppressed,

I topple down the thrones of tyrant kings:

A cry comes from proscribed and hunted lives

Appealing to me against a pitiless world,

A voice of the forsaken and desolate

And the lone prisoner in his dungeon cell.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-02 F-13]

Men hail in my coming the Almighty's force

Or praise with thankful tears his saviour Grace.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-02 F-14]

I smite the Titan who bestrides the world

And slay the ogre in his blood-stained den.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-02 F-15]

I am Durga, goddess of the proud and strong,

And Lakshmi, queen of the fair and fortunate;

I wear the face of Kali when I kill,

I trample the corpses of the demon hordes.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-02 F-16]

I am charged by God to do his mighty work,

Uncaring I serve his will who sent me forth,

Reckless of peril and earthly consequence.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-02 F-17]

I reason not of virtue and of sin

But do the deed he has put into my heart.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-02 F-18]

I fear not for the angry frown of Heaven,

I flinch not from the red assault of Hell;

I crush the opposition of the gods,

Tread down a million goblin obstacles.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-02 F-19]

I guide man to the path of the Divine

And guard him from the red Wolf and the Snake.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-02 F-20]

I set in his mortal hand my heavenly sword

And put on him the breastplate of the gods.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-02 F-21]

I break the ignorant pride of human mind

And lead the thought to the wideness of the Truth;

I rend man's narrow and successful life

And force his sorrowful eyes to gaze at the sun

That he may die to earth and live in his soul.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-02 F-22]

I know the goal, I know the secret route;

I have studied the map of the invisible worlds;

I am the battle's head, the journey's star.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-02 F-23]

But the great obstinate world resists my Word,

And the crookedness and evil in man's heart

Is stronger than Reason, profounder than the Pit,

And the malignancy of hostile Powers

Puts craftily back the clock of destiny

And mightier seems than the eternal Will.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-02 F-24]

The cosmic evil is too deep to unroot,

The cosmic suffering is too vast to heal.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-02 F-25]

A few I guide who pass me towards the Light;

A few I save, the mass falls back unsaved;

A few I help, the many strive and fail.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-02 F-26]

But my heart I have hardened and I do my work:

Slowly the light grows greater in the East,

Slowly the world progresses on God's road.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-02 F-27]

His seal is on my task, it cannot fail:

I shall hear the silver swing of heaven's gates

When God comes out to meet the soul of the world.”

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-02 F-28]

She spoke and from the lower human world

An answer, a warped echo met her speech;

The voice came through the spaces of the mind

Of the dwarf-Titan, the deformed chained god

Who strives to master his nature's rebel stuff

And make the universe his instrument.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-02 F-29]

The Ego of this great world of desire

Claimed earth and the wide heavens for the use

Of man, head of the life it shapes on earth,

Its representative and conscious soul,

And symbol of evolving light and force

And vessel of the godhead that must be.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-02 F-30]

A thinking animal, Nature's struggling lord,

Has made of her his nurse and tool and slave

And pays to her as wage and emolument

Inescapably by a deep law in things

His heart's grief and his body's death and pain:

His pains are her means to grow, to see and feel;

His death assists her immortality.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-02 F-31]

A tool and slave of his own slave and tool,

He praises his free will and his master mind

And is pushed by her upon her chosen paths;

Possessor he is possessed and, ruler, ruled,

Her conscious automaton, her desire's dupe.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-02 F-32]

His soul is her guest, a sovereign mute, inert,

His body her robot, his life her way to live,

His conscious mind her strong revolted serf.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-02 F-33]

The voice rose up and smote some inner sun.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-02 F-34]

“I am the heir of the forces of the earth,

Slowly I make good my right to my estate;

A growing godhead in her divinised mud,

I climb, a claimant to the throne of heaven.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-02 F-35]

The last-born of the earth I stand the first;

Her slow millenniums waited for my birth.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-02 F-36]

Although I live in Time besieged by Death,

Precarious owner of my body and soul

Housed on a little speck amid the stars,

For me and my use the universe was made.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-02 F-37]

Immortal spirit in the perishing clay,

I am God still unevolved in human form;

Even if he is not, he becomes in me.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-02 F-38]

The sun and moon are lights upon my path;

Air was invented for my lungs to breathe,

Conditioned as a wide and wall-less space

For my winged chariot's wheels to cleave a road,

The sea was made for me to swim and sail

And bear my golden commerce on its back:

It laughs cloven by my pleasure's gliding keel,

I laugh at its black stare of fate and death.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-02 F-39]

The earth is my floor, the sky my living's roof.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-02 F-40]

All was prepared through many a silent age,

God made experiments with animal shapes,

Then only when all was ready I was born.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-02 F-41]

I was born weak and small and ignorant,

A helpless creature in a difficult world

Travelling through my brief years with death at my side;

I have grown greater than Nature, wiser than God.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-02 F-42]

I have made real what she never dreamed,

I have seized her powers and harnessed for my work,

I have shaped her metals and new metals made;

I will make glass and raiment out of milk,

Make iron velvet, water unbreakable stone,

Like God in his astuce of artist skill,

Mould from one primal plasm protean forms,

In single Nature multitudinous lives,

All that imagination can conceive

In mind intangible, remould anew

In Matter's plastic solid and concrete.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-02 F-43]

No magic can surpass my magic's skill.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-02 F-44]

There is no miracle I shall not achieve.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-02 F-45]

What God imperfect left, I will complete,

Out of a tangled mind and half-made soul

His sin and error I will eliminate;

What he invented not, I shall invent:

He was the first creator, I am the last.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-02 F-46]

I have found the atoms from which he built the worlds:

The first tremendous cosmic energy

Missioned shall leap to slay my enemy kin,

Expunge a nation or abolish a race,

Death's silence leave where there was laughter and joy.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-02 F-47]

Or the fissured invisible shall spend God's force

To extend my comforts and expand my wealth,

To speed my car which now the lightnings drive

And turn the engines of my miracles.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-02 F-48]

I will take his means of sorcery from his hands

And do with them greater wonders than his best.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-02 F-49]

Yet through it all I have kept my balanced thought;

I have studied my being, I have examined the world,

I have grown a master of the arts of life.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-02 F-50]

I have tamed the wild beast, trained to be my friend;

He guards my house, looks up waiting my will.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-02 F-51]

I have taught my kind to serve and to obey.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-02 F-52]

I have used the mystery of the cosmic waves

To see far distance and to hear far words;

I have conquered Space and knitted close all earth.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-02 F-53]

Soon I shall know the secrets of the Mind;

I play with knowledge and with ignorance

And sin and virtue my inventions are

I can transcend or sovereignly use.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-02 F-54]

I shall know mystic truths, seize occult powers.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-02 F-55]

I shall slay my enemies with a look or thought,

I shall sense the unspoken feelings of all hearts

And see and hear the hidden thoughts of men.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-02 F-56]

When earth is mastered, I shall conquer heaven;

The gods shall be my aides or menial folk,

No wish I harbour unfulfilled shall die:

Omnipotence and omniscience shall be mine.”

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-02 F-57]

And Savitri heard the voice, the warped echo heard

And turning to her being of power she spoke:

“Madonna of might, Mother of works and force,

Thou art a portion of my soul put forth

To help mankind and help the travail of Time.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-02 F-58]

Because thou art in him, man hopes and dares;

Because thou art, men's souls can climb the heavens

And walk like gods in the presence of the Supreme.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-02 F-59]

But without wisdom power is like a wind,

It can breathe upon the heights and kiss the sky,

It cannot build the extreme eternal things.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-02 F-60]

Thou hast given men strength, wisdom thou couldst not give.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-02 F-61]

One day I will return, a bringer of light;

Then will I give to thee the mirror of God;

Thou shalt see self and world as by him they are seen

Reflected in the bright pool of thy soul.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-02 F-62]

Thy wisdom shall be vast as vast thy power.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-02 F-63]

Then hate shall dwell no more in human hearts,

And fear and weakness shall desert men's lives,

The cry of the ego shall be hushed within,

Its lion roar that claims the world as food,

All shall be might and bliss and happy force.”

