Savitri

Canto Three 

 

The Entry into the Inner Countries 

 

At first out of the busy hum of mind

As if from a loud thronged market into a cave

By an inward moment’s magic she had come,

A stark hushed emptiness became her self:

Her mind unvisited by the voice of thought

Stared at a void deep’s dumb infinity.

Her heights receded, her depths behind her closed;

All fled away from her and left her blank.

But when she came back to her self of thought,

Once more she was a human thing on earth,

A lump of Matter, a house of closed sight,

A mind compelled to think out ignorance,

A life-force pressed into a camp of works

And the material world her limiting field.

Amazed like one unknowing she sought her way

Out of the tangle of man’s ignorant past

That took the surface person for the soul.

Then a Voice spoke that dwelt on secret heights:

“For man thou seekst, not for thyself alone.

Only if God assumes the human mind

And puts on mortal ignorance for his cloak

And makes himself the Dwarf with triple stride,

Can he help man to grow into the God.

As man disguised the cosmic Greatness works

And finds the mystic inaccessible gate

And opens the Immortal’s golden door,

Man human follows in God’s human steps.

Accepting his darkness thou must bring to him light,

Accepting his sorrow thou must bring to him bliss.

In Matter’s body find thy heaven-born soul.”

Then Savitri surged out of her body’s wall 

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And stood a little span outside herself

And looked into her subtle being’s depths

And in its heart as in a lotus-bud

Divined her secret and mysterious soul.

At the dim portal of the inner life

That bars out from our depths the body’s mind

And all that lives but by the body’s breath,

She knocked and pressed against the ebony gate.

The living portal groaned with sullen hinge:

Heavily reluctant it complained inert

Against the tyranny of the spirit’s touch.

A formidable voice cried from within:

“Back, creature of earth, lest tortured and torn thou die.”

A dreadful murmur rose like a dim sea;

The Serpent of the threshold hissing rose,

A fatal guardian hood with monstrous coils,

The hounds of darkness growled with jaws agape,

And trolls and gnomes and goblins scowled and stared

And wild beast roarings thrilled the blood with fear

And menace muttered in a dangerous tongue.

Unshaken her will pressed on the rigid bars:

The gate swung wide with a protesting jar,

The opponent Powers withdrew their dreadful guard;

Her being entered into the inner worlds.

In a narrow passage, the subconscient’s gate,

She breathed with difficulty and pain and strove

To find the inner self concealed in sense.

Into a dense of subtle Matter packed,

A cavity filled with a blind mass of power,

An opposition of misleading gleams,

A heavy barrier of unseeing sight,

She forced her way through body to the soul.

Across a perilous border line she passed

Where life dips into the subconscient dusk

Or struggles from Matter into chaos of mind,

Aswarm with elemental entities 

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And fluttering shapes of vague half-bodied thought

And crude beginnings of incontinent force.

At first a difficult narrowness was there,

A press of uncertain powers and drifting wills;

For all was there but nothing in its place.

At times an opening came, a door was forced;

She crossed through spaces of a secret self

And trod in passages of inner Time.

At last she broke into a form of things,

A start of finiteness, a world of sense:

But all was still confused, nothing self-found.

Soul was not there but only cries of life.

A thronged and clamorous air environed her.

A horde of sounds defied significance,

A dissonant clash of cries and contrary calls;

A mob of visions broke across the sight,

A jostled sequence lacking sense and suite,

Feelings pushed through a packed and burdened heart,

Each forced its separate inconsequent way

But cared for nothing but its ego’s drive.

A rally without key of common will,

Thought stared at thought and pulled at the taut brain

As if to pluck the reason from its seat

And cast its corpse into life’s wayside drain;

So might forgotten lie in Nature’s mud

Abandoned the slain sentinel of the soul.

So could life’s power shake from it mind’s rule,

Nature renounce the spirit’s government

And the bare elemental energies

Make of the sense a glory of boundless joy,

A splendour of ecstatic anarchy,

A revel mighty and mad of utter bliss.

This was the sense’s instinct void of soul

Or when the soul sleeps hidden void of power,

But now the vital godhead wakes within

And lifts the life with the supernal’s touch. 

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But how shall come the glory and the flame

If mind is cast away into the abyss?

