Golden Bridge

Savitri: Book 1 Canto 1 Section 1 from 14:19Almost that day the epiphany was disclosedOf which our thoughts and hopes are signal flares;A lonely splendour from the invisible goalAlmost was flung on the opaque Inane.Once more a tread perturbed the vacant Vasts;Infinity’s centre, a Face of rapturous calmParted the eternal lids that open heaven;A Form from far beatitudes seemed to near.Ambassadress twixt eternity and change,The omniscient Goddess leaned across the breadthsThat wrap the fated journeyings of the starsAnd saw the spaces ready for her feet.Once she half looked behind for her veiled sun,Then, thoughtful, went to her immortal work.Earth felt the Imperishable’s passage close:The waking ear of Nature heard her stepsAnd wideness turned to her its limitless eye,And, scattered on sealed depths, her luminous smileKindled to fire the silence of the worlds.All grew a consecration and a rite.Air was a vibrant link between earth and heaven;The wide-winged hymn of a great priestly windArose and failed upon the altar hills;The high boughs prayed in a revealing sky.Here where our half-lit ignorance skirts the gulfsOn the dumb bosom of the ambiguous earth,Here where one knows not even the step in frontAnd Truth has her throne on the shadowy back of doubt,On this anguished and precarious field of toilOutspread beneath some large indifferent gaze,Impartial witness of our joy and bale,Our prostrate soil bore the awakening ray.Here too the vision and prophetic gleamLit into miracles common meaningless shapes;Then the divine afflatus, spent, withdrew,Unwanted, fading from the mortal’s range.A sacred yearning lingered in its trace,The worship of a Presence and a PowerToo perfect to be held by death-bound hearts,The prescience of a marvellous birth to come.

Book 7 Canto 2 Pg 486 Section 3All this the spirit concealed had done in her:A portion of the mighty Mother cameInto her as into its own human part:Amid the cosmic workings of the GodsIt marked her the centre of a wide-drawn scheme,Dreamed in the passion of her far-seeing spiritTo mould humanity into God’s own shapeAnd lead this great blind struggling world to lightOr a new world discover or create.Earth must transform herself and equal HeavenOr Heaven descend into earth’s mortal state.But for such vast spiritual change to be,Out of the mystic cavern in man’s heartThe heavenly Psyche must put off her veilAnd step into common nature’s crowded roomsAnd stand uncovered in that nature’s frontAnd rule its thoughts and fill the body and life.Obedient to a high command she sat:Time, life and death were passing incidentsObstructing with their transient view her sight,Her sight that must break through and liberate the godImprisoned in the visionless mortal man.The inferior nature born into ignoranceStill took too large a place, it veiled her selfAnd must be pushed aside to find her soul.

Savitri: Book 1 Canto 2 Section 2 5:43 to For this she had accepted mortal bredthTo wrestle with the Shadow she had comeAnd must confront the riddle of man’s birthAnd life’s brief struggle in dumb Matter’s night.Whether to bear with Ignorance and deathOr hew the ways of Immortality,To win or lose the godlike game for man,Was her soul’s issue thrown with Destiny’s dice.But not to submit and suffer was she born;To lead, to deliver was her glorious part.Here was no fabric of terrestrial makeFit for a day’s use by busy careless Powers.An image fluttering on the screen of Fate,Half-animated for a passing show,Or a castaway on the ocean of DesireFlung to the eddies in a ruthless sportAnd tossed along the gulfs of Circumstance,A creature born to bend beneath the yoke,A chattel and a plaything of Time’s lords,Or one more pawn who comes destined to be pushedOne slow move forward on a measureless boardIn the chess-play of the earth-soul with Doom,—Such is the human figure drawn by Time.

Savitri: Book 1 Canto 1 Section 2 2:45 to 17:06Apart, living within, all lives she bore;Aloof, she carried in herself the world:Her dread was one with the great cosmic dread,Her strength was founded on the cosmic mights;The universal Mother’s love was hers.Against the evil at life’s afflicted roots,Her own calamity its private sign,Of her pangs she made a mystic poignant sword.A solitary mind, a world-wide heart,To the lone Immortal’s unshared work she rose.At first life grieved not in her burdened breast:On the lap of earth’s original somnolenceInert, released into forgetfulness,Prone it reposed, unconscious on mind’s verge,Obtuse and tranquil like the stone and star.In a deep cleft of silence twixt two realmsShe lay remote from grief, unsawn by care,Nothing recalling of the sorrow here.Then a slow faint remembrance shadowlike moved,And sighing she laid her hand upon her bosomAnd recognised the close and lingering ache,Deep, quiet, old, made natural to its place,But knew not why it was there nor whence it came.The Power that kindles mind was still withdrawn:Heavy, unwilling were life’s servitorsLike workers with no wages of delight;Sullen, the torch of sense refused to burn;The unassisted brain found not its past.Only a vague earth-nature held the frame.But now she stirred, her life shared the cosmic load.At the summons of her body’s voiceless callHer strong far-winging spirit travelled back,Back to the yoke of ignorance and fate,Back to the labour and stress of mortal days,Lighting a pathway through strange symbol dreamsAcross the ebbing of the seas of sleep.

Savitri: Book 1 Canto 1 Section 2 2:45 to 17:06Too unlike the world she came to help and save,Her greatness weighed upon its ignorant breastAnd from its dim chasms welled a dire return,A portion of its sorrow, struggle, fall.To live with grief, to confront death on her road,—The mortal’s lot became the Immortal’s share.Thus trapped in the gin of earthly destinies,Awaiting her ordeal’s hour abode,Outcast from her inborn felicity,Accepting life’s obscure terrestrial robe,Hiding herself even from those she loved,The godhead greater by a human fate.A dark foreknowledge separated herFrom all of whom she was the star and stay;Too great to impart the peril and the pain,In her torn depths she kept the grief to come.As one who watching over men left blindTakes up the load of an unwitting race,Harbouring a foe whom with her heart she must feed,Unknown her act, unknown the doom she faced,Unhelped she must foresee and dread and dare.The long-foreknown and fatal morn was hereBringing a noon that seemed like every noon.For Nature walks upon her mighty wayUnheeding when she breaks a soul, a life;Leaving her slain behind she travels on:Man only marks and God’s all-seeing eyes.Even in this moment of her soul’s despair,In its grim rendezvous with death and fear,No cry broke from her lips, no call for aid;She told the secret of her woe to none:Calm was her face and courage kept her mute.Yet only her outward self suffered and strove;Even her humanity was half divine:Her spirit opened to the Spirit in all,Her nature felt all Nature as its own.

