Savitri Part Two

Book Four
The Book of Birth and Quest
[Savitri B-04 Book Name]

Canto Two

The Growth of the Flame

[Savitri B-04 C-02 Canto Name]

Play Section One
[Savitri B-04 C-02 S-01]

A land of mountains and wide sun-beat plains

And giant rivers pacing to vast seas,

A field of creation and spiritual hush,

Silence swallowing life's acts into the deeps,

Of thought's transcendent climb and heavenward leap,

A brooding world of reverie and trance,

Filled with the mightiest works of God and man,

Where Nature seemed a dream of the Divine

And beauty and grace and grandeur had their home,

Harboured the childhood of the incarnate Flame.

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

Over her watched millennial influences

And the deep godheads of a grandiose past

Looked on her and saw the future's godheads come

As if this magnet drew their powers unseen.

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

Earth's brooding wisdom spoke to her still breast;

Mounting from mind's last peaks to mate with gods,

Making earth's brilliant thoughts a springing-board

To dive into the cosmic vastnesses,

The knowledge of the thinker and the seer

Saw the unseen and thought the unthinkable,

Opened the enormous doors of the unknown,

Rent man's horizons into infinity.

[Savitri B-04 C-02 S-01 F-03]

A shoreless sweep was lent to the mortal's acts,

And art and beauty sprang from the human depths;

Nature and soul vied in nobility.

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

Ethics the human keyed to imitate heaven;

The harmony of a rich culture's tones

Refined the sense and magnified its reach

To hear the unheard and glimpse the invisible

And taught the soul to soar beyond things known,

Inspiring life to greaten and break its bounds,

Aspiring to the Immortals' unseen world.

[Savitri B-04 C-02 S-01 F-05]

Leaving earth's safety daring wings of Mind

Bore her above the trodden fields of thought

Crossing the mystic seas of the Beyond

To live on eagle heights near to the Sun.

[Savitri B-04 C-02 S-01 F-06]

There Wisdom sits on her eternal throne.

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

All her life's turns led her to symbol doors

Admitting to secret Powers that were her kin;

Adept of truth, initiate of bliss,

A mystic acolyte trained in Nature's school,

Aware of the marvel of created things

She laid the secrecies of her heart's deep muse

Upon the altar of the Wonderful;

Her hours were a ritual in a timeless fane;

Her acts became gestures of sacrifice.

[Savitri B-04 C-02 S-01 F-08]

Invested with a rhythm of higher spheres

The word was used as a hieratic means

For the release of the imprisoned spirit

Into communion with its comrade gods.

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

Or it helped to beat out new expressive forms

Of that which labours in the heart of life,

Some immemorial Soul in men and things,

Seeker of the unknown and the unborn

Carrying a light from the Ineffable

To rend the veil of the last mysteries.

[Savitri B-04 C-02 S-01 F-10]

Intense philosophies pointed earth to heaven

Or on foundations broad as cosmic Space

Upraised the earth-mind to superhuman heights.

[Savitri B-04 C-02 S-01 F-11]

Overpassing lines that please the outward eyes

But hide the sight of that which lives within

Sculpture and painting concentrated sense

Upon an inner vision's motionless verge,

Revealed a figure of the invisible,

Unveiled all Nature's meaning in a form,

Or caught into a body the Divine.

[Savitri B-04 C-02 S-01 F-12]

The architecture of the Infinite

Discovered here its inward-musing shapes

Captured into wide breadths of soaring stone:

Music brought down celestial yearnings, song

Held the merged heart absorbed in rapturous depths,

Linking the human with the cosmic cry;

The world-interpreting movements of the dance

Moulded idea and mood to a rhythmic sway

And posture; crafts minute in subtle lines

Eternised a swift moment's memory

Or showed in a carving's sweep, a cup's design

The underlying patterns of the unseen:

Poems in largeness cast like moving worlds

And metres surging with the ocean's voice

Translated by grandeurs locked in Nature's heart

But thrown now into a crowded glory of speech

The beauty and sublimity of her forms,

The passion of her moments and her moods

Lifting the human word nearer to the god's.

[Savitri B-04 C-02 S-01 F-13]

Man's eyes could look into the inner realms;

His scrutiny discovered number's law

And organised the motions of the stars,

Mapped out the visible fashioning of the world,

Questioned the process of his thoughts or made

A theorised diagram of mind and life.

[Savitri B-04 C-02 S-01 F-14]

These things she took in as her nature's food,

But these alone could fill not her wide Self:

A human seeking limited by its gains,

To her they seemed the great and early steps

Hazardous of a young discovering spirit

Which saw not yet by its own native light;

It tapped the universe with testing knocks

Or stretched to find truth mind's divining rod;

There was a growing out to numberless sides,

But not the widest seeing of the soul,

Not yet the vast direct immediate touch,

Nor yet the art and wisdom of the Gods.

[Savitri B-04 C-02 S-01 F-15]

A boundless knowledge greater than man's thought,

A happiness too high for heart and sense

Locked in the world and yearning for release

She felt in her; waiting as yet for form,

It asked for objects around which to grow

And natures strong to bear without recoil

The splendour of her native royalty,

Her greatness and her sweetness and her bliss,

Her might to possess and her vast power to love:

Earth made a stepping-stone to conquer heaven,

The soul saw beyond heaven's limiting boundaries,

Met a great light from the Unknowable

And dreamed of a transcendent action's sphere.

[Savitri B-04 C-02 S-01 F-16]

Aware of the universal Self in all

She turned to living hearts and human forms,

Her soul's reflections, complements, counterparts,

The close outlying portions of her being

Divided from her by walls of body and mind

Yet to her spirit bound by ties divine.

[Savitri B-04 C-02 S-01 F-17]

Overcoming invisible hedge and masked defence

And the loneliness that separates soul from soul,

She wished to make all one immense embrace

That she might house in it all living things

Raised into a splendid point of seeing light

Out of division's dense inconscient cleft,

And make them one with God and world and her.

[Savitri B-04 C-02 S-01 F-18]

Only a few responded to her call:

Still fewer felt the screened divinity

And strove to mate its godhead with their own,

Approaching with some kinship to her heights.

[Savitri B-04 C-02 S-01 F-19]

Uplifted towards luminous secrecies

Or conscious of some splendour hidden above

They leaped to find her in a moment's flash,

Glimpsing a light in a celestial vast,

But could not keep the vision and the power

And fell back to life's dull ordinary tone.

[Savitri B-04 C-02 S-01 F-20]

A mind daring heavenly experiment,

Growing towards some largeness they felt near,

Testing the unknown's bound with eager touch

They still were prisoned by their human grain:

They could not keep up with her tireless step;

Too small and eager for her large-paced will,

Too narrow to look with the unborn Infinite's gaze

Their nature weary grew of things too great.

[Savitri B-04 C-02 S-01 F-21]

For even the close partners of her thoughts

Who could have walked the nearest to her ray,

Worshipped the power and light they felt in her

But could not match the measure of her soul.

[Savitri B-04 C-02 S-01 F-22]

A friend and yet too great wholly to know,

She walked in their front towards a greater light,

Their leader and queen over their hearts and souls,

One close to their bosoms, yet divine and far.

[Savitri B-04 C-02 S-01 F-23]

Admiring and amazed they saw her stride

Attempting with a godlike rush and leap

Heights for their human stature too remote

Or with a slow great many-sided toil

Pushing towards aims they hardly could conceive;

Yet forced to be the satellites of her sun

They moved unable to forego her light,

Desiring they clutched at her with outstretched hands

Or followed stumbling in the paths she made.

[Savitri B-04 C-02 S-01 F-24]

Or longing with their self of life and flesh

They clung to her for heart's nourishment and support:

The rest they could not see in visible light;

Vaguely they bore her inner mightiness.

[Savitri B-04 C-02 S-01 F-25]

Or bound by the senses and the longing heart,

Adoring with a turbid human love,

They could not grasp the mighty spirit she was

Or change by closeness to be even as she.

[Savitri B-04 C-02 S-01 F-26]

Some felt her with their souls and thrilled with her,

A greatness felt near yet beyond mind's grasp;

To see her was a summons to adore,

To be near her drew a high communion's force.

[Savitri B-04 C-02 S-01 F-27]

So men worship a god too great to know,

Too high, too vast to wear a limiting shape;

They feel a Presence and obey a might,

Adore a love whose rapture invades their breasts;

To a divine ardour quickening the heart-beats,

A law they follow greatening heart and life.

[Savitri B-04 C-02 S-01 F-28]

Opened to the breath is a new diviner air,

Opened to man is a freer, happier world:

He sees high steps climbing to Self and Light.

[Savitri B-04 C-02 S-01 F-29]

Her divine parts the soul's allegiance called:

It saw, it felt, it knew the deity.

[Savitri B-04 C-02 S-01 F-30]

Her will was puissant on their nature's acts,

Her heart's inexhaustible sweetness lured their hearts,

A being they loved whose bounds exceeded theirs;

Her measure they could not reach but bore her touch,

Answering with the flower's answer to the sun

They gave themselves to her and asked no more.

[Savitri B-04 C-02 S-01 F-31]

One greater than themselves, too wide for their ken,

Their minds could not understand nor wholly know,

Their lives replied to hers, moved at her words:

They felt a godhead and obeyed a call,

Answered to her lead and did her work in the world;

Their lives, their natures moved compelled by hers

As if the truth of their own larger selves

Put on an aspect of divinity

To exalt them to a pitch beyond their earth's.

[Savitri B-04 C-02 S-01 F-32]

They felt a larger future meet their walk;

She held their hands, she chose for them their paths:

They were moved by her towards great unknown things,

Faith drew them and the joy to feel themselves hers;

They lived in her, they saw the world with her eyes.

[Savitri B-04 C-02 S-01 F-33]

Some turned to her against their nature's bent;

Divided between wonder and revolt,

Drawn by her charm and mastered by her will,

Possessed by her, her striving to possess,

Impatient subjects, their tied longing hearts

Hugging the bonds close of which they most complained,

Murmured at a yoke they would have wept to lose,

The splendid yoke of her beauty and her love:

Others pursued her with life's blind desires

And claiming all of her as their lonely own,

Hastened to engross her sweetness meant for all.

[Savitri B-04 C-02 S-01 F-34]

As earth claims light for its lone separate need

Demanding her for their sole jealous clasp,

They asked from her movements bounded like their own

And to their smallness craved a like response.

[Savitri B-04 C-02 S-01 F-35]

Or they repined that she surpassed their grip,

And hoped to bind her close with longing's cords.

[Savitri B-04 C-02 S-01 F-36]

Or finding her touch desired too strong to bear

They blamed her for a tyranny they loved,

Shrank into themselves as from too bright a sun,

Yet hankered for the splendour they refused.

[Savitri B-04 C-02 S-01 F-37]

Angrily enamoured of her sweet passionate ray

The weakness of their earth could hardly bear,

They longed but cried out at the touch desired

Inapt to meet divinity so close,

Intolerant of a Force they could not house.

[Savitri B-04 C-02 S-01 F-38]

Some drawn unwillingly by her divine sway

Endured it like a sweet but alien spell;

Unable to mount to levels too sublime,

They yearned to draw her down to their own earth.

[Savitri B-04 C-02 S-01 F-39]

Or forced to centre round her their passionate lives,

They hoped to bind to their heart's human needs

Her glory and grace that had enslaved their souls.

[Savitri B-04 C-02 S-01 F-40]

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

But mid this world, these hearts that answered her call,

None could stand up her equal and her mate.

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

In vain she stooped to equal them with her heights,

Too pure that air was for small souls to breathe.

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

These comrade selves to raise to her own wide breadths

Her heart desired and fill with her own power

That a diviner Force might enter life,

A breath of Godhead greaten human time.

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

Although she leaned down to their littleness

Covering their lives with her strong passionate hands

And knew by sympathy their needs and wants

And dived in the shallow wave-depths of their lives

And met and shared their heart-beats of grief and joy

And bent to heal their sorrow and their pride,

Lavishing the might that was hers on her lone peak

To lift to it their aspiration's cry,

And though she drew their souls into her vast

And surrounded with the silence of her deeps

And held as the great Mother holds her own,

Only her earthly surface bore their charge

And mixed its fire with their mortality:

Her greater self lived sole, unclaimed, within.

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

Oftener in dumb Nature's stir and peace

A nearness she could feel serenely one;

The Force in her drew earth's subhuman broods;

And to her spirit's large and free delight

She joined the ardent-hued magnificent lives

Of animal and bird and flower and tree.

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

They answered to her with the simple heart.

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

In man a dim disturbing somewhat lives;

It knows but turns away from divine Light

Preferring the dark ignorance of the fall.

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

Among the many who came drawn to her

Nowhere she found her partner of high tasks,

The comrade of her soul, her other self

Who was made with her, like God and Nature, one.

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

Some near approached, were touched, caught fire, then failed,

Too great was her demand, too pure her force.

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

Thus lighting earth around her like a sun,

Yet in her inmost sky an orb aloof,

A distance severed her from those most close.

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

Puissant, apart her soul as the gods live.

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

Play Section Three
[Savitri B-04 C-02 S-03]

As yet unlinked with the broad human scene,

In a small circle of young eager hearts,

Her being's early school and closed domain,

Apprentice in the business of earth-life,

She schooled her heavenly strain to bear its touch,

Content in her little garden of the gods

As blooms a flower in an unvisited place.

[Savitri B-04 C-02 S-03 F-01]

Earth nursed, unconscious still, the inhabiting flame,

Yet something deeply stirred and dimly knew;

There was a movement and a passionate call,

A rainbow dream, a hope of golden change;

Some secret wing of expectation beat,

A growing sense of something new and rare

And beautiful stole across the heart of Time.

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

Then a faint whisper of her touched the soil,

Breathed like a hidden need the soul divines;

The eye of the great world discovered her

And wonder lifted up its bardic voice.

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

A key to a Light still kept in being's cave,

The sun-word of an ancient mystery's sense,

Her name ran murmuring on the lips of men

Exalted and sweet like an inspired verse

Struck from the epic lyre of rumour's winds

Or sung like a chanted thought by the poet Fame.

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

But like a sacred symbol's was that cult.

[Savitri B-04 C-02 S-03 F-05]

Admired, unsought, intangible to the grasp

Her beauty and flaming strength were seen afar

Like lightning playing with the fallen day,

A glory unapproachably divine.

[Savitri B-04 C-02 S-03 F-06]

No equal heart came close to join her heart,

No transient earthly love assailed her calm,

No hero passion had the strength to seize;

No eyes demanded her replying eyes.

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

A Power within her awed the imperfect flesh;

The self-protecting genius in our clay

Divined the goddess in the woman's shape

And drew back from a touch beyond its kind

The earth-nature bound in sense-life's narrow make.

[Savitri B-04 C-02 S-03 F-08]

The hearts of men are amorous of clay-kin

And bear not spirits lone and high who bring

Fire-intimations from the deathless planes

Too vast for souls not born to mate with heaven.

[Savitri B-04 C-02 S-03 F-09]

Whoever is too great must lonely live.

[Savitri B-04 C-02 S-03 F-10]

Adored he walks in mighty solitude;

Vain is his labour to create his kind,

His only comrade is the Strength within.

[Savitri B-04 C-02 S-03 F-11]

Thus was it for a while with Savitri.

[Savitri B-04 C-02 S-03 F-12]

All worshipped marvellingly, none dared to claim.

[Savitri B-04 C-02 S-03 F-13]

Her mind sat high pouring its golden beams,

Her heart was a crowded temple of delight.

[Savitri B-04 C-02 S-03 F-14]

A single lamp lit in perfection's house,

A bright pure image in a priestless shrine,

Midst those encircling lives her spirit dwelt,

Apart in herself until her hour of fate.

[Savitri B-04 C-02 S-03 F-15]

Book Four Canto Two End

The Growth of the Flame

[Savitri B-04 C-02 Canto End]

Savitri | a Legend and a Symbol

Book Four
The Book of Birth and Quest

Canto Three

The Call to the Quest

[Savitri B-04 C-03 Canto Name]

Play Section One
[Savitri B-04 C-03 S-01]

A morn that seemed a new creation's front,

Bringing a greater sunlight, happier skies,

Came burdened with a beauty moved and strange

Out of the changeless origin of things.

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

An ancient longing struck again new roots:

The air drank deep of unfulfilled desire;

The high trees trembled with a wandering wind

Like souls that quiver at the approach of joy,

And in a bosom of green secrecy

For ever of its one love-note untired

A lyric coïl cried among the leaves.

[Savitri B-04 C-03 S-01 F-02]

Away from the terrestrial murmur turned

Where transient calls and answers mix their flood,

King Aswapati listened through the ray

To other sounds than meet the sense-formed ear.

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

On a subtle interspace which rings our life,

Unlocked were the inner spirit's trance-closed doors:

The inaudible strain in Nature could be caught;

Across this cyclic tramp of eager lives,

Across the deep urgency of present cares,

Earth's wordless hymn to the Ineffable

Arose from the silent heart of the cosmic Void;

He heard the voice repressed of unborn Powers

Murmuring behind the luminous bars of Time.

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

Again the mighty yearning raised its flame

That asks a perfect life on earth for men

And prays for certainty in the uncertain mind

And shadowless bliss for suffering human hearts

And Truth embodied in an ignorant world

And godhead divinising mortal forms.

[Savitri B-04 C-03 S-01 F-05]

A word that leaped from some far sky of thought,

Admitted by the cowled receiving scribe

Traversed the echoing passages of his brain

And left its stamp on the recording cells.

[Savitri B-04 C-03 S-01 F-06]

“O Force-compelled, Fate-driven earth-born race,

O petty adventurers in an infinite world

And prisoners of a dwarf humanity,

How long will you tread the circling tracks of mind

Around your little self and petty things?

But not for a changeless littleness were you meant,

Not for vain repetition were you built;

Out of the Immortal's substance you were made;

Your actions can be swift revealing steps,

Your life a changeful mould for growing gods.

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

A Seer, a strong Creator, is within,

The immaculate Grandeur broods upon your days,

Almighty powers are shut in Nature's cells.

A greater destiny waits you in your front:

This transient earthly being if he wills

Can fit his acts to a transcendent scheme.

[Savitri B-04 C-03 S-01 F-08]

He who now stares at the world with ignorant eyes

Hardly from the Inconscient's night aroused,

That look at images and not at Truth,

Can fill those orbs with an immortal's sight.

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

Yet shall the godhead grow within your hearts,

You shall awake into the spirit's air

And feel the breaking walls of mortal mind

And hear the message which left life's heart dumb

And look through Nature with sun-gazing lids

And blow your conch-shells at the Eternal's gate.

[Savitri B-04 C-03 S-01 F-10]

Authors of earth's high change, to you it is given

To cross the dangerous spaces of the soul

And touch the mighty Mother stark awake

And meet the Omnipotent in this house of flesh

And make of life the million-bodied One.

[Savitri B-04 C-03 S-01 F-11]

The earth you tread is a border screened from heaven;

The life you lead conceals the light you are.

[Savitri B-04 C-03 S-01 F-12]

Immortal Powers sweep flaming past your doors;

Far-off upon your tops the god-chant sounds

While to exceed yourselves thought's trumpets call,

Heard by a few, but fewer dare aspire,

The nympholepts of the ecstasy and the blaze.

[Savitri B-04 C-03 S-01 F-13]

An epic of hope and failure breaks earth's heart;

Her force and will exceed her form and fate.

[Savitri B-04 C-03 S-01 F-14]

A goddess in a net of transience caught,

Self-bound in the pastures of death she dreams of life,

Self-racked with the pains of hell aspires to joy,

And builds to hope her altars of despair,

Knows that one high step might enfranchise all

And, suffering, looks for greatness in her sons.

[Savitri B-04 C-03 S-01 F-15]

But dim in human hearts the ascending fire,

The invisible Grandeur sits unworshipped there;

Man sees the Highest in a limiting form

Or looks upon a Person, hears a Name.

[Savitri B-04 C-03 S-01 F-16]

He turns for little gains to ignorant Powers

Or kindles his altar lights to a demon face.

[Savitri B-04 C-03 S-01 F-17]

He loves the Ignorance fathering his pain.

[Savitri B-04 C-03 S-01 F-18]

A spell is laid upon his glorious strengths;

He has lost the inner Voice that led his thoughts,

And masking the oracular tripod seat

A specious Idol fills the marvel shrine.

[Savitri B-04 C-03 S-01 F-19]

The great Illusion wraps him in its veils,

The soul's deep intimations come in vain,

In vain is the unending line of seers,

The sages ponder in unsubstantial light,

The poets lend their voice to outward dreams,

A homeless fire inspires the prophet tongues.

[Savitri B-04 C-03 S-01 F-20]

Heaven's flaming lights descend and back return,

The luminous Eye approaches and retires;

Eternity speaks, none understands its word;

Fate is unwilling and the Abyss denies;

The Inconscient's mindless waters block all done.

