Savitri

Canto Two 

 

The Journey in Eternal Night

and the Voice of the Darkness 

 

Awhile on the chill dreadful edge of Night

All stood as if a world were doomed to die

And waited on the eternal silence’ brink.

Heaven leaned towards them like a cloudy brow

Of menace through the dim and voiceless hush.

As thoughts stand mute on a despairing verge

Where the last depths plunge into nothingness

And the last dreams must end, they paused; in their front

Were glooms like shadowy wings, behind them pale

The lifeless evening was a dead man’s gaze.

Hungry beyond, the night desired her soul.

But still in its lone niche of templed strength

Motionless, her flame-bright spirit, mute, erect,

Burned like a torch-fire from a windowed room

Pointing against the darkness’ sombre breast.

The Woman first affronted the Abyss

Daring to journey through the eternal Night.

Armoured with light she advanced her foot to plunge

Into the dread and hueless vacancy;

Immortal, unappalled her spirit faced

The danger of the ruthless eyeless waste.

Against night’s inky ground they stirred, moulding

Mysterious motion on her human tread,

A swimming action and a drifting march

Like figures moving before eyelids closed:

All as in dreams went slipping, gliding on.

The rock-gate’s heavy walls were left behind;

As if through passages of receding time

The present and past into the Timeless lapsed;

Arrested upon dim adventure’s brink, 

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The future ended drowned in nothingness.

Amid collapsing shapes they wound obscure;

The fading vestibules of a tenebrous world

Received them, where they seemed to move and yet

Be still, nowhere advancing yet to pass,

A dumb procession a dim picture bounds,

Not conscious forms threading a real scene.

A mystery of terror’s boundlessness,

Gathering its hungry strength the huge pitiless void

Surrounded slowly with its soundless depths,

And monstrous, cavernous, a shapeless throat

Devoured her into its shadowy strangling mass,

The fierce spiritual agony of a dream.

A curtain of impenetrable dread,

The darkness hung around her cage of sense

As, when the trees have turned to blotted shades

And the last friendly glimmer fades away,

Around a bullock in the forest tied

By hunters closes in no empty night.

The thought that strives in the world was here unmade;

Its effort it renounced to live and know,

Convinced at last that it had never been;

It perished, all its dream of action done:

This clotted cypher was its dark result.

In the smothering stress of this stupendous Nought

Mind could not think, breath could not breathe, the soul

Could not remember or feel itself; it seemed

A hollow gulf of sterile emptiness,

A zero oblivious of the sum it closed,

An abnegation of the Maker’s joy

Saved by no wide repose, no depth of peace.

On all that claims here to be Truth and God

And conscious self and the revealing Word

And the creative rapture of the Mind

And Love and Knowledge and heart’s delight, there fell

The immense refusal of the eternal No. 

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As disappears a golden lamp in gloom

Borne into distance from the eye’s desire,

Into the shadows vanished Savitri.

There was no course, no path, no end or goal:

Visionless she moved amid insensible gulfs,

Or drove through some great black unknowing Waste

Or whirled in a dumb eddy of meeting winds

Assembled by the titan hands of Chance.

There was none with her in the dreadful Vast:

She saw no more the vague tremendous god,

Her eyes had lost their luminous Satyavan.

Yet not for this her spirit failed, but held

More deeply than the bounded senses can

Which grasp externally and find to lose

Its object loved. So when on earth they lived

She had felt him straying through the glades, the glades

A scene in her, its clefts her being’s vistas

Opening their secrets to his search and joy,

Because to jealous sweetness in her heart

Whatever happy space his cherished feet

Preferred, must be at once her soul embracing

His body, passioning dumbly to his tread.

But now a silent gulf between them came

And to abysmal loneliness she fell,

Even from herself cast out, from love remote.

Long hours, since long it seems when sluggish time

Is measured by the throbs of the soul’s pain,

In an unreal darkness empty and drear

She travelled treading on the corpse of life,

Lost in a blindness of extinguished souls.