For body without mind has not the light,

The rapture of spirit sense, the joy of life;

All then becomes subconscient, tenebrous,

Inconscience puts its seal on Nature’s page

Or else a mad disorder whirls the brain

Posting along a ravaged nature’s roads,

A chaos of disordered impulses

In which no light can come, no joy, no peace.

This state now threatened, this she pushed from her.

As if in a long endless tossing street

One driven mid a trampling hurrying crowd

Hour after hour she trod without release,

Holding by her will the senseless meute at bay;

Out of the dreadful press she dragged her will

And fixed her thought upon the saviour Name;

Then all grew still and empty; she was free.

A large deliverance came, a vast calm space.

Awhile she moved through a blank tranquillity

Of naked Light from an invisible sun,

A void that was a bodiless happiness,

A blissful vacuum of nameless peace.

But now a mightier danger’s front drew near:

The press of bodily mind, the Inconscient’s brood

Of aimless thought and will had fallen from her.

Approaching loomed a giant head of Life

Ungoverned by mind or soul, subconscient, vast.

It tossed all power into a single drive,

It made its power a might of dangerous seas.

Into the stillness of her silent self,

Into the whiteness of its muse of Space

A spate, a torrent of the speed of Life

Broke like a wind-lashed driven mob of waves

Racing on a pale floor of summer sand;

It drowned its banks, a mountain of climbing waves. 

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Enormous was its vast and passionate voice.

It cried to her listening spirit as it ran,

Demanding God’s submission to chainless Force.

A deaf force calling to a status dumb,

A thousand voices in a muted Vast,

It claimed the heart’s support for its clutch at joy,

For its need to act the witness soul’s consent,

For its lust of power her neutral being’s seal.

Into the wideness of her watching self

It brought a grandiose gust of the Breath of Life;

Its torrent carried the world’s hopes and fears,

All life’s, all Nature’s dissatisfied hungry cry,

And the longing all eternity cannot fill:

It called to the mountain secrecies of the soul

And the miracle of the never-dying fire,

It spoke to some first inexpressible ecstasy

Hidden in the creative beat of Life;

Out of the nether unseen deeps it tore

Its lure and magic of disordered bliss,

Into earth-light poured its maze of tangled charm

And heady draught of Nature’s primitive joy

And the fire and mystery of forbidden delight

Drunk from the world-libido’s bottomless well,

And the honey-sweet poison-wine of lust and death,

But dreamed a vintage of glory of life’s gods,

And felt as celestial rapture’s golden sting.

The cycles of the infinity of desire

And the mystique that made an unrealised world

Wider than the known and closer than the unknown

In which hunt for ever the hounds of mind and life,

Tempted a deep dissatisfied urge within

To long for the unfulfilled and ever far

And make this life upon a limiting earth

A climb towards summits vanishing in the void,

A search for the glory of the impossible.

It dreamed of that which never has been known, 

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It grasped at that which never has been won,

It chased into an Elysian memory

The charms that flee from the heart’s soon lost delight;

It dared the force that slays, the joys that hurt,

The imaged shape of unaccomplished things

And the summons to a Circean transmuting dance

And passion’s tenancy of the courts of love

And the wild Beast’s ramp and romp with Beauty and Life.

It brought its cry and surge of opposite powers,

Its moments of the touch of luminous planes,

Its flame-ascensions and sky-pitched vast attempts,

Its fiery towers of dream built on the winds,

Its sinkings towards the darkness and the abyss,

Its honey of tenderness, its sharp wine of hate,

Its changes of sun and cloud, of laughter and tears,

Its bottomless danger pits and swallowing gulfs,

Its fear and joy and ecstasy and despair,

Its occult wizardries, its simple lines

And great communions and uplifting moves,

Its faith in heaven, its intercourse with hell.

These powers were not blunt with the dead weight of earth,

They gave ambrosia’s taste and poison’s sting.

There was an ardour in the gaze of Life

That saw heaven blue in the grey air of Night:

The impulses godward soared on passion’s wings.

Mind’s quick-paced thoughts floated from their high necks

A glowing splendour as of an irised mane,

A parure of pure intuition’s light;

Its flame-foot gallop they could imitate:

Mind’s voices mimicked inspiration’s stress,

Its ictus of infallibility,

Its speed and lightning heaven-leap of the Gods.

