Savitri

Canto Two 

 

The Issue 

 

Awhile, withdrawn in secret fields of thought,

Her mind moved in a many-imaged past

That lived again and saw its end approach:

Dying, it lived imperishably in her;

Transient and vanishing from transient eyes,

Invisible, a fateful ghost of self,

It bore the future on its phantom breast.

Along the fleeting event’s far-backward trail

Regressed the stream of the insistent hours,

And on the bank of the mysterious flood

Peopled with well-loved forms now seen no more

And the subtle images of things that were,

Her witness spirit stood reviewing Time.

All that she once had hoped and dreamed and been,

Flew past her eagle-winged through memory’s skies.

As in a many-hued flaming inner dawn,

Her life’s broad highways and its sweet bypaths

Lay mapped to her sun-clear recording view,

From the bright country of her childhood’s days

And the blue mountains of her soaring youth

And the paradise groves and peacock wings of Love

To joy clutched under the silent shadow of doom

In a last turn where heaven raced with hell.

Twelve passionate months led in a day of fate.

An absolute supernatural darkness falls

On man sometimes when he draws near to God:

An hour comes 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: 

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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.

A colloquy of the original Gods

Meeting upon the borders of the unknown,

Her soul’s debate with embodied Nothingness

Must be wrestled out on a dangerous dim background:

Her being must confront its formless Cause,

Against the universe weigh its single self.

On the bare peak where Self is alone with Nought

And life has no sense and love no place to stand,

She must plead her case upon extinction’s verge,

In the world’s death-cave uphold life’s helpless claim

And vindicate her right to be and love.

Altered must be Nature’s harsh economy; 

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Acquittance she must win from her past’s bond,

An old account of suffering exhaust,

Strike out from Time the soul’s long compound debt

And the heavy servitudes of the Karmic Gods,

The slow revenge of unforgiving Law

And the deep need of universal pain

And hard sacrifice and tragic consequence.

Out of a timeless barrier she must break,

Penetrate with her thinking depths the Void’s monstrous hush,

Look into the lonely eyes of immortal Death

And with her nude spirit measure the Infinite’s night.

The great and dolorous moment now was close.

A mailed battalion marching to its doom,

The last long days went by with heavy tramp,

Long but too soon to pass, too near the end.

Alone amid the many faces loved,

Aware among unknowing happy hearts,

Her armoured spirit kept watch upon the hours

Listening for a foreseen tremendous step

In the closed beauty of the inhuman wilds.

A combatant in silent dreadful lists,

The world unknowing, for the world she stood:

No helper had she save the Strength within;

There was no witness of terrestrial eyes;

The Gods above and Nature sole below

Were the spectators of that mighty strife.

Around her were the austere sky-pointing hills,

And the green murmurous broad deep-thoughted woods

Muttered incessantly their muffled spell.

A dense magnificent coloured self-wrapped life

Draped in the leaves’ vivid emerald monotone

And set with chequered sunbeams and blithe flowers

Immured her destiny’s secluded scene.

There had she grown to the stature of her spirit:

The genius of titanic silences

Steeping her soul in its wide loneliness 

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Had shown to her her self’s bare reality

And mated her with her environment.

Its solitude greatened her human hours

With a background of the eternal and unique.

A force of spare direct necessity

Reduced the heavy framework of man’s days

And his overburdening mass of outward needs

To a first thin strip of simple animal wants,

And the mighty wideness of the primitive earth

And the brooding multitude of patient trees

And the musing sapphire leisure of the sky

And the solemn weight of the slowly passing months

Had left in her deep room for thought and God.

There was her drama’s radiant prologue lived.

A spot for the eternal’s tread on earth

Set in the cloistral yearning of the woods

And watched by the aspiration of the peaks

Appeared through an aureate opening in Time

Where stillness listening felt the unspoken word

And the hours forgot to pass towards grief and change.

Here with the suddenness divine advents have,

Repeating the marvel of the first descent,

Changing to rapture the dull earthly round,

Love came to her hiding the shadow, Death.

Well might he find in her his perfect shrine.

