Savitri

Canto Two

 

The Kingdom of Subtle Matter 

 

In the impalpable field of secret self,

This little outer being’s vast support

Parted from vision by earth’s solid fence,

He came into a magic crystal air

And found a life that lived not by the flesh,

A light that made visible immaterial things.

A fine degree in wonder’s hierarchy,

The kingdom of subtle Matter’s faery craft

Outlined against a sky of vivid hues,

Leaping out of a splendour-trance and haze,

The wizard revelation of its front.

A world of lovelier forms lies near to ours,

Where, undisguised by earth’s deforming sight,

All shapes are beautiful and all things true.

In that lucent ambiance mystically clear

The eyes were doors to a celestial sense,

Hearing was music and the touch a charm

And the heart drew a deeper breath of power.

There dwell earth-nature’s shining origins:

The perfect plans on which she moulds her works,

The distant outcomes of her travailing force

Repose in a framework of established fate.

Attempted vainly now or won in vain,

Already were mapped and scheduled there the time

And the figure of her future sovereignties

In the sumptuous lineaments traced by desire.

The golden issue of mind’s labyrinth plots,

The riches unfound or still uncaught by our lives

Unsullied by the attaint of mortal thought

Abide in that pellucid atmosphere.

Our vague beginnings are overtaken there, 

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Our middle terms sketched out in prescient lines,

Our finished ends anticipated live.

This brilliant roof of our descending plane,

Intercepting the free boon of heaven’s air,

Admits small inrushes of a mighty breath

Or fragrant circuits through gold lattices;

It shields our ceiling of terrestrial mind

From deathless suns and the streaming of God’s rain,

Yet canalises a strange irised glow,

And bright dews drip from the Immortal’s sky.

A passage for the Powers that move our days,

Occult behind this grosser Nature’s walls,

A gossamer marriage-hall of Mind with Form

Is hidden by a tapestry of dreams;

Heaven’s meanings steal through it as through a veil,

Its inner sight sustains this outer scene.

A finer consciousness with happier lines,

It has a tact our touch cannot attain,

A purity of sense we never feel;

Its intercession with the eternal Ray

Inspires our transient earth’s brief-lived attempts

At beauty and the perfect shape of things.

In rooms of the young divinity of power

And early play of the eternal Child

The embodiments of his outwinging thoughts

Laved in a bright everlasting wonder’s tints

And lulled by whispers of that lucid air

Take dream-hued rest like birds on timeless trees

Before they dive to float on earth-time’s sea.

All that here seems has lovelier semblance there.

Whatever our hearts conceive, our heads create,

Some high original beauty forfeiting,

Thence exiled here consents to an earthly tinge.

Whatever is here of visible charm and grace

Finds there its faultless and immortal lines;

All that is beautiful here is there divine. 

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Figures are there undreamed by mortal mind:

Bodies that have no earthly counterpart

Traverse the inner eye’s illumined trance

And ravish the heart with their celestial tread

Persuading heaven to inhabit that wonder sphere.

The future’s marvels wander in its gulfs;

Things old and new are fashioned in those depths:

A carnival of beauty crowds the heights

In that magic kingdom of ideal sight.

In its antechambers of splendid privacy

Matter and soul in conscious union meet

Like lovers in a lonely secret place:

In the clasp of a passion not yet unfortunate

They join their strength and sweetness and delight

And mingling make the high and low worlds one.

Intruder from the formless Infinite

Daring to break into the Inconscient’s reign,

The spirit’s leap towards body touches ground.

As yet unwrapped in earthly lineaments,

Already it wears outlasting death and birth,

Convincing the abyss by heavenly form,

A covering of its immortality

Alive to the lustre of the wearer’s rank,

Fit to endure the rub of Change and Time.

A tissue mixed of the soul’s radiant light

And Matter’s substance of sign-burdened Force,—

Imagined vainly in our mind’s thin air

An abstract phantasm mould of mental make,—

It feels what earthly bodies cannot feel

And is more real than this grosser frame.

After the falling of mortality’s cloak

Lightened is its weight to heighten its ascent;

Refined to the touch of finer environments

It drops old patterned palls of denser stuff,

Cancels the grip of earth’s descending pull

And bears the soul from world to higher world, 

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Till in the naked ether of the peaks

The spirit simplicity alone is left,

The eternal being’s first transparent robe.

But when it must come back to its mortal load

And the hard ensemble of earth’s experience,

Then its return resumes that heavier dress.

