PART ONE
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The Symbol Dawn
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IT WAS the hour before the Gods awake.
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Across the path of the divine Event
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The huge foreboding mind of Night, alone
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In her unlit temple of eternity,
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Lay stretched immobile upon Silence' marge.
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Almost one felt, opaque, impenetrable,
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In the sombre symbol of her eyeless muse
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The abysm of the unbodied Infinite;
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A fathomless zero occupied the world.
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A power of fallen boundless self awake
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Between the first and the last Nothingness,
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Recalling the tenebrous womb from which it came,
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Turned from the insoluble mystery of birth
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And the tardy process of mortality
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And longed to reach its end in vacant Nought.
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As in a dark beginning of all things,
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A mute featureless semblance of the Unknown
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Repeating for ever the unconscious act,
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Prolonging for ever the unseeing will,
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Cradled the cosmic drowse of ignorant Force
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Whose moved creative slumber kindles the suns
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And carries our lives in its somnambulist whirl.
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Athwart the vain enormous trance of Space,
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Its formless stupor without mind or life,
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A shadow spinning through a soulless Void,
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Thrown back once more into unthinking dreams,
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Earth wheeled abandoned in the hollow gulfs
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Forgetful of her spirit and her fate.
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The impassive skies were neutral, empty, still.
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Then something in the inscrutable darkness stirred;
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A nameless movement, an unthought Idea
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Insistent, dissatisfied, without an aim,
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Something that wished but knew not how to be,
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Teased the Inconscient to wake Ignorance.
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A throe that came and left a quivering trace,
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Gave room for an old tired want unfilled,
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At peace in its subconscient moonless cave
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To raise its head and look for absent light,
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Straining closed eyes of vanished memory,
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Like one who searches for a bygone self
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And only meets the corpse of his desire.
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It was as though even in this Nought's profound,
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Even in this ultimate dissolution's core,
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There lurked an unremembering entity,
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Survivor of a slain and buried past
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Condemned to resume the effort and the pang,
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Reviving in another frustrate world.
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An unshaped consciousness desired light
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And a blank prescience yearned towards distant change.
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As if a childlike finger laid on a cheek
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Reminded of the endless need in things
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The heedless Mother of the universe,
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An infant longing clutched the sombre Vast.
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Insensibly somewhere a breach began:
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A long lone line of hesitating hue
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Like a vague smile tempting a desert heart
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Troubled the far rim of life's obscure sleep.
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Arrived from the other side of boundlessness
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An eye of deity peered through the dumb deeps;
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A scout in a reconnaissance from the sun,
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It seemed amid a heavy cosmic rest,
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The torpor of a sick and weary world,
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To seek for a spirit sole and desolate
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Too fallen to recollect forgotten bliss.
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Intervening in a mindless universe,
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Its message crept through the reluctant hush
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Calling the adventure of consciousness and joy
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2
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CANTO I: The Symbol Dawn
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And, conquering Nature's disillusioned breast,
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Compelled renewed consent to see and feel.
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A thought was sown in the unsounded Void,
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A sense was born within the darkness' depths,
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A memory quivered in the heart of Time
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As if a soul long dead were moved to live:
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But the oblivion that succeeds the fall,
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Had blotted the crowded tablets of the past,
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And all that was destroyed must be rebuilt
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And old experience laboured out once more.
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All can be done if the god-touch is there.
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A hope stole in that hardly dared to be
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Amid the Night's forlorn indifference.
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As if solicited in an alien world
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With timid and hazardous instinctive grace,
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Orphaned and driven out to seek a home,
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An errant marvel with no place to live,
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Into a far-off nook of heaven there came
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A slow miraculous gesture's dim appeal.
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The persistent thrill of a transfiguring touch
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Persuaded the inert black quietude
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And beauty and wonder disturbed the fields of God.
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A wandering hand of pale enchanted light
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That glowed along a fading moment's brink,
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Fixed with gold panel and opalescent hinge
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A gate of dreams ajar on mystery's verge.
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One lucent corner windowing hidden things
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Forced the world's blind immensity to sight.
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The darkness failed and slipped like a falling cloak
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From the reclining body of a god.
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Then through the pallid rift that seemed at first
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Hardly enough for a trickle from the suns,
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Outpoured the revelation and the flame.
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The brief perpetual sign recurred above.
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A glamour from unreached transcendences
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Iridescent with the glory of the Unseen,
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3
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A message from the unknown immortal Light
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Ablaze upon creation's quivering edge,
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Dawn built her aura of magnificent hues
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And buried its seed of grandeur in the hours.
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An instant's visitor the godhead shone.
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On life's thin border awhile the Vision stood
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And bent over earth's pondering forehead curve.
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Interpreting a recondite beauty and bliss
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In colour's hieroglyphs of mystic sense,
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It wrote the lines of a significant myth
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Telling of a greatness of spiritual dawns,
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A brilliant code penned with the sky for page.
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Almost that day the epiphany was disclosed
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Of which our thoughts and hopes are signal flares;
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A lonely splendour from the invisible goal
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Almost was flung on the opaque Inane.
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Once more a tread perturbed the vacant Vasts;
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Infinity's centre, a Face of rapturous calm
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Parted the eternal lids that open heaven;
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A Form from far beatitudes seemed to near.
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Ambassadress twixt eternity and change,
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The omniscient Goddess leaned across the breadths
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That wrap the fated journeyings of the stars
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And saw the spaces ready for her feet.
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Once she half looked behind for her veiled sun,
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Then, thoughtful, went to her immortal work.
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Earth felt the Imperishable's passage close:
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The waking ear of Nature heard her steps
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And wideness turned to her its limitless eye,
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And, scattered on sealed depths, her luminous smile
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Kindled to fire the silence of the worlds.
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All grew a consecration and a rite.
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Air was a vibrant link between earth and heaven;
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The wide-winged hymn of a great priestly wind
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Arose and failed upon the altar hills;
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The high boughs prayed in a revealing sky.
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4
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CANTO I: The Symbol Dawn
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Here where our half-lit ignorance skirts the gulfs
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On the dumb bosom of the ambiguous earth,
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Here where one knows not even the step in front
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And Truth has her throne on the shadowy back of doubt,
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On this anguished and precarious field of toil
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Outspread beneath some large indifferent gaze,
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Impartial witness of our joy and bale,
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Our prostrate soil bore the awakening ray.
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Here too the vision and prophetic gleam
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Lit into miracles common meaningless shapes;
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Then the divine afflatus, spent, withdrew,
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Unwanted, fading from the mortal's range.
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A sacred yearning lingered in its trace,
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The worship of a Presence and a Power
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Too perfect to be held by death-bound hearts,
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The prescience of a marvellous birth to come.
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Only a little the god-light can stay:
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Spiritual beauty illumining human sight
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Lines with its passion and mystery Matter's mask
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And squanders eternity on a beat of Time.
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As when a soul draws near the sill of birth,
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Adjoining mortal time to Timelessness,
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A spark of deity lost in Matter's crypt
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Its lustre vanishes in the inconscient planes,
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That transitory glow of magic fire
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So now dissolved in bright accustomed air.
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The message ceased and waned the messenger.
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The single Call, the uncompanioned Power,
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Drew back into some far-off secret world
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The hue and marvel of the supernal beam:
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She looked no more on our mortality.
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The excess of beauty natural to god-kind
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Could not uphold its claim on time-born eyes;
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Too mystic-real for space-tenancy
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Her body of glory was expunged from heaven:
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The rarity and wonder lived no more.
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5
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There was the common light of earthly day.
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Affranchised from the respite of fatigue
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Once more the rumour of the speed of Life
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Pursued the cycles of her blinded quest.
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All sprang to their unvarying daily acts;
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The thousand peoples of the soil and tree
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Obeyed the unforeseeing instant's urge,
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And, leader here with his uncertain mind,
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Alone who stares at the future's covered face,
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Man lifted up the burden of his fate.
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And Savitri too awoke among these tribes
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That hastened to join the brilliant Summoner's chant
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And, lured by the beauty of the apparent ways,
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Acclaimed their portion of ephemeral joy.
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Akin to the eternity whence she came,
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No part she took in this small happiness;
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A mighty stranger in the human field,
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The embodied Guest within made no response.
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The call that wakes the leap of human mind,
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Its chequered eager motion of pursuit,
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Its fluttering-hued illusion of desire,
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Visited her heart like a sweet alien note.
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Time's message of brief light was not for her.
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In her there was the anguish of the gods
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Imprisoned in our transient human mould,
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The deathless conquered by the death of things.
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A vaster Nature's joy had once been hers,
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But long could keep not its gold heavenly hue
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Or stand upon this brittle earthly base.
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A narrow movement on Time's deep abysm,
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Life's fragile littleness denied the power,
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The proud and conscious wideness and the bliss
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She had brought with her into the human form,
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The calm delight that weds one soul to all,
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The key to the flaming doors of ecstasy.
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6
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CANTO I: The Symbol Dawn
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Earth's grain that needs the sap of pleasure and tears
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Rejected the undying rapture's boon:
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Offered to the daughter of infinity
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Her passion-flower of love and doom she gave.
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In vain now seemed the splendid sacrifice.
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A prodigal of her rich divinity,
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Her self and all she was she had lent to men,
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Hoping her greater being to implant
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And in their body's lives acclimatise
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That heaven might native grow on mortal soil.
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Hard is it to persuade earth-nature's change;
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Mortality bears ill the eternal's touch:
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It fears the pure divine intolerance
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Of that assault of ether and of fire;
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It murmurs at its sorrowless happiness,
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Almost with hate repels the light it brings;
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It trembles at its naked power of Truth
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And the might and sweetness of its absolute Voice.
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Inflicting on the heights the abysm's law,
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It sullies with its mire heaven's messengers:
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Its thorns of fallen nature are the defence
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It turns against the saviour hands of Grace;
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It meets the sons of God with death and pain.
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A glory of lightnings traversing the earth-scene,
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Their sun-thoughts fading, darkened by ignorant minds,
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Their work betrayed, their good to evil turned,
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The cross their payment for the crown they gave,
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Only they leave behind a splendid Name.
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A fire has come and touched men's hearts and gone;
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A few have caught flame and risen to greater life.
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Too unlike the world she came to help and save,
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Her greatness weighed upon its ignorant breast
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And from its dim chasms welled a dire return,
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A portion of its sorrow, struggle, fall.
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To live with grief, to confront death on her road, -
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The mortal's lot became the Immortal's share.
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7
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Thus trapped in the gin of earthly destinies,
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Awaiting her ordeal's hour abode,
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Outcast from her inborn felicity,
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Accepting life's obscure terrestrial robe,
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Hiding herself even from those she loved,
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The godhead greater by a human fate.
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A dark foreknowledge separated her
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From all of whom she was the star and stay;
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Too great to impart the peril and the pain,
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In her torn depths she kept the grief to come.
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As one who watching over men left blind
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Takes up the load of an unwitting race,
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Harbouring a foe whom with her heart she must feed,
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Unknown her act, unknown the doom she faced,
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Unhelped she must foresee and dread and dare.
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The long-foreknown and fatal morn was here
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Bringing a noon that seemed like every noon.
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For Nature walks upon her mighty way
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Unheeding when she breaks a soul, a life;
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Leaving her slain behind she travels on:
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Man only marks and God's all-seeing eyes.
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Even in this moment of her soul's despair,
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In its grim rendezvous with death and fear,
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No cry broke from her lips, no call for aid;
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She told the secret of her woe to none:
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Calm was her face and courage kept her mute.
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Yet only her outward self suffered and strove;
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Even her humanity was half divine:
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Her spirit opened to the Spirit in all,
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Her nature felt all Nature as its own.
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Apart, living within, all lives she bore;
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Aloof, she carried in herself the world:
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Her dread was one with the great cosmic dread,
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Her strength was founded on the cosmic mights;
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The universal Mother's love was hers.
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Against the evil at life's afflicted roots,
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8
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CANTO I: The Symbol Dawn
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Her own calamity its private sign,
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Of her pangs she made a mystic poignant sword.
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A solitary mind, a world-wide heart,
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To the lone Immortal's unshared work she rose.
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At first life grieved not in her burdened breast:
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On the lap of earth's original somnolence
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Inert, released into forgetfulness,
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Prone it reposed, unconscious on mind's verge,
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Obtuse and tranquil like the stone and star.
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In a deep cleft of silence twixt two realms
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She lay remote from grief, unsawn by care,
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Nothing recalling of the sorrow here.
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Then a slow faint remembrance shadowlike moved,
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And sighing she laid her hand upon her bosom
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And recognised the close and lingering ache,
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Deep, quiet, old, made natural to its place,
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But knew not why it was there nor whence it came.
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The Power that kindles mind was still withdrawn:
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Heavy, unwilling were life's servitors
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Like workers with no wages of delight;
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Sullen, the torch of sense refused to burn;
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The unassisted brain found not its past.
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Only a vague earth-nature held the frame.
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But now she stirred, her life shared the cosmic load.
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At the summons of her body's voiceless call
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Her strong far-winging spirit travelled back,
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Back to the yoke of ignorance and fate,
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Back to the labour and stress of mortal days,
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Lighting a pathway through strange symbol dreams
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Across the ebbing of the seas of sleep.
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Her house of Nature felt an unseen sway,
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Illumined swiftly were life's darkened rooms,
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And memory's casements opened on the hours
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And the tired feet of thought approached her doors.
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All came back to her: Earth and Love and Doom,
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The ancient disputants, encircled her
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9
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Like giant figures wrestling in the night:
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The godheads from the dim Inconscient born
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Awoke to struggle and the pang divine,
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And in the shadow of her flaming heart,
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At the sombre centre of the dire debate,
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A guardian of the unconsoled abyss
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Inheriting the long agony of the globe,
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A stone-still figure of high and godlike Pain
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Stared into Space with fixed regardless eyes
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That saw grief's timeless depths but not life's goal.
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Afflicted by his harsh divinity,
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Bound to his throne, he waited unappeased
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The daily oblation of her unwept tears.
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All the fierce question of man's hours relived.
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The sacrifice of suffering and desire
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Earth offers to the immortal Ecstasy
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Began again beneath the eternal Hand.
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Awake she endured the moments' serried march
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And looked on this green smiling dangerous world,
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And heard the ignorant cry of living things.
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Amid the trivial sounds, the unchanging scene
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Her soul arose confronting Time and Fate.
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Immobile in herself, she gathered force.
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This was the day when Satyavan must die.
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The Issue
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AWHILE, withdrawn in secret fields of thought,
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Her mind moved in a many-imaged past
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That lived again and saw its end approach:
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Dying, it lived imperishably in her;
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Transient and vanishing from transient eyes,
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Invisible, a fateful ghost of self,
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It bore the future on its phantom breast.
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Along the fleeting event's far-backward trail
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Regressed the stream of the insistent hours,
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And on the bank of the mysterious flood
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Peopled with well-loved forms now seen no more
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And the subtle images of things that were,
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Her witness spirit stood reviewing Time.
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All that she once had hoped and dreamed and been,
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Flew past her eagle-winged through memory's skies.
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As in a many-hued flaming inner dawn,
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Her life's broad highways and its sweet bypaths
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Lay mapped to her sun-clear recording view,
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From the bright country of her childhood's days
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And the blue mountains of her soaring youth
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And the paradise groves and peacock wings of Love
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To joy clutched under the silent shadow of doom
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In a last turn where heaven raced with hell.
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Twelve passionate months led in a day of fate.
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An absolute supernatural darkness falls
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On man sometimes when he draws near to God:
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An hour arrives when fail all Nature's means;
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Forced out from the protecting Ignorance
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And flung back on his naked primal need,
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He at length must cast from him his surface soul
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And be the ungarbed entity within:
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That hour had fallen now on Savitri.
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A point she had reached where life must be in vain
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Or, in her unborn element awake,
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Her will must cancel her body's destiny.
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For only the unborn spirit's timeless power
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Can lift the yoke imposed by birth in Time.
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Only the Self that builds this figure of self
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Can rase the fixed interminable line
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That joins these changing names, these numberless lives,
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These new oblivious personalities
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And keeps still lurking in our conscious acts
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The trail of old forgotten thoughts and deeds,
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Disown the legacy of our buried selves,
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The burdensome heirship to our vanished forms
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Accepted blindly by the body and soul.
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An episode in an unremembered tale,
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Its beginning lost, its motive and plot concealed,
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A once living story has prepared and made
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Our present fate, child of past energies.
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The fixity of the cosmic sequences
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Fastened with hidden inevitable links
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She must disrupt, dislodge by her soul's force
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Her past, a block on the Immortal's road,
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Make a rased ground and shape anew her fate.
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A colloquy of the original Gods
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Meeting upon the borders of the unknown,
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Her soul's debate with embodied Nothingness
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Must be wrestled out on a dangerous dim background:
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Her being must confront its formless Cause,
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Against the universe weigh its single self.
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On the bare peak where Self is alone with Nought
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And life has no sense and love no place to stand,
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She must plead her case upon extinction's verge,
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In the world's death-cave uphold life's helpless claim
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And vindicate her right to be and love.
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Altered must be Nature's harsh economy;
|
CANTO II: The Issue
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Acquittance she must win from her past's bond,
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An old account of suffering exhaust,
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Strike out from Time the soul's long compound debt
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And the heavy servitudes of the Karmic Gods,
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The slow revenge of unforgiving Law
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And the deep need of universal pain
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And hard sacrifice and tragic consequence.
|
Out of a timeless barrier she must break,
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Penetrate with her thinking depths the Void's monstrous hush,
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Look into the lonely eyes of immortal Death
|
And with her nude spirit measure the Infinite's night.
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The great and dolorous moment now was close.
|
A mailed battalion marching to its doom,
|
The last long days went by with heavy tramp,
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Long but too soon to pass, too near the end.
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Alone amid the many faces loved,
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Aware among unknowing happy hearts,
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Her armoured spirit kept watch upon the hours
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Listening for a foreseen tremendous step
|
In the closed beauty of the inhuman wilds.
|
A combatant in silent dreadful lists,
|
The world unknowing, for the world she stood:
|
No helper had she save the Strength within;
|
There was no witness of terrestrial eyes;
|
The Gods above and Nature sole below
|
Were the spectators of that mighty strife.
|
Around her were the austere sky-pointing hills,
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And the green murmurous broad deep-thoughted woods
|
Muttered incessantly their muffled spell.
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A dense magnificent coloured self-wrapped life
|
Draped in the leaves' vivid emerald monotone
|
And set with chequered sunbeams and bli the flowers
|
Immured her destiny's secluded scene.
|
There had she grown to the stature of her spirit:
|
The genius of titanic silences
|
Steeping her soul in its wide loneliness
|
Had shown to her her self's bare reality
|
And mated her with her environment.
|
Its solitude greatened her human hours
|
With a background of the eternal and unique.
|
A force of spare direct necessity
|
Reduced the heavy framework of man's days
|
And his overburdening mass of outward needs
|
To a first thin strip of simple animal wants,
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And the mighty wildness of the primitive earth
|
And the brooding multitude of patient trees
|
And the musing sapphire leisure of the sky
|
And the solemn weight of the slowly-passing months
|
Had left in her deep room for thought and God.
|
There was her drama's radiant prologue lived.
|
A spot for the eternal's tread on earth
|
Set in the cloistral yearning of the woods
|
And watched by the aspiration of the peaks
|
Appeared through an aureate opening in Time,
|
Where stillness listening felt the unspoken word
|
And the hours forgot to pass towards grief and change.
|
Here with the suddenness divine advents have,
|
Repeating the marvel of the first descent,
|
Changing to rapture the dull earthly round,
|
Love came to her hiding the shadow, Death.
|
Well might he find in her his perfect shrine.
|
Since first the earth-being's heavenward growth began,
|
Through all the long ordeal of the race,
|
Never a rarer creature bore his shaft,
|
That burning test of the godhead in our parts,
|
A lightning from the heights on our abyss.
|
All in her pointed to a nobler kind.
|
Near to earth's wideness, intimate with heaven,
|
Exalted and swift her young large-visioned spirit
|
Voyaging through worlds of splendour and of calm
|
Overflew the ways of Thought to unborn things.
|
Ardent was her self-poised unstumbling will;
|
CANTO II: The Issue
|
Her mind, a sea of white sincerity,
|
Passionate in flow, had not one turbid wave.
|
As in a mystic and dynamic dance
|
A priestess of immaculate ecstasies
|
Inspired and ruled from Truth's revealing vault
|
Moves in some prophet cavern of the gods,
|
A heart of silence in the hands of joy
|
Inhabited with rich creative beats
|
A body like a parable of dawn
|
That seemed a niche for veiled divinity
|
Or golden temple-door to things beyond.
|
Immortal rhythms swayed in her time-born steps;
|
Her look, her smile awoke celestial sense
|
Even in earth-stuff, and their intense delight
|
Poured a supernal beauty on men's lives.
|
A wide self-giving was her native act;
|
A magnanimity as of sea or sky
|
Enveloped with its greatness all that came
|
And gave a sense as of a greatened world:
|
Her kindly care was a sweet temperate sun,
|
Her high passion a blue heaven's equipoise.
|
As might a soul fly like a hunted bird,
|
Escaping with tired wings from a world of storms,
|
And a quiet reach like a remembered breast,
|
In a haven of safety and splendid soft repose
|
One could drink life back in streams of honey-fire,
|
Recover the lost habit of happiness,
|
Feel her bright nature's glorious ambience,
|
And preen joy in her warmth and colour's rule.
|
A deep of compassion, a hushed sanctuary,
|
Her inward help unbarred a gate in heaven;
|
Love in her was wider than the universe,
|
The whole world could take refuge in her single heart.
|
The great unsatisfied godhead here could dwell:
|
Vacant of the dwarf self's imprisoned air,
|
Her mood could harbour his sublimer breath
|
Spiritual that can make all things divine.
|
For even her gulfs were secrecies of light.
|
At once she was the stillness and the word,
|
A continent of self-diffusing peace,
|
An ocean of untrembling virgin fire;
|
The strength, the silence of the gods were hers.
|
In her he found a vastness like his own,
|
His high warm subtle ether he refound
|
And moved in her as in his natural home.
|
In her he met his own eternity.
|
Till then no mournful line had barred this ray.
|
On the frail breast of this precarious earth,
|
Since her orbed sight in its breath-fastened house,
|
Opening in sympathy with happier stars
|
Where life is not exposed to sorrowful change,
|
Remembered beauty death-claimed lids ignore
|
And wondered at this world of fragile forms
|
Carried on canvas-strips of shimmering Time,
|
The impunity of unborn Mights was hers.
|
Although she leaned to bear the human load,
|
Her walk kept still the measures of the gods.
|
Earth's breath had failed to stain that brilliant glass:
|
Unsmeared with the dust of our mortal atmosphere
|
It still reflected heaven's spiritual joy.
|
Almost they saw who lived within her light
|
Her playmate in the sempiternal spheres
|
Descended from its unattainable realms
|
In her attracting advent's luminous wake,
|
The white-fire dragon-bird of endless bliss
|
Drifting with burning wings above her days:
|
Heaven's tranquil shield guarded the missioned child.
|
A glowing orbit was her early term,
|
Years like gold raiment of the gods that pass;
|
Her youth sat throned in calm felicity.
|
But joy cannot endure until the end:
|
CANTO II: The Issue
|
There is a darkness in terrestrial things
|
That will not suffer long too glad a note.
|
On her too closed the inescapable Hand:
|
The armed Immortal bore the snare of Time.
|
One dealt with her who meets the burdened great.
|
Assigner of the ordeal and the path
|
Who chooses in this holocaust of the soul
|
Death, fall and sorrow as the spirit's goads,
|
The dubious godhead with his torch of pain
|
Lit up the chasm of the unfinished world
|
And called her to fill with her vast self the abyss.
|
August and pitiless in his calm outlook,
|
Heightening the Eternal's dreadful strategy,
|
He measured the difficulty with the might
|
And dug more deep the gulf that all must cross.
|
Assailing her divinest elements,
|
He made her heart kin to the striving human heart
|
And forced her strength to its appointed road.
|
For this she had accepted mortal breath;
|
To wrestle with the Shadow she had come
|
And must confront the riddle of man's birth
|
And life's brief struggle in dumb Matter's night.
|
Whether to bear with Ignorance and death
|
Or hew the ways of Immortality,
|
To win or lose the godlike game for man,
|
Was her soul's issue thrown with Destiny's dice.
|
But not to submit and suffer was she born;
|
To lead, to deliver was her glorious part.
|
Here was no fabric of terrestrial make
|
Fit for a day's use by busy careless Powers.
|
An image fluttering on the screen of Fate,
|
Half-animated for a passing show,
|
Or a castaway on the ocean of Desire
|
Flung to the eddies in a ruthless sport
|
And tossed along the gulfs of Circumstance,
|
A creature born to bend beneath the yoke,
|
A chattel and a plaything of Time's lords,
|
Or one more pawn who comes destined to be pushed
|
One slow move forward on a measureless board
|
In the chess-play of the earth-soul with Doom, -
|
Such is the human figure drawn by Time.
|
A conscious frame was here, a self-born Force.
|
In this enigma of the dusk of God,
|
This slow and strange uneasy compromise
|
Of limiting Nature with a limitless Soul,
|
Where all must move between an ordered Chance
|
And an uncaring blind Necessity,
|
Too high the fire spiritual dare not blaze.
|
If once it met the intense original Flame,
|
An answering touch might shatter all measures made
|
And earth sink down with the weight of the Infinite.
|
A gaol is this immense material world:
|
Across each road stands armed a stone-eyed Law,
|
At every gate the huge dim sentinels pace.
|
A grey tribunal of the Ignorance,
|
An Inquisition of the priests of Night
|
In judgment sit on the adventurer soul,
|
And the dual tables and the Karmic norm
|
Restrain the Titan in us and the God:
|
Pain with its lash, joy with its silver bribe
|
Guard the Wheel's circling immobility.
|
A bond is put on the high-climbing mind,
|
A seal on the too large wide-open heart;
|
Death stays the journeying discoverer, Life.
|
Thus is the throne of the Inconscient safe
|
While the tardy coilings of the aeons pass
|
And the Animal browses in the sacred fence
|
And the gold Hawk can cross the skies no more.
|
But one stood up and lit the limitless flame.
|
Arraigned by the dark Power that hates all bliss
|
In the dire court where life must pay for joy,
|
Sentenced by the mechanic justicer
|
CANTO II: The Issue
|
To the afflicting penalty of man's hopes,
|
Her head she bowed not to the stark decree
|
Baring her helpless heart to destiny's stroke.
|
So bows and must the mind-born will in man
|
Obedient to the statutes fixed of old,
|
Admitting without appeal the nether gods.
|
In her the superhuman cast its seed.
|
Inapt to fold its mighty wings of dream
|
Her spirit refused to hug the common soil,
|
Or, finding all life's golden meanings robbed,
|
Compound with earth, struck from the starry list,
|
Or quench with black despair the God-given light.
|
Accustomed to the eternal and the true,
|
Her being conscious of its divine founts
|
Asked not from mortal frailty pain's relief,
|
Patched not with failure bargain or compromise.
|
A work she had to do, a word to speak:
|
Writing the unfinished story of her soul
|
In thoughts and actions graved in Nature's book,
|
She accepted not to close the luminous page,
|
Cancel her commerce with eternity,
|
Or set a signature of weak assent
|
To the brute balance of the world's exchange.
|
A force in her that toiled since earth was made,
|
Accomplishing in life the great world-plan,
|
Pursuing after death immortal aims,
|
Repugned to admit frustration's barren role,
|
Forfeit the meaning of her birth in Time,
|
Obey the government of the casual fact
|
Or yield her high destiny up to passing Chance.
|
In her own self she found her high recourse;
|
She matched with the iron law her sovereign right:
|
Her single will opposed the cosmic rule.
|
To stay the wheels of Doom this greatness rose.
|
At the Unseen's knock upon her hidden gates
|
Her strength made greater by the lightning's touch
|
Awoke from slumber in her heart's recess.
|
It bore the stroke of That which kills and saves.
|
Across the awful march no eye can see,
|
Barring its dreadful route no will can change,
|
She faced the engines of the universe;
|
A heart stood in the way of the driving wheels:
|
Its giant workings paused in front of a mind,
|
Its stark conventions met the flame of a soul.
|
A magic leverage suddenly is caught
|
That moves the veiled Ineffable's timeless will:
|
A prayer, a master act, a king idea
|
Can link man's strength to a transcendent Force.
|
Then miracle is made the common rule,
|
One mighty deed can change the course of things;
|
A lonely thought becomes omnipotent.
|
All now seems Nature's massed machinery;
|
An endless servitude to material rule
|
And long determination's rigid chain,
|
Her firm and changeless habits aping Law,
|
Her empire of unconscious deft device
|
Annul the claim of man's free human will.
|
He too is a machine amid machines;
|
A piston brain pumps out the shapes of thought,
|
A beating heart cuts out emotion's modes;
|
An insentient energy fabricates a soul.
|
Or the figure of the world reveals the signs
|
Of a tied Chance repeating her old steps
|
In circles around Matter's binding-posts.
|
A random series of inept events
|
To which reason lends illusive sense, is here,
|
Or the empiric Life's instinctive search,
|
Or a vast ignorant mind's colossal work.
|
But wisdom comes, and vision grows within:
|
Then Nature's instrument crowns himself her king;
|
He feels his witnessing self and conscious power;
|
His soul steps back and sees the Light supreme.
|
CANTO II: The Issue
|
A Godhead stands behind the brute machine.
|
This truth broke in in a triumph of fire;
|
A victory was won for God in man,
|
The deity revealed its hidden face.
|
The great World-Mother now in her arose:
|
A living choice reversed fate's cold dead turn,
|
Affirmed the spirit's tread on Circumstance,
|
Pressed back the senseless dire revolving Wheel
|
And stopped the mute march of Necessity.
|
A flaming warrior from the eternal peaks
|
Empowered to force the door denied and closed
|
Smote from Death's visage its dumb absolute
|
And burst the bounds of consciousness and Time.
|
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
|
CANTO III: The Yoga of the Soul's Release
|
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,
|
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
|
CANTO III: The Yoga of the Soul's Release
|
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
|
Wisdom upraised him to her master craft
|
And made him an archmason 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
|
CANTO III: The Yoga of the Soul's Release
|
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,
|
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:
|
CANTO III: The Yoga of the Soul's Release
|
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
|
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,
|
CANTO III: The Yoga of the Soul's Release
|
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 region 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
|
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,
|
CANTO III: The Yoga of the Soul's Release
|
The grooves that turn their dumb ellipse in space
|
Ploughed by the seeking of the world's desire,
|
The long regurgitations of 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
|
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 awhile 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 pose 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 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;
|
CANTO III: The Yoga of the Soul's Release
|
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
|
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,
|
CANTO III: The Yoga of the Soul's Release
|
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-wrapped 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.
|
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
|
CANTO III: The Yoga of the Soul's Release
|
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 wrapped 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
|
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,
|
CANTO III: The Yoga of the Soul's Release
|
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.
|
Hardly for a moment glimpsed viewless to Mind,
|
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
|
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
|
CANTO III: The Yoga of the Soul's Release
|
Seeking its own perfect form in souls and things.
|
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 an 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
|
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,
|
CANTO III: The Yoga of the Soul's Release
|
He drew the energies that transmute an age.
|
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.
|
The Secret Knowledge
|
ON A height he stood that looked towards greater heights.
|
Our early approaches to the Infinite
|
Are sunrise splendours on a marvellous verge
|
While lingers yet unseen the glorious sun.
|
What now we see is a shadow of what must come.
|
The earth's uplook to a remote Unknown
|
Is a preface only of the epic climb
|
Of human soul from its flat earthly state
|
To the discovery of a greater self
|
And the far gleam of an eternal Light.
|
This world is a beginning and a base
|
Where Life and Mind erect their structured dreams;
|
An unborn Power must build reality.
|
A deathbound littleness is not all we are:
|
Immortal our forgotten vastnesses
|
Await discovery in our summit selves;
|
Unmeasured breadths and depths of being are ours.
|
Akin to the ineffable Secrecy,
|
Mystic, eternal in unrealised Time,
|
Neighbours of Heaven are Nature's altitudes.
|
To these high-peaked dominions sealed to our search,
|
Too far from surface Nature's postal routes,
|
Too lofty for our mortal lives to breathe,
|
Deep in us a forgotten kinship points
|
And a faint voice of ecstasy and prayer
|
Calls to those lucent lost immensities.