Solitary in the anguish of the void

She lived in spite of death, she conquered still;

In vain her puissant being was oppressed:

Her heavy long monotony of pain

Tardily of its fierce self-torture tired.

At first a faint inextinguishable gleam, 

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Pale but immortal, flickered in the gloom

As if a memory came to spirits dead,

A memory that wished to live again,

Dissolved from mind in Nature’s natal sleep.

It wandered like a lost ray of the moon

Revealing to the night her soul of dread;

Serpentine in the gleam the darkness lolled,

Its black hoods jewelled with the mystic glow;

Its dull sleek folds shrank back and coiled and slid,

As though they felt all light a cruel pain

And suffered from the pale approach of hope.

Night felt assailed her heavy sombre reign;

The splendour of some bright eternity

Threatened with this faint beam of wandering Truth

Her empire of the everlasting Nought.

Implacable in her intolerant strength

And confident that she alone was true,

She strove to stifle the frail dangerous ray;

Aware of an all-negating immensity

She reared her giant head of Nothingness,

Her mouth of darkness swallowing all that is;

She saw in herself the tenebrous Absolute.

But still the light prevailed and still it grew,

And Savitri to her lost self awoke;

Her limbs refused the cold embrace of death,

Her heart-beats triumphed in the grasp of pain;

Her soul persisted claiming for its joy

The soul of the beloved now seen no more.

Before her in the stillness of the world

Once more she heard the treading of a god,

And out of the dumb darkness Satyavan,

Her husband, grew into a luminous shade.

Then a sound pealed through that dead monstrous realm:

Vast like the surge in a tired swimmer’s ears,

Clamouring, a fatal iron-hearted roar,

Death missioned to the night his lethal call. 

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“This is my silent dark immensity,

This is the home of everlasting Night,

This is the secrecy of Nothingness

Entombing the vanity of life’s desires.

Hast thou beheld thy source, O transient heart,

And known from what the dream thou art was made?

In this stark sincerity of nude emptiness

Hopest thou still always to last and love?”

The Woman answered not. Her spirit refused

The voice of the Night that knew and Death that thought.

In her beginningless infinity

Through her soul’s reaches unconfined she gazed;

She saw the undying fountains of her life,

She knew herself eternal without birth.

But still opposing her with endless night

Death, the dire god, inflicted on her eyes

The immortal calm of his tremendous gaze:

“Although thou hast survived the unborn void

Which never shall forgive, while Time endures,

The primal violence that fashioned thought,

Forcing the immobile Vast to suffer and live

This sorrowful victory only hast thou won

To live for a little without Satyavan.

What shall the ancient goddess give to thee

Who helps thy heart-beats? Only she prolongs

The nothing dreamed existence and delays

With the labour of living thy eternal sleep.

A fragile miracle of thinking clay,

Armed with illusions walks the child of Time.

To fill the void around he feels and dreads,

The void he came from and to which he goes,

He magnifies his self and names it God.

He calls the heavens to help his suffering hopes.

He sees above him with a longing heart

Bare spaces more unconscious than himself

That have not even his privilege of mind 

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And empty of all but their unreal blue

And peoples them with bright and merciful powers.

For the sea roars around him and earth quakes

Beneath his steps, and fire is at his doors,

And death prowls baying through the woods of life.

Moved by the Presences with which he yearns,

He offers in implacable shrines his soul

And clothes all with the beauty of his dreams.

The gods who watch the earth with sleepless eyes

And guide its giant stumblings through the void,

Have given to man the burden of his mind;

In his unwilling heart they have lit their fires

And sown in it incurable unrest.

His mind is a hunter upon tracks unknown;

Amusing Time with vain discovery,

He deepens with thought the mystery of his fate

And turns to song his laughter and his tears.

His mortality vexing with the immortal’s dreams,

Troubling his transience with the infinite’s breath

They gave him hungers which no food can fill;

He is the cattle of the shepherd gods.