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-02 F-64]

Play Section Three
[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-03]

Ascending still her spirit's upward route

She came into a high and happy space,

A wide tower of vision whence all could be seen

And all was centred in a single view

As when by distance separate scenes grow one

And a harmony is made of hues at war.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-03 F-01]

The wind was still and fragrance packed the air.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-03 F-02]

There was a carol of birds and murmur of bees,

And all that is common and natural and sweet,

Yet intimately divine to heart and soul.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-03 F-03]

A nearness thrilled of the spirit to its source

And deepest things seemed obvious, close and true.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-03 F-04]

Here, living centre of that vision of peace,

A Woman sat in clear and crystal light:

Heaven had unveiled its lustre in her eyes,

Her feet were moonbeams, her face was a bright sun,

Her smile could persuade a dead lacerated heart

To live again and feel the hands of calm.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-03 F-05]

A low music heard became her floating voice:

“O Savitri, I am thy secret soul.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-03 F-06]

I have come down to the wounded desolate earth

To heal her pangs and lull her heart to rest

And lay her head upon the Mother's lap

That she may dream of God and know his peace

And draw the harmony of higher spheres

Into the rhythm of earth's rude troubled days.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-03 F-07]

I show to her the figures of bright gods

And bring strength and solace to her struggling life;

High things that now are only words and forms

I reveal to her in the body of their power.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-03 F-08]

I am peace that steals into man's war-worn breast,

Amid the reign of Hell his acts create

A hostel where Heaven's messengers can lodge;

I am charity with the kindly hands that bless,

I am silence mid the noisy tramp of life;

I am Knowledge poring on her cosmic map.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-03 F-09]

In the anomalies of the human heart

Where Good and Evil are close bedfellows

And Light is by Darkness dogged at every step,

Where his largest knowledge is an ignorance,

I am the Power that labours towards the best

And works for God and looks up towards the heights.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-03 F-10]

I make even sin and error stepping-stones

And all experience a long march towards Light.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-03 F-11]

Out of the Inconscient I build consciousness,

And lead through death to reach immortal Life.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-03 F-12]

Many are God's forms by which he grows in man;

They stamp his thoughts and deeds with divinity,

Uplift the stature of the human clay

Or slowly transmute it into heaven's gold.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-03 F-13]

He is the Good for which men fight and die,

He is the war of Right with Titan wrong;

He is Freedom rising deathless from her pyre;

He is Valour guarding still the desperate pass

Or lone and erect on the shattered barricade

Or a sentinel in the dangerous echoing Night.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-03 F-14]

He is the crown of the martyr burned in flame

And the glad resignation of the saint

And courage indifferent to the wounds of Time

And the hero's might wrestling with death and fate.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-03 F-15]

He is Wisdom incarnate on a glorious throne

And the calm autocracy of the sage's rule.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-03 F-16]

He is the high and solitary Thought

Aloof above the ignorant multitude:

He is the prophet's voice, the sight of the seer.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-03 F-17]

He is Beauty, nectar of the passionate soul,

He is the Truth by which the spirit lives.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-03 F-18]

He is the riches of the spiritual Vast

Poured out in healing streams on indigent Life;

He is Eternity lured from hour to hour,

He is infinity in a little space:

He is immortality in the arms of death.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-03 F-19]

These powers I am and at my call they come.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-03 F-20]

Thus slowly I lift man's soul nearer the Light.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-03 F-21]

But human mind clings to its ignorance

And to its littleness the human heart

And to its right to grief the earthly life.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-03 F-22]

Only when Eternity takes Time by the hand,

Only when infinity weds the finite's thought,

Can man be free from himself and live with God.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-03 F-23]

I bring meanwhile the gods upon the earth;

I bring back hope to the despairing heart;

I give peace to the humble and the great,

And shed my grace on the foolish and the wise.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-03 F-24]

I shall save earth, if earth consents to be saved.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-03 F-25]

Then Love shall at last unwounded tread earth's soil;

Man's mind shall admit the sovereignty of Truth

And body bear the immense descent of God.”

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-03 F-26]

She spoke and from the ignorant nether plane

A cry, a warped echo naked and shuddering came.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-03 F-27]

A voice of the sense-shackled human mind

Carried its proud complaint of godlike power

Hedged by the limits of a mortal's thoughts,

Bound in the chains of earthly ignorance.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-03 F-28]

Imprisoned in his body and his brain

The mortal cannot see God's mighty whole,

Or share in his vast and deep identity

Who stands unguessed within our ignorant hearts

And knows all things because he is one with all.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-03 F-29]

Man only sees the cosmic surfaces.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-03 F-30]

Then wondering what may lie hid from the sense

A little way he delves to depths below:

But soon he stops, he cannot reach life's core

Or commune with the throbbing heart of things.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-03 F-31]

He sees the naked body of the Truth

Though often baffled by her endless garbs,

But cannot look upon her soul within.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-03 F-32]

Then, furious for a knowledge absolute,

He tears all details out and stabs and digs:

Only the shape's contents he holds for use;

The spirit escapes or dies beneath his knife.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-03 F-33]

He sees as a blank stretch, a giant waste

The crowding riches of infinity.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-03 F-34]

The finite he has made his central field,

Its plan dissects, masters its processes,

That which moves all is hidden from his gaze,

His poring eyes miss the unseen behind.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-03 F-35]

He has the blind man's subtle unerring touch

Or the slow traveller's sight of distant scenes;

The soul's revealing contacts are not his.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-03 F-36]

Yet is he visited by intuitive light

And inspiration comes from the Unknown;

But only reason and sense he feels as sure,

They only are his trusted witnesses.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-03 F-37]

Thus is he baulked, his splendid effort vain;

His knowledge scans bright pebbles on the shore

Of the huge ocean of his ignorance.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-03 F-38]

Yet grandiose were the accents of that cry,

A cosmic pathos trembled in its tone.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-03 F-39]

“I am the mind of God's great ignorant world

Ascending to knowledge by the steps he made;

I am the all-discovering Thought of man.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-03 F-40]

I am a god fettered by Matter and sense,

An animal prisoned in a fence of thorns,

A beast of labour asking for his food,

A smith tied to his anvil and his forge.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-03 F-41]

Yet have I loosened the cord, enlarged my room.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-03 F-42]

I have mapped the heavens and analysed the stars,

Described their orbits through the grooves of Space,

Measured the miles that separate the suns,

Computed their longevity in Time.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-03 F-43]

I have delved into earth's bowels and torn out

The riches guarded by her dull brown soil.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-03 F-44]

I have classed the changes of her stony crust

And of her biography discovered the dates,

Rescued the pages of all Nature's plan.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-03 F-45]

The tree of evolution I have sketched,

Each branch and twig and leaf in its own place,

In the embryo tracked the history of forms,

And the genealogy framed of all that lives.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-03 F-46]

I have detected plasm and cell and gene,

The protozoa traced, man's ancestors,

The humble originals from whom he rose;

I know how he was born and how he dies:

Only what end he serves I know not yet

Or if there is aim at all or any end

Or push of rich creative purposeful joy

In the wide works of the terrestrial power.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-03 F-47]

I have caught her intricate processes, none is left:

Her huge machinery is in my hands;

I have seized the cosmic energies for my use.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-03 F-48]

I have pored on her infinitesimal elements

And her invisible atoms have unmasked:

All Matter is a book I have perused;

Only some pages now are left to read.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-03 F-49]

I have seen the ways of life, the paths of mind;

I have studied the methods of the ant and ape

And the behaviour learned of man and worm.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-03 F-50]

If God is at work, his secrets I have found.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-03 F-51]

But still the Cause of things is left in doubt,

Their truth flees from pursuit into a void;

When all has been explained nothing is known.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-03 F-52]