|
Even when we fail to look into our souls
|
Or lie embedded in earthly consciousness,
|
Still have we parts that grow towards the light,
|
Yet are there luminous tracts and heavens serene
|
And Eldorados of splendour and ecstasy
|
CANTO IV: The Secret Knowledge
|
And temples to the godhead none can see.
|
A shapeless memory lingers in us still
|
And sometimes, when our sight is turned within,
|
Earth's ignorant veil is lifted from our eyes;
|
There is a short miraculous escape.
|
This narrow fringe of clamped experience
|
We leave behind meted to us as life,
|
Our little walks, our insufficient reach.
|
Our souls can visit in great lonely hours
|
Still regions of imperishable Light,
|
All-seeing eagle-peaks of silent Power
|
And moon-flame oceans of swift fathomless Bliss
|
And calm immensities of spirit space.
|
In the unfolding process of the Self
|
Sometimes the inexpressible Mystery
|
Elects a human vessel of descent.
|
A breath comes down from a supernal air,
|
A Presence is born, a guiding Light awakes,
|
A stillness falls upon the instruments:
|
Fixed, motionless like a marble monument,
|
Stone-calm, the body is a pedestal
|
Supporting a figure of eternal Peace.
|
Or a revealing Force sweeps blazing in;
|
Out of some vast superior continent
|
Knowledge breaks through trailing its radiant seas,
|
And Nature trembles with the power, the flame.
|
A greater Personality sometimes
|
Possesses us which yet we know is ours:
|
Or we adore the Master of our souls.
|
Then the small bodily ego thins and falls;
|
No more insisting on its separate self,
|
Losing the punctilio of its separate birth,
|
It leaves us one with Nature and with God.
|
In moments when the inner lamps are lit
|
And the life's cherished guests are left outside,
|
Our spirit sits alone and speaks to its gulfs.
|
A wider consciousness opens then its doors;
|
Invading from spiritual silences
|
A ray of the timeless Glory stoops awhile
|
To commune with our seized illumined clay
|
And leaves its huge white stamp upon our lives.
|
In the oblivious field of mortal mind,
|
Revealed to the closed prophet eyes of trance
|
Or in some deep internal solitude
|
Witnessed by a strange immaterial sense,
|
The signals of eternity appear.
|
The truth mind could not know unveils its face,
|
We hear what mortal ears have never heard,
|
We feel what earthly sense has never felt,
|
We love what common hearts repel and dread;
|
Our minds hush to a bright Omniscient;
|
A Voice calls from the chambers of the soul;
|
We meet the ecstasy of the Godhead's touch
|
In golden privacies of immortal fire.
|
These signs are native to a larger self
|
That lives within us by ourselves unseen;
|
Only sometimes a holier influence comes,
|
A tide of mightier surgings bears our lives
|
And a diviner Presence moves the soul;
|
Or through the earthly coverings something breaks,
|
A grace and beauty of spiritual light,
|
The murmuring tongue of a celestial fire.
|
Ourself and a high stranger whom we feel,
|
It is and acts unseen as if it were not;
|
It follows the line of sempiternal birth,
|
Yet seems to perish with its mortal frame.
|
Assured of the Apocalypse to be,
|
It reckons not the moments and the hours;
|
Great, patient, calm it sees the centuries pass,
|
Awaiting the slow miracle of our change
|
In the sure deliberate process of world-force
|
And the long march of all-revealing Time.
|
CANTO IV: The Secret Knowledge
|
It is the origin and the master-clue,
|
A silence overhead, an inner voice,
|
A living image seated in the heart,
|
An unwalled wideness and a fathomless point,
|
The truth of all these cryptic shows in Space,
|
The Real towards which our strivings move,
|
The secret grandiose meaning of our lives.
|
A treasure of honey in the combs of God,
|
A Splendour burning in a tenebrous cloak,
|
It is our glory of the flame of God,
|
Our golden fountain of the world's delight,
|
An immortality cowled in the cape of death,
|
The shape of our unborn divinity.
|
It guards for us our fate in depths within
|
Where sleeps the eternal seed of transient things.
|
Always we bear in us a magic key
|
Concealed in life's hermetic envelope.
|
A burning Witness in the sanctuary
|
Regards through Time and the blind walls of Form;
|
A timeless Light is in his hidden eyes;
|
He sees the secret things no words can speak
|
And knows the goal of the unconscious world
|
And the heart of the mystery of the journeying years.
|
But all is screened, subliminal, mystical;
|
It needs the intuitive heart, the inward turn,
|
It needs the power of a spiritual gaze.
|
Else to our waking mind's small moment look
|
A goalless voyage seems our dubious course
|
Some Chance has settled or hazarded some Will,
|
Or a Necessity without aim or cause
|
Unwillingly compelled to emerge and be.
|
In this dense field where nothing is plain or sure,
|
Our very being seems to us questionable,
|
Our life a vague experiment, the soul
|
A flickering light in a strange ignorant world,
|
The earth a brute mechanic accident,
|
A net of death in which by chance we live.
|
All we have learned appears a doubtful guess,
|
The achievement done a passage or a phase
|
Whose farther end is hidden from our sight,
|
A chance happening or a fortuitous fate.
|
Out of the unknown we move to the unknown.
|
Ever surround our brief existence here
|
Grey shadows of unanswered questionings;
|
The dark Inconscient's signless mysteries
|
Stand up unsolved behind Fate's starting-line.
|
An aspiration in the Night's profound,
|
Seed of a perishing body and half-lit mind,
|
Uplifts its lonely tongue of conscious fire
|
Towards an undying Light for ever lost;
|
Only it hears, sole echo of its call,
|
The dim reply in man's unknowing heart
|
And meets, not understanding why it came
|
Or for what reason is the suffering here,
|
God's sanction to the paradox of life
|
And the riddle of the Immortal's birth in Time.
|
Along a path of aeons serpentine
|
In the coiled blackness of her nescient course
|
The Earth-Goddess toils across the sands of Time.
|
A Being is in her whom she hopes to know,
|
A Word speaks to her heart she cannot hear,
|
A Fate compels whose form she cannot see.
|
In her unconscious orbit through the Void
|
Out of her mindless depths she strives to rise,
|
A perilous life her gain, a struggling joy;
|
A Thought that can conceive but hardly knows
|
Arises slowly in her and creates
|
The idea, the speech that labels more than it lights;
|
A trembling gladness that is less than bliss
|
Invades from all this beauty that must die.
|
Alarmed by the sorrow dragging at her feet
|
CANTO IV: The Secret Knowledge
|
And conscious of the high things not yet won,
|
Ever she nurses in her sleepless breast
|
An inward urge that takes from her rest and peace.
|
Ignorant and weary and invincible,
|
She seeks through the soul's war and quivering pain
|
The pure perfection her marred nature needs,
|
A breath of Godhead on her stone and mire.
|
A faith she craves that can survive defeat,
|
The sweetness of a love that knows not death,
|
The radiance of a truth for ever sure.
|
A light grows in her, she assumes a voice,
|
Her state she learns to read and the act she has done,
|
But the one needed truth eludes her grasp,
|
Herself and all of which she is the sign.
|
An inarticulate whisper drives her steps
|
Of which she feels the force but not the sense;
|
A few rare intimations come as guides,
|
Immense divining flashes cleave her brain,
|
And sometimes in her hours of dream and muse
|
The truth that she has missed looks out on her
|
As if far off and yet within her soul.
|
A change comes near that flees from her surmise
|
And, ever postponed, compels attempt and hope,
|
Yet seems too great for mortal hope to dare.
|
A vision meets her of supernal Powers
|
That draw her as if mighty kinsmen lost
|
Approaching with estranged great luminous gaze.
|
Then is she moved to all that she is not
|
And stretches arms to what was never hers.
|
Outstretching arms to the unconscious Void,
|
Passionate she prays to invisible forms of Gods
|
Soliciting from dumb Fate and toiling Time
|
What most she needs, what most exceeds her scope,
|
A Mind unvisited by illusion's gleams,
|
A Will expressive of soul's deity,
|
A Strength not forced to stumble by its speed,
|
A Joy that drags not sorrow as its shade.
|
For these she yearns and feels them destined hers:
|
Heaven's privilege she claims as her own right.
|
Just is her claim the all-witnessing Gods approve,
|
Clear in a greater light than reason owns:
|
Our intuitions are its title-deeds;
|
Our souls accept what our blind thoughts refuse.
|
Earth's winged chimaeras are Truth's steeds in Heaven,
|
The impossible God's sign of things to be.
|
But few can look beyond the present state
|
Or overleap this matted hedge of sense.
|
All that transpires on earth and all beyond
|
Are parts of an illimitable plan
|
The One keeps in his heart and knows alone.
|
Our outward happenings have their seed within,
|
And even this random Fate that imitates Chance,
|
This mass of unintelligible results,
|
Are the dumb graph of truths that work unseen:
|
The laws of the Unknown create the known.
|
The events that shape the appearance of our lives
|
Are a cipher of subliminal quiverings
|
Which rarely we surprise or vaguely feel,
|
Are an outcome of suppressed realities
|
That hardly rise into material day:
|
They are born from the spirit's sun of hidden powers
|
Digging a tunnel through emergency.
|
But who shall pierce into the cryptic gulf
|
And learn what deep necessity of the soul
|
Determined casual deed and consequence?
|
Absorbed in a routine of daily acts,
|
Our eyes are fixed on an external scene;
|
We hear the crash of the wheels of Circumstance
|
And wonder at the hidden cause of things.
|
Yet a foreseeing Knowledge might be ours,
|
If we could take our spirit's stand within,
|
If we could hear the muffled daemon voice.
|
CANTO IV: The Secret Knowledge
|
Too seldom is the shadow of what must come
|
Cast in an instant on the secret sense
|
Which feels the shock of the invisible,
|
And seldom in the few who answer give
|
The mighty process of the cosmic Will
|
Communicates its image to our sight,
|
Identifying the world's mind with ours.
|
Our range is fixed within the crowded arc
|
Of what we observe and touch and thought can guess
|
And rarely dawns the light of the Unknown
|
Waking in us the prophet and the seer.
|
The outward and the immediate are our field,
|
The dead past is our background and support;
|
Mind keeps the soul prisoner, we are slaves to our acts;
|
We cannot free our gaze to reach wisdom's sun.
|
Inheritor of the brief animal mind,
|
Man, still a child in Nature's mighty hands,
|
In the succession of the moments lives;
|
To a changing present is his narrow right;
|
His memory stares back at a phantom past,
|
The future flees before him as he moves;
|
He sees imagined garments, not a face.
|
Armed with a limited precarious strength,
|
He saves his fruits of work from adverse chance.
|
A struggling ignorance is his wisdom's mate:
|
He waits to see the consequence of his acts,
|
He waits to weigh the certitude of his thoughts,
|
He knows not what he shall achieve or when;
|
He knows not whether at last he shall survive,
|
Or end like the mastodon and the sloth
|
And perish from the earth where he was king.
|
He is ignorant of the meaning of his life,
|
He is ignorant of his high and splendid fate.
|
Only the Immortals on their deathless heights
|
Dwelling beyond the walls of Time and Space,
|
Masters of living, free from the bonds of Thought,
|
Who are overseers of Fate and Chance and Will
|
And experts of the theorem of world-need,
|
Can see the Idea, the Might that change Time's course,
|
Come maned with light from undiscovered worlds,
|
Hear, while the world toils on with its deep blind heart,
|
The galloping hooves of the unforeseen event,
|
Bearing the superhuman Rider, near
|
And, impassive to earth's din and startled cry,
|
Return to the silence of the hills of God;
|
As lightning leaps, as thunder sweeps, they pass
|
And leave their mark on the trampled breast of Life.
|
Above the world the world-creators stand,
|
In the phenomenon see its mystic source.
|
These heed not the deceiving outward play,
|
They turn not to the moment's busy tramp,
|
But listen with the still patience of the Unborn
|
For the slow footsteps of far Destiny
|
Approaching through huge distances of Time,
|
Unmarked by the eye that sees effect and cause,
|
Unheard mid the clamour of the human plane.
|
Attentive to an unseen Truth they seize
|
A sound as of invisible augur wings,
|
Voices of an unplumbed significance,
|
Mutterings that brood in the core of Matter's sleep.
|
In the heart's profound audition they can catch
|
The murmurs lost by Life's uncaring ear,
|
A prophet-speech in Thought's omniscient trance.
|
Above the illusion of the hopes that pass,
|
Behind the appearance and the overt act,
|
Behind this clock-work Chance and vague surmise,
|
Amid the wrestle of force, the trampling feet,
|
Across the cries of anguish and of joy,
|
Across the triumph, fighting and despair,
|
They watch the Bliss for which earth's heart has cried
|
On the long road which cannot see its end
|
Winding undetected through the sceptic days
|
CANTO IV: The Secret Knowledge
|
And to meet it guide the unheedful moving world.
|
Thus will the masked Transcendent mount his throne.
|
When darkness deepens strangling the earth's breast
|
And man's corporeal mind is the only lamp,
|
As a thief's in the night shall be the covert tread
|
Of one who steps unseen into his house.
|
A Voice ill-heard shall speak, the soul obey,
|
A Power into mind's inner chamber steal,
|
A charm and sweetness open life's closed doors
|
And beauty conquer the resisting world,
|
The Truth-Light capture Nature by surprise,
|
A stealth of God compel the heart to bliss
|
And earth grow unexpectedly divine.
|
In Matter shall be lit the spirit's glow,
|
In body and body kindled the sacred birth;
|
Night shall awake to the anthem of the stars,
|
The days become a happy pilgrim march,
|
Our will a force of the Eternal's power,
|
And thought the rays of a spiritual sun.
|
A few shall see what none yet understands;
|
God shall grow up while the wise men talk and sleep;
|
For man shall not know the coming till its hour
|
And belief shall be not till the work is done.
|
A Consciousness that knows not its own truth,
|
A vagrant hunter of misleading dawns,
|
Between the being's dark and luminous ends
|
Moves here in a half-light that seems the whole:
|
An interregnum in Reality
|
Cuts off the integral Thought, the total Power;
|
It circles or stands in a vague interspace,
|
Doubtful of its beginning and its close,
|
Or runs upon a road that has no end;
|
Far from the original Dusk, the final Flame
|
In some huge void Inconscience it lives,
|
Like a thought persisting in a wide emptiness.
|
As if an unintelligible phrase
|
Suggested a million renderings to the Mind,
|
It lends a purport to a random world.
|
A conjecture leaning upon doubtful proofs,
|
A message misunderstood, a thought confused
|
Missing its aim is all that it can speak
|
Or a fragment of the universal word.
|
It leaves two giant letters void of sense
|
While without sanction turns the middle sign
|
Carrying an enigmatic universe,
|
As if a present without future or past
|
Repeating the same revolution's whirl
|
Turned on its axis in its own Inane.
|
Thus is the meaning of creation veiled;
|
For without context reads the cosmic page:
|
Its signs stare at us like an unknown script,
|
As if appeared screened by a foreign tongue
|
Or code of splendour signs without a key
|
A portion of a parable sublime.
|
It wears to the perishable creature's eyes
|
The grandeur of a useless miracle;
|
Wasting itself that it may last awhile,
|
A river that can never find its sea,
|
It runs through life and death on an edge of Time;
|
A fire in the Night is its mighty action's blaze.
|
This is our deepest need to join once more
|
What now is parted, opposite and twain,
|
Remote in sovereign spheres that never meet
|
Or fronting like far poles of Night and Day.
|
We must fill the immense lacuna we have made,
|
Re-wed the closed finite's lonely consonant
|
With the open vowels of Infinity,
|
A hyphen must connect Matter and Mind,
|
The narrow isthmus of the ascending soul:
|
We must renew the secret bond in things,
|
Our hearts recall the lost divine Idea,
|
CANTO IV: The Secret Knowledge
|
Reconstitute the perfect word, unite
|
The Alpha and the Omega in one sound;
|
Then shall the Spirit and Nature be at one.
|
Two are the ends of the mysterious plan.
|
In the wide signless ether of the Self,
|
In the unchanging Silence white and nude,
|
Aloof, resplendent like gold dazzling suns
|
Veiled by the ray no mortal eye can bear,
|
The Spirit's bare and absolute potencies
|
Burn in the solitude of the thoughts of God.
|
A rapture and a radiance and a hush,
|
Delivered from the approach of wounded hearts,
|
Denied to the Idea that looks at grief,
|
Remote from the Force that cries out in its pain,
|
In his inalienable bliss they live.
|
Immaculate in self-knowledge and self-power,
|
Calm they repose on the eternal Will.
|
Only his law they count and him obey;
|
They have no goal to reach, no aim to serve.
|
Implacable in their timeless purity,
|
All barter or bribe of worship they refuse;
|
Unmoved by cry of revolt and ignorant prayer
|
They reckon not our virtue and our sin;
|
They bend not to the voices that implore,
|
They hold no traffic with error and its reign;
|
They are guardians of the silence of the Truth,
|
They are keepers of the immutable decree.
|
A deep surrender is their source of might,
|
A still identity their way to know,
|
Motionless is their action like a sleep.
|
At peace, regarding the trouble beneath the stars,
|
Deathless, watching the works of Death and Chance,
|
Immobile, seeing the millenniums pass,
|
Untouched while the long map of Fate unrolls,
|
They look on our struggle with impartial eyes,
|
And yet without them cosmos could not be.
|
Impervious to desire and doom and hope,
|
Their station of inviolable might
|
Moveless upholds the world's enormous task,
|
Its ignorance is by their knowledge lit,
|
Its yearning lasts by their indifference.
|
As the height draws the low ever to climb,
|
As the breadths draw the small to adventure vast,
|
Their aloofness drives man to surpass himself.
|
Our passion heaves to wed the Eternal's calm,
|
Our dwarf-search mind to meet the Omniscient's light,
|
Our helpless hearts to enshrine the Omnipotent's force.
|
Acquiescing in the wisdom that made hell
|
And the harsh utility of death and tears,
|
Acquiescing in the gradual steps of Time,
|
Careless they seem of the grief that stings the world's heart,
|
Careless of the pain that rends its body and life;
|
Above joy and sorrow is that grandeur's walk:
|
They have no portion in the good that dies,
|
Mute, pure, they share not in the evil done;
|
Else might their strength be marred and could not save.
|
Alive to the truth that dwells in God's extremes,
|
Awake to a motion of all-seeing Force,
|
The slow outcome of the long ambiguous years
|
And the unexpected good from woeful deeds,
|
The immortal sees not as we vainly see.
|
He looks on hidden aspects and screened powers,
|
He knows the law and natural line of things.
|
Undriven by a brief life's will to act,
|
Unharassed by the spur of pity and fear,
|
He makes no haste to untie the cosmic knot
|
Or the world's torn jarring heart to reconcile.
|
In Time he waits for the Eternal's hour.
|
Yet a spiritual secret aid is there;
|
While a tardy Evolution's coils wind on
|
And Nature hews her way through adamant
|
A divine intervention thrones above.
|
CANTO IV: The Secret Knowledge
|
Alive in a dead rotating universe
|
We whirl not here upon a casual globe
|
Abandoned to a task beyond our force;
|
Even through the tangled anarchy called Fate
|
And through the bitterness of death and fall
|
An outstretched Hand is felt upon our lives.
|
It is near us in unnumbered bodies and births;
|
In its unslackening grasp it keeps for us safe
|
The one inevitable supreme result
|
No will can take away and no doom change,
|
The crown of conscious Immortality,
|
The godhead promised to our struggling souls
|
When first man's heart dared death and suffered life.
|
One who has shaped this world is ever its lord:
|
Our errors are his steps upon the way;
|
He works through the fierce vicissitudes of our lives,
|
He works through the hard breath of battle and toil,
|
He works through our sins and sorrows and our tears,
|
His knowledge overrules our nescience;
|
Whatever the appearance we must bear,
|
Whatever our strong ills and present fate,
|
When nothing we can see but drift and bale,
|
A mighty Guidance leads us still through all.
|
After we have served this great divided world
|
God's bliss and oneness are our inborn right.
|
A date is fixed in the calendar of the Unknown,
|
An anniversary of the Birth sublime:
|
Our soul shall justify its chequered walk,
|
All will come near that now is naught or far.
|
These calm and distant Mights shall act at last.
|
Immovably ready for their destined task,
|
The ever-wise compassionate Brilliances
|
Await the sound of the Incarnate's voice
|
To leap and bridge the chasms of Ignorance
|
And heal the hollow yearning gulfs of Life
|
And fill the abyss that is the universe.
|
Here meanwhile at the Spirit's opposite pole
|
In the mystery of the deeps that God has built
|
For his abode below the Thinker's sight,
|
In this compromise of a stark absolute Truth
|
With the Light that dwells near the dark end of things,
|
In this tragi-comedy of divine disguise,
|
This long far seeking for joy ever near,
|
In the grandiose dream of which the world is made,
|
In this gold dome on a black dragon base,
|
The conscious Force that acts in Nature's breast,
|
A dark-robed labourer in the cosmic scheme
|
Carrying clay images of unborn gods,
|
Executrix of the inevitable Idea
|
Hampered, enveloped by the hoops of Fate,
|
Patient trustee of slow eternal Time,
|
Absolves from hour to hour her secret charge.
|
All she foresees in masked imperative depths;
|
The dumb intention of the unconscious gulfs
|
Answers to a will that sees upon the heights,
|
And the evolving Word's first syllable
|
Ponderous, brute-sensed, contains its luminous close,
|
Privy to a summit victory's vast descent
|
And the portent of the soul's immense uprise.
|
All here where each thing seems its lonely self
|
Are figures of the sole transcendent One:
|
Only by him they are, his breath is their life;
|
An unseen Presence moulds the oblivious clay.
|
A playmate in the mighty Mother's game,
|
One came upon the dubious whirling globe
|
To hide from her pursuit in force and form.
|
A secret spirit in the Inconscient's sleep,
|
A shapeless Energy, a voiceless Word,
|
He was here before the elements could emerge,
|
Before there was light of mind or life could breathe.
|
Accomplice of her cosmic huge pretence,
|
CANTO IV: The Secret Knowledge
|
His semblances he turns to real shapes
|
And makes the symbol equal with the truth:
|
He gives to his timeless thoughts a form in Time.
|
He is the substance, he the self of things;
|
She has forged from him her works of skill and might:
|
She wraps him in the magic of her moods
|
And makes of his myriad truths her countless dreams.
|
The Master of being has come down to her,
|
An immortal child born in the fugitive years.
|
In objects wrought, in the persons she conceives,
|
Dreaming she chases her idea of him,
|
And catches here a look and there a gest:
|
Ever he repeats in them his ceaseless births.
|
He is the Maker and the world he made,
|
He is the vision and he is the Seer;
|
He is himself the actor and the act,
|
He is himself the knower and the known,
|
He is himself the dreamer and the dream.
|
There are Two who are One and play in many worlds;
|
In Knowledge and Ignorance they have spoken and met
|
And light and darkness are their eyes' interchange;
|
Our pleasure and pain are their wrestle and embrace,
|
Our deeds, our hopes are intimate to their tale;
|
They are married secretly in our thought and life.
|
The universe is an endless masquerade:
|
For nothing here is utterly what it seems;
|
It is a dream-fact vision of a truth
|
Which but for the dream would not be wholly true,
|
A phenomenon stands out significant
|
Against dim backgrounds of eternity;
|
We accept its face and pass by all it means;
|
A part is seen, we take it for the whole.
|
Thus have they made their play with us for roles:
|
Author and actor with himself as scene,
|
He moves there as the Soul, as Nature she.
|
Here on the earth where we must fill our parts,
|
We know not how shall run the drama's course;
|
Our uttered sentences veil in their thought.
|
Her mighty plan she holds back from our sight:
|
She has concealed her glory and her bliss
|
And disguised the Love and Wisdom in her heart;
|
Of all the marvel and beauty that are hers,
|
Only a darkened little we can feel.
|
He too wears a diminished godhead here;
|
He has forsaken his omnipotence,
|
His calm he has foregone and infinity.
|
He knows her only, he has forgotten himself;
|
To her he abandons all to make her great.
|
He hopes in her to find himself anew,
|
Incarnate, wedding his infinity's peace
|
To her creative passion's ecstasy.
|
Although possessor of the earth and heavens,
|
He leaves to her the cosmic management
|
And watches all, the Witness of her scene.
|
A supernumerary on her stage,
|
He speaks no words or hides behind the wings.
|
He takes birth in her world, waits on her will,
|
Divines her enigmatic gesture's sense,
|
The fluctuating chance turns of her mood,
|
Works out her meanings she seems not to know
|
And serves her secret purpose in long Time.
|
As one too great for him he worships her;
|
He adores her as his regent of desire,
|
He yields to her as the mover of his will,
|
He burns the incense of his nights and days
|
Offering his life, a splendour of sacrifice.
|
A rapt solicitor for her love and grace,
|
His bliss in her to him is his whole world:
|
He grows through her in all his being's powers;
|
He reads by her God's hidden aim in things.
|
Or, a courtier in her countless retinue,
|
Content to be with her and feel her near
|
CANTO IV: The Secret Knowledge
|
He makes the most of the little that she gives
|
And all she does drapes with his own delight.
|
A glance can make his whole day wonderful,
|
A word from her lips with happiness wings the hours.
|
He leans on her for all he does and is:
|
He builds on her largesses his proud fortunate days
|
And trails his peacock-plumaged joy of life
|
And suns in the glory of her passing smile.
|
In a thousand ways he serves her royal needs;
|
He makes the hours pivot around her will,
|
Makes all reflect her whims; all is their play:
|
This whole wide world is only he and she.
|
This is the knot that ties together the stars:
|
The Two who are one are the secret of all power,
|
The Two who are one are the might and right in things.
|
His soul, silent, supports the world and her,
|
His acts are her commandment's registers.
|
Happy, inert, he lies beneath her feet:
|
His breast he offers for her cosmic dance
|
Of which our lives are the quivering theatre,
|
And none could bear but for his strength within,
|
Yet none would leave because of his delight.
|
His works, his thoughts have been devised by her,
|
His being is a mirror vast of hers:
|
Active, inspired by her he speaks and moves;
|
His deeds obey her heart's unspoken demands:
|
Passive, he bears the impacts of the world
|
As if her touches shaping his soul and life:
|
His journey through the days is her sun-march;
|
He runs upon her roads; hers is his course.
|
A witness and student of her joy and dole,
|
A partner in her evil and her good,
|
He has consented to her passionate ways,
|
He is driven by her sweet and dreadful force.
|
His sanctioning name initials all her works;
|
His silence is his signature to her deeds;
|
In the execution of her drama's scheme,
|
In her fancies of the moment and its mood,
|
In the march of this obvious ordinary world
|
Where all is deep and strange to the eyes that see
|
And Nature's common forms are marvel-wefts,
|
She through his witness sight and motion of might
|
Unrolls the material of her cosmic Act,
|
Her happenings that exalt and smite the soul,
|
Her force that moves, her powers that save and slay,
|
Her Word that in the silence speaks to our hearts,
|
Her silence that transcends the summit Word,
|
Her heights and depths to which our spirit moves,
|
Her events that weave the texture of our lives
|
And all by which we find or lose ourselves,
|
Things sweet and bitter, magnificent and mean,
|
Things terrible and beautiful and divine.
|
Her empire in the cosmos she has built,
|
He is governed by her subtle and mighty laws.
|
His consciousness is a babe upon her knees,
|
His being a field of her vast experiment,
|
Her endless space is the playground of his thoughts;
|
She binds to knowledge of the shapes of Time
|
And the creative error of limiting mind
|
And chance that wears the rigid face of fate
|
And her sport of death and pain and Nescience,
|
His changed and struggling immortality.
|
His soul is a subtle atom in a mass,
|
His substance a material for her works.
|
His spirit survives amid the death of things,
|
He climbs to eternity through being's gaps,
|
He is carried by her from Night to deathless Light.
|
This grand surrender is his free-will's gift,
|
His pure transcendent force submits to hers.
|
In the mystery of her cosmic ignorance,
|
In the insoluble riddle of her play,
|
CANTO IV: The Secret Knowledge
|
A creature made of perishable stuff,
|
In the pattern she has set for him he moves,
|
He thinks with her thoughts, with her trouble his bosom heaves;
|
He seems the thing that she would have him seem,
|
He is whatever her artist will can make.
|
Although she drives him on her fancy's roads,
|
At play with him as with her child or slave,
|
To freedom and the Eternal's mastery
|
And immortality's stand above the world,
|
She moves her seeming puppet of an hour.
|
Even in his mortal session in body's house,
|
An aimless traveller between birth and death,
|
Ephemeral dreaming of immortality,
|
To reign she spurs him. He takes up her powers;
|
He has harnessed her to the yoke of her own law.
|
His face of human thought puts on a crown.
|
Held in her leash, bound to her veiled caprice,
|
He studies her ways if so he may prevail
|
Even for an hour and she work out his will;
|
He makes of her his moment passion's serf:
|
To obey she feigns, she follows her creature's lead:
|
For him she was made, lives only for his use.
|
But conquering her, then is he most her slave;
|
He is her dependent, all his means are hers;
|
Nothing without her he can, she rules him still.
|
At last he wakes to a memory of Self:
|
He sees within the face of deity,
|
The Godhead breaks out through the human mould:
|
Her highest heights she unmasks and is his mate.
|
Till then he is a plaything in her game;
|
Her seeming regent, yet her fancy's toy,
|
A living robot moved by her energy's springs,
|
He acts as in the movements of a dream,
|
An automaton stepping in the grooves of Fate,
|
He stumbles on driven by her whip of Force:
|
His thought labours, a bullock in Time's fields;
|
His will he thinks his own, is shaped in her forge.
|
Obedient to World-Nature's dumb control,
|
Driven by his own formidable Power,
|
His chosen partner in a titan game,
|
Her will he has made the master of his fate,
|
Her whim the dispenser of his pleasure and pain;
|
He has sold himself into her regal power
|
For any blow or boon that she may choose:
|
Even in what is suffering to our sense,
|
He feels the sweetness of her mastering touch,
|
In all experience meets her blissful hands;
|
On his heart he bears the happiness of her tread
|
And the surprise of her arrival's joy
|
In each event and every moment's chance.
|
All she can do is marvellous in his sight:
|
He revels in her, a swimmer in her sea,
|
A tireless amateur of her world-delight,
|
He rejoices in her every thought and act
|
And gives consent to all that she can wish;
|
Whatever she desires he wills to be:
|
The Spirit, the innumerable One,
|
He has left behind his lone eternity,
|
He is an endless birth in endless Time,
|
Her finite's multitude in an infinite Space.
|
The master of existence lurks in us
|
And plays at hide-and-seek with his own Force;
|
In Nature's instrument loiters secret God.
|
The Immanent lives in man as in his house;
|
He has made the universe his pastime's field,
|
A vast gymnasium of his works of might.
|
All-knowing he accepts our darkened state,
|
Divine, wears shapes of animal or man;
|
Eternal, he assents to Fate and Time,
|
Immortal, dallies with mortality.
|
The All-Conscious ventured into Ignorance,
|
CANTO IV: The Secret Knowledge
|
The All-Blissful bore to be insensible.
|
Incarnate in a world of strife and pain,
|
He puts on joy and sorrow like a robe
|
And drinks experience like a streng thening wine.
|
He whose transcendence rules the pregnant Vasts,
|
Prescient now dwells in our subliminal depths,
|
A luminous individual Power, alone.
|
The Absolute, the Perfect, the Alone
|
Has called out of the Silence his mute Force
|
Where she lay in the featureless and formless hush
|
Guarding from Time by her immobile sleep
|
The ineffable puissance of his solitude.
|
The Absolute, the Perfect, the Alone
|
Has entered with his silence into space:
|
He has fashioned these countless persons of one self;
|
He has built a million figures of his power;
|
He lives in all, who lived in his Vast alone;
|
Space is himself and Time is only he.
|
The Absolute, the Perfect, the Immune,
|
One who is in us as our secret self,
|
Our mask of imperfection has assumed,
|
He has made this tenement of flesh his own,
|
His image in the human measure cast
|
That to his divine measure we might rise;
|
Then in a figure of divinity
|
The Maker shall recast us and impose
|
A plan of godhead on the mortal's mould
|
Lifting our finite minds to his infinite,
|
Touching the moment with eternity.
|
This transfiguration is earth's due to heaven:
|
A mutual debt binds man to the Supreme:
|
His nature we must put on as he put ours;
|
We are sons of God and must be even as he:
|
His human portion, we must grow divine.
|
Our life is a paradox with God for key.
|
But meanwhile all is a shadow cast by a dream
|
And to the musing and immobile spirit
|
Life and himself don the aspect of a myth,
|
The burden of a long unmeaning tale.