[Savitri B-04 C-03 S-01 F-21]

Only a little lifted is Mind's screen;

The Wise who know see but one half of Truth,

The strong climb hardly to a low-peaked height,

The hearts that yearn are given one hour to love.

[Savitri B-04 C-03 S-01 F-22]

His tale half told, falters the secret Bard;

The gods are still too few in mortal forms.”

[Savitri B-04 C-03 S-01 F-23]

The Voice withdrew into its hidden skies.

[Savitri B-04 C-03 S-01 F-24]

But like a shining answer from the gods

Approached through sun-bright spaces Savitri.

[Savitri B-04 C-03 S-01 F-25]

Advancing amid tall heaven-pillaring trees,

Apparelled in her flickering-coloured robe

She seemed, burning towards the eternal realms,

A bright moved torch of incense and of flame

That from the sky-roofed temple-soil of earth

A pilgrim hand lifts in an invisible shrine.

[Savitri B-04 C-03 S-01 F-26]

There came the gift of a revealing hour:

He saw through depths that reinterpret all,

Limited not now by the dull body's eyes,

New-found through an arch of clear discovery,

This intimation of the world's delight,

This wonder of the divine Artist's make

Carved like a nectar-cup for thirsty gods,

This breathing Scripture of the Eternal's joy,

This net of sweetness woven of aureate fire.

[Savitri B-04 C-03 S-01 F-27]

Transformed the delicate image-face became

A deeper Nature's self-revealing sign,

A gold-leaf palimpsest of sacred births,

A grave world-symbol chiselled out of life.

[Savitri B-04 C-03 S-01 F-28]

Her brow, a copy of clear unstained heavens,

Was meditation's pedestal and defence,

The very room and smile of musing Space,

Its brooding line infinity's symbol curve.

[Savitri B-04 C-03 S-01 F-29]

Amid her tresses' cloudy multitude

Her long eyes shadowed as by wings of Night

Under that moon-gold forehead's dreaming breadth

Were seas of love and thought that held the world;

Marvelling at life and earth they saw truths far.

[Savitri B-04 C-03 S-01 F-30]

A deathless meaning filled her mortal limbs;

As in a golden vase's poignant line

They seemed to carry the rhythmic sob of bliss

Of earth's mute adoration towards heaven

Released in beauty's cry of living form

Towards the perfection of eternal things.

[Savitri B-04 C-03 S-01 F-31]

Transparent grown the ephemeral living dress

Bared the expressive deity to his view.

[Savitri B-04 C-03 S-01 F-32]

Escaped from surface sight and mortal sense

The seizing harmony of its shapes became

The strange significant icon of a Power

Renewing its inscrutable descent

Into a human figure of its works

That stood out in life's bold abrupt relief

On the soil of the evolving universe,

A godhead sculptured on a wall of thought,

Mirrored in the flowing hours and dimly shrined

In Matter as in a cathedral cave.

[Savitri B-04 C-03 S-01 F-33]

Annulled were the transient values of the mind,

The body's sense renounced its earthly look;

Immortal met immortal in their gaze.

[Savitri B-04 C-03 S-01 F-34]

Awaked from the close spell of daily use

That hides soul-truth with the outward form's disguise,

He saw through the familiar cherished limbs

The great and unknown spirit born his child.

[Savitri B-04 C-03 S-01 F-35]

An impromptu from the deeper sight within,

Thoughts rose in him that knew not their own scope.

[Savitri B-04 C-03 S-01 F-36]

Then to those large and brooding depths whence Love

Regarded him across the straits of mind,

He spoke in sentences from the unseen Heights.

[Savitri B-04 C-03 S-01 F-37]

For the hidden prompters of our speech sometimes

Can use the formulas of a moment's mood

To weigh unconscious lips with words from Fate:

A casual passing phrase can change our life.

[Savitri B-04 C-03 S-01 F-38]

“O spirit, traveller of eternity,

Who cam'st from the immortal spaces here

Armed for the splendid hazard of thy life

To set thy conquering foot on Chance and Time,

The moon shut in her halo dreams like thee.

[Savitri B-04 C-03 S-01 F-39]

A mighty Presence still defends thy frame.

[Savitri B-04 C-03 S-01 F-40]

Perhaps the heavens guard thee for some great soul,

Thy fate, thy work are kept somewhere afar.

[Savitri B-04 C-03 S-01 F-41]

Thy spirit came not down a star alone.

[Savitri B-04 C-03 S-01 F-42]

O living inscription of the beauty of love

Missalled in aureate virginity,

What message of heavenly strength and bliss in thee

Is written with the Eternal's sun-white script,

One shall discover and greaten with it his life

To whom thou loosenest thy heart's jewelled strings.

[Savitri B-04 C-03 S-01 F-43]

O rubies of silence, lips from which there stole

Low laughter, music of tranquillity,

Star-lustrous eyes awake in sweet large night

And limbs like fine-linked poems made of gold

Stanzaed to glimmering curves by artist gods,

Depart where love and destiny call your charm.

[Savitri B-04 C-03 S-01 F-44]

Venture through the deep world to find thy mate.

[Savitri B-04 C-03 S-01 F-45]

For somewhere on the longing breast of earth,

Thy unknown lover waits for thee the unknown.

[Savitri B-04 C-03 S-01 F-46]

Thy soul has strength and needs no other guide

Than One who burns within thy bosom's powers.

[Savitri B-04 C-03 S-01 F-47]

There shall draw near to meet thy approaching steps

The second self for whom thy nature asks,

He who shall walk until thy body's end

A close-bound traveller pacing with thy pace,

The lyrist of thy soul's most intimate chords

Who shall give voice to what in thee is mute.

[Savitri B-04 C-03 S-01 F-48]

Then shall you grow like vibrant kindred harps,

One in the beats of difference and delight,

Responsive in divine and equal strains,

Discovering new notes of the eternal theme.

[Savitri B-04 C-03 S-01 F-49]

One force shall be your mover and your guide,

One light shall be around you and within;

Hand in strong hand confront Heaven's question, life:

Challenge the ordeal of the immense disguise.

[Savitri B-04 C-03 S-01 F-50]

Ascend from Nature to divinity's heights;

Face the high gods, crowned with felicity,

Then meet a greater god, thy self beyond Time.”

[Savitri B-04 C-03 S-01 F-51]

This word was seed of all the thing to be:

A hand from some Greatness opened her heart's locked doors

And showed the work for which her strength was born.

[Savitri B-04 C-03 S-01 F-52]

As when the mantra sinks in Yoga's ear,

Its message enters stirring the blind brain

And keeps in the dim ignorant cells its sound;

The hearer understands a form of words

And, musing on the index thought it holds,

He strives to read it with the labouring mind,

But finds bright hints, not the embodied truth:

Then, falling silent in himself to know

He meets the deeper listening of his soul:

The Word repeats itself in rhythmic strains:

Thought, vision, feeling, sense, the body's self

Are seized unutterably and he endures

An ecstasy and an immortal change;

He feels a Wideness and becomes a Power,

All knowledge rushes on him like a sea:

Transmuted by the white spiritual ray

He walks in naked heavens of joy and calm,

Sees the God-face and hears transcendent speech:

An equal greatness in her life was sown.

[Savitri B-04 C-03 S-01 F-53]

Accustomed scenes were now an ended play:

Moving in muse amid familiar powers,

Touched by new magnitudes and fiery signs,

She turned to vastnesses not yet her own;

Allured her heart throbbed to unknown sweetnesses;

The secrets of an unseen world were close.

[Savitri B-04 C-03 S-01 F-54]

The morn went up into a smiling sky;

Cast from its sapphire pinnacle of trance

Day sank into the burning gold of eve;

The moon floated, a luminous waif through heaven

And sank below the oblivious edge of dream;

Night lit the watch-fires of eternity.

[Savitri B-04 C-03 S-01 F-55]

Then all went back into mind's secret caves;

A darkness stooping on the heaven-bird's wings

Sealed in her senses from external sight

And opened the stupendous depths of sleep.

[Savitri B-04 C-03 S-01 F-56]

When the pale dawn slipped through Night's shadowy guard,

Vainly the new-born light desired her face;

The palace woke to its own emptiness;

The sovereign of its daily joys was far;

Her moonbeam feet tinged not the lucent floors:

The beauty and divinity were gone.

[Savitri B-04 C-03 S-01 F-57]

Delight had fled to search the spacious world.

[Savitri B-04 C-03 S-01 F-58]

Book Four Canto Three End

The Call to the Quest

[Savitri B-04 C-03 End]

Savitri | a Legend and a Symbol

Book Four
The Book of Birth and Quest

Canto Four

The Quest

[Savitri B-04 C-04 Canto Name]

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

The world-ways opened before Savitri.

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

At first a strangeness of new brilliant scenes

Peopled her mind and kept her body's gaze.

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

But as she moved across the changing earth

A deeper consciousness welled up in her:

A citizen of many scenes and climes,

Each soil and country it had made its home;

It took all clans and peoples for her own,

Till the whole destiny of mankind was hers.

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

These unfamiliar spaces on her way

Were known and neighbours to a sense within,

Landscapes recurred like lost forgotten fields,

Cities and rivers and plains her vision claimed

Like slow-recurring memories in front,

The stars at night were her past's brilliant friends,

The winds murmured to her of ancient things

And she met nameless comrades loved by her once.

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

All was a part of old forgotten selves:

Vaguely or with a flash of sudden hints

Her acts recalled a line of bygone power,

Even her motion's purpose was not new:

Traveller to a prefigured high event,

She seemed to her remembering witness soul

To trace again a journey often made.

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

A guidance turned the dumb revolving wheels

And in the eager body of their speed

The dim-masked hooded godheads rode who move

Assigned to man immutably from his birth,

Receivers of the inner and outer law,

At once the agents of his spirit's will

And witnesses and executors of his fate.

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

Inexorably faithful to their task,

They hold his nature's sequence in their guard

Carrying the unbroken thread old lives have spun.

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

Attendants on his destiny's measured walk

Leading to joys he has won and pains he has called,

Even in his casual steps they intervene.

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

Nothing we think or do is void or vain;

Each is an energy loosed and holds its course.

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

The shadowy keepers of our deathless past

Have made our fate the child of our own acts,

And from the furrows laboured by our will

We reap the fruit of our forgotten deeds.

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

But since unseen the tree that bore this fruit

And we live in a present born from an unknown past,

They seem but parts of a mechanic Force

To a mechanic mind tied by earth's laws;

Yet are they instruments of a Will supreme,

Watched by a still all-seeing Eye above.

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

A prescient architect of Fate and Chance

Who builds our lives on a foreseen design

The meaning knows and consequence of each step

And watches the inferior stumbling powers.

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

Upon her silent heights she was aware

Of a calm Presence throned above her brows

Who saw the goal and chose each fateful curve;

It used the body for its pedestal;

The eyes that wandered were its searchlight fires,

The hands that held the reins its living tools;

All was the working of an ancient plan,

A way proposed by an unerring Guide.

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

Across wide noons and glowing afternoons,

She met with Nature and with human forms

And listened to the voices of the world;

Driven from within she followed her long road,

Mute in the luminous cavern of her heart,

Like a bright cloud through the resplendent day.

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

At first her path ran far through peopled tracts:

Admitted to the lion eye of States

And theatres of the loud act of man,

Her carven chariot with its fretted wheels

Threaded through clamorous marts and sentinel towers

Past figured gates and high dream-sculptured fronts

And gardens hung in the sapphire of the skies,

Pillared assembly halls with armoured guards,

Small fanes where one calm Image watched man's life

And temples hewn as if by exiled gods

To imitate their lost eternity.

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

Often from gilded dusk to argent dawn,

Where jewel-lamps flickered on frescoed walls

And the stone lattice stared at moonlit boughs,

Half-conscious of the tardy listening night

Dimly she glided between banks of sleep

At rest in the slumbering palaces of kings.

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

Hamlet and village saw the fate-wain pass,

Homes of a life bent to the soil it ploughs

For sustenance of its short and passing days

That, transient, keep their old repeated course,

Unchanging in the circle of a sky

Which alters not above our mortal toil.

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

Away from this thinking creature's burdened hours

To free and griefless spaces now she turned

Not yet perturbed by human joys and fears.

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

Here was the childhood of primaeval earth,

Here timeless musings large and glad and still,

Men had forborne as yet to fill with cares,

Imperial acres of the eternal sower

And wind-stirred grass-lands winking in the sun:

Or mid green musing of woods and rough-browed hills,

In the grove's murmurous bee-air humming wild

Or past the long lapsing voice of silver floods

Like a swift hope journeying among its dreams

Hastened the chariot of the golden bride.

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

Out of the world's immense unhuman past

Tract-memories and ageless remnants came,

Domains of light enfeoffed to antique calm

Listened to the unaccustomed sound of hooves

And large immune entangled silences

Absorbed her into emerald secrecy

And slow hushed wizard nets of fiery bloom

Environed with their coloured snare her wheels.

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

The strong importunate feet of Time fell soft

Along these lonely ways, his titan pace

Forgotten and his stark and ruinous rounds.

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

The inner ear that listens to solitude,

Leaning self-rapt unboundedly could hear

The rhythm of the intenser wordless Thought

That gathers in the silence behind life,

And the low sweet inarticulate voice of earth

In the great passion of her sun-kissed trance

Ascended with its yearning undertone.

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

Afar from the brute noise of clamorous needs

The quieted all-seeking mind could feel,

At rest from its blind outwardness of will,

The unwearied clasp of her mute patient love

And know for a soul the mother of our forms.

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

This spirit stumbling in the fields of sense,

This creature bruised in the mortar of the days

Could find in her broad spaces of release.

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

Not yet was a world all occupied by care.

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

The bosom of our mother kept for us still

Her austere regions and her musing depths,

Her impersonal reaches lonely and inspired

And the mightinesses of her rapture haunts.

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

Muse-lipped she nursed her symbol mysteries

And guarded for her pure-eyed sacraments

The valley clefts between her breasts of joy,

Her mountain altars for the fires of dawn

And nuptial beaches where the ocean couched

And the huge chanting of her prophet woods.

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

Fields had she of her solitary mirth,

Plains hushed and happy in the embrace of light,

Alone with the cry of birds and hue of flowers,

And wildernesses of wonder lit by her moons

And grey seer-evenings kindling with the stars

And dim movement in the night's infinitude.

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

August, exulting in her Maker's eye,

She felt her nearness to him in earth's breast,

Conversed still with a Light behind the veil,

Still communed with Eternity beyond.

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

A few and fit inhabitants she called

To share the glad communion of her peace;

The breadth, the summit were their natural home.

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

The strong king-sages from their labour done,

Freed from the warrior tension of their task,

Came to her serene sessions in these wilds;

The strife was over, the respite lay in front.

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

Happy they lived with birds and beasts and flowers

And sunlight and the rustle of the leaves,

And heard the wild winds wandering in the night,

Mused with the stars in their mute constant ranks,

And lodged in the mornings as in azure tents,

And with the glory of the noons were one.

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

Some deeper plunged; from life's external clasp

Beckoned into a fiery privacy

In the soul's unprofaned star-white recess

They sojourned with an everliving Bliss;

A Voice profound in the ecstasy and the hush

They heard, beheld an all-revealing Light.

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

All time-made difference they overcame;

The world was fibred with their own heart-strings;

Close drawn to the heart that beats in every breast,

They reached the one self in all through boundless love.

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

Attuned to Silence and to the world-rhyme,

They loosened the knot of the imprisoning mind;

Achieved was the wide untroubled witness gaze,

Unsealed was Nature's great spiritual eye;

To the height of heights rose now their daily climb:

Truth leaned to them from her supernal realm;

Above them blazed eternity's mystic suns.

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

Nameless the austere ascetics without home

Abandoning speech and motion and desire

Aloof from creatures sat absorbed, alone,

Immaculate in tranquil heights of self

On concentration's luminous voiceless peaks,

World-naked hermits with their matted hair

Immobile as the passionless great hills

Around them grouped like thoughts of some vast mood

Awaiting the Infinite's behest to end.

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

The seers attuned to the universal Will,

Content in Him who smiles behind earth's forms,

Abode ungrieved by the insistent days.

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

About them like green trees girdling a hill

Young grave disciples fashioned by their touch,

Trained to the simple act and conscious word,

Greatened within and grew to meet their heights.

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

Far-wandering seekers on the Eternal's path

Brought to these quiet founts their spirit's thirst

And spent the treasure of a silent hour

Bathed in the purity of the mild gaze

That, uninsistent, ruled them from its peace,

And by its influence found the ways of calm.

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

The Infants of the monarchy of the worlds,

The heroic leaders of a coming time,

King-children nurtured in that spacious air

Like lions gambolling in sky and sun

Received half-consciously their godlike stamp:

Formed in the type of the high thoughts they sang

They learned the wide magnificence of mood

That makes us comrades of the cosmic urge,

No longer chained to their small separate selves,

Plastic and firm beneath the eternal hand,

Met Nature with a bold and friendly clasp

And served in her the Power that shapes her works.

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

One-souled to all and free from narrowing bonds,

Large like a continent of warm sunshine

In wide equality's impartial joy,

These sages breathed for God's delight in things.

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

Assisting the slow entries of the gods,

Sowing in young minds immortal thoughts they lived,

Taught the great Truth to which man's race must rise

Or opened the gates of freedom to a few.

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

Imparting to our struggling world the Light

They breathed like spirits from Time's dull yoke released,

Comrades and vessels of the cosmic Force,

Using a natural mastery like the sun's:

Their speech, their silence was a help to earth.

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

A magic happiness flowed from their touch;

Oneness was sovereign in that sylvan peace,

The wild beast joined in friendship with its prey;

Persuading the hatred and the strife to cease

The love that flows from the one Mother's breast

Healed with their hearts the hard and wounded world.

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

Others escaped from the confines of thought

To where Mind motionless sleeps waiting Light's birth,

And came back quivering with a nameless Force,

Drunk with a wine of lightning in their cells;

Intuitive knowledge leaping into speech,

Seized, vibrant, kindling with the inspired word,

Hearing the subtle voice that clothes the heavens,

Carrying the splendour that has lit the suns,

They sang Infinity's names and deathless powers

In metres that reflect the moving worlds,

Sight's sound-waves breaking from the soul's great deeps.

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

Some lost to the person and his strip of thought

In a motionless ocean of impersonal Power,

Sat mighty, visioned with the Infinite's light,

Or, comrades of the everlasting Will,

Surveyed the plan of past and future Time.

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

Some winged like birds out of the cosmic sea

And vanished into a bright and featureless Vast:

Some silent watched the universal dance,

Or helped the world by world-indifference.

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

Some watched no more merged in a lonely Self,

Absorbed in the trance from which no soul returns,

All the occult world-lines for ever closed,

The chains of birth and person cast away:

Some uncompanioned reached the Ineffable.

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

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

As floats a sunbeam through a shady place,

The golden virgin in her carven car

Came gliding among meditation's seats.

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

Often in twilight mid returning troops

Of cattle thickening with their dust the shades

When the loud day had slipped below the verge,

Arriving in a peaceful hermit grove

She rested drawing round her like a cloak

Its spirit of patient muse and potent prayer.

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

Or near to a lion river's tawny mane

And trees that worshipped on a praying shore,

A domed and templed air's serene repose

Beckoned to her hurrying wheels to stay their speed.

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

In the solemnity of a space that seemed

A mind remembering ancient silences,

Where to the heart great bygone voices called

And the large liberty of brooding seers

Had left the long impress of their soul's scene,

Awake in candid dawn or darkness mooned,

To the still touch inclined the daughter of Flame

Drank in hushed splendour between tranquil lids

And felt the kinship of eternal calm.

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

But morn broke in reminding her of her quest

And from low rustic couch or mat she rose

And went impelled on her unfinished way

And followed the fateful orbit of her life

Like a desire that questions silent gods

Then passes starlike to some bright Beyond.

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

Thence to great solitary tracts she came,

Where man was a passer-by towards human scenes

Or sole in Nature's vastness strove to live

And called for help to ensouled invisible Powers,

Overwhelmed by the immensity of his world

And unaware of his own infinity.

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

The earth multiplied to her a changing brow

And called her with a far and nameless voice.

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

The mountains in their anchorite solitude,

The forests with their multitudinous chant

Disclosed to her the masked divinity's doors.

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

On dreaming plains, an indolent expanse,

The death-bed of a pale enchanted eve

Under the glamour of a sunken sky,

Impassive she lay as at an age's end,

Or crossed an eager pack of huddled hills

Lifting their heads to hunt a lairlike sky,

Or travelled in a strange and empty land

Where desolate summits camped in a weird heaven,

Mute sentinels beneath a drifting moon,

Or wandered in some lone tremendous wood

Ringing for ever with the crickets' cry

Or followed a long glistening serpent road

Through fields and pastures lapped in moveless light

Or reached the wild beauty of a desert space

Where never plough was driven nor herd had grazed

And slumbered upon stripped and thirsty sands

Amid the savage wild-beast night's appeal.

