Savitri

Canto Two 

 

The Parable of the Search for the Soul 

 

As in the vigilance of the sleepless night

Through the slow heavy-footed silent hours,

Repressing in her bosom its load of grief,

She sat staring at the dumb tread of Time

And the approach of ever-nearing Fate,

A summons from her being’s summit came,

A sound, a call that broke the seals of Night.

Above her brows where will and knowledge meet

A mighty Voice invaded mortal space.

It seemed to come from inaccessible heights

And yet was intimate with all the world

And knew the meaning of the steps of Time

And saw eternal destiny’s changeless scene

Filling the far prospect of the cosmic gaze.

As the Voice touched, her body became a stark

And rigid golden statue of motionless trance,

A stone of God lit by an amethyst soul.

Around her body’s stillness all grew still:

Her heart listened to its slow measured beats,

Her mind renouncing thought heard and was mute:

“Why camest thou to this dumb deathbound earth,

This ignorant life beneath indifferent skies

Tied like a sacrifice on the altar of Time,

O spirit, O immortal energy,

If ’twas to nurse grief in a helpless heart

Or with hard tearless eyes await thy doom?

Arise, O soul, and vanquish Time and Death.”

But Savitri’s heart replied in the dim night:

“My strength is taken from me and given to Death,

Why should I lift my hands to the shut heavens

Or struggle with mute inevitable Fate 

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Or hope in vain to uplift an ignorant race

Who hug their lot and mock the saviour Light

And see in Mind Wisdom’s sole tabernacle,

In its harsh peak and its inconscient base

A rock of safety and an anchor of sleep?

Is there a God whom any cry can move?

He sits in peace and leaves the mortal’s strength

Impotent against his calm omnipotent Law

And Inconscience and the almighty hands of Death.

What need have I, what need has Satyavan

To avoid the black meshed net, the dismal door,

Or call a mightier Light into life’s closed room,

A greater Law into man’s little world?

Why should I strive with earth’s unyielding laws

Or stave off death’s inevitable hour?

This surely is best to pactise with my fate

And follow close behind my lover’s steps

And pass through night from twilight to the sun

Across the tenebrous river that divides

The adjoining parishes of earth and heaven.

Then could we lie inarmed breast upon breast,

Untroubled by thought, untroubled by our hearts,

Forgetting man and life and time and its hours,

Forgetting eternity’s call, forgetting God.”

The Voice replied: “Is this enough, O spirit?

And what shall thy soul say when it wakes and knows

The work was left undone for which it came?

Or is this all for thy being born on earth

Charged with a mandate from eternity,

A listener to the voices of the years,

A follower of the footprints of the gods,

To pass and leave unchanged the old dusty laws?

Shall there be no new tables, no new Word,

No greater light come down upon the earth

Delivering her from her unconsciousness,

Man’s spirit from unalterable fate? 

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Cam’st thou not down to open the doors of Fate,

The iron doors that seemed for ever closed,

And lead man to truth’s wide and golden road

That runs through finite things to eternity?

Is this then the report that I must make,

My head bowed with shame before the Eternal’s seat,—

His power he kindled in thy body has failed,

His labourer returns, her task undone?”

Then Savitri’s heart fell mute, it spoke no word.

But holding back her troubled rebel heart,

Abrupt, erect and strong, calm like a hill,

Surmounting the seas of mortal ignorance,

Its peak immutable above mind’s air,

A Power within her answered the still Voice:

“I am thy portion here charged with thy work,

As thou myself seated for ever above,

Speak to my depths, O great and deathless Voice,

Command, for I am here to do thy will.”

The Voice replied: “Remember why thou cam’st:

Find out thy soul, recover thy hid self,

In silence seek God’s meaning in thy depths,

Then mortal nature change to the divine.

Open God’s door, enter into his trance.

Cast Thought from thee, that nimble ape of Light:

In his tremendous hush stilling thy brain

His vast Truth wake within and know and see.

Cast from thee sense that veils thy spirit’s sight:

In the enormous emptiness of thy mind

Thou shalt see the Eternal’s body in the world,

Know him in every voice heard by thy soul:

In the world’s contacts meet his single touch;

All things shall fold thee into his embrace.

Conquer thy heart’s throbs, let thy heart beat in God:

Thy nature shall be the engine of his works,

Thy voice shall house the mightiness of his Word:

Then shalt thou harbour my force and conquer Death.” 

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Then Savitri by her doomed husband sat,

Still rigid in her golden motionless pose,

A statue of the fire of the inner sun.

In the black night the wrath of storm swept by,

The thunder crashed above her, the rain hissed,

Its million footsteps pattered on the roof.

Impassive mid the movement and the cry,

Witness of the thoughts of mind, the moods of life,

She looked into herself and sought for her soul.

