Savitri | a Legend and a Symbol

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Savitri Canto Recordings

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Book Nine All Cantos
The Book of Eternal Night

Canto One

Towards the Black Void

[Savitri B-09 C-01 Canto Name]

Play Section One
[Savitri B-09 C-01 S-01]

So was she left alone in the huge wood,

Surrounded by a dim unthinking world,

Her husband's corpse on her forsaken breast.

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

In her vast silent spirit motionless

She measured not her loss with helpless thoughts,

Nor rent with tears the marble seals of pain:

She rose not yet to face the dreadful god.

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

Over the body she loved her soul leaned out

In a great stillness without stir or voice,

As if her mind had died with Satyavan.

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

But still the human heart in her beat on.

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

Aware still of his being near to hers,

Closely she clasped to her the mute lifeless form

As though to guard the oneness they had been

And keep the spirit still within its frame.

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

Then suddenly there came on her the change

Which in tremendous moments of our lives

Can overtake sometimes the human soul

And hold it up towards its luminous source.

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

The veil is torn, the thinker is no more:

Only the spirit sees and all is known.

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

Then a calm Power seated above our brows

Is seen, unshaken by our thoughts and deeds,

Its stillness bears the voices of the world:

Immobile, it moves Nature, looks on life.

[Savitri B-09 C-01 S-01 F-08]

It shapes immutably its far-seen ends;

Untouched and tranquil amid error and tears

And measureless above our striving wills,

Its gaze controls the turbulent whirl of things.

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

To mate with the Glory it sees, the spirit grows:

The voice of life is tuned to infinite sounds,

The moments on great wings of lightning come

And godlike thoughts surprise the mind of earth.

[Savitri B-09 C-01 S-01 F-10]

Into the soul's splendour and intensity

A crescent of miraculous birth is tossed,

Whose horn of mystery floats in a bright void.

[Savitri B-09 C-01 S-01 F-11]

As into a heaven of strength and silence thought

Is ravished, all this living mortal clay

Is seized and in a swift and fiery flood

Of touches shaped by a Harmonist unseen.

[Savitri B-09 C-01 S-01 F-12]

A new sight comes, new voices in us form

A body of the music of the Gods.

[Savitri B-09 C-01 S-01 F-13]

Immortal yearnings without name leap down,

Large quiverings of godhead seeking run

And weave upon a puissant field of calm

A high and lonely ecstasy of will.

[Savitri B-09 C-01 S-01 F-14]

This in a moment's depths was born in her.

[Savitri B-09 C-01 S-01 F-15]

Now to the limitless gaze disclosed that sees

Things barred from human thinking's earthly lids,

The Spirit who had hidden in Nature soared

Out of his luminous nest within the worlds:

Like a vast fire it climbed the skies of night.

[Savitri B-09 C-01 S-01 F-16]

Thus were the cords of self-oblivion torn:

Like one who looks up to far heights she saw,

Ancient and strong as on a windless summit

Above her where she had worked in her lone mind

Labouring apart in a sole tower of self,

The source of all which she had seemed or wrought,

A power projected into cosmic space,

A slow embodiment of the aeonic will,

A starry fragment of the eternal Truth,

The passionate instrument of an unmoved Power.

[Savitri B-09 C-01 S-01 F-17]

A Presence was there that filled the listening world;

A central All assumed her boundless life.

[Savitri B-09 C-01 S-01 F-18]

A sovereignty, a silence and a swiftness,

One brooded over abysses who was she.

[Savitri B-09 C-01 S-01 F-19]

As in a choric robe of unheard sounds

A Force descended trailing endless lights;

Linking Time's seconds to infinity,

Illimitably it girt the earth and her:

It sank into her soul and she was changed.

[Savitri B-09 C-01 S-01 F-20]

Then like a thought fulfilled by some great word

That mightiness assumed a symbol form:

Her being's spaces quivered with its touch,

It covered her as with immortal wings;

On its lips the curve of the unuttered Truth,

A halo of Wisdom's lightnings for its crown,

It entered the mystic lotus in her head,

A thousand-petalled home of power and light.

[Savitri B-09 C-01 S-01 F-21]

Immortal leader of her mortality,

Doer of her works and fountain of her words,

Invulnerable by Time, omnipotent,

It stood above her calm, immobile, mute.

[Savitri B-09 C-01 S-01 F-22]

Play Section Two
[Savitri B-09 C-01 S-02]

All in her mated with that mighty hour,

As if the last remnant had been slain by Death

Of the humanity that once was hers.

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

Assuming a spiritual wide control,

Making life's sea a mirror of heaven's sky,

The young divinity in her earthly limbs

Filled with celestial strength her mortal part.

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

Over was the haunted pain, the rending fear:

Her grief had passed away, her mind was still,

Her heart beat quietly with a sovereign force.

[Savitri B-09 C-01 S-02 F-03]

There came a freedom from the heart-strings' clutch,

Now all her acts sprang from a godhead's calm.

[Savitri B-09 C-01 S-02 F-04]

Calmly she laid upon the forest soil

The dead who still reposed upon her breast

And bore to turn away from the dead form:

Sole now she rose to meet the dreadful god.

[Savitri B-09 C-01 S-02 F-05]

That mightier spirit turned its mastering gaze

On life and things, inheritor of a work

Left to it unfinished from her halting past,

When yet the mind, a passionate learner, toiled

And ill-shaped instruments were crudely moved.