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

Still unaccomplished was the fateful quest;

Still she found not the one predestined face

For which she sought amid the sons of men.

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

A grandiose silence wrapped the regal day:

The months had fed the passion of the sun

And now his burning breath assailed the soil.

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

The tiger heats prowled through the fainting earth;

All was licked up as by a lolling tongue.

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

The spring winds failed; the sky was set like bronze.

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

Book Four Canto Four End

The Quest

[Savitri B-04 C-04 Canto End]

Book Four End
THE BOOK OF BIRTH AND QUEST
[Savitri B-04 Book End]

Savitri | a Legend and a Symbol

Book Five All Cantos
The Book of Love

Canto One

The Destined Meeting-Place

[Savitri B-05 C-01 Canto Name]

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

But now the destined spot and hour were close;

Unknowing she had neared her nameless goal.

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

For though a dress of blind and devious chance

Is laid upon the work of all-wise Fate,

Our acts interpret an omniscient Force

That dwells in the compelling stuff of things,

And nothing happens in the cosmic play

But at its time and in its foreseen place.

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

To a space she came of soft and delicate air

That seemed a sanctuary of youth and joy,

A highland world of free and green delight

Where spring and summer lay together and strove

In indolent and amicable debate,

Inarmed, disputing with laughter who should rule.

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

There expectation beat wide sudden wings

As if a soul had looked out from earth's face,

And all that was in her felt a coming change

And forgetting obvious joys and common dreams,

Obedient to Time's call, to the spirit's fate,

Was lifted to a beauty calm and pure

That lived under the eyes of Eternity.

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

A crowd of mountainous heads assailed the sky

Pushing towards rival shoulders nearer heaven,

The armoured leaders of an iron line;

Earth prostrate lay beneath their feet of stone.

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

Below them crouched a dream of emerald woods

And gleaming borders solitary as sleep:

Pale waters ran like glimmering threads of pearl.

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

A sigh was straying among happy leaves;

Cool-perfumed with slow pleasure-burdened feet

Faint stumbling breezes faltered among flowers.

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

The white crane stood, a vivid motionless streak,

Peacock and parrot jewelled soil and tree,

The dove's soft moan enriched the enamoured air

And fire-winged wild-drakes swam in silvery pools.

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

Earth couched alone with her great lover Heaven,

Uncovered to her consort's azure eye.

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

In a luxurious ecstasy of joy

She squandered the love-music of her notes,

Wasting the passionate pattern of her blooms

And festival riot of her scents and hues.

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

A cry and leap and hurry was around,

The stealthy footfalls of her chasing things,

The shaggy emerald of her centaur mane,

The gold and sapphire of her warmth and blaze.

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

Magician of her rapt felicities,

Blithe, sensuous-hearted, careless and divine,

Life ran or hid in her delightful rooms;

Behind all brooded Nature's grandiose calm.

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

Primaeval peace was there and in its bosom

Held undisturbed the strife of bird and beast.

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

Man the deep-browed artificer had not come

To lay his hand on happy inconscient things,

Thought was not there nor the measurer, strong-eyed toil,

Life had not learned its discord with its aim.

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

The Mighty Mother lay outstretched at ease.

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

All was in line with her first satisfied plan;

Moved by a universal will of joy

The trees bloomed in their green felicity

And the wild children brooded not on pain.

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

At the end reclined a stern and giant tract

Of tangled depths and solemn questioning hills,

Peaks like a bare austerity of the soul,

Armoured, remote and desolately grand

Like the thought-screened infinities that lie

Behind the rapt smile of the Almighty's dance.

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

A matted forest-head invaded heaven

As if a blue-throated ascetic peered

From the stone fastness of his mountain cell

Regarding the brief gladness of the days;

His vast extended spirit couched behind.

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

A mighty murmur of immense retreat

Besieged the ear, a sad and limitless call

As of a soul retiring from the world.

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

This was the scene which the ambiguous Mother

Had chosen for her brief felicitous hour;

Here in this solitude far from the world

Her part she began in the world's joy and strife.

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

Here were disclosed to her the mystic courts,

The lurking doors of beauty and surprise,

The wings that murmur in the golden house,

The temple of sweetness and the fiery aisle.

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

A stranger on the sorrowful roads of Time,

Immortal under the yoke of death and fate,

A sacrificant of the bliss and pain of the spheres,

Love in the wilderness met Savitri.

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

Book Five Canto One End

The Destined Meeting-Place

[Savitri B-05 C-01 Canto End]

Savitri | a Legend and a Symbol

Book Five
The Book of Love

Canto Two

Satyavan

[Savitri B-05 C-02 Canto Name]

Play Section One
[Savitri B-05 C-02 S-01]

All she remembered on this day of Fate,

The road that hazarded not the solemn depths

But turned away to flee to human homes,

The wilderness with its mighty monotone,

The morning like a lustrous seer above,

The passion of the summits lost in heaven,

The titan murmur of the endless woods.

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

As if a wicket gate to joy were there

Ringed in with voiceless hint and magic sign,

Upon the margin of an unknown world

Reclined the curve of a sun-held recess;

Groves with strange flowers like eyes of gazing nymphs

Peered from their secrecy into open space,

Boughs whispering to a constancy of light

Sheltered a dim and screened felicity,

And slowly a supine inconstant breeze

Ran like a fleeting sigh of happiness

Over slumbrous grasses pranked with green and gold.

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

Hidden in the forest's bosom of loneliness

Amid the leaves the inmate voices called,

Sweet like desires enamoured and unseen,

Cry answering to low insistent cry.

[Savitri B-05 C-02 S-01 F-03]

Behind slept emerald dumb remotenesses,

Haunt of a Nature passionate, veiled, denied

To all but her own vision lost and wild.

[Savitri B-05 C-02 S-01 F-04]

Earth in this beautiful refuge free from cares

Murmured to the soul a song of strength and peace.

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

Only one sign was there of a human tread:

A single path, shot thin and arrowlike

Into this bosom of vast and secret life,

Pierced its enormous dream of solitude.

[Savitri B-05 C-02 S-01 F-06]

Here first she met on the uncertain earth

The one for whom her heart had come so far.

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

As might a soul on Nature's background limned

Stand out for a moment in a house of dream

Created by the ardent breath of life,

So he appeared against the forest verge

Inset twixt green relief and golden ray.

[Savitri B-05 C-02 S-01 F-08]

As if a weapon of the living Light,

Erect and lofty like a spear of God

His figure led the splendour of the morn.

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

Noble and clear as the broad peaceful heavens

A tablet of young wisdom was his brow;

Freedom's imperious beauty curved his limbs,

The joy of life was on his open face.

[Savitri B-05 C-02 S-01 F-10]

His look was a wide daybreak of the gods,

His head was a youthful Rishi's touched with light,

His body was a lover's and a king's.

[Savitri B-05 C-02 S-01 F-11]

In the magnificent dawning of his force

Built like a moving statue of delight

He illumined the border of the forest page.

[Savitri B-05 C-02 S-01 F-12]

Out of the ignorant eager toil of the years

Abandoning man's loud drama he had come

Led by the wisdom of an adverse Fate

To meet the ancient Mother in her groves.

[Savitri B-05 C-02 S-01 F-13]

In her divine communion he had grown

A foster-child of beauty and solitude,

Heir to the centuries of the lonely wise,

A brother of the sunshine and the sky,

A wanderer communing with depth and marge.

[Savitri B-05 C-02 S-01 F-14]

A Veda-knower of the unwritten book

Perusing the mystic scripture of her forms,

He had caught her hierophant significances,

Her sphered immense imaginations learned,

Taught by sublimities of stream and wood

And voices of the sun and star and flame

And chant of the magic singers on the boughs

And the dumb teaching of four-footed things.

[Savitri B-05 C-02 S-01 F-15]

Helping with confident steps her slow great hands

He leaned to her influence like a flower to rain

And, like the flower and tree a natural growth,

Widened with the touches of her shaping hours.

[Savitri B-05 C-02 S-01 F-16]

The mastery free natures have was his

And their assent to joy and spacious calm;

One with the single Spirit inhabiting all,

He laid experience at the Godhead's feet;

His mind was open to her infinite mind,

His acts were rhythmic with her primal force;

He had subdued his mortal thought to hers.

[Savitri B-05 C-02 S-01 F-17]

That day he had turned from his accustomed paths;

For One who, knowing every moment's load,

Can move in all our studied or careless steps,

Had laid the spell of destiny on his feet

And drawn him to the forest's flowering verge.

[Savitri B-05 C-02 S-01 F-18]

At first her glance that took life's million shapes

Impartially to people its treasure-house

Along with sky and flower and hill and star,

Dwelt rather on the bright harmonious scene.

[Savitri B-05 C-02 S-01 F-19]

It saw the green-gold of the slumbrous sward,

The grasses quivering with the slow wind's tread,

The branches haunted by the wild bird's call.

[Savitri B-05 C-02 S-01 F-20]

Awake to Nature, vague as yet to life,

The eager prisoner from the Infinite,

The immortal wrestler in its mortal house,

Its pride, power, passion of a striving God,

It saw this image of veiled deity,

This thinking master creature of the earth,

This last result of the beauty of the stars,

But only saw like fair and common forms

The artist spirit needs not for its work

And puts aside in memory's shadowy rooms.

[Savitri B-05 C-02 S-01 F-21]

A look, a turn decides our ill-poised fate.

[Savitri B-05 C-02 S-01 F-22]

Thus in the hour that most concerned her all,

Wandering unwarned by the slow surface mind,

The heedless scout beneath her tenting lids

Admired indifferent beauty and cared not

To wake her body's spirit to its king.

[Savitri B-05 C-02 S-01 F-23]

So might she have passed by on chance ignorant roads

Missing the call of Heaven, losing life's aim,

But the god touched in time her conscious soul.

[Savitri B-05 C-02 S-01 F-24]

Her vision settled, caught and all was changed.

[Savitri B-05 C-02 S-01 F-25]

Her mind at first dwelt in ideal dreams,

Those intimate transmuters of earth's signs

That make known things a hint of unseen spheres,

And saw in him the genius of the spot,

A symbol figure standing mid earth's scenes,

A king of life outlined in delicate air.

[Savitri B-05 C-02 S-01 F-26]

Yet this was but a moment's reverie;

For suddenly her heart looked out at him,

The passionate seeing used thought cannot match,

And knew one nearer than its own close strings.

[Savitri B-05 C-02 S-01 F-27]

All in a moment was surprised and seized,

All in inconscient ecstasy lain wrapped

Or under imagination's coloured lids

Held up in a large mirror-air of dream,

Broke forth in flame to recreate the world,

And in that flame to new things she was born.

[Savitri B-05 C-02 S-01 F-28]

A mystic tumult from her depths arose;

Haled, smitten erect like one who dreamed at ease,

Life ran to gaze from every gate of sense:

Thoughts indistinct and glad in moon-mist heavens,

Feelings as when a universe takes birth,

Swept through the turmoil of her bosom's space

Invaded by a swarm of golden gods:

Arising to a hymn of wonder's priests

Her soul flung wide its doors to this new sun.

[Savitri B-05 C-02 S-01 F-29]

An alchemy worked, the transmutation came;

The missioned face had wrought the Master's spell.

[Savitri B-05 C-02 S-01 F-30]

In the nameless light of two approaching eyes

A swift and fated turning of her days

Appeared and stretched to a gleam of unknown worlds.

[Savitri B-05 C-02 S-01 F-31]

Then trembling with the mystic shock her heart

Moved in her breast and cried out like a bird

Who hears his mate upon a neighbouring bough.

[Savitri B-05 C-02 S-01 F-32]

Hooves trampling fast, wheels largely stumbling ceased;

The chariot stood like an arrested wind.

[Savitri B-05 C-02 S-01 F-33]

And Satyavan looked out from his soul's doors

And felt the enchantment of her liquid voice

Fill his youth's purple ambience and endured

The haunting miracle of a perfect face.

[Savitri B-05 C-02 S-01 F-34]

Mastered by the honey of a strange flower-mouth,

Drawn to soul-spaces opening round a brow,

He turned to the vision like a sea to the moon

And suffered a dream of beauty and of change,

Discovered the aureole round a mortal's head,

Adored a new divinity in things.

[Savitri B-05 C-02 S-01 F-35]

His self-bound nature foundered as in fire;

His life was taken into another's life.

[Savitri B-05 C-02 S-01 F-36]

The splendid lonely idols of his brain

Fell prostrate from their bright sufficiencies,

As at the touch of a new infinite,

To worship a godhead greater than their own.

[Savitri B-05 C-02 S-01 F-37]

An unknown imperious force drew him to her.

[Savitri B-05 C-02 S-01 F-38]

Marvelling he came across the golden sward:

Gaze met close gaze and clung in sight's embrace.

[Savitri B-05 C-02 S-01 F-39]

A visage was there, noble and great and calm,

As if encircled by a halo of thought,

A span, an arch of meditating light,

As though some secret nimbus half was seen;

Her inner vision still remembering knew

A forehead that wore the crown of all her past,

Two eyes her constant and eternal stars,

Comrade and sovereign eyes that claimed her soul,

Lids known through many lives, large frames of love.

[Savitri B-05 C-02 S-01 F-40]

He met in her regard his future's gaze,

A promise and a presence and a fire,

Saw an embodiment of aeonic dreams,

A mystery of the rapture for which all

Yearns in this world of brief mortality

Made in material shape his very own.

[Savitri B-05 C-02 S-01 F-41]

This golden figure given to his grasp

Hid in its breast the key of all his aims,

A spell to bring the Immortal's bliss on earth,

To mate with heaven's truth our mortal thought,

To lift earth-hearts nearer the Eternal's sun.

[Savitri B-05 C-02 S-01 F-42]

In these great spirits now incarnate here

Love brought down power out of eternity

To make of life his new undying base.

[Savitri B-05 C-02 S-01 F-43]

His passion surged a wave from fathomless deeps;

It leaped to earth from far forgotten heights,

But kept its nature of infinity.

[Savitri B-05 C-02 S-01 F-44]

On the dumb bosom of this oblivious globe

Although as unknown beings we seem to meet,

Our lives are not aliens nor as strangers join,

Moved to each other by a causeless force.

[Savitri B-05 C-02 S-01 F-45]

The soul can recognise its answering soul

Across dividing Time and, on life's roads

Absorbed wrapped traveller, turning it recovers

Familiar splendours in an unknown face

And touched by the warning finger of swift love

It thrills again to an immortal joy

Wearing a mortal body for delight.

[Savitri B-05 C-02 S-01 F-46]

There is a Power within that knows beyond

Our knowings; we are greater than our thoughts,

And sometimes earth unveils that vision here.

[Savitri B-05 C-02 S-01 F-47]

To live, to love are signs of infinite things,

Love is a glory from eternity's spheres.

[Savitri B-05 C-02 S-01 F-48]

Abased, disfigured, mocked by baser mights

That steal his name and shape and ecstasy,

He is still the godhead by which all can change.

[Savitri B-05 C-02 S-01 F-49]

A mystery wakes in our inconscient stuff,

A bliss is born that can remake our life.

[Savitri B-05 C-02 S-01 F-50]

Love dwells in us like an unopened flower

Awaiting a rapid moment of the soul,

Or he roams in his charmed sleep mid thoughts and things;

The child-god is at play, he seeks himself

In many hearts and minds and living forms:

He lingers for a sign that he can know

And, when it comes, wakes blindly to a voice,

A look, a touch, the meaning of a face.

[Savitri B-05 C-02 S-01 F-51]

His instrument the dim corporeal mind,

Of celestial insight now forgetful grown,

He seizes on some sign of outward charm

To guide him mid the throng of Nature's hints,

Reads heavenly truths into earth's semblances,

Desires the image for the godhead's sake,

Divines the immortalities of form

And takes the body for the sculptured soul.

[Savitri B-05 C-02 S-01 F-52]

Love's adoration like a mystic seer

Through vision looks at the invisible,

In earth's alphabet finds a godlike sense;

But the mind only thinks, “Behold the one

For whom my life has waited long unfilled,

Behold the sudden sovereign of my days."

[Savitri B-05 C-02 S-01 F-53]

Heart feels for heart, limb cries for answering limb;

All strives to enforce the unity all is.

[Savitri B-05 C-02 S-01 F-54]

Too far from the Divine, Love seeks his truth

And Life is blind and the instruments deceive

And Powers are there that labour to debase.

[Savitri B-05 C-02 S-01 F-55]

Still can the vision come, the joy arrive.

[Savitri B-05 C-02 S-01 F-56]

Rare is the cup fit for love's nectar wine,

As rare the vessel that can hold God's birth;

A soul made ready through a thousand years

Is the living mould of a supreme Descent.

[Savitri B-05 C-02 S-01 F-57]

These knew each other though in forms thus strange.

[Savitri B-05 C-02 S-01 F-58]

Although to sight unknown, though life and mind

Had altered to hold a new significance,

These bodies summed the drift of numberless births,

And the spirit to the spirit was the same.

[Savitri B-05 C-02 S-01 F-59]

Amazed by a joy for which they had waited long,

The lovers met upon their different paths,

Travellers across the limitless plains of Time

Together drawn from fate-led journeyings

In the self-closed solitude of their human past,

To a swift rapturous dream of future joy

And the unexpected present of these eyes.

[Savitri B-05 C-02 S-01 F-60]

By the revealing greatness of a look,

Form-smitten the spirit's memory woke in sense.

[Savitri B-05 C-02 S-01 F-61]

The mist was torn that lay between two lives;

Her heart unveiled and his to find her turned;

Attracted as in heaven star by star,

They wondered at each other and rejoiced

And wove affinity in a silent gaze.

[Savitri B-05 C-02 S-01 F-62]

A moment passed that was eternity's ray,

An hour began, the matrix of new Time.

[Savitri B-05 C-02 S-01 F-63]

Book Five Canto Two End

Satyavan

[Savitri B-05 C-02 Canto End]

Savitri | a Legend and a Symbol

Book Five
The Book of Love

Canto Three

Satyavan and Savitri

[Savitri B-05 C-03 Canto Name]

Play Section One
[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-01]

Out of the voiceless mystery of the past

In a present ignorant of forgotten bonds

These spirits met upon the roads of Time.

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

Yet in the heart their secret conscious selves

At once aware grew of each other warned

By the first call of a delightful voice

And a first vision of the destined face.

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-01 F-02]

As when being cries to being from its depths

Behind the screen of the external sense

And strives to find the heart-disclosing word,

The passionate speech revealing the soul's need,

But the mind's ignorance veils the inner sight,

Only a little breaks through our earth-made bounds,

So now they met in that momentous hour,

So utter the recognition in the deeps,

The remembrance lost, the oneness felt and missed.

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

Thus Satyavan spoke first to Savitri:

“O thou who com'st to me out of Time's silences,

Yet thy voice has wakened my heart to an unknown bliss,

Immortal or mortal only in thy frame,

For more than earth speaks to me from thy soul

And more than earth surrounds me in thy gaze,

How art thou named among the sons of men?

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-01 F-04]

Whence hast thou dawned filling my spirit's days,

Brighter than summer, brighter than my flowers,

Into the lonely borders of my life,

O sunlight moulded like a golden maid?

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

I know that mighty gods are friends of earth.

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-01 F-06]

Amid the pageantries of day and dusk,

Long have I travelled with my pilgrim soul

Moved by the marvel of familiar things.

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

Earth could not hide from me the powers she veils:

Even though moving mid an earthly scene

And the common surfaces of terrestrial things,

My vision saw unblinded by her forms;

The Godhead looked at me from familiar scenes.

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-01 F-08]

I witnessed the virgin bridals of the dawn

Behind the glowing curtains of the sky

Or vying in joy with the bright morning's steps

I paced along the slumbrous coasts of noon,

Or the gold desert of the sunlight crossed

Traversing great wastes of splendour and of fire,

Or met the moon gliding amazed through heaven

In the uncertain wideness of the night,

Or the stars marched on their long sentinel routes

Pointing their spears through the infinitudes:

The day and dusk revealed to me hidden shapes;

Figures have come to me from secret shores

And happy faces looked from ray and flame.

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

I have heard strange voices cross the ether's waves,

The Centaur's wizard song has thrilled my ear;

I have glimpsed the Apsaras bathing in the pools,

I have seen the wood-nymphs peering through the leaves;

The winds have shown to me their trampling lords,

I have beheld the princes of the Sun

Burning in thousand-pillared homes of light.

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-01 F-10]

So now my mind could dream and my heart fear

That from some wonder-couch beyond our air

Risen in a wide morning of the gods

Thou drov'st thy horses from the Thunderer's worlds.

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-01 F-11]

Although to heaven thy beauty seems allied,

Much rather would my thoughts rejoice to know

That mortal sweetness smiles between thy lids

And thy heart can beat beneath a human gaze

And thy aureate bosom quiver with a look

And its tumult answer to an earth-born voice.

