-36_Canto Three – The Entry into the Inner Countries.htm

As if from a loud thronged market into a cave

A stark hushed emptiness became her self:

Stared at a void deep’s dumb infinity.

All fled away from her and left her blank.

Once more she was a human thing on earth,

A mind compelled to think out ignorance,

And the material world her limiting field.

Out of the tangle of man’s ignorant past

Then a Voice spoke that dwelt on secret heights:

Only if God assumes the human mind

And makes himself the Dwarf with triple stride,

As man disguised the cosmic Greatness works

And opens the Immortal’s golden door.

Accepting his darkness thou must bring to him light,

In Matter’s body find thy heaven-born soul.”

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And looked into her subtle being’s depths

Divined her secret and mysterious soul.

That bars out from our depths the body’s mind

She knocked and pressed against the ebony gate.

Heavily reluctant it complained inert

A formidable voice cried from within:

A dreadful murmur rose like a dim sea;

A fatal guardian hood with monstrous coils,

And trolls and gnomes and goblins scowled and stared

And menace muttered in a dangerous tongue.

The gate swung wide with a protesting jar,

Her being entered into the inner worlds.

She breathed with difficulty and pain and strove

Into a dense of subtle Matter packed,

An opposition of misleading gleams,

She forced her way through body to the soul.

Where Life dips into the subconscient dusk

Aswarm with elemental entities

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And crude beginnings of incontinent force.

A press of uncertain powers and drifting wills;

At times an opening came, a door was forced;

And trod in passages of inner Time.

A start of finiteness, a world of sense:

Soul was not there but only cries of life.

A horde of sounds defied significance,

A mob of visions broke across the sight,

Feelings pushed through a packed and burdened heart,

But cared for nothing but its ego’s drive.

Thought stared at thought and pulled at the taut brain

And cast its corpse into life’s wayside drain;

Abandoned the slain sentinel of the soul.

Nature renounce the spirit’s government

Make of the sense a glory of boundless joy,

A revel mighty and mad of utter bliss.

Or when the soul sleeps hidden void of power,

And lifts the life with the Supernal’s touch.

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If mind is cast away into the abyss?

The rapture of spirit sense, the joy of life;

Inconscience puts its seal on Nature’s page

Posting along a ravaged nature’s roads,

In which no light can come, no joy, no peace.

As if in a long endless tossing street

Hour after hour she trod without release

Out of the dreadful press she dragged her will

Then all grew still and empty; she was free.

Awhile she moved through a blank tranquillity

A void that was a bodiless happiness,

But now a mightier danger’s front drew near:

Of aimless thought and will had fallen from her.

Ungoverned by mind or soul, subconscient, vast.

It made its power a might of dangerous seas.

Into the whiteness of its muse of Space

Broke like a wind-lashed driven mob of waves

It drowned its banks, a mountain of climbing waves.

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It cried to her listening spirit as it ran,

A deaf force calling to a status dumb,

It claimed the heart’s support for its clutch at joy,

For its lust of power her neutral being’s seal.

It brought a grandiose gust of the Breath of Life;

All life’s, all Nature’s dissatisfied hungry cry,

It called to the mountain secrecies of the soul

It spoke to some first inexpressible ecstasy

Out of the nether unseen deeps it tore

Into earth-light poured its maze of tangled charm

And the fire and mystery of forbidden delight

And the honey-sweet poison-wine of lust and death,

And felt as celestial rapture’s golden sting.

And the mystique that made an unrealised world

In which hunt for ever the hounds of mind and life,

To long for the unfulfilled and ever far

A climb towards summits vanishing in the void,

It dreamed of that which never has been known,

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It chased into an Elysian memory

It dared the force that slays, the joys that hurt,

And the summons to a Circean transmuting dance

And the wild Beast’s ramp and romp with Beauty and Life.

Its moments of the touch of luminous planes,

Its fiery towers of dream built on the winds,

Its honey of tenderness, its sharp wine of hate,

Its bottomless danger-pits and swallowing gulfs,

Its occult wizardries, its simple lines

Its faith in heaven, its intercourse with hell.

They gave ambrosia’s taste and poison’s sting.

That saw heaven blue in the grey air of Night:

Mind’s quick-paced thoughts floated from their high necks,

A parure of pure intuition’s light;

Mind’s voices mimicked inspiration’s stress,

Its speed and lightning heaven-leap of the Gods.

Its sword of discernment seemed almost divine.

The forms that came were not heaven’s native births:

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Its puissance dangerous and absolute

On these high shining backs falsehood could ride;

Gliding downstream in a blithe gilded barge:

Here in Life’s nether realms all contraries meet;

And Ignorance is Wisdom’s patron here:

Could bear to a dangerous intermediate zone

Or they enter the valley of the wandering Gleam

Souls trapped in that region never can escape.

Toiling for ever in the snare of Time.

Ensnare the spirit in the moment’s dreams,

Out of Matter’s belly into the sink of Nought.

Carrying Truth’s image in the sheltered heart,

Break paths through the blind walls of little self,

All this streamed past her and seemed to her vision’s sight

A clamour of waters from far unknown hills

And made a hungry world of white wild foam:

Its foam and cry a drunken giant’s din,

It ebbed receding into a distant roar.