[Savitri B-09 C-01 S-02 F-06]

Transcended now was the poor human rule;

A sovereign power was there, a godlike will.

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

A moment yet she lingered motionless

And looked down on the dead man at her feet;

Then like a tree recovering from a wind

She raised her noble head; fronting her gaze

Something stood there, unearthly, sombre, grand,

A limitless denial of all being

That wore the terror and wonder of a shape.

[Savitri B-09 C-01 S-02 F-08]

In its appalling eyes the tenebrous Form

Bore the deep pity of destroying gods;

A sorrowful irony curved the dreadful lips

That speak the word of doom.

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

Eternal Night

In the dire beauty of an immortal face

Pitying arose, receiving all that lives

For ever into its fathomless heart, refuge

Of creatures from their anguish and world-pain.

[Savitri B-09 C-01 S-02 F-10]

His shape was nothingness made real, his limbs

Were monuments of transience and beneath

Brows of unwearying calm large godlike lids

Silent beheld the writhing serpent, life.

[Savitri B-09 C-01 S-02 F-11]

Unmoved their timeless wide unchanging gaze

Had seen the unprofitable cycles pass,

Survived the passing of unnumbered stars

And sheltered still the same immutable orbs.

[Savitri B-09 C-01 S-02 F-12]

The two opposed each other with their eyes,

Woman and universal god: around her,

Piling their void unbearable loneliness

Upon her mighty uncompanioned soul,

Many inhuman solitudes came close.

[Savitri B-09 C-01 S-02 F-13]

Vacant eternities forbidding hope

Laid upon her their huge and lifeless look,

And to her ears, silencing earthly sounds,

A sad and formidable voice arose

Which seemed the whole adverse world's.

[Savitri B-09 C-01 S-02 F-14]

 “Unclasp”, it cried,

“Thy passionate influence and relax, O slave

Of Nature, changing tool of changeless Law,

Who vainly writh'st rebellion to my yoke,

Thy elemental grasp; weep and forget.

[Savitri B-09 C-01 S-02 F-15]

Entomb thy passion in its living grave.

[Savitri B-09 C-01 S-02 F-16]

Leave now the once-loved spirit's abandoned robe:

Pass lonely back to thy vain life on earth.”

[Savitri B-09 C-01 S-02 F-17]

It ceased, she moved not, and it spoke again,

Lowering its mighty key to human chords,—

Yet a dread cry behind the uttered sounds,

Echoing all sadness and immortal scorn,

Moaned like a hunger of far wandering waves.

[Savitri B-09 C-01 S-02 F-18]

“Wilt thou for ever keep thy passionate hold,

Thyself a creature doomed like him to pass,

Denying his soul death's calm and silent rest?

[Savitri B-09 C-01 S-02 F-19]

Relax thy grasp; this body is earth's and thine,

His spirit now belongs to a greater power.

[Savitri B-09 C-01 S-02 F-20]

Woman, thy husband suffers.”

[Savitri B-09 C-01 S-02 F-21]

Savitri

Drew back her heart's force that clasped his body still

Where from her lap renounced on the smooth grass

Softly it lay, as often before in sleep

When from their couch she rose in the white dawn

Called by her daily tasks: now too, as if called,

She rose and stood gathered in lonely strength,

Like one who drops his mantle for a race

And waits the signal, motionlessly swift.

[Savitri B-09 C-01 S-02 F-22]

She knew not to what course: her spirit above

On the crypt-summit of her secret form

Like one left sentinel on a mountain crest,

A fiery-footed splendour puissant-winged,

Watched flaming-silent, with her voiceless soul

Like a still sail upon a windless sea.

[Savitri B-09 C-01 S-02 F-23]

White passionless it rode, an anchored might,

Waiting what far-ridged impulse should arise

Out of the eternal depths and cast its surge.

[Savitri B-09 C-01 S-02 F-24]

Then Death the king leaned boundless down, as leans

Night over tired lands, when evening pales

And fading gleams break down the horizon's walls,

Nor yet the dusk grows mystic with the moon.

[Savitri B-09 C-01 S-02 F-25]

The dim and awful godhead rose erect

From his brief stooping to his touch on earth,

And, like a dream that wakes out of a dream,

Forsaking the poor mould of that dead clay,

Another luminous Satyavan arose,

Starting upright from the recumbent earth

As if someone over viewless borders stepped

Emerging on the edge of unseen worlds.

[Savitri B-09 C-01 S-02 F-26]

In the earth's day the silent marvel stood

Between the mortal woman and the god.

[Savitri B-09 C-01 S-02 F-27]

Such seemed he as if one departed came

Wearing the light of a celestial shape

Splendidly alien to the mortal air.

[Savitri B-09 C-01 S-02 F-28]

The mind sought things long loved and fell back foiled

From unfamiliar hues, beheld yet longed,

By the sweet radiant form unsatisfied,

Incredulous of its too bright hints of heaven;

Too strange the brilliant phantasm to life's clasp

Desiring the warm creations of the earth

Reared in the ardour of material suns,

The senses seized in vain a glorious shade:

Only the spirit knew the spirit still,

And the heart divined the old loved heart, though changed.

[Savitri B-09 C-01 S-02 F-29]

Between two realms he stood, not wavering,

But fixed in quiet strong expectancy,

Like one who, sightless, listens for a command.