|
For the key is hid and by the Inconscient kept;
|
The secret God beneath the threshold dwells.
|
In a body obscuring the immortal Spirit
|
A nameless Resident vesting unseen powers
|
With Matter's shapes and motives beyond thought
|
And the hazard of an unguessed consequence,
|
An omnipotent indiscernible Influence,
|
He sits, unfelt by the form in which he lives
|
And veils his knowledge by the groping mind.
|
A wanderer in a world his thoughts have made,
|
He turns in a chiaroscuro of error and truth
|
To find a wisdom that on high is his.
|
As one forgetting he searches for himself;
|
As if he had lost an inner light he seeks:
|
As a sojourner lingering amid alien scenes
|
He journeys to a home he knows no more.
|
His own self's truth he seeks who is the Truth;
|
He is the Player who became the play,
|
He is the Thinker who became the thought;
|
He is the many who was the silent One.
|
In the symbol figures of the cosmic Force
|
And in her living and inanimate signs
|
And in her complex tracery of events
|
He explores the ceaseless miracle of himself,
|
Till the thousandfold enigma has been solved
|
In the single light of an all-witnessing Soul.
|
This was his compact with his mighty mate,
|
For love of her and joined to her for ever
|
To follow the course of Time's eternity,
|
Amid magic dramas of her sudden moods
|
And the surprises of her masked Idea
|
And the vicissitudes of her vast caprice.
|
CANTO IV: The Secret Knowledge
|
Two seem his goals, yet ever are they one
|
And gaze at each other over bourneless Time;
|
Spirit and Matter are their end and source.
|
A seeker of hidden meanings in life's forms,
|
Of the great Mother's wide uncharted will
|
And the rude enigma of her terrestrial ways
|
He is the explorer and the mariner
|
On a secret inner ocean without bourne:
|
He is the adventurer and cosmologist
|
Of a magic earth's obscure geography.
|
In her material order's fixed design
|
Where all seems sure and, even when changed, the same,
|
Even though the end is left for ever unknown
|
And ever unstable is life's shifting flow,
|
His paths are found for him by silent fate;
|
As stations in the ages' weltering flood
|
Firm lands appear that tempt and stay awhile,
|
Then new horizons lure the mind's advance.
|
There comes no close to the finite's boundlessness,
|
There is no last certitude in which thought can pause
|
And no terminus to the soul's experience.
|
A limit, a farness never wholly reached,
|
An unattained perfection calls to him
|
From distant boundaries in the Unseen:
|
A long beginning only has been made.
|
This is the sailor on the flow of Time,
|
This is World-Matter's slow discoverer,
|
Who, launched into this small corporeal birth,
|
Has learned his craft in tiny bays of self,
|
But dares at last unplumbed infinitudes,
|
A voyager upon eternity's seas.
|
In his world-adventure's crude initial start
|
Behold him ignorant of his godhead's force,
|
Timid initiate of its vast design.
|
An expert captain of a fragile craft,
|
A trafficker in small impermanent wares,
|
At first he hugs the shore and shuns the breadths,
|
Dares not to affront the far-off perilous main.
|
He in a petty coastal traffic plies,
|
His pay doled out from port to neighbour port,
|
Content with his safe round's unchanging course,
|
He hazards not the new and the unseen.
|
But now he hears the sound of larger seas.
|
A widening world calls him to distant scenes
|
And journeyings in a larger vision's arc
|
And peoples unknown and still unvisited shores.
|
On a commissioned keel his merchant hull
|
Serves the world's commerce in the riches of Time
|
Severing the foam of a great land-locked sea
|
To reach unknown harbour lights in distant climes
|
And open markets for life's opulent arts,
|
Rich bales, carved statuettes, hued canvases,
|
And jewelled toys brought for an infant's play
|
And perishable products of hard toil
|
And transient splendours won and lost by the days.
|
Or passing through a gate of pillar-rocks,
|
Venturing not yet to cross oceans unnamed
|
And journey into a dream of distances
|
He travels close to unfamiliar coasts
|
And finds new haven in storm-troubled isles,
|
Or, guided by a sure compass in his thought,
|
He plunges through a bright haze that hides the stars,
|
Steering on the trade-routes of Ignorance.
|
His prow pushes towards undiscovered shores,
|
He chances on unimagined continents:
|
A seeker of the islands of the Blest,
|
He leaves the last lands, crosses the ultimate seas,
|
He turns to eternal things his symbol quest;
|
Life changes for him its time-constructed scenes,
|
Its images veiling infinity.
|
Earth's borders recede and the terrestrial air
|
CANTO IV: The Secret Knowledge
|
Hangs round him no longer its translucent veil.
|
He has crossed the limit of mortal thought and hope,
|
He has reached the world's end and stares beyond;
|
The eyes of mortal body plunge their gaze
|
Into Eyes that look upon eternity.
|
A greater world Time's traveller must explore.
|
At last he hears a chanting on the heights
|
And the far speaks and the unknown grows near:
|
He crosses the boundaries of the unseen
|
And passes over the edge of mortal sight
|
To a new vision of himself and things.
|
He is a spirit in an unfinished world
|
That knows him not and cannot know itself:
|
The surface symbol of his goalless quest
|
Takes deeper meanings to his inner view;
|
His is a search of darkness for the light,
|
Of mortal life for immortality.
|
In the vessel of an earthly embodiment
|
Over the narrow rails of limiting sense
|
He looks out on the magic waves of Time
|
Where mind like a moon illumines the world's dark.
|
There is limned ever retreating from the eyes,
|
As if in a tenuous misty dream-light drawn,
|
The outline of a dim mysterious shore.
|
A sailor on the Inconscient's fathomless sea,
|
He voyages through a starry world of thought
|
On Matter's deck to a spiritual sun.
|
Across the noise and multitudinous cry,
|
Across the rapt unknowable silences,
|
Through a strange mid-world under supernal skies,
|
Beyond earth's longitudes and latitudes,
|
His goal is fixed outside all present maps.
|
But none learns whither through the unknown he sails
|
Or what secret mission the great Mother gave.
|
In the hidden strength of her omnipotent Will,
|
Driven by her breath across life's tossing deep,
|
Through the thunder's roar and through the windless hush,
|
Through fog and mist where nothing more is seen,
|
He carries her sealed orders in his breast.
|
Late will he know, opening the mystic script,
|
Whether to a blank port in the Unseen
|
He goes or, armed with her fiat, to discover
|
A new mind and body in the city of God
|
And enshrine the Immortal in his glory's house
|
And make the finite one with Infinity.
|
Across the salt waste of the endless years
|
Her ocean winds impel his errant boat,
|
The cosmic waters plashing as he goes,
|
A rumour around him and danger and a call.
|
Always he follows in her force's wake.
|
He sails through life and death and other life,
|
He travels on through waking and through sleep.
|
A power is on him from her occult force
|
That ties him to his own creation's fate,
|
And never can the mighty Traveller rest
|
And never can the mystic voyage cease
|
Till the nescient dusk is lifted from man's soul
|
And the morns of God have overtaken his night.
|
As long as Nature lasts, he too is there,
|
For this is sure that he and she are one;
|
Even when he sleeps, he keeps her on his breast:
|
Whoever leaves her, he will not depart
|
To repose without her in the Unknowable.
|
There is a truth to know, a work to do;
|
Her play is real; a Mystery he fulfils:
|
There is a plan in the Mother's deep world-whim,
|
A purpose in her vast and random game.
|
This ever she meant since the first dawn of life,
|
This constant will she covered with her sport,
|
To evoke a Person in the impersonal Void,
|
With the Truth-Light strike earth's massive roots of trance,
|
Wake a dumb self in the inconscient depths
|
CANTO IV: The Secret Knowledge
|
And raise a lost Power from its python sleep
|
That the eyes of the Timeless might look out from Time
|
And the world manifest the unveiled Divine.
|
For this he left his white infinity
|
And laid on the spirit the burden of the flesh,
|
That Godhead's seed might flower in mindless Space.
|
The Yoga of the King:
|
The Yoga of the Spirit's Freedom and Greatness
|
THIS knowledge first he had of time-born men.
|
Admitted through a curtain of bright mind
|
That hangs between our thoughts and absolute sight,
|
He found the occult cave, the mystic door
|
Near to the well of vision in the soul,
|
And entered where the Wings of Glory brood
|
In the silent space where all is for ever known.
|
Indifferent to doubt and to belief,
|
Avid of the naked real's single shock
|
He shore the cord of mind that ties the earth-heart
|
And cast away the yoke of Matter's law.
|
The body's rules bound not the spirit's powers:
|
When life had stopped its beats, death broke not in;
|
He dared to live when breath and thought were still.
|
Thus could he step into that magic place
|
Which few can even glimpse with hurried glance
|
Lifted for a moment from mind's laboured works
|
And the poverty of Nature's earthly sight.
|
All that the Gods have learned is there self-known.
|
There in a hidden chamber closed and mute
|
Are kept the record graphs of the cosmic scribe,
|
And there the tables of the sacred Law,
|
There is the Book of Being's index page;
|
The text and glossary of the Vedic truth
|
Are there; the rhythms and metres of the stars
|
Significant of the movements of our fate:
|
The symbol powers of number and of form,
|
And the secret code of the history of the world
|
And Nature's correspondence with the soul
|
Are written in the mystic heart of Life.
|
CANTO V: The Yoga of the Spirit's Freedom and Greatness
|
In the glow of the spirit's room of memories
|
He could recover the luminous marginal notes
|
Dotting with light the crabbed ambiguous scroll,
|
Rescue the preamble and the saving clause
|
Of the dark Agreement by which all is ruled
|
That rises from material Nature's sleep
|
To clo the the Everlasting in new shapes.
|
He could re-read now and interpret new
|
Its strange symbol letters, scattered abstruse signs,
|
Resolve its oracle and its paradox,
|
Its riddling phrases and its blindfold terms,
|
The deep oxymoron of its truth's repliques,
|
And recognise as a just necessity
|
Its hard conditions for the mighty work, -
|
Nature's impossible Herculean toil
|
Only her warlock-wisecraft could enforce,
|
Its law of the opposition of the gods,
|
Its list of inseparable contraries.
|
The dumb great Mother in her cosmic trance
|
Exploiting for creation's joy and pain
|
Infinity's sanction to the birth of form,
|
Accepts indomitably to execute
|
The will to know in an inconscient world,
|
The will to live under a reign of death,
|
The thirst for rapture in a heart of flesh,
|
And works out through the appearance of a soul
|
By a miraculous birth in plasm and gas
|
The mystery of God's covenant with the Night.
|
Once more was heard in the still cosmic Mind
|
The Eternal's promise to his labouring Force
|
Inducing the world-passion to begin,
|
The cry of birth into mortality
|
And the opening verse of the tragedy of Time.
|
Out of the depths the world's buried secret rose;
|
He read the original ukase kept back
|
In the locked archives of the spirit's crypt,
|
And saw the signature and fiery seal
|
Of Wisdom on the dim Power's hooded work
|
Who builds in Ignorance the steps of Light.
|
A sleeping deity opened deathless eyes:
|
He saw the unshaped thought in soulless forms,
|
Knew Matter pregnant with spiritual sense,
|
Mind dare the study of the Unknowable,
|
Life its gestation of the Golden Child.
|
In the light flooding thought's blank vacancy,
|
Interpreting the universe by soul signs
|
He read from within the text of the without:
|
The riddle grew plain and lost its catch obscure.
|
A larger lustre lit the mighty page.
|
A purpose mingled with the whims of Time,
|
A meaning met the stumbling pace of Chance
|
And Fate revealed a chain of seeing Will;
|
A conscious wideness filled the old dumb Space.
|
In the Void he saw throned the Omniscience supreme.
|
A Will, a hope immense now seized his heart,
|
And to discern the superhuman's form
|
He raised his eyes to unseen spiritual heights,
|
Aspiring to bring down a greater world.
|
The glory he had glimpsed must be his home.
|
A brighter heavenlier sun must soon illume
|
This dusk room with its dark internal stair,
|
The infant soul in its small nursery school
|
Mid objects meant for a lesson hardly learned
|
Outgrow its early grammar of intellect
|
And its imitation of Earth-Nature's art,
|
Its earthly dialect to God-language change,
|
In living symbols study Reality
|
And learn the logic of the Infinite.
|
The Ideal must be Nature's common truth,
|
The body illumined with the indwelling God,
|
The heart and mind feel one with all that is,
|
CANTO V: The Yoga of the Spirit's Freedom and Greatness
|
A conscious soul live in a conscious world.
|
As through a mist a sovereign peak is seen,
|
The greatness of the eternal Spirit appeared,
|
Exiled in a fragmented universe
|
Amid half-semblances of diviner things.
|
These now could serve no more his regal turn;
|
The Immortal's pride refused the doom to live
|
A miser of the scanty bargain made
|
Between our littleness and bounded hopes
|
And the compassionate Infinitudes.
|
His height repelled the lowness of earth's state:
|
A wideness discontented with its frame
|
Resiled from poor assent to Nature's terms,
|
The harsh contract spurned and the diminished lease.
|
Only beginnings are accomplished here;
|
Our base's Matter seems alone complete,
|
An absolute machine without a soul.
|
Or all seems a misfit of half ideas,
|
Or we saddle with the vice of earthly form
|
A hurried imperfect glimpse of heavenly things,
|
Guesses and travesties of celestial types.
|
Here chaos sorts itself into a world,
|
A brief formation drifting in the void:
|
Apings of knowledge, unfinished arcs of power,
|
Flamings of beauty into earthly shapes,
|
Love's broken reflexes of unity
|
Swim, fragment-mirrorings of a floating sun.
|
A packed assemblage of crude tentative lives
|
Are pieced into a tessellated whole.
|
There is no perfect answer to our hopes;
|
There are blind voiceless doors that have no key;
|
Thought climbs in vain and brings a borrowed light,
|
Cheated by counterfeits sold to us in life's mart,
|
Our hearts clutch at a forfeited heavenly bliss.
|
There is provender for the mind's satiety,
|
There are thrills of the flesh, but not the soul's desire.
|
Here even the highest rapture Time can give
|
Is a mimicry of ungrasped beatitudes,
|
A mutilated statue of ecstasy,
|
A wounded happiness that cannot live,
|
A brief felicity of mind or sense
|
Thrown by the World-Power to her body-slave,
|
Or a simulacrum of enforced delight
|
In the seraglios of Ignorance.
|
For all we have acquired soon loses worth,
|
An old disvalued credit in Time's bank,
|
Imperfection's cheque drawn on the Inconscient.
|
An inconsequence dogs every effort made,
|
And chaos waits on every cosmos formed:
|
In each success a seed of failure lurks.
|
He saw the doubtfulness of all things here,
|
The incertitude of man's proud confident thought,
|
The transience of the achievements of his force.
|
A thinking being in an unthinking world,
|
An island in the sea of the Unknown,
|
He is a smallness trying to be great,
|
An animal with some instincts of a god,
|
His life a story too common to be told,
|
His deeds a number summing up to nought,
|
His consciousness a torch lit to be quenched,
|
His hope a star above a cradle and grave.
|
And yet a greater destiny may be his,
|
For the eternal Spirit is his truth.
|
He can re-create himself and all around
|
And fashion new the world in which he lives:
|
He, ignorant, is the Knower beyond Time,
|
He is the Self above Nature, above Fate.
|
His soul retired from all that he had done.
|
Hushed was the futile din of human toil,
|
Forsaken wheeled the circle of the days;
|
In distance sank the crowded tramp of life.
|
CANTO V: The Yoga of the Spirit's Freedom and Greatness
|
The Silence was his sole companion left.
|
Impassive he lived immune from earthly hopes,
|
A figure in the ineffable Witness' shrine
|
Pacing the vast cathedral of his thoughts
|
Under its arches dim with infinity
|
And heavenward brooding of invisible wings.
|
A call was on him from intangible heights;
|
Indifferent to the little outpost Mind,
|
He dwelt in the wideness of the Eternal's reign.
|
His being now exceeded thinkable Space,
|
His boundless thought was neighbour to cosmic sight:
|
A universal light was in his eyes,
|
A golden influx flowed through heart and brain;
|
A Force came down into his mortal limbs,
|
A current from eternal seas of Bliss;
|
He felt the invasion and the nameless joy.
|
Aware of his occult omnipotent Source,
|
Allured by the omniscient Ecstasy,
|
A living centre of the Illimitable
|
Widened to equate with the world's circumference,
|
He turned to his immense spiritual fate.
|
Abandoned on a canvas of torn air,
|
A picture lost in far and fading streaks,
|
The earth-nature's summits sank below his feet:
|
He climbed to meet the infinite more above.
|
The Immobile's ocean-silence saw him pass,
|
An arrow leaping through eternity
|
Suddenly shot from the tense bow of Time,
|
A ray returning to its parent sun.
|
Opponent of that glory of escape,
|
The black Inconscient swung its dragon tail
|
Lashing a slumbrous Infinite by its force
|
Into the deep obscurities of form:
|
Death lay beneath him like a gate of sleep.
|
One-pointed to the immaculate Delight,
|
Questing for God as for a splendid prey,
|
He mounted burning like a cone of fire.
|
To a few is given that godlike rare release.
|
One among many thousands never touched,
|
Engrossed in the external world's design,
|
Is chosen by a secret witness Eye
|
And driven by a pointing hand of Light
|
Across his soul's unmapped immensitudes.
|
A pilgrim of the everlasting Truth,
|
Our measures cannot hold his measureless mind;
|
He has turned from the voices of the narrow realm
|
And left the little lane of human Time.
|
In the hushed precincts of a vaster plan
|
He treads the vestibules of the Unseen,
|
Or listens following a bodiless Guide
|
To a lonely cry in boundless vacancy.
|
All the deep cosmic murmur falling still,
|
He lives in the hush before the world was born,
|
His soul left naked to the timeless One.
|
Far from compulsion of created things
|
Thought and its shadowy idols disappear,
|
The moulds of form and person are undone:
|
The ineffable Wideness knows him for its own.
|
A lone forerunner of the Godward earth,
|
Among the symbols of yet unshaped things
|
Watched by closed eyes, mute faces of the Unborn,
|
He journeys to meet the Incommunicable,
|
Hearing the echo of his single steps
|
In the eternal courts of Solitude.
|
A nameless Marvel fills the motionless hours.
|
His spirit mingles with eternity's heart
|
And bears the silence of the Infinite.
|
In a divine retreat from mortal thought,
|
In a prodigious gesture of soul-sight,
|
His being towered into pathless heights,
|
Naked of its vesture of humanity.
|
CANTO V: The Yoga of the Spirit's Freedom and Greatness
|
As thus it rose, to meet him bare and pure
|
A strong Descent leaped down. A Might, a Flame,
|
A Beauty half-visible with deathless eyes,
|
A violent Ecstasy, a Sweetness dire,
|
Enveloped him with its stupendous limbs
|
And penetrated nerve and heart and brain
|
That thrilled and fainted with the epiphany:
|
His nature shuddered in the Unknown's grasp.
|
In a moment shorter than death, longer than Time,
|
By a Power more ruthless than Love, happier than Heaven,
|
Taken sovereignly into eternal arms,
|
Haled and coerced by a stark absolute bliss,
|
In a whirlwind circuit of delight and force
|
Hurried into unimaginable depths,
|
Upborne into immeasurable heights,
|
It was torn out from its mortality
|
And underwent a new and bourneless change.
|
An Omniscient knowing without sight or thought,
|
An indecipherable Omnipotence,
|
A mystic Form that could contain the worlds,
|
Yet make one human breast its passionate shrine,
|
Drew him out of his seeking loneliness
|
Into the magnitudes of God's embrace.
|
As when a timeless Eye annuls the hours
|
Abolishing the agent and the act,
|
So now his spirit shone out wide, blank, pure:
|
His wakened mind became an empty slate
|
On which the Universal and Sole could write.
|
All that represses our fallen consciousness
|
Was taken from him like a forgotten load:
|
A fire that seemed the body of a god
|
Consumed the limiting figures of the past
|
And made large room for a new self to live.
|
Eternity's contact broke the moulds of sense.
|
A greater Force than the earthly held his limbs,
|
Huge workings bared his undiscovered sheaths,
|
Strange energies wrought and screened tremendous hands
|
Unwound the triple cord of mind and freed
|
The heavenly wideness of a Godhead's gaze.
|
As through a dress the wearer's shape is seen,
|
There reached through forms to the hidden absolute
|
A cosmic feeling and transcendent sight.
|
Increased and heightened were the instruments.
|
Illusion lost her aggrandising lens;
|
As from her failing hand the measures fell,
|
Atomic looked the things that loomed so large.
|
The little ego's ring could join no more;
|
In the enormous spaces of the self
|
The body now seemed only a wandering shell,
|
His mind the many-frescoed outer court
|
Of an imperishable Inhabitant:
|
His spirit breathed a superhuman air.
|
The imprisoned deity rent its magic fence.
|
As with a sound of thunder and of seas,
|
Vast barriers crashed around the huge escape.
|
Immutably coeval with the world,
|
Circle and end of every hope and toil
|
Inexorably drawn round thought and act,
|
The fixed immovable peripheries
|
Effaced themselves beneath the Incarnate's tread.
|
The dire velamen and the bottomless crypt
|
Between which life and thought for ever move,
|
Forbidden still to cross the dim dread bounds,
|
The guardian darknesses mute and formidable,
|
Empowered to circumscribe the wingless spirit
|
In the boundaries of Mind and Ignorance,
|
Protecting no more a dual eternity
|
Vanished rescinding their enormous role:
|
Once figure of creation's vain ellipse,
|
The expanding zero lost its giant curve.
|
The old adamantine vetoes stood no more:
|
Overpowered were earth and Nature's obsolete rule;
|
CANTO V: The Yoga of the Spirit's Freedom and Greatness
|
The python coils of the restricting Law
|
Could not restrain the swift arisen God:
|
Abolished were the scripts of destiny.
|
There was no small death-hunted creature more,
|
No fragile form of being to preserve
|
From an all-swallowing Immensity.
|
The great hammer-beats of a pent-up world-heart
|
Burst open the narrow dams that keep us safe
|
Against the forces of the universe.
|
The soul and cosmos faced as equal powers.
|
A boundless being in a measureless Time
|
Invaded Nature with the infinite;
|
He saw unpathed, unwalled, his titan scope.
|
All was uncovered to his sealless eye.
|
A secret Nature stripped of her defence,
|
Once in a dreaded half-light formidable,
|
Overtaken in her mighty privacy
|
Lay bare to the burning splendour of his will.
|
In shadowy chambers lit by a strange sun
|
And opening hardly to hid mystic keys
|
Her perilous arcanes and hooded Powers
|
Confessed the advent of a mastering Mind
|
And bore the compulsion of a time-born gaze.
|
Incalculable in their wizard modes,
|
Immediate and invincible in the act,
|
Her secret strengths native to greater worlds
|
Lifted above our needy limited scope,
|
The occult privilege of demigods
|
And the sure power-pattern of her cryptic signs,
|
Her diagrams of geometric force,
|
Her potencies of marvel-fraught design
|
Courted employment by an earth-nursed might.
|
A conscious Nature's quick machinery
|
Armed with a latent splendour of miracle
|
The prophet-passion of a seeing Mind,
|
And the lightning bareness of a free soul-force.
|
All once impossible deemed could now become
|
A natural limb of possibility,
|
A new domain of normalcy supreme.
|
An almighty occultist erects in Space
|
This seeming outward world which tricks the sense;
|
He weaves his hidden threads of consciousness,
|
He builds bodies for his shapeless energy;
|
Out of the unformed and vacant Vast he has made
|
His sorcery of solid images,
|
His magic of formative number and design,
|
The fixed irrational links none can annul,
|
This criss-cross tangle of invisible laws;
|
His infallible rules, his covered processes,
|
Achieve unerringly an inexplicable
|
Creation where our error carves dead frames
|
Of knowledge for a living ignorance.
|
In her mystery's moods divorced from the Maker's laws
|
She too as sovereignly creates her field,
|
Her will shaping the undetermined vasts,
|
Making a finite of infinity;
|
She too can make an order of her caprice,
|
As if her rash superb wagered to outvie
|
The veiled Creator's cosmic secrecies.
|
The rapid footsteps of her fantasy,
|
Amid whose falls wonders like flowers rise,
|
Are surer than reason, defter than device
|
And swifter than Imagination's wings.
|
All she new-fashions by the thought and word,
|
Compels all substance by her wand of Mind.
|
Mind is a mediator divinity:
|
Its powers can undo all Nature's work:
|
Mind can suspend or change earth's concrete law.
|
Affranchised from earth-habit's drowsy seal
|
The leaden grip of Matter it can break;
|
Indifferent to the angry stare of Death,
|
CANTO V: The Yoga of the Spirit's Freedom and Greatness
|
It can immortalise a moment's work:
|
A simple fiat of its thinking force,
|
The casual pressure of its slight assent
|
Can liberate the Energy dumb and pent
|
Within its chambers of mysterious trance:
|
It makes the body's sleep a puissant arm,
|
Holds still the breath, the beatings of the heart,
|
While the unseen is found, the impossible done,
|
Communicates without means the unspoken thought;
|
It moves events by its bare silent will,
|
Acts at a distance without hands or feet.
|
This giant Ignorance, this dwarfish Life
|
It can illumine with a prophet sight,
|
Invoke the bacchic rapture, the Fury's goad,
|
In our body arouse the demon or the god,
|
Call in the Omniscient and Omnipotent,
|
Awake a forgotten Almightiness within.
|
In its own plane a shining emperor,
|
Even in this rigid realm, Mind can be king:
|
The logic of its demigod Idea
|
In the leap of a transitional moment brings
|
Surprises of creation never achieved
|
Even by Matter's strange unconscious skill.
|
All's miracle here and can by miracle change.
|
This is that secret Nature's edge of might.
|
On the margin of great immaterial planes,
|
In kingdoms of an untrammelled glory of force,
|
Where Mind is master of the life and form
|
And soul fulfils its thoughts by its own power,
|
She meditates upon mighty words and looks
|
On the unseen links that join the parted spheres.
|
Thence to the initiate who observes her laws
|
She brings the light of her mysterious realms:
|
Here where he stands, his feet on a prostrate world,
|
His mind no more cast into Matter's mould,
|
Over their bounds in spurts of splendid strength
|
She carries their magician processes
|
And the formulas of their stupendous speech,
|
Till heaven and hell become purveyors to earth
|
And the universe the slave of mortal will.
|
A mediatrix with veiled and nameless gods
|
Whose alien will touches our human life,
|
Imitating the World-Magician's ways
|
She invents for her self-bound free-will its grooves
|
And feigns for magic's freaks a binding cause.
|
All worlds she makes the partners of her deeds,
|
Accomplices of her mighty violence,
|
Her daring leaps into the impossible:
|
From every source she has taken her cunning means,
|
She draws from the free-love marriage of the planes
|
Elements for her creation's tour-de-force:
|
A wonder-weft of knowledge incalculable,
|
A compendium of divine invention's feats
|
She has combined to make the unreal true
|
Or liberate suppressed reality:
|
In her unhedged Circean wonderland
|
Pell-mell she shepherds her occult mightinesses;
|
Her mnemonics of the craft of the Infinite,
|
Jets of the screened subliminal's caprice,
|
Tags of the gramarye of Inconscience,
|
Freedom of a sovereign Truth without a law,
|
Thoughts that were born in the immortals' world,
|
Oracles that break out from behind the shrine,
|
Warnings from the daemonic inner voice
|
And peeps and lightning-leaps of prophecy
|
And intimations to the inner ear,
|
Abrupt interventions stark and absolute
|
And the Superconscient's unaccountable acts,
|
Have woven her balanced web of miracles
|
And the weird technique of her tremendous art.
|
This bizarre kingdom passed into his charge.
|
As one resisting more the more she loves,
|
CANTO V: The Yoga of the Spirit's Freedom and Greatness
|
Her great possessions and her power and lore
|
She gave, compelled, with a reluctant joy;
|
Herself she gave for rapture and for use.
|
Absolved from aberrations in deep ways,
|
The ends she recovered for which she was made:
|
She turned against the evil she had helped
|
Her engined wrath, her invisible means to slay;
|
Her dangerous moods and arbitrary force
|
She surrendered to the service of the soul
|
And the control of a spiritual will.
|
A greater despot tamed her despotism.
|
Assailed, surprised in the fortress of her self,
|
Conquered by her own unexpected king,
|
Fulfilled and ransomed by her servitude,
|
She yielded in a vanquished ecstasy,
|
Her sealed hermetic wisdom forced from her,
|
Fragments of the mystery of omnipotence.
|
A border sovereign is the occult Force.
|
A threshold guardian of the earth-scene's Beyond,
|
She has canalised the outbreaks of the Gods
|
And cut through vistas of intuitive sight
|
A long road of shimmering discoveries.
|
The worlds of a marvellous Unknown were near,
|
Behind her an ineffable Presence stood:
|
Her reign received their mystic influences,
|
Their lion-forces crouched beneath her feet;
|
The future sleeps unknown behind their doors.
|
Abysms infernal gaped round the soul's steps
|
And called to its mounting vision peaks divine:
|
An endless climb and adventure of the Idea
|
There tirelessly tempted the explorer mind
|
And countless voices visited the charmed ear;
|
A million figures passed and were seen no more.
|
This was a forefront of God's thousandfold house,
|
Beginnings of the half-screened Invisible.
|
A magic porch of entry glimmering
|
Quivered in a penumbra of screened Light,
|
A court of the mystical traffic of the worlds,
|
A balcony and miraculous facade.
|
Above her lightened high immensities;
|
All the unknown looked out from boundlessness:
|
It lodged upon an edge of hourless Time,
|
Gazing out of some everlasting Now,
|
Its shadows gleaming with the birth of gods,
|
Its bodies signalling the Bodiless,
|
Its foreheads glowing with the Oversoul,
|
Its forms projected from the Unknowable,
|
Its eyes dreaming of the Ineffable,
|
Its faces staring into eternity.
|
Life in him learned its huge subconscient rear;
|
The little fronts unlocked to the unseen Vasts:
|
Her gulfs stood nude, her far transcendences
|
Flamed in transparencies of crowded light.
|
A giant order was discovered here
|
Of which the tassel and extended fringe
|
Are the scant stuff of our material lives.
|
This overt universe whose figures hide
|
The secrets merged in superconscient light,
|
Wrote clear the letters of its glowing code:
|
A map of subtle signs surpassing thought
|
Was hung upon a wall of inmost mind.
|
Illumining the world's concrete images
|
Into significant symbols by its gloss,
|
It offered to the intuitive exegete
|
Its reflex of the eternal Mystery.
|
Ascending and descending twixt life's poles
|
The seried kingdoms of the graded Law
|
Plunged from the Everlasting into Time,
|
Then glad of a glory of multitudinous mind
|
And rich with life's adventure and delight
|
CANTO V: The Yoga of the Spirit's Freedom and Greatness
|
And packed with the beauty of Matter's shapes and hues
|
Climbed back from Time into undying Self,
|
Up a golden ladder carrying the soul,
|
Tying with diamond threads the Spirit's extremes.
|
In this drop from consciousness to consciousness
|
Each leaned on the occult Inconscient's power,
|
The fountain of its needed Ignorance,
|
Archmason of the limits by which it lives.
|
In this soar from consciousness to consciousness
|
Each lifted tops to That from which it came,
|
Origin of all that it had ever been
|
And home of all that it could still become.
|
An organ scale of the Eternal's acts,
|
Mounting to their climax in an endless Calm,
|
Paces of the many-visaged Wonderful,
|
Predestined stadia of the evolving Way,
|
Measures of the stature of the growing soul,
|
They interpreted existence to itself
|
And, mediating twixt the heights and deeps,
|
United the veiled married opposites
|
And linked creation to the Ineffable.
|
A last high world was seen where all worlds meet;
|
In its summit gleam where Night is not nor Sleep,
|
The light began of the Trinity supreme.
|
All there discovered what it seeks for here.
|
It freed the finite into boundlessness
|
And rose into its own eternities.
|
The Inconscient found its heart of consciousness,
|
The idea and feeling groping in Ignorance
|
At last clutched passionately the body of Truth,
|
The music born in Matter's silences
|
Plucked nude out of the Ineffable's fathomlessness
|
The meaning it had held but could not voice;
|
The perfect rhythm now only sometimes dreamed
|
An answer brought to the torn earth's hungry need
|
Rending the night that had concealed the Unknown,
|
Giving to her her lost forgotten soul.
|
A grand solution closed the long impasse
|
In which the heights of mortal effort end.