What chose the process, whence the Power sprang

I know not and perhaps shall never know.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-03 F-53]

A mystery is this mighty Nature's birth;

A mystery is the elusive stream of mind,

A mystery the protean freak of life.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-03 F-54]

What I have learned, Chance leaps to contradict;

What I have built is seized and torn by Fate.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-03 F-55]

I can foresee the acts of Matter's force,

But not the march of the destiny of man:

He is driven upon paths he did not choose,

He falls trampled underneath the rolling wheels.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-03 F-56]

My great philosophies are a reasoned guess;

The mystic heavens that claim the human soul

Are a charlatanism of the imagining brain:

All is a speculation or a dream.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-03 F-57]

In the end the world itself becomes a doubt:

The infinitesimal's jest mocks mass and shape,

A laugh peals from the infinite's finite mask.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-03 F-58]

Perhaps the world is an error of our sight,

A trick repeated in each flash of sense,

An unreal mind hallucinates the soul

With a stress-vision of false reality,

Or a dance of Maya veils the void Unborn.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-03 F-59]

Even if a greater consciousness I could reach,

What profit is it then for Thought to win

A Real which is for ever ineffable

Or hunt to its lair the bodiless Self or make

The Unknowable the target of the soul?

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-03 F-60]

Nay, let me work within my mortal bounds,

Not live beyond life nor think beyond the mind;

Our smallness saves us from the Infinite.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-03 F-61]

In a frozen grandeur lone and desolate

Call me not to die the great eternal death,

Left naked of my own humanity

In the chill vast of the spirit's boundlessness.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-03 F-62]

Each creature by its nature's limits lives,

And how can one evade his native fate?

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-03 F-63]

Human I am, human let me remain

Till in the Inconscient I fall dumb and sleep.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-03 F-64]

A high insanity, a chimaera is this,

To think that God lives hidden in the clay

And that eternal Truth can dwell in Time,

And call to her to save our self and world.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-03 F-65]

How can man grow immortal and divine

Transmuting the very stuff of which he is made?

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-03 F-66]

This wizard gods may dream, not thinking men.”

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-03 F-67]

And Savitri heard the voice, the warped answer heard

And turning to her being of light she spoke:

“Madonna of light, Mother of joy and peace,

Thou art a portion of my self put forth

To raise the spirit to its forgotten heights

And wake the soul by touches of the heavens.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-03 F-68]

Because thou art, the soul draws near to God;

Because thou art, love grows in spite of hate

And knowledge walks unslain in the pit of Night.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-03 F-69]

But not by showering heaven's golden rain

Upon the intellect's hard and rocky soil

Can the tree of Paradise flower on earthly ground

And the Bird of Paradise sit upon life's boughs

And the winds of Paradise visit mortal air.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-03 F-70]

Even if thou rain down intuition's rays,

The mind of man will think it earth's own gleam,

His spirit by spiritual ego sink,

Or his soul dream shut in sainthood's brilliant cell

Where only a bright shadow of God can come.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-03 F-71]

His hunger for the eternal thou must nurse

And fill his yearning heart with heaven's fire

And bring God down into his body and life.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-03 F-72]

One day I will return, His hand in mine,

And thou shalt see the face of the Absolute.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-03 F-73]

Then shall the holy marriage be achieved,

Then shall the divine family be born.

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-03 F-74]

There shall be light and peace in all the worlds.”

[Savitri B-07 C-04 S-03 F-75]

Book Seven Canto Four End

The Triple Soul-Forces

[Savitri B-07 C-04 Canto End]

Savitri | a Legend and a Symbol

Book Seven
The Book of Yoga

Canto Five

The Finding of the Soul

[Savitri B-07 C-05 Canto Name]

Play Section One
[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-01]

Onward she passed seeking the soul's mystic cave.

[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-01 F-01]

At first she stepped into a night of God.

[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-01 F-02]

The light was quenched that helps the labouring world,

The power that struggles and stumbles in our life;

This inefficient mind gave up its thoughts,

The striving heart its unavailing hopes.

[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-01 F-03]

All knowledge failed and the Idea's forms

And Wisdom screened in awe her lowly head

Feeling a Truth too great for thought or speech,

Formless, ineffable, for ever the same.

[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-01 F-04]

An innocent and holy Ignorance

Adored like one who worships formless God

The unseen Light she could not claim nor own.

[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-01 F-05]

In a simple purity of emptiness

Her mind knelt down before the unknowable.

[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-01 F-06]

All was abolished save her naked self

And the prostrate yearning of her surrendered heart:

There was no strength in her, no pride of force;

The lofty burning of desire had sunk

Ashamed, a vanity of separate self,

The hope of spiritual greatness fled,

Salvation she asked not nor a heavenly crown:

Humility seemed now too proud a state.

[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-01 F-07]

Her self was nothing, God alone was all,

Yet God she knew not but only knew he was.

[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-01 F-08]

A sacred darkness brooded now within,

The world was a deep darkness great and nude.

[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-01 F-09]

This void held more than all the teeming worlds,

This blank felt more than all that Time has borne,

This dark knew dumbly, immensely the Unknown.

[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-01 F-10]

But all was formless, voiceless, infinite.

[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-01 F-11]

As might a shadow walk in a shadowy scene,

A small nought passing through a mightier Nought,

A night of person in a bare outline

Crossing a fathomless impersonal Night,

Silent she moved, empty and absolute.

[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-01 F-12]

In endless Time her soul reached a wide end,

The spaceless Vast became her spirit's place.

[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-01 F-13]

At last a change approached, the emptiness broke;

A wave rippled within, the world had stirred;

Once more her inner self became her space.

[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-01 F-14]

There was felt a blissful nearness to the goal;

Heaven leaned low to kiss the sacred hill,

The air trembled with passion and delight.

[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-01 F-15]

A rose of splendour on a tree of dreams,

The face of Dawn out of mooned twilight grew.

[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-01 F-16]

Day came, priest of a sacrifice of joy

Into the worshipping silence of her world;

He carried immortal lustre as his robe,

Trailed heaven like a purple scarf and wore

As his vermilion caste-mark a red sun.

[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-01 F-17]

As if an old remembered dream come true,

She recognised in her prophetic mind

The imperishable lustre of that sky,

The tremulous sweetness of that happy air

And, covered from mind's view and life's approach,

The mystic cavern in the sacred hill

And knew the dwelling of her secret soul.

[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-01 F-18]

As if in some Elysian occult depth,

Truth's last retreat from thought's profaning touch,

As if in a rock-temple's solitude hid,

God's refuge from an ignorant worshipping world,

It lay withdrawn even from life's inner sense,

Receding from the entangled heart's desire.

[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-01 F-19]

A marvellous brooding twilight met the eyes

And a holy stillness held that voiceless space.

[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-01 F-20]

An awful dimness wrapped the great rock-doors

Carved in the massive stone of Matter's trance.

[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-01 F-21]

Two golden serpents round the lintel curled,

Enveloping it with their pure and dreadful strength,

Looked out with wisdom's deep and luminous eyes.

[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-01 F-22]

An eagle covered it with wide conquering wings:

Flames of self-lost immobile reverie,

Doves crowded the grey musing cornices

Like sculptured postures of white-bosomed peace.

[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-01 F-23]

Across the threshold's sleep she entered in

And found herself amid great figures of gods

Conscious in stone and living without breath,

Watching with fixed regard the soul of man,

Executive figures of the cosmic self,

World-symbols of immutable potency.

[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-01 F-24]

On the walls covered with significant shapes

Looked at her the life-scene of man and beast

And the high meaning of the life of gods,

The power and necessity of these numberless worlds,

And faces of beings and stretches of world-space

Spoke the succinct and inexhaustible

Hieratic message of the climbing planes.

[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-01 F-25]

In their immensitude signing infinity

They were the extension of the self of God

And housed, impassively receiving all,

His figures and his small and mighty acts

And his passion and his birth and life and death

And his return to immortality.