For long before earth’s solid vest was forged

By the technique of the atomic Void,

A lucent envelope of self-disguise

Was woven round the secret spirit in things.

The subtle realms from those bright sheaths are made.

This wonder-world with all its radiant boon

Of vision and inviolate happiness,

Only for expression cares and perfect form;

Fair on its peaks, it has dangerous nether planes;

Its light draws towards the verge of Nature’s lapse;

It lends beauty to the terror of the gulfs

And fascinating eyes to perilous Gods,

Invests with grace the demon and the snake.

Its trance imposes earth’s inconscience,

Immortal it weaves for us death’s sombre robe

And authorises our mortality.

This medium serves a greater Consciousness:

A vessel of its concealed autocracy,

It is the subtle ground of Matter’s worlds,

It is the immutable in their mutable forms,

In the folds of its creative memory

It guards the deathless type of perishing things:

Its lowered potencies found our fallen strengths;

Its thought invents our reasoned ignorance;

Its sense fathers our body’s reflexes.

Our secret breath of untried mightier force,

The lurking sun of an instant’s inner sight,

Its fine suggestions are a covert fount

For our iridescent rich imaginings

Touching things common with transfiguring hues 

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Till even earth’s mud grows rich and warm with the skies

And a glory gleams from the soul’s decadence.

Its knowledge is our error’s starting-point;

Its beauty dons our mud-mask ugliness,

Its artist good begins our evil’s tale.

A heaven of creative truths above,

A cosmos of harmonious dreams between,

A chaos of dissolving forms below,

It plunges lost in our inconscient base.

Out of its fall our denser Matter came.

 

Thus taken was God’s plunge into the Night.

This fallen world became a nurse of souls

Inhabited by concealed divinity.

A Being woke and lived in the meaningless void,

A world-wide Nescience strove towards life and thought,

A Consciousness plucked out from mindless sleep.

All here is driven by an insentient will.

Thus fallen, inconscient, frustrate, dense, inert,

Sunk into inanimate and torpid drowse

Earth lay, a drudge of sleep, forced to create

By a subconscient yearning memory

Left from a happiness dead before she was born,

An alien wonder on her senseless breast.

This mire must harbour the orchid and the rose,

From her blind unwilling substance must emerge

A beauty that belongs to happier spheres.

This is the destiny bequeathed to her,

As if a slain god left a golden trust

To a blind force and an imprisoned soul.

An immortal godhead’s perishable parts

She must reconstitute from fragments lost,

Re-word from a document complete elsewhere

Her doubtful title to her divine Name.

A residue her sole inheritance,

All things she carries in her shapeless dust. 

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Her giant energy tied to petty forms

In the slow tentative motion of her power

With only frail blunt instruments for use,

She has accepted as her nature’s need

And given to man as his stupendous work

A labour to the gods impossible.

A life living hardly in a field of death

Its portion claims of immortality;

A brute half-conscious body serves as means

A mind that must recover a knowledge lost

Held in stone-grip by the world’s inconscience,

And wearing still these countless knots of Law

A spirit bound stand up as Nature’s king.

 

A mighty kinship is this daring’s cause.

All we attempt in this imperfect world,

Looks forward or looks back beyond Time’s gloss

To its pure idea and firm inviolate type

In an absolute creation’s flawless skill.

To seize the absolute in shapes that pass,

To feel the eternal’s touch in time-made things,

This is the law of all perfection here.

A fragment here is caught of heaven’s design;

Else could we never hope for greater life

And ecstasy and glory could not be.

Even in the littleness of our mortal state,

Even in this prison-house of outer form,

A brilliant passage for the infallible Flame

Is driven through gross walls of nerve and brain,

A Splendour presses or a Power breaks through,

Earth’s great dull barrier is removed awhile,

The inconscient seal is lifted from our eyes

And we grow vessels of creative might.

The enthusiasm of a divine surprise

Pervades our life, a mystic stir is felt,

A joyful anguish trembles in our limbs; 

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A dream of beauty dances through the heart,

A thought from the eternal Mind draws near,

Intimations cast from the Invisible

Awaking from Infinity’s sleep come down,

Symbols of That which never yet was made.

But soon the inert flesh responds no more,

Then sinks the sacred orgy of delight,

The blaze of passion and the tide of power

Are taken from us and, though a glowing form

Abides astonishing earth, imagined supreme,

Too little of what was meant has left a trace.