[Savitri B-09 C-01 S-02 F-30]

So were they immobile on that earthly field,

Powers not of earth, though one in human clay.

[Savitri B-09 C-01 S-02 F-31]

On either side of one two spirits strove;

Silence battled with silence, vast with vast.

[Savitri B-09 C-01 S-02 F-32]

But now the impulse of the Path was felt

Moving from the Silence that supports the stars

To touch the confines of the visible world.

[Savitri B-09 C-01 S-02 F-33]

Luminous he moved away; behind him Death

Went slowly with his noiseless tread, as seen

In dream-built fields a shadowy herdsman glides

Behind some wanderer from his voiceless herds,

And Savitri moved behind eternal Death,

Her mortal pace was equalled with the god's.

[Savitri B-09 C-01 S-02 F-34]

Wordless she travelled in her lover's steps,

Planting her human feet where his had trod,

Into the perilous silences beyond.

[Savitri B-09 C-01 S-02 F-35]

Play Section Three
[Savitri B-09 C-01 S-03]

At first in a blind stress of woods she moved

With strange inhuman paces on the soil,

Journeying as if upon an unseen road.

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

Around her on the green and imaged earth

The flickering screen of forests ringed her steps;

Its thick luxurious obstacle of boughs

Besieged her body pressing dimly through

In a rich realm of whispers palpable,

And all the murmurous beauty of the leaves

Rippled around her like an emerald robe.

[Savitri B-09 C-01 S-03 F-02]

But more and more this grew an alien sound,

And her old intimate body seemed to her

A burden which her being remotely bore.

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

Herself lived far in some uplifted scene

Where to the trance-claimed vision of pursuit,

Sole presences in a high spaceless dream,

The luminous spirit glided stilly on

And the great shadow travelled vague behind.

[Savitri B-09 C-01 S-03 F-04]

Still with an amorous crowd of seeking hands

Softly entreated by their old desires

Her senses felt earth's close and gentle air

Cling round them and in troubled branches knew

Uncertain treadings of a faint-foot wind:

She bore dim fragrances, far callings touched;

The wild bird's voice and its winged rustle came

As if a sigh from some forgotten world.

[Savitri B-09 C-01 S-03 F-05]

Earth stood aloof, yet near: round her it wove

Its sweetness and its greenness and delight,

Its brilliance suave of well-loved vivid hues,

Sunlight arriving to its golden noon,

And the blue heavens and the caressing soil.

[Savitri B-09 C-01 S-03 F-06]

The ancient mother offered to her child

Her simple world of kind familiar things.

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

But now, as if the body's sensuous hold

Curbing the godhead of her infinite walk

Had freed those spirits to their grander road

Across some boundary's intangible bar,

The silent god grew mighty and remote

In other spaces, and the soul she loved

Lost its consenting nearness to her life.

[Savitri B-09 C-01 S-03 F-08]

Into a deep and unfamiliar air

Enormous, windless, without stir or sound

They seemed to enlarge away, drawn by some wide

Pale distance, from the warm control of earth

And her grown far: now, now they would escape.

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

Then flaming from her body's nest alarmed

Her violent spirit soared at Satyavan.

[Savitri B-09 C-01 S-03 F-10]

Out mid the plunge of heaven-surrounded rocks

So in a terror and a wrath divine

From her eyrie streams against the ascending death,

Indignant at its crouching point of steel,

A fierce she-eagle threatened in her brood,

Borne on a rush of puissance and a cry,

Outwinging like a mass of golden fire.

[Savitri B-09 C-01 S-03 F-11]

So on a spirit's flaming outrush borne

She crossed the borders of dividing sense;

Like pale discarded sheaths dropped dully down

Her mortal members fell back from her soul.

[Savitri B-09 C-01 S-03 F-12]

A moment of a secret body's sleep,

Her trance knew not of sun or earth or world;

Thought, time and death were absent from her grasp:

She knew not self, forgotten was Savitri.

[Savitri B-09 C-01 S-03 F-13]

All was the violent ocean of a will

Where lived captive to an immense caress,

Possessed in a supreme identity,

Her aim, joy, origin, Satyavan alone.

[Savitri B-09 C-01 S-03 F-14]

Her sovereign prisoned in her being's core,

He beat there like a rhythmic heart,—herself

But different still, one loved, enveloped, clasped,

A treasure saved from the collapse of space.

[Savitri B-09 C-01 S-03 F-15]

Around him nameless, infinite she surged,

Her spirit fulfilled in his spirit, rich with all Time,

As if Love's deathless moment had been found,

A pearl within eternity's white shell.

[Savitri B-09 C-01 S-03 F-16]

Then out of the engulfing sea of trance

Her mind rose drenched to light streaming with hues

Of vision and, awake once more to Time,

Returned to shape the lineaments of things

And live in borders of the seen and known.

[Savitri B-09 C-01 S-03 F-17]

Onward the three still moved in her soul-scene.

[Savitri B-09 C-01 S-03 F-18]

As if pacing through fragments of a dream,

She seemed to travel on, a visioned shape

Imagining other musers like herself,

By them imagined in their lonely sleep.

[Savitri B-09 C-01 S-03 F-19]

Ungrasped, unreal, yet familiar, old,

Like clefts of unsubstantial memory,

Scenes often traversed, never lived in, fled

Past her unheeding to forgotten goals.

