Savitri

Canto Three

 

The Yoga of the King:

The Yoga of the Soul’s Release 

 

A world’s desire compelled her mortal birth.

One in the front of the immemorial quest,

Protagonist of the mysterious play

In which the Unknown pursues himself through forms

And limits his eternity by the hours

And the blind Void struggles to live and see,

A thinker and toiler in the ideal’s air,

Brought down to earth’s dumb need her radiant power.

His was a spirit that stooped from larger spheres

Into our province of ephemeral sight,

A colonist from immortality.

A pointing beam on earth’s uncertain roads,

His birth held up a symbol and a sign;

His human self like a translucent cloak

Covered the All-Wise who leads the unseeing world.

Affiliated to cosmic Space and Time

And paying here God’s debt to earth and man

A greater sonship was his divine right.

Although consenting to mortal ignorance,

His knowledge shared the Light ineffable.

A strength of the original Permanence

Entangled in the moment and its flow,

He kept the vision of the Vasts behind:

A power was in him from the Unknowable.

An archivist of the symbols of the Beyond,

A treasurer of superhuman dreams,

He bore the stamp of mighty memories

And shed their grandiose ray on human life.

His days were a long growth to the Supreme.

A skyward being nourishing its roots 

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On sustenance from occult spiritual founts

Climbed 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 mortality

Touched by this tenant from the heights became

A 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 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.

At last the traveller in the paths of Time

Arrives on the frontiers of eternity.

In the transient symbol of humanity draped,

He feels his substance of undying self

And loses his kinship to mortality.

A beam of the Eternal smites his heart, 

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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 ground

As the security of her changing world

And 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 peace

Tracked 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 flame

A 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 fall

Until at last is reached the giant point

Through which his Glory shines for whom we were made

And we break into the infinity of God.

Across our nature’s border line we escape

Into supernature’s arc of living light.

This now was witnessed in that son of Force,

In him that high transition laid its base.

Original and supernal Immanence

Of which all Nature’s process is the art,

The cosmic Worker set his secret hand 

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To turn this frail mud-engine to heaven-use.

A Presence wrought behind the ambiguous screen:

It beat his soil to bear a Titan’s weight,

Refining half-hewn blocks of natural strength

It built his soul into a statued God.

The Craftsman of the magic stuff of self

Who labours at his high and difficult plan

In the wide workshop of the wonderful world,

Modelled in inward Time his rhythmic parts.

Then came the abrupt transcendent miracle:

The masked immaculate Grandeur could outline,

At travail in the occult womb of life,

His dreamed magnificence of things to be.

A crown of the architecture of the worlds,

A mystery of married Earth and Heaven

Annexed divinity to the mortal scheme.

A Seer was born, a shining Guest of Time.

For him mind’s limiting firmament ceased above,

In the griffin forefront of the Night and Day

A 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 covenants

And, striking off subjection’s rigorous clause,

Annulled the soul’s treaty with Nature’s nescience.

All the grey inhibitions were torn off

And 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 Ignorance 

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Wisdom upraised him to her master craft

And made him an arch-mason 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.

 

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 

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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.

A magical accord quickened and attuned

To ethereal symphonies the old earthy strings;

It raised the servitors of mind and life

To be happy partners in the soul’s response,

Tissue and nerve were turned to sensitive chords,

Records of lustre and ecstasy; it made

The body’s means the spirit’s acolytes.

A heavenlier function with a finer mode

Lit with its grace man’s outward earthliness;

The soul’s experience of its deeper sheaths

No more slept drugged by Matter’s dominance.

In the dead wall closing us from wider self,

Into a secrecy of apparent sleep,

The mystic tract beyond our waking thoughts,

A door parted, built in by Matter’s force,

Releasing things unseized by earthly sense:

A world unseen, unknown by outward mind

Appeared in the silent spaces of the soul.

He sat in secret chambers looking out

Into the luminous countries of the unborn

Where all things dreamed by the mind are seen and true

And all that the life longs for is drawn close.

He saw the Perfect in their starry homes

Wearing the glory of a deathless form 

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Lain in the arms of the Eternal’s peace,

Rapt in the heart-beats of God-ecstasy.