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-01 F-12]

If our time-vexed affections thou canst feel,

Earth's ease of simple things can satisfy,

If thy glance can dwell content on earthly soil,

And this celestial summary of delight,

Thy golden body, dally with fatigue

Oppressing with its grace our terrain, while

The frail sweet passing taste of earthly food

Delays thee and the torrent's leaping wine,

Descend. Let thy journey cease, come down to us.

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-01 F-13]

Close is my father's creepered hermitage

Screened by the tall ranks of these silent kings,

Sung to by voices of the hue-robed choirs

Whose chants repeat transcribed in music's notes

The passionate coloured lettering of the boughs

And fill the hours with their melodious cry.

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-01 F-14]

Amid the welcome-hum of many bees

Invade our honied kingdom of the woods;

There let me lead thee into an opulent life.

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-01 F-15]

Bare, simple is the sylvan hermit-life;

Yet is it clad with the jewelry of earth.

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-01 F-16]

Wild winds run—visitors midst the swaying tops,

Through the calm days heaven's sentinels of peace

Couched on a purple robe of sky above

Look down on a rich secrecy and hush

And the chambered nuptial waters chant within.

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-01 F-17]

Enormous, whispering, many-formed around

High forest gods have taken in their arms

The human hour, a guest of their centuried pomps.

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-01 F-18]

Apparelled are the morns in gold and green,

Sunlight and shadow tapestry the walls

To make a resting chamber fit for thee.”

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-01 F-19]

Awhile she paused as if hearing still his voice,

Unwilling to break the charm, then slowly spoke.

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-01 F-20]

Musing she answered, “I am Savitri,

Princess of Madra. Who art thou? What name

Musical on earth expresses thee to men?

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-01 F-21]

What trunk of kings watered by fortunate streams

Has flowered at last upon one happy branch?

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-01 F-22]

Why is thy dwelling in the pathless wood

Far from the deeds thy glorious youth demands,

Haunt of the anchorites and earth's wilder broods,

Where only with thy witness self thou roamst

In Nature's green unhuman loneliness

Surrounded by enormous silences

And the blind murmur of primaeval calms?”

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-01 F-23]

And Satyavan replied to Savitri:

“In days when yet his sight looked clear on life,

King Dyumatsena once, the Shalwa, reigned

Through all the tract which from behind these tops

Passing its days of emerald delight

In trusting converse with the traveller winds

Turns, looking back towards the southern heavens,

And leans its flank upon the musing hills.

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-01 F-24]

But equal Fate removed her covering hand.

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-01 F-25]

A living night enclosed the strong man's paths,

Heaven's brilliant gods recalled their careless gifts,

Took from blank eyes their glad and helping ray

And led the uncertain goddess from his side.

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-01 F-26]

Outcast from empire of the outer light,

Lost to the comradeship of seeing men,

He sojourns in two solitudes, within

And in the solemn rustle of the woods.

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-01 F-27]

Son of that king, I, Satyavan, have lived

Contented, for not yet of thee aware,

In my high-peopled loneliness of spirit

And this huge vital murmur kin to me,

Nursed by the vastness, pupil of solitude.

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-01 F-28]

Great Nature came to her recovered child;

I reigned in a kingdom of a nobler kind

Than men can build upon dull Matter's soil;

I met the frankness of the primal earth,

I enjoyed the intimacy of infant God.

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-01 F-29]

In the great tapestried chambers of her state,

Free in her boundless palace I have dwelt

Indulged by the warm mother of us all,

Reared with my natural brothers in her house.

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-01 F-30]

I lay in the wide bare embrace of heaven,

The sunlight's radiant blessing clasped my brow,

The moonbeams' silver ecstasy at night

Kissed my dim lids to sleep.

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-01 F-31]

Earth's morns were mine;

Lured by faint murmurings with the green-robed hours

I wandered lost in woods, prone to the voice

Of winds and waters, partner of the sun's joy,

A listener to the universal speech:

My spirit satisfied within me knew

Godlike our birthright, luxuried our life

Whose close belongings are the earth and skies.

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-01 F-32]

Before Fate led me into this emerald world,

Aroused by some foreshadowing touch within,

An early prescience in my mind approached

The great dumb animal consciousness of earth

Now grown so close to me who have left old pomps

To live in this grandiose murmur dim and vast.

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-01 F-33]

Already I met her in my spirit's dream.

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-01 F-34]

As if to a deeper country of the soul

Transposing the vivid imagery of earth,

Through an inner seeing and sense a wakening came.

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-01 F-35]

A visioned spell pursued my boyhood's hours,

All things the eye had caught in coloured lines

Were seen anew through the interpreting mind

And in the shape it sought to seize the soul.

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-01 F-36]

An early child-god took my hand that held,

Moved, guided by the seeking of his touch,

Bright forms and hues which fled across his sight;

Limned upon page and stone they spoke to men.

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-01 F-37]

High beauty's visitants my intimates were.

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-01 F-38]

The neighing pride of rapid life that roams

Wind-maned through our pastures, on my seeing mood

Cast shapes of swiftness; trooping spotted deer

Against the vesper sky became a song

Of evening to the silence of my soul.

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-01 F-39]

I caught for some eternal eye the sudden

King-fisher flashing to a darkling pool;

A slow swan silvering the azure lake,

A shape of magic whiteness, sailed through dream;

Leaves trembling with the passion of the wind,

Pranked butterflies, the conscious flowers of air,

And wandering wings in blue infinity

Lived on the tablets of my inner sight;

Mountains and trees stood there like thoughts from God.

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-01 F-40]

The brilliant long-bills in their vivid dress,

The peacock scattering on the breeze his moons

Painted my memory like a frescoed wall.

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-01 F-41]

I carved my vision out of wood and stone;

I caught the echoes of a word supreme

And metred the rhythm-beats of infinity

And listened through music for the eternal Voice.

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-01 F-42]

I felt a covert touch, I heard a call,

But could not clasp the body of my God

Or hold between my hands the World-Mother's feet.

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-01 F-43]

In men I met strange portions of a Self

That sought for fragments and in fragments lived:

Each lived in himself and for himself alone

And with the rest joined only fleeting ties;

Each passioned over his surface joy and grief,

Nor saw the Eternal in his secret house.

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-01 F-44]

I conversed with Nature, mused with the changeless stars,

God's watch-fires burning in the ignorant Night,

And saw upon her mighty visage fall

A ray prophetic of the Eternal's sun.

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-01 F-45]

I sat with the forest sages in their trance:

There poured awakening streams of diamond light,

I glimpsed the presence of the One in all.

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-01 F-46]

But still there lacked the last transcendent power

And Matter still slept empty of its Lord.

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-01 F-47]

The Spirit was saved, the body lost and mute

Lived still with Death and ancient Ignorance;

The Inconscient was its base, the Void its fate.

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-01 F-48]

But thou hast come and all will surely change:

I shall feel the World-Mother in thy golden limbs

And hear her wisdom in thy sacred voice.

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-01 F-49]

The child of the Void shall be reborn in God,

My Matter shall evade the Inconscient's trance.

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-01 F-50]

My body like my spirit shall be free.

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-01 F-51]

It shall escape from Death and Ignorance.”

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-01 F-52]

And Savitri, musing still, replied to him:

“Speak more to me, speak more, O Satyavan,

Speak of thyself and all thou art within;

I would know thee as if we had ever lived

Together in the chamber of our souls.

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-01 F-53]

Speak till a light shall come into my heart

And my moved mortal mind shall understand

What all the deathless being in me feels.

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-01 F-54]

It knows that thou art he my spirit has sought

Amidst earth's thronging visages and forms

Across the golden spaces of my life.”

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-01 F-55]

And Satyavan like a replying harp

To the insistent calling of a flute

Answered her questioning and let stream to her

His heart in many-coloured waves of speech:

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-01 F-56]

“O golden princess, perfect Savitri,

More I would tell than failing words can speak,

Of all that thou hast meant to me, unknown,

All that the lightning-flash of love reveals

In one great hour of the unveiling gods.

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-01 F-57]

Even a brief nearness has reshaped my life.

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-01 F-58]

For now I know that all I lived and was

Moved towards this moment of my heart's rebirth;

I look back on the meaning of myself,

A soul made ready on earth's soil for thee.

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-01 F-59]

Once were my days like days of other men:

To think and act was all, to enjoy and breathe;

This was the width and height of mortal hope:

Yet there came glimpses of a deeper self

That lives behind Life and makes her act its scene.

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-01 F-60]

A truth was felt that screened its shape from mind,

A Greatness working towards a hidden end,

And vaguely through the forms of earth there looked

Something that life is not and yet must be.

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-01 F-61]

I groped for the Mystery with the lantern, Thought.

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-01 F-62]

Its glimmerings lighted with the abstract word

A half-visible ground and travelling yard by yard

It mapped a system of the Self and God.

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-01 F-63]

I could not live the truth it spoke and thought.

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-01 F-64]

I turned to seize its form in visible things,

Hoping to fix its rule by mortal mind,

Imposed a narrow structure of world-law

Upon the freedom of the Infinite,

A hard firm skeleton of outward Truth,

A mental scheme of a mechanic Power.

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-01 F-65]

This light showed more the darknesses unsearched;

It made the original Secrecy more occult;

It could not analyse its cosmic Veil

Or glimpse the Wonder-worker's hidden hand

And trace the pattern of his magic plans.

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-01 F-66]

I plunged into an inner seeing Mind

And knew the secret laws and sorceries

That make of Matter mind's bewildered slave:

The mystery was not solved but deepened more.

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-01 F-67]

I strove to find its hints through Beauty and Art,

But Form cannot unveil the indwelling Power;

Only it throws its symbols at our hearts.

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-01 F-68]

It evoked a mood of self, invoked a sign

Of all the brooding glory hidden in sense:

I lived in the ray but faced not to the sun.

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-01 F-69]

I looked upon the world and missed the Self,

And when I found the Self, I lost the world,

My other selves I lost and the body of God,

The link of the finite with the Infinite,

The bridge between the appearance and the Truth,

The mystic aim for which the world was made,

The human sense of Immortality.

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-01 F-70]

But now the gold link comes to me with thy feet

And His gold sun has shone on me from thy face.

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-01 F-71]

For now another realm draws near with thee

And now diviner voices fill my ear,

A strange new world swims to me in thy gaze

Approaching like a star from unknown heavens;

A cry of spheres comes with thee and a song

Of flaming gods.

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-01 F-72]

I draw a wealthier breath

And in a fierier march of moments move.

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-01 F-73]

My mind transfigures to a rapturous seer.

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-01 F-74]

A foam-leap travelling from the waves of bliss

Has changed my heart and changed the earth around:

All with thy coming fills.

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-01 F-75]

Air, soil and stream

Wear bridal raiment to be fit for thee

And sunlight grows a shadow of thy hue

Because of change within me by thy look.

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-01 F-76]

Come nearer to me from thy car of light

On this green sward disdaining not our soil.

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-01 F-77]

For here are secret spaces made for thee

Whose caves of emerald long to screen thy form.

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-01 F-78]

Wilt thou not make this mortal bliss thy sphere?

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-01 F-79]

Descend, O happiness, with thy moon-gold feet

Enrich earth's floors upon whose sleep we lie.

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-01 F-80]

O my bright beauty's princess Savitri,

By my delight and thy own joy compelled

Enter my life, thy chamber and thy shrine.

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-01 F-81]

In the great quietness where spirits meet,

Led by my hushed desire into my woods

Let the dim rustling arches over thee lean;

One with the breath of things eternal live,

Thy heart-beats near to mine, till there shall leap

Enchanted from the fragrance of the flowers

A moment which all murmurs shall recall

And every bird remember in its cry.”

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-01 F-82]

Play Section Two
[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-02]

Allured to her lashes by his passionate words

Her fathomless soul looked out at him from her eyes;

Passing her lips in liquid sounds it spoke.

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-02 F-01]

This word alone she uttered and said all:

“O Satyavan, I have heard thee and I know;

I know that thou and only thou art he.”

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

Then down she came from her high carven car

Descending with a soft and faltering haste;

Her many-hued raiment glistening in the light

Hovered a moment over the wind-stirred grass,

Mixed with a glimmer of her body's ray

Like lovely plumage of a settling bird.

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

Her gleaming feet upon the green-gold sward

Scattered a memory of wandering beams

And lightly pressed the unspoken desire of earth

Cherished in her too brief passing by the soil.

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-02 F-04]

Then flitting like pale-brilliant moths her hands

Took from the sylvan verge's sunlit arms

A load of their jewel-faces' clustering swarms,

Companions of the spring-time and the breeze.

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

A candid garland set with simple forms

Her rapid fingers taught a flower song,

The stanzaed movement of a marriage hymn.

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-02 F-06]

Profound in perfume and immersed in hue

They mixed their yearning's coloured signs and made

The bloom of their purity and passion one.

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

A sacrament of joy in treasuring palms

She brought, flower-symbol of her offered life,

Then with raised hands that trembled a little now

At the very closeness that her soul desired,

This bond of sweetness, their bright union's sign,

She laid on the bosom coveted by her love.

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-02 F-08]

As if inclined before some gracious god

Who has out of his mist of greatness shone

To fill with beauty his adorer's hours,

She bowed and touched his feet with worshipping hands;

She made her life his world for him to tread

And made her body the room of his delight,

Her beating heart a remembrancer of bliss.

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-02 F-09]

He bent to her and took into his own

Their married yearning joined like folded hopes;

As if a whole rich world suddenly possessed,

Wedded to all he had been, became himself,

An inexhaustible joy made his alone,

He gathered all Savitri into his clasp.

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-02 F-10]

Around her his embrace became the sign

Of a locked closeness through slow intimate years,

A first sweet summary of delight to come,

One brevity intense of all long life.

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-02 F-11]

In a wide moment of two souls that meet

She felt her being flow into him as in waves

A river pours into a mighty sea.

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-02 F-12]

As when a soul is merging into God

To live in Him for ever and know His joy,

Her consciousness grew aware of him alone

And all her separate self was lost in his.

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-02 F-13]

As a starry heaven encircles happy earth,

He shut her into himself in a circle of bliss

And shut the world into himself and her.

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-02 F-14]

A boundless isolation made them one;

He was aware of her enveloping him

And let her penetrate his very soul

As is a world by the world's spirit filled,

As the mortal wakes into Eternity,

As the finite opens to the Infinite.

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-02 F-15]

Thus were they in each other lost awhile,

Then drawing back from their long ecstasy's trance

Came into a new self and a new world.

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-02 F-16]

Each now was a part of the other's unity,

The world was but their twin self-finding's scene

Or their own wedded being's vaster frame.

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-02 F-17]

On the high glowing cupola of the day

Fate tied a knot with morning's halo threads

While by the ministry of an auspice-hour

Heart-bound before the sun, their marriage fire,

The wedding of the eternal Lord and Spouse

Took place again on earth in human forms:

In a new act of the drama of the world

The united Two began a greater age.

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-02 F-18]

In the silence and murmur of that emerald world

And the mutter of the priest-wind's sacred verse,

Amid the choral whispering of the leaves

Love's twain had joined together and grew one.

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-02 F-19]

The natural miracle was wrought once more:

In the immutable ideal world

One human moment was eternal made.

[Savitri B-05 C-03 S-02 F-20]

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

Then down the narrow path where their lives had met

He led and showed to her her future world,

Love's refuge and corner of happy solitude.

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

At the path's end through a green cleft in the trees

She saw a clustering line of hermit-roofs

And looked now first on her heart's future home,

The thatch that covered the life of Satyavan.

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

Adorned with creepers and red climbing flowers

It seemed a sylvan beauty in her dreams

Slumbering with brown body and tumbled hair

In her chamber inviolate of emerald peace.

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

Around it stretched the forest's anchorite mood

Lost in the depths of its own solitude.

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

Then moved by the deep joy she could not speak,

A little depth of it quivering in her words,

Her happy voice cried out to Satyavan:

“My heart will stay here on this forest verge

And close to this thatched roof while I am far:

Now of more wandering it has no need.

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

But I must haste back to my father's house

Which soon will lose one loved accustomed tread

And listen in vain for a once cherished voice.

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

For soon I shall return nor ever again

Oneness must sever its recovered bliss

Or fate sunder our lives while life is ours.”

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

Once more she mounted on the carven car

And under the ardour of a fiery noon

Less bright than the splendour of her thoughts and dreams

She sped swift-reined, swift-hearted but still saw

In still lucidities of sight's inner world

Through the cool-scented wood's luxurious gloom

On shadowy paths between great rugged trunks

Pace towards a tranquil clearing Satyavan.

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

A nave of trees enshrined the hermit thatch,

The new deep covert of her felicity,

Preferred to heaven her soul's temple and home.

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

This now remained with her, her heart's constant scene.

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

Book Five Canto Three End

Satyavan and Savitri

[Savitri B-05 C-03 Canto End]

Book Five End
The Book of Love
[Savitri B-05 Book End]

Savitri | a Legend and a Symbol

Book Six All Cantos
The Book of Fate

Canto One

The Word of Fate

[Savitri B-06 C-01 Canto Name]

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

In silent bounds bordering the mortal's plane

Crossing a wide expanse of brilliant peace

Narad the heavenly sage from Paradise

Came chanting through the large and lustrous air.

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

Attracted by the golden summer-earth

That lay beneath him like a glowing bowl

Tilted upon a table of the Gods,

Turning as if moved round by an unseen hand

To catch the warmth and blaze of a small sun,

He passed from the immortals' happy paths

To a world of toil and quest and grief and hope,

To these rooms of the see-saw game of death with life.

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

Across an intangible border of soul-space

He passed from Mind into material things

Amid the inventions of the inconscient Self

And the workings of a blind somnambulist Force.

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

Below him circling burned the myriad suns:

He bore the ripples of the etheric sea;

A primal Air brought the first joy of touch;

A secret Spirit drew its mighty breath

Contracting and expanding this huge world

In its formidable circuit through the Void;

The secret might of the creative Fire

Displayed its triple power to build and form,

Its infinitesimal wave-sparks' weaving dance,

Its nebulous units grounding shape and mass,

Magic foundation and pattern of a world,

Its radiance bursting into the light of stars;

He felt a sap of life, a sap of death;

Into solid Matter's dense communion

Plunging and its obscure oneness of forms

He shared with a dumb Spirit identity.

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

He beheld the cosmic Being at his task,

His eyes measured the spaces, gauged the depths,

His inner gaze the movements of the soul,

He saw the eternal labour of the Gods,

And looked upon the life of beasts and men.

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

A change now fell upon the singer's mood,

A rapture and a pathos moved his voice;

He sang no more of Light that never wanes,

And oneness and pure everlasting bliss,

He sang no more the deathless heart of Love,

His chant was a hymn of Ignorance and Fate.

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

He sang the name of Vishnu and the birth

And joy and passion of the mystic world,

And how the stars were made and life began

And the mute regions stirred with the throb of a Soul.

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

He sang the Inconscient and its secret self,

Its power omnipotent knowing not what it does,

All-shaping without will or thought or sense,

Its blind unerring occult mystery,

And darkness yearning towards the eternal Light,

And Love that broods within the dim abyss

And waits the answer of the human heart,

And death that climbs to immortality.

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

He sang of the Truth that cries from Night's blind deeps,

And the Mother-Wisdom hid in Nature's breast

And the Idea that through her dumbness works

And the miracle of her transforming hands,

Of life that slumbers in the stone and sun

And Mind subliminal in mindless life,

And the Consciousness that wakes in beasts and men.

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

He sang of the glory and marvel still to be born,

Of Godhead throwing off at last its veil,

Of bodies made divine and life made bliss,

Immortal sweetness clasping immortal might,

Heart sensing heart, thought looking straight at thought,

And the delight when every barrier falls,

And the transfiguration and the ecstasy.

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

And as he sang the demons wept with joy

Foreseeing the end of their long dreadful task

And the defeat for which they hoped in vain,

And glad release from their self-chosen doom

And return into the One from whom they came.

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

He who has conquered the Immortals' seats,

Came down to men on earth the Man divine.

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

As darts a lightning streak, a glory fell

Nearing until the rapt eyes of the sage

Looked out from luminous cloud and, strangely limned,

His face, a beautiful mask of antique joy,

Appearing in light descended where arose

King Aswapati's palace to the winds

In Madra, flowering up in delicate stone.

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

There welcomed him the sage and thoughtful king,

At his side a creature beautiful, passionate, wise,

Aspiring like a sacrificial flame

Skyward from its earth-seat through luminous air,

Queen-browed, the human mother of Savitri.

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

There for an hour untouched by the earth's siege

They ceased from common life and care and sat

Inclining to the high and rhythmic voice,

While in his measured chant the heavenly seer

Spoke of the toils of men and what the gods

Strive for on earth, and joy that throbs behind

The marvel and the mystery of pain.

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

He sang to them of the lotus-heart of love

With all its thousand luminous buds of truth,

Which quivering sleeps veiled by apparent things.

