Savitri

 Canto One 

 

The Symbol Dawn 

 

It was the hour before the Gods awake.

Across the path of the divine Event

The huge foreboding mind of Night, alone

In her unlit temple of eternity,

Lay stretched immobile upon Silence’ marge.

Almost one felt, opaque, impenetrable,

In the sombre symbol of her eyeless muse

The abysm of the unbodied Infinite;

A fathomless zero occupied the world.

A power of fallen boundless self awake

Between the first and the last Nothingness,

Recalling the tenebrous womb from which it came,

Turned from the insoluble mystery of birth

And the tardy process of mortality

And longed to reach its end in vacant Nought.

As in a dark beginning of all things,

A mute featureless semblance of the Unknown

Repeating for ever the unconscious act,

Prolonging for ever the unseeing will,

Cradled the cosmic drowse of ignorant Force

Whose moved creative slumber kindles the suns

And carries our lives in its somnambulist whirl.

Athwart the vain enormous trance of Space,

Its formless stupor without mind or life,

A shadow spinning through a soulless Void,

Thrown back once more into unthinking dreams,

Earth wheeled abandoned in the hollow gulfs

Forgetful of her spirit and her fate.

The impassive skies were neutral, empty, still.

Then something in the inscrutable darkness stirred;

A nameless movement, an unthought Idea 

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Insistent, dissatisfied, without an aim,

Something that wished but knew not how to be,

Teased the Inconscient to wake Ignorance.

A throe that came and left a quivering trace,

Gave room for an old tired want unfilled,

At peace in its subconscient moonless cave

To raise its head and look for absent light,

Straining closed eyes of vanished memory,

Like one who searches for a bygone self

And only meets the corpse of his desire.

It was as though even in this Nought’s profound,

Even in this ultimate dissolution’s core

There lurked an unremembering entity,

Survivor of a slain and buried past

Condemned to resume the effort and the pang,

Reviving in another frustrate world.

An unshaped consciousness desired light

And a blank prescience yearned towards distant change.

As if a childlike finger laid on a cheek

Reminded of the endless need in things

The heedless Mother of the universe,

An infant longing clutched the sombre Vast.

Insensibly somewhere a breach began:

A long lone line of hesitating hue

Like a vague smile tempting a desert heart

Troubled the far rim of life’s obscure sleep.

Arrived from the other side of boundlessness

An eye of deity pierced through the dumb deeps;

A scout in a reconnaissance from the sun,

It seemed amid a heavy cosmic rest,

The torpor of a sick and weary world,

To seek for a spirit sole and desolate

Too fallen to recollect forgotten bliss.

Intervening in a mindless universe,

Its message crept through the reluctant hush

Calling the adventure of consciousness and joy 

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And, conquering Nature’s disillusioned breast,

Compelled renewed consent to see and feel.

A thought was sown in the unsounded Void,

A sense was born within the darkness’ depths,

A memory quivered in the heart of Time

As if a soul long dead were moved to live:

But the oblivion that succeeds the fall,

Had blotted the crowded tablets of the past,

And all that was destroyed must be rebuilt

And old experience laboured out once more.

All can be done if the God-touch is there.

A hope stole in that hardly dared to be

Amid the Night’s forlorn indifference.

As if solicited in an alien world

With timid and hazardous instinctive grace,

Orphaned and driven out to seek a home,

An errant marvel with no place to live,

Into a far-off nook of heaven there came

A slow miraculous gesture’s dim appeal.

The persistent thrill of a transfiguring touch

Persuaded the inert black quietude

And beauty and wonder disturbed the fields of God.

A wandering hand of pale enchanted light

That glowed along a fading moment’s brink,

Fixed with gold panel and opalescent hinge

A gate of dreams ajar on mystery’s verge.

One lucent corner windowing hidden things

Forced the world’s blind immensity to sight.

The darkness failed and slipped like a falling cloak

From the reclining body of a god.

Then through the pallid rift that seemed at first

Hardly enough for a trickle from the suns,

Outpoured the revelation and the flame.

The brief perpetual sign recurred above.

A glamour from the unreached transcendences

Iridescent with the glory of the Unseen, 

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A message from the unknown immortal Light

Ablaze upon creation’s quivering edge,

Dawn built her aura of magnificent hues

And buried its seed of grandeur in the hours.

An instant’s visitor the godhead shone:

On life’s thin border awhile the Vision stood

And bent over earth’s pondering forehead curve.

Interpreting a recondite beauty and bliss

In colour’s hieroglyphs of mystic sense,

It wrote the lines of a significant myth

Telling of a greatness of spiritual dawns,

A brilliant code penned with the sky for page.

Almost that day the epiphany was disclosed

Of which our thoughts and hopes are signal flares;

A lonely splendour from the invisible goal

Almost was flung on the opaque Inane.