He lived in the mystic space where thought is born

And will is nursed by an ethereal Power

And fed on the white milk of the Eternal’s strengths

Till it grows into the likeness of a god.

In the Witness’s occult rooms with mind-built walls

On hidden interiors, lurking passages

Opened the windows of the inner sight.

He owned the house of undivided Time.

Lifting the heavy curtain of the flesh

He stood upon a threshold serpent-watched,

And peered into gleaming endless corridors,

Silent and listening in the silent heart

For the coming of the new and the unknown.

He gazed across the empty stillnesses

And heard the footsteps of the undreamed Idea

In the far avenues of the Beyond.

He heard the secret Voice, the Word that knows,

And saw the secret face that is our own.

The inner planes uncovered their crystal doors;

Strange powers and influences touched his life.

A vision came of higher realms than ours,

A consciousness of brighter fields and skies,

Of beings less circumscribed than brief-lived men

And subtler bodies than these passing frames,

Objects too fine for our material grasp,

Acts vibrant with a superhuman light

And movements pushed by a superconscient force,

And joys that never flowed through mortal limbs,

And lovelier scenes than earth’s and happier lives.

A consciousness of beauty and of bliss,

A knowledge which became what it perceived,

Replaced the separated sense and heart

And drew all Nature into its embrace.

The mind leaned out to meet the hidden worlds. 

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Air glowed and teemed with marvellous shapes and hues,

In the nostrils quivered celestial fragrances,

On the tongue lingered the honey of paradise.

A channel of universal harmony,

Hearing was a stream of magic audience,

A bed for occult sounds earth cannot hear.

Out of a covert tract of slumber self

The voice came of a truth submerged, unknown

That flows beneath the cosmic surfaces,

Only mid an omniscient silence heard,

Held by intuitive heart and secret sense.

It caught the burden of secrecies sealed and dumb,

It voiced the unfulfilled demand of earth

And the song of promise of unrealised heavens

And all that hides in an omnipotent Sleep.

In the unceasing drama carried by Time

On its long listening flood that bears the world’s

Insoluble doubt on a pilgrimage without goal,

A laughter of sleepless pleasure foamed and spumed

And murmurings of desire that cannot die:

A cry came of the world’s delight to be,

The grandeur and greatness of its will to live,

Recall of the soul’s adventure into space,

A traveller through the magic centuries

And being’s labour in Matter’s universe,

Its search for the mystic meaning of its birth

And joy of high spiritual response,

Its throb of satisfaction and content

In all the sweetness of the gifts of life,

Its large breath and pulse and thrill of hope and fear,

Its taste of pangs and tears and ecstasy,

Its rapture’s poignant beat of sudden bliss,

The sob of its passion and unending pain.

The murmur and whisper of the unheard sounds

Which crowd around our hearts but find no window

To enter, swelled into a canticle 

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Of all that suffers to be still unknown

And all that labours vainly to be born

And all the sweetness none will ever taste

And all the beauty that will never be.

Inaudible to our deaf mortal ears

The wide world-rhythms wove their stupendous chant

To which life strives to fit our rhyme-beats here,

Melting our limits in the illimitable,

Tuning the finite to infinity.

A low muttering rose from the subconscient caves,

The stammer of the primal ignorance;

Answer to that inarticulate questioning,

There stooped with lightning neck and thunder’s wings

A radiant hymn to the Inexpressible

And the anthem of the superconscient light.

All was revealed there none can here express;

Vision and dream were fables spoken by truth

Or symbols more veridical than fact,

Or were truths enforced by supernatural seals.

Immortal eyes approached and looked in his,

And beings of many kingdoms neared and spoke:

The ever-living whom we name as dead

Could leave their glory beyond death and birth

To utter the wisdom which exceeds all phrase:

The kings of evil and the kings of good,

Appellants at the reason’s judgment seat,

Proclaimed the gospel of their opposites,

And all believed themselves spokesmen of God:

The gods of light and titans of the dark

Battled for his soul as for a costly prize.