[Savitri B-09 C-01 S-03 F-20]

In voiceless regions they were travellers

Alone in a new world where souls were not,

But only living moods: a strange hushed weird

Country was round them, strange far skies above,

A doubting space where dreaming objects lived

Within themselves their one unchanged idea.

[Savitri B-09 C-01 S-03 F-21]

Weird were the grasses, weird the treeless plains;

Weird ran the road which like fear hastening

Towards that of which it has most terror, passed

Phantasmal between pillared conscious rocks

Sombre and high, gates brooding, whose stone thoughts

Lost their huge sense beyond in giant night.

[Savitri B-09 C-01 S-03 F-22]

Enigma of the Inconscient's sculptural sleep,

Symbols of the approach to darkness old

And monuments of her titanic reign,

Opening to depths like dumb appalling jaws

That wait a traveller down a haunted path

Attracted to a mystery that slays,

They watched across her road, cruel and still;

Sentinels they stood of dumb Necessity,

Mute heads of vigilant and sullen gloom,

Carved muzzle of a dim enormous world.

[Savitri B-09 C-01 S-03 F-23]

Then, to that chill sere heavy line arrived

Where his feet touched the shadowy marches' brink,

Turning arrested luminous Satyavan

Looked back with his wonderful eyes at Savitri.

[Savitri B-09 C-01 S-03 F-24]

But Death pealed forth his vast abysmal cry:

“O mortal, turn back to thy transient kind;

Aspire not to accompany Death to his home,

As if thy breath could live where Time must die.

[Savitri B-09 C-01 S-03 F-25]

Think not thy mind-born passion strength from heaven

To uplift thy spirit from its earthly base

And, breaking out from the material cage,

To upbuoy thy feet of dream in groundless Nought

And bear thee through the pathless infinite.

[Savitri B-09 C-01 S-03 F-26]

Only in human limits man lives safe.

[Savitri B-09 C-01 S-03 F-27]

Trust not in the unreal Lords of Time,

Immortal deeming this image of thyself

Which they have built on a Dream's floating ground.

[Savitri B-09 C-01 S-03 F-28]

Let not the dreadful goddess move thy soul

To enlarge thy vehement trespass into worlds

Where it shall perish like a helpless thought.

[Savitri B-09 C-01 S-03 F-29]

Know the cold term-stones of thy hopes in life.

[Savitri B-09 C-01 S-03 F-30]

Armed vainly with the Ideal's borrowed might,

Dare not to outstep man's bound and measured force:

Ignorant and stumbling, in brief boundaries pent,

He crowns himself the world's mock suzerain,

Tormenting Nature with the works of Mind.

[Savitri B-09 C-01 S-03 F-31]

O sleeper, dreaming of divinity,

Wake trembling mid the indifferent silences

In which thy few weak chords of being die.

[Savitri B-09 C-01 S-03 F-32]

Impermanent creatures, sorrowful foam of Time,

Your transient loves bind not the eternal gods.”

[Savitri B-09 C-01 S-03 F-33]

The dread voice ebbed in the consenting hush

Which seemed to close upon it, wide, intense,

A wordless sanction from the jaws of Night.

[Savitri B-09 C-01 S-03 F-34]

The Woman answered not.

[Savitri B-09 C-01 S-03 F-35]

Her high nude soul,

Stripped of the girdle of mortality,

Against fixed destiny and the grooves of law

Stood up in its sheer will a primal force.

[Savitri B-09 C-01 S-03 F-36]

Still like a statue on its pedestal,

Lone in the silence and to vastness bared,

Against midnight's dumb abysses piled in front

A columned shaft of fire and light she rose.

[Savitri B-09 C-01 S-03 F-37]

Book Nine Canto One End

Towards the Black Void

[Savitri B-09 C-01 Canto End]

Savitri | a Legend and a Symbol

Home

Savitri Canto Recordings

Reading Exercises

Book Nine
The Book of Eternal Night

Canto Two

The Journey in Eternal Night and the Voice of the Darkness

[Savitri B-09 C-02 Canto Name]

Play Section One
[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-01]

Awhile on the chill dreadful edge of Night

All stood as if a world were doomed to die

And waited on the eternal silence' brink.

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

Heaven leaned towards them like a cloudy brow

Of menace through the dim and voiceless hush.

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

As thoughts stand mute on a despairing verge

Where the last depths plunge into nothingness

And the last dreams must end, they paused; in their front

Were glooms like shadowy wings, behind them, pale,

The lifeless evening was a dead man's gaze.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-01 F-03]

Hungry beyond, the night desired her soul.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-01 F-04]

But still in its lone niche of templed strength

Motionless, her flame-bright spirit, mute, erect,

Burned like a torch-fire from a windowed room

Pointing against the darkness' sombre breast.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-01 F-05]

The Woman first affronted the Abyss

Daring to journey through the eternal Night.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-01 F-06]

Armoured with light she advanced her foot to plunge

Into the dread and hueless vacancy;

Immortal, unappalled, her spirit faced

The danger of the ruthless eyeless waste.

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

Against night's inky ground they stirred, moulding

Mysterious motion on her human tread,

A swimming action and a drifting march

Like figures moving before eyelids closed:

All as in dreams went slipping, gliding on.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-01 F-08]

The rock-gate's heavy walls were left behind;

As if through passages of receding time

Present and past into the Timeless lapsed;

Arrested upon dim adventure's brink,

The future ended drowned in nothingness.