Earth’s eyes half see, her forces half create;

Her rarest works are copies of heaven’s art.

A radiance of a golden artifice,

A masterpiece of inspired device and rule,

Her forms hide what they house and only mime

The unseized miracle of self-born shapes

That live for ever in the Eternal’s gaze.

Here in a difficult half-finished world

Is a slow toiling of unconscious Powers;

Here is man’s ignorant divining mind,

His genius born from an inconscient soil.

To copy on earth’s copies is his art.

For when he strives for things surpassing earth,

Too rude the workman’s tools, too crude his stuff,

And hardly with his heart’s blood he achieves

His transient house of the divine Idea,

His figure of a Time-inn for the Unborn.

Our being thrills with high far memories

And would bring down their dateless meanings here,

But, too divine for earthly Nature’s scheme,

Beyond our reach the eternal marvels blaze.

Absolute they dwell, unborn, immutable,

Immaculate in the Spirit’s deathless air,

Immortal in a world of motionless Time

And an unchanging muse of deep self-space. 

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Only when we have climbed above ourselves,

A line of the Transcendent meets our road

And joins us to the timeless and the true;

It brings to us the inevitable word,

The godlike act, the thoughts that never die.

A ripple of light and glory wraps the brain,

And travelling down the moment’s vanishing route

The figures of eternity arrive.

As the mind’s visitors or the heart’s guests

They espouse our mortal brevity awhile,

Or seldom in some rare delivering glimpse

Are caught by our vision’s delicate surmise.

Although beginnings only and first attempts,

These glimmerings point to the secret of our birth

And the hidden miracle of our destiny.

What we are there and here on earth shall be

Is imaged in a contact and a call.

As yet earth’s imperfection is our sphere,

Our nature’s glass shows not our real self;

That greatness still abides held back within.

Earth’s doubting future hides our heritage:

The Light now distant shall grow native here,

The Strength that visits us our comrade power;

The Ineffable shall find a secret voice,

The Imperishable burn through Matter’s screen

Making this mortal body godhead’s robe.

The Spirit’s greatness is our timeless source

And it shall be our crown in endless Time.

A vast Unknown is round us and within;

All things are wrapped in the dynamic One:

A subtle link of union joins all life.

Thus all creation is a single chain:

We are not left alone in a closed scheme

Between a driving of inconscient Force

And an incommunicable Absolute.

Our life is a spur in a sublime soul-range, 

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Our being looks beyond its walls of mind

And it communicates with greater worlds;

There are brighter earths and wider heavens than ours.

There are realms where Being broods in its own depths;

It feels in its immense dynamic core

Its nameless, unformed, unborn potencies

Cry for expression in the unshaped Vast:

Ineffable beyond Ignorance and death,

The images of its ever-living Truth

Look out from a chamber of its self-rapt soul:

As if to its own inner witness gaze

The Spirit holds up its mirrored self and works,

The power and passion of its timeless heart,

The figures of its formless ecstasy,

The grandeurs of its multitudinous might.

Thence comes the mystic substance of our souls

Into the prodigy of our nature’s birth,

There is the unfallen height of all we are

And dateless fount of all we hope to be.

On every plane the hieratic Power,

Initiate of the unspoken verities,

Dreams to transcribe and make a part of life

In its own native style and living tongue

Some trait of the perfection of the Unborn,

Some vision seen in the omniscient Light,

Some far tune of the immortal rhapsodist Voice,

Some rapture of the all-creating Bliss,

Some form and plan of the Beauty unutterable.

Worlds are there nearer to those absolute realms,

Where the response to Truth is swift and sure

And spirit is not hampered by its frame

And hearts by sharp division seized and rent

And delight and beauty are inhabitants

And love and sweetness are the law of life.

A finer substance in a subtler mould

Embodies the divinity earth but dreams; 

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Its strength can overtake joy’s running feet;

Overleaping the fixed hurdles set by Time,

The rapid net of an intuitive clasp

Captures the fugitive happiness we desire.

A Nature lifted by a larger breath,

Plastic and passive to the all-shaping Fire,

Answers the flaming Godhead’s casual touch:

Immune from our inertia of response

It hears the word to which our hearts are deaf,

Adopts the seeing of immortal eyes

And, traveller on the roads of line and hue,

Pursues the spirit of beauty to its home.