|
A reconciling Wisdom looked on life;
|
It took the striving undertones of mind
|
And took the confused refrain of human hopes
|
And made of them a sweet and happy call;
|
It lifted from an underground of pain
|
The inarticulate murmur of our lives
|
And found for it a sense illimitable.
|
A mighty oneness its perpetual theme,
|
It caught the soul's faint scattered utterances,
|
Read hardly twixt our lines of rigid thought
|
Or mid this drowse and coma on Matter's breast
|
Heard like disjointed mutterings in sleep;
|
It grouped the golden links that they had lost
|
And showed to them their divine unity,
|
Saving from the error of divided self
|
The deep spiritual cry in all that is.
|
All the great Words that toiled to express the One
|
Were lifted into an absoluteness of light,
|
An ever-burning Revelation's fire
|
And the immortality of the eternal Voice.
|
There was no quarrel more of truth with truth;
|
The endless chapter of their differences
|
Retold in light by an omniscient Scribe
|
Travelled through difference towards unity,
|
Mind's winding search lost every tinge of doubt
|
Led to its end by an all-seeing speech
|
That garbed the initial and original thought
|
With the finality of an ultimate phrase:
|
United were Time's creative mood and tense
|
To the style and syntax of Identity.
|
A paean swelled from the lost musing deeps;
|
An anthem pealed to the triune ecstasies,
|
A cry of the moments to the Immortal's bliss.
|
CANTO V: The Yoga of the Spirit's Freedom and Greatness
|
As if the strophes of a cosmic ode,
|
A hierarchy of climbing harmonies
|
Peopled with voices and with visages
|
Aspired in a crescendo of the Gods
|
From Matter's abysses to the Spirit's peaks.
|
Above were the Immortal's changeless seats,
|
White chambers of dalliance with eternity
|
And the stupendous gates of the Alone.
|
Across the unfolding of the seas of self
|
Appeared the deathless countries of the One.
|
A many-miracled Consciousness unrolled
|
Vast aim and process and unfettered norms,
|
A larger Nature's great familiar roads.
|
Affranchised from the net of earthly sense
|
Calm continents of potency were glimpsed;
|
Homelands of beauty shut to human eyes,
|
Half-seen at first through wonder's gleaming lids,
|
Surprised the vision with felicity;
|
Sunbelts of knowledge, moonbelts of delight
|
Stretched out in an ecstasy of widenesses
|
Beyond our indigent corporeal range.
|
There he could enter, there awhile abide.
|
A voyager upon uncharted routes
|
Fronting the viewless danger of the Unknown,
|
Adventuring across enormous realms,
|
He broke into another Space and Time.
|
of the Worlds
|
The World-Stair
|
ALONE he moved watched by the infinity
|
Around him and the Unknowable above.
|
All could be seen that shuns the mortal eye,
|
All could be known the mind has never grasped;
|
All could be done no mortal will can dare.
|
A limitless movement filled a limitless peace.
|
In a profound existence beyond earth's
|
Parent or kin to our ideas and dreams
|
Where Space is a vast experiment of the soul,
|
In an immaterial substance linked to ours
|
In a deep oneness of all things that are,
|
The universe of the Unknown arose.
|
A self-creation without end or pause
|
Revealed the grandeurs of the Infinite:
|
It flung into the hazards of its play
|
A million moods, a myriad energies,
|
The world-shapes that are fancies of its Truth
|
And the formulas of the freedom of its Force.
|
It poured into the Ever-stable's flux
|
A bacchic rapture and revel of Ideas,
|
A passion and motion of everlastingness.
|
There rose unborn into the Unchanging's surge
|
Thoughts that abide in their deathless consequence,
|
Words that immortal last though fallen mute,
|
Acts that brought out from Silence its dumb sense,
|
Lines that convey the inexpressible.
|
The Eternal's stillness saw in unmoved joy
|
His universal Power at work display
|
In plots of pain and dramas of delight
|
The wonder and beauty of her will to be.
|
All, even pain, was the soul's pleasure here;
|
Here all experience was a single plan,
|
The thousandfold expression of the One.
|
All came at once into his single view;
|
Nothing escaped his vast intuitive sight,
|
Nothing drew near he could not feel as kin:
|
He was one spirit with that immensity.
|
Images in a supernal consciousness
|
Embodying the Unborn who never dies,
|
The structured visions of the cosmic Self
|
Alive with the touch of being's eternity
|
Looked at him like form-bound spiritual thoughts
|
Figuring the movements of the Ineffable.
|
Aspects of being donned world-outline; forms
|
That open moving doors on things divine,
|
Became familiar to his hourly sight;
|
The symbols of the Spirit's reality,
|
The living bodies of the Bodiless
|
Grew near to him, his daily associates.
|
The exhaustless seeings of the unsleeping Mind,
|
Letterings of its contact with the invisible,
|
Surrounded him with countless pointing signs;
|
The voices of a thousand realms of Life
|
Missioned to him her mighty messages.
|
The heaven-hints that invade our earthly lives,
|
The dire imaginations dreamed by Hell,
|
Which if enacted and experienced here
|
Our dulled capacity soon would cease to feel
|
Or our mortal frailty could not long endure,
|
Were set in their sublime proportions there.
|
There lived out in their self-born atmosphere,
|
They resumed their topless pitch and native power;
|
Their fortifying stress upon the soul
|
Bit deep into the ground of consciousness
|
The passion and purity of their extremes,
|
The absoluteness of their single cry
|
And the sovereign sweetness or violent poetry
|
CANTO I: The World-Stair
|
Of their beautiful or terrible delight.
|
All thought can know or widest sight perceive
|
And all that thought and sight can never know,
|
All things occult and rare, remote and strange
|
Were near to heart's contact, felt by spirit-sense.
|
Asking for entry at his nature's gates
|
They crowded the widened spaces of his mind,
|
His self-discovery's flaming witnesses,
|
Offering their marvel and their multitude.
|
These now became new portions of himself,
|
The figures of his spirit's greater life,
|
The moving scenery of his large time-walk
|
Or the embroidered tissue of his sense:
|
These took the place of intimate human things
|
And moved as close companions of his thoughts,
|
Or were his soul's natural environment.
|
Tireless the heart's adventure of delight,
|
Endless the kingdoms of the Spirit's bliss,
|
Unnumbered tones struck from one harmony's strings;
|
Each to its wide-winged universal poise,
|
Its fathomless feeling of the All in one,
|
Brought notes of some perfection yet unseen,
|
Its single retreat into Truth's secrecies,
|
Its happy sidelight on the Infinite.
|
All was found there the Unique has dreamed and made
|
Tinging with ceaseless rapture and surprise
|
And an opulent beauty of passionate difference
|
The recurring beat that moments God in Time.
|
Only was missing the sole timeless Word
|
That carries eternity in its lonely sound,
|
The Idea self-luminous key to all ideas,
|
The integer of the Spirit's perfect sum
|
That equates the unequal All to the equal One,
|
The single sign interpreting every sign,
|
The absolute index to the Absolute.
|
There walled apart by its own innerness
|
In a mystical barrage of dynamic light
|
He saw a lone immense high-curved world-pile
|
Erect like a mountain-chariot of the Gods
|
Motionless under an inscrutable sky.
|
As if from Matter's plinth and viewless base
|
To a top as viewless, a carved sea of worlds
|
Climbing with foam-maned waves to the Supreme
|
Ascended towards breadths immeasurable;
|
It hoped to soar into the Ineffable's reign:
|
A hundred levels raised it to the Unknown.
|
So it towered up to heights intangible
|
And disappeared in the hushed conscious Vast
|
As climbs a storeyed temple-tower to heaven
|
Built by the aspiring soul of man to live
|
Near to his dream of the Invisible.
|
Infinity calls to it as it dreams and climbs;
|
Its spire touches the apex of the world;
|
Mounting into great voiceless stillnesses
|
It marries the earth to screened eternities.
|
Amid the many systems of the One
|
Made by an interpreting creative joy
|
Alone it points us to our journey back
|
Out of our long self-loss in Nature's deeps;
|
Planted on earth it holds in it all realms:
|
It is a brief compendium of the Vast.
|
This was the single stair to being's goal.
|
A summary of the stages of the spirit,
|
Its copy of the cosmic hierarchies
|
Refashioned in our secret air of self
|
A subtle pattern of the universe.
|
It is within, below, without, above.
|
Acting upon this visible Nature's scheme
|
It wakens our earth-matter's heavy doze
|
To think and feel and to react to joy;
|
It models in us our diviner parts,
|
CANTO I: The World-Stair
|
Lifts mortal mind into a greater air,
|
Makes yearn this life of flesh to intangible aims,
|
Links the body's death with immortality's call:
|
Out of the swoon of the Inconscience
|
It labours towards a superconscient Light.
|
If earth were all and this were not in her,
|
Thought could not be nor life-delight's response:
|
Only material forms could then be her guests
|
Driven by an inanimate world-force.
|
Earth by this golden superfluity
|
Bore thinking man and more than man shall bear;
|
This higher scheme of being is our cause
|
And holds the key to our ascending fate;
|
It calls out of our dense mortality
|
The conscious spirit nursed in Matter's house.
|
The living symbol of these conscious planes,
|
Its influences and godheads of the unseen,
|
Its unthought logic of Reality's acts
|
Arisen from the unspoken truth in things,
|
Have fixed our inner life's slow-scaled degrees.
|
Its steps are paces of the soul's return
|
From the deep adventure of material birth,
|
A ladder of delivering ascent
|
And rungs that Nature climbs to deity.
|
Once in the vigil of a deathless gaze
|
These grades had marked her giant downward plunge,
|
The wide and prone leap of a godhead's fall.
|
Our life is a holocaust of the Supreme.
|
The great World-Mother by her sacrifice
|
Has made her soul the body of our state;
|
Accepting sorrow and unconsciousness
|
Divinity's lapse from its own splendours wove
|
The many-patterned ground of all we are.
|
An idol of self is our mortality.
|
Our earth is a fragment and a residue;
|
Her power is packed with the stuff of greater worlds
|
And steeped in their colour-lustres dimmed by her drowse;
|
An atavism of higher births is hers,
|
Her sleep is stirred by their buried memories
|
Recalling the lost spheres from which they fell.
|
Unsatisfied forces in her bosom move;
|
They are partners of her greater growing fate
|
And her return to immortality;
|
They consent to share her doom of birth and death;
|
They kindle partial gleams of the All and drive
|
Her blind laborious spirit to compose
|
A meagre image of the mighty Whole.
|
The calm and luminous Intimacy within
|
Approves her work and guides the unseeing Power.
|
His vast design accepts a puny start.
|
An attempt, a drawing half-done is the world's life;
|
Its lines doubt their concealed significance,
|
Its curves join not their high intended close.
|
Yet some first image of greatness trembles there,
|
And when the ambiguous crowded parts have met
|
The many-toned unity to which they moved,
|
The Artist's joy shall laugh at reason's rules;
|
The divine intention suddenly shall be seen,
|
The end vindicate intuition's sure technique.
|
A graph shall be of many meeting worlds,
|
A cube and union-crystal of the gods;
|
A Mind shall think behind Nature's mindless mask,
|
A conscious Vast fill the old dumb brute Space.
|
This faint and fluid sketch of soul called man
|
Shall stand out on the background of long Time
|
A glowing epitome of eternity,
|
A little point reveal the infinitudes.
|
A Mystery's process is the universe.
|
At first was laid a strange anomalous base,
|
A void, a cipher of some secret Whole,
|
Where zero held infinity in its sum
|
And All and Nothing were a single term,
|
CANTO I: The World-Stair
|
An eternal negative, a matrix Nought:
|
Into its forms the Child is ever born
|
Who lives for ever in the vasts of God.
|
A slow reversal's movement then took place:
|
A gas belched out from some invisible Fire,
|
Of its dense rings were formed these million stars;
|
Upon earth's new-born soil God's tread was heard.
|
Across the thick smoke of earth's ignorance
|
A Mind began to see and look at forms
|
And groped for knowledge in the nescient Night:
|
Caught in a blind stone-grip Force worked its plan
|
And made in sleep this huge mechanical world,
|
That Matter might grow conscious of its soul
|
And like a busy midwife the life-power
|
Deliver the zero carrier of the All.
|
Because eternal eyes turned on earth's gulfs
|
The lucent clarity of a pure regard
|
And saw a shadow of the Unknowable
|
Mirrored in the Inconscient's boundless sleep,
|
Creation's search for self began its stir.
|
A spirit dreamed in the crude cosmic whirl,
|
Mind flowed unknowing in the sap of life
|
And Matter's breasts suckled the divine Idea.
|
A miracle of the Absolute was born;
|
Infinity put on a finite soul,
|
All ocean lived within a wandering drop,
|
A time-made body housed the Illimitable.
|
To live this Mystery out our souls came here.
|
A Seer within who knows the ordered plan
|
Concealed behind our momentary steps,
|
Inspires our ascent to viewless heights
|
As once the abysmal leap to earth and life.
|
His call had reached the Traveller in Time.
|
Apart in an unfathomed loneliness,
|
He travelled in his mute and single strength
|
Bearing the burden of the world's desire.
|
A formless Stillness called, a nameless Light.
|
Above him was the white immobile Ray,
|
Around him the eternal Silences.
|
No term was fixed to the high-pitched attempt;
|
World after world disclosed its guarded powers,
|
Heaven after heaven its deep beatitudes,
|
But still the invisible Magnet drew his soul.
|
A figure sole on Nature's giant stair,
|
He mounted towards an indiscernible end
|
On the bare summit of created things.
|
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 ambience 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 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,
|
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.
|
CANTO II: The Kingdom of Subtle Matter
|
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,
|
Till in the naked ether of the peaks
|
The spirit's 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
|
CANTO II: The Kingdom of Subtle Matter
|
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 bequea thed 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,
|
Reword 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.
|
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 fix 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;
|
A dream of beauty dances through the heart,
|
CANTO II: The Kingdom of Subtle Matter
|
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.
|
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,
|
Our being looks beyond its walls of mind
|
CANTO II: The Kingdom of Subtle Matter
|
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 everlasting 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 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 tone 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;
|
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-beats' 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
|
Brings brief magnificent reminiscences
|
CANTO II: The Kingdom of Subtle Matter
|
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,
|
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,
|
She had no wings for wide and dangerous flight,
|
CANTO II: The Kingdom of Subtle Matter
|
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.
|
The Glory and the Fall of Life
|
AN UNEVEN broad ascent now lured his feet.
|
Answering a greater Nature's troubled call
|
He crossed the limits of embodied Mind
|
And entered wide obscure disputed fields
|
Where all was doubt and change and nothing sure,
|
A world of search and toil without repose.
|
As one who meets the face of the Unknown,
|
A questioner with none to give reply,
|
Attracted to a problem never solved,
|
Always uncertain of the ground he trod,
|
Always drawn on to an inconstant goal
|
He travelled through a land peopled by doubts
|
In shifting confines on a quaking base.
|
In front he saw a boundary ever unreached
|
And thought himself at each step nearer now, -
|
A far retreating horizon of mirage.
|
A vagrancy was there that brooked no home,
|
A journey of countless paths without a close.
|
Nothing he found to satisfy his heart;
|
A tireless wandering sought and could not cease.
|
There life is the manifest Incalculable,
|
A movement of unquiet seas, a long
|
And venturous leap of spirit into Space,
|
A vexed disturbance in the eternal Calm,
|
An impulse and passion of the Infinite.
|
Assuming whatever shape her fancy wills,
|
Escaped from the restraint of settled forms
|
She has left the safety of the tried and known.
|
Unshepherded by the fear that walks through Time,
|
Undaunted by Fate that dogs and Chance that springs,
|
She accepts disaster as a common risk;
|
CANTO III: The Glory and the Fall of Life
|
Careless of suffering, heedless of sin and fall,
|
She wrestles with danger and discovery
|
In the unexplored expanses of the soul.
|
To be seemed only a long experiment,
|
The hazard of a seeking ignorant Force
|
That tries all truths and, finding none supreme,
|
Moves on unsatisfied, unsure of its end.
|
As saw some inner mind, so life was shaped:
|
From thought to thought she passed, from phase to phase,
|
Tortured by her own powers or proud and blest,
|
Now master of herself, now toy and slave.
|
A huge inconsequence was her action's law,
|
As if all possibility must be drained,
|
And anguish and bliss were pastimes of the heart.
|
In a gallop of thunder-hooved vicissitudes
|
She swept through the race-fields of Circumstance,
|
Or, swaying, she tossed between her heights and deeps,
|
Uplifted or broken on Time's inconstant wheel.
|
Amid a tedious crawl of drab desires
|
She writhed, a worm mid worms in Nature's mud,
|
Then, Titan-statured, took all earth for food,
|
Ambitioned the seas for robe, for crown the stars
|
And shouting strode from peak to giant peak,
|
Clamouring for worlds to conquer and to rule.
|
Then, wantonly enamoured of Sorrow's face,
|
She plunged into the anguish of the depths
|
And, wallowing, clung to her own misery.
|
In dolorous converse with her squandered self
|
She wrote the account of all that she had lost,
|
Or sat with grief as with an ancient friend.
|
A romp of violent raptures soon was spent,
|
Or she lingered tied to an inadequate joy
|
Missing the turns of fate, missing life's goal.
|
A scene was planned for all her numberless moods
|
Where each could be the law and way of life,
|
But none could offer a pure felicity;
|
Only a flickering zest they left behind
|
Or the fierce lust that brings a dead fatigue.
|
Amid her swift untold variety
|
Something remained dissatisfied, ever the same
|
And in the new saw only a face of the old,
|
For every hour repeated all the rest
|
And every change prolonged the same unease.
|
A spirit of her self and aim unsure,
|
Tired soon of too much joy and happiness,
|
She needs the spur of pleasure and of pain
|
And the native taste of suffering and unrest:
|
She strains for an end that never can she win.
|
A perverse savour haunts her thirsting lips:
|
For the grief she weeps which came from her own choice,
|
For the pleasure yearns that racked with wounds her breast;
|
Aspiring to heaven she turns her steps towards hell.
|
Chance she has chosen and danger for playfellows;
|
Fate's dreadful swing she has taken for cradle and seat.
|
Yet pure and bright from the Timeless was her birth,
|
A lost world-rapture lingers in her eyes,
|
Her moods are faces of the Infinite:
|
Beauty and happiness are her native right,
|
And endless Bliss is her eternal home.
|
This now revealed its antique face of joy,
|
A sudden disclosure to the heart of grief
|
Tempting it to endure and long and hope.
|
Even in changing worlds bereft of peace,
|
In an air racked with sorrow and with fear
|
And while his feet trod on a soil unsafe,
|
He saw the image of a happier state.
|
In an architecture of hieratic Space
|
Circling and mounting towards creation's tops,
|
At a blue height which never was too high
|
For warm communion between body and soul,
|
As far as heaven, as near as thought and hope,
|
CANTO III: The Glory and the Fall of Life
|
Glimmered the kingdom of a griefless life.
|
Above him in a new celestial vault
|
Other than the heavens beheld by mortal eyes,
|
As on a fretted ceiling of the gods,
|
An archipelago of laughter and fire,
|
Swam stars apart in a rippled sea of sky.
|
Towered spirals, magic rings of vivid hue
|
And gleaming spheres of strange felicity
|
Floated through distance like a symbol world.
|
On the trouble and the toil they could not share,
|
On the unhappiness they could not aid,
|
Impervious to life's suffering, struggle, grief,
|
Untarnished by its anger, gloom and hate,
|
Unmoved, untouched, looked down great visioned planes
|
Blissful for ever in their timeless right.
|
Absorbed in their own beauty and content,
|
Of their immortal gladness they live sure.
|
Apart in their self-glory plunged, remote
|
Burning they swam in a vague lucent haze,
|
An everlasting refuge of dream-light,
|
A nebula of the splendours of the gods
|
Made from the musings of eternity.
|
Almost unbelievable by human faith,
|
Hardly they seemed the stuff of things that are.
|
As through a magic television's glass
|
Outlined to some magnifying inner eye
|
They shone like images thrown from a far scene
|
Too high and glad for mortal lids to seize.
|
But near and real to the longing heart
|
And to the body's passionate thought and sense
|
Are the hidden kingdoms of beatitude.
|
In some close unattained realm which yet we feel,
|
Immune from the harsh clutch of Death and Time,
|
Escaping the search of sorrow and desire,
|
In bright enchanted safe peripheries
|
For ever wallowing in bliss they lie.
|
In dream and trance and muse before our eyes,
|
Across a subtle vision's inner field,
|
Wide rapturous landscapes fleeting from the sight,
|
The figures of the perfect kingdom pass
|
And behind them leave a shining memory's trail.
|
Imagined scenes or great eternal worlds,
|
Dream-caught or sensed, they touch our hearts with their depths;
|
Unreal-seeming, yet more real than life,
|
Happier than happiness, truer than things true,
|
If dreams these were or captured images,
|
Dream's truth made false earth's vain realities.
|
In a swift eternal moment fixed there live
|
Or ever recalled come back to longing eyes
|
Calm heavens of imperishable Light,
|
Illumined continents of violet peace,
|
Oceans and rivers of the mirth of God
|
And griefless countries under purple suns.
|
This, once a star of bright remote idea
|
Or imagination's comet trail of dream,
|
Took now a close shape of reality.
|
The gulf between dream-truth, earth-fact was crossed,
|
The wonder-worlds of life were dreams no more;
|
His vision made all they unveiled its own:
|
Their scenes, their happenings met his eyes and heart
|
And smote them with pure loveliness and bliss.
|
A breathless summit region drew his gaze
|
Whose boundaries jutted into a sky of Self
|
And dipped towards a strange ethereal base.
|
The quintessence glowed of Life's supreme delight.
|
On a spiritual and mysterious peak
|
Only a miracle's high transfiguring line
|
Divided life from the formless Infinite
|
And sheltered Time against eternity.
|
Out of that formless stuff Time mints his shapes;
|
The Eternal's quiet holds the cosmic act:
|
CANTO III: The Glory and the Fall of Life
|
The protean images of the World-Force
|
Have drawn the strength to be, the will to last
|
From a deep ocean of dynamic peace.
|
Inverting the spirit's apex towards life,
|
She spends the plastic liberties of the One
|
To cast in acts the dreams of her caprice,
|
His wisdom's call steadies her careless feet,
|
He props her dance upon a rigid base,
|
His timeless still immutability
|
Must standardise her creation's miracle.
|
Out of the Void's unseeing energies
|
Inventing the scene of a concrete universe,
|
By his thought she has fixed its paces, in its blind acts
|
She sees by flashes of his all-knowing Light.
|
At her will the inscrutable Supermind leans down
|
To guide her force that feels but cannot know,
|
Its breath of power controls her restless seas
|
And life obeys the governing Idea.
|
At her will, led by a luminous Immanence
|
The hazardous experimenting Mind
|
Pushes its way through obscure possibles
|
Mid chance formations of an unknowing world.
|
Our human ignorance moves towards the Truth
|
That Nescience may become omniscient,
|
Transmuted instincts shape to divine thoughts,
|
Thoughts house infallible immortal sight
|
And Nature climb towards God's identity.
|
The Master of the worlds self-made her slave
|
Is the executor of her fantasies:
|
She has canalised the seas of omnipotence;
|
She has limited by her laws the Illimitable.
|
The Immortal bound himself to do her works;
|
He labours at the tasks her Ignorance sets,
|
Hidden in the cape of our mortality.
|
The worlds, the forms her goddess fancy makes
|
Have lost their origin on unseen heights:
|
Even severed, straying from their timeless source,
|
Even deformed, obscure, accursed and fallen, -
|
Since even fall has its perverted joy
|
And nothing she leaves out that serves delight, -
|
These too can to the peaks revert or here
|
Cut out the sentence of the spirit's fall,
|
Recover their forfeited divinity.
|
At once caught in an eternal vision's sweep
|
He saw her pride and splendour of highborn zones
|
And her regions crouching in the nether deeps.
|
Above was a monarchy of unfallen self,
|
Beneath was the gloomy trance of the abyss,
|
An opposite pole or dim antipodes.
|
There were vasts of the glory of life's absolutes:
|
All laughed in a safe immortality
|
And an eternal childhood of the soul
|
Before darkness came and pain and grief were born
|
Where all could dare to be themselves and one
|
And Wisdom played in sinless innocence
|
With naked Freedom in Truth's happy sun.
|
There were worlds of her laughter and dreadful irony,
|
There were fields of her taste of toil and strife and tears;
|
Her head lay on the breast of amorous Death,
|
Sleep imitated awhile extinction's peace.
|
The light of God she has parted from his dark
|
To test the savour of bare opposites.
|
Here mingling in man's heart their tones and hues
|
Have woven his being's mutable design,
|
His life a forward-rippling stream in Time,
|
His nature's constant fixed mobility,
|
His soul a moving picture's changeful film,
|
His cosmos-chaos of personality.
|
The grand creatrix with her cryptic touch
|
Has turned to pathos and power being's self-dream,
|
Made a passion-play of its fathomless mystery.
|
CANTO III: The Glory and the Fall of Life
|
But here were worlds lifted half-way to heaven.
|
The Veil was there but not the Shadowy Wall;
|
In forms not too remote from human grasp
|
Some passion of the inviolate purity
|
Broke through, a ray of the original Bliss.
|
Heaven's joys might have been earth's if earth were pure.
|
There could have reached our divinised sense and heart
|
Some natural felicity's bright extreme,
|
Some thrill of Supernature's absolutes:
|
All strengths could laugh and sport on earth's hard roads
|
And never feel her cruel edge of pain,
|
All love could play and nowhere Nature's shame.
|
But she has stabled her dreams in Matter's courts
|
And still her doors are barred to things supreme.
|
These worlds could feel God's breath visiting their tops;
|
Some glimmer of the Transcendent's hem was there.
|
Across the white aeonic silences
|
Immortal figures of embodied joy
|
Traversed wide spaces near to eternity's sleep.
|
Pure mystic voices in beatitude's hush
|
Appealed to Love's immaculate sweetnesses,
|
Calling his honeyed touch to thrill the worlds,
|
His blissful hands to seize on Nature's limbs,
|
His sweet intolerant might of union
|
To take all beings into his saviour arms,
|
Drawing to his pity the rebel and the waif
|
To force on them the happiness they refuse.
|
A chant hymeneal to the unseen Divine,
|
A flaming rhapsody of white desire
|
Lured an immortal music into the heart
|
And woke the slumbering ear of ecstasy.
|
A purer, fierier sense had there its home,
|
A burning urge no earthly limbs can hold;
|
One drew a large unburdened spacious breath
|
And the heart sped from beat to rapturous beat.
|
The voice of Time sang of the Immortal's joy;
|
An inspiration and a lyric cry,
|
The moments came with ecstasy on their wings;
|
Beauty unimaginable moved heaven-bare
|
Absolved from boundaries in the vasts of dream;
|
The cry of the Birds of Wonder called from the skies
|
To the deathless people of the shores of Light.
|
Creation leaped straight from the hands of God;
|
Marvel and rapture wandered in the ways.
|
Only to be was a supreme delight,
|
Life was a happy laughter of the soul
|
And Joy was king with Love for minister.
|
The spirit's luminousness was bodied there.
|
Life's contraries were lovers or natural friends
|
And her extremes keen edges of harmony:
|
Indulgence with a tender purity came
|
And nursed the god on her maternal breast:
|
There none was weak, so falsehood could not live;
|
Ignorance was a thin shade protecting light,
|
Imagination the free-will of Truth,
|
Pleasure a candidate for heaven's fire;
|
The intellect was Beauty's worshipper,
|
Strength was the slave of calm spiritual law,
|
Power laid its head upon the breasts of Bliss.
|
There were summit-glories inconceivable,
|
Autonomies of Wisdom's still self-rule
|
And high dependencies of her virgin sun,
|
Illumined theocracies of the seeing soul
|
Throned in the power of the Transcendent's ray.
|
A vision of grandeurs, a dream of magnitudes
|
In sun-bright kingdoms moved with regal gait:
|
Assemblies, crowded senates of the gods,
|
Life's puissances reigned on seats of marble will,
|
High dominations and autocracies
|
And laurelled strengths and armed imperative mights.
|
All objects there were great and beautiful,
|
All beings wore a royal stamp of power.
|
CANTO III: The Glory and the Fall of Life
|
There sat the oligarchies of natural Law,
|
Proud violent heads served one calm monarch brow:
|
All the soul's postures donned divinity.
|
There met the ardent mutual intimacies
|
Of mastery's joy and the joy of servitude
|
Imposed by Love on Love's heart that obeys
|
And Love's body held beneath a rapturous yoke.
|
All was a game of meeting kinglinesses.
|
For worship lifts the worshipper's bowed strength
|
Close to the god's pride and bliss his soul adores:
|
The ruler there is one with all he rules;
|
To him who serves with a free equal heart
|
Obedience is his princely training's school,
|
His nobility's coronet and privilege,
|
His faith is a high nature's idiom,
|
His service a spiritual sovereignty.
|
There were realms where Knowledge joined creative Power
|
In her high home and made her all his own:
|
The grand Illuminate seized her gleaming limbs
|
And filled them with the passion of his ray
|
Till all her body was its transparent house
|
And all her soul a counterpart of his soul.
|
Apotheosised, transfigured by wisdom's touch,
|
Her days became a luminous sacrifice;
|
An immortal moth in happy and endless fire,
|
She burned in his sweet intolerable blaze.
|
A captive Life wedded her conqueror.
|
In his wide sky she built her world anew;
|
She gave to mind's calm pace the motor's speed,
|
To thinking a need to live what the soul saw,
|
To living an impetus to know and see.
|
His splendour grasped her, her puissance to him clung;
|
She crowned the Idea a king in purple robes,
|
Put her magic serpent sceptre in Thought's grip,
|
Made forms his inward vision's rhythmic shapes
|
And her acts the living body of his will.
|
A flaming thunder, a creator flash,
|
His victor Light rode on her deathless Force;
|
A centaur's mighty gallop bore the god.
|
Life throned with mind, a double majesty.
|
Worlds were there of a happiness great and grave
|
And action tinged with dream, laughter with thought,
|
And passion there could wait for its desire
|
Until it heard the near approach of God.
|
Worlds were there of a childlike mirth and joy;
|
A carefree youthfulness of mind and heart
|
Found in the body a heavenly instrument;
|
It lit an aureate halo round desire
|
And freed the deified animal in the limbs
|
To divine gambols of love and beauty and bliss.
|
On a radiant soil that gazed at heaven's smile
|
A swift life-impulse stinted not nor stopped:
|
It knew not how to tire; happy were its tears.
|
There work was play and play the only work,
|
The tasks of heaven a game of godlike might:
|
A celestial bacchanal for ever pure,
|
Unstayed by faintness as in mortal frames
|
Life was an eternity of rapture's moods:
|
Age never came, care never lined the face.
|
Imposing on the safety of the stars
|
A race and laughter of immortal strengths,
|
The nude god-children in their play-fields ran
|
Smiting the winds with splendour and with speed;
|
Of storm and sun they made companions,
|
Sported with the white mane of tossing seas,
|
Slew distance trampled to death under their wheels
|
And wrestled in the arenas of their force.
|
Imperious in their radiance like the suns
|
They kindled heaven with the glory of their limbs
|
Flung like a divine largess to the world.
|
A spell to force the heart to stark delight,
|
They carried the pride and mastery of their charm
|
CANTO III: The Glory and the Fall of Life
|
As if Life's banner on the roads of Space.
|
Ideas were luminous comrades of the soul;
|
Mind played with speech, cast javelins of thought,
|
But needed not these instruments' toil to know;
|
Knowledge was Nature's pastime like the rest.
|
Investitured with the fresh heart's bright ray,
|
An early God-instinct's child inheritors,
|
Tenants of the perpetuity of Time
|
Still thrilling with the first creation's bliss,
|
They steeped existence in their youth of soul.
|
An exquisite and vehement tyranny,
|
The strong compulsion of their will to joy
|
Poured smiling streams of happiness through the world.
|
There reigned a breath of high immune content,
|
A fortunate gait of days in tranquil air,
|
A flood of universal love and peace.
|
A sovereignty of tireless sweetness lived
|
Like a song of pleasure on the lips of Time.
|
A large spontaneous order freed the will,
|
A sun-frank winging of the soul to bliss,
|
The breadth and greatness of the unfettered act
|
And the swift fire-heart's golden liberty.
|
There was no falsehood of soul-severance,
|
There came no crookedness of thought or word
|
To rob creation of its native truth;
|
All was sincerity and natural force.
|
There freedom was sole rule and highest law.