[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-01 F-26]

To the abiding and eternal is their climb,

To the pure existence everywhere the same,

To the sheer consciousness and the absolute force

And the unimaginable and formless bliss,

To the mirth in Time and the timeless mystery

Of the triune being who is all and one

And yet is no one but himself apart.

[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-01 F-27]

There was no step of breathing men, no sound,

Only the living nearness of the soul.

[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-01 F-28]

Yet all the worlds and God himself were there,

For every symbol was a reality

And brought the presence which had given it life.

[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-01 F-29]

All this she saw and inly felt and knew

Not by some thought of mind but by the self.

[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-01 F-30]

A light not born of sun or moon or fire,

A light that dwelt within and saw within

Shedding an intimate visibility

Made secrecy more revealing than the word:

Our sight and sense are a fallible gaze and touch

And only the spirit's vision is wholly true.

[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-01 F-31]

As thus she passed in that mysterious place

Through room and room, through door and rock-hewn door,

She felt herself made one with all she saw.

[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-01 F-32]

A sealed identity within her woke;

She knew herself the Beloved of the Supreme:

These Gods and Goddesses were he and she:

The Mother was she of Beauty and Delight,

The Word in Brahma's vast creating clasp,

The World-Puissance on almighty Shiva's lap,—

The Master and the Mother of all lives

Watching the worlds their twin regard had made,

And Krishna and Radha for ever entwined in bliss,

The Adorer and Adored self-lost and one.

[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-01 F-33]

In the last chamber on a golden seat

One sat whose shape no vision could define;

Only one felt the world's unattainable fount,

A Power of which she was a straying Force,

An invisible Beauty, goal of the world's desire,

A Sun of which all knowledge is a beam,

A Greatness without whom no life could be.

[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-01 F-34]

Thence all departed into silent self,

And all became formless and pure and bare.

[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-01 F-35]

Then through a tunnel dug in the last rock

She came out where there shone a deathless sun.

[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-01 F-36]

A house was there all made of flame and light

And crossing a wall of doorless living fire

There suddenly she met her secret soul.

[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-01 F-37]

Play Section Two
[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-02]

A being stood immortal in transience,

Deathless dallying with momentary things,

In whose wide eyes of tranquil happiness

Which pity and sorrow could not abrogate

Infinity turned its gaze on finite shapes:

Observer of the silent steps of the hours,

Eternity upheld the minute's acts

And the passing scenes of the Everlasting's play.

[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-02 F-01]

In the mystery of its selecting will,

In the Divine Comedy a participant,

The Spirit's conscious representative,

God's delegate in our humanity,

Comrade of the universe, the Transcendent's ray,

She had come into the mortal body's room

To play at ball with Time and Circumstance.

[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-02 F-02]

A joy in the world her master movement here,

The passion of the game lighted her eyes:

A smile on her lips welcomed earth's bliss and grief,

A laugh was her return to pleasure and pain.

[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-02 F-03]

All things she saw as a masquerade of Truth

Disguised in the costumes of Ignorance,

Crossing the years to immortality;

All she could front with the strong spirit's peace.

[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-02 F-04]

But since she knows the toil of mind and life

As a mother feels and shares her children's lives,

She puts forth a small portion of herself,

A being no bigger than the thumb of man

Into a hidden region of the heart

To face the pang and to forget the bliss,

To share the suffering and endure earth's wounds

And labour mid the labour of the stars.

[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-02 F-05]

This in us laughs and weeps, suffers the stroke,

Exults in victory, struggles for the crown;

Identified with the mind and body and life,

It takes on itself their anguish and defeat,

Bleeds with Fate's whips and hangs upon the cross,

Yet is the unwounded and immortal self

Supporting the actor in the human scene.

[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-02 F-06]

Through this she sends us her glory and her powers,

Pushes to wisdom's heights, through misery's gulfs;

She gives us strength to do our daily task

And sympathy that partakes of others' grief

And the little strength we have to help our race,

We who must fill the role of the universe

Acting itself out in a slight human shape

And on our shoulders carry the struggling world.

[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-02 F-07]

This is in us the godhead small and marred;

In this human portion of divinity

She seats the greatness of the Soul in Time

To uplift from light to light, from power to power,

Till on a heavenly peak it stands, a king.

[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-02 F-08]

In body weak, in its heart an invincible might,

It climbs stumbling, held up by an unseen hand,

A toiling spirit in a mortal shape.

[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-02 F-09]

Here in this chamber of flame and light they met;

They looked upon each other, knew themselves,

The secret deity and its human part,

The calm immortal and the struggling soul.

[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-02 F-10]

Then with a magic transformation's speed

They rushed into each other and grew one.

[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-02 F-11]

Play Section Three
[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-03]

Once more she was human upon earthly soil

In the muttering night amid the rain-swept woods

And the rude cottage where she sat in trance:

That subtle world withdrew deeply within

Behind the sun-veil of the inner sight.

[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-03 F-01]

But now the half-opened lotus bud of her heart

Had bloomed and stood disclosed to the earthly ray;

In an image shone revealed her secret soul.

[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-03 F-02]

There was no wall severing the soul and mind,

No mystic fence guarding from the claims of life.

[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-03 F-03]

In its deep lotus home her being sat

As if on concentration's marble seat,

Calling the mighty Mother of the worlds

To make this earthly tenement her house.

[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-03 F-04]

As in a flash from a supernal light,

A living image of the original Power,

A face, a form came down into her heart

And made of it its temple and pure abode.

[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-03 F-05]

But when its feet had touched the quivering bloom,

A mighty movement rocked the inner space

As if a world were shaken and found its soul:

Out of the Inconscient's soulless mindless night

A flaming Serpent rose released from sleep.

[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-03 F-06]

It rose billowing its coils and stood erect

And climbing mightily, stormily on its way

It touched her centres with its flaming mouth;

As if a fiery kiss had broken their sleep,

They bloomed and laughed surcharged with light and bliss.

[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-03 F-07]

Then at the crown it joined the Eternal's space.

[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-03 F-08]

In the flower of the head, in the flower of Matter's base,

In each divine stronghold and Nature-knot

It held together the mystic stream which joins

The viewless summits with the unseen depths,

The string of forts that make the frail defence

Safeguarding us against the enormous world,

Our lines of self-expression in its Vast.

[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-03 F-09]

An image sat of the original Power

Wearing the mighty Mother's form and face.

[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-03 F-10]

Armed, bearer of the weapon and the sign

Whose occult might no magic can imitate,

Manifold yet one she sat, a guardian force:

A saviour gesture stretched her lifted arm,

And symbol of some native cosmic strength,

A sacred beast lay prone below her feet,

A silent flame-eyed mass of living force.

[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-03 F-11]

All underwent a high celestial change:

Breaking the black Inconscient's blind mute wall,

Effacing the circles of the Ignorance,

Powers and divinities burst flaming forth;

Each part of the being trembling with delight

Lay overwhelmed with tides of happiness

And saw her hand in every circumstance

And felt her touch in every limb and cell.

[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-03 F-12]

In the country of the lotus of the head

Which thinking mind has made its busy space,

In the castle of the lotus twixt the brows

Whence it shoots the arrows of its sight and will,

In the passage of the lotus of the throat

Where speech must rise and the expressing mind

And the heart's impulse run towards word and act,

A glad uplift and a new working came.

[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-03 F-13]

The immortal's thoughts displaced our bounded view,

The immortal's thoughts earth's drab idea and sense;

All things now bore a deeper heavenlier sense.

[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-03 F-14]

A glad clear harmony marked their truth's outline,

Reset the balance and measures of the world.

[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-03 F-15]

Each shape showed its occult design, unveiled

God's meaning in it for which it was made

And the vivid splendour of his artist thought.

[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-03 F-16]

A channel of the mighty Mother's choice,

The immortal's will took into its calm control

Our blind or erring government of life;

A loose republic once of wants and needs,

Then bowed to the uncertain sovereign mind,

Life now obeyed to a diviner rule

And every act became an act of God.