Once more a tread perturbed the vacant Vasts;

Infinity’s centre, a Face of rapturous calm

Parted 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 breadths

That wrap the fated journeyings of the stars

And 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 steps

And wideness turned to her its limitless eye,

And, scattered on sealed depths, her luminous smile

Kindled 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 wind

Arose and failed upon the altar hills;

The high boughs prayed in a revealing sky. 

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Here where our half-lit ignorance skirts the gulfs

On the dumb bosom of the ambiguous earth,

Here where one knows not even the step in front

And Truth has her throne on the shadowy back of doubt,

On this anguished and precarious field of toil

Outspread beneath some large indifferent gaze,

Impartial witness to our joy and bale,

Our prostrate soil bore the awakening ray.

Here too the vision and prophetic gleam

Lit 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 Power

Too perfect to be held by death-bound hearts,

The prescience of a marvellous birth to come.

Only a little the God-light can stay:

Spiritual beauty illumining human sight

Lines with its passion and mystery Matter’s mask

And squanders eternity on a beat of Time.

As when a soul draws near the sill of birth,

Adjoining mortal time to Timelessness,

A spark of deity lost in Matter’s crypt

Its lustre vanishes in the inconscient planes,

That transitory glow of magic fire

So now dissolved in bright accustomed air.

The message ceased and waned the messenger.

The single Call, the uncompanioned Power,

Drew back into some far-off secret world

The hue and marvel of the supernal beam:

She looked no more on our mortality.

The excess of beauty natural to God-kind

Could not uphold its claim on time-born eyes;

Too mystic-real for space-tenancy

Her body of glory was expunged from heaven:

The rarity and wonder lived no more. 

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There was the common light of earthly day.

Affranchised from the respite of fatigue

Once more the rumour of the speed of Life

Pursued the cycles of her blinded quest.

All sprang to their unvarying daily acts;

The thousand peoples of the soil and tree

Obeyed the unforeseeing instant’s urge,

And, leader here with his uncertain mind,

Alone who stares at the future’s covered face,

Man lifted up the burden of his fate.

 

And Savitri too awoke among these tribes

That hastened to join the brilliant Summoner’s chant

And, lured by the beauty of the apparent ways,

Acclaimed their portion of ephemeral joy.

Akin to the eternity whence she came,

No part she took in this small happiness;

A mighty stranger in the human field,

The embodied Guest within made no response.

The call that wakes the leap of human mind,

Its chequered eager motion of pursuit,

Its fluttering-hued illusion of desire,

Visited her heart like a sweet alien note.

Time’s message of brief light was not for her.

In her there was the anguish of the gods

Imprisoned in our transient human mould,

The deathless conquered by the death of things.

A vaster Nature’s joy had once been hers,

But long could keep not its gold heavenly hue

Or stand upon this brittle earthly base.

A narrow movement on Time’s deep abysm,

Life’s fragile littleness denied the power,

The proud and conscious wideness and the bliss

She 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. 

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Earth’s grain that needs the sap of pleasure and tears

Rejected the undying rapture’s boon:

Offered to the daughter of infinity

Her 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 implant

That 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 intolerance

Of 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 Truth

And 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 defence

It 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.

Too unlike the world she came to help and save,

Her greatness weighed upon its ignorant breast,

And from its deep 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, 

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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 her

From 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 blind

Takes 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 here

Bringing a noon that seemed like every noon.

For Nature walks upon her mighty way

Unheeding 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.

Apart, 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, 

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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 somnolence

Inert, 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 realms

She 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 bosom

And 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 servitors

Like 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 call

Her 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 dreams

Across the ebbing of the seas of sleep.

Her house of Nature felt an unseen sway,

Illumined swiftly were life’s darkened rooms,

And memory’s casements opened on the hours

And the tired feet of thought approached her doors.

All came back to her: Earth and Love and Doom,

The ancient disputants, encircled her

Like giant figures wrestling in the night: 

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The godheads from the dim Inconscient born

Awoke to struggle and the pang divine,

And in the shadow of her flaming heart,

At the sombre centre of the dire debate,

A guardian of the unconsoled abyss

Inheriting the long agony of the globe,

A stone-still figure of high and godlike Pain

Stared into space with fixed regardless eyes

That saw grief’s timeless depths but not life’s goal.

Afflicted by his harsh divinity,

Bound to his throne, he waited unappeased

The daily oblation of her unwept tears.

All the fierce question of man’s hours relived.

The sacrifice of suffering and desire

Earth offers to the immortal Ecstasy

Began again beneath the eternal Hand.

Awake she endured the moments’ serried march

And looked on this green smiling dangerous world,

And heard the ignorant cry of living things.

Amid the trivial sounds, the unchanging scene

Her soul arose confronting Time and Fate.

Immobile in herself, she gathered force.

This was the day when Satyavan must die.

 

End of Canto One 

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