 

A dream disclosed to her the cosmic past,

The crypt-seed and the mystic origins,

The shadowy beginnings of world-fate:

A lamp of symbol lighting hidden truth

Imaged to her the world’s significance.

In the indeterminate formlessness of Self

Creation took its first mysterious steps,

It made the body’s shape a house of soul

And Matter learned to think and person grew;

She saw Space peopled with the seeds of life

And saw the human creature born in Time.

At first appeared a dim half-neutral tide

Of being emerging out of infinite Nought:

A consciousness looked at the inconscient Vast

And pleasure and pain stirred in the insensible Void.

All was the deed of a blind World-Energy:

Unconscious of her own exploits she worked,

Shaping a universe out of the Inane.

In fragmentary beings she grew aware:

A chaos of little sensibilities

Gathered round a small ego’s pinpoint head;

In it a sentient creature found its poise,

It moved and lived a breathing, thinking whole.

On a dim ocean of subconscient life

A formless surface consciousness awoke:

A stream of thoughts and feelings came and went, 

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A foam of memories hardened and became

A bright crust of habitual sense and thought,

A seat of living personality

And recurrent habits mimicked permanence.

Mind nascent laboured out a mutable form,

It built a mobile house on shifting sands,

A floating isle upon a bottomless sea.

A conscious being was by this labour made;

It looked around it on its difficult field

In the green wonderful and perilous earth;

It hoped in a brief body to survive,

Relying on Matter’s false eternity.

It felt a godhead in its fragile house;

It saw blue heavens, dreamed immortality.

A conscious soul in the Inconscient’s world

Hidden behind our thoughts and hopes and dreams,

An indifferent Master signing Nature’s acts

Leaves the vicegerent mind a seeming king.

In his floating house upon the sea of Time

This regent sits at work and never rests:

He is a puppet of the dance of Time;

He is driven by the hours, the moment’s call

Compels him with the thronging of life’s need

And the babel of the voices of the world.

This mind no silence knows nor dreamless sleep,

In the incessant circling of its steps

Thoughts tread for ever through the listening brain;

It toils like a machine and cannot stop.

Into the body’s many-storeyed rooms

Endless crowd down the dream-god’s messages.

All is a hundred-toned murmur and babble and stir,

There is a tireless running to and fro,

A haste of movement and a ceaseless cry,

The hurried servant senses answer apace

To every knock upon the outer doors,

Bring in life’s visitors, report each call, 

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Admit the thousand queries and the calls

And the messages of communicating minds

And the heavy business of unnumbered lives

And all the thousandfold commerce of the world.

Even in the tracts of sleep is scant repose;

He mocks life’s steps in strange subconscient dreams,

He strays in a sublime realm of symbol scenes,

His night with thin-air visions and dim forms

He packs or peoples with slight drifting shapes

And only a moment spends in silent self.

Adventuring into infinite mind-space

He unfolds his wings of thought in inner air,

Or travelling in imagination’s car

Crosses the globe, journeys beneath the stars,

To subtle worlds takes his ethereal course,

Visits the gods on life’s miraculous peaks,

Communicates with Heaven, tampers with Hell.

This is the little surface of man’s life.

He is this and he is all the universe;

He scales the Unseen, his depths dare the Abyss;

A whole mysterious world is locked within.

Unknown to himself lives a hidden king

Behind rich tapestries in great secret rooms;

An epicure of the spirit’s unseen joys,

He lives on the sweet honey of solitude:

A nameless god in an unapproachable fane,

In the secret adytum of his inmost soul

He guards the being’s covered mysteries

Beneath the threshold behind shadowy gates

Or shut in vast cellars of inconscient sleep.

The immaculate Divine All-Wonderful

Casts into the argent purity of his soul

His splendour and his greatness and the light

Of self-creation in Time’s infinity

As into a sublimely mirroring glass.

Man in the world’s life works out the dreams of God. 

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But all is there, even God’s opposites;

He is a little front of Nature’s works,

A thinking outline of a cryptic Force.

All she reveals in him that is in her,

Her glories walk in him and her darknesses.

Man’s house of life holds not the gods alone:

There are occult Shadows, there are tenebrous Powers,

Inhabitants of life’s ominous nether rooms,

A shadowy world’s stupendous denizens.

A careless guardian of his nature’s powers,

Man harbours dangerous forces in his house.

The Titan and the Fury and the Djinn

Lie bound in the subconscient’s cavern pit

And the Beast grovels in his antre den:

Dire mutterings rise and murmur in their drowse.

Insurgent sometimes raises its huge head

A monstrous mystery lurking in life’s deeps,

The mystery of dark and fallen worlds,

The dread visages of the adversary Kings.

The dreadful powers held down within his depths

Become his masters or his ministers;

Enormous they invade his bodily house,

Can act in his acts, infest his thought and life.