In every hour loosed from the quiver of Time

There rose a song of new discovery,

A bow-twang’s hum of young experiment.

Each day was a spiritual romance,

As if he was born into a bright new world;

Adventure leaped an unexpected friend, 

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And danger brought a keen sweet tang of joy:

Each happening was a deep experience.

There were high encounters, epic colloquies,

And counsels came couched in celestial speech,

And honeyed pleadings breathed from occult lips

To help the heart to yield to rapture’s call,

And sweet temptations stole from beauty’s realms

And sudden ecstasies from a world of bliss.

It was a reign of wonder and delight ;

All now his bright clairaudience could receive,

A contact thrilled of mighty unknown things.

Awakened to new unearthly closenesses,

The touch replied to subtle infinities,

And with a silver cry of opening gates

Sight’s lightnings leaped into the invisible.

Ever his consciousness and vision grew;

They took an ampler sweep, a loftier flight;

He passed the border marked for Matter’s rule

And passed the zone where thought replaces life.

Out of this world of signs suddenly he came

Into a silent self where world was not

And looked beyond into a nameless vast.

These symbol figures lost their right to live,

All tokens dropped our sense can recognise;

There the heart beat no more at body’s touch,

There the eyes gazed no more on beauty’s shape.

In rare and lucent intervals of hush

Into a signless region he could soar

Packed with the deep contents of formlessness

Where world was into a single being rapt

And all was known by the light of identity

And spirit was its own self-evidence.

The Supreme’s gaze looked out through human eyes

And saw all things and creatures as itself

And knew all thought and word as its own voice.

There unity is too close for search and clasp 

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And love is a yearning of the One for the One,

And beauty is a sweet difference of the Same

And oneness is the soul of multitude.

There all the truths unite in a single truth,

And all ideas rejoin Reality.

There knowing herself by her own termless self,

Wisdom supernal, wordless, absolute

Sat uncompanioned in the eternal Calm,

All-seeing, motionless, sovereign and alone.

There knowledge needs not words to embody Idea;

Idea, seeking a house in boundlessness,

Weary of its homeless immortality,

Asks not in thought’s carved brilliant cell to rest

Whose single window’s clipped outlook on things

Sees only a little arc of God’s vast sky.

The boundless with the boundless there consorts;

While there, one can be wider than the world;

While there, one is one’s own infinity.

His centre was no more in earthly mind,

A power of seeing silence filled his limbs:

Caught by a voiceless white epiphany

Into a vision that surpasses forms,

Into a living that surpasses life,

He neared the still consciousness sustaining all.

The voice that only by speech can move the mind

Became a silent knowledge in the soul;

The strength that only in action feels its truth

Was lodged now in a mute omnipotent peace.

A leisure in the labour of the worlds,

A pause in the joy and anguish of the search

Restored the stress of Nature to God’s calm.

A vast unanimity ended life’s debate.

The war of thoughts that fathers the universe,

The clash of forces struggling to prevail

In the tremendous shock that lights a star

As in the building of a grain of dust, 

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The grooves that turn their dumb ellipse in space

Ploughed by the seeking of the world’s desire,

The long regurgitations in Time’s flood,

The torment edging the dire force of lust

That wakes kinetic in earth’s dullard slime

And carves a personality out of mud,

The sorrow by which Nature’s hunger is fed,

The oestrus which creates with fire of pain,

The fate that punishes virtue with defeat,

The tragedy that destroys long happiness,

The weeping of Love, the quarrel of the Gods,

Ceased in a truth which lives in its own light.

His soul stood free, a witness and a king.

Absorbed no more in the moment-ridden flux

Where mind incessantly drifts as on a raft

Hurried from phenomenon to phenomenon,

He abode at rest in indivisible Time.

As if a story long written but acted now,

In his present he held his future and his past,

Felt in the seconds the uncounted years

And saw the hours like dots upon a page.

An aspect of the unknown Reality

Altered the meaning of the cosmic scene.

This huge material universe became

A small result of a stupendous force:

Overtaking the moment the eternal Ray

Illumined that which never yet was made.