|
In a happy series climbed or plunged these worlds:
|
In realms of curious beauty and surprise,
|
In fields of grandeur and of titan power,
|
Life played at ease with her immense desires.
|
A thousand Edens she could build nor pause;
|
No bound was set to her greatness and to her grace
|
And to her heavenly variety.
|
Awake with a cry and stir of numberless souls,
|
Arisen from the breast of some deep Infinite,
|
Smiling like a new-born child at love and hope,
|
In her nature housing the Immortal's power,
|
In her bosom bearing the eternal Will,
|
No guide she needed but her luminous heart:
|
No fall debased the godhead of her steps,
|
No alien Night had come to blind her eyes.
|
There was no use for grudging ring or fence;
|
Each act was a perfection and a joy.
|
Abandoned to her rapid fancy's moods
|
And the rich coloured riot of her mind,
|
Initiate of divine and mighty dreams,
|
Magician builder of unnumbered forms
|
Exploring the measures of the rhythms of God,
|
At will she wove her wizard wonder-dance,
|
A Dionysian goddess of delight,
|
A Bacchant of creative ecstasy.
|
This world of bliss he saw and felt its call,
|
But found no way to enter into its joy;
|
Across the conscious gulf there was no bridge.
|
A darker air encircled still his soul
|
Tied to an image of unquiet life.
|
In spite of yearning mind and longing sense,
|
To a sad Thought by grey experience formed
|
And a vision dimmed by care and sorrow and sleep
|
All this seemed only a bright desirable dream
|
Conceived in a longing distance by the heart
|
Of one who walks in the shadow of earth-pain.
|
Although he once had felt the Eternal's clasp,
|
Too near to suffering worlds his nature lived,
|
And where he stood were entrances of Night.
|
Hardly, too close beset by the world's care,
|
Can the dense mould in which we have been made
|
Return sheer joy to joy, pure light to light.
|
For its tormented will to think and live
|
First to a mingled pain and pleasure woke
|
CANTO III: The Glory and the Fall of Life
|
And still it keeps the habit of its birth:
|
A dire duality is our way to be.
|
In the crude beginnings of this mortal world
|
Life was not nor mind's play nor heart's desire.
|
When earth was built in the unconscious Void
|
And nothing was save a material scene,
|
Identified with sea and sky and stone
|
Her young gods yearned for the release of souls
|
Asleep in objects, vague, inanimate.
|
In that desolate grandeur, in that beauty bare,
|
In the deaf stillness, mid the unheeded sounds,
|
Heavy was the uncommunicated load
|
Of Godhead in a world that had no needs;
|
For none was there to feel or to receive.
|
This solid mass which brooked no throb of sense
|
Could not contain their vast creative urge:
|
Immersed no more in Matter's harmony,
|
The Spirit lost its statuesque repose.
|
In the uncaring trance it groped for sight,
|
Passioned for the movements of a conscious heart,
|
Famishing for speech and thought and joy and love,
|
In the dumb insensitive wheeling day and night
|
Hungered for the beat of yearning and response.
|
The poised inconscience shaken with a touch,
|
The intuitive Silence trembling with a name,
|
They cried to Life to invade the senseless mould
|
And in brute forms awake divinity.
|
A voice was heard on the mute rolling globe,
|
A murmur moaned in the unlistening Void.
|
A being seemed to brea the where once was none:
|
Something pent up in dead insentient depths,
|
Denied conscious existence, lost to joy,
|
Turned as if one asleep since dateless time.
|
Aware of its own buried reality,
|
Remembering its forgotten self and right,
|
It yearned to know, to aspire, to enjoy, to live.
|
Life heard the call and left her native light.
|
Overflowing from her bright magnificent plane
|
On the rigid coil and sprawl of mortal Space,
|
Here too the gracious great-winged Angel poured
|
Her splendour and her swiftness and her bliss,
|
Hoping to fill a fair new world with joy.
|
As comes a goddess to a mortal's breast
|
And fills his days with her celestial clasp,
|
She stooped to make her home in transient shapes;
|
In Matter's womb she cast the Immortal's fire,
|
In the unfeeling Vast woke thought and hope,
|
Smote with her charm and beauty flesh and nerve
|
And forced delight on earth's insensible frame.
|
Alive and clad with trees and herbs and flowers
|
Earth's great brown body smiled towards the skies,
|
Azure replied to azure in the sea's laugh;
|
New sentient creatures filled the unseen depths,
|
Life's glory and swiftness ran in the beauty of beasts,
|
Man dared and thought and met with his soul the world.
|
But while the magic breath was on its way,
|
Before her gifts could reach our prisoned hearts,
|
A dark ambiguous Presence questioned all.
|
The secret Will that robes itself with Night
|
And offers to spirit the ordeal of the flesh,
|
Imposed a mystic mask of death and pain.
|
Interned now in the slow and suffering years
|
Sojourns the winged and wonderful wayfarer
|
And can no more recall her happier state,
|
But must obey the inert Inconscient's law,
|
Insensible foundation of a world
|
In which blind limits are on beauty laid
|
And sorrow and joy as struggling comrades live.
|
A dim and dreadful muteness fell on her:
|
Abolished was her subtle mighty spirit
|
And slain her boon of child-god happiness,
|
And all her glory into littleness turned
|
CANTO III: The Glory and the Fall of Life
|
And all her sweetness into a maimed desire.
|
To feed death with her works is here life's doom.
|
So veiled was her immortality that she seemed,
|
Inflicting consciousness on unconscious things,
|
An episode in an eternal death,
|
A myth of being that must for ever cease.
|
Such was the evil mystery of her change.
|
The Kingdoms of the Little Life
|
A QUIVERING trepidant uncertain world
|
Born from that dolorous meeting and eclipse
|
Appeared in the emptiness where her feet had trod,
|
A quick obscurity, a seeking stir.
|
There was a writhing of half-conscious force
|
Hardly awakened from the Inconscient's sleep,
|
Tied to an instinct-driven Ignorance,
|
To find itself and find its hold on things.
|
Inheritor of poverty and loss,
|
Assailed by memories that fled when seized,
|
Haunted by a forgotten uplifting hope,
|
It strove with a blindness as of groping hands
|
To fill the aching and disastrous gap
|
Between earth-pain and the bliss from which Life fell.
|
A world that ever seeks for something missed,
|
Hunts for the joy that earth has failed to keep.
|
Too near to our gates its unappeased unrest
|
For peace to live on the inert solid globe:
|
It has joined its hunger to the hunger of earth,
|
It has given the law of craving to our lives,
|
It has made our spirit's need a fathomless gulf.
|
An Influence entered mortal night and day,
|
A shadow overcast the time-born race;
|
In the troubled stream where leaps a blind heart-pulse
|
And the nerve-beat of feeling wakes in sense
|
Dividing Matter's sleep from conscious Mind,
|
There strayed a call that knew not why it came.
|
A Power beyond earth's scope has touched the earth;
|
The repose that might have been can be no more;
|
A formless yearning passions in man's heart,
|
A cry is in his blood for happier things:
|
CANTO IV: The Kingdoms of the Little Life
|
Else could he roam on a free sunlit soil
|
With the childlike pain-forgetting mind of beasts
|
Or live happy, unmoved, like flowers and trees.
|
The Might that came upon the earth to bless,
|
Has stayed on earth to suffer and aspire.
|
The infant laugh that rang through time is hushed:
|
Man's natural joy of life is overcast
|
And sorrow is his nurse of destiny.
|
The animal's thoughtless joy is left behind,
|
Care and reflection burden his daily walk;
|
He has risen to greatness and to discontent,
|
He is awake to the Invisible.
|
Insatiate seeker, he has all to learn:
|
He has exhausted now life's surface acts,
|
His being's hidden realms remain to explore.
|
He becomes a mind, he becomes a spirit and self;
|
In his fragile tenement he grows Nature's lord.
|
In him Matter wakes from its long obscure trance,
|
In him earth feels the Godhead drawing near.
|
An eyeless Power that sees no more its aim,
|
A restless hungry energy of Will,
|
Life cast her seed in the body's indolent mould;
|
It woke from happy torpor a blind Force
|
Compelling it to sense and seek and feel.
|
In the enormous labour of the Void
|
Perturbing with her dreams the vast routine
|
And dead roll of a slumbering universe
|
The mighty prisoner struggled for release.
|
Alive with her yearning woke the inert cell,
|
In the heart she kindled a fire of passion and need,
|
Amid the deep calm of inanimate things
|
Arose her great voice of toil and prayer and strife.
|
A groping consciousness in a voiceless world,
|
A guideless sense was given her for her road;
|
Thought was withheld and nothing now she knew,
|
But all the unknown was hers to feel and clasp.
|
Obeying the push of unborn things towards birth
|
Out of her seal of insentient life she broke:
|
In her substance of unthinking mute soul-strength
|
That cannot utter what its depths divine,
|
Awoke a blind necessity to know.
|
The chain that bound her she made her instrument;
|
Instinct was hers, the chrysalis of Truth,
|
And effort and growth and striving nescience.
|
Inflicting on the body desire and hope,
|
Imposing on inconscience consciousness,
|
She brought into Matter's dull tenacity
|
Her anguished claim to her lost sovereign right,
|
Her tireless search, her vexed uneasy heart,
|
Her wandering unsure steps, her cry for change.
|
Adorer of a joy without a name,
|
In her obscure cathedral of delight
|
To dim dwarf gods she offers secret rites.
|
But vain unending is the sacrifice,
|
The priest an ignorant mage who only makes
|
Futile mutations in the altar's plan
|
And casts blind hopes into a powerless flame.
|
A burden of transient gains weighs down her steps
|
And hardly under that load can she advance;
|
But the hours cry to her, she travels on
|
Passing from thought to thought, from want to want;
|
Her greatest progress is a deepened need.
|
Matter dissatisfies, she turns to Mind;
|
She conquers earth, her field, then claims the heavens.
|
Insensible, breaking the work she has done
|
The stumbling ages over her labour pass,
|
But still no great transforming light came down
|
And no revealing rapture touched her fall.
|
Only a glimmer sometimes splits mind's sky
|
Justifying the ambiguous providence
|
That makes of night a path to unknown dawns
|
Or a dark clue to some diviner state.
|
CANTO IV: The Kingdoms of the Little Life
|
In Nescience began her mighty task,
|
In Ignorance she pursues the unfinished work,
|
For knowledge gropes, but meets not Wisdom's face.
|
Ascending slowly with unconscious steps,
|
A foundling of the Gods she wanders here
|
Like a child-soul left near the gates of Hell
|
Fumbling through fog in search of Paradise.
|
In this slow ascension he must follow her pace
|
Even from her faint and dim subconscious start:
|
So only can earth's last salvation come.
|
For so only could he know the obscure cause
|
Of all that holds us back and baffles God
|
In the jail-delivery of the imprisoned soul.
|
Along swift paths of fall through dangerous gates
|
He chanced into a grey obscurity
|
Teeming with instincts from the mindless gulfs
|
That pushed to wear a form and win a place.
|
Life here was intimate with Death and Night
|
And ate Death's food that she might brea the awhile;
|
She was their inmate and adopted waif.
|
Accepting subconscience, in dumb darkness' reign
|
A sojourner, she hoped not any more.
|
There far away from Truth and luminous thought
|
He saw the original seat, the separate birth
|
Of the dethroned, deformed and suffering Power.
|
An unhappy face of falsity made true,
|
A contradiction of our divine birth,
|
Indifferent to beauty and to light,
|
Parading she flaunted her animal disgrace
|
Unhelped by camouflage, brutal and bare,
|
An au thentic image recognised and signed
|
Of her outcast force exiled from heaven and hope,
|
Fallen, glorying in the vileness of her state,
|
The grovel of a strength once half divine,
|
The graceless squalor of her beast desires,
|
The staring visage of her ignorance,
|
The naked body of her poverty.
|
Here first she crawled out from her cabin of mud
|
Where she had lain inconscient, rigid, mute:
|
Its narrowness and torpor held her still,
|
A darkness clung to her uneffaced by Light.
|
There neared no touch redeeming from above:
|
The upward look was alien to her sight,
|
Forgotten the fearless godhead of her walk;
|
Renounced was the glory and felicity,
|
The adventure in the dangerous fields of Time:
|
Hardly she availed, wallowing, to bear and live.
|
A wide unquiet mist of seeking Space,
|
A rayless region swallowed in vague swathes,
|
That seemed, unnamed, unbodied and unhoused,
|
A swaddled visionless and formless mind,
|
Asked for a body to translate its soul.
|
Its prayer denied, it fumbled after thought.
|
As yet not powered to think, hardly to live,
|
It opened into a weird and pigmy world
|
Where this unhappy magic had its source.
|
On dim confines where Life and Matter meet
|
He wandered among things half-seen, half-guessed,
|
Pursued by ungrasped beginnings and lost ends.
|
There life was born but died before it could live.
|
There was no solid ground, no constant drift;
|
Only some flame of mindless Will had power.
|
Himself was dim to himself, half-felt, obscure,
|
As if in a struggle of the Void to be.
|
In strange domains where all was living sense
|
But mastering thought was not nor cause nor rule,
|
Only a crude child-heart cried for toys of bliss,
|
Mind flickered, a disordered infant glow,
|
And random shapeless energies drove towards form
|
And took each wisp-fire for a guiding sun.
|
CANTO IV: The Kingdoms of the Little Life
|
This blindfold force could place no thinking step;
|
Asking for light she followed darkness' clue.
|
An inconscient Power groped towards consciousness,
|
Matter smitten by Matter glimmered to sense,
|
Blind contacts, slow reactions beat out sparks
|
Of instinct from a cloaked subliminal bed,
|
Sensations crowded, dumb substitutes for thought,
|
Perception answered Nature's wakening blows
|
But still was a mechanical response,
|
A jerk, a leap, a start in Nature's dream,
|
And rude unchastened impulses jostling ran
|
Heedless of every motion but their own
|
And, darkling, clashed with darker than themselves,
|
Free in a world of settled anarchy.
|
The need to exist, the instinct to survive
|
Engrossed the tense precarious moment's will
|
And an unseeing desire felt out for food.
|
The gusts of Nature were the only law,
|
Force wrestled with force, but no result remained:
|
Only were achieved a nescient grasp and drive
|
And feelings and instincts knowing not their source,
|
Sense-pleasures and sense-pangs soon caught, soon lost,
|
And the brute motion of unthinking lives.
|
It was a vain unnecessary world
|
Whose will to be brought poor and sad results
|
And meaningless suffering and a grey unease.
|
Nothing seemed worth the labour to become.
|
But judged not so his spirit's wakened eye.
|
As shines a solitary witness star
|
That burns apart, Light's lonely sentinel,
|
In the drift and teeming of a mindless Night,
|
A single thinker in an aimless world
|
Awaiting some tremendous dawn of God,
|
He saw the purpose in the works of Time.
|
Even in that aimlessness a work was done
|
Pregnant with magic will and change divine.
|
The first writhings of the cosmic serpent Force
|
Uncoiled from the mystic ring of Matter's trance;
|
It raised its head in the warm air of life.
|
It could not cast off yet Night's stiffening sleep
|
Or wear as yet mind's wonder-flecks and streaks,
|
Put on its jewelled hood the crown of soul
|
Or stand erect in the blaze of spirit's sun.
|
As yet were only seen foulness and force,
|
The secret crawl of consciousness to light
|
Through a fertile slime of lust and battening sense,
|
Beneath the body's crust of thickened self
|
A tardy fervent working in the dark,
|
The turbid yeast of Nature's passionate change,
|
Ferment of the soul's creation out of mire.
|
A heavenly process donned this grey disguise,
|
A fallen ignorance in its covert night
|
Laboured to achieve its dumb unseemly work,
|
A camouflage of the Inconscient's need
|
To release the glory of God in Nature's mud.
|
His sight, spiritual in embodying orbs,
|
Could pierce through the grey phosphorescent haze
|
And scan the secrets of the shifting flux
|
That animates these mute and solid cells
|
And leads the thought and longing of the flesh
|
And the keen lust and hunger of its will.
|
This too he tracked along its hidden stream
|
And traced its acts to a miraculous fount.
|
A mystic Presence none can probe nor rule,
|
Creator of this game of ray and shade
|
In this sweet and bitter paradoxical life,
|
Asks from the body the soul's intimacies
|
And by the swift vibration of a nerve
|
Links its mechanic throbs to light and love.
|
It summons the spirit's sleeping memories
|
Up from subconscient depths beneath Time's foam;
|
CANTO IV: The Kingdoms of the Little Life
|
Oblivious of their flame of happy truth,
|
Arriving with heavy eyes that hardly see,
|
They come disguised as feelings and desires,
|
Like weeds upon the surface float awhile
|
And rise and sink on a somnambulist tide.
|
Impure, degraded though her motions are,
|
Always a heaven-truth broods in life's deeps;
|
In her obscurest members burns that fire.
|
A touch of God's rapture in creation's acts,
|
A lost remembrance of felicity
|
Lurks still in the dumb roots of death and birth,
|
The world's senseless beauty mirrors God's delight.
|
That rapture's smile is secret everywhere;
|
It flows in the wind's breath, in the tree's sap,
|
Its hued magnificence blooms in leaves and flowers.
|
When life broke through its half-drowse in the plant
|
That feels and suffers but cannot move or cry,
|
In beast and in winged bird and thinking man
|
It made of the heart's rhythm its music's beat;
|
It forced the unconscious tissues to awake
|
And ask for happiness and earn the pang
|
And thrill with pleasure and laughter of brief delight,
|
And quiver with pain and crave for ecstasy.
|
Imperative, voiceless, ill-understood,
|
Too far from light, too close to being's core,
|
Born strangely in Time from the eternal Bliss,
|
It presses on heart's core and vibrant nerve;
|
Its sharp self-seeking tears our consciousness;
|
Our pain and pleasure have that sting for cause:
|
Instinct with it, but blind to its true joy
|
The soul's desire leaps out towards passing things.
|
All Nature's longing drive none can resist,
|
Comes surging through the blood and quickened sense;
|
An ecstasy of the infinite is her cause.
|
It turns in us to finite loves and lusts,
|
The will to conquer and have, to seize and keep,
|
To enlarge life's room and scope and pleasure's range,
|
To battle and overcome and make one's own,
|
The hope to mix one's joy with others' joy,
|
A yearning to possess and be possessed,
|
To enjoy and be enjoyed, to feel, to live.
|
Here was its early brief attempt to be,
|
Its rapid end of momentary delight
|
Whose stamp of failure haunts all ignorant life.
|
Inflicting still its habit on the cells
|
The phantom of a dark and evil start
|
Ghostlike pursues all that we dream and do.
|
Although on earth are firm established lives,
|
A working of habit or a sense of law,
|
A steady repetition in the flux,
|
Yet are its roots of will ever the same;
|
These passions are the stuff of which we are made.
|
This was the first cry of the awaking world.
|
It clings around us still and clamps the god.
|
Even when reason is born and soul takes form,
|
In beast and reptile and in thinking man
|
It lasts and is the fount of all their life.
|
This too was needed that breath and living might be.
|
The spirit in a finite ignorant world
|
Must rescue so its prisoned consciousness
|
Forced out in little jets at quivering points
|
From the Inconscient's sealed infinitude.
|
Then slowly it gathers mass, looks up at Light.
|
This Nature lives tied to her origin,
|
A clutch of nether force is on her still;
|
Out of unconscious depths her instincts leap;
|
A neighbour is her life to insentient Nought.
|
Under this law an ignorant world was made.
|
In the enigma of the darkened Vasts,
|
In the passion and self-loss of the Infinite
|
When all was plunged in the negating Void,
|
Non-Being's night could never have been saved
|
CANTO IV: The Kingdoms of the Little Life
|
If Being had not plunged into the dark
|
Carrying with it its triple mystic cross.
|
Invoking in world-time the timeless truth,
|
Bliss changed to sorrow, knowledge made ignorant,
|
God's force turned into a child's helplessness
|
Can bring down heaven by their sacrifice.
|
A contradiction founds the base of life:
|
The eternal, the divine Reality
|
Has faced itself with its own contraries;
|
Being became the Void and Conscious-Force
|
Nescience and walk of a blind Energy
|
And Ecstasy took the figure of world-pain.
|
In a mysterious dispensation's law
|
A Wisdom that prepares its far-off ends
|
Planned so to start her slow aeonic game.
|
A blindfold search and wrestle and fumbling clasp
|
Of a half-seen Nature and a hidden Soul,
|
A game of hide-and-seek in twilit rooms,
|
A play of love and hate and fear and hope
|
Continues in the nursery of mind
|
Its hard and heavy romp of self-born twins.
|
At last the struggling Energy can emerge
|
And meet the voiceless Being in wider fields;
|
Then can they see and speak and, breast to breast,
|
In a larger consciousness, a clearer light,
|
The Two embrace and strive and each know each
|
Regarding closer now the playmate's face.
|
Even in these formless coilings he could feel
|
Matter's response to an infant stir of soul.
|
In Nature he saw the mighty Spirit concealed,
|
Watched the weak birth of a tremendous Force,
|
Pursued the riddle of Godhead's tentative pace,
|
Heard the faint rhythms of a great unborn Muse.
|
Then came a fierier breath of waking Life,
|
And there arose from the dim gulf of things
|
The strange creations of a thinking sense,
|
Existences half-real and half-dream.
|
A life was there that hoped not to survive:
|
Beings were born who perished without trace,
|
Events that were a formless drama's limbs
|
And actions driven by a blind creature will.
|
A seeking Power found out its road to form,
|
Patterns were built of love and joy and pain
|
And symbol figures for the moods of Life.
|
An insect hedonism fluttered and crawled
|
And basked in a sunlit Nature's surface thrills,
|
And dragon raptures, python agonies
|
Crawled in the marsh and mire and licked the sun.
|
Huge armoured strengths shook a frail quaking ground,
|
Great puissant creatures with a dwarfish brain,
|
And pigmy tribes imposed their small life-drift.
|
In a dwarf model of humanity
|
Nature now launched the extreme experience
|
And master-point of her design's caprice,
|
Luminous result of her half-conscious climb
|
On rungs twixt her sublimities and grotesques
|
To massive from infinitesimal shapes,
|
To a subtle balancing of body and soul,
|
To an order of intelligent littleness.
|
Around him in the moment-beats of Time
|
The kingdom of the animal self arose,
|
Where deed is all and mind is still half-born
|
And the heart obeys a dumb unseen control.
|
The Force that works by the light of Ignorance,
|
Her animal experiment began,
|
Crowding with conscious creatures her world-scheme;
|
But to the outward only were they alive,
|
Only they replied to touches and surfaces
|
And to the prick of need that drove their lives.
|
A body that knew not its own soul within,
|
There lived and longed, had wrath and joy and grief;
|
CANTO IV: The Kingdoms of the Little Life
|
A mind was there that met the objective world
|
As if a stranger or enemy at its door:
|
Its thoughts were kneaded by the shocks of sense;
|
It captured not the spirit in the form,
|
It entered not the heart of what it saw;
|
It looked not for the power behind the act,
|
It studied not the hidden motive in things
|
Nor strove to find the meaning of it all.
|
Beings were there who wore a human form;
|
Absorbed they lived in the passion of the scene,
|
But knew not who they were or why they lived:
|
Content to breathe, to feel, to sense, to act,
|
Life had for them no aim save Nature's joy
|
And the stimulus and delight of outer things;
|
Identified with the spirit's outward shell,
|
They worked for the body's wants, they craved no more.
|
The veiled spectator watching from their depths
|
Fixed not his inward eye upon himself
|
Nor turned to find the author of the plot,
|
He saw the drama only and the stage.
|
There was no brooding stress of deeper sense,
|
The burden of reflection was not borne:
|
Mind looked on Nature with unknowing eyes,
|
Adored her boons and feared her monstrous strokes.
|
It pondered not on the magic of her laws,
|
It thirsted not for the secret wells of Truth,
|
But made a register of crowding facts
|
And strung sensations on a vivid thread:
|
It hunted and it fled and sniffed the winds,
|
Or slothed inert in sunshine and soft air:
|
It sought the engrossing contacts of the world,
|
But only to feed the surface sense with bliss.
|
These felt life's quiver in the outward touch,
|
They could not feel behind the touch the soul.
|
To guard their form of self from Nature's harm,
|
To enjoy and to survive was all their care.
|
The narrow horizon of their days was filled
|
With things and creatures that could help and hurt:
|
The world's values hung upon their little self.
|
Isolated, cramped in the vast unknown,
|
To save their small lives from surrounding Death
|
They made a tiny circle of defence
|
Against the siege of the huge universe:
|
They preyed upon the world and were its prey,
|
But never dreamed to conquer and be free.
|
Obeying the World-Power's hints and firm taboos
|
A scanty part they drew from her rich store;
|
There was no conscious code and no life-plan:
|
The patterns of thinking of a little group
|
Fixed a traditional behaviour's law.
|
Ignorant of soul save as a wraith within,
|
Tied to a mechanism of unchanging lives
|
And to a dull usual sense and feeling's beat,
|
They turned in grooves of animal desire.
|
In walls of stone fenced round they worked and warred,
|
Did by a banded selfishness a small good
|
Or wrought a dreadful wrong and cruel pain
|
On sentient lives and thought they did no ill.
|
Ardent from the sack of happy peaceful homes
|
And gorged with slaughter, plunder, rape and fire,
|
They made of human selves their helpless prey,
|
A drove of captives led to lifelong woe,
|
Or torture a spectacle made and holiday,
|
Mocking or thrilled by their torn victims' pangs;
|
Admiring themselves as titans and as gods
|
Proudly they sang their high and glorious deeds
|
And praised their victory and their splendid force.
|
An animal in the instinctive herd
|
Pushed by life impulses, forced by common needs,
|
Each in his own kind saw his ego's glass;
|
All served the aim and action of the pack.
|
Those like himself, by blood or custom kin,
|
CANTO IV: The Kingdoms of the Little Life
|
To him were parts of his life, his adjunct selves,
|
His personal nebula's constituent stars,
|
Satellite companions of his solar I.
|
A master of his life's environment,
|
A leader of a huddled human mass
|
Herding for safety on a dangerous earth,
|
He gathered them round him as if minor Powers
|
To make a common front against the world,
|
Or, weak and sole on an indifferent earth,
|
As a fortress for his undefended heart,
|
Or else to heal his body's loneliness.
|
In others than his kind he sensed a foe,
|
An alien unlike force to shun and fear,
|
A stranger and adversary to hate and slay.
|
Or he lived as lives the solitary brute;
|
At war with all he bore his single fate.
|
Absorbed in the present act, the fleeting days,
|
None thought to look beyond the hour's gains,
|
Or dreamed to make this earth a fairer world,
|
Or felt some touch divine surprise his heart.
|
The gladness that the fugitive moment gave,
|
The desire grasped, the bliss, the experience won,
|
Movement and speed and strength were joy enough
|
And bodily longings shared and quarrel and play,
|
And tears and laughter and the need called love.
|
In war and clasp these life-wants joined the All-Life,
|
Wrestlings of a divided unity
|
Inflicting mutual grief and happiness
|
In ignorance of the Self for ever one.
|
Arming its creatures with delight and hope
|
A half-awakened Nescience struggled there
|
To know by sight and touch the outside of things.
|
Instinct was formed; in memory's crowded sleep
|
The past lived on as in a bottomless sea:
|
Inverting into half-thought the quickened sense
|
She felt around for truth with fumbling hands,
|
Clutched to her the little she could reach and seize
|
And put aside in her subconscient cave.
|
So must the dim being grow in light and force
|
And rise to his higher destiny at last,
|
Look up to God and round at the universe,
|
And learn by failure and progress by fall
|
And battle with environment and doom,
|
By suffering discover his deep soul
|
And by possession grow to his own vasts.
|
Half-way she stopped and found her path no more.
|
Still nothing was achieved but to begin,
|
Yet finished seemed the circle of her force.
|
Only she had beaten out sparks of ignorance;
|
Only the life could think and not the mind,
|
Only the sense could feel and not the soul.
|
Only was lit some heat of the flame of Life,
|
Some joy to be, some rapturous leaps of sense.
|
All was an impetus of half-conscious Force,
|
A spirit sprawling drowned in dense life-foam,
|
A vague self grasping at the shape of things.
|
Behind all moved seeking for vessels to hold
|
A first raw vintage of the grapes of God,
|
On earth's mud a spilth of the supernal Bliss,
|
Intoxicating the stupefied soul and mind
|
A heady wine of rapture dark and crude,
|
Dim, uncast yet into spiritual form,
|
Obscure inhabitant of the world's blind core,
|
An unborn godhead's will, a mute Desire.
|
A third creation now revealed its face.
|
A mould of body's early mind was made.
|
A glint of light kindled the obscure World-Force;
|
It dowered a driven world with the seeing Idea
|
And armed the act with thought's dynamic point:
|
A small thinking being watched the works of Time.
|
A difficult evolution from below
|
CANTO IV: The Kingdoms of the Little Life
|
Called a masked intervention from above;
|
Else this great, blind inconscient universe
|
Could never have disclosed its hidden mind,
|
Or even in blinkers worked in beast and man
|
The Intelligence that devised the cosmic scheme.
|
At first he saw a dim obscure mind-power
|
Moving concealed by Matter and dumb life.
|
A current thin, it streamed in life's vast flow
|
Tossing and drifting under a drifting sky
|
Amid the surge and glimmering tremulous wash,
|
Released in splash of sense and feeling's waves.
|
In the deep midst of an insentient world
|
Its huddled waves and foam of consciousness ran
|
Pressing and eddying through a narrow strait,
|
Carrying experience in its crowded pace.
|
It flowed emerging into upper light
|
From the deep pool of its subliminal birth
|
To reach some high existence still unknown.
|
There was no thinking self, aim there was none:
|
All was unorganised stress and seekings vague.
|
Only to the unstable surface rose
|
Sensations, stabs and edges of desire
|
And passion's leaps and brief emotion's cries,
|
A casual colloquy of flesh with flesh,
|
A murmur of heart to longing wordless heart,
|
Glimmerings of knowledge with no shape of thought
|
And jets of subconscious will or hunger's pulls.
|
All was dim sparkle on a foaming top:
|
It whirled around a drifting shadow-self
|
On an inconscient flood of Force in Time.
|
Then came the pressure of a seeing Power
|
That drew all into a dancing turbid mass
|
Circling around a single luminous point,
|
Centre of reference in a conscious field,
|
Figure of a unitary Light within.
|
It lit the impulse of the half-sentient flood,
|
Even an illusion gave of fixity
|
As if a sea could serve as a firm soil.
|
That strange observing Power imposed its sight.
|
It forced on flux a limit and a shape,
|
It gave its stream a lower narrow bank,
|
Drew lines to snare the spirit's formlessness.
|
It fashioned the life-mind of bird and beast,
|
The answer of the reptile and the fish,
|
The primitive pattern of the thoughts of man.
|
A finite movement of the Infinite
|
Came winging its way through a wide air of Time;
|
A march of knowledge moved in Nescience
|
And guarded in the form a separate soul.
|
Its right to be immortal it reserved,
|
But built a wall against the siege of death
|
And threw a hook to clutch eternity.
|
A thinking entity appeared in Space.
|
A little ordered world broke into view
|
Where being had prison-room for act and sight,
|
A floor to walk, a clear but scanty range.
|
An instrument-personality was born,
|
And a restricted clamped intelligence
|
Consented to confine in narrow bounds
|
Its seeking; it tied the thought to visible things,
|
Prohibiting the adventure of the Unseen
|
And the soul's tread through unknown infinities.
|
A reflex reason, Nature-habit's glass
|
Illumined life to know and fix its field,
|
Accept a dangerous ignorant brevity
|
And the inconclusive purpose of its walk
|
And profit by the hour's precarious chance
|
In the allotted boundaries of its fate.
|
A little joy and knowledge satisfied
|
This little being tied into a knot
|
And hung on a bulge of its environment,
|
A little curve cut off in measureless Space,
|
CANTO IV: The Kingdoms of the Little Life
|
A little span of life in all vast Time.
|
A thought was there that planned, a will that strove,
|
But for small aims within a narrow scope,
|
Wasting unmeasured toil on transient things.
|
It knew itself a creature of the mud;
|
It asked no larger law, no loftier aim;
|
It had no inward look, no upward gaze.
|
A backward scholar on logic's rickety bench
|
Indoctrinated by the erring sense,
|
It took appearance for the face of God,
|
For casual lights the marching of the suns,
|
For heaven a starry strip of doubtful blue;
|
Aspects of being feigned to be the whole.