His body the tether with which he is tied,

They cast for fodder grief and hope and joy:

His pasture ground they have fenced with Ignorance.

Into his fragile undefended breast

They have breathed a courage that is met by death,

They have given a wisdom that is mocked by night,

They have traced a journey that foresees no goal.

Aimless man toils in an uncertain world

Lulled by inconstant pauses of his pain,

Scourged like a beast by the infinite desire,

Bound to the chariot of the dreadful gods.

But if thou still canst hope and still wouldst love,

Return to thy body’s shell they tie to earth,

And with thy heart’s little remnants try to live.

Hope not to win back to thee Satyavan. 

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Yet since thy strength deserves no trivial crown,

Gifts I can give to soothe thy wounded life.

The pacts which transient beings make with fate,

And the wayside sweetness earth-bound hearts would pluck,

These if thy will accepts make freely thine.

Choose a life’s hopes for thy deceiving prize.”

As ceased the ruthless and tremendous Voice,

Unendingly there rose in Savitri

Like moonlit ridges on a shuddering flood

A stir of thoughts out of some silence born

Across the sea of her dumb fathomless heart.

At last she spoke; her voice was heard by Night:

“I bow not to thee, O huge mask of Death,

Black lie of night to the cowed soul of man,

Unreal, inescapable end of things,

Thou grim jest played with the immortal spirit.

Conscious of immortality I walk.

A victor spirit conscious of my force,

Not as a suppliant to thy gates I came:

Unslain I have survived the clutch of Night.

My first strong grief moves not my seated mind;

My unwept tears have turned to pearls of strength:

I have transformed my ill-shaped brittle clay

Into the hardness of a statued soul.

Now in the wrestling of the splendid gods

My spirit shall be obstinate and strong

Against the vast refusals of the world.

I stoop not with the subject mob of minds

Who run to glean with eager satisfied hands

And pick from its mire mid many trampling feet

Its scornful small concessions to the weak.

Mine is the labour of the battling gods:

Imposing on the slow reluctant years

The flaming will that reigns beyond the stars,

They lay the law of Mind on Matter’s works

And win the soul’s wish from earth’s inconscient force. 

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First I demand whatever Satyavan,

My husband, waking in the forest’s charm

Out of his long pure childhood’s lonely dreams,

Desired and had not for his beautiful life.

Give, if thou must, or if thou canst, refuse.”

Death bowed his head in scornful cold assent,

The builder of this dreamlike earth for man

Who has mocked with vanity all gifts he gave.

Uplifting his disastrous voice he spoke:

“Indulgent to the dreams my touch shall break,

I yield to his blind father’s longing heart

Kingdom and power and friends and greatness lost

And royal trappings for his peaceful age,

The pallid pomps of man’s declining days,

The silvered decadent glories of life’s fall.

To one who wiser grew by adverse fate,

Goods I restore the deluded soul prefers

To impersonal nothingness’s bare sublime.

The sensuous solace of the light I give

To eyes which could have found a larger realm,

A deeper vision in their fathomless night.

For that this man desired and asked in vain

While still he lived on earth and cherished hope.

Back from the grandeur of my perilous realms

Go, mortal, to thy small permitted sphere!

Hasten swift-footed, lest to slay thy life

The great laws thou hast violated, moved,

Open at last on thee their marble eyes.”

But Savitri answered the disdainful Shade:

“World-spirit, I was thy equal spirit born.

I am immortal in my mortality.

I tremble not before the immobile gaze

Of the unchanging marble hierarchies

That look with the stone eyes of Law and Fate.

My soul can meet them with its living fire.

Out of thy shadow give me back again 

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Into earth’s flowering spaces Satyavan

In the sweet transiency of human limbs

To do with him my spirit’s burning will.

I will bear with him the ancient Mother’s load,

I will follow with him earth’s path that leads to God.

Else shall the eternal spaces open to me

While round us strange horizons far recede,

Travelling together the immense unknown.