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

Amid collapsing shapes they wound obscure;

The fading vestibules of a tenebrous world

Received them, where they seemed to move and yet

Be still, nowhere advancing yet to pass,

A dumb procession a dim picture bounds,

Not conscious forms threading a real scene.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-01 F-10]

A mystery of terror's boundlessness,

Gathering its hungry strength the huge pitiless void

Surrounded slowly with its soundless depths,

And monstrous, cavernous, a shapeless throat

Devoured her into its shadowy strangling mass,

The fierce spiritual agony of a dream.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-01 F-11]

A curtain of impenetrable dread,

The darkness hung around her cage of sense

As, when the trees have turned to blotted shades

And the last friendly glimmer fades away,

Around a bullock in the forest tied

By hunters closes in no empty night.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-01 F-12]

The thought that strives in the world was here unmade;

Its effort it renounced to live and know,

Convinced at last that it had never been;

It perished, all its dream of action done:

This clotted cypher was its dark result.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-01 F-13]

In the smothering stress of this stupendous Nought

Mind could not think, breath could not breathe, the soul

Could not remember or feel itself; it seemed

A hollow gulf of sterile emptiness,

A zero oblivious of the sum it closed,

An abnegation of the Maker's joy

Saved by no wide repose, no depth of peace.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-01 F-14]

On all that claims here to be Truth and God

And conscious self and the revealing Word

And the creative rapture of the Mind

And Love and Knowledge and heart's delight, there fell

The immense refusal of the eternal No.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-01 F-15]

As disappears a golden lamp in gloom

Borne into distance from the eyes' desire,

Into the shadows vanished Savitri.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-01 F-16]

There was no course, no path, no end or goal:

Visionless she moved amid insensible gulfs,

Or drove through some great black unknowing waste,

Or whirled in a dumb eddy of meeting winds

Assembled by the titan hands of Chance.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-01 F-17]

There was none with her in the dreadful Vast:

She saw no more the vague tremendous god,

Her eyes had lost their luminous Satyavan.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-01 F-18]

Yet not for this her spirit failed, but held

More deeply than the bounded senses can

Which grasp externally and find to lose,

Its object loved.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-01 F-19]

So when on earth they lived

She had felt him straying through the glades, the glades

A scene in her, its clefts her being's vistas

Opening their secrets to his search and joy,

Because to jealous sweetness in her heart

Whatever happy space his cherished feet

Preferred, must be at once her soul embracing

His body, passioning dumbly to his tread.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-01 F-20]

But now a silent gulf between them came

And to abysmal loneliness she fell,

Even from herself cast out, from love remote.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-01 F-21]

Long hours, since long it seems when sluggish time

Is measured by the throbs of the soul's pain,

In an unreal darkness empty and drear

She travelled treading on the corpse of life,

Lost in a blindness of extinguished souls.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-01 F-22]

Solitary in the anguish of the void

She lived in spite of death, she conquered still;

In vain her puissant being was oppressed:

Her heavy long monotony of pain

Tardily of its fierce self-torture tired.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-01 F-23]

At first a faint inextinguishable gleam,

Pale but immortal, flickered in the gloom

As if a memory came to spirits dead,

A memory that wished to live again,

Dissolved from mind in Nature's natal sleep.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-01 F-24]

It wandered like a lost ray of the moon

Revealing to the night her soul of dread;

Serpentine in the gleam the darkness lolled,

Its black hoods jewelled with the mystic glow;

Its dull sleek folds shrank back and coiled and slid,

As though they felt all light a cruel pain

And suffered from the pale approach of hope.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-01 F-25]

Night felt assailed her heavy sombre reign;

The splendour of some bright eternity

Threatened with this faint beam of wandering Truth

Her empire of the everlasting Nought.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-01 F-26]

Implacable in her intolerant strength

And confident that she alone was true,

She strove to stifle the frail dangerous ray;

Aware of an all-negating immensity

She reared her giant head of Nothingness,

Her mouth of darkness swallowing all that is;

She saw in herself the tenebrous Absolute.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-01 F-27]

But still the light prevailed and still it grew,

And Savitri to her lost self awoke;

Her limbs refused the cold embrace of death,

Her heart-beats triumphed in the grasp of pain;

Her soul persisted claiming for its joy

The soul of the beloved now seen no more.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-01 F-28]

Before her in the stillness of the world

Once more she heard the treading of a god,

And out of the dumb darkness Satyavan,

Her husband, grew into a luminous shade.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-01 F-29]

Then a sound pealed through that dead monstrous realm:

Vast like the surge in a tired swimmer's ears,

Clamouring, a fatal iron-hearted roar,

Death missioned to the night his lethal call.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-01 F-30]

“This is my silent dark immensity,

This is the home of everlasting Night,

This is the secrecy of Nothingness

Entombing the vanity of life's desires.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-01 F-31]

Hast thou beheld thy source, O transient heart,

And known from what the dream thou art was made?

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-01 F-32]

In this stark sincerity of nude emptiness

Hopest thou still always to last and love?”