[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-03 F-17]

In the kingdom of the lotus of the heart

Love chanting its pure hymeneal hymn

Made life and body mirrors of sacred joy

And all the emotions gave themselves to God.

[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-03 F-18]

In the navel lotus' broad imperial range

Its proud ambitions and its master lusts

Were tamed into instruments of a great calm sway

To do a work of God on earthly soil.

[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-03 F-19]

In the narrow nether centre's petty parts

Its childish game of daily dwarf desires

Was changed into a sweet and boisterous play,

A romp of little gods with life in Time.

[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-03 F-20]

In the deep place where once the Serpent slept,

There came a grip on Matter's giant powers

For large utilities in life's little space;

A firm ground was made for Heaven's descending might.

[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-03 F-21]

Behind all reigned her sovereign deathless soul:

Casting aside its veil of Ignorance,

Allied to gods and cosmic beings and powers

It built the harmony of its human state;

Surrendered into the great World-Mother's hands

Only she obeyed her sole supreme behest

In the enigma of the Inconscient's world.

[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-03 F-22]

A secret soul behind supporting all

Is master and witness of our ignorant life,

Admits the Person's look and Nature's role.

[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-03 F-23]

But once the hidden doors are flung apart

Then the veiled king steps out in Nature's front;

A Light comes down into the Ignorance,

Its heavy painful knot loosens its grasp:

The mind becomes a mastered instrument

And life a hue and figure of the soul.

[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-03 F-24]

All happily grows towards knowledge and towards bliss.

[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-03 F-25]

A divine Puissance then takes Nature's place

And pushes the movements of our body and mind;

Possessor of our passionate hopes and dreams,

The beloved despot of our thoughts and acts,

She streams into us with her unbound force,

Into mortal limbs the Immortal's rapture and power.

[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-03 F-26]

An inner law of beauty shapes our lives;

Our words become the natural speech of Truth,

Each thought is a ripple on a sea of Light.

[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-03 F-27]

Then sin and virtue leave the cosmic lists;

They struggle no more in our delivered hearts:

Our acts chime with God's simple natural good

Or serve the rule of a supernal Right.

[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-03 F-28]

All moods unlovely, evil and untrue

Forsake their stations in fierce disarray

And hide their shame in the subconscient's dusk.

[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-03 F-29]

Then lifts the mind a cry of victory:

“O soul, my soul, we have created Heaven,

Within we have found the kingdom here of God,

His fortress built in a loud ignorant world.

[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-03 F-30]

Our life is entrenched between two rivers of Light,

We have turned space into a gulf of peace

And made the body a Capitol of bliss.

[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-03 F-31]

What more, what more, if more must still be done?”

[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-03 F-32]

In the slow process of the evolving spirit,

In the brief stade between a death and birth

A first perfection's stage is reached at last;

Out of the wood and stone of our nature's stuff

A temple is shaped where the high gods could live.

[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-03 F-33]

Even if the struggling world is left outside

One man's perfection still can save the world.

[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-03 F-34]

There is won a new proximity to the skies,

A first betrothal of the Earth to Heaven,

A deep concordat between Truth and Life:

A camp of God is pitched in human time.

[Savitri B-07 C-05 S-03 F-35]

Book Seven Canto Five End

The Finding of the Soul

[Savitri B-07 C-05 Canto End]

Savitri | a Legend and a Symbol

Book Seven
The Book of Yoga

Canto Six

Nirvana and the Discovery of the All-Negating Absolute

[Savitri B-07 C-06 Canto Name]

Play Section One
[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-01]

A calm slow sun looked down from tranquil heavens.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-01 F-01]

A routed sullen rearguard of retreat,

The last rains had fled murmuring across the woods

Or failed, a sibilant whisper mid the leaves,

And the great blue enchantment of the sky

Recovered the deep rapture of its smile.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-01 F-02]

Its mellow splendour unstressed by storm-licked heats

Found room for a luxury of warm mild days,

The night's gold treasure of autumnal moons

Came floating shipped through ripples of faery air.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-01 F-03]

And Savitri's life was glad, fulfilled like earth's;

She had found herself, she knew her being's aim.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-01 F-04]

Although her kingdom of marvellous change within

Remained unspoken in her secret breast,

All that lived round her felt its magic's charm:

The trees' rustling voices told it to the winds,

Flowers spoke in ardent hues an unknown joy,

The birds' carolling became a canticle,

The beasts forgot their strife and lived at ease.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-01 F-05]

Absorbed in wide communion with the Unseen

The mild ascetics of the wood received

A sudden greatening of their lonely muse.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-01 F-06]

This bright perfection of her inner state

Poured overflowing into her outward scene,

Made beautiful dull common natural things

And action wonderful and time divine.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-01 F-07]

Even the smallest meanest work became

A sweet or glad and glorious sacrament,

An offering to the self of the great world

Or a service to the One in each and all.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-01 F-08]

A light invaded all from her being's light;

Her heart-beats' dance communicated bliss:

Happiness grew happier, shared with her, by her touch

And grief some solace found when she drew near.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-01 F-09]

Above the cherished head of Satyavan

She saw not now Fate's dark and lethal orb;

A golden circle round a mystic sun

Disclosed to her new-born predicting sight

The cyclic rondure of a sovereign life.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-01 F-10]

In her visions and deep-etched veridical dreams,

In brief shiftings of the future's heavy screen,

He lay not by a dolorous decree

A victim in the dismal antre of death

Or borne to blissful regions far from her

Forgetting the sweetness of earth's warm delight,

Forgetting the passionate oneness of love's clasp,

Absolved in the self-rapt immortal's bliss.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-01 F-11]

Always he was with her, a living soul

That met her eyes with close enamoured eyes,

A living body near to her body's joy.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-01 F-12]

But now no longer in these great wild woods

In kinship with the days of bird and beast

And levelled to the bareness of earth's brown breast,

But mid the thinking high-built lives of men

In tapestried chambers and on crystal floors,

In armoured town or gardened pleasure-walks,

Even in distance closer than her thoughts,

Body to body near, soul near to soul,

Moving as if by a common breath and will

They were tied in the single circling of their days

Together by love's unseen atmosphere,

Inseparable like the earth and sky.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-01 F-13]

Thus for a while she trod the Golden Path;

This was the sun before abysmal Night.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-01 F-14]

Once as she sat in deep felicitous muse,

Still quivering from her lover's strong embrace,

And made her joy a bridge twixt earth and heaven,

An abyss yawned suddenly beneath her heart.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-01 F-15]

A vast and nameless fear dragged at her nerves

As drags a wild beast its half-slaughtered prey;

It seemed to have no den from which it sprang:

It was not hers, but hid its unseen cause.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-01 F-16]

Then rushing came its vast and fearful Fount.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-01 F-17]

A formless Dread with shapeless endless wings

Filling the universe with its dangerous breath,

A denser darkness than the Night could bear,

Enveloped the heavens and possessed the earth.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-01 F-18]

A rolling surge of silent death, it came

Curving round the far edge of the quaking globe;

Effacing heaven with its enormous stride

It willed to expunge the choked and anguished air

And end the fable of the joy of life.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-01 F-19]

It seemed her very being to forbid,

Abolishing all by which her nature lived,

And laboured to blot out her body and soul,

A clutch of some half-seen Invisible,

An ocean of terror and of sovereign might,

A person and a black infinity.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-01 F-20]

It seemed to cry to her without thought or word

The message of its dark eternity

And the awful meaning of its silences:

Out of some sullen monstrous vast arisen,

Out of an abysmal deep of grief and fear

Imagined by some blind regardless self,

A consciousness of being without its joy,

Empty of thought, incapable of bliss,

That felt life blank and nowhere found a soul,

A voice to the dumb anguish of the heart

Conveyed a stark sense of unspoken words;

In her own depths she heard the unuttered thought

That made unreal the world and all life meant.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-01 F-21]

“Who art thou who claimst thy crown of separate birth,

The illusion of thy soul's reality

And personal godhead on an ignorant globe

In the animal body of imperfect man?