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

It trembles at each touch, it strives to wake

And one day it shall hear a blissful voice

And in the garden of the Spouse shall bloom

When she is seized by her discovered lord.

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

A mighty shuddering coil of ecstasy

Crept through the deep heart of the universe.

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

Out of her Matter's stupor, her mind's dreams,

She woke, she looked upon God's unveiled face.

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

Play Section Two
[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-02]

Even as he sang and rapture stole through earth-time

And caught the heavens, came with a call of hooves,

As of her swift heart hastening, Savitri;

Her radiant tread glimmered across the floor.

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

A happy wonder in her fathomless gaze,

Changed by the halo of her love she came;

Her eyes rich with a shining mist of joy

As one who comes from a heavenly embassy

Discharging the proud mission of her heart,

One carrying the sanction of the gods

To her love and its luminous eternity,

She stood before her mighty father's throne

And, eager for beauty on discovered earth

Transformed and new in her heart's miracle-light,

Saw like a rose of marvel, worshipping,

The fire-tinged sweetness of the son of Heaven.

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

He flung on her his vast immortal look;

His inner gaze surrounded her with its light

And reining back knowledge from his immortal lips

He cried to her, “Who is this that comes, the bride,

The flame-born, and round her illumined head

Pouring their lights her hymeneal pomps

Move flashing about her? From what green glimmer of glades

Retreating into dewy silences

Or half-seen verge of waters moon-betrayed

Bringst thou this glory of enchanted eyes?

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-02 F-03]

Earth has gold-hued expanses, shadowy hills

That cowl their dreaming phantom heads in night,

And, guarded in a cloistral joy of woods,

Screened banks sink down into felicity

Seized by the curved incessant yearning hands

And ripple-passion of the upgazing stream:

Amid cool-lipped murmurs of its pure embrace

They lose their souls on beds of trembling reeds.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-02 F-04]

And all these are mysterious presences

In which some spirit's immortal bliss is felt,

And they betray the earth-born heart to joy.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-02 F-05]

There hast thou paused, and marvelling borne eyes

Unknown, or heard a voice that forced thy life

To strain its rapture through thy listening soul?

Or, if my thought could trust this shimmering gaze,

It would say thou hast not drunk from an earthly cup,

But stepping through azure curtains of the noon

Thou wast surrounded on a magic verge

In brighter countries than man's eyes can bear.

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

Assailed by trooping voices of delight

And seized mid a sunlit glamour of the boughs

In faery woods, led down the gleaming slopes

Of Gandhamadan where the Apsaras roam,

Thy limbs have shared the sports which none has seen,

And in god-haunts thy human footsteps strayed,

Thy mortal bosom quivered with god-speech

And thy soul answered to a Word unknown.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-02 F-08]

What feet of gods, what ravishing flutes of heaven

Have thrilled high melodies round, from near and far

Approaching through the soft and revelling air,

Which still surprised thou hearest? They have fed

Thy silence on some red strange-ecstasied fruit

And thou hast trod the dim moon-peaks of bliss.

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

Reveal, O winged with light, whence thou hast flown

Hastening bright-hued through the green tangled earth,

Thy body rhythmical with the spring-bird's call.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-02 F-10]

The empty roses of thy hands are filled

Only with their own beauty and the thrill

Of a remembered clasp, and in thee glows

A heavenly jar, thy firm deep-honied heart,

New-brimming with a sweet and nectarous wine.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-02 F-11]

Thou hast not spoken with the kings of pain.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-02 F-12]

Life's perilous music rings yet to thy ear

Far-melodied, rapid and grand, a Centaur's song,

Or soft as water plashing mid the hills,

Or mighty as a great chant of many winds.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-02 F-13]

Moon-bright thou livest in thy inner bliss.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-02 F-14]

Thou comest like a silver deer through groves

Of coral flowers and buds of glowing dreams,

Or fleest like a wind-goddess through leaves,

Or roamst, O ruby-eyed and snow-winged dove,

Flitting through thickets of thy pure desires

In the unwounded beauty of thy soul.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-02 F-15]

These things are only images to thy earth,

But truest truth of that which in thee sleeps.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-02 F-16]

For such is thy spirit, a sister of the gods,

Thy earthly body lovely to the eyes

And thou art kin in joy to heaven's sons.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-02 F-17]

O thou who hast come to this great perilous world

Now only seen through the splendour of thy dreams,

Where hardly love and beauty can live safe,

Thyself a being dangerously great,

A soul alone in a golden house of thought

Has lived walled in by the safety of thy dreams.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-02 F-18]

On heights of happiness leaving doom asleep

Who hunts unseen the unconscious lives of men,

If thy heart could live locked in the ideal's gold,

As high, as happy might thy waking be!

If for all time doom could be left to sleep!”

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-02 F-19]

He spoke but held his knowledge back from words.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-02 F-21]

As a cloud plays with lightnings' vivid laugh,

But still holds back the thunder in its heart,

Only he let bright images escape.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-02 F-22]

His speech like glimmering music veiled his thoughts;

As a wind flatters the bright summer air,

Pitiful to mortals, only to them it spoke

Of living beauty and of present bliss:

He hid in his all-knowing mind the rest.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-02 F-23]

To those who hearkened to his celestial voice,

The veil heaven's pity throws on future pain

The Immortals' sanction seemed of endless joy.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-02 F-24]

But Aswapati answered to the seer;—

His listening mind had marked the dubious close,

An ominous shadow felt behind the words,

But calm like one who ever sits facing Fate

Here mid the dangerous contours of earth's life,

He answered covert thought with guarded speech:

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-02 F-25]

“O deathless sage who knowest all things here,

If I could read by the ray of my own wish

Through the carved shield of symbol images

Which thou hast thrown before thy heavenly mind

I might see the steps of a young godlike life

Happily beginning luminous-eyed on earth;

Between the Unknowable and the Unseen

Born on the borders of two wonder-worlds,

It flames out symbols of the infinite

And lives in a great light of inner suns.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-02 F-26]

For it has read and broken the wizard seals;

It has drunk of the Immortal's wells of joy,

It has looked across the jewel bars of heaven,

It has entered the aspiring Secrecy,

It sees beyond terrestrial common things

And communes with the Powers that build the worlds,

Till through the shining gates and mystic streets

Of the city of lapis lazuli and pearl

Proud deeds step forth, a rank and march of gods.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-02 F-27]

Although in pauses of our human lives

Earth keeps for man some short and perfect hours

When the inconstant tread of Time can seem

The eternal moment which the deathless live,

Yet rare that touch upon the mortal's world:

Hardly a soul and body here are born

In the fierce difficult movement of the stars,

Whose life can keep the paradisal note,

Its rhythm repeat the many-toned melody

Tirelessly throbbing through the rapturous air

Caught in the song that sways the Apsara's limbs

When she floats gleaming like a cloud of light,

A wave of joy on heaven's moonstone floor.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-02 F-28]

Behold this image cast by light and love,

A stanza of the ardour of the gods

Perfectly rhymed, a pillared ripple of gold!

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-02 F-29]

Her body like a brimmed pitcher of delight

Shaped in a splendour of gold-coloured bronze

As if to seize earth's truth of hidden bliss.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-02 F-30]

Dream-made illumined mirrors are her eyes

Draped subtly in a slumbrous fringe of jet,

Retaining heaven's reflections in their depths.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-02 F-31]

Even as her body, such is she within.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-02 F-32]

Heaven's lustrous mornings gloriously recur,

Like drops of fire upon a silver page,

In her young spirit yet untouched with tears.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-02 F-33]

All beautiful things eternal seem and new

To virgin wonder in her crystal soul.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-02 F-34]

The unchanging blue reveals its spacious thought;

Marvellous the moon floats on through wondering skies;

Earth's flowers spring up and laugh at time and death;

The charmed mutations of the enchanter life

Race like bright children past the smiling hours.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-02 F-35]

If but this joy of life could last, nor pain

Throw its bronze note into her rhythmed days!

Behold her, singer with the prescient gaze,

And let thy blessing chant that this fair child

Shall pour the nectar of a sorrowless life

Around her from her lucid heart of love,

Heal with her bliss the tired breast of earth

And cast like a happy snare felicity.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-02 F-36]

As grows the great and golden bounteous tree

Flowering by Alacananda's murmuring waves,

Where with enamoured speed the waters run

Lisping and babbling to the splendour of morn

And cling with lyric laughter round the knees

Of heaven's daughters dripping magic rain

Pearl-bright from moon-gold limbs and cloudy hair,

So are her dawns like jewelled leaves of light,

So casts she her felicity on men.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-02 F-38]

A flame of radiant happiness she was born

And surely will that flame set earth alight:

Doom surely will see her pass and say no word!

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-02 F-39]

But too often here the careless Mother leaves

Her chosen in the envious hands of Fate:

The harp of God falls mute, its call to bliss

Discouraged fails mid earth's unhappy sounds;

The strings of the siren Ecstasy cry not here

Or soon are silenced in the human heart.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-02 F-40]

Of sorrow's songs we have enough: bid once

Her glad and griefless days bring heaven here.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-02 F-41]

Or must fire always test the great of soul?

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-02 F-42]

Along the dreadful causeway of the Gods,

Armoured with love and faith and sacred joy,

A traveller to the Eternal's house,

Once let unwounded pass a mortal life.”

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-02 F-43]

Play Section Three
[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-03]

But Narad answered not; silent he sat,

Knowing that words are vain and Fate is lord.

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

He looked into the unseen with seeing eyes,

Then, dallying with the mortal's ignorance

Like one who knows not, questioning, he cried:

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-03 F-02]

“On what high mission went her hastening wheels?

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

Whence came she with this glory in her heart

And Paradise made visible in her eyes?

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-03 F-04]

What sudden God has met, what face supreme?”

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-03 F-05]

To whom the king, “The red asoca watched

Her going forth which now sees her return.

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

Arisen into an air of flaming dawn

Like a bright bird tired of her lonely branch,

To find her own lord, since to her on earth

He came not yet, this sweetness wandered forth

Cleaving her way with the beat of her rapid wings.

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

Led by a distant call her vague swift flight

Threaded the summer morns and sunlit lands.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-03 F-08]

The happy rest her burdened lashes keep

And these charmed guardian lips hold treasured still.

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

Virgin who comest perfected by joy,

Reveal the name thy sudden heart-beats learned.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-03 F-10]

Whom hast thou chosen, kingliest among men?”

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-03 F-11]

And Savitri answered with her still calm voice

As one who speaks beneath the eyes of Fate:

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-03 F-12]

“Father and king, I have carried out thy will.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-03 F-13]

One whom I sought I found in distant lands;

I have obeyed my heart, I have heard its call.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-03 F-14]

On the borders of a dreaming wilderness

Mid Shalwa's giant hills and brooding woods

In his thatched hermitage Dyumatsena dwells,

Blind, exiled, outcast, once a mighty king.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-03 F-15]

The son of Dyumatsena, Satyavan,

I have met on the wild forest's lonely verge.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-03 F-16]

My father, I have chosen. This is done.”

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-03 F-17]

Astonished, all sat silent for a space.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-03 F-18]

Then Aswapati looked within and saw

A heavy shadow float above the name

Chased by a sudden and stupendous light;

He looked into his daughter's eyes and spoke:

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-03 F-19]

“Well hast thou done and I approve thy choice.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-03 F-20]

If this is all, then all is surely well;

If there is more, then all can still be well.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-03 F-21]

Whether it seem good or evil to men's eyes,

Only for good the secret Will can work.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-03 F-22]

Our destiny is written in double terms:

Through Nature's contraries we draw nearer God;

Out of the darkness we still grow to light.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-03 F-23]

Death is our road to immortality.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-03 F-24]

`Cry woe, cry woe,' the world's lost voices wail,

Yet conquers the eternal Good at last.”

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-03 F-25]

Then might the sage have spoken, but the king

In haste broke out and stayed the dangerous word:

“O singer of the ultimate ecstasy,

Lend not a dangerous vision to the blind

Because by native right thou hast seen clear.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-03 F-26]

Impose not on the mortal's tremulous breast

The dire ordeal that foreknowledge brings;

Demand not now the Godhead in our acts.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-03 F-28]

Here are not happy peaks the heaven-nymphs roam

Or Coilas or Vaicountha's starry stair:

Abrupt, jagged hills only the mighty climb

Are here where few dare even think to rise;

Far voices call down from the dizzy rocks,

Chill, slippery, precipitous are the paths.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-03 F-29]

Too hard the gods are with man's fragile race;

In their large heavens they dwell exempt from Fate

And they forget the wounded feet of man,

His limbs that faint beneath the whips of grief,

His heart that hears the tread of time and death.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-03 F-30]

The future's road is hid from mortal sight:

He moves towards a veiled and secret face.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-03 F-31]

To light one step in front is all his hope

And only for a little strength he asks

To meet the riddle of his shrouded fate.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-03 F-32]

Awaited by a vague and half-seen force,

Aware of danger to his uncertain hours

He guards his flickering yearnings from her breath;

He feels not when the dreadful fingers close

Around him with the grasp none can elude.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-03 F-33]

If thou canst loose her grip, then only speak.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-03 F-34]

Perhaps from the iron snare there is escape:

Our mind perhaps deceives us with its words

And gives the name of doom to our own choice;

Perhaps the blindness of our will is Fate.”

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-03 F-35]

He said and Narad answered not the king.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-03 F-36]

But now the queen alarmed lifted her voice:

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-03 F-37]

“O seer, thy bright arrival has been timed

To this high moment of a happy life;

Then let the speech benign of griefless spheres

Confirm this blithe conjunction of two stars

And sanction joy with thy celestial voice.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-03 F-38]

Here drag not in the peril of our thoughts,

Let not our words create the doom they fear.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-03 F-39]

Here is no cause for dread, no chance for grief

To raise her ominous head and stare at love.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-03 F-40]

A single spirit in a multitude,

Happy is Satyavan mid earthly men

Whom Savitri has chosen for her mate,

And fortunate the forest hermitage

Where leaving her palace and riches and a throne

My Savitri will dwell and bring in heaven.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-03 F-41]

Then let thy blessing put the immortals' seal

On these bright lives' unstained felicity

Pushing the ominous Shadow from their days.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-03 F-42]

Too heavy falls a Shadow on man's heart;

It dares not be too happy upon earth.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-03 F-43]

It dreads the blow dogging too vivid joys,

A lash unseen in Fate's extended hand,

The danger lurking in fortune's proud extremes,

An irony in life's indulgent smile,

And trembles at the laughter of the gods.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-03 F-44]

Or if crouches unseen a panther doom,

If wings of Evil brood above that house,

Then also speak, that we may turn aside

And rescue our lives from hazard of wayside doom

And chance entanglement of an alien fate.”

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-03 F-45]

And Narad slowly answered to the queen:

“What help is in prevision to the driven?

Safe doors cry opening near, the doomed pass on.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-03 F-46]

A future knowledge is an added pain,

A torturing burden and a fruitless light

On the enormous scene that Fate has built.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-03 F-48]

The eternal poet, universal Mind,

Has paged each line of his imperial act;

Invisible the giant actors tread

And man lives like some secret player's mask.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-03 F-49]

He knows not even what his lips shall speak.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-03 F-50]

For a mysterious Power compels his steps

And life is stronger than his trembling soul.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-03 F-51]

None can refuse what the stark Force demands:

Her eyes are fixed upon her mighty aim;

No cry or prayer can turn her from her path.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-03 F-52]

She has leaped an arrow from the bow of God.”

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-03 F-53]

His words were theirs who live unforced to grieve

And help by calm the swaying wheels of life

And the long restlessness of transient things

And the trouble and passion of the unquiet world.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-03 F-54]

As though her own bosom were pierced the mother saw

The ancient human sentence strike her child,

Her sweetness that deserved another fate

Only a larger measure given of tears.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-03 F-55]

Aspiring to the nature of the gods,

A mind proof-armoured mailed in mighty thoughts,

A will entire couchant behind wisdom's shield,

Though to still heavens of knowledge she had risen,

Though calm and wise and Aswapati's queen,

Human was she still and opened her doors to grief;

The stony-eyed injustice she accused

Of the marble godhead of inflexible Law,

Nor sought the strength extreme adversity brings

To lives that stand erect and front the World-Power:

Her heart appealed against the impartial judge,

Taxed with perversity the impersonal One.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-03 F-56]

Her tranquil spirit she called not to her aid,

But as a common man beneath his load

Grows faint and breathes his pain in ignorant words,

So now she arraigned the world's impassive will:

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-03 F-57]

“What stealthy doom has crept across her path

Emerging from the dark forest's sullen heart,

What evil thing stood smiling by the way

And wore the beauty of the Shalwa boy?

Perhaps he came an enemy from her past

Armed with a hidden force of ancient wrongs,

Himself unknowing, and seized her unknown.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-03 F-58]

Here dreadfully entangled love and hate

Meet us blind wanderers mid the perils of Time.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-03 F-60]

Our days are links of a disastrous chain,

Necessity avenges casual steps;

Old cruelties come back unrecognised,

The gods make use of our forgotten deeds.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-03 F-61]

Yet all in vain the bitter law was made.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-03 F-62]

Our own minds are the justicers of doom.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-03 F-63]

For nothing have we learned, but still repeat

Our stark misuse of self and others' souls.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-03 F-64]

There are dire alchemies of the human heart

And fallen from his ethereal element

Love darkens to the spirit of nether gods.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-03 F-65]

The dreadful angel, angry with his joys

Woundingly sweet he cannot yet forego,

Is pitiless to the soul his gaze disarmed,

He visits with his own pangs his quivering prey

Forcing us to cling enamoured to his grip

As if in love with our own agony.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-03 F-66]

This is one poignant misery in the world,

And grief has other lassoes for our life.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-03 F-67]

Our sympathies become our torturers.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-03 F-68]

Strength have I my own punishment to bear,

Knowing it just, but on this earth perplexed,

Smitten in the sorrow of scourged and helpless things,

Often it faints to meet other suffering eyes.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-03 F-69]

We are not as the gods who know not grief

And look impassive on a suffering world,

Calm they gaze down on the little human scene

And the short-lived passion crossing mortal hearts.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-03 F-70]

An ancient tale of woe can move us still,

We keep the ache of breasts that breathe no more,

We are shaken by the sight of human pain,

And share the miseries that others feel.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-03 F-71]

Ours not the passionless lids that cannot age.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-03 F-72]

Too hard for us is heaven's indifference:

Our own tragedies are not enough for us,

All pathos and all sufferings we make ours;

We have sorrow for a greatness passed away

And feel the touch of tears in mortal things.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-03 F-73]

Even a stranger's anguish rends my heart,

And this, O Narad, is my well-loved child.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-03 F-74]

Hide not from us our doom, if doom is ours.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-03 F-75]

This is the worst, an unknown face of Fate,

A terror ominous, mute, felt more than seen

Behind our seat by day, our couch by night,

A Fate lurking in the shadow of our hearts,

The anguish of the unseen that waits to strike.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-03 F-76]

To know is best, however hard to bear.”

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-03 F-77]

Play Section Four
[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-04]

Then cried the sage piercing the mother's heart,

Forcing to steel the will of Savitri,

His words set free the spring of cosmic Fate.

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

The great Gods use the pain of human hearts

As a sharp axe to hew their cosmic road:

They squander lavishly men's blood and tears

For a moment's purpose in their fateful work.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-04 F-02]

This cosmic Nature's balance is not ours

Nor the mystic measure of her need and use.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-04 F-03]

A single word lets loose vast agencies;

A casual act determines the world's fate.

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

So now he set free destiny in that hour.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-04 F-05]

“The truth thou hast claimed; I give to thee the truth.

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

A marvel of the meeting earth and heavens

Is he whom Savitri has chosen mid men,

His figure is the front of Nature's march,

His single being excels the works of Time.

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

A sapphire cutting from the sleep of heaven,

Delightful is the soul of Satyavan,

A ray out of the rapturous Infinite,

A silence waking to a hymn of joy.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-04 F-08]

A divinity and kingliness gird his brow;

His eyes keep a memory from a world of bliss.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-04 F-09]

As brilliant as a lonely moon in heaven,

Gentle like the sweet bud that spring desires,

Pure like a stream that kisses silent banks,

He takes with bright surprise spirit and sense.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-04 F-10]

A living knot of golden Paradise,

A blue Immense he leans to the longing world,

Time's joy borrowed out of eternity,

A star of splendour or a rose of bliss.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-04 F-11]

In him soul and Nature, equal Presences,

Balance and fuse in a wide harmony.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-04 F-12]

The Happy in their bright ether have not hearts

More sweet and true than this of mortal make

That takes all joy as the world's native gift

And to all gives joy as the world's natural right.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-04 F-13]

His speech carries a light of inner truth,

And a large-eyed communion with the Power

In common things has made veilless his mind,

A seer in earth-shapes of garbless deity.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-04 F-14]

A tranquil breadth of sky windless and still

Watching the world like a mind of unplumbed thought,

A silent space musing and luminous

Uncovered by the morning to delight,

A green tangle of trees upon a happy hill

Made into a murmuring nest by southern winds,

These are his images and parallels,

His kin in beauty and in depth his peers.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-04 F-15]

A will to climb lifts a delight to live,

Heaven's height companion of earth-beauty's charm,

An aspiration to the immortals' air

Lain on the lap of mortal ecstasy.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-04 F-16]

His sweetness and his joy attract all hearts

To live with his own in a glad tenancy,

His strength is like a tower built to reach heaven,

A godhead quarried from the stones of life.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-04 F-17]

O loss, if death into its elements

Of which his gracious envelope was built,

Shatter this vase before it breathes its sweets,

As if earth could not keep too long from heaven

A treasure thus unique loaned by the gods,

A being so rare, of so divine a make!