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Then smiled again a large and tranquil air:

Lived as of old, companions in happiness;

All now was still, the soil shone dry and pure.

Out of the vastness of the silent self

Then journeying forward through the self’s wide hush

There Life dwelt parked in an armed tranquillity;

Tamed to the modesty of a measured pace,

She had lost the careless majesty of her muse

Curbed were her mighty pomps, her splendid waste,

Cut down were her squanderings in desire’s bazaar,

A cold stolidity bound the riot of sense.

The sovereign throned obeyed her ministers:

Her spirit’s bounds they cast in rigid lines

The reason’s balanced reign, kept order and peace.

Coerced was her force by chains that feigned to adorn,

Her wanton and licentious favourite;

Were set in its place sentinelled by marshalled facts,

For kingdom a small world of rule and line:

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Shrank patterned into a copy-book device.

A schoolman mind had captured life’s large space,

Parked off from the too vast dangerous universe,

Even the Idea’s ample sweep was cut

Or rivetted to Matter’s solid ground:

Obeying the Ideal’s high-browed law

Disdaining earth’s flat triviality:

Or all stepped into a systemed universe:

Its thoughts an army ranked and disciplined;

At the bidding of the trained centurion mind.

Or marched through fixed and constellated heavens

In the sky’s unchanging cosmic hierarchy.

Forbidden to walk unveiled the public ways,

Her feeling in cloisters live or gardened paths.

It dared not tempt the great and difficult heights

Or skirt the danger of the precipice

Adventure’s lyrist, danger’s amateur,

Or leave the world’s bounds and where no limits are

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Or set the world ablaze with the inner Fire.

She must fill with colour just her sanctioned space,

Nor trespass into rhythms too high or vast.

Thought’s flight lost not itself in heaven’s blue:

Of disciplined beauty and harmonic light.

Its acts were tools of the considering thought,

Or the careful reason’s diplomatic moves

Or at the highest pitch some calm Will’s plan

To conquer the secret treasures of the gods

Not a reflex of the spontaneous self,

A winging of conscious spirit, a sacrament

Or its pure movement on the Eternal’s road.

A house was built with too close-fitting bricks;

Of small ideals limiting the soul.

And worship turned to an exclusive God,

Whose doors were shut against the universe;

A mind shut to the cry and fire of love:

It planned a smooth life’s acts with ethics’ rule

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The sacred Book lay on its sanctified desk

A credo sealed up its spiritual sense.

Here was a quiet country of fixed mind,

Here life no more was all nor passion’s voice;

Soul was not there nor spirit but mind alone;

The spirit saw itself as form of mind,

A light that made invisible the sun.

Where all was still and all things kept their place.

All had a final last stability.

On an important brow and held a rod;

Tradition’s petrified wisdom carved his speech,

“Traveller or pilgrim of the inner world,

Flaming with thought’s supreme finality.

Here find it; rest from search and live at peace.

Here is the truth, God’s harmony is here.

Admitted by the sanction of the few,

Thy ticket of order draw in Life’s bureau

All here, docketed and tied, the mind can know,

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Here is the safety of the ultimate wall,

Here is the victory of a single Truth,

A favourite of Heaven and Nature live.”

Savitri replied casting into his world

For here the heart spoke not, only clear daylight

“Happy are they who in this chaos of things,

Can find the single Truth, the eternal Law:

Happy are men anchored on fixed belief

Or who have planted in the heart’s rich soil

Happiest who stand on faith as on a rock.

Truth’s rounded outcome firm, immutable

This ordered knowledge of apparent things.

None answered in that bright contented world,

Astonished to hear questioning in that air

But some murmured, passers-by from kindred spheres:

“Who then is this who knows not that the soul

Disquieting the sane government of the mind,

Or a yearning lodged in Nature’s mortal house

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Who would prolong his brief unhappy term

But others, “Nay, it is her spirit she seeks.

A formless lustre from the Ideal’s realm,

But none has touched its limbs or seen its face.

Mind is that soul’s one parent, its conscious cause,

Mind, sole creator of the apparent world.

Our minds have made the world in which we live.”

Who loved his slain belief and mourned its death,

Can still the path be found, opened the gate?”

So she fared on across her silent self.

To a road she came thronged with an ardent crowd

Pressing to reach the world’s mysterious wall,

Where the Light comes not nor the mystic voice,

Guests from the cavern of the secret soul.

Or shed wide wonder on our waking self,

Dreams that are hints of unborn Reality,

Strong wind-haired gods carrying the harps of hope,

Aspiration’s sun-dream head and star-carved limbs,

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Yearning to the spiritual light they bore,

But she reined back the high passion in her heart;

Only who save themselves can others save.

They carrying the light to suffering men

Her eyes were turned towards the eternal source.

“O happy company of luminous gods,

For surely that bright quarter is your home, —

And the deep mansion of my secret soul.”

On a remote extremity of sleep

“O Savitri, from thy hidden soul we come.

Who help men’s drab and heavy ignorant lives

Touching them with glory and divinity;

And hold the torch of knowledge on ignorant roads;

O human copy and disguise of God

And livest by the Truth thou hast not known,

There in the silence few have ever reached,

And the deep cavern of thy secret soul.”

Came where it dwindled into a narrow path

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A few bright forms emerged from unknown depths

There was no sound to break the brooding hush;

END OF CANTO THREE

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