|
There was a voice of busy interchange,
|
A market-place of trivial thoughts and acts:
|
A life soon spent, a mind the body's slave
|
Here seemed the brilliant crown of Nature's work,
|
And tiny egos took the world as means
|
To sate awhile dwarf lusts and brief desires,
|
In a death-closed passage saw life's start and end
|
As though a blind alley were creation's sign,
|
As if for this the soul had coveted birth
|
In the wonderl and of a self-creating world
|
And the opportunities of cosmic Space.
|
This creature passionate only to survive,
|
Fettered to puny thoughts with no wide range
|
And to the body's needs and pangs and joys,
|
This fire growing by its fuel's death,
|
Increased by what it seized and made its own:
|
It gathered and grew and gave itself to none.
|
Only it hoped for greatness in its den
|
And pleasure and victory in small fields of power
|
And conquest of life-room for self and kin,
|
An animal limited by its feeding-space.
|
It knew not the Immortal in its house;
|
It had no greater deeper cause to live.
|
In limits only it was powerful;
|
Acute to capture truth for outward use,
|
Its knowledge was the body's instrument;
|
Absorbed in the little works of its prison-house
|
It turned around the same unchanging points
|
In the same circle of interest and desire,
|
But thought itself the master of its jail.
|
Although for action, not for wisdom made,
|
Thought was its apex - or its gutter's rim:
|
It saw an image of the external world
|
And saw its surface self, but knew no more.
|
Out of a slow confused embroiled self-search
|
Mind grew to a clarity cut out, precise,
|
A gleam enclosed in a stone ignorance.
|
In this bound thinking's narrow leadership
|
Tied to the soil, inspired by common things,
|
Attached to a confined familiar world,
|
Amid the multitude of her motived plots,
|
Her changing actors and her million masks,
|
Life was a play monotonously the same.
|
There were no vast perspectives of the spirit,
|
No swift invasions of unknown delight,
|
No golden distances of wide release.
|
This petty state resembled our human days
|
But fixed to eternity of changeless type,
|
A moment's movement doomed to last through Time.
|
Existence bridge-like spanned the inconscient gulfs,
|
A half-illumined building in a mist,
|
Which from a void of Form arose to sight
|
And jutted out into a void of Soul.
|
A little light in a great darkness born,
|
Life knew not where it went nor whence it came.
|
Around all floated still the nescient haze.
|
The Godheads of the Little Life
|
A FIXED and narrow power with rigid forms,
|
He saw the empire of the little life,
|
An unhappy corner in eternity.
|
It lived upon the margin of the Idea
|
Protected by Ignorance as in a shell.
|
Then, hoping to learn the secret of this world
|
He peered across its scanty fringe of sight,
|
To disengage from its surface-clear obscurity
|
The Force that moved it and the Idea that made,
|
Imposing smallness on the Infinite,
|
The ruling spirit of its littleness,
|
The divine law that gave it right to be,
|
Its claim on Nature and its need in Time.
|
He plunged his gaze into the siege of mist
|
That held this ill-lit straitened continent
|
Ringed with the skies and seas of ignorance
|
And kept it safe from Truth and Self and Light.
|
As when a searchlight stabs the Night's blind breast
|
And dwellings and trees and figures of men appear
|
As if revealed to an eye in Nothingness,
|
All lurking things were torn out of their veils
|
And held up in his vision's sun-white blaze.
|
A busy restless uncouth populace
|
Teemed in their dusky unnoted thousands there.
|
In a mist of secrecy wrapping the world-scene
|
The little deities of Time's nether act
|
Who work remote from Heaven's controlling eye,
|
Plotted, unknown to the creatures whom they move,
|
The small conspiracies of this petty reign
|
Amused with the small contrivings, the brief hopes
|
And little eager steps and little ways
|
And reptile wallowings in the dark and dust,
|
And the crouch and ignominy of creeping life.
|
A trepidant and motley multitude,
|
A strange pell-mell of magic artisans,
|
Was seen moulding the plastic clay of life,
|
An elfin brood, an elemental kind.
|
Astonished by the unaccustomed glow,
|
As if immanent in the shadows started up
|
Imps with wry limbs and carved beast visages,
|
Sprite-prompters goblin-wizened or faery-small,
|
And genii fairer but unsouled and poor
|
And fallen beings, their heavenly portion lost,
|
And errant divinities trapped in Time's dust.
|
Ignorant and dangerous wills but armed with power,
|
Half-animal, half-god their mood, their shape.
|
Out of the greyness of a dim background
|
Their whispers come, an inarticulate force,
|
Awake in mind an echoing thought or word,
|
To their sting of impulse the heart's sanction draw,
|
And in that little Nature do their work
|
And fill its powers and creatures with unease.
|
Its seed of joy they curse with sorrow's fruit,
|
Put out with error's breath its scanty lights
|
And turn its surface truths to falsehood's ends,
|
Its small emotions spur, its passions drive
|
To the abyss or through the bog and mire:
|
Or else with a goad of hard dry lusts they prick,
|
While jogs on devious ways that nowhere lead
|
Life's cart finding no issue from ignorance.
|
To sport with good and evil is their law;
|
Luring to failure and meaningless success,
|
All models they corrupt, all measures cheat,
|
Make knowledge a poison, virtue a pattern dull
|
And lead the endless cycles of desire
|
Through semblances of sad or happy chance
|
To an inescapable fatality.
|
CANTO V: The Godheads of the Little Life
|
All by their influence is enacted there.
|
Nor there alone is their empire or their role:
|
Wherever are soulless minds and guideless lives
|
And in a small body self is all that counts,
|
Wherever love and light and largeness lack,
|
These crooked fashioners take up their task.
|
To all half-conscious worlds they extend their reign.
|
Here too these godlings drive our human hearts,
|
Our nature's twilight is their lurking-place:
|
Here too the darkened primitive heart obeys
|
The veiled suggestions of a hidden Mind
|
That dogs our knowledge with misleading light
|
And stands between us and the Truth that saves.
|
It speaks to us with the voices of the Night:
|
Our darkened lives to greater darkness move;
|
Our seekings listen to calamitous hopes.
|
A structure of unseeing thoughts is built
|
And reason used by an irrational Force.
|
This earth is not alone our teacher and nurse;
|
The powers of all the worlds have entrance here.
|
In their own fields they follow the wheel of law
|
And cherish the safety of a settled type;
|
On earth out of their changeless orbit thrown
|
Their law is kept, lost their fixed form of things.
|
Into a creative chaos they are cast
|
Where all asks order but is driven by Chance;
|
Strangers to earth-nature, they must learn earth's ways,
|
Aliens or opposites, they must unite:
|
They work and battle and with pain agree:
|
These join, those part, all parts and joins anew,
|
But never can we know and truly live
|
Till all have found their divine harmony.
|
Our life's uncertain way winds circling on,
|
Our mind's unquiet search asks always light,
|
Till they have learned their secret in their source,
|
In the light of the Timeless and its spaceless home,
|
In the joy of the Eternal sole and one.
|
But now the Light supreme is far away:
|
Our conscious life obeys the Inconscient's laws;
|
To ignorant purposes and blind desires
|
Our hearts are moved by an ambiguous force;
|
Even our mind's conquests wear a battered crown.
|
A slowly changing order binds our will.
|
This is our doom until our souls are free.
|
A mighty Hand then rolls mind's firmaments back,
|
Infinity takes up the finite's acts
|
And Nature steps into the eternal Light.
|
Then only ends this dream of nether life.
|
At the outset of this enigmatic world
|
Which seems at once an enormous brute machine
|
And a slow unmasking of the spirit in things,
|
In this revolving chamber without walls
|
In which God sits impassive everywhere
|
As if unknown to himself and by us unseen
|
In a miracle of inconscient secrecy,
|
Yet is all here his action and his will.
|
In this whirl and sprawl through infinite vacancy
|
The Spirit became Matter and lay in the whirl,
|
A body sleeping without sense or soul.
|
A mass phenomenon of visible shapes
|
Supported by the silence of the Void
|
Appeared in the eternal Consciousness
|
And seemed an outward and insensible world.
|
There was none there to see and none to feel;
|
Only the miraculous Inconscient,
|
A subtle wizard skilled, was at its task.
|
Inventing ways for magical results,
|
Managing creation's marvellous device,
|
Marking mechanically dumb wisdom's points,
|
Using the unthought inevitable Idea,
|
It did the works of God's intelligence
|
CANTO V: The Godheads of the Little Life
|
Or wrought the will of some supreme Unknown.
|
Still consciousness was hidden in Nature's womb,
|
Unfelt was the Bliss whose rapture dreamed the worlds.
|
Being was an inert substance driven by Force.
|
At first was only an etheric Space:
|
Its huge vibrations circled round and round
|
Housing some unconceived initiative:
|
Upheld by a supreme original Breath
|
Expansion and contraction's mystic act
|
Created touch and friction in the void,
|
Into abstract emptiness brought clash and clasp:
|
Parent of an expanding universe
|
In a matrix of disintegrating force,
|
By spending it conserved an endless sum.
|
On the hearth of Space it kindled a viewless Fire
|
That, scattering worlds as one might scatter seeds,
|
Whirled out the luminous order of the stars.
|
An ocean of electric Energy
|
Formlessly formed its strange wave-particles
|
Constructing by their dance this solid scheme,
|
Its mightiness in the atom shut to rest;
|
Masses were forged or feigned and visible shapes;
|
Light flung the photon's swift revealing spark
|
And showed, in the minuteness of its flash
|
Imaged, this cosmos of apparent things.
|
Thus has been made this real impossible world,
|
An obvious miracle or convincing show.
|
Or so it seems to man's audacious mind
|
Who seats his thought as the arbiter of truth,
|
His personal vision as impersonal fact,
|
As witnesses of an objective world
|
His erring sense and his instruments' artifice.
|
Thus must he work life's tangible riddle out
|
In a doubtful light, by error seize on Truth
|
And slowly part the visage and the veil.
|
Or else, forlorn of faith in mind and sense,
|
His knowledge a bright body of ignorance,
|
He sees in all things strangely fashioned here
|
The unwelcome jest of a deceiving Force,
|
A parable of Maya and her might.
|
This vast perpetual motion caught and held
|
In the mysterious and unchanging change
|
Of the persistent movement we call Time
|
And ever renewing its recurrent beat,
|
These mobile rounds that stereotype a flux,
|
These static objects in the cosmic dance
|
That are but Energy's self-repeating whorls
|
Prolonged by the spirit of the brooding Void,
|
Awaited life and sense and waking Mind.
|
A little the Dreamer changed his pose of stone.
|
But when the Inconscient's scrupulous work was done
|
And Chance coerced by fixed immutable laws,
|
A scene was set for Nature's conscious play.
|
Then stirred the Spirit's mute immobile sleep;
|
The Force concealed broke dumbly, slowly out.
|
A dream of living woke in Matter's heart,
|
A will to live moved the Inconscient's dust,
|
A freak of living startled vacant Time,
|
Ephemeral in a blank eternity,
|
Infinitesimal in a dead Infinite.
|
A subtler breath quickened dead Matter's forms;
|
The world's set rhythm changed to a conscious cry;
|
A serpent Power twinned the insensible Force.
|
Islands of living dotted lifeless Space
|
And germs of living formed in formless air.
|
A Life was born that followed Matter's law,
|
Ignorant of the motives of its steps;
|
Ever inconstant, yet for ever the same,
|
It repeated the paradox that gave it birth:
|
Its restless and unstable stabilities
|
Recurred incessantly in the flow of Time
|
And purposeful movements in unthinking forms
|
CANTO V: The Godheads of the Little Life
|
Betrayed the heavings of an imprisoned Will.
|
Waking and sleep lay locked in mutual arms;
|
Helpless and indistinct came pleasure and pain
|
Trembling with the first faint thrills of a World-Soul.
|
A strength of life that could not cry or move,
|
Yet broke into beauty signing some deep delight:
|
An inarticulate sensibility,
|
Throbs of the heart of an unknowing world,
|
Ran through its somnolent torpor and there stirred
|
A vague uncertain thrill, a wandering beat,
|
A dim unclosing as of secret eyes.
|
Infant self-feeling grew and birth was born.
|
A godhead woke but lay with dreaming limbs;
|
Her house refused to open its sealed doors.
|
Insentient to our eyes that only see
|
The form, the act and not the imprisoned God,
|
Life hid in her pulse occult of growth and power
|
A consciousness with mute stifled beats of sense,
|
A mind suppressed that knew not yet of thought,
|
An inert spirit that could only be.
|
At first she raised no voice, no motion dared:
|
Charged with world-power, instinct with living force,
|
Only she clung with her roots to the safe earth,
|
Thrilled dumbly to the shocks of ray and breeze
|
And put out tendril fingers of desire;
|
The strength in her yearning for sun and light
|
Felt not the embrace that made her brea the and live;
|
Absorbed she dreamed content with beauty and hue.
|
At last the charmed Immensity looked forth:
|
Astir, vibrant, hungering, she groped for mind;
|
Then slowly sense quivered and thought peered out;
|
She forced the reluctant mould to grow aware.
|
The magic was chiselled of a conscious form;
|
Its tranced vibrations rhythmed a quick response,
|
And luminous stirrings prompted brain and nerve,
|
Awoke in Matter spirit's identity
|
And in a body lit the miracle
|
Of the heart's love and the soul's witness gaze.
|
Impelled by an unseen Will there could break out
|
Fragments of some vast impulse to become
|
And vivid glimpses of a secret self,
|
And the doubtful seeds and force of shapes to be
|
Awoke from the inconscient swoon of things.
|
An animal creation crept and ran
|
And flew and called between the earth and sky,
|
Hunted by death but hoping still to live
|
And glad to brea the if only for a while.
|
Then man was moulded from the original brute.
|
A thinking mind had come to lift life's moods,
|
The keen-edged tool of a Nature mixed and vague,
|
An intelligence half-witness, half-machine.
|
This seeming driver of her wheel of works
|
Missioned to motive and record her drift
|
And fix its law on her inconstant powers,
|
This master-spring of a delicate enginery,
|
Aspired to enlighten its user and refine
|
Lifting to a vision of the indwelling Power
|
The absorbed mechanic's crude initiative:
|
He raised his eyes; Heaven-light mirrored a Face.
|
Amazed at the works wrought in her mystic sleep,
|
She looked upon the world that she had made:
|
Wondering now seized the great automaton;
|
She paused to understand her self and aim,
|
Pondering she learned to act by conscious rule,
|
A visioned measure guided her rhythmic steps;
|
Thought bordered her instincts with a frame of will
|
And lit with the idea her blinded urge.
|
On her mass of impulses, her reflex acts,
|
On the Inconscient's pushed or guided drift
|
And mystery of unthinking accurate steps
|
She stuck the specious image of a self,
|
A living idol of disfigured spirit;
|
CANTO V: The Godheads of the Little Life
|
On Matter's acts she imposed a patterned law;
|
She made a thinking body from chemic cells
|
And moulded a being out of a driven force.
|
To be what she was not inflamed her hope:
|
She turned her dream towards some high Unknown;
|
A breath was felt below of One supreme.
|
An opening looked up to spheres above
|
And coloured shadows limned on mortal ground
|
The passing figures of immortal things;
|
A quick celestial flash could sometimes come:
|
The illumined soul-ray fell on heart and flesh
|
And touched with semblances of ideal light
|
The stuff of which our earthly dreams are made.
|
A fragile human love that could not last,
|
Ego's moth-wings to lift the seraph soul,
|
Appeared, a surface glamour of brief date
|
Extinguished by a scanty breath of Time;
|
Joy that forgot mortality for a while
|
Came, a rare visitor who left betimes,
|
And made all things seem beautiful for an hour,
|
Hopes that soon fade to drab realities
|
And passions that crumble to ashes while they blaze
|
Kindled the common earth with their brief flame.
|
A creature insignificant and small
|
Visited, uplifted by an unknown Power,
|
Man laboured on his little patch of earth
|
For means to last, to enjoy, to suffer and die.
|
A spirit that perished not with the body and breath
|
Was there like a shadow of the Unmanifest
|
And stood behind the little personal form
|
But claimed not yet this earthly embodiment.
|
Assenting to Nature's long slow-moving toil,
|
Watching the works of his own Ignorance,
|
Unknown, unfelt the mighty Witness lives
|
And nothing shows the Glory that is here.
|
A Wisdom governing the mystic world,
|
A Silence listening to the cry of Life,
|
It sees the hurrying crowd of moments stream
|
Towards the still greatness of a distant hour.
|
This huge world unintelligibly turns
|
In the shadow of a mused Inconscience;
|
It hides a key to inner meanings missed,
|
It locks in our hearts a voice we cannot hear.
|
An enigmatic labour of the spirit,
|
An exact machine of which none knows the use,
|
An art and ingenuity without sense,
|
This minute elaborate orchestrated life
|
For ever plays its motiveless symphonies.
|
The mind learns and knows not, turning its back to truth;
|
It studies surface laws by surface thought,
|
Life's steps surveys and Nature's process sees,
|
Not seeing for what she acts or why we live;
|
It marks her tireless care of just device,
|
Her patient intricacy of fine detail,
|
The ingenious spirit's brave inventive plan
|
In her great futile mass of endless works,
|
Adds purposeful figures to her purposeless sum,
|
Its gabled storeys piles, its climbing roofs
|
On the close-carved foundations she has laid,
|
Imagined citadels reared in mythic air
|
Or mounts a stair of dream to a mystic moon:
|
Transient creations point and hit the sky:
|
A world-conjecture's scheme is laboured out
|
On the dim floor of mind's incertitude,
|
Or painfully built a fragmentary whole.
|
Impenetrable, a mystery recondite
|
Is the vast plan of which we are a part;
|
Its harmonies are discords to our view
|
Because we know not the great theme they serve.
|
Inscrutable work the cosmic agencies.
|
Only the fringe of a wide surge we see;
|
CANTO V: The Godheads of the Little Life
|
Our instruments have not that greater light,
|
Our will tunes not with the eternal Will,
|
Our heart's sight is too blind and passionate.
|
Impotent to share in Nature's mystic tact,
|
Inapt to feel the pulse and core of things,
|
Our reason cannot sound life's mighty sea
|
And only counts its waves and scans its foam;
|
It knows not whence these motions touch and pass,
|
It sees not whither sweeps the hurrying flood:
|
Only it strives to canalise its powers
|
And hopes to turn its course to human ends:
|
But all its means come from the Inconscient's store.
|
Unseen here act dim huge world-energies
|
And only trickles and currents are our share.
|
Our mind lives far off from the au thentic Light
|
Catching at little fragments of the Truth
|
In a small corner of infinity,
|
Our lives are inlets of an ocean's force.
|
Our conscious movements have sealed origins
|
But with those shadowy seats no converse hold;
|
No understanding binds our comrade parts;
|
Our acts emerge from a crypt our minds ignore.
|
Our deepest depths are ignorant of themselves;
|
Even our body is a mystery shop;
|
As our earth's roots lurk screened below our earth,
|
So lie unseen our roots of mind and life.
|
Our springs are kept close hid beneath, within;
|
Our souls are moved by powers behind the wall.
|
In the subterranean reaches of the spirit
|
A puissance acts and recks not what it means;
|
Using unthinking monitors and scribes,
|
It is the cause of what we think and feel.
|
The troglodytes of the subconscious Mind,
|
Ill-trained slow stammering interpreters
|
Only of their small task's routine aware
|
And busy with the record in our cells,
|
Concealed in the subliminal secrecies
|
Mid an obscure occult machinery,
|
Capture the mystic Morse whose measured lilt
|
Transmits the messages of the cosmic Force.
|
A whisper falls into life's inner ear
|
And echoes from the dun subconscient caves,
|
Speech leaps, thought quivers, the heart vibrates, the will
|
Answers and tissue and nerve obey the call.
|
Our lives translate these subtle intimacies;
|
All is the commerce of a secret Power.
|
A thinking puppet is the mind of life:
|
Its choice is the work of elemental strengths
|
That know not their own birth and end and cause
|
And glimpse not the immense intent they serve.
|
In this nether life of man drab-hued and dull,
|
Yet filled with poignant small ignoble things,
|
The conscious Doll is pushed a hundred ways
|
And feels the push but not the hands that drive.
|
For none can see the masked ironic troupe
|
To whom our figure-selves are marionettes,
|
Our deeds unwitting movements in their grasp,
|
Our passionate strife an entertainment's scene.
|
Ignorant themselves of their own fount of strength
|
They play their part in the enormous whole.
|
Agents of darkness imitating light,
|
Spirits obscure and moving things obscure,
|
Unwillingly they serve a mightier Power.
|
Ananke's engines organising Chance,
|
Channels perverse of a stupendous Will,
|
Tools of the Unknown who use us as their tools,
|
Invested with power in Nature's nether state,
|
Into the actions mortals think their own
|
They bring the incoherencies of Fate,
|
Or make a doom of Time's slipshod caprice
|
And toss the lives of men from hand to hand
|
In an inconsequent and devious game.
|
CANTO V: The Godheads of the Little Life
|
Against all higher truth their stuff rebels;
|
Only to Titan force their will lies prone.
|
Inordinate their hold on human hearts,
|
In all our nature's turns they intervene.
|
Insignificant architects of low-built lives
|
And engineers of interest and desire,
|
Out of crude earthiness and muddy thrills
|
And coarse reactions of material nerve
|
They build our huddled structures of self-will
|
And the ill-lighted mansions of our thought,
|
Or with the ego's factories and marts
|
Surround the beautiful temple of the soul.
|
Artists minute of the hues of littleness,
|
They set the mosaic of our comedy
|
Or plan the trivial tragedy of our days,
|
Arrange the deed, combine the circumstance
|
And the fantasia of the moods costume.
|
These unwise prompters of man's ignorant heart
|
And tutors of his stumbling speech and will,
|
Movers of petty wraths and lusts and hates
|
And changeful thoughts and shallow emotion's starts,
|
These slight illusion-makers with their masks,
|
Painters of the decor of a dull-hued stage
|
And nimble scene-shifters of the human play,
|
Ever are busy with this ill-lit scene.
|
Ourselves incapable to build our fate
|
Only as actors speak and strut our parts
|
Until the piece is done and we pass off
|
Into a brighter Time and subtler Space.
|
Thus they inflict their little pigmy law
|
And curb the mounting slow uprise of man,
|
Then his too scanty walk with death they close.
|
This is the ephemeral creature's daily life.
|
As long as the human animal is lord
|
And a dense nether nature screens the soul,
|
As long as intellect's outward-gazing sight
|
Serves earthy interest and creature joys,
|
An incurable littleness pursues his days.
|
Ever since consciousness was born on earth,
|
Life is the same in insect, ape and man,
|
Its stuff unchanged, its way the common route.
|
If new designs, if richer details grow
|
And thought is added and more tangled cares,
|
If little by little it wears a brighter face,
|
Still even in man the plot is mean and poor.
|
A gross content prolongs his fallen state;
|
His small successes are failures of the soul,
|
His little pleasures punctuate frequent griefs:
|
Hardship and toil are the heavy price he pays
|
For the right to live and his last wages death.
|
An inertia sunk towards inconscience,
|
A sleep that imitates death is his repose.
|
A puny splendour of creative force
|
Is made his spur to fragile human works
|
Which yet outlast their brief creator's breath.
|
He dreams sometimes of the revels of the gods
|
And sees the Dionysian gesture pass, -
|
A leonine greatness that would tear his soul
|
If through his failing limbs and fainting heart
|
The sweet and joyful mighty madness swept:
|
Trivial amusements stimulate and waste
|
The energy given to him to grow and be.
|
His little hour is spent in little things.
|
A brief companionship with many jars,
|
A little love and jealousy and hate,
|
A touch of friendship mid indifferent crowds
|
Draw his heart-plan on life's diminutive map.
|
If something great awakes, too frail his pitch
|
To reveal its zenith tension of delight,
|
His thought to eternise its ephemeral soar,
|
Art's brilliant gleam is a pastime for his eyes,
|
CANTO V: The Godheads of the Little Life
|
A thrill that smites the nerves is music's spell.
|
Amidst his harassed toil and welter of cares,
|
Pressed by the labour of his crowding thoughts,
|
He draws sometimes around his aching brow
|
Nature's calm mighty hands to heal his life-pain.
|
He is saved by her silence from his rack of self;
|
In her tranquil beauty is his purest bliss.
|
A new life dawns, he looks out from vistas wide;
|
The Spirit's breath moves him but soon retires:
|
His strength was not made to hold that puissant guest.
|
All dulls down to convention and routine
|
Or a fierce excitement brings him vivid joys:
|
His days are tinged with the red hue of strife
|
And lust's hot glare and passion's crimson stain;
|
Battle and murder are his tribal game.
|
Time has he none to turn his eyes within
|
And look for his lost self and his dead soul.
|
His motion on too short an axis wheels;
|
He cannot soar but creeps on his long road
|
Or if, impatient of the trudge of Time,
|
He would make a splendid haste on Fate's slow road,
|
His heart that runs soon pants and tires and sinks;
|
Or he walks ever on and finds no end.
|
Hardly a few can climb to greater life.
|
All tunes to a low scale and conscious pitch.
|
His knowledge dwells in the house of Ignorance;
|
His force nears not even once the Omnipotent,
|
Rare are his visits of heavenly ecstasy.
|
The bliss which sleeps in things and tries to wake,
|
Breaks out in him in a small joy of life:
|
This scanty grace is his persistent stay;
|
It lightens the burden of his many ills
|
And reconciles him to his little world.
|
He is satisfied with his common average kind;
|
Tomorrow's hopes and his old rounds of thought,
|
His old familiar interests and desires
|
He has made into a thick and narrowing hedge
|
Defending his small life from the Invisible;
|
His being's kinship to infinity
|
He has shut away from him into inmost self,
|
Fenced off the greatnesses of hidden God.
|
His being was formed to play a trivial part
|
In a little drama on a petty stage;
|
In a narrow plot he has pitched his tent of life
|
Beneath the wide gaze of the starry Vast.
|
He is the crown of all that has been done:
|
Thus is creation's labour justified;
|
This is the world's result, Nature's last poise!
|
And if this were all and nothing more were meant,
|
If what now seems were the whole of what must be,
|
If this were not a stade through which we pass
|
On our road from Matter to eternal Self,
|
To the Light that made the worlds, the Cause of things,
|
Well might interpret our mind's limited view
|
Existence as an accident in Time,
|
Illusion or phenomenon or freak,
|
The paradox of a creative Thought
|
Which moves between unreal opposites,
|
Inanimate Force struggling to feel and know,
|
Matter that chanced to read itself by Mind,
|
Inconscience monstrously engendering soul.
|
At times all looks unreal and remote:
|
We seem to live in a fiction of our thoughts
|
Pieced from sensation's fanciful traveller's tale,
|
Or caught on the film of the recording brain,
|
A figment or circumstance in cosmic sleep.
|
A somnambulist walking under the moon,
|
An image of ego treads through an ignorant dream
|
Counting the moments of a spectral Time.
|
In a false perspective of effect and cause,
|
Trusting to a specious prospect of world-space,
|
It drifts incessantly from scene to scene,
|
CANTO V: The Godheads of the Little Life
|
Whither it knows not, to what fabulous verge.
|
All here is dreamed or doubtfully exists,
|
But who the dreamer is and whence he looks
|
Is still unknown or only a shadowy guess.
|
Or the world is real but ourselves too small,
|
Insufficient for the mightiness of our stage.
|
A thin life-curve crosses the titan whirl
|
Of the orbit of a soulless universe,
|
And in the belly of the sparse rolling mass
|
A mind looks out from a small casual globe
|
And wonders what itself and all things are.
|
And yet to some interned subjective sight
|
That strangely has formed in Matter's sightless stuff,
|
A pointillage minute of little self
|
Takes figure as world-being's conscious base.
|
Such is our scene in the half-light below.
|
This is the sign of Matter's infinite,
|
This the weird purport of the picture shown
|
To Science the giantess, measurer of her field,
|
As she pores on the record of her close survey
|
And mathematises her huge external world,
|
To Reason bound within the circle of sense,
|
Or in Thought's broad impalpable Exchange
|
A speculator in tenuous vast ideas,
|
Abstractions in the void her currency
|
We know not with what firm values for its base.
|
Only religion in this bankruptcy
|
Presents its dubious riches to our hearts
|
Or signs unprovisioned cheques on the Beyond:
|
Our poverty shall there have its revenge.
|
Our spirits depart discarding a futile life
|
Into the blank unknown or with them take
|
Death's passport into immortality.
|
Yet was this only a provisional scheme,
|
A false appearance sketched by limiting sense,
|
Mind's insufficient self-discovery,
|
An early attempt, a first experiment.
|
This was a toy to amuse the infant earth;
|
But knowledge ends not in these surface powers
|
That live upon a ledge in the Ignorance
|
And dare not look into the dangerous depths
|
Or to stare upward measuring the Unknown.
|
There is a deeper seeing from within
|
And, when we have left these small purlieus of mind,
|
A greater vision meets us on the heights
|
In the luminous wideness of the spirit's gaze.
|
At last there wakes in us a witness Soul
|
That looks at truths unseen and scans the Unknown;
|
Then all assumes a new and marvellous face:
|
The world quivers with a God-light at its core,
|
In Time's deep heart high purposes move and live,
|
Life's borders crumble and join infinity.
|
This broad, confused, yet rigid scheme becomes
|
A magnificent imbroglio of the Gods,
|
A game, a work ambiguously divine.
|
Our seekings are short-lived experiments
|
Made by a wordless and inscrutable Power
|
Testing its issues from inconscient Night
|
To meet its luminous self of Truth and Bliss.
|
It peers at the Real through the apparent form;
|
It labours in our mortal mind and sense;
|
Amid the figures of the Ignorance,
|
In the symbol pictures drawn by word and thought,
|
It seeks the truth to which all figures point;
|
It looks for the source of Light with vision's lamp;
|
It works to find the Doer of all works,
|
The unfelt Self within who is the guide,
|
The unknown Self above who is the goal.
|
All is not here a blinded Nature's task:
|
A Word, a Wisdom watches us from on high,
|
A Witness sanctioning her will and works,
|
CANTO V: The Godheads of the Little Life
|
An Eye unseen in the unseeing vast;
|
There is an Influence from a Light above,
|
There are thoughts remote and sealed eternities;
|
A mystic motive drives the stars and suns.
|
In this passage from a deaf unknowing Force
|
To struggling consciousness and transient breath
|
A mighty Supernature waits on Time.
|
The world is other than we now think and see,
|
Our lives a deeper mystery than we have dreamed;
|
Our minds are starters in the race to God,
|
Our souls deputed selves of the Supreme.
|
Across the cosmic field through narrow lanes
|
Asking a scanty dole from Fortune's hands
|
And garbed in beggar's robes there walks the One.
|
Even in the theatre of these small lives
|
Behind the act a secret sweetness breathes,
|
An urge of miniature divinity.
|
A mystic passion from the wells of God
|
Flows through the guarded spaces of the soul;
|
A force that helps supports the suffering earth,
|
An unseen nearness and a hidden joy.
|
There are muffled throbs of laughter's undertones,
|
The murmur of an occult happiness,
|
An exultation in the depths of sleep,
|
A heart of bliss within a world of pain.
|
An Infant nursed on Nature's covert breast,
|
An Infant playing in the magic woods,
|
Fluting to rapture by the spirit's streams,
|
Awaits the hour when we shall turn to his call.
|
In this investiture of fleshly life
|
A soul that is a spark of God survives
|
And sometimes it breaks through the sordid screen
|
And kindles a fire that makes us half-divine.
|
In our body's cells there sits a hidden Power
|
That sees the unseen and plans eternity,
|
Our smallest parts have room for deepest needs;
|
There too the golden Messengers can come:
|
A door is cut in the mud wall of self;
|
Across the lowly threshold with bowed heads
|
Angels of ecstasy and self-giving pass,
|
And lodged in an inner sanctuary of dream
|
The makers of the image of deity live.
|
Pity is there and fire-winged sacrifice,
|
And flashes of sympathy and tenderness
|
Cast heaven-lights from the heart's secluded shrine.
|
A work is done in the deep silences;
|
A glory and wonder of spiritual sense,
|
A laughter in beauty's everlasting space
|
Transforming world-experience into joy,
|
Inhabit the mystery of the untouched gulfs;
|
Lulled by Time's beats eternity sleeps in us.
|
In the sealed hermetic heart, the happy core,
|
Unmoved behind this outer shape of death
|
The eternal Entity prepares within
|
Its matter of divine felicity,
|
Its reign of heavenly phenomenon.
|
Even in our sceptic mind of ignorance
|
A foresight comes of some immense release,
|
Our will lifts towards it slow and shaping hands.
|
Each part in us desires its absolute.