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-04 F-18]

In one brief year when this bright hour flies back

And perches careless on a branch of Time,

This sovereign glory ends heaven lent to earth,

This splendour vanishes from the mortal's sky:

Heaven's greatness came, but was too great to stay.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-04 F-19]

Twelve swift-winged months are given to him and her;

This day returning Satyavan must die.”

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-04 F-20]

A lightning bright and nude the sentence fell.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-04 F-21]

But the queen cried: “Vain then can be heaven's grace!

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-04 F-22]

Heaven mocks us with the brilliance of its gifts,

For Death is a cupbearer of the wine

Of too brief joy held up to mortal lips

For a passionate moment by the careless gods.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-04 F-23]

But I reject the grace and the mockery.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-04 F-24]

Mounting thy car go forth, O Savitri,

And travel once more through the peopled lands.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-04 F-25]

Alas, in the green gladness of the woods

Thy heart has stooped to a misleading call.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-04 F-26]

Choose once again and leave this fated head,

Death is the gardener of this wonder-tree;

Love's sweetness sleeps in his pale marble hand.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-04 F-27]

Advancing in a honeyed line but closed,

A little joy would buy too bitter an end.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-04 F-28]

Plead not thy choice, for death has made it vain.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-04 F-29]

Thy youth and radiance were not born to lie

A casket void dropped on a careless soil;

A choice less rare may call a happier fate.”

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-04 F-30]

But Savitri answered from her violent heart,—

Her voice was calm, her face was fixed like steel:

“Once my heart chose and chooses not again.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-04 F-31]

The word I have spoken can never be erased,

It is written in the record book of God.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-04 F-32]

The truth once uttered, from the earth's air effaced,

By mind forgotten, sounds immortally

For ever in the memory of Time.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-04 F-33]

Once the dice fall thrown by the hand of Fate

In an eternal moment of the gods.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-04 F-34]

My heart has sealed its troth to Satyavan:

Its signature adverse Fate cannot efface,

Its seal not Fate nor Death nor Time dissolve.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-04 F-35]

Those who shall part who have grown one being within?

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-04 F-36]

Death's grip can break our bodies, not our souls;

If death take him, I too know how to die.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-04 F-37]

Let Fate do with me what she will or can;

I am stronger than death and greater than my fate;

My love shall outlast the world, doom falls from me

Helpless against my immortality.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-04 F-38]

Fate's law may change, but not my spirit's will.”

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-04 F-39]

An adamant will, she cast her speech like bronze.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-04 F-40]

But in the queen's mind listening her words

Rang like the voice of a self-chosen Doom

Denying every issue of escape.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-04 F-41]

To her own despair answer the mother made;

As one she cried who in her heavy heart

Labours amid the sobbing of her hopes

To wake a note of help from sadder strings:

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-04 F-42]

“O child, in the magnificence of thy soul

Dwelling on the border of a greater world

And dazzled by thy superhuman thoughts,

Thou lendst eternity to a mortal hope.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-04 F-43]

Here on this mutable and ignorant earth

Who is the lover and who is the friend?

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-04 F-44]

All passes here, nothing remains the same.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-04 F-45]

None is for any on this transient globe.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-04 F-46]

He whom thou lovest now, a stranger came

And into a far strangeness shall depart:

His moment's part once done upon life's stage

Which for a time was given him from within,

To other scenes he moves and other players

And laughs and weeps mid faces new, unknown.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-04 F-47]

The body thou hast loved is cast away

Amidst the brute unchanging stuff of worlds

To indifferent mighty Nature and becomes

Crude matter for the joy of others' lives.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-04 F-48]

But for our souls, upon the wheel of God

For ever turning, they arrive and go,

Married and sundered in the magic round

Of the great Dancer of the boundless dance.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-04 F-49]

Our emotions are but high and dying notes

Of his wild music changed compellingly

By the passionate movements of a seeking Heart

In the inconstant links of hour with hour.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-04 F-50]

To call down heaven's distant answering song,

To cry to an unseized bliss is all we dare;

Once seized, we lose the heavenly music's sense;

Too near, the rhythmic cry has fled or failed;

All sweetnesses are baffling symbols here.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-04 F-51]

Love dies before the lover in our breast:

Our joys are perfumes in a brittle vase.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-04 F-52]

O then what wreck is this upon Time's sea

To spread life's sails to the hurricane desire

And call for pilot the unseeing heart!

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-04 F-53]

O child, wilt thou proclaim, wilt thou then follow

Against the Law that is the eternal will

The autarchy of the rash Titan's mood

To whom his own fierce will is the one law

In a world where Truth is not, nor Light nor God?

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-04 F-54]

Only the gods can speak what now thou speakst.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-04 F-55]

Thou who art human, think not like a god.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-04 F-56]

For man, below the god, above the brute,

Is given the calm reason as his guide;

He is not driven by an unthinking will

As are the actions of the bird and beast;

He is not moved by stark Necessity

Like the senseless motion of inconscient things.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-04 F-57]

The giant's and the Titan's furious march

Climbs to usurp the kingdom of the gods

Or skirts the demon magnitudes of Hell;

In the unreflecting passion of their hearts

They dash their lives against the eternal Law

And fall and break by their own violent mass:

The middle path is made for thinking man.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-04 F-58]

To choose his steps by reason's vigilant light,

To choose his path among the many paths

Is given him, for each his difficult goal

Hewn out of infinite possibility.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-04 F-59]

Leave not thy goal to follow a beautiful face.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-04 F-60]

Only when thou hast climbed above thy mind

And liv'st in the calm vastness of the One

Can love be eternal in the eternal Bliss

And love divine replace the human tie.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-04 F-61]

There is a shrouded law, an austere force:

It bids thee strengthen thy undying spirit;

It offers its severe benignancies

Of work and thought and measured grave delight

As steps to climb to God's far secret heights.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-04 F-62]

Then is our life a tranquil pilgrimage,

Each year a mile upon the heavenly Way,

Each dawn opens into a larger Light.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-04 F-63]

Thy acts are thy helpers, all events are signs,

Waking and sleep are opportunities

Given to thee by an immortal Power.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-04 F-64]

So canst thou raise thy pure unvanquished spirit,

Till spread to heaven in a wide vesper calm,

Indifferent and gentle as the sky,

It greatens slowly into timeless peace.”

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-04 F-65]

But Savitri replied with steadfast eyes:

“My will is part of the eternal Will,

My fate is what my spirit's strength can make,

My fate is what my spirit's strength can bear;

My strength is not the Titan's; it is God's.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-04 F-66]

I have discovered my glad reality

Beyond my body in another's being:

I have found the deep unchanging soul of love.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-04 F-67]

Then how shall I desire a lonely good,

Or slay, aspiring to white vacant peace,

The endless hope that made my soul spring forth

Out of its infinite solitude and sleep?

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-04 F-68]

My spirit has glimpsed the glory for which it came,

The beating of one vast heart in the flame of things,

My eternity clasped by his eternity

And, tireless of the sweet abysms of Time,

Deep possibility always to love.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-04 F-69]

This, this is first, last joy and to its throb

The riches of a thousand fortunate years

Are poverty.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-04 F-70]

Nothing to me are death and grief

Or ordinary lives and happy days.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-04 F-71]

And what to me are common souls of men

Or eyes and lips that are not Satyavan's?

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-04 F-72]

I have no need to draw back from his arms

And the discovered paradise of his love

And journey into a still infinity.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-04 F-73]

Only now for my soul in Satyavan

I treasure the rich occasion of my birth:

In sunlight and a dream of emerald ways

I shall walk with him like gods in Paradise.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-04 F-74]

If for a year, that year is all my life.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-04 F-75]

And yet I know this is not all my fate

Only to live and love awhile and die.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-04 F-76]

For I know now why my spirit came on earth

And who I am and who he is I love.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-04 F-77]

I have looked at him from my immortal Self,

I have seen God smile at me in Satyavan;

I have seen the Eternal in a human face.”

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-04 F-78]

Then none could answer to her words.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-04 F-79]

Silent

They sat and looked into the eyes of Fate.

[Savitri B-06 C-01 S-04 F-80]

Book Six Canto One End

The Word of Fate

[Savitri B-06 C-01 Canto End]

Savitri | a Legend and a Symbol

Book Six
The Book of Fate

Canto Two

The Way of Fate and the Problem of Pain

[Savitri B-06 C-02 Canto Name]

Play Section One
[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-01]

A silence sealed the irrevocable decree,

The word of Fate that fell from heavenly lips

Fixing a doom no power could ever reverse

Unless heaven's will itself could change its course.

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

Or so it seemed: yet from the silence rose

One voice that questioned changeless destiny,

A will that strove against the immutable Will.

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

A mother's heart had heard the fateful speech

That rang like a sanction to the call of death

And came like a chill close to life and hope.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-01 F-03]

Yet hope sank down like an extinguished fire.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-01 F-04]

She felt the leaden inevitable hand

Invade the secrecy of her guarded soul

And smite with sudden pain its still content

And the empire of her hard-won quietude.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-01 F-05]

Awhile she fell to the level of human mind,

A field of mortal grief and Nature's law;

She shared, she bore the common lot of men

And felt what common hearts endure in Time.

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

Voicing earth's question to the inscrutable power

The queen now turned to the still immobile seer:

Assailed by the discontent in Nature's depths,

Partner in the agony of dumb driven things

And all the misery, all the ignorant cry,

Passionate like sorrow questioning heaven she spoke.

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

Lending her speech to the surface soul on earth

She uttered the suffering in the world's dumb heart

And man's revolt against his ignorant fate.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-01 F-08]

“O seer, in the earth's strange twi-natured life

By what pitiless adverse Necessity

Or what cold freak of a Creator's will,

By what random accident or governed Chance

That shaped a rule out of fortuitous steps,

Made destiny from an hour's emotion, came

Into the unreadable mystery of Time

The direr mystery of grief and pain?

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

Is it thy God who made this cruel law?

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-01 F-10]

Or some disastrous Power has marred his work

And he stands helpless to defend or save?

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-01 F-11]

A fatal seed was sown in life's false start

When evil twinned with good on earthly soil.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-01 F-12]

Then first appeared the malady of mind,

Its pang of thought, its quest for the aim of life.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-01 F-13]

It twisted into forms of good and ill

The frank simplicity of the animal's acts;

It turned the straight path hewn by the body's gods,

Followed the zigzag of the uncertain course

Of life that wanders seeking for its aim

In the pale starlight falling from thought's skies,

Its guides the unsure idea, the wavering will.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-01 F-14]

Lost was the instinct's safe identity

With the arrow-point of being's inmost sight,

Marred the sure steps of Nature's simple walk

And truth and freedom in the growing soul.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-01 F-15]

Out of some ageless innocence and peace,

Privilege of souls not yet betrayed to birth,

Cast down to suffer on this hard dangerous earth

Our life was born in pain and with a cry.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-01 F-16]

Although earth-nature welcomes heaven's breath

Inspiring Matter with the will to live,

A thousand ills assail the mortal's hours

And wear away the natural joy of life;

Our bodies are an engine cunningly made,

But for all its parts as cunningly are planned,

Contrived ingeniously with demon skill,

Its apt inevitable heritage

Of mortal danger and peculiar pain,

Its payment of the tax of Time and Fate,

Its way to suffer and its way to die.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-01 F-17]

This is the ransom of our high estate,

The sign and stamp of our humanity.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-01 F-18]

A grisly company of maladies

Come, licensed lodgers, into man's bodily house,

Purveyors of death and torturers of life.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-01 F-19]

In the malignant hollows of the world,

In its subconscient cavern-passages

Ambushed they lie waiting their hour to leap,

Surrounding with danger the sieged city of life:

Admitted into the citadel of man's days

They mine his force and maim or suddenly kill.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-01 F-20]

Ourselves within us lethal forces nurse;

We make of our own enemies our guests:

Out of their holes like beasts they creep and gnaw

The chords of the divine musician's lyre

Till frayed and thin the music dies away

Or crashing snaps with a last tragic note.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-01 F-21]

All that we are is like a fort beset:

All that we strive to be alters like a dream

In the grey sleep of Matter's ignorance.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-01 F-22]

Mind suffers lamed by the world's disharmony

And the unloveliness of human things.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-01 F-23]

A treasure misspent or cheaply, fruitlessly sold

In the bazaar of a blind destiny,

A gift of priceless value from Time's gods

Lost or mislaid in an uncaring world,

Life is a marvel missed, an art gone wry;

A seeker in a dark and obscure place,

An ill-armed warrior facing dreadful odds,

An imperfect worker given a baffling task,

An ignorant judge of problems Ignorance made,

Its heavenward flights reach closed and keyless gates,

Its glorious outbursts peter out in mire.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-01 F-24]

On Nature's gifts to man a curse was laid:

All walks inarmed by its own opposites,

Error is the comrade of our mortal thought

And falsehood lurks in the deep bosom of truth,

Sin poisons with its vivid flowers of joy

Or leaves a red scar burnt across the soul;

Virtue is a grey bondage and a gaol.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-01 F-25]

At every step is laid for us a snare.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-01 F-26]

Alien to reason and the spirit's light,

Our fount of action from a darkness wells;

In ignorance and nescience are our roots.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-01 F-27]

A growing register of calamities

Is the past's account, the future's book of Fate:

The centuries pile man's follies and man's crimes

Upon the countless crowd of Nature's ills;

As if the world's stone load was not enough,

A crop of miseries obstinately is sown

By his own hand in the furrows of the gods,

The vast increasing tragic harvest reaped

From old misdeeds buried by oblivious Time.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-01 F-28]

He walks by his own choice into Hell's trap;

This mortal creature is his own worst foe.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-01 F-29]

His science is an artificer of doom;

He ransacks earth for means to harm his kind;

He slays his happiness and others' good.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-01 F-30]

Nothing has he learned from Time and its history;

Even as of old in the raw youth of Time,

When Earth ignorant ran on the highways of Fate,

Old forms of evil cling to the world's soul:

War making nought the sweet smiling calm of life,

Battle and rapine, ruin and massacre

Are still the fierce pastimes of man's warring tribes;

An idiot hour destroys what centuries made,

His wanton rage or frenzied hate lays low

The beauty and greatness by his genius wrought

And the mighty output of a nation's toil.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-01 F-31]

All he has achieved he drags to the precipice.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-01 F-32]

His grandeur he turns to an epic of doom and fall;

His littleness crawls content through squalor and mud,

He calls heaven's retribution on his head

And wallows in his self-made misery.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-01 F-33]

A part author of the cosmic tragedy,

His will conspires with death and time and fate.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-01 F-34]

His brief appearance on the enigmaed earth

Ever recurs but brings no high result

To this wanderer through the aeon-rings of God

That shut his life in their vast longevity.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-01 F-35]

His soul's wide search and ever returning hopes

Pursue the useless orbit of their course

In a vain repetition of lost toils

Across a track of soon forgotten lives.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-01 F-36]

All is an episode in a meaningless tale.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-01 F-37]

Why is it all and wherefore are we here?

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-01 F-38]

If to some being of eternal bliss

It is our spirit's destiny to return

Or some still impersonal height of endless calm,

Since That we are and out of That we came,

Whence rose the strange and sterile interlude

Lasting in vain through interminable Time?

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-01 F-39]

Who willed to form or feign a universe

In the cold and endless emptiness of Space?

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-01 F-40]

Or if these beings must be and their brief lives,

What need had the soul of ignorance and tears?

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-01 F-41]

Whence rose the call for sorrow and for pain?

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-01 F-42]

Or all came helplessly without a cause?

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-01 F-43]

What power forced the immortal spirit to birth?

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-01 F-44]

The eternal witness once of eternity,

A deathless sojourner mid transient scenes,

He camps in life's half-lit obscurity

Amid the debris of his thoughts and dreams.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-01 F-45]

Or who persuaded it to fall from bliss

And forfeit its immortal privilege?

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-01 F-46]

Who laid on it the ceaseless will to live

A wanderer in this beautiful, sorrowful world,

And bear its load of joy and grief and love?

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-01 F-47]

Or if no being watches the works of Time,

What hard impersonal Necessity

Compels the vain toil of brief living things?

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-01 F-48]

A great Illusion then has built the stars.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-01 F-49]

But where then is the soul's security,

Its poise in this circling of unreal suns?

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-01 F-50]

Or else it is a wanderer from its home

Who strayed into a blind alley of Time and chance

And finds no issue from a meaningless world.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-01 F-51]

Or where begins and ends Illusion's reign?

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-01 F-52]

Perhaps the soul we feel is only a dream,

Eternal self a fiction sensed in trance.”

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-01 F-53]

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

Then after a silence Narad made reply:

Tuning his lips to earthly sound he spoke,

And something now of the deep sense of fate

Weighted the fragile hints of mortal speech.

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

His forehead shone with vision solemnised,

Turned to a tablet of supernal thoughts

As if characters of an unwritten tongue

Had left in its breadth the inscriptions of the gods.

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

Bare in that light Time toiled, his unseen works

Detected; the broad-flung far-seeing schemes

Unfinished which his aeoned flight unrolls

Were mapped already in that world-wide look.

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

“Was then the sun a dream because there is night?

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

Hidden in the mortal's heart the Eternal lives:

He lives secret in the chamber of thy soul,

A Light shines there nor pain nor grief can cross.

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

A darkness stands between thyself and him,

Thou canst not hear or feel the marvellous Guest,

Thou canst not see the beatific sun.

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

O queen, thy thought is a light of the Ignorance,

Its brilliant curtain hides from thee God's face.

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

It illumes a world born from the Inconscience

But hides the Immortal's meaning in the world.

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

Thy mind's light hides from thee the Eternal's thought,

Thy heart's hopes hide from thee the Eternal's will,

Earth's joys shut from thee the Immortal's bliss.

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

Thence rose the need of a dark intruding god,

The world's dread teacher, the creator, pain.

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

Where Ignorance is, there suffering too must come;

Thy grief is a cry of darkness to the Light;

Pain was the first-born of the Inconscience

Which was thy body's dumb original base;

Already slept there pain's subconscient shape:

A shadow in a shadowy tenebrous womb,

Till life shall move, it waits to wake and be.

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

In one caul with joy came forth the dreadful Power.

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

In life's breast it was born hiding its twin;

But pain came first, then only joy could be.

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

Pain ploughed the first hard ground of the world-drowse.

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

By pain a spirit started from the clod,

By pain Life stirred in the subliminal deep.

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

Interned, submerged, hidden in Matter's trance

Awoke to itself the dreamer, sleeping Mind;

It made a visible realm out of its dreams,

It drew its shapes from the subconscient depths,

Then turned to look upon the world it had made.

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

By pain and joy, the bright and tenebrous twins,

The inanimate world perceived its sentient soul,

Else had the Inconscient never suffered change.

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

Pain is the hammer of the Gods to break

A dead resistance in the mortal's heart,

His slow inertia as of living stone.

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

If the heart were not forced to want and weep,

His soul would have lain down content, at ease,

And never thought to exceed the human start

And never learned to climb towards the Sun.

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

This earth is full of labour, packed with pain;

Throes of an endless birth coerce her still;

The centuries end, the ages vainly pass

And yet the Godhead in her is not born.

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

The ancient Mother faces all with joy,

Calls for the ardent pang, the grandiose thrill;

For with pain and labour all creation comes.

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

This earth is full of the anguish of the gods;

Ever they travail driven by Time's goad,

And strive to work out the eternal Will

And shape the life divine in mortal forms.

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

His will must be worked out in human breasts

Against the Evil that rises from the gulfs,

Against the world's Ignorance and its obstinate strength,

Against the stumblings of man's pervert will,

Against the deep folly of his human mind,

Against the blind reluctance of his heart.

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

The spirit is doomed to pain till man is free.

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

There is a clamour of battle, a tramp, a march:

A cry arises like a moaning sea,

A desperate laughter under the blows of death,

A doom of blood and sweat and toil and tears.

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

Men die that man may live and God be born.

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

An awful Silence watches tragic Time.

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

Pain is the hand of Nature sculpturing men

To greatness: an inspired labour chisels

With heavenly cruelty an unwilling mould.