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-01 F-22]

Hope not to be happy in a world of pain

And dream not, listening to the unspoken Word

And dazzled by the inexpressible Ray,

Transcending the mute Superconscient's realm,

To give a body to the Unknowable,

Or for a sanction to thy heart's delight

To burden with bliss the silent still Supreme

Profaning its bare and formless sanctity,

Or call into thy chamber the Divine

And sit with God tasting a human joy.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-01 F-23]

I have created all, all I devour;

I am Death and the dark terrible Mother of life,

I am Kali black and naked in the world,

I am Maya and the universe is my cheat.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-01 F-24]

I lay waste human happiness with my breath

And slay the will to live, the joy to be

That all may pass back into nothingness

And only abide the eternal and absolute.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-01 F-25]

For only the blank Eternal can be true.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-01 F-26]

All else is shadow and flash in Mind's bright glass,

Mind, hollow mirror in which Ignorance sees

A splendid figure of its own false self

And dreams it sees a glorious solid world.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-01 F-27]

O soul, inventor of man's thoughts and hopes,

Thyself the invention of the moments' stream,

Illusion's centre or subtle apex point,

At last know thyself, from vain existence cease.”

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-01 F-28]

A shadow of the negating Absolute,

The intolerant Darkness travelled surging past

And ebbed in her the formidable Voice.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-01 F-29]

It left behind her inner world laid waste:

A barren silence weighed upon her heart,

Her kingdom of delight was there no more;

Only her soul remained, its emptied stage,

Awaiting the unknown eternal Will.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-01 F-30]

Then from the heights a greater Voice came down,

The Word that touches the heart and finds the soul,

The voice of Light after the voice of Night:

The cry of the Abyss drew Heaven's reply,

A might of storm chased by the might of the Sun.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-01 F-31]

“O soul, bare not thy kingdom to the foe;

Consent to hide thy royalty of bliss

Lest Time and Fate find out its avenues

And beat with thunderous knock upon thy gates.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-01 F-32]

Hide whilst thou canst thy treasure of separate self

Behind the luminous rampart of thy depths

Till of a vaster empire it grows part.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-01 F-33]

But not for self alone the Self is won:

Content abide not with one conquered realm;

Adventure all to make the whole world thine,

To break into greater kingdoms turn thy force.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-01 F-34]

Fear not to be nothing that thou mayst be all;

Assent to the emptiness of the Supreme

That all in thee may reach its absolute.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-01 F-35]

Accept to be small and human on the earth,

Interrupting thy new-born divinity,

That man may find his utter self in God.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-01 F-36]

If for thy own sake only thou hast come,

An immortal spirit into the mortal's world,

To found thy luminous kingdom in God's dark,

In the Inconscient's realm one shining star,

One door in the Ignorance opened upon light,

Why hadst thou any need to come at all?

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-01 F-37]

Thou hast come down into a struggling world

To aid a blind and suffering mortal race,

To open to Light the eyes that could not see,

To bring down bliss into the heart of grief,

To make thy life a bridge twixt earth and heaven;

If thou wouldst save the toiling universe,

The vast universal suffering feel as thine:

Thou must bear the sorrow that thou claimst to heal;

The day-bringer must walk in darkest night.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-01 F-38]

He who would save the world must share its pain.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-01 F-39]

If he knows not grief, how shall he find grief's cure?

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-01 F-40]

If far he walks above mortality's head,

How shall the mortal reach that too high path?

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-01 F-41]

If one of theirs they see scale heaven's peaks,

Men then can hope to learn that titan climb.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-01 F-42]

God must be born on earth and be as man

That man being human may grow even as God.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-01 F-43]

He who would save the world must be one with the world,

All suffering things contain in his heart's space

And bear the grief and joy of all that lives.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-01 F-44]

His soul must be wider than the universe

And feel eternity as its very stuff,

Rejecting the moment's personality

Know itself older than the birth of Time,

Creation an incident in its consciousness,

Arcturus and Belphegor grains of fire

Circling in a corner of its boundless self,

The world's destruction a small transient storm

In the calm infinity it has become.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-01 F-45]

If thou wouldst a little loosen the vast chain,

Draw back from the world that the Idea has made,

Thy mind's selection from the Infinite,

Thy senses' gloss on the Infinitesimal's dance,

Then shalt thou know how the great bondage came.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-01 F-46]

Banish all thought from thee and be God's void.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-01 F-47]

Then shalt thou uncover the Unknowable

And the Superconscient conscious grow on thy tops;

Infinity's vision through thy gaze shall pierce;

Thou shalt look into the eyes of the Unknown,

Find the hid Truth in things seen null and false,

Behind things known discover Mystery's rear.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-01 F-48]

Thou shalt be one with God's bare reality

And the miraculous world he has become

And the diviner miracle still to be

When Nature who is now unconscious God

Translucent grows to the Eternal's light,

Her seeing his sight, her walk his steps of power

And life is filled with a spiritual joy

And Matter is the Spirit's willing bride.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-01 F-49]

Consent to be nothing and none, dissolve Time's work,

Cast off thy mind, step back from form and name.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-01 F-50]

Annul thyself that only God may be.”

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-01 F-51]

Play Section Two
[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-02]

Thus spoke the mighty and uplifting Voice,

And Savitri heard; she bowed her head and mused

Plunging her deep regard into herself

In her soul's privacy in the silent Night.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-02 F-01]

Aloof and standing back detached and calm,

A witness of the drama of herself,

A student of her own interior scene,

She watched the passion and the toil of life

And heard in the crowded thoroughfares of mind

The unceasing tread and passage of her thoughts.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-02 F-02]

All she allowed to rise that chose to stir;

Calling, compelling nought, forbidding nought,

She left all to the process formed in Time

And the free initiative of Nature's will.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-02 F-03]

Thus following the complex human play

She heard the prompter's voice behind the scenes,

Perceived the original libretto's set

And the organ theme of the composer Force.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-02 F-04]

All she beheld that surges from man's depths,

The animal instincts prowling mid life's trees,

The impulses that whisper to the heart

And passion's thunder-chase sweeping the nerves;

She saw the Powers that stare from the Abyss

And the wordless Light that liberates the soul.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-02 F-05]

But most her gaze pursued the birth of thought.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-02 F-06]

Affranchised from the look of surface mind

She paused not to survey the official case,

The issue of forms from the office of the brain,

Its factory of thought-sounds and soundless words

And voices stored within unheard by men,

Its mint and treasury of shining coin.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-02 F-07]

These were but counters in mind's symbol game,

A gramophone's discs, a reproduction's film,

A list of signs, a cipher and a code.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-02 F-08]

In our unseen subtle body thought is born

Or there it enters from the cosmic field.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-02 F-09]

Oft from her soul stepped out a naked thought

Luminous with mysteried lips and wonderful eyes;

Or from her heart emerged some burning face

And looked for life and love and passionate truth,

Aspired to heaven or embraced the world

Or led the fancy like a fleeting moon

Across the dull sky of man's common days,

Amidst the doubtful certitudes of earth's lore,

To the celestial beauty of faith gave form,

As if at flower-prints in a dingy room

Laughed in a golden vase one living rose.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-02 F-10]

A thaumaturgist sat in her heart's deep,

Compelled the forward stride, the upward look,

Till wonder leaped into the illumined breast

And life grew marvellous with transfiguring hope.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-02 F-11]

A seeing will pondered between the brows;

Thoughts, glistening Angels, stood behind the brain

In flashing armour, folding hands of prayer,

And poured heaven's rays into the earthly form.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-02 F-12]

Imaginations flamed up from her breast,

Unearthly beauty, touches of surpassing joy

And plans of miracle, dreams of delight:

Around her navel lotus clustering close

Her large sensations of the teeming worlds

Streamed their dumb movements of the unformed Idea;

Invading the small sensitive flower of the throat

They brought their mute unuttered resonances

To kindle the figures of a heavenly speech.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-02 F-13]

Below, desires formed their wordless wish,

And longings of physical sweetness and ecstasy

Translated into the accents of a cry

Their grasp on objects and their clasp on souls.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-02 F-14]

Her body's thoughts climbed from her conscious limbs

And carried their yearnings to its mystic crown

Where Nature's murmurs meet the Ineffable.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-02 F-15]

But for the mortal prisoned in outward mind

All must present their passports at its door;

Disguised they must don the official cap and mask

Or pass as manufactures of the brain,

Unknown their secret truth and hidden source.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-02 F-16]

Only to the inner mind they speak direct,

Put on a body and assume a voice,

Their passage seen, their message heard and known,

Their birthplace and their natal mark revealed,

And stand confessed to an immortal's sight,

Our nature's messengers to the witness soul.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-02 F-17]

Impenetrable, withheld from mortal sense,

The inner chambers of the spirit's house

Disclosed to her their happenings and their guests;

Eyes looked through crevices in the invisible wall

And through the secrecy of unseen doors

There came into mind's little frontal room

Thoughts that enlarged our limited human range,

Lifted the ideal's half-quenched or sinking torch

Or peered through the finite at the infinite.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-02 F-18]

A sight opened upon the invisible

And sensed the shapes that mortal eyes see not,

The sounds that mortal listening cannot hear,

The blissful sweetness of the intangible's touch;

The objects that to us are empty air,

Are there the stuff of daily experience

And the common pabulum of sense and thought.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-02 F-19]

The beings of the subtle realms appeared

And scenes concealed behind our earthly scene;

She saw the life of remote continents

And distance deafened not to voices far;

She felt the movements crossing unknown minds;

The past's events occurred before her eyes.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-02 F-20]

The great world's thoughts were part of her own thought,

The feelings dumb for ever and unshared,

The ideas that never found an utterance.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-02 F-21]

The dim subconscient's incoherent hints

Laid bare a meaning twisted, deep and strange,

The bizarre secret of their fumbling speech,

Their links with underlying reality.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-02 F-22]

The unseen grew visible and audible:

Thoughts leaped down from a superconscient field

Like eagles swooping from a viewless peak,

Thoughts gleamed up from the screened subliminal depths

Like golden fishes from a hidden sea.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-02 F-23]

This world is a vast unbroken totality,

A deep solidarity joins its contrary powers;

God's summits look back on the mute Abyss.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-02 F-24]

So man evolving to divinest heights

Colloques still with the animal and the Djinn;

The human godhead with star-gazer eyes

Lives still in one house with the primal beast.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-02 F-25]

The high meets the low, all is a single plan.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-02 F-26]

So she beheld the many births of thought,

If births can be of what eternal is;

For the Eternal's powers are like himself,

Timeless in the Timeless, in Time ever born.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-02 F-27]

This too she saw that all in outer mind

Is made, not born, a product perishable,

Forged in the body's factory by earth-force.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-02 F-28]

This mind is a dynamic small machine

Producing ceaselessly, till it wears out,

With raw material drawn from the outside world,

The patterns sketched out by an artist God.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-02 F-29]

Often our thoughts are finished cosmic wares

Admitted by a silent office gate

And passed through the subconscient's galleries,

Then issued in Time's mart as private make.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-02 F-30]

For now they bear the living person's stamp;

A trick, a special hue claims them his own.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-02 F-31]

All else is Nature's craft and this too hers.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-02 F-32]

Our tasks are given, we are but instruments;

Nothing is all our own that we create:

The Power that acts in us is not our force.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-02 F-33]

The genius too receives from some high fount

Concealed in a supernal secrecy

The work that gives him an immortal name.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-02 F-34]

The word, the form, the charm, the glory and grace

Are missioned sparks from a stupendous Fire;

A sample from the laboratory of God

Of which he holds the patent upon earth,

Comes to him wrapped in golden coverings;

He listens for Inspiration's postman knock

And takes delivery of the priceless gift

A little spoilt by the receiver mind

Or mixed with the manufacture of his brain;

When least defaced, then is it most divine.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-02 F-35]

Although his ego claims the world for its use,

Man is a dynamo for the cosmic work;

Nature does most in him, God the high rest:

Only his soul's acceptance is his own.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-02 F-36]

This independent, once a power supreme,

Self-born before the universe was made,

Accepting cosmos, binds himself Nature's serf

Till he becomes her freedman—or God's slave.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-02 F-37]

This is the appearance in our mortal front;

Our greater truth of being lies behind:

Our consciousness is cosmic and immense,

But only when we break through Matter's wall

In that spiritual vastness can we stand

Where we can live the masters of our world

And mind is only a means and body a tool.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-02 F-38]

For above the birth of body and of thought

Our spirit's truth lives in the naked self

And from that height, unbound, surveys the world.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-02 F-39]

Out of the mind she rose to escape its law

That it might sleep in some deep shadow of self

Or fall silent in the silence of the Unseen.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-02 F-40]

High she attained and stood from Nature free

And saw creation's life from far above,

Thence upon all she laid her sovereign will

To dedicate it to God's timeless calm:

Then all grew tranquil in her being's space,

Only sometimes small thoughts arose and fell

Like quiet waves upon a silent sea

Or ripples passing over a lonely pool

When a stray stone disturbs its dreaming rest.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-02 F-41]

Yet the mind's factory had ceased to work,

There was no sound of the dynamo's throb,

There came no call from the still fields of life.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-02 F-42]

Then even those stirrings rose in her no more;

Her mind now seemed like a vast empty room

Or like a peaceful landscape without sound.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-02 F-43]

This men call quietude and prize as peace.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-02 F-44]

But to her deeper sight all yet was there,

Effervescing like a chaos under a lid;

Feelings and thoughts cried out for word and act

But found no response in the silenced brain:

All was suppressed but nothing yet expunged;

At every moment might explosion come.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-02 F-45]

Then this too paused; the body seemed a stone.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-02 F-46]

All now was a wide mighty vacancy,

But still excluded from eternity's hush;

For still was far the repose of the Absolute

And the ocean silence of Infinity.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-02 F-47]

Even now some thoughts could cross her solitude;

These surged not from the depths or from within

Cast up from formlessness to seek a form,

Spoke not the body's need nor voiced life's call.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-02 F-48]

These seemed not born nor made in human Time:

Children of cosmic Nature from a far world,

Idea's shapes in complete armour of words

Posted like travellers in an alien space.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-02 F-49]

Out of some far expanse they seemed to come

As if carried on vast wings like large white sails,

And with easy access reached the inner ear

As though they used a natural privileged right

To the high royal entries of the soul.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-02 F-50]

As yet their path lay deep-concealed in light.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-02 F-51]

Then looking to know whence the intruders came

She saw a spiritual immensity

Pervading and encompassing the world-space

As ether our transparent tangible air,

And through it sailing tranquilly a thought.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-02 F-52]

As smoothly glides a ship nearing its port,

Ignorant of embargo and blockade,

Confident of entrance and the visa's seal,

It came to the silent city of the brain

Towards its accustomed and expectant quay,

But met a barring will, a blow of Force

And sank vanishing in the immensity.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-02 F-53]

After a long vacant pause another appeared

And others one by one suddenly emerged,

Mind's unexpected visitors from the Unseen

Like far-off sails upon a lonely sea.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-02 F-54]

But soon that commerce failed, none reached mind's coast.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-02 F-55]

Then all grew still, nothing moved any more:

Immobile, self-rapt, timeless, solitary

A silent spirit pervaded silent Space.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-02 F-56]

Play Section Three
[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-03]

In that absolute stillness bare and formidable

There was glimpsed an all-negating Void Supreme

That claimed its mystic Nihil's sovereign right

To cancel Nature and deny the soul.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-03 F-01]