Since first the earth-being’s heavenward growth began,

Through all the long ordeal of the race,

Never a rarer creature bore his shaft,

That burning test of the godhead in our parts,

A lightning from the heights on our abyss.

All 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; 

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Her mind, a sea of white sincerity,

Passionate in flow, had not one turbid wave.

As in a mystic and dynamic dance

A priestess of immaculate ecstasies

Inspired and ruled from Truth’s revealing vault

Moves in some prophet cavern of the gods,

A heart of silence in the hands of joy

Inhabited with rich creative beats

A body like a parable of dawn

That seemed a niche for veiled divinity

Or golden temple door to things beyond.

Immortal rhythms swayed in her time-born steps;

Her look, her smile awoke celestial sense

Even in earth-stuff, and their intense delight

Poured a supernal beauty on men’s lives.

A wide self-giving was her native act;

A magnanimity as of sea or sky

Enveloped with its greatness all that came

And 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 repose

One could drink life back in streams of honey-fire,

Recover the lost habit of happiness,

Feel her bright nature’s glorious ambiance,

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 breath 

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Spiritual 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 refound

And moved in her as in his natural home.

In her he met his own eternity.

 

Till then no mournful line had barred this ray.

On the frail breast of this precarious earth,

Since her orbed sight in its breath-fastened house,

Opening in sympathy with happier stars

Where life is not exposed to sorrowful change,

Remembered beauty death-claimed lids ignore

And wondered at this world of fragile forms

Carried on canvas-strips of shimmering Time,

The impunity of unborn Mights was hers.

Although she leaned to bear the human load,

Her walk kept still the measure of the gods.

Earth’s breath had failed to stain that brilliant glass:

Unsmeared with the dust of our mortal atmosphere

It still reflected heaven’s spiritual joy.

Almost they saw who lived within her light

Her playmate in the sempiternal spheres

Descended from its unattainable realms

In her attracting advent’s luminous wake,

The white-fire dragon bird of endless bliss

Drifting with burning wings above her days:

Heaven’s tranquil shield guarded the missioned child.

A glowing orbit was her early term,

Years like gold raiment of the gods that pass;

Her youth sat throned in calm felicity.

But joy cannot endure until the end: 

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There is a darkness in terrestrial things

That will not suffer long too glad a note.

On her too closed the inescapable Hand:

The armed Immortal bore the snare of Time.

One dealt with her who meets the burdened great.

Assigner of the ordeal and the path

Who chooses in this holocaust of the soul

Death, fall and sorrow as the spirit’s goads,

The dubious godhead with his torch of pain

Lit up the chasm of the unfinished world

And called her to fill with her vast self the abyss.

August and pitiless in his calm outlook,

Heightening the Eternal’s dreadful strategy,

He measured the difficulty with the might

And dug more deep the gulf that all must cross.

Assailing her divinest elements,

He made her heart kin to the striving human heart

And forced her strength to its appointed road.

For this she had accepted mortal breath;

To wrestle with the Shadow she had come

And must confront the riddle of man’s birth

And life’s brief struggle in dumb Matter’s night.

Whether to bear with Ignorance and Death

Or 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 make

Fit 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 Desire

Flung to the eddies in a ruthless sport

And tossed along the gulfs of Circumstance,

A creature born to bend beneath the yoke, 

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A chattel and a plaything of Time’s lords,

Or one more pawn who comes destined to be pushed

One slow move forward on a measureless board

In the chess-play of the earth-soul with Doom,—

Such is the human figure drawn by Time.

A conscious frame was here, a self-born Force.

In this enigma of the dusk of God,

This slow and strange uneasy compromise

Of limiting Nature with a limitless Soul,

Where all must move between an ordered Chance

And an uncaring blind Necessity,

Too high the fire spiritual dare not blaze.

If once it met the intense original Flame,

An answering touch might shatter all measures made

And earth sink down with the weight of the Infinite.

A gaol is this immense material world.

Across each road stands armed a stone-eyed law,

At every gate the huge dim sentinels pace.