Inferno surges into the human air

And touches all with a perverting breath.

Grey forces like a thin miasma creep

Stealing through chinks in his closed mansion’s doors,

Discolouring the walls of upper mind

In which he lives his fair and specious life,

And leave behind a stench of sin and death:

Not only rise in him perverse drifts of thought

And formidable formless influences,

But there come presences and awful shapes:

Tremendous forms and faces mount dim steps

And stare at times into his living-rooms,

Or called up for a moment’s passionate work 

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Lay a dire custom’s claim upon his heart:

Aroused from sleep, they can be bound no more.

Afflicting the daylight and alarming night,

Invading at will his outer tenement

The stark gloom’s grisly dire inhabitants

Mounting into God’s light all light perturb.

All they have touched or seen they make their own,

In Nature’s basement lodge, mind’s passages fill,

Disrupt thought’s links and musing sequences,

Break through the soul’s stillness with a noise and cry

Or they call the inhabitants of the abyss,

Invite the instincts to forbidden joys,

A laughter wake of dread demoniac mirth

And with nether riot and revel shake life’s floor.

Impotent to quell his terrible prisoners,

Appalled the householder helpless sits above,

Taken from him his house is his no more.

He is bound and forced, a victim of the play,

Or, allured, joys in the mad and mighty din.

His nature’s dangerous forces have arisen

And hold at will a rebel’s holiday.

Aroused from the darkness where they crouched in the depths,

Prisoned from the sight, they can be held no more;

His nature’s impulses are now his lords.

Once quelled or wearing specious names and vests

Infernal elements, demon powers are there.

Man’s lower nature hides these awful guests.

Their vast contagion grips sometimes man’s world.

An awful insurgence overpowers man’s soul.

In house and house the huge uprising grows;

Hell’s companies are loosed to do their work,

Into the earth-ways they break out from all doors,

Invade with blood-lust and the will to slay

And fill with horror and carnage God’s fair world.

Death and his hunters stalk a victim earth;

The terrible Angel smites at every door: 

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An awful laughter mocks at the world’s pain

And massacre and torture grin at Heaven:

All is the prey of the destroying force;

Creation rocks and tremble top and base.

This evil Nature housed in human hearts

A foreign inhabitant, a dangerous guest:

The soul that harbours it it can dislodge,

Expel the householder, possess the house.

An opposite potency contradicting God,

A momentary Evil’s almightiness

Has straddled the straight path of Nature’s acts.

It imitates the Godhead it denies,

Puts on his figure and assumes his face.

A Manichean creator and destroyer,

This can abolish man, annul his world.

But there is a guardian power, there are Hands that save,

Calm eyes divine regard the human scene.

All the world’s possibilities in man

Are waiting as the tree waits in its seed:

His past lives in him; it drives his future’s pace;

His present’s acts fashion his coming fate.

The unborn gods hide in his house of Life.

The daemons of the unknown overshadow his mind

Casting their dreams into live moulds of thought,

The moulds in which his mind builds out its world.

His mind creates around him its universe.

All that has been renews in him its birth,

All that can be is figured in his soul.

Issuing in deeds it scores on the roads of the world,

Obscure to the interpreting reason’s guess,

Lines of the secret purpose of the gods.

In strange directions runs the intricate plan;

Held back from human foresight is their end.

And the far intention of some ordering Will

Or the order of life’s arbitrary Chance

Finds out its settled poise and fated hour. 

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Our surface watched in vain by reason’s gaze,

Invaded by the impromptus of the unseen,

Helpless records the accidents of Time,

The involuntary turns and leaps of life.

Only a little of us foresees its steps,

Only a little has will and purposed pace.

A vast subliminal is man’s measureless part.

The dim subconscient is his cavern base.

Abolished vainly in the walks of Time

Our past lives still in our unconscious selves

And by the weight of its hidden influences

Is shaped our future’s self-discovery.

Thus all is an inevitable chain

And yet a series seems of accidents.

The unremembering hours repeat the old acts,

Our dead past round our future’s ankles clings

And drags back the new nature’s glorious stride,

Or from its buried corpse old ghosts arise,

Old thoughts, old longings, dead passions live again,

Recur in sleep or move the waking man

To words that force the barrier of the lips,

To deeds that suddenly start and o’erleap

His head of reason and his guardian will.

An old self lurks in the new self we are;

Hardly we escape from what we once had been:

In the dim gleam of habit’s passages,

In the subconscient’s darkling corridors

All things are carried by the porter nerves

And nothing checked by subterranean mind,

Unstudied by the guardians of the doors

And passed by a blind instinctive memory,

The old gang dismissed, old cancelled passports serve,

Nothing is wholly dead that once has lived.