A trenchant blade that shore the nets of doubt,

Its sword of discernment seemed almost divine.

Yet all that knowledge was a borrowed sun’s;

The forms that came were not heaven’s native births: 

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Its puissance dangerous and absolute

Could mingle poison with the wine of God.

On these high shining backs falsehood could ride;

Truth lay with delight in error’s passionate arms

Gliding downstream in a blithe gilded barge:

She edged her ray with a magnificent lie.

Here in Life’s nether realms all contraries meet;

Truth stares and does her works with bandaged eyes,

And Ignorance is Wisdom’s patron here.

Those galloping hooves in their enthusiast speed

Could bear to a dangerous intermediate zone

Where Death walks wearing a robe of deathless Life.

Or they enter the valley of the wandering Gleam

Whence, captives or victims of the specious Ray,

Souls trapped in that region never can escape.

Agents, not masters, they serve Life’s desires

Toiling for ever in the snare of Time.

Their bodies born out of some Nihil’s womb

Ensnare the spirit in the moment’s dreams,

Then perish vomiting the immortal soul

Out of Matter’s belly into the sink of Nought.

Yet some uncaught, unslain can warily pass

Carrying Truth’s image in their sheltered heart,

Pluck Knowledge out of error’s screening grip,

Break paths through the blind walls of little self,

Then travel on to reach a greater life.

All this streamed past her and seemed to her vision’s sight

As if around a high and voiceless isle

A clamour of waters from far unknown hills

Swallowed its narrow banks in crowding waves

And made a hungry world of white wild foam:

Hastening, a dragon with a million feet,

Its foam and cry a drunken giant’s din,

Tossing a mane of Darkness into God’s sky,

It ebbed receding into a distant roar.

Then smiled again a large and tranquil air: 

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Blue heaven, green earth, partners of Beauty’s reign,

Lived as of old, companions in happiness;

And in the world’s heart laughed the joy of life.

All now was still, the soil shone dry and pure.

Through it all she moved not, plunged not in the vain waves

Out of the vastness of the silent self

Life’s clamour fled; her spirit was mute and free.

 

Then journeying forward through the self’s wide hush

She came into a brilliant ordered Space.

There Life dwelt parked in an armed tranquillity;

A chain was on her strong insurgent heart.

Tamed to the modesty of a measured pace,

She kept no more her vehement stride and rush;

She had lost the careless majesty of her muse

And the ample grandeur of her regal force;

Curbed were her mighty pomps, her splendid waste,

Sobered the revels of her bacchant play,

Cut down were her squanderings in desire’s bazaar,

Coerced her despot will, her fancy’s dance,

A cold stolidity bound the riot of sense.

Her spirit’s bounds they cast in rigid lines.

A royalty without freedom was her lot;

The sovereign throned obeyed her ministers:

Her servants mind and sense governed her house:

And guarding with a phalanx of armoured rules

The reason’s balanced reign, kept order and peace.

Her will lived closed in adamant walls of law,

Coerced was her force by chains that feigned to adorn,

Imagination was prisoned in a fort,

Her wanton and licentious favourite;

Reality’s poise and reason’s symmetry

Were set in its place sentinelled by marshalled facts,

They gave to the soul for throne a bench of Law,

For kingdom a small world of rule and line:

The ages’ wisdom, shrivelled to scholiast lines, 

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Shrank patterned into a copy-book device.

The Spirit’s almighty freedom was not here:

A schoolman mind had captured life’s large space,

But chose to live in bare and paltry rooms

Parked off from the too vast dangerous universe,

Fearing to lose its soul in the infinite.

Even the Idea’s ample sweep was cut

Into a system, chained to fixed pillars of thought

Or rivetted to Matter’s solid ground:

Or else the soul was lost in its own heights:

Obeying the Ideal’s high-browed law

Thought based a throne on unsubstantial air

Disdaining earth’s flat triviality:

It barred reality out to live in its dreams.

Or all stepped into a systemed universe:

Life’s empire was a managed continent,

Its thoughts an army ranked and disciplined;

Uniformed they kept the logic of their fixed place

At the bidding of the trained centurion mind.