For I who have trod with him the tracts of Time,

Can meet behind his steps whatever night

Or unimaginable stupendous dawn

Breaks on our spirits in the untrod Beyond.

Wherever thou leadst his soul I shall pursue.”

But to her claim opposed, implacable,

Insisting on the immutable Decree,

Insisting on the immitigable Law

And the insignificance of created things,

Out of the rolling wastes of night there came

Born from the enigma of the unknowable depths

A voice of majesty and appalling scorn.

As when the storm-haired Titan-striding sea

Throws on a swimmer its tremendous laugh

Remembering all the joy its waves had drowned,

So from the darkness of the sovereign night

Against the Woman’s boundless heart arose

The almighty cry of universal Death:

“Hast thou god-wings or feet that tread my stars,

Frail creature with the courage that aspires,

Forgetting thy bounds of thought, thy mortal role?

Their orbs were coiled before thy soul was formed.

I, Death, created them out of my void;

All things I have built in them and I destroy.

I made the worlds my net, each joy a mesh.

A Hunger amorous of its suffering prey,

Life that devours, my image see in things.

Mortal, whose spirit is my wandering breath, 

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Whose transience was imagined by my smile,

Flee clutching thy poor gains to thy trembling breast

Pierced by my pangs Time shall not soon appease.

Blind slave of my deaf force whom I compel

To sin that I may punish, to desire

That I may scourge thee with despair and grief

And thou come bleeding to me at the last,

Thy nothingness recognised, my greatness known,

Turn nor attempt forbidden happy fields

Meant for the souls that can obey my law,

Lest in their sombre shrines thy tread awake

From their uneasy iron-hearted sleep

The Furies who avenge fulfilled desire.

Dread lest in skies where passion hoped to live,

The Unknown’s lightnings start and terrified,

Lone, sobbing, hunted by the hounds of heaven,

A wounded and forsaken soul, thou flee

Through the long torture of the centuries,

Nor many lives exhaust the tireless Wrath

Hell cannot slake nor heaven’s mercy assuage.

I will take from thee the black eternal grip:

Clasping in thy heart thy fate’s exigiuous doles

Depart in peace, if peace for man is just.”

But Savitri answered meeting scorn with scorn,

The mortal woman to the dreadful Lord:

“Who is this God imagined by thy night,

Contemptuously creating worlds disdained,

Who made for vanity the brilliant stars?

Not he who has reared his temple in my thoughts

And made his sacred floor my human heart.

My God is Will and triumphs in his paths,

My God is Love and sweetly suffers all.

To him I have offered hope for sacrifice

And gave my longings as a sacrament.

Who shall prohibit or hedge in his course,

The wonderful, the charioteer, the swift? 

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A traveller of the million roads of life,

His steps familiar with the lights of heaven

Tread without pain the sword-paved courts of hell;

There he descends to edge eternal joy.

Love’s golden wings have power to fan thy void:

The eyes of love gaze starlike through death’s night,

The feet of love tread naked hardest worlds.

He labours in the depths, exults on the heights;

He shall remake thy universe, O Death.”

She spoke and for a while no voice replied,

While still they travelled through the trackless night

And still that gleam was like a pallid eye

Troubling the darkness with its doubtful gaze.

Then once more came a deep and perilous pause

In that unreal journey through blind Nought;

Once more a Thought, a Word in the void arose

And Death made answer to the human soul:

“What is thy hope? to what dost thou aspire?

This is thy body’s sweetest lure of bliss,

Assailed by pain a frail precarious form,

To please for a few years thy faltering sense

With honey of physical longings and the heart’s fire

And a vain oneness seeking to embrace

The brilliant idol of a fugitive hour.

And thou, what art thou, soul, thou glorious dream

Of brief emotions made and glittering thoughts,

A thin dance of fireflies speeding through the night,

A sparkling ferment in life’s sunlit mire?