Savitri: Book 1 Canto 1 Section 2 2:45 to 17:06Too unlike the world she came to help and save,Her greatness weighed upon its ignorant breastAnd from its dim chasms welled a dire return,A portion of its sorrow, struggle, fall.To live with grief, to confront death on her road,—The mortal’s lot became the Immortal’s share.Thus trapped in the gin of earthly destinies,Awaiting her ordeal’s hour abode,Outcast from her inborn felicity,Accepting life’s obscure terrestrial robe,Hiding herself even from those she loved,The godhead greater by a human fate.A dark foreknowledge separated herFrom all of whom she was the star and stay;Too great to impart the peril and the pain,In her torn depths she kept the grief to come.As one who watching over men left blindTakes up the load of an unwitting race,Harbouring a foe whom with her heart she must feed,Unknown her act, unknown the doom she faced,Unhelped she must foresee and dread and dare.The long-foreknown and fatal morn was hereBringing a noon that seemed like every noon.For Nature walks upon her mighty wayUnheeding when she breaks a soul, a life;Leaving her slain behind she travels on:Man only marks and God’s all-seeing eyes.Even in this moment of her soul’s despair,In its grim rendezvous with death and fear,No cry broke from her lips, no call for aid;She told the secret of her woe to none:Calm was her face and courage kept her mute.Yet only her outward self suffered and strove;Even her humanity was half divine:Her spirit opened to the Spirit in all,Her nature felt all Nature as its own.

Book 1 Canto 1 Section 2 2:45 to 17:06She had brought with her into the human form,The calm delight that weds one soul to all,The key to the flaming doors of ecstasy.Earth’s grain that needs the sap of pleasure and tearsRejected the undying rapture’s boon:Offered to the daughter of infinityHer passion-flower of love and doom she gave.In vain now seemed the splendid sacrifice.A prodigal of her rich divinity,Her self and all she was she had lent to men,Hoping her greater being to implantAnd in their body’s lives acclimatiseThat heaven might native grow on mortal soil.Hard is it to persuade earth-nature’s change;Mortality bears ill the eternal’s touch:It fears the pure divine intoleranceOf that assault of ether and of fire;It murmurs at its sorrowless happiness,Almost with hate repels the light it brings;It trembles at its naked power of TruthAnd the might and sweetness of its absolute Voice.Inflicting on the heights the abysm’s law,It sullies with its mire heaven’s messengers:Its thorns of fallen nature are the defenceIt turns against the saviour hands of Grace;It meets the sons of God with death and pain.A glory of lightnings traversing the earth-scene,Their sun-thoughts fading, darkened by ignorant minds,Their work betrayed, their good to evil turned,The cross their payment for the crown they gave,Only they leave behind a splendid Name.A fire has come and touched men’s hearts and gone;A few have caught flame and risen to greater life.

Savitri BOOK VI: The Book of Fate 443-44-45CANTO II: The Way of Fate and the Problem of PainSection 2Where Ignorance is, there suffering too must come;Thy grief is a cry of darkness to the Light;Pain was the first-born of the InconscienceWhich 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.In one caul with joy came forth the dreadful Power.In life’s breast it was born hiding its twin;But pain came first, then only joy could be.Pain ploughed the first hard ground of the world-drowse. By pain a spirit started from the clod,By pain Life stirred in the subliminal deep.Interned, submerged, hidden in Matter’s tranceAwoke 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.By pain and joy, the bright and tenebrous twins,The inanimate world perceived its sentient soul,Else had the Inconscient never suffered change.Pain is the hammer of the Gods to breakA dead resistance in the mortal’s heart,His slow inertia as of living stone.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 startAnd never learned to climb towards the Sun.This earth is full of labour, packed with pain;Throes of an endless birth coerce her still; The centuries end, the ages vainly passAnd yet the Godhead in her is not born.The ancient Mother faces all with joy,Calls for the ardent pang, the grandiose thrill; For with pain and labour all creation comes.

Savitri BOOK VI: The Book of Fate 443-44-45CANTO II: The Way of Fate and the Problem of PainSection 2Then 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.His forehead shone with vision solemnised, Turned to a tablet of supernal thoughtsAs if characters of an unwritten tongueHad left in its breadth the inscriptions of the gods. Bare in that light Time toiled, his unseen works Detected; the broad-flung far-seeing schemes Unfinished which his aeoned flight unrollsWere mapped already in that world-wide look. “Was then the sun a dream because there is night? 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. A darkness stands between thyself and him,Thou canst not hear or feel the marvellous Guest, Thou canst not see the beatific sun.O queen, thy thought is a light of the Ignorance, Its brilliant curtain hides from thee God’s face.It illumes a world born from the InconscienceBut hides the Immortal’s meaning in the world.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.Thence rose the need of a dark intruding god,The world’s dread teacher, the creator, pain.

Savitri - CANTO III: The Yoga of the Soul’s Release 25-26-27A Seer was born, a shining Guest of Time.For him mind’s limiting firmament ceased above. In the griffin forefront of the Night and DayA gap was rent in the all-concealing vault;The conscious ends of being went rolling back: The landmarks of the little person fell,The island ego joined its continent.Overpassed was this world of rigid limiting forms: Life’s barriers opened into the Unknown. Abolished were conception’s covenantsAnd, striking off subjection’s rigorous clause, Annulled the soul’s treaty with Nature’s nescience. All the grey inhibitions were torn offAnd broken the intellect’s hard and lustrous lid; Truth unpartitioned found immense sky-room; An empyrean vision saw and knew;The bounded mind became a boundless light,The finite self mated with infinity.His march now soared into an eagle’s flight.Out of apprenticeship to IgnoranceWisdom upraised him to her master craftAnd made him an archmason of the soul,A builder of the Immortal’s secret house,An aspirant to supernal Timelessness:Freedom and empire called to him from on high; Above mind’s twilight and life’s star-led night There gleamed the dawn of a spiritual day.