Thought lay down in a mighty voicelessness;

The toiling thinker widened and grew still,

Wisdom transcendent touched his quivering heart:

His soul could sail beyond thought’s luminous bar;

Mind screened no more the shoreless infinite.

Across a void retreating sky he glimpsed

Through a last glimmer and drift of vanishing stars

The superconscient realms of motionless peace

Where judgment ceases and the word is mute 

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And the Unconceived lies pathless and alone.

There came not form or any mounting voice;

There only were Silence and the Absolute.

Out of that stillness mind new-born arose

And woke to truths once inexpressible,

And forms appeared, dumbly significant,

A seeing thought, a self-revealing voice.

He knew the source from which his spirit came:

Movement was married to the immobile Vast;

He plunged his roots into the Infinite,

He based his life upon Eternity.

 

Only a while at first these heavenlier states,

These large wide-poised upliftings could endure.

The high and luminous tension breaks too soon,

The body’s stone stillness and the life’s hushed trance,

The breathless might and calm of silent mind;

Or slowly they fail as sets a golden day.

The restless nether members tire of peace;

A nostalgia of old little works and joys,

A need to call back small familiar selves,

To tread the accustomed and inferior way,

The need to rest in a natural poise of fall,

As a child who learns to walk can walk not long,

Replace the titan will for ever to climb,

On the heart’s altar dim the sacred fire.

An old pull of subconscious cords renews;

It draws the unwilling spirit from the heights,

Or a dull gravitation drags us down

To the blind driven inertia of our base.

This too the supreme Diplomat can use,

He makes our fall a means for greater rise.

For into the ignorant nature’s gusty field,

Into the half-ordered chaos of mortal life

The formless Power, the Self of eternal light

Follow in the shadow of the spirit’s descent; 

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The twin duality for ever one

Chooses its home mid the tumults of the sense.

He comes unseen into our darker parts

And, curtained by the darkness, does his work,

A subtle and all-knowing guest and guide,

Till they too feel the need and will to change.

All here must learn to obey a higher law,

Our body’s cells must hold the Immortal’s flame.

Else would the spirit reach alone its source

Leaving a half-saved world to its dubious fate.

Nature would ever labour unredeemed;

Our earth would ever spin unhelped in space,

And this immense creation’s purpose fail

Till at last the frustrate universe sank undone.

Even his godlike strength to rise must fall:

His greater consciousness withdrew behind;

Dim and eclipsed, his human outside strove

To feel again the old sublimities,

Bring the high saving touch, the ethereal flame,

Call back to its dire need the divine Force.

Always the power poured back like sudden rain,

Or slowly in his breast a presence grew;

It clambered back to some remembered height

Or soared above the peak from which it fell.

Each time he rose there was a larger poise,

A dwelling on a higher spirit plane;

The Light remained in him a longer space.

In this oscillation between earth and heaven,

In this ineffable communion’s climb

There grew in him as grows a waxing moon

The glory of the integer of his soul.

A union of the Real with the unique,

A gaze of the Alone from every face,

The Presence of the Eternal in the hours

Widening the mortal mind’s half-look on things,

Bridging the gap between man’s force and Fate 

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Made whole the fragment-being we are here.

At last was won a firm spiritual poise,

A constant lodging in the Eternal’s realm,

A safety in the Silence and the Ray,

A settlement in the Immutable.

His heights of being lived in the still Self ;

His mind could rest on a supernal ground

And look down on the magic and the play

Where the God-child lies on the lap of Night and Dawn

And the Everlasting puts on Time’s disguise.

To the still heights and to the troubled depths

His equal spirit gave its vast assent:

A poised serenity of tranquil strength,

A wide unshaken look on Time’s unrest

Faced all experience with unaltered peace.

Indifferent to the sorrow and delight,

Untempted by the marvel and the call,

Immobile it beheld the flux of things,

Calm and apart supported all that is:

His spirit’s stillness helped the toiling world.

Inspired by silence and the closed eyes’ sight

His force could work with a new luminous art

On the crude material from which all is made

And the refusal of Inertia’s mass

And the grey front of the world’s Ignorance

And nescient Matter and the huge error of life.