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-01 F-33]

The Woman answered not.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-01 F-34]

Her spirit refused

The voice of Night that knew and Death that thought.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-01 F-35]

In her beginningless infinity

Through her soul's reaches unconfined she gazed;

She saw the undying fountains of her life,

She knew herself eternal without birth.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-01 F-36]

But still opposing her with endless night

Death, the dire god, inflicted on her eyes

The immortal calm of his tremendous gaze:

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-01 F-37]

“Although thou hast survived the unborn void

Which never shall forgive, while Time endures,

The primal violence that fashioned thought,

Forcing the immobile vast to suffer and live,

This sorrowful victory only hast thou won

To live for a little without Satyavan.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-01 F-38]

What shall the ancient goddess give to thee

Who helps thy heart-beats?

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-01 F-39]

Only she prolongs

The nothing dreamed existence and delays

With the labour of living thy eternal sleep.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-01 F-40]

A fragile miracle of thinking clay,

Armed with illusions walks the child of Time.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-01 F-41]

To fill the void around he feels and dreads,

The void he came from and to which he goes,

He magnifies his self and names it God.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-01 F-42]

He calls the heavens to help his suffering hopes.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-01 F-43]

He sees above him with a longing heart

Bare spaces more unconscious than himself

That have not even his privilege of mind,

And empty of all but their unreal blue,

And peoples them with bright and merciful powers.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-01 F-44]

For the sea roars around him and earth quakes

Beneath his steps, and fire is at his doors,

And death prowls baying through the woods of life.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-01 F-45]

Moved by the Presences with which he yearns,

He offers in implacable shrines his soul

And clothes all with the beauty of his dreams.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-01 F-46]

The gods who watch the earth with sleepless eyes

And guide its giant stumblings through the void,

Have given to man the burden of his mind;

In his unwilling heart they have lit their fires

And sown in it incurable unrest.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-01 F-47]

His mind is a hunter upon tracks unknown;

Amusing Time with vain discovery,

He deepens with thought the mystery of his fate

And turns to song his laughter and his tears.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-01 F-48]

His mortality vexing with the immortal's dreams,

Troubling his transience with the infinite's breath,

They gave him hungers which no food can fill;

He is the cattle of the shepherd gods.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-01 F-49]

His body the tether with which he is tied,

They cast for fodder grief and hope and joy:

His pasture ground they have fenced with Ignorance.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-01 F-50]

Into his fragile undefended breast

They have breathed a courage that is met by death,

They have given a wisdom that is mocked by night,

They have traced a journey that foresees no goal.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-01 F-51]

Aimless man toils in an uncertain world,

Lulled by inconstant pauses of his pain,

Scourged like a beast by the infinite desire,

Bound to the chariot of the dreadful gods.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-01 F-52]

But if thou still canst hope and still wouldst love,

Return to thy body's shell, thy tie to earth,

And with thy heart's little remnants try to live.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-01 F-53]

Hope not to win back to thee Satyavan.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-01 F-54]

Yet since thy strength deserves no trivial crown,

Gifts I can give to soothe thy wounded life.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-01 F-55]

The pacts which transient beings make with fate,

And the wayside sweetness earth-bound hearts would pluck,

These if thy will accepts make freely thine.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-01 F-56]

Choose a life's hopes for thy deceiving prize.”

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-01 F-57]

As ceased the ruthless and tremendous Voice,

Unendingly there rose in Savitri,

Like moonlit ridges on a shuddering flood,

A stir of thoughts out of some silence born

Across the sea of her dumb fathomless heart.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-01 F-58]

At last she spoke; her voice was heard by Night:

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-01 F-59]

“I bow not to thee, O huge mask of death,

Black lie of night to the cowed soul of man,

Unreal, inescapable end of things,

Thou grim jest played with the immortal spirit.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-01 F-60]

Conscious of immortality I walk.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-01 F-61]

A victor spirit conscious of my force,

Not as a suppliant to thy gates I came:

Unslain I have survived the clutch of Night.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-01 F-62]

My first strong grief moves not my seated mind;

My unwept tears have turned to pearls of strength:

I have transformed my ill-shaped brittle clay

Into the hardness of a statued soul.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-01 F-63]

Now in the wrestling of the splendid gods

My spirit shall be obstinate and strong

Against the vast refusal of the world.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-01 F-64]

I stoop not with the subject mob of minds

Who run to glean with eager satisfied hands

And pick from its mire mid many trampling feet

Its scornful small concessions to the weak.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-01 F-65]

Mine is the labour of the battling gods:

Imposing on the slow reluctant years

The flaming will that reigns beyond the stars,

They lay the law of Mind on Matter's works

And win the soul's wish from earth's inconscient Force.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-01 F-66]

First I demand whatever Satyavan,

My husband, waking in the forest's charm

Out of his long pure childhood's lonely dreams,

Desired and had not for his beautiful life.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-01 F-67]

Give, if thou must, or, if thou canst, refuse.”

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-01 F-68]

Death bowed his head in scornful cold assent,

The builder of this dreamlike earth for man

Who has mocked with vanity all gifts he gave.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-01 F-69]

Uplifting his disastrous voice he spoke:

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-01 F-70]

“Indulgent to the dreams my touch shall break,

I yield to his blind father's longing heart

Kingdom and power and friends and greatness lost

And royal trappings for his peaceful age,

The pallid pomps of man's declining days,

The silvered decadent glories of life's fall.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-01 F-71]

To one who wiser grew by adverse Fate,

Goods I restore the deluded soul prefers

To impersonal nothingness's bare sublime.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-01 F-72]

The sensuous solace of the light I give

To eyes which could have found a larger realm,

A deeper vision in their fathomless night.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-01 F-73]

For that this man desired and asked in vain

While still he lived on earth and cherished hope.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-01 F-74]

Back from the grandeur of my perilous realms

Go, mortal, to thy small permitted sphere!