A grey tribunal of the Ignorance,

An Inquisition of the priests of Night

In judgment sit on the adventurer soul,

And the dual tables and the Karmic norm

Restrain the Titan in us and the God:

Pain with its lash, joy with its silver bribe

Guard the Wheel’s circling immobility,

A bond is put on the high climbing mind,

A seal on the too large wide-open heart;

Death stays the journeying discoverer, Life.

Thus is the throne of the Inconscient safe

While the tardy coilings of the aeons pass

And the Animal browses in the sacred fence

And the gold Hawk can cross the skies no more.

But one stood up and lit the limitless flame.

Arraigned by the dark Power that hates all bliss

In the dire court where life must pay for joy,

Sentenced by the mechanic justicer 

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To the afflicting penalty of man’s hopes,

Her head she bowed not to the stark decree

Baring her helpless heart to destiny’s stroke.

So bows and must the mind-born will in man

Obedient to the statutes fixed of old,

Admitting without appeal the nether gods.

In her the superhuman cast its seed.

Inapt to fold its mighty wings of dream

Her spirit refused to hug the common soil,

Or, finding all life’s golden meanings robbed,

Compound with earth, struck from the starry list,

Or quench with black despair the God-given light.

Accustomed to the eternal and the true,

Her being conscious of its divine founts

Asked not from mortal frailty pain’s relief,

Patched not with failure bargain or compromise.

A work she had to do, a word to speak;

Writing the unfinished story of her soul

In thoughts and actions graved in Nature’s book,

She accepted not to close the luminous page,

Cancel her commerce with eternity,

Or set a signature of weak assent

To the brute balance of the world’s exchange.

A force in her that toiled since earth was made,

Accomplishing in life the great world-plan,

Pursuing after death immortal aims,

Repugned to admit frustration’s barren role,

Forfeit the meaning of her birth in Time,

Obey the government of the casual fact

Or yield her high destiny up to passing Chance.

In her own self she found her high recourse;

She matched with the iron law her sovereign right:

Her single will opposed the cosmic rule.

To stay the wheels of Doom this greatness rose.

At the Unseen’s knock upon the hidden gates

Her strength made greater by the lightning’s touch 

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Awoke from slumber in her heart’s recess.

It bore the stroke of That which kills and saves.

Across the awful march no eye can see,

Barring its dreadful route no will can change,

She faced the engines of the universe;

A heart stood in the way of the driving wheels:

Its giant workings paused in front of a mind,

Its stark conventions met the flame of a soul.

A magic leverage suddenly is caught

That moves the veiled Ineffable’s timeless will:

A prayer, a master act, a king idea

Can link man’s strength to a transcendent Force.

Then miracle is made the common rule,

One mighty deed can change the course of things;

A lonely thought becomes omnipotent.

All now seems Nature’s massed machinery;

An endless servitude to material rule

And long determination’s rigid chain,

Her firm and changeless habits aping Law,

Her empire of unconscious deft device

Annul the claim of man’s free human will.

He too is a machine amid machines;

A piston brain pumps out the shapes of thought,

A beating heart cuts out emotion’s modes;

An insentient energy fabricates a soul.

Or the figure of the world reveals the signs

Of a tied Chance repeating her old steps

In circles around Matter’s binding-posts.

A random series of inept events

To which reason lends illusive sense, is here,

Or the empiric Life’s instinctive search,

Or a vast ignorant mind’s colossal work.

But wisdom comes, and vision grows within;

Then Nature’s instrument crowns himself her king;

He feels his witnessing self and conscious power;

His soul steps back and sees the Light supreme. 

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A Godhead stands behind the brute machine.

This truth broke in in a triumph of fire;

A victory was won for God in man,

The deity revealed its hidden face.

The great World-Mother now in her arose:

A living choice reversed fate’s cold dead turn,

Affirmed the spirit’s tread on Circumstance,

Pressed back the senseless dire revolving Wheel

And stopped the mute march of Necessity.

A flaming warrior from the eternal peaks

Empowered to force the door denied and closed

Smote from Death’s visage its dumb absolute

And burst the bounds of consciousness and Time.

 

End of Canto Two 

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