As a sculptor chisels a deity out of stone

He slowly chipped off the dark envelope,

Line of defence of Nature’s ignorance,

The illusion and mystery of the Inconscient

In whose black pall the Eternal wraps his head

That he may act unknown in cosmic Time.

A splendour of self-creation from the peaks,

A transfiguration in the mystic depths,

A happier cosmic working could begin

And fashion the world-shape in him anew, 

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God found in Nature, Nature fulfilled in God.

Already in him was seen that task of Power:

Life made its home on the high tops of self;

His soul, mind, heart became a single sun;

Only life’s lower reaches remained dim.

But there too, in the uncertain shadow of life,

There was a labour and a fiery breath;

The ambiguous cowled celestial puissance worked

Watched by the inner Witness’s moveless peace.

Even on the struggling Nature left below

Strong periods of illumination came:

Lightnings of glory after glory burned,

Experience was a tale of blaze and fire,

Air rippled round the argosies of the Gods,

Strange riches sailed to him from the Unseen;

Splendours of insight filled the blank of thought,

Knowledge spoke to the inconscient stillnesses,

Rivers poured down of bliss and luminous force,

Visits of beauty, storm-sweeps of delight

Rained from the all-powerful Mystery above.

Thence stooped the eagles of Omniscience.

A dense veil was rent, a mighty whisper heard;

Repeated in the privacy of his soul,

A wisdom-cry from rapt transcendences

Sang on the mountains of an unseen world;

The voices that an inner listening hears

Conveyed to him their prophet utterances,

And flame-wrapt outbursts of the immortal Word

And flashes of an occult revealing Light

Approached him from the unreachable secrecy.

An inspired Knowledge sat enthroned within

Whose seconds illumined more than reason’s years:

An ictus of revealing lustre fell

As if a pointing accent upon Truth,

And like a sky-flare showing all the ground

A swift intuitive discernment shone. 

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One glance could separate the true and false,

Or raise its rapid torch-fire in the dark

To check the claimants crowding through mind’s gates

Covered by the forged signatures of the gods,

Detect the magic bride in her disguise

Or scan the apparent face of thought and life.

 

Oft inspiration with her lightning feet,

A sudden messenger from the all-seeing tops,

Traversed the soundless corridors of his mind

Bringing her rhythmic sense of hidden things.

A music spoke transcending mortal speech.

As if from a golden phial of the All-Bliss,

A joy of light, a joy of sudden sight,

A rapture of the thrilled undying Word

Poured into his heart as into an empty cup,

A repetition of God’s first delight

Creating in a young and virgin Time.

In a brief moment caught, a little space,

All-Knowledge packed into great wordless thoughts

Lodged in the expectant stillness of his depths

A crystal of the ultimate Absolute,

A portion of the inexpressible Truth

Revealed by silence to the silent soul.

The intense creatrix in his stillness wrought;

Her power fallen speechless grew more intimate;

She looked upon the seen and the unforeseen,

Unguessed domains she made her native field.

All-vision gathered into a single ray,

As when the eyes stare at an invisible point

Till through the intensity of one luminous spot

An apocalypse of a world of images

Enters into the kingdom of the seer.

A great nude arm of splendour suddenly rose;

It rent the gauze opaque of Nescience:

Her lifted finger’s keen unthinkable tip 

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Bared with a stab of flame the closed Beyond.

An eye awake in voiceless heights of trance,

A mind plucking at the unimaginable,

Overleaping with a sole and perilous bound

The high black wall hiding superconscience,

She broke in with inspired speech for scythe

And plundered the Unknowable’s vast estate.

A gleaner of infinitesimal grains of Truth,

A sheaf-binder of infinite experience,

She pierced the guarded mysteries of World-Force

And her magic methods wrapt in a thousand veils;

Or she gathered the lost secrets dropped by Time

In the dust and crannies of his mounting route

Mid old forsaken dreams of hastening Mind

And buried remnants of forgotten space.

A traveller between summit and abyss

She joined the distant ends, the viewless deeps,

Or streaked along the roads of Heaven and Hell

Pursuing all knowledge like a questing hound.