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-01 F-75]

Hasten swift-footed, lest to slay thy life

The great laws thou hast violated, moved,

Open at last on thee their marble eyes.”

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-01 F-76]

Play Section Two
[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-02]

But Savitri answered the disdainful Shade:

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

“World-spirit, I was thy equal spirit born.

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

My will too is a law, my strength a god.

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

I am immortal in my mortality.

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

I tremble not before the immobile gaze

Of the unchanging marble hierarchies

That look with the stone eyes of Law and Fate.

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

My soul can meet them with its living fire.

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

Out of thy shadow give me back again

Into earth's flowering spaces Satyavan

In the sweet transiency of human limbs

To do with him my spirit's burning will.

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

I will bear with him the ancient Mother's load,

I will follow with him earth's path that leads to God.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-02 F-08]

Else shall the eternal spaces open to me,

While round us strange horizons far recede,

Travelling together the immense unknown.

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

For I who have trod with him the tracts of Time,

Can meet behind his steps whatever night

Or unimaginable stupendous dawn

Breaks on our spirits in the untrod Beyond.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-02 F-10]

Wherever thou leadst his soul I shall pursue.”

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-02 F-11]

But to her claim opposed, implacable,

Insisting on the immutable Decree,

Insisting on the immitigable Law

And the insignificance of created things,

Out of the rolling wastes of night there came

Born from the enigma of the unknowable depths

A voice of majesty and appalling scorn.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-02 F-12]

As when the storm-haired Titan-striding sea

Throws on a swimmer its tremendous laugh

Remembering all the joy its waves have drowned,

So from the darkness of the sovereign night

Against the Woman's boundless heart arose

The almighty cry of universal Death.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-02 F-13]

“Hast thou god-wings or feet that tread my stars,

Frail creature with the courage that aspires,

Forgetting thy bounds of thought, thy mortal role?

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-02 F-14]

Their orbs were coiled before thy soul was formed.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-02 F-15]

I, Death, created them out of my void;

All things I have built in them and I destroy.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-02 F-16]

I made the worlds my net, each joy a mesh.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-02 F-17]

A Hunger amorous of its suffering prey,

Life that devours, my image see in things.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-02 F-18]

Mortal, whose spirit is my wandering breath,

Whose transience was imagined by my smile,

Flee clutching thy poor gains to thy trembling breast

Pierced by my pangs Time shall not soon appease.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-02 F-19]

Blind slave of my deaf force whom I compel

To sin that I may punish, to desire

That I may scourge thee with despair and grief

And thou come bleeding to me at the last,

Thy nothingness recognised, my greatness known,

Turn nor attempt forbidden happy fields

Meant for the souls that can obey my law,

Lest in their sombre shrines thy tread awake

From their uneasy iron-hearted sleep

The Furies who avenge fulfilled desire.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-02 F-20]

Dread lest in skies where passion hoped to live,

The Unknown's lightnings start and, terrified,

Lone, sobbing, hunted by the hounds of heaven,

A wounded and forsaken soul thou flee

Through the long torture of the centuries,

Nor many lives exhaust the tireless Wrath

Hell cannot slake nor Heaven's mercy assuage.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-02 F-21]

I will take from thee the black eternal grip:

Clasping in thy heart thy fate's exiguous dole

Depart in peace, if peace for man is just.”

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-02 F-22]

But Savitri answered meeting scorn with scorn,

The mortal woman to the dreadful Lord:

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-02 F-23]

 “Who is this God imagined by thy night,

Contemptuously creating worlds disdained,

Who made for vanity the brilliant stars?

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-02 F-24]

Not he who has reared his temple in my thoughts

And made his sacred floor my human heart.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-02 F-25]

My God is will and triumphs in his paths,

My God is love and sweetly suffers all.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-02 F-26]

To him I have offered hope for sacrifice

And gave my longings as a sacrament.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-02 F-27]

Who shall prohibit or hedge in his course,

The wonderful, the charioteer, the swift?

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-02 F-28]

A traveller of the million roads of life,

His steps familiar with the lights of heaven

Tread without pain the sword-paved courts of hell;

There he descends to edge eternal joy.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-02 F-29]

Love's golden wings have power to fan thy void:

The eyes of love gaze starlike through death's night,

The feet of love tread naked hardest worlds.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-02 F-30]

He labours in the depths, exults on the heights;

He shall remake thy universe, O Death.”

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-02 F-31]

She spoke and for a while no voice replied,

While still they travelled through the trackless night

And still that gleam was like a pallid eye

Troubling the darkness with its doubtful gaze.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-02 F-32]

Then once more came a deep and perilous pause

In that unreal journey through blind Nought;

Once more a Thought, a Word in the void arose

And Death made answer to the human soul:

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-02 F-33]

 “What is thy hope? to what dost thou aspire?