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

Implacable in the passion of their will,

Lifting the hammers of titanic toil

The demiurges of the universe work;

They shape with giant strokes their own; their sons

Are marked with their enormous stamp of fire.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-02 F-29]

Although the shaping god's tremendous touch

Is torture unbearable to mortal nerves,

The fiery spirit grows in strength within

And feels a joy in every titan pang.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-02 F-30]

He who would save himself lives bare and calm;

He who would save the race must share its pain:

This he shall know who obeys that grandiose urge.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-02 F-31]

The Great who came to save this suffering world

And rescue out of Time's shadow and the Law,

Must pass beneath the yoke of grief and pain;

They are caught by the Wheel that they had hoped to break,

On their shoulders they must bear man's load of fate.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-02 F-32]

Heaven's riches they bring, their sufferings count the price

Or they pay the gift of knowledge with their lives.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-02 F-33]

The Son of God born as the Son of man

Has drunk the bitter cup, owned Godhead's debt,

The debt the Eternal owes to the fallen kind

His will has bound to death and struggling life

That yearns in vain for rest and endless peace.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-02 F-34]

Now is the debt paid, wiped off the original score.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-02 F-35]

The Eternal suffers in a human form,

He has signed salvation's testament with his blood:

He has opened the doors of his undying peace.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-02 F-36]

The Deity compensates the creature's claim,

The Creator bears the law of pain and death;

A retribution smites the incarnate God.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-02 F-37]

His love has paved the mortal's road to Heaven:

He has given his life and light to balance here

The dark account of mortal ignorance.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-02 F-38]

It is finished, the dread mysterious sacrifice,

Offered by God's martyred body for the world;

Gethsemane and Calvary are his lot,

He carries the cross on which man's soul is nailed;

His escort is the curses of the crowd;

Insult and jeer are his right's acknowledgment;

Two thieves slain with him mock his mighty death.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-02 F-39]

He has trod with bleeding brow the Saviour's way.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-02 F-40]

He who has found his identity with God

Pays with the body's death his soul's vast light.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-02 F-41]

His knowledge immortal triumphs by his death.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-02 F-42]

Hewn, quartered on the scaffold as he falls,

His crucified voice proclaims, `I, I am God;'

`Yes, all is God,' peals back Heaven's deathless call.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-02 F-43]

The seed of Godhead sleeps in mortal hearts,

The flower of Godhead grows on the world-tree:

All shall discover God in self and things.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-02 F-44]

But when God's messenger comes to help the world

And lead the soul of earth to higher things,

He too must carry the yoke he came to unloose;

He too must bear the pang that he would heal:

Exempt and unafflicted by earth's fate,

How shall he cure the ills he never felt?

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-02 F-45]

He covers the world's agony with his calm;

But though to the outward eye no sign appears

And peace is given to our torn human hearts,

The struggle is there and paid the unseen price;

The fire, the strife, the wrestle are within.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-02 F-46]

He carries the suffering world in his own breast;

Its sins weigh on his thoughts, its grief is his:

Earth's ancient load lies heavy on his soul;

Night and its powers beleaguer his tardy steps,

The Titan adversary's clutch he bears;

His march is a battle and a pilgrimage.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-02 F-47]

Life's evil smites, he is stricken with the world's pain:

A million wounds gape in his secret heart.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-02 F-48]

He journeys sleepless through an unending night;

Antagonist forces crowd across his path;

A siege, a combat is his inner life.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-02 F-49]

Even worse may be the cost, direr the pain:

His large identity and all-harbouring love

Shall bring the cosmic anguish into his depths,

The sorrow of all living things shall come

And knock at his doors and live within his house;

A dreadful cord of sympathy can tie

All suffering into his single grief and make

All agony in all the worlds his own.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-02 F-50]

He meets an ancient adversary Force,

He is lashed with the whips that tear the world's worn heart;

The weeping of the centuries visits his eyes:

He wears the blood-glued fiery Centaur shirt,

The poison of the world has stained his throat.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-02 F-51]

In the market-place of Matter's capital

Amidst the chafferings of the affair called life

He is tied to the stake of a perennial Fire;

He burns on an unseen original verge

That Matter may be turned to spirit stuff:

He is the victim in his own sacrifice.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-02 F-52]

The Immortal bound to earth's mortality

Appearing and perishing on the roads of Time

Creates God's moment by eternity's beats.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-02 F-53]

He dies that the world may be new-born and live.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-02 F-54]

Even if he escapes the fiercest fires,

Even if the world breaks not in, a drowning sea,

Only by hard sacrifice is high heaven earned:

He must face the fight, the pang who would conquer Hell.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-02 F-55]

A dark concealed hostility is lodged

In the human depths, in the hidden heart of Time

That claims the right to change and mar God's work.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-02 F-56]

A secret enmity ambushes the world's march;

It leaves a mark on thought and speech and act:

It stamps stain and defect on all things done;

Till it is slain peace is forbidden on earth.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-02 F-57]

There is no visible foe, but the unseen

Is round us, forces intangible besiege,

Touches from alien realms, thoughts not our own

Overtake us and compel the erring heart;

Our lives are caught in an ambiguous net.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-02 F-58]

An adversary Force was born of old:

Invader of the life of mortal man,

It hides from him the straight immortal path.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-02 F-59]

A power came in to veil the eternal Light,

A power opposed to the eternal will

Diverts the messages of the infallible Word,

Contorts the contours of the cosmic plan:

A whisper lures to evil the human heart,

It seals up wisdom's eyes, the soul's regard,

It is the origin of our suffering here,

It binds earth to calamity and pain.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-02 F-60]

This all must conquer who would bring down God's peace.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-02 F-61]

This hidden foe lodged in the human breast

Man must overcome or miss his higher fate.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-02 F-62]

This is the inner war without escape.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-02 F-63]

Play Section Three
[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-03]

“Hard is the world-redeemer's heavy task;

The world itself becomes his adversary,

Those he would save are his antagonists:

This world is in love with its own ignorance,

Its darkness turns away from the saviour light,

It gives the cross in payment for the crown.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-03 F-01]

His work is a trickle of splendour in a long night;

He sees the long march of Time, the little won;

A few are saved, the rest strive on and fail:

A Sun has passed, on earth Night's shadow falls.

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

Yes, there are happy ways near to God's sun;

But few are they who tread the sunlit path;

Only the pure in soul can walk in light.

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

An exit is shown, a road of hard escape

From the sorrow and the darkness and the chain;

But how shall a few escaped release the world?

The human mass lingers beneath the yoke.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-03 F-04]

Escape, however high, redeems not life,

Life that is left behind on a fallen earth.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-03 F-05]

Escape cannot uplift the abandoned race

Or bring to it victory and the reign of God.

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

A greater power must come, a larger light.

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

Although Light grows on earth and Night recedes,

Yet till the evil is slain in its own home

And Light invades the world's inconscient base

And perished has the adversary Force,

He still must labour on, his work half done.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-03 F-08]

One yet may come armoured, invincible;

His will immobile meets the mobile hour;

The world's blows cannot bend that victor head;

Calm and sure are his steps in the growing Night;

The goal recedes, he hurries not his pace,

He turns not to high voices in the night;

He asks no aid from the inferior gods;

His eyes are fixed on his immutable aim.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-03 F-09]

Man turns aside or chooses easier paths;

He keeps to the one high and difficult road

That sole can climb to the Eternal's peaks;

The ineffable planes already have felt his tread;

He has made heaven and earth his instruments,

But the limits fall from him of earth and heaven;

Their law he transcends but uses as his means.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-03 F-10]

He has seized life's hands, he has mastered his own heart.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-03 F-11]

The feints of Nature mislead not his sight,

Inflexible his look towards Truth's far end;

Fate's deaf resistance cannot break his will.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-03 F-12]

In the dreadful passages, the fatal paths,

Invulnerable his soul, his heart unslain,

He lives through the opposition of earth's Powers

And Nature's ambushes and the world's attacks.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-03 F-13]

His spirit's stature transcending pain and bliss,

He fronts evil and good with calm and equal eyes.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-03 F-14]

He too must grapple with the riddling Sphinx

And plunge into her long obscurity.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-03 F-15]

He has broken into the Inconscient's depths

That veil themselves even from their own regard:

He has seen God's slumber shape these magic worlds.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-03 F-16]

He has watched the dumb God fashioning Matter's frame,

Dreaming the dreams of its unknowing sleep,

And watched the unconscious Force that built the stars.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-03 F-17]

He has learned the Inconscient's workings and its law,

Its incoherent thoughts and rigid acts,

Its hazard wastes of impulse and idea,

The chaos of its mechanic frequencies,

Its random calls, its whispers falsely true,

Misleaders of the hooded listening soul.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-03 F-18]

All things come to its ear but nothing abides;

All rose from the silence, all goes back to its hush.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-03 F-19]

Its somnolence founded the universe,

Its obscure waking makes the world seem vain.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-03 F-20]

Arisen from Nothingness and towards Nothingness turned,

Its dark and potent nescience was earth's start;

It is the waste stuff from which all was made;

Into its deeps creation can collapse.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-03 F-21]

Its opposition clogs the march of the soul,

It is the mother of our ignorance.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-03 F-22]

He must call light into its dark abysms,

Else never can Truth conquer Matter's sleep

And all earth look into the eyes of God.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-03 F-23]

All things obscure his knowledge must relume,

All things perverse his power must unknot:

He must pass to the other shore of falsehood's sea,

He must enter the world's dark to bring there light.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-03 F-24]

The heart of evil must be bared to his eyes,

He must learn its cosmic dark necessity,

Its right and its dire roots in Nature's soil.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-03 F-25]

He must know the thought that moves the demon act

And justifies the Titan's erring pride

And the falsehood lurking in earth's crooked dreams:

He must enter the eternity of Night

And know God's darkness as he knows his Sun.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-03 F-26]

For this he must go down into the pit,

For this he must invade the dolorous Vasts.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-03 F-27]

Imperishable and wise and infinite,

He still must travel Hell the world to save.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-03 F-28]

Into the eternal Light he shall emerge

On borders of the meeting of all worlds;

There on the verge of Nature's summit steps

The secret Law of each thing is fulfilled,

All contraries heal their long dissidence.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-03 F-29]

There meet and clasp the eternal opposites,

There pain becomes a violent fiery joy;

Evil turns back to its original good,

And sorrow lies upon the breasts of Bliss:

She has learned to weep glad tears of happiness;

Her gaze is charged with a wistful ecstasy.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-03 F-30]

Then shall be ended here the Law of Pain.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-03 F-31]

Earth shall be made a home of Heaven's light,

A seer heaven-born shall lodge in human breasts;

The superconscient beam shall touch men's eyes

And the truth-conscious world come down to earth

Invading Matter with the Spirit's ray,

Awaking its silence to immortal thoughts,

Awaking the dumb heart to the living Word.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-03 F-32]

This mortal life shall house Eternity's bliss,

The body's self taste immortality.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-03 F-33]

Then shall the world-redeemer's task be done.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-03 F-34]

Play Section Four
[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-04]

“Till then must life carry its seed of death

And sorrow's plaint be heard in the slow Night.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-04 F-01]

O mortal, bear this great world's law of pain,

In thy hard passage through a suffering world

Lean for thy soul's support on Heaven's strength,

Turn towards high Truth, aspire to love and peace.

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

A little bliss is lent thee from above,

A touch divine upon thy human days.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-04 F-03]

Make of thy daily way a pilgrimage,

For through small joys and griefs thou mov'st towards God.

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

Haste not towards Godhead on a dangerous road,

Open not thy doorways to a nameless Power,

Climb not to Godhead by the Titan's road.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-04 F-05]

Against the Law he pits his single will,

Across its way he throws his pride of might.

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

Heavenward he clambers on a stair of storms

Aspiring to live near the deathless sun.

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

He strives with a giant strength to wrest by force

From life and Nature the immortals' right;

He takes by storm the world and fate and heaven.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-04 F-08]

He comes not to the high World-maker's seat,

He waits not for the outstretched hand of God

To raise him out of his mortality.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-04 F-09]

All he would make his own, leave nothing free,

Stretching his small self to cope with the infinite.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-04 F-10]

Obstructing the gods' open ways he makes

His own estate of the earth's air and light;

A monopolist of the world-energy,

He dominates the life of common men.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-04 F-11]

His pain and others' pain he makes his means:

On death and suffering he builds his throne.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-04 F-12]

In the hurry and clangour of his acts of might,

In a riot and excess of fame and shame,

By his magnitudes of hate and violence,

By the quaking of the world beneath his tread

He matches himself against the Eternal's calm

And feels in himself the greatness of a god:

Power is his image of celestial self.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-04 F-13]

The Titan's heart is a sea of fire and force;

He exults in the death of things and ruin and fall,

He feeds his strength with his own and others' pain;

In the world's pathos and passion he takes delight,

His pride, his might call for the struggle and pang.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-04 F-14]

He glories in the sufferings of the flesh

And covers the stigmata with the Stoic's name.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-04 F-15]

His eyes blinded and visionless stare at the sun,

The seeker's Sight receding from his heart

Can find no more the light of eternity;

He sees the beyond as an emptiness void of soul

And takes his night for a dark infinite.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-04 F-16]

His nature magnifies the unreal's blank

And sees in Nought the sole reality:

He would stamp his single figure on the world,

Obsess the world's rumours with his single name.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-04 F-17]

His moments centre the vast universe.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-04 F-18]

He sees his little self as very God.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-04 F-19]

His little `I' has swallowed the whole world,

His ego has stretched into infinity.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-04 F-20]

His mind, a beat in original Nothingness,

Ciphers his thought on a slate of hourless Time.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-04 F-21]

He builds on a mighty vacancy of soul

A huge philosophy of Nothingness.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-04 F-22]

In him Nirvana lives and speaks and acts

Impossibly creating a universe.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-04 F-23]

An eternal zero is his formless self,

His spirit the void impersonal absolute.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-04 F-24]

Take not that stride, O growing soul of man;

Cast not thy self into that night of God.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-04 F-25]

The soul suffering is not eternity's key,

Or ransom by sorrow heaven's demand on life.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-04 F-26]

O mortal, bear, but ask not for the stroke,

Too soon will grief and anguish find thee out.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-04 F-27]

Too enormous is that venture for thy will;

Only in limits can man's strength be safe;

Yet is infinity thy spirit's goal;

Its bliss is there behind the world's face of tears.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-04 F-28]

A power is in thee that thou knowest not;

Thou art a vessel of the imprisoned spark.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-04 F-29]

It seeks relief from Time's envelopment,

And while thou shutst it in, the seal is pain:

Bliss is the Godhead's crown, eternal, free,

Unburdened by life's blind mystery of pain:

Pain is the signature of the Ignorance

Attesting the secret god denied by life:

Until life finds him pain can never end.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-04 F-30]

Calm is self's victory overcoming fate.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-04 F-31]

Bear; thou shalt find at last thy road to bliss.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-04 F-32]

Bliss is the secret stuff of all that lives,

Even pain and grief are garbs of world-delight,

It hides behind thy sorrow and thy cry.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-04 F-33]

Because thy strength is a part and not God's whole,

Because afflicted by the little self

Thy consciousness forgets to be divine

As it walks in the vague penumbra of the flesh

And cannot bear the world's tremendous touch,

Thou criest out and sayst that there is pain.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-04 F-34]

Indifference, pain and joy, a triple disguise,

Attire of the rapturous Dancer in the ways,

Withhold from thee the body of God's bliss.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-04 F-35]

Thy spirit's strength shall make thee one with God,

Thy agony shall change to ecstasy,

Indifference deepen into infinity's calm

And joy laugh nude on the peaks of the Absolute.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-04 F-36]

Play Section Five
[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-05]

“O mortal who complainst of death and fate,

Accuse none of the harms thyself hast called;

This troubled world thou hast chosen for thy home,

Thou art thyself the author of thy pain.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-05 F-01]

Once in the immortal boundlessness of Self,

In a vast of Truth and Consciousness and Light

The soul looked out from its felicity.

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

It felt the Spirit's interminable bliss,

It knew itself deathless, timeless, spaceless, one,

It saw the Eternal, lived in the Infinite.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-05 F-03]

Then, curious of a shadow thrown by Truth,

It strained towards some otherness of self,

It was drawn to an unknown Face peering through night.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-05 F-04]

It sensed a negative infinity,

A void supernal whose immense excess

Imitating God and everlasting Time

Offered a ground for Nature's adverse birth

And Matter's rigid hard unconsciousness

Harbouring the brilliance of a transient soul

That lights up birth and death and ignorant life.

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

A Mind arose that stared at Nothingness

Till figures formed of what could never be;

It housed the contrary of all that is.

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

A Nought appeared as Being's huge sealed cause,

Its dumb support in a blank infinite,

In whose abysm spirit must disappear:

A darkened Nature lived and held the seed

Of Spirit hidden and feigning not to be.

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

Eternal Consciousness became a freak

Of an unsouled almighty Inconscient

And, breathed no more as spirit's native air,

Bliss was an incident of a mortal hour,

A stranger in the insentient universe.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-05 F-08]

As one drawn by the grandeur of the Void

The soul attracted leaned to the Abyss:

It longed for the adventure of Ignorance

And the marvel and surprise of the Unknown

And the endless possibility that lurked

In the womb of Chaos and in Nothing's gulf

Or looked from the unfathomed eyes of Chance.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-05 F-09]

It tired of its unchanging happiness,

It turned away from immortality:

It was drawn to hazard's call and danger's charm,

It yearned to the pathos of grief, the drama of pain,

Perdition's peril, the wounded bare escape,

The music of ruin and its glamour and crash,

The savour of pity and the gamble of love

And passion and the ambiguous face of Fate.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-05 F-10]

A world of hard endeavour and difficult toil,

And battle on extinction's perilous verge,

A clash of forces, a vast incertitude,

The joy of creation out of Nothingness,

Strange meetings on the roads of Ignorance

And the companionship of half-known souls

Or the solitary greatness and lonely force

Of a separate being conquering its world,

Called it from its too safe eternity.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-05 F-11]

A huge descent began, a giant fall:

For what the spirit sees, creates a truth

And what the soul imagines is made a world.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-05 F-12]

A Thought that leaped from the Timeless can become,

Indicator of cosmic consequence

And the itinerary of the gods,

A cyclic movement in eternal Time.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-05 F-13]

Thus came, born from a blind tremendous choice,

This great perplexed and discontented world,

This haunt of Ignorance, this home of Pain:

There are pitched desire's tents, grief's headquarters.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-05 F-14]

A vast disguise conceals the Eternal's bliss.”

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-05 F-15]

Play Section Six
[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-06]

Then Aswapati answered to the seer:

“Is then the spirit ruled by an outward world?

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

O seer, is there no remedy within?

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

But what is Fate if not the spirit's will

After long time fulfilled by cosmic Force?

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

I deemed a mighty Power had come with her;

Is not that Power the high compeer of Fate?”

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

But Narad answered covering truth with truth:

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

“O Aswapati, random seem the ways

Along whose banks your footsteps stray or run

In casual hours or moments of the gods,

Yet your least stumblings are foreseen above.

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

Infallibly the curves of life are drawn

Following the stream of Time through the unknown;

They are led by a clue the calm immortals keep.

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

This blazoned hieroglyph of prophet morns

A meaning more sublime in symbols writes

Than sealed Thought wakes to, but of this high script

How shall my voice convince the mind of earth?

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

Heaven's wiser love rejects the mortal's prayer;

Unblinded by the breath of his desire,

Unclouded by the mists of fear and hope,

It bends above the strife of love with death;

It keeps for her her privilege of pain.

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

A greatness in thy daughter's soul resides

That can transform herself and all around

But must cross on stones of suffering to its goal.

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

Although designed like a nectar cup of heaven,

Of heavenly ether made she sought this air,

She too must share the human need of grief

And all her cause of joy transmute to pain.

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

The mind of mortal man is led by words,

His sight retires behind the walls of Thought

And looks out only through half-opened doors.

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

He cuts the boundless Truth into sky-strips

And every strip he takes for all the heavens.

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

He stares at infinite possibility

And gives to the plastic Vast the name of Chance;

He sees the long results of an all-wise Force

Planning a sequence of steps in endless Time

But in its links imagines a senseless chain

Or the dead hand of cold Necessity;

He answers not to the mystic Mother's heart,

Misses the ardent heavings of her breast

And feels cold rigid limbs of lifeless Law.

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

The will of the Timeless working out in Time

In the free absolute steps of cosmic Truth

He thinks a dead machine or unconscious Fate.

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

A Magician's formulas have made Matter's laws

And while they last, all things by them are bound;

But the spirit's consent is needed for each act

And Freedom walks in the same pace with Law.

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

All here can change if the Magician choose.

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

If human will could be made one with God's,

If human thought could echo the thoughts of God,

Man might be all-knowing and omnipotent;

But now he walks in Nature's doubtful ray.

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

Yet can the mind of man receive God's light,

The force of man can be driven by God's force,

Then is he a miracle doing miracles.

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

For only so can he be Nature's king.