A reporter and scribe of hidden wisdom talk,

Her shining minutes of celestial speech,

Passed through the masked office of the occult mind,

Transmitting gave to prophet and to seer

The inspired body of the mystic Truth.

A recorder of the inquiry of the gods,

Spokesman of the silent seeings of the Supreme,

She brought immortal words to mortal men.

Above the reason’s brilliant slender curve,

Released like radiant air dimming a moon,

Broad spaces of a vision without line

Or limit swam into his spirit’s ken.

Oceans of being met his voyaging soul

Calling to infinite discovery;

Timeless domains of joy and absolute power

Stretched out surrounded by the eternal hush;

The ways that lead to endless happiness 

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Ran like dream-smiles through meditating vasts:

Disclosed stood up in a gold moment’s blaze

White sun-steppes in the pathless Infinite.

Along a naked curve in bourneless Self

The points that run through the closed heart of things

Shadowed the indeterminable line

That carries the Everlasting through the years.

The magician order of the cosmic Mind

Coercing the freedom of infinity

With the stark array of Nature’s symbol facts

And life’s incessant signals of event,

Transmuted chance recurrences into laws,

A chaos of signs into a universe.

Out of the rich wonders and the intricate whorls

Of the spirit’s dance with Matter as its mask

The balance of the world’s design grew clear,

Its symmetry of self-arranged effects

Managed in the deep perspectives of the soul,

And the realism of its illusive art,

Its logic of infinite intelligence,

Its magic of a changing eternity.

A glimpse was caught of things for ever unknown ;

The letters stood out of the unmoving Word.

In the immutable nameless Origin

Was seen emerging as from fathomless seas

The trail of the Ideas that made the world,

And, sown in the black earth of Nature’s trance,

The seed of the Spirit’s blind and huge desire

From which the tree of cosmos was conceived

And spread its magic arms through a dream of space.

Immense realities took on a shape:

There looked out from the shadow of the Unknown

The bodiless Namelessness that saw God born

And tries to gain from the mortal’s mind and soul

A deathless body and a divine name.

The immobile lips, the great surreal wings, 

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The visage masked by superconscient Sleep,

The eyes with their closed lids that see all things,

Appeared of the Architect who builds in trance.

The original Desire born in the Void

Peered out; he saw the hope that never sleeps,

The feet that run behind a fleeting fate,

The ineffable meaning of the endless dream.

As if a torch held by a power of God,

The radiant world of the everlasting Truth

Glimmered like a faint star bordering the night

Above the golden Overmind’s shimmering ridge.

Even were caught as through a cunning veil

The smile of love that sanctions the long game,

The calm indulgence and maternal breasts

Of Wisdom suckling the child-laughter of Chance,

Silence the nurse of the Almighty’s power,

The omniscient hush, womb of the immortal Word,

And of the Timeless the still brooding face,

And the creative eye of Eternity.

The inspiring goddess entered a mortal’s breast,

Made there her study of divining thought

And sanctuary of prophetic speech

And sat upon the tripod seat of mind:

All was made wide above, all lit below.

In darkness’ core she dug out wells of light,

On the undiscovered depths imposed a form,

Lent a vibrant cry to the unuttered vasts,

And through great shoreless, voiceless, starless breadths

Bore earthward fragments of revealing thought

Hewn from the silence of the Ineffable.

A voice in the heart uttered the unspoken Name,

A dream of seeking thought wandering through space

Entered the invisible and forbidden house:

The treasure was found of a supernal Day.

In the deep subconscient glowed her jewel-lamp;

Lifted, it showed the riches of the Cave 

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Where, by the miser traffickers of sense

Unused, guarded beneath Night’s dragon paws,

In folds of velvet darkness draped they sleep

Whose priceless value could have saved the world.

A darkness carrying morning in its breast

Looked for the eternal wide returning gleam,

Waiting the advent of a larger ray

And rescue of the lost herds of the Sun.