|
Our thoughts covet the everlasting Light,
|
Our strength derives from an omnipotent Force,
|
And since from a veiled God-joy the worlds were made
|
And since eternal Beauty asks for form
|
Even here where all is made of being's dust,
|
Our hearts are captured by ensnaring shapes,
|
Our very senses blindly seek for bliss.
|
Our error crucifies Reality
|
To force its birth and divine body here,
|
Compelling, incarnate in a human form
|
And breathing in limbs that one can touch and clasp,
|
Its Knowledge to rescue an ancient Ignorance,
|
CANTO V: The Godheads of the Little Life
|
Its saviour light the inconscient universe.
|
And when that greater Self comes sea-like down
|
To fill this image of our transience,
|
All shall be captured by delight, transformed:
|
In waves of undreamed ecstasy shall roll
|
Our mind and life and sense and laugh in a light
|
Other than this hard limited human day,
|
The body's tissues thrill apotheosised,
|
Its cells sustain bright metamorphosis.
|
This little being of Time, this shadow soul,
|
This living dwarf-figurehead of darkened spirit
|
Out of its traffic in petty dreams shall rise.
|
Its shape of person and its ego-face
|
Divested of this mortal travesty,
|
Like a clay troll kneaded into a god
|
New-made in the image of the eternal Guest,
|
It shall be caught to the breast of a white Force
|
And, flaming with the paradisal touch
|
In a rose-fire of sweet spiritual grace,
|
In the red passion of its infinite change,
|
Quiver, awake, and shudder with ecstasy.
|
As if reversing a deformation's spell,
|
Released from the black magic of the Night,
|
Renouncing servitude to the dim Abyss,
|
It shall learn at last who lived within unseen,
|
And seized with marvel in the adoring heart
|
To the enthroned Child-Godhead kneel aware,
|
Trembling with beauty and delight and love.
|
But first the spirit's ascent we must achieve
|
Out of the chasm from which our nature rose.
|
The soul must soar sovereign above the form
|
And climb to summits beyond mind's half-sleep;
|
Our hearts we must inform with heavenly strength,
|
Surprise the animal with the occult god.
|
Then kindling the gold tongue of sacrifice,
|
Calling the powers of a bright hemisphere,
|
We shall shed the discredit of our mortal state,
|
Make the abysm a road for Heaven's descent,
|
Acquaint our depths with the supernal Ray
|
And cleave the darkness with the mystic Fire.
|
Adventuring once more in the natal mist
|
Across the dangerous haze, the pregnant stir,
|
He through the astral chaos shore a way
|
Mid the grey faces of its demon gods,
|
Questioned by whispers of its flickering ghosts,
|
Besieged by sorceries of its fluent force.
|
As one who walks unguided through strange fields
|
Tending he knows not where nor with what hope,
|
He trod a soil that failed beneath his feet
|
And journeyed in stone strength to a fugitive end.
|
His trail behind him was a vanishing line
|
Of glimmering points in a vague immensity;
|
A bodiless murmur travelled at his side
|
In the wounded gloom complaining against light.
|
A huge obstruction its immobile heart,
|
The watching opacity multiplied as he moved
|
Its hostile mass of dead and staring eyes;
|
The darkness glimmered like a dying torch.
|
Around him an extinguished phantom glow
|
Peopled with shadowy and misleading shapes
|
The vague Inconscient's dark and measureless cave.
|
His only sunlight was his spirit's flame.
|
The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Life
|
AS ONE who between dim receding walls
|
Towards the far gleam of a tunnel's mouth,
|
Hoping for light, walks now with freer pace
|
And feels approach a breath of wider air,
|
So he escaped from that grey anarchy.
|
Into an ineffectual world he came,
|
A purposeless region of arrested birth
|
Where being from non-being fled and dared
|
To live but had no strength long to abide.
|
Above there gleamed a pondering brow of sky
|
Tormented, crossed by wings of doubtful haze
|
Adventuring with a voice of roaming winds
|
And crying for a direction in the void
|
Like blind souls looking for the selves they lost
|
And wandering through unfamiliar worlds;
|
Wings of vague questioning met the query of Space.
|
After denial dawned a dubious hope,
|
A hope of self and form and leave to live
|
And the birth of that which never yet could be,
|
And joy of the mind's hazard, the heart's choice,
|
Grace of the unknown and hands of sudden surprise
|
And a touch of sure delight in unsure things:
|
To a strange uncertain tract his journey came
|
Where consciousness played with unconscious self
|
And birth was an attempt or episode.
|
A charm drew near that could not keep its spell,
|
An eager Power that could not find its way,
|
A Chance that chose a strange arithmetic
|
But could not bind with it the forms it made,
|
A multitude that could not guard its sum
|
Which less than zero grew and more than one.
|
Arriving at a large and shadowy sense
|
That cared not to define its fleeting drift,
|
Life laboured in a strange and mythic air
|
Denuded of her sweet magnificent suns.
|
In worlds imagined, never yet made true,
|
A lingering glimmer on creation's verge,
|
One strayed and dreamed and never stopped to achieve:
|
To achieve would have destroyed that magic Space.
|
The marvels of a twilight wonderland
|
Full of a beauty strangely, vainly made,
|
A surge of fanciful realities,
|
Dim tokens of a Splendour sealed above,
|
Awoke the passion of the eyes' desire,
|
Compelled belief on the enamoured thought
|
And drew the heart but led it to no goal.
|
A magic flowed as if of moving scenes
|
That kept awhile their fugitive delicacy
|
Of sparing lines limned by an abstract art
|
In a rare scanted light with faint dream-brush
|
On a silver background of incertitude.
|
An infant glow of heavens near to morn,
|
A fire intense conceived but never lit,
|
Caressed the air with ardent hints of day.
|
The perfect longing for imperfection's charm,
|
The illumined caught by the snare of Ignorance,
|
Ethereal creatures drawn by body's lure
|
To that region of promise, beating invisible wings,
|
Came hungry for the joy of finite life
|
But too divine to tread created soil
|
And share the fate of perishable things.
|
The Children of the unembodied Gleam
|
Arisen from a formless thought in the soul
|
And chased by an imperishable desire,
|
Traversed the field of the pursuing gaze.
|
A Will that unpersisting failed, worked there:
|
Life was a search but finding never came.
|
CANTO VI: The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Life
|
There nothing satisfied, but all allured,
|
Things seemed to be that never wholly are,
|
Images were seen that looked like living acts
|
And symbols hid the sense they claimed to show,
|
Pale dreams grew real to the dreamer's eyes.
|
The souls came there that vainly strive for birth,
|
And spirits entrapped might wander through all time,
|
Yet never find the truth by which they live.
|
All ran like hopes that hunt a lurking chance;
|
Nothing was solid, nothing felt complete:
|
All was unsafe, miraculous and half-true.
|
It seemed a realm of lives that had no base.
|
Then dawned a greater seeking, broadened sky,
|
A journey under wings of brooding Force.
|
First came the kingdom of the morning star:
|
A twilight beauty trembled under its spear
|
And the throb of promise of a wider Life.
|
Then slowly rose a great and doubting sun
|
And in its light she made of self a world.
|
A spirit was there that sought for its own deep self,
|
Yet was content with fragments pushed in front
|
And parts of living that belied the whole
|
But, pieced together, might one day be true.
|
Yet something seemed to be achieved at last.
|
A growing volume of the will-to-be,
|
A text of living and a graph of force,
|
A script of acts, a song of conscious forms
|
Burdened with meanings fugitive from thought's grasp
|
And crowded with undertones of life's rhythmic cry,
|
Could write itself on the hearts of living things.
|
In an outbreak of the might of secret Spirit,
|
In Life and Matter's answer of delight,
|
Some face of deathless beauty could be caught
|
That gave immortality to a moment's joy,
|
Some word that could incarnate highest Truth
|
Leaped out from a chance tension of the soul,
|
Some hue of the Absolute could fall on life,
|
Some glory of knowledge and intuitive sight,
|
Some passion of the rapturous heart of Love.
|
A hierophant of the bodiless Secrecy
|
Interned in an unseen spiritual sheath,
|
The Will that pushes sense beyond its scope
|
To feel the light and joy intangible,
|
Half found its way into the Ineffable's peace,
|
Half captured a sealed sweetness of desire
|
That yearned from a bosom of mysterious Bliss,
|
Half manifested veiled Reality.
|
A soul not wrapped into its cloak of mind
|
Could glimpse the true sense of a world of forms;
|
Illumined by a vision in the thought,
|
Upbuoyed by the heart's understanding flame,
|
It could hold in the conscious ether of the spirit
|
The divinity of a symbol universe.
|
This realm inspires us with our vaster hopes;
|
Its forces have made landings on our globe,
|
Its signs have traced their pattern in our lives:
|
It lends a sovereign movement to our fate,
|
Its errant waves motive our life's high surge.
|
All that we seek for is prefigured there
|
And all we have not known nor ever sought
|
Which yet one day must be born in human hearts
|
That the Timeless may fulfil itself in things.
|
Incarnate in the mystery of the days,
|
Eternal in an unclosed Infinite,
|
A mounting endless possibility
|
Climbs high upon a topless ladder of dream
|
For ever in the Being's conscious trance.
|
All on that ladder mounts to an unseen end.
|
An Energy of perpetual transience makes
|
The journey from which no return is sure,
|
The pilgrimage of Nature to the Unknown.
|
CANTO VI: The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Life
|
As if in her ascent to her lost source
|
She hoped to unroll all that could ever be,
|
Her high procession moves from stage to stage,
|
A progress leap from sight to greater sight,
|
A process march from form to ampler form,
|
A caravan of the inexhaustible
|
Formations of a boundless Thought and Force.
|
Her timeless Power that lay once on the lap
|
Of a beginningless and endless Calm,
|
Now severed from the Spirit's immortal bliss,
|
Erects the type of all the joys she has lost;
|
Compelling transient substance into shape,
|
She hopes by the creative act's release
|
To o'erleap sometimes the gulf she cannot fill,
|
To heal awhile the wound of severance,
|
Escape from the moment's prison of littleness
|
And meet the Eternal's wide sublimities
|
In the uncertain time-field portioned here.
|
Almost she nears what never can be attained;
|
She shuts eternity into an hour
|
And fills a little soul with the Infinite;
|
The Immobile leans to the magic of her call;
|
She stands on a shore in the Illimitable,
|
Perceives the formless Dweller in all forms
|
And feels around her infinity's embrace.
|
Her task no ending knows; she serves no aim
|
But labours driven by a nameless Will
|
That came from some unknowable formless Vast.
|
This is her secret and impossible task
|
To catch the boundless in a net of birth,
|
To cast the spirit into physical form,
|
To lend speech and thought to the Ineffable;
|
She is pushed to reveal the ever Unmanifest.
|
Yet by her skill the impossible has been done:
|
She follows her sublime irrational plan,
|
Invents devices of her magic art
|
To find new bodies for the Infinite
|
And images of the Unimaginable;
|
She has lured the Eternal into the arms of Time.
|
Even now herself she knows not what she has done.
|
For all is wrought beneath a baffling mask:
|
A semblance other than its hidden truth
|
The aspect wears of an illusion's trick,
|
A feigned time-driven unreality,
|
The unfinished creation of a changing soul
|
In a body changing with the inhabitant.
|
Insignificant her means, infinite her work;
|
On a great field of shapeless consciousness
|
In little finite strokes of mind and sense
|
An endless Truth she endlessly unfolds;
|
A timeless mystery works out in Time.
|
The greatness she has dreamed her acts have missed,
|
Her labour is a passion and a pain,
|
A rapture and pang, her glory and her curse;
|
And yet she cannot choose but labours on;
|
Her mighty heart forbids her to desist.
|
As long as the world lasts her failure lives
|
Astonishing and foiling Reason's gaze,
|
A folly and a beauty unspeakable,
|
A superb madness of the will to live,
|
A daring, a delirium of delight.
|
This is her being's law, its sole resource;
|
She sates, though satisfaction never comes,
|
Her hungry will to lavish everywhere
|
Her many-imaged fictions of the Self
|
And thousand fashions of one Reality.
|
A world she made touched by truth's fleeing hem,
|
A world cast into a dream of what it seeks,
|
An icon of truth, a conscious mystery's shape.
|
It lingered not like the earth-mind hemmed in
|
In solid barriers of apparent fact;
|
It dared to trust the dream-mind and the soul.
|
CANTO VI: The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Life
|
A hunter of spiritual verities
|
Still only thought or guessed or held by faith,
|
It seized in imagination and confined
|
A painted bird of paradise in a cage.
|
This greater life is enamoured of the Unseen;
|
It calls to some highest Light beyond its reach,
|
It can feel the Silence that absolves the soul;
|
It feels a saviour touch, a ray divine:
|
Beauty and good and truth its godheads are.
|
It is near to heavenlier heavens than earth's eyes see,
|
A direr darkness than man's life can bear:
|
It has kinship with the demon and the god.
|
A strange enthusiasm has moved its heart;
|
It hungers for heights, it passions for the supreme.
|
It hunts for the perfect word, the perfect shape,
|
It leaps to the summit thought, the summit light.
|
For by the form the Formless is brought close
|
And all perfection fringes the Absolute.
|
A child of heaven who never saw his home,
|
Its impetus meets the eternal at a point:
|
It can only near and touch, it cannot hold;
|
It can only strain towards some bright extreme:
|
Its greatness is to seek and to create.
|
On every plane, this Greatness must create.
|
On earth, in heaven, in hell she is the same;
|
Of every fate she takes her mighty part.
|
A guardian of the fire that lights the suns,
|
She triumphs in her glory and her might:
|
Opposed, oppressed she bears God's urge to be born:
|
The spirit survives upon non-being's ground,
|
World-force outlasts world-disillusion's shock:
|
Dumb, she is still the Word, inert the Power.
|
Here fallen, a slave of death and ignorance,
|
To things deathless she is driven to aspire
|
And moved to know even the Unknowable.
|
Even nescient, null, her sleep creates a world.
|
When most unseen, most mightily she works;
|
Housed in the atom, buried in the clod,
|
Her quick creative passion cannot cease.
|
Inconscience is her long gigantic pause,
|
Her cosmic swoon is a stupendous phase:
|
Time-born, she hides her immortality;
|
In death, her bed, she waits the hour to rise.
|
Even with the Light denied that sent her forth
|
And the hope dead she needed for her task,
|
Even when her brightest stars are quenched in Night,
|
Nourished by hardship and calamity
|
And with pain for her body's handmaid, masseuse, nurse,
|
Her tortured invisible spirit continues still
|
To toil though in darkness, to create though with pangs;
|
She carries crucified God upon her breast.
|
In chill insentient depths where joy is none,
|
Immured, oppressed by the resisting Void
|
Where nothing moves and nothing can become,
|
Still she remembers, still invokes the skill
|
The Wonder-worker gave her at her birth,
|
Imparts to drowsy formlessness a shape,
|
Reveals a world where nothing was before.
|
In realms confined to a prone circle of death,
|
To a dark eternity of Ignorance,
|
A quiver in an inert inconscient mass,
|
Or imprisoned in immobilised whorls of Force,
|
By Matter's blind compulsion deaf and mute
|
She refuses motionless in the dust to sleep.
|
Then, for her rebel waking's punishment
|
Given only hard mechanic Circumstance
|
As the enginery of her magic craft,
|
She fashions godlike marvels out of mud;
|
In the plasm she sets her dumb immortal urge,
|
Helps the live tissue to think, the closed sense to feel,
|
Flashes through the frail nerves poignant messages,
|
In a heart of flesh miraculously loves,
|
CANTO VI: The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Life
|
To brute bodies gives a soul, a will, a voice.
|
Ever she summons as by a sorcerer's wand
|
Beings and shapes and scenes innumerable,
|
Torch-bearers of her pomps through Time and Space.
|
This world is her long journey through the night,
|
The suns and planets lamps to light her road,
|
Our reason is the confidante of her thoughts,
|
Our senses are her vibrant witnesses.
|
There drawing her signs from things half true, half false,
|
She labours to replace by realised dreams
|
The memory of her lost eternity.
|
These are her deeds in this huge world-ignorance:
|
Till the veil is lifted, till the night is dead,
|
In light or dark she keeps her tireless search;
|
Time is her road of endless pilgrimage.
|
One mighty passion motives all her works.
|
Her eternal Lover is her action's cause;
|
For him she leaped forth from the unseen Vasts
|
To move here in a stark unconscious world.
|
Its acts are her commerce with her hidden Guest,
|
His moods she takes for her heart's passionate moulds;
|
In beauty she treasures the sunlight of his smile.
|
Ashamed of her rich cosmic poverty,
|
She cajoles with her small gifts his mightiness,
|
Holds with her scenes his look's fidelity
|
And woos his large-eyed wandering thoughts to dwell
|
In figures of her million-impulsed Force.
|
Only to attract her veiled companion
|
And keep him close to her breast in her world-cloak
|
Lest from her arms he turn to his formless peace,
|
Is her heart's business and her clinging care.
|
Yet when he is most near, she feels him far.
|
For contradiction is her nature's law.
|
Although she is ever in him and he in her,
|
As if unaware of the eternal tie,
|
Her will is to shut God into her works
|
And keep him as her cherished prisoner
|
That never they may part again in Time.
|
A sumptuous chamber of the spirit's sleep
|
At first she made, a deep interior room,
|
Where he slumbers as if a forgotten guest.
|
But now she turns to break the oblivious spell,
|
Awakes the sleeper on the sculptured couch;
|
She finds again the Presence in the form
|
And in the light that wakes with him recovers
|
A meaning in the hurry and trudge of Time,
|
And through this mind that once obscured the soul
|
Passes a glint of unseen deity.
|
Across a luminous dream of spirit-space
|
She builds creation like a rainbow bridge
|
Between the original Silence and the Void.
|
A net is made of the mobile universe;
|
She weaves a snare for the conscious Infinite.
|
A knowledge is with her that conceals its steps
|
And seems a mute omnipotent Ignorance.
|
A might is with her that makes wonders true;
|
The incredible is her stuff of common fact.
|
Her purposes, her workings riddles prove;
|
Examined, they grow other than they were,
|
Explained, they seem yet more inexplicable.
|
Even in our world a mystery has reigned
|
Earth's cunning screen of trivial plainness hides;
|
Her larger levels are of sorceries made.
|
There the enigma shows its splendid prism,
|
There is no deep disguise of commonness;
|
Occult, profound comes all experience,
|
Marvel is ever new, miracle divine.
|
There is a screened burden, a mysterious touch,
|
There is a secrecy of hidden sense.
|
Although no ear then mask weighs on her face,
|
Into herself she flees from her own sight.
|
All forms are tokens of some veiled idea
|
CANTO VI: The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Life
|
Whose covert purpose lurks from mind's pursuit,
|
Yet is a womb of sovereign consequence.
|
There every thought and feeling is an act,
|
And every act a symbol and a sign,
|
And every symbol hides a living power.
|
A universe she builds from truths and myths,
|
But what she needed most she cannot build;
|
All shown is a figure or copy of the Truth,
|
But the Real veils from her its mystic face.
|
All else she finds, there lacks eternity;
|
All is sought out, but missed the Infinite.
|
A consciousness lit by a Truth above
|
Was felt; it saw the light but not the Truth:
|
It caught the Idea and built from it a world;
|
It made an Image there and called it God.
|
Yet something true and inward harboured there.
|
The beings of that world of greater life,
|
Tenants of a larger air and freer space,
|
Live not by the body or in outward things:
|
A deeper living was their seat of self.
|
In that intense domain of intimacy
|
Objects dwell as companions of the soul;
|
The body's actions are a minor script,
|
The surface rendering of a life within.
|
All forces are Life's retinue in that world
|
And thought and body as her handmaids move.
|
The universal widenesses give her room:
|
All feel the cosmic movement in their acts
|
And are the instruments of her cosmic might.
|
Or their own self they make their universe.
|
In all who have risen to a greater Life,
|
A voice of unborn things whispers to the ear,
|
To their eyes visited by some high sunlight
|
Aspiration shows the image of a crown:
|
To work out a seed that she has thrown within,
|
To achieve her power in them her creatures live.
|
Each is a greatness growing towards the heights
|
Or from his inner centre oceans out;
|
In circling ripples of concentric power
|
They swallow, glutted, their environment.
|
Even of that largeness many a cabin make;
|
In narrower breadths and briefer vistas pent
|
They live content with some small greatness won.
|
To rule the little empire of themselves,
|
To be a figure in their private world
|
And make the milieu's joys and griefs their own
|
And satisfy their life-motives and life-wants
|
Is charge enough and office for this strength,
|
A steward of the Person and his fate.
|
This was transition-line and starting-point,
|
A first immigration into heavenliness,
|
For all who cross into that brilliant sphere:
|
These are the kinsmen of our earthly race;
|
This region borders on our mortal state.
|
This wider world our greater movements gives,
|
Its strong formations build our growing selves;
|
Its creatures are our brighter replicas,
|
Complete the types we only initiate
|
And are securely what we strive to be.
|
As if thought-out eternal characters,
|
Entire, not pulled as we by contrary tides,
|
They follow the unseen leader in the heart,
|
Their lives obey the inner nature's law.
|
There is kept grandeur's store, the hero's mould;
|
The soul is the watchful builder of its fate;
|
None is a spirit indifferent and inert;
|
They choose their side, they see the god they adore.
|
A battle is joined between the true and false,
|
A pilgrimage sets out to the divine Light.
|
For even Ignorance there aspires to know
|
And shines with the lustre of a distant star;
|
CANTO VI: The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Life
|
There is a knowledge in the heart of sleep
|
And Nature comes to them as a conscious force.
|
An ideal is their leader and their king:
|
Aspiring to the monarchy of the sun
|
They call in Truth for their high government,
|
Hold her incarnate in their daily acts
|
And fill their thoughts with her inspired voice
|
And shape their lives into her breathing form,
|
Till in her sun-gold godhead they too share.
|
Or to the truth of Darkness they subscribe;
|
Whether for Heaven or Hell they must wage war:
|
Warriors of Good, they serve a shining cause
|
Or are Evil's soldiers in the pay of Sin.
|
For evil and good an equal tenure keep
|
Wherever Knowledge is Ignorance's twin.
|
All powers of Life towards their godhead tend
|
In the wideness and the daring of that air,
|
Each builds its temple and expands its cult,
|
And Sin too there is a divinity.
|
Affirming the beauty and splendour of her law
|
She claims life as her natural domain,
|
Assumes the world's throne or dons the papal robe:
|
Her worshippers proclaim her sacred right.
|
A red-tiaraed Falsehood they revere,
|
Worship the shadow of a crooked God,
|
Admit the black Idea that twists the brain
|
Or lie with the harlot Power that slays the soul.
|
A mastering virtue statuesques the pose,
|
Or a Titan passion goads to a proud unrest:
|
At Wisdom's altar they are kings and priests
|
Or their life a sacrifice to an idol of Power.
|
Or Beauty shines on them like a wandering star;
|
Too far to reach, passionate they follow her light;
|
In Art and life they catch the All-Beautiful's ray
|
And make the world their radiant treasure house:
|
Even common figures are with marvel robed;
|
A charm and greatness locked in every hour
|
Awakes the joy which sleeps in all things made.
|
A mighty victory or a mighty fall,
|
A throne in heaven or a pit in hell,
|
The dual Energy they have justified
|
And marked their souls with her tremendous seal:
|
Whatever Fate may do to them they have earned;
|
Something they have done, something they have been, they live.
|
There Matter is soul's result and not its cause.
|
In a contrary balance to earth's truth of things
|
The gross weighs less, the subtle counts for more;
|
On inner values hangs the outer plan.
|
As quivers with the thought the expressive word,
|
As yearns the act with the passion of the soul
|
This world's apparent sensible design
|
Looks vibrant back to some interior might.
|
A Mind not limited by external sense
|
Gave figures to the spirit's imponderables,
|
The world's impacts without channels registered
|
And turned into the body's concrete thrill
|
The vivid workings of a bodiless Force;
|
Powers here subliminal that act unseen
|
Or in ambush crouch waiting behind the wall
|
Came out in front uncovering their face.
|
The occult grew there overt, the obvious kept
|
A covert turn and shouldered the unknown;
|
The unseen was felt and jostled visible shapes.
|
In the communion of two meeting minds
|
Thought looked at thought and had no need of speech;
|
Emotion clasped emotion in two hearts,
|
They felt each other's thrill in the flesh and nerves
|
Or melted each in each and grew immense
|
As when two houses burn and fire joins fire:
|
Hate grappled hate and love broke in on love,
|
Will wrestled with will on mind's invisible ground;
|
Others' sensations passing through like waves
|
CANTO VI: The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Life
|
Left quivering the subtle body's frame,
|
Their anger rushed galloping in brute attack,
|
A charge of trampling hooves on shaken soil;
|
One felt another's grief invade the breast,
|
Another's joy exulting ran through the blood:
|
Hearts could draw close through distance, voices near
|
That spoke upon the shore of alien seas.
|
There beat a throb of living interchange:
|
Being felt being even when afar
|
And consciousness replied to consciousness.
|
And yet the ultimate oneness was not there.
|
There was a separateness of soul from soul:
|
An inner wall of silence could be built,
|
An armour of conscious might protect and shield;
|
The being could be closed in and solitary;
|
One could remain apart in self, alone.
|
Identity was not yet nor union's peace.
|
All was imperfect still, half-known, half-done:
|
The miracle of Inconscience overpassed,
|
The miracle of the Superconscient still,
|
Unknown, self-wrapped, unfelt, unknowable,
|
Looked down on them, origin of all they were.
|
As forms they came of the formless Infinite,
|
As names lived of a nameless Eternity.
|
The beginning and the end were there occult;
|
A middle term worked unexplained, abrupt:
|
They were words that spoke to a vast wordless Truth,
|
They were figures crowding an unfinished sum.
|
None truly knew himself or knew the world
|
Or the Reality living there enshrined:
|
Only they knew what Mind could take and build
|
Out of the secret Supermind's huge store.
|
A darkness under them, a bright Void above,
|
Uncertain they lived in a great climbing Space;
|
By mysteries they explained a Mystery,
|
A riddling answer met the riddle of things.
|
As he moved in this ether of ambiguous life,
|
Himself was soon a riddle to himself;
|
As symbols he saw all and sought their sense.
|
Across the leaping springs of death and birth
|
And over shifting borders of soul-change,
|
A hunter on the spirit's creative track,
|
He followed in life's fine and mighty trails
|
Pursuing her sealed formidable delight
|
In a perilous adventure without close.
|
At first no aim appeared in those large steps:
|
Only the wide source he saw of all things here
|
Looking towards a wider source beyond.
|
For as she drew away from earthly lines,
|
A tenser drag was felt from the Unknown,
|
A higher context of delivering thought
|
Drove her towards marvel and discovery;
|
There came a high release from pettier cares,
|
A mightier image of desire and hope,
|
A vaster formula, a greater scene.
|
Ever she circled towards some far-off Light:
|
Her signs still covered more than they revealed;
|
But tied to some immediate sight and will
|
They lost their purport in the joy of use,
|
Till stripped of their infinite meaning they became
|
A cipher gleaming with unreal sense.
|
Armed with a magical and haunted bow
|
She aimed at a target kept invisible
|
And ever deemed remote though always near.
|
As one who spells illumined characters,
|
The key-book of a crabbed magician text,
|
He scanned her subtle tangled weird designs
|
And the screened difficult theorem of her clues,
|
Traced in the monstrous sands of desert Time
|
The thread beginnings of her titan works,
|
Watched her charade of action for some hint,
|
CANTO VI: The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Life
|
Read the No-gestures of her silhouettes,
|
And strove to capture in their burdened drift
|
The dance-fantasia of her sequences
|
Escaping into rhythmic mystery,
|
A glimmer of fugitive feet on fleeing soil.
|
In the labyrinth pattern of her thoughts and hopes
|
And the byways of her intimate desires,
|
In the complex corners crowded with her dreams
|
And rounds crossed by an intrigue of irrelevant rounds,
|
A wanderer straying amid fugitive scenes,
|
He lost its signs and chased each failing guess.
|
Ever he met key-words, ignorant of their key.
|
A sun that dazzled its own eye of sight,
|
A luminous enigma's brilliant hood
|
Lit the dense purple barrier of thought's sky:
|
A dim large trance showed to the night her stars.
|
As if sitting near an open window's gap,
|
He read by lightning-flash on crowding flash
|
Chapters of her metaphysical romance
|
Of the soul's search for lost Reality
|
And her fictions drawn from spirit's au thentic fact,
|
Her caprices and conceits and meanings locked,
|
Her rash unseizable freaks and mysteried turns.
|
The magnificent wrappings of her secrecy
|
That fold her desirable body out of sight,
|
The strange significant forms woven on her robe,
|
Her meaningful outlines of the souls of things
|
He saw, her false transparencies of thought-hue,
|
Her rich brocades with imaged fancies sewn
|
And mutable masks and broideries of disguise.
|
A thousand baffling faces of the Truth
|
Looked at him from her forms with unknown eyes
|
And wordless mouths unrecognisable,
|
Spoke from the figures of her masquerade,
|
Or peered from the recondite magnificence
|
And subtle splendour of her draperies.
|
In sudden scintillations of the Unknown,
|
Inexpressive sounds became veridical,
|
Ideas that seemed unmeaning flashed out truth;
|
Voices that came from unseen waiting worlds
|
Uttered the syllables of the Unmanifest
|
To clo the the body of the mystic Word,
|
And wizard diagrams of the occult Law
|
Sealed some precise unreadable harmony,
|
Or used hue and figure to reconstitute
|
The herald blazon of Time's secret things.
|
In her green wildernesses and lurking depths,
|
In her thickets of joy where danger clasps delight,
|
He glimpsed the hidden wings of her songster hopes,
|
A glimmer of blue and gold and scarlet fire.
|
In her covert lanes, bordering her chance field-paths
|
And by her singing rivulets and calm lakes
|
He found the glow of her golden fruits of bliss
|
And the beauty of her flowers of dream and muse.
|
As if a miracle of heart's change by joy
|
He watched in the alchemist radiance of her suns
|
The crimson outburst of one secular flower
|
On the tree-of-sacrifice of spiritual love.
|
In the sleepy splendour of her noons he saw,
|
A perpetual repetition through the hours,
|
Thought's dance of dragonflies on mystery's stream
|
That skim but never test its murmurs' race,
|
And heard the laughter of her rose desires
|
Running as if to escape from longed-for hands,
|
Jingling sweet anklet-bells of fantasy.
|
Amidst live symbols of her occult power
|
He moved and felt them as close real forms:
|
In that life more concrete than the lives of men
|
Throbbed heart-beats of the hidden reality:
|
Embodied was there what we but think and feel,
|
Self-framed what here takes outward borrowed shapes.
|
A comrade of Silence on her austere heights
|
CANTO VI: The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Life
|
Accepted by her mighty loneliness,
|
He stood with her on meditating peaks
|
Where life and being are a sacrament
|
Offered to the Reality beyond,
|
And saw her loose into infinity
|
Her hooded eagles of significance,
|
Messengers of Thought to the Unknowable.
|
Identified in soul-vision and soul-sense,
|
Entering into her depths as into a house,
|
All he became that she was or longed to be,
|
He thought with her thoughts and journeyed with her steps,
|
Lived with her breath and scanned all with her eyes
|
That so he might learn the secret of her soul.
|
A witness overmastered by his scene,
|
He admired her splendid front of pomp and play
|
And the marvels of her rich and delicate craft,
|
And thrilled to the insistence of her cry;
|
Impassioned he bore the sorceries of her might,
|
Felt laid on him her abrupt mysterious will,
|
Her hands that knead fate in their violent grasp,
|
Her touch that moves, her powers that seize and drive.
|
But this too he saw, her soul that wept within,
|
Her seekings vain that clutch at fleeing truth,
|
Her hopes whose sombre gaze mates with despair,
|
The passion that possessed her longing limbs,
|
The trouble and rapture of her yearning breasts,
|
Her mind that toils unsatisfied with its fruits,
|
Her heart that captures not the one Beloved.
|
Always he met a veiled and seeking Force,
|
An exiled goddess building mimic heavens,
|
A Sphinx whose eyes look up to a hidden Sun.
|
Ever he felt near a spirit in her forms:
|
Its passive presence was her nature's strength;
|
This sole is real in apparent things,
|
Even upon earth the spirit is life's key,
|
But her solid outsides nowhere bear its trace.
|
Its stamp on her acts is undiscoverable.
|
A pathos of lost heights is its appeal.
|
Only sometimes is caught a shadowy line
|
That seems a hint of veiled reality.