Savitri - Book 1, CANTO III: (Section 1 later)At last the traveller in the paths of TimeArrives on the frontiers of eternity.In the transient symbol of humanity draped,He feels his substance of undying selfAnd loses his kinship to mortality.A beam of the Eternal smites his heart,His thought stretches into infinitude;All in him turns to spirit vastnesses.His soul breaks out to join the Oversoul, His life is oceaned by that superlife.He has drunk from the breasts of the Mother of the worlds; A topless Supernature fills his frame:She adopts his spirit’s everlasting groundAs the security of her changing worldAnd shapes the figure of her unborn mights.Immortally she conceives herself in him,In the creature the unveiled Creatrix works:Her face is seen through his face, her eyes through his eyes; Her being is his through a vast identity.Then is revealed in man the overt Divine.A static Oneness and dynamic Power Descend in him, the integral Godhead’s seals; His soul and body take that splendid stamp. A long dim preparation is man’s life,A circle of toil and hope and war and peaceTracked out by Life on Matter’s obscure ground.In his climb to a peak no feet have ever trod,He seeks through a penumbra shot with flameA veiled reality half-known, ever missed,A search for something or someone never found,Cult of an ideal never made real here,An endless spiral of ascent and fallUntil at last is reached the giant pointThrough which his Glory shines for whom we were made And we break into the infinity of God.Across our nature’s border line we escapeInto Supernature’s arc of living light.

Savitri - Book 1, CANTO III: Section 1 earlyHis days were a long growth to the Supreme.A skyward being nourishing its rootsOn sustenance from occult spiritual fountsClimbed through white rays to meet an unseen Sun.His soul lived as eternity’s delegate,His mind was like a fire assailing heaven,His will a hunter in the trails of light.An ocean impulse lifted every breath;Each action left the footprints of a god,Each moment was a beat of puissant wings.The little plot of our mortalityTouched by this tenant from the heights becameA playground of the living Infinite.This bodily appearance is not all;The form deceives, the person is a mask;Hid deep in man celestial powers can dwell.His fragile ship conveys through the sea of years An incognito of the Imperishable.A spirit that is a flame of God abides,A fiery portion of the Wonderful,Artist of his own beauty and delight,Immortal in our mortal poverty.This sculptor of the forms of the Infinite,This screened unrecognised Inhabitant,Initiate of his own veiled mysteries,Hides in a small dumb seed his cosmic thought.In the mute strength of the occult IdeaDetermining predestined shape and act,Passenger from life to life, from scale to scale, Changing his imaged self from form to form,He regards the icon growing by his gazeAnd in the worm foresees the coming god.

Savitri: Book 2 Canto 14 Section 1The silent Soul of all the world was there:A Being lived, a Presence and a Power,A single Person who was himself and allAnd cherished Nature’s sweet and dangerous throbsTransfigured into beats divine and pure.One who could love without return for love,Meeting and turning to the best the worst,It healed the bitter cruelties of earth,Transforming all experience to delight;Intervening in the sorrowful paths of birthIt rocked the cradle of the cosmic ChildAnd stilled all weeping with its hand of joy;It led things evil towards their secret good,It turned racked falsehood into happy truth;Its power was to reveal divinity.Infinite, coeval with the mind of God,It bore within itself a seed, a flame,A seed from which the Eternal is new-born,A flame that cancels death in mortal things.All grew to all kindred and self and near;The intimacy of God was everywhere,No veil was felt, no brute barrier inert,Distance could not divide, Time could not change.A fire of passion burned in spirit-depths,A constant touch of sweetness linked all hearts,The throb of one adoration’s single blissIn a rapt ether of undying love.An inner happiness abode in all,A sense of universal harmonies,A measureless secure eternityOf truth and beauty and good and joy made one.Here was the welling core of finite life;A formless spirit became the soul of form.

Savitri: Book 3 Canto 4 Section 1O Son of Strength who climbst creation’s peaks,No soul is thy companion in the light;Alone thou standest at the eternal doors.What thou hast won is thine, but ask no more.O Spirit aspiring in an ignorant frame,O Voice arisen from the Inconscient’s world,How shalt thou speak for men whose hearts are dumb,Make purblind earth the soul’s seer-vision’s homeOr lighten the burden of the senseless globe?I am the Mystery beyond reach of mind,I am the goal of the travail of the suns;My fire and sweetness are the cause of life.But too immense my danger and my joy.Awake not the immeasurable descent,Speak not my secret name to hostile Time;Man is too weak to bear the Infinite’s weight.Truth born too soon might break the imperfect earth.Leave the all-seeing Power to hew its way:In thy single vast achievement reign apartHelping the world with thy great lonely days.I ask thee not to merge thy heart of flameIn the Immobile’s wide uncaring bliss,Turned from the fruitless motion of the years,Deserting the fierce labour of the worlds,Aloof from beings, lost in the Alone.How shall thy mighty spirit brook reposeWhile Death is still unconquered on the earthAnd Time a field of suffering and pain?Thy soul was born to share the laden Force;Obey thy nature and fulfil thy fate:Accept the difficulty and godlike toil,For the slow-paced omniscient purpose live.

Savitri: Book 3 Canto 4 Section 3 (very beginning)“O strong forerunner, I have heard thy cry.One shall descend and break the iron Law,Change Nature’s doom by the lone spirit’s power.A limitless Mind that can contain the world,A sweet and violent heart of ardent calmsMoved by the passions of the gods shall come.All mights and greatnesses shall join in her;Beauty shall walk celestial on the earth,Delight shall sleep in the cloud-net of her hair,And in her body as on his homing treeImmortal Love shall beat his glorious wings.A music of griefless things shall weave her charm;The harps of the Perfect shall attune her voice,The streams of Heaven shall murmur in her laugh,Her lips shall be the honeycombs of God,Her limbs his golden jars of ecstasy,Her breasts the rapture-flowers of Paradise.She shall bear Wisdom in her voiceless bosom,Strength shall be with her like a conqueror’s swordAnd from her eyes the Eternal’s bliss shall gaze.A seed shall be sown in Death’s tremendous hour,A branch of heaven transplant to human soil;Nature shall overleap her mortal step;Fate shall be changed by an unchanging will.”

Savitri: Book 4 Canto 3 Section 1“O Force-compelled, Fate-driven earth-born race,O petty adventurers in an infinite worldAnd prisoners of a dwarf humanity,How long will you tread the circling tracks of mindAround 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.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 willsCan fit his acts to a transcendent scheme.He who now stares at the world with ignorant eyesHardly from the Inconscient’s night aroused,That look at images and not at Truth,Can fill those orbs with an immortal’s sight.Yet shall the godhead grow within your hearts,You shall awake into the spirit’s airAnd feel the breaking walls of mortal mindAnd hear the message which left life’s heart dumbAnd look through Nature with sun-gazing lidsAnd blow your conch-shells at the Eternal’s gate.Authors of earth’s high change, to you it is givenTo cross the dangerous spaces of the soulAnd touch the mighty Mother stark awakeAnd meet the Omnipotent in this house of fleshAnd make of life the million-bodied One.The earth you tread is a border screened from heavenThe life you lead conceals the light you are.

