Painfully He Guards The Heavy Trust

Savitri: Book 3 Canto 4 Section 1 His day is a moment in perpetual Time; He is the prey of the minutes and the hours. Assailed on earth and unassured of heaven, Descended here unhappy and sublime, A link between the demigod and the beast, He knows not his own greatness nor his aim; He has forgotten why he has come and whence. His spirit and his members are at war; His heights break off too low to reach the skies, His mass is buried in the animal mire. A strange antinomy is his nature’s rule. A riddle of opposites is made his field: Freedom he asks but needs to live in bonds, He has need of darkness to perceive some light And need of grief to feel a little bliss; He has need of death to find a greater life. All sides he sees and turns to every call; He has no certain light by which to walk; His life is a blind-man’s-buff, a hide-and-seek; He seeks himself and from himself he runs; Meeting himself, he thinks it other than he. Always he builds, but finds no constant ground, Always he journeys, but nowhere arrives; He would guide the world, himself he cannot guide; He would save his soul, his life he cannot save. The light his soul had brought his mind has lost; All he has learned is soon again in doubt; A sun to him seems the shadow of his thoughts, Then all is shadow again and nothing true: Unknowing what he does or whither he tends He fabricates signs of the Real in Ignorance. He has hitched his mortal error to Truth’s star. Wisdom attracts him with her luminous masks, But never has he seen the face behind: A giant Ignorance surrounds his lore. Assigned to meet the cosmic mystery In the dumb figure of a material world, His passport of entry false and his personage, He is compelled to be what he is not; He obeys the Inconscience he had come to rule And sinks in Matter to fulfil his soul. Awakened from her lower driven forms The Earth-Mother gave her forces to his hands And painfully he guards the heavy trust; His mind is a lost torch-bearer on her roads.