Wilt thou claim immortality, O heart,

Crying against the eternal witnesses

That thou and he are endless powers and last?

Death only lasts and the inconscient Void.

I only am eternal and endure.

I am the shapeless formidable Vast,

I am the emptiness that men call Space,

I am a timeless Nothingness carrying all, 

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I am the Illimitable, the mute Alone.

I, Death, am He; there is no other God.

All from my depths are born, they live by death;

All to my depths return and are no more.

I have made a world by my inconscient Force.

My force is Nature that creates and slays

The hearts that hope, the limbs that long to live.

I have made man her instrument and slave,

His body I made my banquet, his life my food.

Man has no other help but only Death;

He comes to me at his end for rest and peace.

I, Death, am the one refuge of thy soul.

The gods to whom man prays can help not man;

They are my imaginations and my moods

Reflected in him by illusion’s power.

That which thou seest as thy immortal self

Is a shadowy icon of my infinite,

Is Death in thee dreaming of eternity.

I am the Immobile in which all things move,

I am the nude Inane in which they cease:

I have no body and no tongue to speak,

I commune not with human eye and ear;

Only thy thought gave a figure to my void.

Because, O aspirant to divinity,

Thou calledst me to wrestle with thy soul,

I have assumed a face, a form, a voice.

But if there were a being witnessing all,

How should he help thy passionate desire?

Aloof he watches sole and absolute,

Indifferent to thy cry in nameless calm.

His being is pure, unwounded, motionless, one.

One endless watches the inconscient scene

Where all things perish, as the foam the stars.

The One lives for ever. There no Satyavan

Changing was born and there no Savitri

Claims from brief life her bribe of joy. There love 

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Came never with his fretful eyes of tears,

Nor Time is there nor the vain vasts of Space.

It wears no living face, it has no name,

No gaze, no heart that throbs, it asks no second

To aid its being or to share its joys.

It is delight immortally alone.

If thou desirest immortality,

Be then alone sufficient to thy soul:

Live in thyself; forget the man thou lov’st.

My last grand death shall rescue thee from life;

Then shalt thou rise into thy unnamed source.”

But Savitri replied to the dread Voice:

“O Death, who reasonest, I reason not,

Reason that scans and breaks, but cannot build

Or builds in vain because she doubts her work.

I am, I love, I see, I act, I will.”

Death answered her, one deep surrounding cry:

“Know also. Knowing, thou shalt cease to love

And cease to will, delivered from thy heart.

So shalt thou rest for ever and be still,

Consenting to the impermanence of things.”

But Savitri replied for man to Death:

“When I have loved for ever, I shall know.

Love in me knows the truth all changings mask.

I know that knowledge is a vast embrace:

I know that every being is myself,

In every heart is hidden the myriad One.

I know the calm Transcendent bears the world,

The veiled Inhabitant, the silent Lord:

I feel his secret act, his intimate fire;

I hear the murmur of the cosmic Voice.

I know my coming was a wave from God.

For all his suns were conscient in my birth,

And one who loves in us came veiled by death.

Then man was born among the monstrous stars

Dowered with a mind and heart to conquer thee.” 

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In the eternity of his ruthless will

Sure of his empire and his armoured might,

Like one disdaining violent helpless words

From victim lips Death answered not again.

He stood in silence and in darkness wrapped,

A figure motionless, a shadow vague,

Girt with the terrors of his secret sword.

Half-seen in clouds appeared a sombre face;

Night’s dusk tiara was his matted hair,

The ashes of the pyre his forehead’s sign.

Once more a Wanderer in the unending Night,

Blindly forbidden by dead vacant eyes,

She travelled through the dumb unhoping vasts.

Around her rolled the shuddering waste of gloom,

Its swallowing emptiness and joyless death

Resentful of her thought and life and love.

Through the long fading night by her compelled,

Gliding half-seen on their unearthly path,

Phantasmal in the dimness moved the three.

 

End of Canto Two

End of Book Nine 

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