Book 1, Canto II, p. 14-15-16All in her pointed to a nobler kind.Near to earth’s wideness, intimate with heaven, Exalted and swift her young large-visioned spirit Voyaging through worlds of splendour and of calm Overflew the ways of Thought to unborn things. Ardent was her self-poised unstumbling will;Her mind, a sea of white sincerity,Passionate in flow, had not one turbid wave.As in a mystic and dynamic danceA priestess of immaculate ecstasiesInspired and ruled from Truth’s revealing vaultMoves in some prophet cavern of the gods,A heart of silence in the hands of joyInhabited with rich creative beatsA body like a parable of dawnThat seemed a niche for veiled divinityOr golden temple-door to things beyond.Immortal rhythms swayed in her time-born steps;Her look, her smile awoke celestial senseEven in earth-stuff, and their intense delightPoured a supernal beauty on men’s lives.A wide self-giving was her native act;A magnanimity as of sea or skyEnveloped with its greatness all that cameAnd gave a sense as of a greatened world:Her kindly care was a sweet temperate sun,Her high passion a blue heaven’s equipoise.As might a soul fly like a hunted bird,Escaping with tired wings from a world of storms, And a quiet reach like a remembered breast,In a haven of safety and splendid soft reposeOne could drink life back in streams of honey-fire, Recover the lost habit of happiness,Feel her bright nature’s glorious ambience,And preen joy in her warmth and colour’s rule.A deep of compassion, a hushed sanctuary,Her inward help unbarred a gate in heaven;Love in her was wider than the universe,The whole world could take refuge in her single heart. The great unsatisfied godhead here could dwell: Vacant of the dwarf self’s imprisoned air,Her mood could harbour his sublimer breathSpiritual that can make all things divine. For even her gulfs were secrecies of light. At once she was the stillness and the word, A continent of self-diffusing peace,An ocean of untrembling virgin fire;The strength, the silence of the gods were hers. In her he found a vastness like his own,His high warm subtle ether he refoundAnd moved in her as in his natural home.In her he met his own eternity.

Savitri: Book 1, Canto 2 Section 1 An absolute supernatural darkness falls On man sometimes when he draws near to God: An hour arrives when fail all Nature’s means; Forced out from the protecting Ignorance And flung back on his naked primal need, He at length must cast from him his surface soul And be the ungarbed entity within: That hour had fallen now on Savitri. A point she had reached where life must be in vain Or, in her unborn element awake, Her will must cancel her body’s destiny. For only the unborn spirit’s timeless power Can lift the yoke imposed by birth in Time. Only the Self that builds this figure of self Can rase the fixed interminable line That joins these changing names, these numberless lives, These new oblivious personalities And keeps still lurking in our conscious acts The trail of old forgotten thoughts and deeds, Disown the legacy of our buried selves, The burdensome heirship to our vanished forms Accepted blindly by the body and soul. An episode in an unremembered tale, Its beginning lost, its motive and plot concealed, A once living story has prepared and made Our present fate, child of past energies. The fixity of the cosmic sequences Fastened with hidden inevitable links She must disrupt, dislodge by her soul’s force Her past, a block on the Immortal’s road, Make a rased ground and shape anew her fate.

Savitri: Book VII, Canto II The parable of the search for the Soul (p.475-76-77) The Voice replied: “Is this enough, O spirit? And what shall thy soul say when it wakes and knows The work was left undone for which it came? 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? 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? 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? 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?” Then Savitri’s heart fell mute, it spoke no word. 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: “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.” 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. Open God’s door, enter into his trance. 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. 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. 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.” Then Savitri by her doomed husband sat, Still rigid in her golden motionless pose, A statue of the fire of the inner sun. 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. 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: Book VII, Canto II The parable of the search for the Soul (p.474-75) 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. Around her body’s stillness all grew still: Her heart listened to its slow measured beats, Her mind renouncing thought heard and was mute: “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? Arise, O soul, and vanquish Time and Death.” But Savitri’s heart replied in the dim night: “My strength is taken from me and given to Death. 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? Is there a God whom any cry can move? He sits in peace and leaves the mortal’s strength Impotent against his calm omnipotent Law And Inconscience and the almighty hands of Death. 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? Why should I strive with earth’s unyielding laws Or stave off death’s inevitable hour? 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. 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: Book 6 Canto 2 Section 6 Fate is Truth working out in Ignorance. O King, thy fate is a transaction done At every hour between Nature and thy soul With God for its foreseeing arbiter. Fate is a balance drawn in Destiny’s book. Man can accept his fate, he can refuse. 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. 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. Its splendid failures sum to victory. 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. 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. 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. Adventurer through blind unforeseeing Time, A forced advance through a long line of lives, It pushes its spearhead through the centuries. 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. Then late the joy ineffable is felt, Then he remembers his forgotten self; He has refound the skies from which he fell. 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: Book 5 Canto 3 Section 1 31:03 to 36:32 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. 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. I groped for the Mystery with the lantern, Thought. 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. I could not live the truth it spoke and thought. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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: Book 4 Canto 2 Section 1 Part 1 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. 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. Her divine parts the soul’s allegiance called: It saw, it felt, it knew the deity. 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. 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. 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. 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: Book 4, Canto 2, Section 1, Part 1 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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: Book 2 Canto 14 Section 3 Part 2 His spirit was made a vessel of her force; Mute in the fathomless passion of his will He outstretched to her his folded hands of prayer. Then in a sovereign answer to his heart A gesture came as of worlds thrown away, And from her raiment’s lustrous mystery raised One arm half-parted the eternal veil. A light appeared still and imperishable. Attracted to the large and luminous depths Of the ravishing enigma of her eyes, He saw the mystic outline of a face. Overwhelmed by her implacable light and bliss, An atom of her illimitable self Mastered by the honey and lightning of her power, Tossed towards the shores of her ocean-ecstasy, Drunk with a deep golden spiritual wine, He cast from the rent stillness of his soul A cry of adoration and desire And the surrender of his boundless mind And the self-giving of his silent heart. He fell down at her feet unconscious, prone.

