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Canto Four
The Quest THE WORLD-WAYS opened before Savitri. At first a strangeness of new brilliant scenes Peopled her mind and kept her body’s gaze.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.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 claimedLike 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.All was a part of old forgotten selves: Vaguely or with a flash of sudden hintsHer 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 soulTo trace again a journey often made. A guidance turned the dumb revolving wheelsAnd in the eager body of their speed The dim-masked hooded godheads rode who moveAssigned 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.
Page – 377 Inexorably faithful to their task, They hold his nature’s sequence in their guard Carrying the unbroken thread old lives have spun.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. Nothing we think or do is void or vain;Each is an energy loosed and holds its course. The shadowy keepers of our deathless pastHave made our fate the child of our own acts, And from the furrows laboured by our willWe reap the fruit of our forgotten deeds. But since unseen the tree that bore this fruitAnd we live in a present born from an unknown past, They seem but parts of a mechanic ForceTo a mechanic mind tied by earth’s laws; Yet are they instruments of a Will supreme,Watched by a still all-seeing Eye above. A prescient architect of Fate and ChanceWho builds our lives on a foreseen design The meaning knows and consequence of each stepAnd watches the inferior stumbling powers. Upon her silent heights she was awareOf 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. 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.
Page – 378 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 towersPast 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 lifeAnd temples hewn as if by exiled gods To imitate their lost eternity.Often from gilded dusk to argent dawn, Where jewel-lamps flickered on frescoed wallsAnd the stone lattice stared at moonlit boughs, Half-conscious of the tardy listening nightDimly she glided between banks of sleep At rest in the slumbering palaces of kings.Hamlet and village saw the fate-wain pass, Homes of a life bent to the soil it ploughsFor 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.Away from this thinking creature’s burdened hours To free and griefless spaces now she turnedNot yet perturbed by human joys and fears. 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 wildOr past the long lapsing voice of silver floods Like a swift hope journeying among its dreamsHastened the chariot of the golden bride.
Page – 379 Out of the world’s immense unhuman past Tract-memories and ageless remnants came, Domains of light enfeoffed to antique calmListened to the unaccustomed sound of hooves And large immune entangled silencesAbsorbed her into emerald secrecy And slow hushed wizard nets of fiery bloomEnvironed with their coloured snare her wheels. The strong importunate feet of Time fell softAlong these lonely ways, his titan pace Forgotten and his stark and ruinous rounds.The inner ear that listens to solitude, Leaning self-rapt unboundedly could hearThe 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 tranceAscended with its yearning undertone. Afar from the brute noise of clamorous needsThe 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.This spirit stumbling in the fields of sense, This creature bruised in the mortar of the daysCould find in her broad spaces of release. Not yet was a world all occupied by care.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.Muse-lipped she nursed her symbol mysteries And guarded for her pure-eyed sacramentsThe valley clefts between her breasts of joy, Her mountain altars for the fires of dawnAnd nuptial beaches where the ocean couched
Page – 380 And the huge chanting of her prophet woods. 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 moonsAnd grey seer-evenings kindling with the stars And dim movement in the night’s infinitude.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.A few and fit inhabitants she called To share the glad communion of her peace;The breadth, the summit were their natural home. 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. Happy they lived with birds and beasts and flowersAnd 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. Some deeper plunged; from life’s external claspBeckoned into a fiery privacy In the soul’s unprofaned star-white recessThey sojourned with an everliving Bliss; A Voice profound in the ecstasy and the hushThey heard, beheld an all-revealing Light. 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. Attuned to Silence and to the world-rhyme,They loosened the knot of the imprisoning mind;
Page – 381 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.Nameless the austere ascetics without home Abandoning speech and motion and desireAloof from creatures sat absorbed, alone, Immaculate in tranquil heights of selfOn concentration’s luminous voiceless peaks, World-naked hermits with their matted hairImmobile as the passionless great hills Around them grouped like thoughts of some vast moodAwaiting the Infinite’s behest to end. The seers attuned to the universal Will,Content in Him who smiles behind earth’s forms, Abode ungrieved by the insistent days.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.Far-wandering seekers on the Eternal’s path Brought to these quiet founts their spirit’s thirstAnd spent the treasure of a silent hour Bathed in the purity of the mild gazeThat, uninsistent, ruled them from its peace, And by its influence found the ways of calm.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 sunReceived half-consciously their godlike stamp: Formed in the type of the high thoughts they sangThey learned the wide magnificence of mood That makes us comrades of the cosmic urge,No longer chained to their small separate selves,
Page – 382 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.One-souled to all and free from narrowing bonds, Large like a continent of warm sunshineIn wide equality’s impartial joy, These sages breathed for God’s delight in things.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.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. 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 breastHealed with their hearts the hard and wounded world. Others escaped from the confines of thoughtTo 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 powersIn metres that reflect the moving worlds, Sight’s sound-waves breaking from the soul’s great deeps.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,
Page – 383 Or, comrades of the everlasting Will, Surveyed the plan of past and future Time. Some winged like birds out of the cosmic seaAnd vanished into a bright and featureless Vast: Some silent watched the universal dance,Or helped the world by world-indifference. 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.As floats a sunbeam through a shady place, The golden virgin in her carven carCame gliding among meditation’s seats. Often in twilight mid returning troopsOf 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 cloakIts spirit of patient muse and potent prayer. Or near to a lion river’s tawny maneAnd trees that worshipped on a praying shore, A domed and templed air’s serene reposeBeckoned to her hurrying wheels to stay their speed. In the solemnity of a space that seemedA mind remembering ancient silences, Where to the heart great bygone voices calledAnd 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 FlameDrank in hushed splendour between tranquil lids And felt the kinship of eternal calm.But morn broke in reminding her of her quest And from low rustic couch or mat she rose
Page – 384 And went impelled on her unfinished way And followed the fateful orbit of her lifeLike a desire that questions silent gods Then passes starlike to some bright Beyond.Thence to great solitary tracts she came, Where man was a passer-by towards human scenesOr 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.The earth multiplied to her a changing brow And called her with a far and nameless voice.The mountains in their anchorite solitude, The forests with their multitudinous chantDisclosed to her the masked divinity’s doors. 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 hillsLifting their heads to hunt a lairlike sky, Or travelled in a strange and empty landWhere 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’ cryOr followed a long glistening serpent road Through fields and pastures lapped in moveless lightOr reached the wild beauty of a desert space Where never plough was driven nor herd had grazedAnd slumbered upon stripped and thirsty sands Amid the savage wild-beast night’s appeal.Still unaccomplished was the fateful quest; Still she found not the one predestined faceFor which she sought amid the sons of men. A grandiose silence wrapped the regal day:
Page – 385 The months had fed the passion of the sun And now his burning breath assailed the soil. The tiger heats prowled through the fainting earth;All was licked up as by a lolling tongue. The spring winds failed; the sky was set like bronze.
END OF CANTO FOUR END OF BOOK FOUR
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