In a splendid extravagance of the waste of God

Dropped carelessly in creation’s spendthrift work,

Left in the chantiers of the bottomless world

And stolen by the robbers of the Deep,

The golden shekels of the Eternal lie,

Hoarded from touch and view and thought’s desire,

Locked in blind antres of the ignorant flood

Lest men should find them and be even as Gods.

A vision lightened on the viewless heights,

A wisdom illumined from the voiceless depths:

A deeper interpretation greatened Truth,

A grand reversal of the Night and Day;

All the world’s values changed heightening life’s aim;

A wiser word, a larger thought came in

Than what the slow labour of human mind can bring,

A secret sense awoke that could perceive

A Presence and a Greatness everywhere.

The universe was not now this senseless whirl

Borne round inert on an immense machine;

It cast away its grandiose lifeless front,

A mechanism no more or work of Chance,

But a living movement of the body of God.

A spirit hid in forces and in forms

Was the spectator of the mobile scene:

The beauty and the ceaseless miracle

Let in a glow of the Unmanifest:

The formless Everlasting moved in it

Seeking its own perfect form in souls and things. 

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Life kept no more a dull and meaningless shape.

In the struggle and upheaval of the world

He saw the labour of a godhead’s birth:

A secret knowledge masked as Ignorance;

Fate covered with unseen necessity

The game of chance of an omnipotent Will.

A glory and a rapture and a charm,

The All-Blissful sat unknown within the heart;

Earth’s pains were the ransom of its prisoned delight.

A glad communion tinged the passing hours;

The days were travellers on a destined road,

The nights companions of his musing spirit.

A heavenly impetus quickened all his breast;

The trudge of time changed to a splendid march;

The divine Dwarf towered to unconquered worlds,

Earth grew too narrow for his victory.

Once only registering the heavy tread

Of a blind Power on human littleness,

Life now became a sure approach to God,

Existence a divine experiment

And cosmos the soul’s opportunity.

The world was a conception and a birth

Of Spirit in Matter into living forms,

And Nature bore the Immortal in her womb,

That she might climb through him to eternal life.

His being lay down in bright immobile peace

And bathed in wells of pure spiritual light;

It wandered in wide fields of wisdom-self

Lit by the rays of an everlasting sun.

Even his body’s subtle self within

Could raise the earthly parts towards higher things

And feel on it the breath of heavenlier air.

Already it journeyed towards divinity:

Upbuoyed upon winged winds of rapid joy,

Upheld to a Light it could not always hold,

It left mind’s distance from the Truth supreme 

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And lost life’s incapacity for bliss.

All now suppressed in us began to emerge.

 

Thus came his soul’s release from Ignorance,

His mind and body’s first spiritual change.

A wide God-knowledge poured down from above,

A new world-knowledge broadened from within:

His daily thoughts looked up to the True and One,

His commonest doings welled from an inner Light.

Awakened to the lines that Nature hides,

Attuned to her movements that exceed our ken,

He grew one with a covert universe.

His grasp surprised her mightiest energies’ springs;

He spoke with the unknown Guardians of the worlds,

Forms he descried our mortal eyes see not.

His wide eyes bodied viewless entities,

He saw the cosmic forces at their work

And felt the occult impulse behind man’s will.

Time’s secrets were to him an oft-read book;

The records of the future and the past

Outlined their excerpts on the etheric page.

One and harmonious by the Maker’s skill,

The human in him paced with the divine.

His acts betrayed not the interior flame.

This forged the greatness of his front to earth.

A genius heightened in his body’s cells

That knew the meaning of his fate-hedged works

Akin to the march of unaccomplished Powers

Beyond life’s arc in spirit’s immensities.

Apart he lived in his mind’s solitude,

A demigod shaping the lives of men:

One soul’s ambition lifted up the race;

A Power worked, but none knew whence it came.

The universal strengths were linked with his;

Filling earth’s smallness with their boundless breadths,

He drew the energies that transmute an age. 

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Immeasurable by the common look,

He made great dreams a mould for coming things

And cast his deeds like bronze to front the years.

His walk through Time outstripped the human stride.

Lonely his days and splendid like the sun’s.

 

End of Canto Three 

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