Even the nude sense of self grew pale and thin:

Impersonal, signless, featureless, void of forms

A blank pure consciousness had replaced the mind.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-03 F-02]

Her spirit seemed the substance of a name,

The world a pictured symbol drawn on self,

A dream of images, a dream of sounds

Built up the semblance of a universe

Or lent to spirit the appearance of a world.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-03 F-03]

This was self-seeing; in that intolerant hush

No notion and no concept could take shape,

There was no sense to frame the figure of things,

A sheer self-sight was there, no thought arose.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-03 F-04]

Emotion slept deep down in the still heart

Or lay buried in a cemetery of peace:

All feelings seemed quiescent, calm or dead,

As if the heart-strings rent could work no more

And joy and grief could never rise again.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-03 F-05]

The heart beat on with an unconscious rhythm

But no response came from it and no cry.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-03 F-06]

Vain was the provocation of events;

Nothing within answered an outside touch,

No nerve was stirred and no reaction rose.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-03 F-07]

Yet still her body saw and moved and spoke;

It understood without the aid of thought,

It said whatever needed to be said,

It did whatever needed to be done.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-03 F-08]

There was no person there behind the act,

No mind that chose or passed the fitting word:

All wrought like an unerring apt machine.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-03 F-09]

As if continuing old habitual turns,

And pushed by an old unexhausted force

The engine did the work for which it was made:

Her consciousness looked on and took no part;

All it upheld, in nothing had a share.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-03 F-10]

There was no strong initiator will;

An incoherence crossing a firm void

Slipped into an order of related chance.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-03 F-11]

A pure perception was the only power

That stood behind her action and her sight.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-03 F-12]

If that retired, all objects would be extinct,

Her private universe would cease to be,

The house she had built with bricks of thought and sense

In the beginning after the birth of Space.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-03 F-13]

This seeing was identical with the seen;

It knew without knowledge all that could be known,

It saw impartially the world go by,

But in the same supine unmoving glance

Saw too its abysmal unreality.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-03 F-14]

It watched the figure of the cosmic game,

But the thought and inner life in forms seemed dead,

Abolished by her own collapse of thought:

A hollow physical shell persisted still.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-03 F-15]

All seemed a brilliant shadow of itself,

A cosmic film of scenes and images:

The enduring mass and outline of the hills

Was a design sketched on a silent mind

And held to a tremulous false solidity

By constant beats of visionary sight.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-03 F-16]

The forest with its emerald multitudes

Clothed with its show of hues vague empty Space,

A painting's colours hiding a surface void

That flickered upon dissolution's edge;

The blue heavens, an illusion of the eyes,

Roofed in the mind's illusion of a world.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-03 F-17]

The men who walked beneath an unreal sky

Seemed mobile puppets out of cardboard cut

And pushed by unseen hands across the soil

Or moving pictures upon Fancy's film:

There was no soul within, no power of life.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-03 F-18]

The brain's vibrations that appear like thought,

The nerve's brief answer to each contact's knock,

The heart's quiverings felt as joy and grief and love

Were twitchings of the body, their seeming self,

That body forged from atoms and from gas

A manufactured lie of Maya's make,

Its life a dream seen by the sleeping Void.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-03 F-19]

The animals lone or trooping through the glades

Fled like a passing vision of beauty and grace

Imagined by some all-creating Eye.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-03 F-20]

Yet something was there behind the fading scene;

Wherever she turned, at whatsoever she looked,

It was perceived, yet hid from mind and sight.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-03 F-21]

The One only real shut itself from Space

And stood aloof from the idea of Time.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-03 F-22]

Its truth escaped from shape and line and hue.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-03 F-23]

All else grew unsubstantial, self-annulled,

This only everlasting seemed and true,

Yet nowhere dwelt, it was outside the hours.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-03 F-24]

This only could justify the labour of sight,

But sight could not define for it a form;

This only could appease the unsatisfied ear

But hearing listened in vain for a missing sound;

This answered not the sense, called not to Mind.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-03 F-25]

It met her as the uncaught inaudible Voice

That speaks for ever from the Unknowable.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-03 F-26]

It met her like an omnipresent point

Pure of dimensions, unfixed, invisible,

The single oneness of its multiplied beat

Accentuating its sole eternity.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-03 F-27]

It faced her as some vast Nought's immensity,

An endless No to all that seems to be,

An endless Yes to things ever unconceived

And all that is unimagined and unthought,

An eternal zero or untotalled Aught,

A spaceless and a placeless Infinite.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-03 F-28]

Yet eternity and infinity seemed but words

Vainly affixed by mind's incompetence

To its stupendous lone reality.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-03 F-29]

The world is but a spark-burst from its light,

All moments flashes from its Timelessness,

All objects glimmerings of the Bodiless

That disappear from Mind when That is seen.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-03 F-30]

It held, as if a shield before its face,

A consciousness that saw without a seer,

The Truth where knowledge is not nor knower nor known,

The Love enamoured of its own delight

In which the Lover is not nor the Beloved

Bringing their personal passion into the Vast,

The Force omnipotent in quietude,

The Bliss that none can ever hope to taste.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-03 F-31]

It cancelled the convincing cheat of self;

A truth in nothingness was its mighty clue.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-03 F-32]

If all existence could renounce to be

And Being take refuge in Non-being's arms

And Non-being could strike out its ciphered round,

Some lustre of that Reality might appear.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-03 F-33]

A formless liberation came on her.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-03 F-34]

Once sepulchred alive in brain and flesh

She had risen up from body, mind and life;

She was no more a Person in a world,

She had escaped into infinity.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-03 F-35]

What once had been herself had disappeared;

There was no frame of things, no figure of soul.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-03 F-36]

A refugee from the domain of sense,

Evading the necessity of thought,

Delivered from Knowledge and from Ignorance

And rescued from the true and the untrue,

She shared the Superconscient's high retreat

Beyond the self-born Word, the nude Idea,

The first bare solid ground of consciousness;

Beings were not there, existence had no place,

There was no temptation of the joy to be.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-03 F-37]

Unutterably effaced, no one and null,

A vanishing vestige like a violet trace,

A faint record merely of a self now past,

She was a point in the unknowable.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-03 F-38]

Only some last annulment now remained,

Annihilation's vague indefinable step:

A memory of being still was there

And kept her separate from nothingness:

She was in That but still became not That.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-03 F-39]

This shadow of herself so close to nought

Could be again self's point d'appui to live,

Return out of the Inconceivable

And be what some mysterious vast might choose.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-03 F-40]

Even as the Unknowable decreed,

She might be nought or new-become the All,

Or if the omnipotent Nihil took a shape

Emerge as someone and redeem the world.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-03 F-41]

Even, she might learn what the mystic cipher held,

This seeming exit or closed end of all

Could be a blind tenebrous passage screened from sight,

Her state the eclipsing shell of a darkened sun

On its secret way to the Ineffable.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-03 F-42]

Even now her splendid being might flame back

Out of the silence and the nullity,

A gleaming portion of the All-Wonderful,

A power of some all-affirming Absolute,

A shining mirror of the eternal Truth

To show to the One-in-all its manifest face,

To the souls of men their deep identity.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-03 F-43]

Or she might wake into God's quietude

Beyond the cosmic day and cosmic night

And rest appeased in his white eternity.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-03 F-44]

But this was now unreal or remote

Or covered in the mystic fathomless blank.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-03 F-45]

In infinite Nothingness was the ultimate sign

Or else the Real was the Unknowable.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-03 F-46]

A lonely Absolute negated all:

It effaced the ignorant world from its solitude

And drowned the soul in its everlasting peace.

[Savitri B-07 C-06 S-03 F-47]

Book Seven Canto Six End

Nirvana and the Discovery of the All-Negating Absolute

[Savitri B-07 C-06 Canto Name]

Savitri | a Legend and a Symbol