Or each stepped into its station like a star

Or marched through fixed and constellated heavens

Or kept its feudal rank among its peers

In the sky’s unchanging cosmic hierarchy.

Or like a highbred maiden with chaste eyes

Forbidden to walk unveiled the public ways,

She must in close secluded chambers move,

Her feeling in cloisters live or gardened paths.

Life was consigned to a safe level path,

It dared not tempt the great and difficult heights

Or climb to be neighbour to a lonely star

Or skirt the danger of the precipice

Or tempt the foam-curled breakers’ perilous laugh,

Adventure’s lyrist, danger’s amateur,

Or into her chamber call some flaming god,

Or leave the world’s bounds and, where no limits are,

Meet with the heart’s passion the Adorable 

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Or set the world ablaze with the inner Fire.

A chastened epithet in the prose of life,

She must fill with colour just her sanctioned space,

Not break out of the cabin of the idea

Nor trespass into rhythms too high or vast.

Even when it soared into ideal air,

Thought’s flight lost not itself in heaven’s blue:

It drew upon the skies a patterned flower

Of disciplined beauty and harmonic light.

A temperate vigilant spirit governed life:

Its acts were tools of the considering thought,

Too cold to take fire and set the world ablaze,

Or the careful reason’s diplomatic moves

Testing the means to a prefigured end,

Or at the highest pitch some calm Will’s plan

Or a strategy of some High Command within

To conquer the secret treasures of the gods

Or win for a masked king some glorious world,

Not a reflex of the spontaneous self,

An index of the being and its moods,

A winging of conscious spirit, a sacrament

Of life’s communion with the still Supreme

Or its pure movement on the Eternal’s road.

Or else for the body of some high Idea

A house was built with too close-fitting bricks;

Action and thought cemented made a wall

Of small ideals limiting the soul.

Even meditation mused on a narrow seat;

And worship turned to an exclusive God,

To the Universal in a chapel prayed

Whose doors were shut against the universe:

Or kneeled to the bodiless Impersonal

A mind shut to the cry and fire of love:

A rational religion dried the heart.

It planned a smooth life’s acts with ethics’ rule

Or offered a cold and flameless sacrifice. 

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The sacred Book lay on its sanctified desk

Wrapped in interpretation’s silken strings:

A credo sealed up its spiritual sense.

 

Here was a quiet country of fixed mind,

Here life no more was all nor passion’s voice;

A cry of sense had sunk into a hush.

Soul was not there nor spirit, but mind alone;

Mind claimed to be the spirit and the soul.

The spirit saw itself as form of mind,

Lost itself in the glory of the thought,

A light that made invisible the sun.

Into a firm and settled space she came

Where all was still and all things kept their place.

Each found what it had sought and knew its aim.

All had a final last stability.¹

There one stood forth who bore authority

On an important brow and held a rod;

Command was incarnate in his gesture and tone;

Tradition’s petrified wisdom carved his speech,

His sentences savoured the oracle.

“Traveller or pilgrim of the inner world,

Fortunate art thou to reach our brilliant air

Flaming with thought’s supreme finality.

O aspirant to the perfect way of life,

Here find it; rest from search and live at peace.

Ours is the home of cosmic certainty.

 

¹ Another version of this paragraph-beginning of twelve lines:

 

  This narrowed life’s pedestrian thought and will

Debouched into a little continent space

Where soul was not nor spirit, and thinking mind

Laboured content with small finalities.

It seemed to it the top of being’s arc

And the last circle of the quest of life.

It was a paradise for thought’s crowned ease

Where nothing more was left to find or know,

A tabernacle of wise contented life. 

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Here is the truth, God’s harmony is here.

Register thy name in the book of the elite,

Admitted by the sanction of the few,

Adopt thy station of knowledge, thy post in mind,

Thy ticket of order draw in Life’s bureau

And praise thy fate that made thee one of ours.

All here, docketed and tied, the mind can know,

All schemed by law that God permits to life.

This is the end and there is no beyond.

Here is the safety of the ultimate wall,

Here is the clarity of the sword of Light,

Here is the victory of a single Truth,

Here burns the diamond of flawless bliss.

A favourite of Heaven and Nature live.”

But to the too satisfied and confident sage

Savitri replied casting into his world

Sight’s deep release, the heart’s questioning inner voice.