In dim tunnels of the world’s being and in ours

The old rejected nature still survives;

The corpses of its slain thoughts raise their heads 

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And visit mind’s nocturnal walks in sleep,

Its stifled impulses breathe and move and rise;

All keeps a phantom immortality.

Irresistible are Nature’s sequences:

The seeds of sins renounced sprout from hid soil;

The evil cast from our hearts once more we face.

Our dead selves come to slay our living soul.

A portion of us lives in present Time,

A secret mass in dim inconscience gropes;

Out of the inconscient and subliminal

Arisen, we live in mind’s uncertain light

And strive to know and master a dubious world

Whose purpose and meaning are hidden from our sight.

Above us dwells a superconscient god

Hidden in the mystery of his own light:

Around us is a vast of ignorance

Lit by the uncertain ray of human mind,

Below us sleeps the Inconscient dark and mute.

But this is only Matter’s first self-view,

A scale and series in the Ignorance.

This is not all we are or all our world.

Our greater self of knowledge waits for us,

A supreme light in the truth-conscious Vast:

It sees from summits beyond thinking mind,

It moves in a splendid air transcending life.

It shall descend and make earth’s life divine.

Truth made the world, not a blind Nature-Force.

For here are not our large diviner heights;

Our summits in the superconscient’s blaze

Are glorious with the very face of God:

There is our aspect of eternity,

There is the figure of the god we are,

His young unaging look on deathless things,

His joy in our escape from death and Time,

His immortality and light and bliss.

Our larger being sits behind cryptic walls: 

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There are greatnesses hidden in our unseen parts

That wait their hour to step into life’s front:

We feel an aid from deep indwelling Gods:

One speaks within, Light comes to us from above.

Our soul from its mysterious chamber acts;

Its influence pressing on our heart and mind

Pushes them to exceed their mortal selves.

It seeks for Good and Beauty and for God;

We see beyond self’s walls our limitless self,

We gaze through our world’s glass at half-seen vasts,

We hunt for the Truth behind apparent things.

Our inner Mind dwells in a larger light,

Its brightness looks at us through hidden doors;

Our members luminous grow and Wisdom’s face

Appears in the doorway of the mystic ward:

When she enters into our house of outward sense,

Then we look up and see, above, her sun.

A mighty life-self with its inner powers

Supports the dwarfish modicum we call life;

It can graft upon our crawl two puissant wings.

Our body’s subtle self is throned within

In its viewless palace of veridical dreams

That are bright shadows of the thoughts of God.

In the prone obscure beginnings of the race

The human grew in the bowed apelike man.

He stood erect, a godlike form and force,

And a soul’s thoughts looked out from earthborn eyes;

Man stood erect, he wore the thinker’s brow:

He looked at heaven and saw his comrade stars;

A vision came of beauty and greater birth

Slowly emerging from the heart’s chapel of light

And moved in a white lucent air of dreams.

He saw his being’s unrealised vastnesses,

He aspired and housed the nascent demi-god.

Out of the dim recesses of the self

The occult seeker into the open came: 

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He heard the far and touched the intangible,

He gazed into the future and the unseen;

He used the powers earth-instruments cannot use,

A pastime made of the impossible;

He caught up fragments of the Omniscient’s thought,

He scattered formulas of omnipotence.

Thus man in his little house made of earth’s dust

Grew towards an unseen heaven of thought and dream

Looking into the vast vistas of his mind

On a small globe dotting infinity.

At last climbing a long and narrow stair

He stood alone on a high roof of things

And saw the light of a spiritual sun.

Aspiring he transcends his earthly self;

He stands in the largeness of his soul new-born

Redeemed from encirclement by mortal things

And moves in a pure free spiritual realm

As in the rare breath of a stratosphere.

A lost end of far lines of divinity,

He mounts by a frail thread to his high source;

He reaches his fount of immortality,

He calls the Godhead into his mortal life.

All this the spirit concealed had done in her:

A portion of the mighty Mother came

Into her as into its own human part:

Amid the cosmic workings of the Gods

It marked her the centre of a wide-drawn scheme,

Dreamed in the passion of her far-seeing spirit

To mould humanity into God’s own shape

And lead this great blind struggling world to light

Or a new world discover or create.

Earth must transform herself and equal Heaven

Or Heaven descend into earth’s mortal state.

But for such vast spiritual change to be,

Out of the mystic cavern in man’s heart

The heavenly Psyche must put off her veil 

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And step into common nature’s crowded rooms

And stand uncovered in that nature’s front

And rule its thoughts and fill the body and life.

Obedient to a high command she sat:

Time, life and death were passing incidents

Obstructing with their transient view her sight,

Her sight that must break through and liberate the god

Imprisoned in the visionless mortal man.

The inferior nature born into ignorance

Still took too large a place, it veiled her self

And must be pushed aside to find her soul.

 

End of Canto Two 

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