Thus we draw near to the All-Wonderful

Following his rapture in things as sign and guide;

Beauty is his footprint showing us where he has passed,

Love is his heart beat’s rhythm in mortal breasts,

Happiness the smile on his adorable face.

A communion of spiritual entities,

A genius of creative Immanence,

Makes all creation deeply intimate:

A fourth dimension of aesthetic sense

Where all is in ourselves, ourselves in all,

To the cosmic wideness re-aligns our souls.

A kindling rapture joins the seer and seen;

The craftsman and the craft grown inly one

Achieve perfection by the magic throb

And passion of their close identity.

All that we slowly piece from gathered parts,

Or by long labour stumblingly evolve,

Is there self-born by its eternal right.

In us too the intuitive Fire can burn;

An agent Light, it is coiled in our folded hearts,

On the celestial levels is its home:

Descending, it can bring those heavens here.

But rarely burns the flame nor burns for long,

The joy it calls from those diviner heights 

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Brings brief magnificent reminiscences

And high splendid glimpses of interpreting thought,

But not the utter vision and delight.

A veil is kept, something is still held back,

Lest, captives of the beauty and the joy,

Our souls forget to the Highest to aspire.

 

In that fair subtle realm behind our own

The form is all, and physical gods are kings.

The inspiring Light plays in fine boundaries;

A faultless beauty comes by Nature’s grace;

There liberty is perfection’s guarantee:

Although the absolute Image lacks, the Word

Incarnate, the sheer spiritual ecstasy,

All is a miracle of symmetric charm,

A fantasy of perfect line and rule.

There all feel satisfied in themselves and whole,

A rich completeness is by limit made,

Marvel in an utter littleness abounds,

An intricate rapture riots in a small space:

Each rhythm is kin to its environment,

Each line is perfect and inevitable,

Each object faultlessly built for charm and use.

All is enamoured of its own delight.

Intact it lives of its perfection sure

In a heaven-pleased self-glad immunity;

Content to be, it has need of nothing more.

Here was not futile effort’s broken heart:

Exempt from the ordeal and the test,

Empty of opposition and of pain,

It was a world that could not fear nor grieve.

It had no grace of error or defeat,

It had no room for fault, no power to fail.

Out of some packed self-bliss it drew at once

Its form-discoveries of the mute Idea

And the miracle of its rhythmic thoughts and acts, 

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Its clear technique of firm and rounded lives,

Its gracious people of inanimate shapes

And glory of breathing bodies like our own.

Amazed, his senses ravished with delight,

He moved in a divine, yet kindred world

Admiring marvellous forms so near to ours

Yet perfect like the playthings of a god,

Deathless in the aspect of mortality.

In their narrow and exclusive absolutes

The finite’s ranked supremacies throned abide;

It dreams not ever of what might have been;

Only in boundaries can this absolute live.

In a supremeness bound to its own plan

Where all was finished and no widths were left,

No space for shadows of the immeasurable,

No room for the incalculable’s surprise,

A captive of its own beauty and ecstasy,

In a magic circle wrought the enchanted Might.

The spirit stood back effaced behind its frame.

Admired for the bright finality of its lines

A blue horizon limited the soul;

Thought moved in luminous facilities,

The outer ideal’s shallows its swim-range:

Life in its boundaries lingered satisfied

With the small happiness of the body’s acts.

Assigned as Force to a bound corner Mind,

Attached to the safe paucity of her room,

She did her little works and played and slept

And thought not of a greater work undone.

Forgetful of her violent vast desires,

Forgetful of the heights to which she rose,

Her walk was fixed within a radiant groove.

The beautiful body of a soul at ease,

Like one who laughs in sweet and sunlit groves,

Childlike she swung in her gold cradle of joy.

The spaces’ call reached not her charmed abode, 

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She had no wings for wide and dangerous flight,

She faced no peril of sky or of abyss,

She knew no vistas and no mighty dreams,

No yearning for her lost infinitudes.

A perfect picture in a perfect frame,

This faery artistry could not keep his will:

Only a moment’s fine release it gave;

A careless hour was spent in a slight bliss.

Our spirit tires of being’s surfaces,

Transcended is the splendour of the form;

It turns to hidden powers and deeper states.

So now he looked beyond for greater light.

His soul’s peak-climb abandoning in its rear

This brilliant courtyard of the House of Days,

He left that fine material Paradise.

His destiny lay beyond in larger Space.

 

End of Canto Two 

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