Savitri: Book 6 Canto 2 Section 2 part 2 The spirit is doomed to pain till man is free. 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. Men die that man may live and God be born. An awful Silence watches tragic Time. Pain is the hand of Nature sculpturing men To greatness: an inspired labour chisels With heavenly cruelty an unwilling mould. 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. 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. He who would save himself lives bare and calm; CANTO II: The Way of Fate and the Problem of Pain 445 He who would save the race must share its pain: This he shall know who obeys that grandiose urge. 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. Heaven’s riches they bring, their sufferings count the price Or they pay the gift of knowledge with their lives. 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: Book 2 Canto 14 Section 3 Part 1 In a slumber of the voices of the world He of the eternal moment grew aware; His knowledge stripped bare of the garbs of sense Knew by identity without thought or word; His being saw itself without its veils, Life’s line fell from the spirit’s infinity. Along a road of pure interior light, Alone between tremendous Presences, Under the watching eyes of nameless Gods, His soul passed on, a single conscious power, Towards the end which ever begins again, Approaching through a stillness dumb and calm To the source of all things human and divine. There he beheld in their mighty union’s poise The figure of the deathless Two-in-One, A single being in two bodies clasped, A diarchy of two united souls, Seated absorbed in deep creative joy; Their trance of bliss sustained the mobile world. Behind them in a morning dusk One stood Who brought them forth from the Unknowable. Ever disguised she awaits the seeking spirit; Watcher on the supreme unreachable peaks, Guide of the traveller of the unseen paths, She guards the austere approach to the Alone. At the beginning of each far-spread plane Pervading with her power the cosmic suns She reigns, inspirer of its multiple works And thinker of the symbol of its scene. Above them all she stands supporting all, The sole omnipotent Goddess ever-veiled Of whom the world is the inscrutable mask; The ages are the footfalls of her tread, Their happenings the figure of her thoughts, And all creation is her endless act.

Savitri: Book 6 Canto 2 Section 2 part 1 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. In one caul with joy came forth the dreadful Power. In life’s breast it was born hiding its twin; But pain came first, then only joy could be. Pain ploughed the first hard ground of the world-drowse. By pain a spirit started from the clod, By pain Life stirred in the subliminal deep. 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. By pain and joy, the bright and tenebrous twins, The inanimate world perceived its sentient soul, Else had the Inconscient never suffered change. Pain is the hammer of the Gods to break A dead resistance in the mortal’s heart, His slow inertia as of living stone. 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. 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. The ancient Mother faces all with joy, Calls for the ardent pang, the grandiose thrill; For with pain and labour all creation comes. 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. 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: Book 3 Canto 2 Section 3 This was a seed cast into endless Time. A Word is spoken or a Light is shown, A moment sees, the ages toil to express. So flashing out of the Timeless leaped the worlds; An eternal instant is the cause of the years. All he had done was to prepare a field; His small beginnings asked for a mighty end: For all that he had been must now new-shape In him her joy to embody, to enshrine Her beauty and greatness in his house of life. But now his being was too wide for self; His heart’s demand had grown immeasurable: His single freedom could not satisfy, Her light, her bliss he asked for earth and men. But vain are human power and human love To break earth’s seal of ignorance and death; His nature’s might seemed now an infant’s grasp; Heaven is too high for outstretched hands to seize. This Light comes not by struggle or by thought; In the mind’s silence the Transcendent acts And the hushed heart hears the unuttered Word. A vast surrender was his only strength. A Power that lives upon the heights must act, Bring into life’s closed room the Immortal’s air And fill the finite with the Infinite. All that denies must be torn out and slain And crushed the many longings for whose sake We lose the One for whom our lives were made. Now other claims had hushed in him their cry: Only he longed to draw her presence and power Into his heart and mind and breathing frame; Only he yearned to call for ever down Her healing touch of love and truth and joy Into the darkness of the suffering world. His soul was freed and given to her alone.

Savitri: Book 3 Canto 2 Section 2 At the head she stands of birth and toil and fate, In their slow round the cycles turn to her call; Alone her hands can change Time’s dragon base. Hers is the mystery the Night conceals; The spirit’s alchemist energy is hers; She is the golden bridge, the wonderful fire. The luminous heart of the Unknown is she, A power of silence in the depths of God; She is the Force, the inevitable Word, The magnet of our difficult ascent, The Sun from which we kindle all our suns, The Light that leans from the unrealised Vasts, The joy that beckons from the impossible, The Might of all that never yet came down. All Nature dumbly calls to her alone To heal with her feet the aching throb of life And break the seals on the dim soul of man And kindle her fire in the closed heart of things. All here shall be one day her sweetness’ home, All contraries prepare her harmony; Towards her our knowledge climbs, our passion gropes; In her miraculous rapture we shall dwell, Her clasp shall turn to ecstasy our pain. Our self shall be one self with all through her. In her confirmed because transformed in her, Our life shall find in its fulfilled response Above, the boundless hushed beatitudes, Below, the wonder of the embrace divine. This known as in a thunder-flash of God, The rapture of things eternal filled his limbs; Amazement fell upon his ravished sense; His spirit was caught in her intolerant flame. Once seen, his heart acknowledged only her. Only a hunger of infinite bliss was left. All aims in her were lost, then found in her; His base was gathered to one pointing spire.

Savitri: Book 10 Canto 4 Section 2 end Already the torch becomes the undying ray, Already the life is the Immortal’s force, The house grows of the householder part and one. How sayst thou Truth can never light the human mind And Bliss can never invade the mortal’s heart Or God descend into the world he made? If in the meaningless Void creation rose, If from a bodiless Force Matter was born, If Life could climb in the unconscious tree, Its green delight break into emerald leaves And its laughter of beauty blossom in the flower, If sense could wake in tissue, nerve and cell And Thought seize the grey matter of the brain, And soul peep from its secrecy through the flesh, How shall the nameless Light not leap on men, And unknown powers emerge from Nature’s sleep? Even now hints of a luminous Truth like stars Arise in the mind-mooned splendour of Ignorance; Even now the deathless Lover’s touch we feel: If the chamber’s door is even a little ajar, What then can hinder God from stealing in Or who forbid his kiss on the sleeping soul? Already God is near, the Truth is close: Because the dark atheist body knows him not, Must the sage deny the Light, the seer his soul? I am not bound by thought or sense or shape; I live in the glory of the Infinite, I am near to the Nameless and Unknowable, The Ineffable is now my household mate. But standing on Eternity’s luminous brink I have discovered that the world was He; I have met Spirit with spirit, Self with self, But I have loved too the body of my God. I have pursued him in his earthly form. A lonely freedom cannot satisfy A heart that has grown one with every heart: I am a deputy of the aspiring world, My spirit’s liberty I ask for all.”