For here the heart spoke not, only clear daylight

Of intellect reigned here, limiting, cold, precise.

“Happy are they who in this chaos of things,

This coming and going of the feet of Time,

Can find the single Truth, the eternal Law:

Untouched they live by hope and doubt and fear.

Happy are men anchored on fixed belief

In this uncertain and ambiguous world,

Or who have planted in the heart’s rich soil

One small grain of spiritual certitude.

Happiest who stand on faith as on a rock.

But I must pass leaving the ended search,

Truth’s rounded outcome firm, immutable

And this harmonic building of world-fact,

This ordered knowledge of apparent things.

Here I can stay not, for I seek my soul.”

None answered in that bright contented world,

Or only turned on their accustomed way

Astonished to hear questioning in that air 

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Or thoughts that could still turn to the Beyond.

But some murmured, passers-by from kindred spheres:

Each by his credo judged the thought she spoke.

“Who then is this who knows not that the soul

Is a least gland or a secretion’s fault

Disquieting the sane government of the mind,

Disordering the function of the brain,

Or a yearning lodged in Nature’s mortal house

Or dream whispered in man’s cave of hollow thought

Who would prolong his brief unhappy term

Or cling to living in a sea of death?”

But others, “Nay, it is her spirit she seeks.

A splendid shadow of the name of God,

A formless lustre from the Ideal’s realm,

The Spirit is the Holy Ghost of Mind;

But none has touched its limits or seen its face.

Each soul is the great Father’s crucified Son,

Mind is that soul’s one parent, its conscious cause,

The ground on which trembles a brief passing light,

Mind, sole creator of the apparent world.

All that is here is part of our own self;

Our minds have made the world in which we live.”

Another with mystic and unsatisfied eyes

Who loved his slain belief and mourned its death:

“Is there one left who seeks for a Beyond?

Can still the path be found, opened the gate?”

 

So she fared on across her silent self.

To a road she came thronged with an ardent crowd

Who sped brilliant, fire-footed, sunlight-eyed,

Pressing to reach the world’s mysterious wall,

And pass through masked doorways into outer mind

Where the Light comes not nor the mystic voice,

Messengers from our subliminal greatnesses,

Guests from the cavern of the secret soul.

Into dim spiritual somnolence they break 

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Or shed wide wonder on our waking self,

Ideas that haunt us with their radiant tread,

Dreams that are hints of unborn Reality,

Strange goddesses with deep-pooled magical eyes,

Strong wind-haired gods carrying harps of hope,

Great moon-hued visions gliding through gold air,

Aspiration’s sun-dream head and star-carved limbs,

Emotions making common hearts sublime.

And Savitri mingling in that glorious crowd,

Yearning to the spiritual light they bore,

Longed once to hasten like them to save God’s world;

But she reined back the high passion in her heart:

She knew that first she must discover her soul.

Only who save themselves can others save.

In contrary sense she faced life’s riddling truth:

They carrying the light to suffering men

Hurried with eager feet to the outer world;

Her eyes were turned towards the eternal source.

Outstretching her hands to stay the throng she cried:

“O happy company of luminous gods,

Reveal, who know, the road that I must tread,—

For surely that bright quarter is your home,—

To find the birthplace of the occult Fire

And the deep mansion of my secret soul.”

One answered pointing to a silence dim

On a remote extremity of sleep

In some far background of the inner world.

“O Savitri, from thy hidden soul we come.

We are the messengers, the occult gods

Who help men’s drab and heavy ignorant lives

To wake to beauty and the wonder of things

Touching them with glory and divinity;

In evil we light the deathless flame of good

And hold the torch of knowledge on ignorant roads;

We are thy will and all men’s will towards Light.

O human copy and disguise of God 

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Who seekst the deity thou keepest hid

And livest by the Truth thou hast not known,

Follow the world’s winding highway to its source.

There in the silence few have ever reached,

Thou shalt see the Fire burning on the bare stone

And the deep cavern of thy secret soul.”

Then Savitri following the great winding road

Came where it dwindled into a narrow path

Trod only by rare wounded pilgrim-feet.

A few bright forms emerged from unknown depths

And looked at her with calm immortal eyes.

There was no sound to break the brooding hush;

One felt the silent nearness of the soul.

 

End of Canto Three 

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