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-02 F-34]

This is thy body's sweetest lure of bliss,

Assailed by pain, a frail precarious form,

To please for a few years thy faltering sense

With honey of physical longings and the heart's fire

And, a vain oneness seeking, to embrace

The brilliant idol of a fugitive hour.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-02 F-35]

And thou, what art thou, soul, thou glorious dream

Of brief emotions made and glittering thoughts,

A thin dance of fireflies speeding through the night,

A sparkling ferment in life's sunlit mire?

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-02 F-36]

Wilt thou claim immortality, O heart,

Crying against the eternal witnesses

That thou and he are endless powers and last?

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-02 F-37]

Death only lasts and the inconscient Void.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-02 F-38]

I only am eternal and endure.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-02 F-39]

I am the shapeless formidable Vast,

I am the emptiness that men call Space,

I am a timeless Nothingness carrying all,

I am the Illimitable, the mute Alone.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-02 F-40]

I, Death, am He; there is no other God.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-02 F-41]

All from my depths are born, they live by death;

All to my depths return and are no more.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-02 F-42]

I have made a world by my inconscient Force.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-02 F-43]

My Force is Nature that creates and slays

The hearts that hope, the limbs that long to live.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-02 F-44]

I have made man her instrument and slave,

His body I made my banquet, his life my food.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-02 F-45]

Man has no other help but only Death;

He comes to me at his end for rest and peace.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-02 F-46]

I, Death, am the one refuge of thy soul.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-02 F-47]

The Gods to whom man prays can help not man;

They are my imaginations and my moods

Reflected in him by illusion's power.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-02 F-48]

That which thou seest as thy immortal self

Is a shadowy icon of my infinite,

Is Death in thee dreaming of eternity.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-02 F-49]

I am the Immobile in which all things move,

I am the nude Inane in which they cease:

I have no body and no tongue to speak,

I commune not with human eye and ear;

Only thy thought gave a figure to my void.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-02 F-50]

Because, O aspirant to divinity,

Thou calledst me to wrestle with thy soul,

I have assumed a face, a form, a voice.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-02 F-51]

But if there were a Being witnessing all,

How should he help thy passionate desire?

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-02 F-52]

Aloof he watches sole and absolute,

Indifferent to thy cry in nameless calm.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-02 F-53]

His being is pure, unwounded, motionless, one.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-02 F-54]

One endless watches the inconscient scene

Where all things perish, as the foam the stars.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-02 F-55]

The One lives for ever.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-02 F-56]

There no Satyavan

Changing was born and there no Savitri

Claims from brief life her bribe of joy.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-02 F-57]

There love

Came never with his fretful eyes of tears,

Nor Time is there nor the vain vasts of Space.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-02 F-58]

It wears no living face, it has no name,

No gaze, no heart that throbs; it asks no second

To aid its being or to share its joys.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-02 F-59]

It is delight immortally alone.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-02 F-60]

If thou desirest immortality,

Be then alone sufficient to thy soul:

Live in thyself; forget the man thou lov'st.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-02 F-61]

My last grand death shall rescue thee from life;

Then shalt thou rise into thy unmoved source.”

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-02 F-62]

But Savitri replied to the dread Voice:

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-02 F-63]

“O Death, who reasonest, I reason not,

Reason that scans and breaks, but cannot build

Or builds in vain because she doubts her work.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-02 F-64]

I am, I love, I see, I act, I will.”

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-02 F-65]

Death answered her, one deep surrounding cry:

 “Know also.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-02 F-66]

 Knowing, thou shalt cease to love

And cease to will, delivered from thy heart.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-02 F-67]

So shalt thou rest for ever and be still,

Consenting to the impermanence of things.”

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-02 F-68]

But Savitri replied for man to Death:

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-02 F-69]

“When I have loved for ever, I shall know.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-02 F-70]

Love in me knows the truth all changings mask.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-02 F-71]

I know that knowledge is a vast embrace:

I know that every being is myself,

In every heart is hidden the myriad One.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-02 F-72]

I know the calm Transcendent bears the world,

The veiled Inhabitant, the silent Lord:

I feel his secret act, his intimate fire;

I hear the murmur of the cosmic Voice.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-02 F-73]

I know my coming was a wave from God.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-02 F-74]

For all his suns were conscient in my birth,

And one who loves in us came veiled by death.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-02 F-75]

Then was man born among the monstrous stars

Dowered with a mind and heart to conquer thee.”

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-02 F-76]

In the eternity of his ruthless will

Sure of his empire and his armoured might,

Like one disdaining violent helpless words

From victim lips Death answered not again.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-02 F-77]

He stood in silence and in darkness wrapped,

A figure motionless, a shadow vague,

Girt with the terrors of his secret sword.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-02 F-78]

Half-seen in clouds appeared a sombre face;

Night's dusk tiara was his matted hair,

The ashes of the pyre his forehead's sign.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-02 F-79]

Once more a wanderer in the unending Night,

Blindly forbidden by dead vacant eyes,

She travelled through the dumb unhoping vasts.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-02 F-60]

Around her rolled the shuddering waste of gloom,

Its swallowing emptiness and joyless death

Resentful of her thought and life and love.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-02 F-81]

Through the long fading night by her compelled,

Gliding half-seen on their unearthly path,

Phantasmal in the dimness moved the three.

[Savitri B-09 C-02 S-02 F-82]

Book Nine Canto Two End

The Journey in Eternal Night and the Voice of the Darkness

[Savitri B-09 C-02 Canto Name]

Book Nine End
The Book of Eternal Night
[Savitri B-09 Book End]