Savitri: BOOK 11 Canto 1 Section 8 The Book of Everlasting Day The Spirit shall be the master of his world Lurking no more in form’s obscurity And Nature shall reverse her action’s rule, The outward world disclose the Truth it veils; All things shall manifest the covert God, All shall reveal the Spirit’s light and might And move to its destiny of felicity. Even should a hostile force cling to its reign And claim its right’s perpetual sovereignty And man refuse his high spiritual fate, Yet shall the secret Truth in things prevail. For in the march of all-fulfilling Time The hour must come of the Transcendent’s will: All turns and winds towards his predestined ends In Nature’s fixed inevitable course Decreed since the beginning of the worlds In the deep essence of created things: Even there shall come as a high crown of all The end of Death, the death of Ignorance. But first high Truth must set her feet on earth And man aspire to the Eternal’s light And all his members feel the Spirit’s touch And all his life obey an inner Force. This too shall be; for a new life shall come, A body of the Superconscient’s truth, A native field of Supernature’s mights: It shall make earth’s nescient ground Truth’s colony, Make even the Ignorance a transparent robe Through which shall shine the brilliant limbs of Truth And Truth shall be a sun on Nature’s head And Truth shall be the guide of Nature’s steps And Truth shall gaze out of her nether deeps. When superman is born as Nature’s king His presence shall transfigure Matter’s world: The Soul’s Choice and the Supreme Consummation 709 He shall light up Truth’s fire in Nature’s night, He shall lay upon the earth Truth’s greater law; Man too shall turn towards the Spirit’s call. Awake to his hidden possibility, Awake to all that slept within his heart And all that Nature meant when earth was formed And the Spirit made this ignorant world his home, He shall aspire to Truth and God and Bliss.

Mahalakshmi Book -3, Canto- 2, The book of the Divine Mother, Pg-314 A burning Love from white spiritual founts Annulled the sorrow of the ignorant depths; Suffering was lost in her immortal smile. A Life from beyond grew conqueror here of death; To err no more was natural to mind; Wrong could not come where all was light and love. The Formless and the Formed were joined in her: Immensity was exceeded by a look, A Face revealed the crowded Infinite. Incarnating inexpressibly in her limbs The boundless joy the blind world-forces seek, Her body of beauty mooned the seas of bliss.

Savitri: BOOK 3 Canto 4 Section 1 The Book of the Divine Mother 340 The high gods look on man and watch and choose Today’s impossibles for the future’s base. His transience trembles with the Eternal’s touch, His barriers cede beneath the Infinite’s tread; The Immortals have their entries in his life: The Ambassadors of the Unseen draw near. A splendour sullied by the mortal air, Love passes through his heart, a wandering guest. Beauty surrounds him for a magic hour, He has visits of a large revealing joy, Brief widenesses release him from himself, Enticing towards a glory ever in front Hopes of a deathless sweetness lure and leave. His mind is crossed by strange discovering fires, Rare intimations lift his stumbling speech To a moment’s kinship with the eternal Word; A masque of Wisdom circles through his brain Perturbing him with glimpses half divine. He lays his hands sometimes on the Unknown; He communes sometimes with Eternity. A strange and grandiose symbol was his birth And immortality and spirit-room And pure perfection and a shadowless bliss Are this afflicted creature’s mighty fate. In him the Earth-Mother sees draw near the change Foreshadowed in her dumb and fiery depths, A godhead drawn from her transmuted limbs, An alchemy of Heaven on Nature’s base. Adept of the self-born unfailing line, Leave not the light to die the ages bore, Help still humanity’s blind and suffering life: Obey thy spirit’s wide omnipotent urge. A witness to God’s parley with the Night, It leaned compassionate from immortal calm And housed desire, the troubled seed of things. Assent to thy high self, create, endure. Cease not from knowledge, let thy toil be vast. No more can earthly limits pen thy force; Equal thy work with long unending Time’s. Traveller upon the bare eternal heights, Tread still the difficult and dateless path Joining the cycles with its austere curve Measured for man by the initiate Gods. My light shall be in thee, my strength thy force. Let not the impatient Titan drive thy heart, Ask not the imperfect fruit, the partial prize. Only one boon, to greaten thy spirit, demand; Only one joy, to raise thy kind, desire. Above blind fate and the antagonist powers Moveless there stands a high unchanging Will; To its omnipotence leave thy work’s result. All things shall change in God’s transfiguring hour.”

Savitri - Book 10 Canto 4 Section 2 The world is a spiritual paradox Invented by a need in the Unseen, A poor translation to the creature’s sense Of That which for ever exceeds idea and speech, A symbol of what can never be symbolised, A language mispronounced, misspelt, yet true. Its powers have come from the eternal heights And plunged into the inconscient dim Abyss And risen from it to do their marvellous work. The soul is a figure of the Unmanifest, The mind labours to think the Unthinkable, The life to call the Immortal into birth, The body to enshrine the Illimitable. The world is not cut off from Truth and God. In vain thou hast dug the dark unbridgeable gulf, In vain thou hast built the blind and doorless wall: Man’s soul crosses through thee to Paradise, Heaven’s sun forces its way through death and night; Its light is seen upon our being’s verge. My mind is a torch lit from the eternal sun, My life a breath drawn by the immortal Guest, My mortal body is the Eternal’s house.

Savitri: Book 3 Canto 4 Section 1 Illumining breath to think and plasm to feel, He labours with his slow and sceptic brain Helped by the reason’s vacillating fires, To make his thought and will a magic door For knowledge to enter the darkness of the world And love to rule a realm of strife and hate. A mind impotent to reconcile heaven and earth And tied to Matter with a thousand bonds, He lifts himself to be a conscious god. Even when a glory of wisdom crowns his brow, When mind and spirit shed a grandiose ray To exalt this product of the sperm and gene, This alchemist’s miracle from plasm and gas, And he who shared the animal’s run and crawl Lifts his thought-stature to the Immortal’s heights, His life still keeps the human middle way; His body he resigns to death and pain, Abandoning Matter, his too heavy charge. A thaumaturge sceptic of miracles, A spirit left sterile of its occult power By an unbelieving brain and credulous heart, He leaves the world to end where it began: His work unfinished he claims a heavenly prize. Thus has he missed creation’s absolute. Half-way he stops his star of destiny: A vast and vain long-tried experiment, An ill-served high conception doubtfully done, The world’s life falters on not seeing its goal,— A zigzag towards unknown dangerous ground Ever repeating its habitual walk, Ever retreating after marches long And hardiest victories without sure result, Drawn endlessly an inconclusive game.