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

It is decreed and Satyavan must die;

The hour is fixed, chosen the fatal stroke.

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

What else shall be is written in her soul

But till the hour reveals the fateful script,

The writing waits illegible and mute.

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

Fate is Truth working out in Ignorance.

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

O King, thy fate is a transaction done

At every hour between Nature and thy soul

With God for its foreseeing arbiter.

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

Fate is a balance drawn in Destiny's book.

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

Man can accept his fate, he can refuse.

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

Even if the One maintains the unseen decree

He writes thy refusal in thy credit page:

For doom is not a close, a mystic seal.

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

Arisen from the tragic crash of life,

Arisen from the body's torture and death,

The spirit rises mightier by defeat;

Its godlike wings grow wider with each fall.

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

Its splendid failures sum to victory.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-06 F-29]

O man, the events that meet thee on thy road,

Though they smite thy body and soul with joy and grief,

Are not thy fate,—they touch thee awhile and pass;

Even death can cut not short thy spirit's walk:

Thy goal, the road thou choosest are thy fate.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-06 F-30]

On the altar throwing thy thoughts, thy heart, thy works,

Thy fate is a long sacrifice to the gods

Till they have opened to thee thy secret self

And made thee one with the indwelling God.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-06 F-31]

O soul, intruder in Nature's ignorance,

Armed traveller to the unseen supernal heights,

Thy spirit's fate is a battle and ceaseless march

Against invisible opponent Powers,

A passage from Matter into timeless self.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-06 F-32]

Adventurer through blind unforeseeing Time,

A forced advance through a long line of lives,

It pushes its spearhead through the centuries.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-06 F-33]

Across the dust and mire of the earthly plain,

On many guarded lines and dangerous fronts,

In dire assaults, in wounded slow retreats,

Holding the ideal's ringed and battered fort

Or fighting against odds in lonely posts,

Or camped in night around the bivouac's fires

Awaiting the tardy trumpets of the dawn,

In hunger and in plenty and in pain,

Through peril and through triumph and through fall,

Through life's green lanes and over her desert sands,

Up the bald moor, along the sunlit ridge,

In serried columns with a straggling rear

Led by its nomad vanguard's signal fires,

Marches the army of the waylost god.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-06 F-34]

Then late the joy ineffable is felt,

Then he remembers his forgotten self;

He has refound the skies from which he fell.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-06 F-35]

At length his front's indomitable line

Forces the last passes of the Ignorance:

Advancing beyond Nature's last known bounds,

Reconnoitring the formidable unknown,

Beyond the landmarks of things visible,

It mounts through a miraculous upper air

Till climbing the mute summit of the world

He stands upon the splendour-peaks of God.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-06 F-36]

In vain thou mournst that Satyavan must die;

His death is a beginning of greater life,

Death is the spirit's opportunity.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-06 F-37]

A vast intention has brought two souls close

And love and death conspire towards one great end.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-06 F-38]

For out of danger and pain heaven-bliss shall come,

Time's unforeseen event, God's secret plan.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-06 F-39]

This world was not built with random bricks of Chance,

A blind god is not destiny's architect;

A conscious power has drawn the plan of life,

There is a meaning in each curve and line.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-06 F-40]

It is an architecture high and grand

By many named and nameless masons built

In which unseeing hands obey the Unseen,

And of its master-builders she is one.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-06 F-41]

“Queen, strive no more to change the secret will;

Time's accidents are steps in its vast scheme.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-06 F-42]

Bring not thy brief and helpless human tears

Across the fathomless moments of a heart

That knows its single will and God's as one:

It can embrace its hostile destiny;

It sits apart with grief and facing death,

Affronting adverse fate armed and alone.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-06 F-43]

In this enormous world standing apart

In the mightiness of her silent spirit's will,

In the passion of her soul of sacrifice

Her lonely strength facing the universe,

Affronting fate, asks not man's help nor god's:

Sometimes one life is charged with earth's destiny,

It cries not for succour from the time-bound powers.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-06 F-44]

Alone she is equal to her mighty task.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-06 F-45]

Intervene not in a strife too great for thee,

A struggle too deep for mortal thought to sound,

Its question to this Nature's rigid bounds

When the soul fronts nude of garbs the infinite,

Its too vast theme of a lonely mortal will

Pacing the silence of eternity.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-06 F-46]

As a star, uncompanioned, moves in heaven

Unastonished by the immensities of Space,

Travelling infinity by its own light,

The great are strongest when they stand alone.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-06 F-47]

A God-given might of being is their force,

A ray from self's solitude of light the guide;

The soul that can live alone with itself meets God;

Its lonely universe is their rendezvous.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-06 F-48]

A day may come when she must stand unhelped

On a dangerous brink of the world's doom and hers,

Carrying the world's future on her lonely breast,

Carrying the human hope in a heart left sole

To conquer or fail on a last desperate verge,

Alone with death and close to extinction's edge.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-06 F-49]

Her single greatness in that last dire scene

Must cross alone a perilous bridge in Time

And reach an apex of world-destiny

Where all is won or all is lost for man.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-06 F-50]

In that tremendous silence lone and lost

Of a deciding hour in the world's fate,

In her soul's climbing beyond mortal time

When she stands sole with Death or sole with God

Apart upon a silent desperate brink,

Alone with her self and death and destiny

As on some verge between Time and Timelessness

When being must end or life rebuild its base,

Alone she must conquer or alone must fall.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-06 F-51]

No human aid can reach her in that hour,

No armoured god stand shining at her side.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-06 F-52]

Cry not to heaven, for she alone can save.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-06 F-53]

For this the silent Force came missioned down;

In her the conscious Will took human shape:

She only can save herself and save the world.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-06 F-54]

O queen, stand back from that stupendous scene,

Come not between her and her hour of Fate.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-06 F-55]

Her hour must come and none can intervene:

Think not to turn her from her heaven-sent task,

Strive not to save her from her own high will.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-06 F-56]

Thou hast no place in that tremendous strife;

Thy love and longing are not arbiters there;

Leave the world's fate and her to God's sole guard.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-06 F-57]

Even if he seems to leave her to her lone strength,

Even though all falters and falls and sees an end

And the heart fails and only are death and night,

God-given her strength can battle against doom

Even on a brink where Death alone seems close

And no human strength can hinder or can help.

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-06 F-58]

Think not to intercede with the hidden Will,

Intrude not twixt her spirit and its force

But leave her to her mighty self and Fate.”

[Savitri B-06 C-02 S-06 F-59]

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

He spoke and ceased and left the earthly scene.

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

Away from the strife and suffering on our globe,

He turned towards his far-off blissful home.

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

A brilliant arrow pointing straight to heaven,

The luminous body of the ethereal seer

Assailed the purple glory of the noon

And disappeared like a receding star

Vanishing into the light of the Unseen.

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

But still a cry was heard in the infinite,

And still to the listening soul on mortal earth

A high and far imperishable voice

Chanted the anthem of eternal love.

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

Book Six Canto Two End

The Way of Fate and the Problem of Pain

[Savitri B-06 C-02 Canto End]

Book Six End
The Book of Fate
[Savitri B-06 Book End]

Savitri | a Legend and a Symbol

Book Seven All Cantos
The Book of Yoga

Canto One

The Joy of Union; the Ordeal of the Foreknowledge of Death and the Heart’s Grief and Pain

[Savitri B-07 C-01 Canto Name]

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

Fate followed her foreseen immutable road.

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

Man's hopes and longings build the journeying wheels

That bear the body of his destiny

And lead his blind will towards an unknown goal.

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

His fate within him shapes his acts and rules;

Its face and form already are born in him,

Its parentage is in his secret soul:

Here Matter seems to mould the body's life

And the soul follows where its nature drives.

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

Nature and Fate compel his free-will's choice.

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

But greater spirits this balance can reverse

And make the soul the artist of its fate.

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

This is the mystic truth our ignorance hides:

Doom is a passage for our inborn force,

Our ordeal is the hidden spirit's choice,

Ananke is our being's own decree.

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

All was fulfilled the heart of Savitri

Flower-sweet and adamant, passionate and calm,

Had chosen and on her strength's unbending road

Forced to its issue the long cosmic curve.

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

Once more she sat behind loud hastening hooves;

A speed of armoured squadrons and a voice

Far-heard of chariots bore her from her home.

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

A couchant earth wakened in its dumb muse

Looked up at her from a vast indolence:

Hills wallowing in a bright haze, large lands

That lolled at ease beneath the summer heavens,

Region on region spacious in the sun,

Cities like chrysolites in the wide blaze

And yellow rivers pacing lion-maned

Led to the Shalwa marches' emerald line,

A happy front to iron vastnesses

And austere peaks and titan solitudes.

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

Once more was near the fair and fated place,

The borders gleaming with the groves' delight

Where first she met the face of Satyavan

And he saw like one waking into a dream

Some timeless beauty and reality,

The moon-gold sweetness of heaven's earth-born child.

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

The past receded and the future neared:

Far now behind lay Madra's spacious halls,

The white carved pillars, the cool dim alcoves,

The tinged mosaic of the crystal floors,

The towered pavilions, the wind-rippled pools

And gardens humming with the murmur of bees,

Forgotten soon or a pale memory

The fountain's plash in the white stone-bound pool,

The thoughtful noontide's brooding solemn trance,

The colonnade's dream grey in the quiet eve,

The slow moonrise gliding in front of Night.

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

Left far behind were now the faces known,

The happy silken babble on laughter's lips

And the close-clinging clasp of intimate hands

And adoration's light in cherished eyes

Offered to the one sovereign of their life.

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

Nature's primaeval loneliness was here:

Here only was the voice of bird and beast,—

The ascetic's exile in the dim-souled huge

Inhuman forest far from cheerful sound

Of man's blithe converse and his crowded days.

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

In a broad eve with one red eye of cloud,

Through a narrow opening, a green flowered cleft,

Out of the stare of sky and soil they came

Into a mighty home of emerald dusk.

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

There onward led by a faint brooding path

Which toiled through the shadow of enormous trunks

And under arches misers of sunshine,

They saw low thatched roofs of a hermitage

Huddled beneath a patch of azure hue

In a sunlit clearing that seemed the outbreak

Of a glad smile in the forest's monstrous heart,

A rude refuge of the thought and will of man

Watched by the crowding giants of the wood.

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

Arrived in that rough-hewn homestead they gave,

Questioning no more the strangeness of her fate,

Their pride and loved one to the great blind king,

A regal pillar of fallen mightiness

And the stately care-worn woman once a queen

Who now hoped nothing for herself from life,

But all things only hoped for her one child,

Calling on that single head from partial Fate

All joy of earth, all heaven's beatitude.

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

Adoring wisdom and beauty like a young god's,

She saw him loved by heaven as by herself,

She rejoiced in his brightness and believed in his fate

And knew not of the evil drawing near.

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

Lingering some days upon the forest verge

Like men who lengthen out departure's pain,

Unwilling to separate sorrowful clinging hands,

Unwilling to see for the last time a face,

Heavy with the sorrow of a coming day

And wondering at the carelessness of Fate

Who breaks with idle hands her supreme works,

They parted from her with pain-fraught burdened hearts

As forced by inescapable fate we part

From one whom we shall never see again;

Driven by the singularity of her fate,

Helpless against the choice of Savitri's heart

They left her to her rapture and her doom

In the tremendous forest's savage charge.

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

All put behind her that was once her life,

All welcomed that henceforth was his and hers,

She abode with Satyavan in the wild woods:

Priceless she deemed her joy so close to death;

Apart with love she lived for love alone.

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

As if self-poised above the march of days,

Her immobile spirit watched the haste of Time,

A statue of passion and invincible force,

An absolutism of sweet imperious will,

A tranquillity and a violence of the gods

Indomitable and immutable.

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

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

At first to her beneath the sapphire heavens

The sylvan solitude was a gorgeous dream,

An altar of the summer's splendour and fire,

A sky-topped flower-hung palace of the gods

And all its scenes a smile on rapture's lips

And all its voices bards of happiness.

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

There was a chanting in the casual wind,

There was a glory in the least sunbeam;

Night was a chrysoprase on velvet cloth,

A nestling darkness or a moonlit deep;

Day was a purple pageant and a hymn,

A wave of the laughter of light from morn to eve.

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

His absence was a dream of memory,

His presence was the empire of a god.

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

A fusing of the joys of earth and heaven,

A tremulous blaze of nuptial rapture passed,

A rushing of two spirits to be one,

A burning of two bodies in one flame.

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

Opened were gates of unforgettable bliss:

Two lives were locked within an earthly heaven

And fate and grief fled from that fiery hour.

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

But soon now failed the summer's ardent breath

And throngs of blue-black clouds crept through the sky

And rain fled sobbing over the dripping leaves

And storm became the forest's titan voice.

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

Then listening to the thunder's fatal crash

And the fugitive pattering footsteps of the showers

And the long unsatisfied panting of the wind

And sorrow muttering in the sound-vexed night,

The grief of all the world came near to her.

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

Night's darkness seemed her future's ominous face.

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

The shadow of her lover's doom arose

And fear laid hands upon her mortal heart.

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

The moments swift and ruthless raced; alarmed

Her thoughts, her mind remembered Narad's date.

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

A trembling moved accountant of her riches,

She reckoned the insufficient days between:

A dire expectancy knocked at her breast;

Dreadful to her were the footsteps of the hours:

Grief came, a passionate stranger to her gate:

Banished when in his arms, out of her sleep

It rose at morn to look into her face.

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

Vainly she fled into abysms of bliss

From her pursuing foresight of the end.

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

The more she plunged into love that anguish grew;

Her deepest grief from sweetest gulfs arose.

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

Remembrance was a poignant pang, she felt

Each day a golden leaf torn cruelly out

From her too slender book of love and joy.

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

Thus swaying in strong gusts of happiness

And swimming in foreboding's sombre waves

And feeding sorrow and terror with her heart,—

For now they sat among her bosom's guests

Or in her inner chamber paced apart,—

Her eyes stared blind into the future's night.

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

Out of her separate self she looked and saw,

Moving amid the unconscious faces loved,

In mind a stranger though in heart so near,

The ignorant smiling world go happily by

Upon its way towards an unknown doom

And wondered at the careless lives of men.

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

As if in different worlds they walked, though close,

They confident of the returning sun,

They wrapped in little hourly hopes and tasks,—

She in her dreadful knowledge was alone.

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

The rich and happy secrecy that once

Enshrined her as if in a silver bower

Apart in a bright nest of thoughts and dreams

Made room for tragic hours of solitude

And lonely grief that none could share or know,

A body seeing the end too soon of joy

And the fragile happiness of its mortal love.

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

Her quiet visage still and sweet and calm,

Her graceful daily acts were now a mask;

In vain she looked upon her depths to find

A ground of stillness and the spirit's peace.

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

Still veiled from her was the silent Being within

Who sees life's drama pass with unmoved eyes,

Supports the sorrow of the mind and heart

And bears in human breasts the world and fate.

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

A glimpse or flashes came, the Presence was hid.

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

Only her violent heart and passionate will

Were pushed in front to meet the immutable doom;

Defenceless, nude, bound to her human lot

They had no means to act, no way to save.

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

These she controlled, nothing was shown outside:

She was still to them the child they knew and loved;

The sorrowing woman they saw not within.

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

No change was in her beautiful motions seen:

A worshipped empress all once vied to serve,

She made herself the diligent serf of all,

Nor spared the labour of broom and jar and well,

Or close gentle tending or to heap the fire

Of altar and kitchen, no slight task allowed

To others that her woman's strength might do.

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

In all her acts a strange divinity shone:

Into a simplest movement she could bring

A oneness with earth's glowing robe of light,

A lifting up of common acts by love.

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

All-love was hers and its one heavenly cord

Bound all to all with her as golden tie.

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

But when her grief to the surface pressed too close,

These things, once gracious adjuncts of her joy,

Seemed meaningless to her, a gleaming shell,

Or were a round mechanical and void,

Her body's actions shared not by her will.

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

Always behind this strange divided life

Her spirit like a sea of living fire

Possessed her lover and to his body clung,

One locked embrace to guard its threatened mate.

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

At night she woke through the slow silent hours

Brooding on the treasure of his bosom and face,

Hung o'er the sleep-bound beauty of his brow

Or laid her burning cheek upon his feet.

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

Waking at morn her lips endlessly clung to his,

Unwilling ever to separate again

Or lose that honeyed drain of lingering joy,

Unwilling to loose his body from her breast,

The warm inadequate signs that love must use.

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

Intolerant of the poverty of Time

Her passion catching at the fugitive hours

Willed the expense of centuries in one day

Of prodigal love and the surf of ecstasy;

Or else she strove even in mortal time

To build a little room for timelessness

By the deep union of two human lives,

Her soul secluded shut into his soul.

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

After all was given she demanded still;

Even by his strong embrace unsatisfied,

She longed to cry,

“O tender Satyavan,

O lover of my soul, give more, give more

Of love while yet thou canst, to her thou lov'st.

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

Imprint thyself for every nerve to keep

That thrills to thee the message of my heart.

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

For soon we part and who shall know how long

Before the great wheel in its monstrous round

Restore us to each other and our love?”

[Savitri B-07 C-01 S-02 F-34]

Too well she loved to speak a fateful word

And lay her burden on his happy head;

She pressed the outsurging grief back into her breast

To dwell within silent, unhelped, alone.

[Savitri B-07 C-01 S-02 F-35]

But Satyavan sometimes half understood,

Or felt at least with the uncertain answer

Of our thought-blinded hearts the unuttered need,

The unplumbed abyss of her deep passionate want.

[Savitri B-07 C-01 S-02 F-36]

All of his speeding days that he could spare

From labour in the forest hewing wood

And hunting food in the wild sylvan glades

And service to his father's sightless life

He gave to her and helped to increase the hours

By the nearness of his presence and his clasp,

And lavish softness of heart-seeking words

And the close beating felt of heart on heart.

[Savitri B-07 C-01 S-02 F-37]

All was too little for her bottomless need.

[Savitri B-07 C-01 S-02 F-38]

If in his presence she forgot awhile,

Grief filled his absence with its aching touch;

She saw the desert of her coming days

Imaged in every solitary hour.

[Savitri B-07 C-01 S-02 F-39]

Although with a vain imaginary bliss

Of fiery union through death's door of escape

She dreamed of her body robed in funeral flame,

She knew she must not clutch that happiness

To die with him and follow, seizing his robe

Across our other countries, travellers glad

Into the sweet or terrible Beyond.

[Savitri B-07 C-01 S-02 F-40]

For those sad parents still would need her here

To help the empty remnant of their day.

[Savitri B-07 C-01 S-02 F-41]

Often it seemed to her the ages' pain

Had pressed their quintessence into her single woe,

Concentrating in her a tortured world.

[Savitri B-07 C-01 S-02 F-42]

Thus in the silent chamber of her soul

Cloistering her love to live with secret grief

She dwelt like a dumb priest with hidden gods

Unappeased by the wordless offering of her days,

Lifting to them her sorrow like frankincense,

Her life the altar, herself the sacrifice.

[Savitri B-07 C-01 S-02 F-43]

Yet ever they grew into each other more

Until it seemed no power could rend apart,

Since even the body's walls could not divide.

[Savitri B-07 C-01 S-02 F-44]

For when he wandered in the forest, oft

Her conscious spirit walked with him and knew

His actions as if in herself he moved;

He, less aware, thrilled with her from afar.

[Savitri B-07 C-01 S-02 F-45]

Always the stature of her passion grew;

Grief, fear became the food of mighty love.

[Savitri B-07 C-01 S-02 F-46]

Increased by its torment it filled the whole world;

It was all her life, became her whole earth and heaven.

[Savitri B-07 C-01 S-02 F-47]

Although life-born, an infant of the hours,

Immortal it walked unslayable as the gods:

Her spirit stretched measureless in strength divine,

An anvil for the blows of Fate and Time:

Or tired of sorrow's passionate luxury,

Grief's self became calm, dull-eyed, resolute,

Awaiting some issue of its fiery struggle,

Some deed in which it might for ever cease,

Victorious over itself and death and tears.

[Savitri B-07 C-01 S-02 F-48]

The year now paused upon the brink of change.

[Savitri B-07 C-01 S-02 F-49]

No more the storms sailed with stupendous wings

And thunder strode in wrath across the world,

But still was heard a muttering in the sky

And rain dripped wearily through the mournful air

And grey slow-drifting clouds shut in the earth.

[Savitri B-07 C-01 S-02 F-50]

So her grief's heavy sky shut in her heart.

[Savitri B-07 C-01 S-02 F-51]

A still self hid behind but gave no light:

No voice came down from the forgotten heights;

Only in the privacy of its brooding pain

Her human heart spoke to the body's fate.

[Savitri B-07 C-01 S-02 F-52]

Book Seven Canto One End

The Joy of Union; the Ordeal of the Foreknowledge of Death and the Heart’s Grief and Pain

[Savitri B-07 C-01 Canto End]

Savitri | a Legend and a Symbol

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