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.

Savitri: Book 3 Canto 4 Section 1 THEN suddenly there rose a sacred stir. Amid the lifeless silence of the Void In a solitude and an immensity A sound came quivering like a loved footfall Heard in the listening spaces of the soul; A touch perturbed his fibres with delight. An Influence had approached the mortal range, A boundless Heart was near his longing heart, A mystic Form enveloped his earthly shape. All at her contact broke from silence’ seal; Spirit and body thrilled identified, Linked in the grasp of an unspoken joy; Mind, members, life were merged in ecstasy. Intoxicated as with nectarous rain His nature’s passioning stretches flowed to her, Flashing with lightnings, mad with luminous wine. All was a limitless sea that heaved to the moon. A divinising stream possessed his veins, His body’s cells awoke to spirit sense, Each nerve became a burning thread of joy: Tissue and flesh partook beatitude. Alight, the dun unplumbed subconscient caves Thrilled with the prescience of her longed-for tread And filled with flickering crests and praying tongues. Even lost in slumber, mute, inanimate His very body answered to her power. The One he worshipped was within him now: Flame-pure, ethereal-tressed, a mighty Face Appeared and lips moved by immortal words; Lids, Wisdom’s leaves, drooped over rapture’s orbs. A marble monument of ponderings, shone A forehead, sight’s crypt, and large like ocean’s gaze Towards Heaven, two tranquil eyes of boundless thought Looked into man’s and saw the god to come.

Savitri : Book 3 Canto 2 A Heart was felt in the spaces wide and bare, A burning Love from white spiritual founts Annulled the sorrow of the ignorant depths; Suffering was lost in her immortal smile. A Life from beyond grew conqueror here of death; To err no more was natural to mind; Wrong could not come where all was light and love. The Formless and the Formed were joined in her: Immensity was exceeded by a look, A Face revealed the crowded Infinite. Incarnating inexpressibly in her limbs The boundless joy the blind world-forces seek, Her body of beauty mooned the seas of bliss. At the head she stands of birth and toil and fate, In their slow round the cycles turn to her call; Alone her hands can change Time’s dragon base. Hers is the mystery the Night conceals; The spirit’s alchemist energy is hers; She is the golden bridge, the wonderful fire. The luminous heart of the Unknown is she, A power of silence in the depths of God; She is the Force, the inevitable Word, The magnet of our difficult ascent, The Sun from which we kindle all our suns, The Light that leans from the unrealised Vasts, The joy that beckons from the impossible, The Might of all that never yet came down. All Nature dumbly calls to her alone To heal with her feet the aching throb of life And break the seals on the dim soul of man And kindle her fire in the closed heart of things. All here shall be one day her sweetness’ home, All contraries prepare her harmony; Towards her our knowledge climbs, our passion gropes; In her miraculous rapture we shall dwell, Her clasp shall turn to ecstasy our pain. Our self shall be one self with all through her. In her confirmed because transformed in her, Our life shall find in its fulfilled response Above, the boundless hushed beatitudes, Below, the wonder of the embrace divine.

Savitri: Book 3 Canto 1 Section 1 ALL IS too little that the world can give: Its power and knowledge are the gifts of Time And cannot fill the spirit’s sacred thirst. Although of One these forms of greatness are And by its breath of grace our lives abide, Although more near to us than nearness’ self, It is some utter truth of what we are; Hidden by its own works, it seemed far-off, Impenetrable, occult, voiceless, obscure. The Presence was lost by which all things have charm, The Glory lacked of which they are dim signs. The world lived on made empty of its Cause, Like love when the beloved’s face is gone. The labour to know seemed a vain strife of Mind; All knowledge ended in the Unknowable: The effort to rule seemed a vain pride of Will; A trivial achievement scorned by Time, All power retired into the Omnipotent. A cave of darkness guards the eternal Light. A silence settled on his striving heart; Absolved from the voices of the world’s desire, He turned to the Ineffable’s timeless call. A Being intimate and unnameable, A wide compelling ecstasy and peace Felt in himself and all and yet ungrasped, Approached and faded from his soul’s pursuit As if for ever luring him beyond. Near, it retreated; far, it called him still. Nothing could satisfy but its delight: Its absence left the greatest actions dull, Its presence made the smallest seem divine.

Savitri: Book 2 Canto 10 Section 1 This was the first means of our slow ascent From the half-conscience of the animal soul Living in a crowded press of shape-events In a realm it cannot understand nor change; Only it sees and acts in a given scene And feels and joys and sorrows for a while. The ideas that drive the obscure embodied spirit Along the roads of suffering and desire In a world that struggles to discover Truth, Found here their power to be and Nature-force. Here are devised the forms of an ignorant life That sees the empiric fact as settled law, Labours for the hour and not for eternity And trades its gains to meet the moment’s call: The slow process of a material mind Which serves the body it should rule and use And needs to lean upon an erring sense, Was born in that luminous obscurity. Advancing tardily from a limping start, Crutching hypothesis on argument, Throning its theories as certitudes, It reasons from the half-known to the unknown, Ever constructing its frail house of thought, Ever undoing the web that it has spun. A twilight sage whose shadow seems to him self, Moving from minute to brief minute lives; A king dependent on his satellites Signs the decrees of ignorant ministers, A judge in half-possession of his proofs, A voice clamant of uncertainty’s postulates, An architect of knowledge, not its source. This powerful bondslave of his instruments Thinks his low station Nature’s highest top, Oblivious of his share in all things made And haughtily humble in his own conceit Believes himself a spawn of Matter’s mud And takes his own creations for his cause. To eternal light and knowledge meant to rise, Up from man’s bare beginning is our climb; Out of earth’s heavy smallness we must break, We must search our nature with spiritual fire: An insect crawl preludes our glorious flight; Our human state cradles the future god, Our mortal frailty an immortal force.

Savitri: Book 4 Canto 3 Section 1 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:

Savitri: Book 7 Canto 6 Section 2 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. 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. For now they bear the living person’s stamp; A trick, a special hue claims them his own. All else is Nature’s craft and this too hers. 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. The genius too receives from some high fount Concealed in a supernal secrecy The work that gives him an immortal name. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. This men call quietude and prize as peace.

Savitri: Book 1 Canto 4 Section 4 All here where each thing seems its lonely self Are figures of the sole transcendent One: Only by him they are, his breath is their life; An unseen Presence moulds the oblivious clay. A playmate in the mighty Mother’s game, One came upon the dubious whirling globe To hide from her pursuit in force and form. A secret spirit in the Inconscient’s sleep, A shapeless Energy, a voiceless Word, He was here before the elements could emerge, Before there was light of mind or life could breathe. Accomplice of her cosmic huge pretence, His semblances he turns to real shapes And makes the symbol equal with the truth: He gives to his timeless thoughts a form in Time. He is the substance, he the self of things; She has forged from him her works of skill and might: She wraps him in the magic of her moods And makes of his myriad truths her countless dreams. The Master of being has come down to her, An immortal child born in the fugitive years. In objects wrought, in the persons she conceives, Dreaming she chases her idea of him, And catches here a look and there a gest: Ever he repeats in them his ceaseless births. He is the Maker and the world he made, He is the vision and he is the Seer; He is himself the actor and the act, He is himself the knower and the known, He is himself the dreamer and the dream. There are Two who are One and play in many worlds; In Knowledge and Ignorance they have spoken and met And light and darkness are their eyes’ interchange; Our pleasure and pain are their wrestle and embrace, Our deeds, our hopes are intimate to their tale; They are married secretly in our thought and life. The universe is an endless masquerade: For nothing here is utterly what it seems; It is a dream-fact vision of a truth Which but for the dream would not be wholly true, A phenomenon stands out significant Against dim backgrounds of eternity; We accept its face and pass by all it means; A part is seen, we take it for the whole.

Savitri: Book 1 Canto 4 Section 6 The master of existence lurks in us And plays at hide-and-seek with his own Force; In Nature’s instrument loiters secret God. The Immanent lives in man as in his house; He has made the universe his pastime’s field, A vast gymnasium of his works of might. All-knowing he accepts our darkened state, Divine, wears shapes of animal or man; Eternal, he assents to Fate and Time, Immortal, dallies with mortality. The All-Conscious ventured into Ignorance, The All-Blissful bore to be insensible. Incarnate in a world of strife and pain, He puts on joy and sorrow like a robe And drinks experience like a strengthening wine. He whose transcendence rules the pregnant Vasts, Prescient now dwells in our subliminal depths, A luminous individual Power, alone. The Absolute, the Perfect, the Alone Has called out of the Silence his mute Force Where she lay in the featureless and formless hush Guarding from Time by her immobile sleep The ineffable puissance of his solitude. The Absolute, the Perfect, the Alone Has entered with his silence into space: He has fashioned these countless persons of one self; He has built a million figures of his power; He lives in all, who lived in his Vast alone; Space is himself and Time is only he. The Absolute, the Perfect, the Immune, One who is in us as our secret self, Our mask of imperfection has assumed, He has made this tenement of flesh his own, His image in the human measure cast That to his divine measure we might rise; Then in a figure of divinity The Maker shall recast us and impose A plan of godhead on the mortal’s mould Lifting our finite minds to his infinite, Touching the moment with eternity. This transfiguration is earth’s due to heaven: A mutual debt binds man to the Supreme: His nature we must put on as he put ours; We are sons of God and must be even as he: His human portion, we must grow divine. Our life is a paradox with God for key.

Savitri: Book 1, Canto 3, Section 2 As so he grew into his larger self, Humanity framed his movements less and less; A greater being saw a greater world. A fearless will for knowledge dared to erase The lines of safety Reason draws that bar Mind’s soar, soul’s dive into the Infinite. Even his first steps broke our small earth-bounds And loitered in a vaster freer air. In hands sustained by a transfiguring Might He caught up lightly like a giant’s bow Left slumbering in a sealed and secret cave The powers that sleep unused in man within. He made of miracle a normal act And turned to a common part of divine works, Magnificently natural at this height, Efforts that would shatter the strength of mortal hearts, Pursued in a royalty of mighty ease Aims too sublime for Nature’s daily will: The gifts of the spirit crowding came to him; They were his life’s pattern and his privilege. A pure perception lent its lucent joy: Its intimate vision waited not to think; It enveloped all Nature in a single glance, It looked into the very self of things; Deceived no more by form he saw the soul. In beings it knew what lurked to them unknown; It seized the idea in mind, the wish in the heart; It plucked out from grey folds of secrecy The motives which from their own sight men hide. He felt the beating life in other men Invade him with their happiness and their grief; Their love, their anger, their unspoken hopes Entered in currents or in pouring waves Into the immobile ocean of his calm. He heard the inspired sound of his own thoughts Re-echoed in the vault of other minds; The world’s thought-streams travelled into his ken; His inner self grew near to others’ selves And bore a kinship’s weight, a common tie, Yet stood untouched, king of itself, alone.

Savitri: Book Three, Canto Three, Section 1 A MIGHTIER task remained than all he had done. To That he turned from which all being comes, A sign attending from the Secrecy Which knows the Truth ungrasped behind our thoughts And guards the world with its all-seeing gaze. In the unapproachable stillness of his soul, Intense, one-pointed, monumental, lone, Patient he sat like an incarnate hope Motionless on a pedestal of prayer. A strength he sought that was not yet on earth, Help from a Power too great for mortal will, The light of a Truth now only seen afar, A sanction from his high omnipotent Source.

Savitri: Book 7 Canto 2 Section 1 A Power within her answered the still Voice: “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.” 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. Open God’s door, enter into his trance. 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. 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. 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.”

Book 1, Canto 3, Section 1 : This bodily appearance is not all; The form deceives, the person is a mask; Hid deep in man celestial powers can dwell. His fragile ship conveys through the sea of years An incognito of the Imperishable. A spirit that is a flame of God abides, A fiery portion of the Wonderful, Artist of his own beauty and delight, Immortal in our mortal poverty. This sculptor of the forms of the Infinite, This screened unrecognised Inhabitant, Initiate of his own veiled mysteries, Hides in a small dumb seed his cosmic thought. In the mute strength of the occult Idea Determining predestined shape and act, Passenger from life to life, from scale to scale, Changing his imaged self from form to form, He regards the icon growing by his gaze And in the worm foresees the coming god.

From Savitri Book 7 CANTO V Section 2: The Finding of the Soul Section 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Then with a magic transformation’s speed They rushed into each other and grew one.