|
Life stared at him with vague confused outlines
|
Offering a picture the eyes could not keep,
|
A story that was yet not written there.
|
As in a fragmentary half-lost design
|
Life's meanings fled from the pursuing eye.
|
Life's visage hides life's real self from sight;
|
Life's secret sense is written within, above.
|
The thought that gives it sense lives far beyond;
|
It is not seen in its half-finished design.
|
In vain we hope to read the baffling signs
|
Or find the word of the half-played charade.
|
Only in that greater life a cryptic thought
|
Is found, is hinted some interpreting word
|
That makes the earth-myth a tale intelligible.
|
Something was seen at last that looked like truth.
|
In a half-lit air of hazardous mystery
|
The eye that looks at the dark half of truth
|
Made out an image mid a vivid blur
|
And peering through a mist of subtle tints
|
He saw a half-blind chained divinity
|
Bewildered by the world in which he moved,
|
Yet conscious of some light prompting his soul.
|
Attracted to strange far-off shimmerings,
|
Led by the fluting of a distant Player
|
He sought his way amid life's laughter and call
|
And the index chaos of her myriad steps
|
Towards some total deep infinitude.
|
Around crowded the forest of her signs:
|
At hazard he read by arrow-leaps of Thought
|
That hit the mark by guess or luminous chance,
|
Her changing coloured road-lights of idea
|
CANTO VI: The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Life
|
And her signals of uncertain swift event,
|
The hieroglyphs of her symbol pageantries
|
And her landmarks in the tangled paths of Time.
|
In her mazes of approach and of retreat
|
To every side she draws him and repels,
|
But drawn too near escapes from his embrace;
|
All ways she leads him but no way is sure.
|
Allured by the many-toned marvel of her chant,
|
Attracted by the witchcraft of her moods
|
And moved by her casual touch to joy and grief,
|
He loses himself in her but wins her not.
|
A fugitive paradise smiles at him from her eyes:
|
He dreams of her beauty made for ever his,
|
He dreams of his mastery her limbs shall bear,
|
He dreams of the magic of her breasts of bliss.
|
In her illumined script, her fanciful
|
Translation of God's pure original text,
|
He thinks to read the Scripture Wonderful,
|
Hieratic key to unknown beatitudes.
|
But the Word of Life is hidden in its script,
|
The chant of Life has lost its divine note.
|
Unseen, a captive in a house of sound,
|
The spirit lost in the splendour of a dream
|
Listens to a thousand-voiced illusion's ode.
|
A delicate weft of sorcery steals the heart
|
Or a fiery magic tints her tones and hues,
|
Yet they but wake a thrill of transient grace;
|
A vagrant march struck by the wanderer Time,
|
They call to a brief unsatisfied delight
|
Or wallow in ravishments of mind and sense,
|
But miss the luminous answer of the soul.
|
A blind heart-throb that reaches joy through tears,
|
A yearning towards peaks for ever unreached,
|
An ecstasy of unfulfilled desire
|
Track the last heavenward climbings of her voice.
|
Transmuted are past suffering's memories
|
Into an old sadness's sweet escaping trail:
|
Turned are her tears to gems of diamond pain,
|
Her sorrow into a magic crown of song.
|
Brief are her snatches of felicity
|
That touch the surface, then escape or die:
|
A lost remembrance echoes in her depths,
|
A deathless longing is hers, a veiled self's call;
|
A prisoner in the mortal's limiting world,
|
A spirit wounded by life sobs in her breast;
|
A cherished suffering is her deepest cry.
|
A wanderer on forlorn despairing routes,
|
Along the roads of sound a frustrate voice
|
Forsaken cries to a forgotten bliss.
|
Astray in the echo caverns of Desire,
|
It guards the phantoms of a soul's dead hopes
|
And keeps alive the voice of perished things
|
Or lingers upon sweet and errant notes
|
Hunting for pleasure in the heart of pain.
|
A fateful hand has touched the cosmic chords
|
And the intrusion of a troubled strain
|
Covers the inner music's hidden key
|
That guides unheard the surface cadences.
|
Yet is it joy to live and to create
|
And joy to love and labour though all fails,
|
And joy to seek though all we find deceives
|
And all on which we lean betrays our trust;
|
Yet something in its depths was worth the pain,
|
A passionate memory haunts with ecstasy's fire.
|
Even grief has joy hidden beneath its roots:
|
For nothing is truly vain the One has made:
|
In our defeated hearts God's strength survives
|
And victory's star still lights our desperate road;
|
Our death is made a passage to new worlds.
|
This to Life's music gives its anthem swell.
|
To all she lends the glory of her voice;
|
Heaven's raptures whisper to her heart and pass,
|
CANTO VI: The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Life
|
Earth's transient yearnings cry from her lips and fade.
|
Alone the God-given hymn escapes her art
|
That came with her from her spiritual home
|
But stopped half-way and failed, a silent word
|
Awake in some deep pause of waiting worlds,
|
A murmur suspended in eternity's hush:
|
But no breath comes from the supernal peace:
|
A sumptuous interlude occupies the ear
|
And the heart listens and the soul consents;
|
An evanescent music it repeats
|
Wasting on transience Time's eternity.
|
A tremolo of the voices of the hours
|
Oblivious screens the high intended theme
|
The self-embodying spirit came to play
|
On the vast clavichord of Nature-Force.
|
Only a mighty murmur here and there
|
Of the eternal Word, the blissful Voice
|
Or Beauty's touch transfiguring heart and sense,
|
A wandering splendour and a mystic cry,
|
Recalls the strength and sweetness heard no more.
|
Here is the gap, here stops or sinks life's force;
|
This deficit paupers the magician's skill:
|
This want makes all the rest seem thin and bare.
|
A half-sight draws the horizon of her acts:
|
Her depths remember what she came to do,
|
But the mind has forgotten or the heart mistakes:
|
In Nature's endless lines is lost the God.
|
In knowledge to sum up omniscience,
|
In action to erect the Omnipotent,
|
To create her Creator here was her heart's conceit,
|
To invade the cosmic scene with utter God.
|
Toiling to transform the still far Absolute
|
Into an all-fulfilling epiphany,
|
Into an utterance of the Ineffable,
|
She would bring the glory here of the Absolute's force,
|
Change poise into creation's rhythmic swing,
|
Marry with a sky of calm a sea of bliss.
|
A fire to call eternity into Time,
|
Make body's joy as vivid as the soul's,
|
Earth she would lift to neighbourhood with heaven,
|
Labours life to equate with the Supreme
|
And reconcile the Eternal and the Abyss.
|
Her pragmatism of the transcendent Truth
|
Fills silence with the voices of the gods,
|
But in the cry the single Voice is lost.
|
For Nature's vision climbs beyond her acts.
|
A life of gods in heaven she sees above,
|
A demigod emerging from an ape
|
Is all she can in our mortal element.
|
Here the half-god, the half-titan are her peak:
|
This greater life wavers twixt earth and sky.
|
A poignant paradox pursues her dreams:
|
Her hooded energy moves an ignorant world
|
To look for a joy her own strong clasp puts off:
|
In her embrace it cannot turn to its source.
|
Immense her power, endless her act's vast drive,
|
Astray is its significance and lost.
|
Although she carries in her secret breast
|
The law and journeying curve of all things born
|
Her knowledge partial seems, her purpose small;
|
On a soil of yearning tread her sumptuous hours.
|
A leaden Nescience weighs the wings of Thought,
|
Her power oppresses the being with its garbs,
|
Her actions prison its immortal gaze.
|
A sense of limit haunts her masteries
|
And nowhere is assured content or peace:
|
For all the depth and beauty of her work
|
A wisdom lacks that sets the spirit free.
|
An old and faded charm had now her face
|
And palled for him her quick and curious lore;
|
His wide soul asked a deeper joy than hers.
|
CANTO VI: The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Life
|
Out of her daedal lines he sought escape;
|
But neither gate of horn nor ivory
|
He found nor postern of spiritual sight,
|
There was no issue from that dreamlike space.
|
Our being must move eternally through Time;
|
Death helps us not, vain is the hope to cease;
|
A secret Will compels us to endure.
|
Our life's repose is in the Infinite;
|
It cannot end, its end is Life supreme.
|
Death is a passage, not the goal of our walk:
|
Some ancient deep impulsion labours on:
|
Our souls are dragged as with a hidden leash,
|
Carried from birth to birth, from world to world,
|
Our acts prolong after the body's fall
|
The old perpetual journey without pause.
|
No silent peak is found where Time can rest.
|
This was a magic stream that reached no sea.
|
However far he went, wherever turned,
|
The wheel of works ran with him and outstripped;
|
Always a farther task was left to do.
|
A beat of action and a cry of search
|
For ever grew in that unquiet world;
|
A busy murmur filled the heart of Time.
|
All was contrivance and unceasing stir.
|
A hundred ways to live were tried in vain:
|
A sameness that assumed a thousand forms
|
Strove to escape from its long monotone
|
And made new things that soon were like the old.
|
A curious decoration lured the eye
|
And novel values furbished ancient themes
|
To cheat the mind with the idea of change.
|
A different picture that was still the same
|
Appeared upon the cosmic vague background.
|
Only another labyrinthine house
|
Of creatures and their doings and events,
|
A city of the traffic of bound souls,
|
A market of creation and her wares,
|
Was offered to the labouring mind and heart.
|
A circuit ending where it first began
|
Is dubbed the forward and eternal march
|
Of progress on perfection's unknown road.
|
Each final scheme leads to a sequel plan.
|
Yet every new departure seems the last,
|
Inspired evangel, theory's ultimate peak,
|
Proclaiming a panacea for all Time's ills
|
Or carrying thought in its ultimate zenith flight
|
And trumpeting supreme discovery;
|
Each brief idea, a structure perishable,
|
Publishes the immortality of its rule,
|
Its claim to be the perfect form of things,
|
Truth's last epitome, Time's golden best.
|
But nothing has been achieved of infinite worth:
|
A world made ever anew, never complete,
|
Piled always half-attempts on lost attempts
|
And saw a fragment as the eternal Whole.
|
In the aimless mounting total of things done
|
Existence seemed a vain necessity's act,
|
A wrestle of eternal opposites
|
In a clasped antagonism's close-locked embrace,
|
A play without denouement or idea,
|
A hunger march of lives without a goal,
|
Or, written on a bare blackboard of Space,
|
A futile and recurring sum of souls,
|
A hope that failed, a light that never shone,
|
The labour of an unaccomplished Force
|
Tied to its acts in a dim eternity.
|
There is no end or none can yet be seen:
|
Although defeated, life must struggle on;
|
Always she sees a crown she cannot grasp;
|
Her eyes are fixed beyond her fallen state.
|
There quivers still within her breast and ours
|
A glory that was once and is no more,
|
CANTO VI: The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Life
|
Or there calls to us from some unfulfilled beyond
|
A greatness yet unreached by the halting world.
|
In a memory behind our mortal sense
|
A dream persists of larger happier air
|
Breathing around free hearts of joy and love,
|
Forgotten by us, immortal in lost Time.
|
A ghost of bliss pursues her haunted depths;
|
For she remembers still, though now so far,
|
Her realm of golden ease and glad desire
|
And the beauty and strength and happiness that were hers
|
In the sweetness of her glowing paradise,
|
In her kingdom of immortal ecstasy
|
Half-way between God's silence and the Abyss.
|
This knowledge in our hidden parts we keep;
|
Awake to a vague mystery's appeal,
|
We meet a deep unseen Reality
|
Far truer than the world's face of present truth:
|
We are chased by a self we cannot now recall
|
And moved by a Spirit we must still become.
|
As one who has lost the kingdom of his soul,
|
We look back to some god-phase of our birth
|
Other than this imperfect creature here
|
And hope in this or a diviner world
|
To recover yet from Heaven's patient guard
|
What by our mind's forgetfulness we miss,
|
Our being's natural felicity,
|
Our heart's delight we have exchanged for grief,
|
The body's thrill we bartered for mere pain,
|
The bliss for which our mortal nature yearns
|
As yearns an obscure moth to blazing Light.
|
Our life is a march to a victory never won.
|
This wave of being longing for delight,
|
This eager turmoil of unsatisfied strengths,
|
These long far files of forward-striving hopes
|
Lift worshipping eyes to the blue Void called heaven
|
Looking for the golden Hand that never came,
|
The advent for which all creation waits,
|
The beautiful visage of Eternity
|
That shall appear upon the roads of Time.
|
Yet still to ourselves we say rekindling faith,
|
"Oh, surely one day he shall come to our cry,
|
One day he shall create our life anew
|
And utter the magic formula of peace
|
And bring perfection to the scheme of things.
|
One day he shall descend to life and earth,
|
Leaving the secrecy of the eternal doors,
|
Into a world that cries to him for help,
|
And bring the truth that sets the spirit free,
|
The joy that is the baptism of the soul,
|
The strength that is the outstretched arm of Love.
|
One day he shall lift his beauty's dreadful veil,
|
Impose delight on the world's beating heart
|
And bare his secret body of light and bliss."
|
But now we strain to reach an unknown goal:
|
There is no end of seeking and of birth,
|
There is no end of dying and return;
|
The life that wins its aim asks greater aims,
|
The life that fails and dies must live again;
|
Till it has found itself it cannot cease.
|
All must be done for which life and death were made.
|
But who shall say that even then is rest?
|
Or there repose and action are the same
|
In the deep breast of God's supreme delight.
|
In a high state where ignorance is no more,
|
Each movement is a wave of peace and bliss,
|
Repose God's motionless creative force,
|
Action a ripple in the Infinite
|
And birth a gesture of Eternity.
|
A sun of transfiguration still can shine
|
And Night can bare its core of mystic light;
|
The self-cancelling, self-afflicting paradox
|
Into a self-luminous mystery might change,
|
CANTO VI: The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Life
|
The imbroglio into a joyful miracle.
|
Then God could be visible here, here take a shape;
|
Disclosed would be the spirit's identity;
|
Life would reveal her true immortal face.
|
But now a termless labour is her fate:
|
In its recurrent decimal of events
|
Birth, death are a ceaseless iteration's points;
|
The old question-mark margins each finished page,
|
Each volume of her effort's history.
|
A limping Yes through the aeons journeys still
|
Accompanied by an eternal No.
|
All seems in vain, yet endless is the game.
|
Impassive turns the ever-circling Wheel,
|
Life has no issue, death brings no release.
|
A prisoner of itself the being lives
|
And keeps its futile immortality;
|
Extinction is denied, its sole escape.
|
An error of the gods has made the world.
|
Or indifferent the Eternal watches Time.
|
The Descent into Night
|
A MIND absolved from life, made calm to know,
|
A heart divorced from the blindness and the pang,
|
The seal of tears, the bond of ignorance,
|
He turned to find that wide world-failure's cause.
|
Away he looked from Nature's visible face
|
And sent his gaze into the viewless Vast,
|
The formidable unknown Infinity,
|
Asleep behind the endless coil of things,
|
That carries the universe in its timeless breadths
|
And the ripples of its being are our lives.
|
The worlds are built by its unconscious Breath
|
And Matter and Mind are its figures or its powers,
|
Our waking thoughts the output of its dreams.
|
The veil was rent that covers Nature's depths:
|
He saw the fount of the world's lasting pain
|
And the mouth of the black pit of Ignorance;
|
The evil guarded at the roots of life
|
Raised up its head and looked into his eyes.
|
On a dim bank where dies subjective Space,
|
From a stark ridge overlooking all that is,
|
A tenebrous awakened Nescience,
|
Her wide blank eyes wondering at Time and Form,
|
Stared at the inventions of the living Void
|
And the Abyss whence our beginnings rose.
|
Behind appeared a grey carved mask of Night
|
Watching the birth of all created things.
|
A hidden Puissance conscious of its force,
|
A vague and lurking Presence everywhere,
|
A contrary Doom that threatens all things made,
|
A Death figuring as the dark seed of life,
|
Seemed to engender and to slay the world.
|
CANTO VII: The Descent into Night
|
Then from the sombre mystery of the gulfs
|
And from the hollow bosom of the Mask
|
Something crept forth that seemed a shapeless Thought.
|
A fatal Influence upon creatures stole
|
Whose lethal touch pursued the immortal spirit,
|
On life was laid the haunting finger of death
|
And overcast with error, grief and pain
|
The soul's native will for truth and joy and light.
|
A deformation coiled that claimed to be
|
The being's very turn, Nature's true drive.
|
A hostile and perverting Mind at work
|
In every corner ensconced of conscious life
|
Corrupted Truth with her own formulas;
|
Interceptor of the listening of the soul,
|
Afflicting knowledge with the hue of doubt
|
It captured the oracles of the occult gods,
|
Effaced the signposts of Life's pilgrimage,
|
Cancelled the firm rock-edicts graved by Time,
|
And on the foundations of the cosmic Law
|
Erected its bronze pylons of misrule.
|
Even Light and Love by that cloaked danger's spell
|
Turned from the brilliant nature of the gods
|
To fallen angels and misleading suns,
|
Became themselves a danger and a charm,
|
A perverse sweetness, heaven-born malefice:
|
Its power could deform divinest things.
|
A wind of sorrow breathed upon the world;
|
All thought with falsehood was besieged, all act
|
Stamped with defect or with frustration's sign,
|
All high attempt with failure or vain success,
|
But none could know the reason of his fall.
|
The grey Mask whispered and, though no sound was heard,
|
Yet in the ignorant heart a seed was sown
|
That bore black fruit of suffering, death and bale.
|
Out of the chill steppes of a bleak Unseen
|
Invisible, wearing the Night's grey mask,
|
Arrived the shadowy dreadful messengers,
|
Invaders from a dangerous world of power,
|
Ambassadors of evil's absolute.
|
In silence the inaudible voices spoke,
|
Hands that none saw planted the fatal grain,
|
No form was seen, yet a dire work was done,
|
An iron decree in crooked uncials written
|
Imposed a law of sin and adverse fate.
|
Life looked at him with changed and sombre eyes:
|
Her beauty he saw and the yearning heart in things
|
That with a little happiness is content,
|
Answering to a small ray of truth or love;
|
He saw her gold sunlight and her far blue sky,
|
Her green of leaves and hue and scent of flowers
|
And the charm of children and the love of friends
|
And the beauty of women and kindly hearts of men,
|
But saw too the dreadful Powers that drive her moods
|
And the anguish she has strewn upon her ways,
|
Fate waiting on the unseen steps of men
|
And her evil and sorrow and last gift of death.
|
A breath of disillusion and decadence
|
Corrupting watched for Life's maturity
|
And made to rot the full grain of the soul:
|
Progress became a purveyor of Death.
|
A world that clung to the law of a slain Light
|
Cherished the putrid corpses of dead truths,
|
Hailed twisted forms as things free, new and true,
|
Beauty from ugliness and evil drank
|
Feeling themselves guests at a banquet of the gods
|
And tasted corruption like a high-spiced food.
|
A darkness settled on the heavy air;
|
It hunted the bright smile from Nature's lips
|
And slew the native confidence in her heart
|
And put fear's crooked look into her eyes.
|
The lust that warps the spirit's natural good
|
Replaced by a manufactured virtue and vice
|
CANTO VII: The Descent into Night
|
The frank spontaneous impulse of the soul:
|
Afflicting Nature with the dual's lie,
|
Their twin values whetted a forbidden zest,
|
Made evil a relief from spurious good,
|
The ego battened on righteousness and sin
|
And each became an instrument of Hell.
|
In rejected heaps by a monotonous road
|
The old simple delights were left to lie
|
On the wastel and of life's descent to Night.
|
All glory of life was dimmed, tarnished with doubt;
|
All beauty ended in an aging face;
|
All power was dubbed a tyranny cursed by God
|
And Truth a fiction needed by the mind:
|
The chase of joy was now a tired hunt;
|
All knowledge was left a questioning Ignorance.
|
As from a womb obscure he saw emerge
|
The body and visage of a dark Unseen
|
Hidden behind the fair outsides of life.
|
Its dangerous commerce is our suffering's cause.
|
Its breath is a subtle poison in men's hearts;
|
All evil starts from that ambiguous face.
|
A peril haunted now the common air;
|
The world grew full of menacing Energies,
|
And wherever turned for help or hope his eyes,
|
In field and house, in street and camp and mart
|
He met the prowl and stealthy come and go
|
Of armed disquieting bodied Influences.
|
A march of goddess figures dark and nude
|
Alarmed the air with grandiose unease;
|
Appalling footsteps drew invisibly near,
|
Shapes that were threats invaded the dream-light,
|
And ominous beings passed him on the road
|
Whose very gaze was a calamity:
|
A charm and sweetness sudden and formidable,
|
Faces that raised alluring lips and eyes
|
Approached him armed with beauty like a snare,
|
But hid a fatal meaning in each line
|
And could in a moment dangerously change.
|
But he alone discerned that screened attack.
|
A veil upon the inner vision lay,
|
A force was there that hid its dreadful steps;
|
All was belied, yet thought itself the truth;
|
All were beset but knew not of the siege:
|
For none could see the authors of their fall.
|
Aware of some dark wisdom still withheld
|
That was the seal and warrant of this strength,
|
He followed the track of dim tremendous steps
|
Returning to the night from which they came.
|
A tract he reached unbuilt and owned by none:
|
There all could enter but none stay for long.
|
It was a no man's land of evil air,
|
A crowded neighbourhood without one home,
|
A borderl and between the world and hell.
|
There unreality was Nature's lord:
|
It was a space where nothing could be true,
|
For nothing was what it had claimed to be:
|
A high appearance wrapped a specious void.
|
Yet nothing would confess its own pretence
|
Even to itself in the ambiguous heart:
|
A vast deception was the law of things;
|
Only by that deception they could live.
|
An unsubstantial Nihil guaranteed
|
The falsehood of the forms this Nature took
|
And made them seem awhile to be and live.
|
A borrowed magic drew them from the Void;
|
They took a shape and stuff that was not theirs
|
And showed a colour that they could not keep,
|
Mirrors to a phantasm of reality.
|
Each rainbow brilliance was a splendid lie;
|
A beauty unreal graced a glamour face.
|
Nothing could be relied on to remain:
|
CANTO VII: The Descent into Night
|
Joy nurtured tears and good an evil proved,
|
But never out of evil one plucked good:
|
Love ended early in hate, delight killed with pain,
|
Truth into falsity grew and death ruled life.
|
A Power that laughed at the mischiefs of the world,
|
An irony that joined the world's contraries
|
And flung them into each other's arms to strive,
|
Put a sardonic rictus on God's face.
|
Aloof, its influence entered everywhere
|
And left a cloven hoof-mark on the breast;
|
A twisted heart and a strange sombre smile
|
Mocked at the sinister comedy of life.
|
Announcing the advent of a perilous Form
|
An ominous tread softened its dire footfall
|
That none might understand or be on guard;
|
None heard until a dreadful grasp was close.
|
Or else all augured a divine approach,
|
An air of prophecy felt, a heavenly hope,
|
Listened for a gospel, watched for a new star.
|
The Fiend was visible but cloaked in light;
|
He seemed a helping angel from the skies:
|
He armed untruth with Scripture and the Law;
|
He deceived with wisdom, with virtue slew the soul
|
And led to perdition by the heavenward path.
|
A lavish sense he gave of power and joy,
|
And, when arose the warning from within,
|
He reassured the ear with dulcet tones
|
Or took the mind captive in its own net;
|
His rigorous logic made the false seem true.
|
Amazing the elect with holy lore
|
He spoke as with the very voice of God.
|
The air was full of treachery and ruse;
|
Truth-speaking was a stratagem in that place;
|
Ambush lurked in a smile and peril made
|
Safety its cover, trust its entry's gate:
|
Falsehood came laughing with the eyes of truth;
|
Each friend might turn an enemy or spy,
|
The hand one clasped ensleeved a dagger's stab
|
And an embrace could be Doom's iron cage.
|
Agony and danger stalked their trembling prey
|
And softly spoke as to a timid friend:
|
Attack sprang suddenly vehement and unseen;
|
Fear leaped upon the heart at every turn
|
And cried out with an anguished dreadful voice;
|
It called for one to save but none came near.
|
All warily walked, for death was ever close;
|
Yet caution seemed a vain expense of care,
|
For all that guarded proved a deadly net,
|
And when after long suspense salvation came
|
And brought a glad relief disarming strength,
|
It served as a smiling passage to worse fate.
|
There was no truce and no safe place to rest;
|
One dared not slumber or put off one's arms:
|
It was a world of battle and surprise.
|
All who were there lived for themselves alone;
|
All warred against all, but with a common hate
|
Turned on the mind that sought some higher good;
|
Truth was exiled lest she should dare to speak
|
And hurt the heart of darkness with her light
|
Or bring her pride of knowledge to blaspheme
|
The settled anarchy of established things.
|
Then the scene changed, but kept its dreadful core:
|
Altering its form the life remained the same.
|
A capital was there without a State:
|
It had no ruler, only groups that strove.
|
He saw a city of ancient Ignorance
|
Founded upon a soil that knew not Light.
|
There each in his own darkness walked alone:
|
Only they agreed to differ in Evil's paths,
|
To live in their own way for their own selves
|
Or to enforce a common lie and wrong;
|
CANTO VII: The Descent into Night
|
There Ego was lord upon his peacock seat
|
And Falsehood sat by him, his mate and queen:
|
The world turned to them as Heaven to Truth and God.
|
Injustice justified by firm decrees
|
The sovereign weights of Error's legalised trade,
|
But all the weights were false and none the same;
|
Ever she watched with her balance and a sword,
|
Lest any sacrilegious word expose
|
The sanctified formulas of her old misrule.
|
In high professions wrapped self-will walked wide
|
And licence stalked prating of order and right:
|
There was no altar raised to Liberty;
|
True freedom was abhorred and hunted down:
|
Harmony and tolerance nowhere could be seen;
|
Each group proclaimed its dire and naked Law.
|
A frame of ethics knobbed with scriptural rules
|
Or a theory passionately believed and praised
|
A table seemed of high Heaven's sacred code.
|
A formal practice mailed and iron-shod
|
Gave to a rude and ruthless warrior kind
|
Drawn from the savage bowels of the earth
|
A proud stern poise of harsh nobility,
|
A civic posture rigid and formidable.
|
But all their private acts belied the pose:
|
Power and utility were their Truth and Right,
|
An eagle rapacity clawed its coveted good,
|
Beaks pecked and talons tore all weaker prey.
|
In their sweet secrecy of pleasant sins
|
Nature they obeyed and not a moralist God.
|
Inconscient traders in bundles of contraries,
|
They did what in others they would persecute;
|
When their eyes looked upon their fellow's vice,
|
An indignation flamed, a virtuous wrath;
|
Oblivious of their own deep-hid offence,
|
Moblike they stoned a neighbour caught in sin.
|
A pragmatist judge within passed false decrees,
|
Posed worst iniquities on equity's base,
|
Reasoned ill actions just, sanctioned the scale
|
Of the merchant ego's interest and desire.
|
Thus was a balance kept, the world could live.
|
A zealot fervour pushed their ruthless cults,
|
All faith not theirs bled scourged as heresy;
|
They questioned, captived, tortured, burned or smote
|
And forced the soul to abandon right or die.
|
Amid her clashing creeds and warring sects
|
Religion sat upon a blood-stained throne.
|
A hundred tyrannies oppressed and slew
|
And founded unity upon fraud and force.
|
Only what seemed was prized as real there:
|
The ideal was a cynic ridicule's butt;
|
Hooted by the crowd, mocked by enlightened wits,
|
Spiritual seeking wandered outcasted, -
|
A dreamer's self-deceiving web of thought
|
Or mad chimaera deemed or hypocrite's fake,
|
Its passionate instinct trailed through minds obscure
|
Lost in the circuits of the Ignorance.
|
A lie was there the truth and truth a lie.
|
Here must the traveller of the upward Way -
|
For daring Hell's kingdoms winds the heavenly route -
|
Pause or pass slowly through that perilous space,
|
A prayer upon his lips and the great Name.
|
If probed not all discernment's keen spear-point,
|
He might stumble into falsity's endless net.
|
Over his shoulder often he must look back
|
Like one who feels on his neck an enemy's breath;
|
Else stealing up behind a treasonous blow
|
Might prostrate cast and pin to unholy soil,
|
Pierced through his back by Evil's poignant stake.
|
So might one fall on the Eternal's road
|
Forfeiting the spirit's lonely chance in Time
|
And no news of him reach the waiting gods,
|
Marked "missing" in the register of souls,
|
CANTO VII: The Descent into Night
|
His name the index of a failing hope,
|
The position of a dead remembered star.
|
Only were safe who kept God in their hearts:
|
Courage their armour, faith their sword, they must walk,
|
The hand ready to smite, the eye to scout,
|
Casting a javelin regard in front,
|
Heroes and soldiers of the army of Light.
|
Hardly even so, the grisly danger past,
|
Released into a calmer purer air,
|
They dared at length to brea the and smile once more.
|
Once more they moved beneath a real sun.
|
Though Hell claimed rule, the spirit still had power.
|
This No-man's-land he passed without debate;
|
Him the heights missioned, him the Abyss desired:
|
None stood across his way, no voice forbade.
|
For swift and easy is the downward path,
|
And now towards the Night was turned his face.
|
A greater darkness waited, a worse reign,
|
If worse can be where all is evil's extreme;
|
Yet to the cloaked the uncloaked is naked worst.
|
There God and Truth and the supernal Light
|
Had never been or else had power no more.
|
As when one slips in a deep moment's trance
|
Over mind's border into another world,
|
He crossed a boundary whose stealthy trace
|
Eye could not see but only the soul feel.
|
Into an armoured fierce domain he came
|
And saw himself wandering like a lost soul
|
Amid grimed walls and savage slums of Night.
|
Around him crowded grey and squalid huts
|
Neighbouring proud palaces of perverted Power,
|
Inhuman quarters and demoniac wards.
|
A pride in evil hugged its wretchedness;
|
A misery haunting splendour pressed those fell
|
Dun suburbs of the cities of dream-life.
|
There Life displayed to the spectator soul
|
The shadow depths of her strange miracle.
|
A strong and fallen goddess without hope,
|
Obscured, deformed by some dire Gorgon spell,
|
As might a harlot empress in a bouge,
|
Nude, unashamed, exulting she upraised
|
Her evil face of perilous beauty and charm
|
And, drawing panic to a shuddering kiss
|
Twixt the magnificence of her fatal breasts,
|
Allured to their abyss the spirit's fall.
|
Across his field of sight she multiplied
|
As on a scenic film or moving plate
|
The implacable splendour of her nightmare pomps.
|
On the dark background of a soulless world
|
She staged between a lurid light and shade
|
Her dramas of the sorrow of the depths
|
Written on the agonised nerves of living things:
|
Epics of horror and grim majesty,
|
Wry statues spat and stiffened in life's mud,
|
A glut of hideous forms and hideous deeds
|
Paralysed pity in the hardened breast.
|
In booths of sin and night-repairs of vice
|
Styled infamies of the body's concupiscence
|
And sordid imaginations etched in flesh,
|
Turned lust into a decorative art:
|
Abusing Nature's gift her pervert skill
|
Immortalised the sown grain of living death,
|
In a mud goblet poured the bacchic wine,
|
To a satyr gave the thyrsus of a god.
|
Impure, sadistic, with grimacing mouths,
|
Grey foul inventions gruesome and macabre
|
Came televisioned from the gulfs of Night.
|
Her craft ingenious in monstrosity,
|
Impatient of all natural shape and poise,
|
A gape of nude exaggerated lines,
|
Gave caricature a stark reality,
|
CANTO VII: The Descent into Night
|
And art-parades of weird distorted forms,
|
And gargoyle masques obscene and terrible
|
Trampled to tormented postures the torn sense.
|
An inexorable evil's worshipper,
|
She made vileness great and sublimated filth;
|
A dragon power of reptile energies
|
And strange epiphanies of grovelling Force
|
And serpent grandeurs couching in the mire
|
Drew adoration to a gleam of slime.
|
All Nature pulled out of her frame and base
|
Was twisted into an unnatural pose:
|
Repulsion stimulated inert desire;
|
Agony was made a red-spiced food for bliss,
|
Hatred was trusted with the work of lust
|
And torture took the form of an embrace;
|
A ritual anguish consecrated death;
|
Worship was offered to the Undivine.
|
A new aesthesis of Inferno's art
|
That trained the mind to love what the soul hates,
|
Imposed allegiance on the quivering nerves
|
And forced the unwilling body to vibrate.
|
Too sweet and too harmonious to excite
|
In this regime that soiled the being's core,
|
Beauty was banned, the heart's feeling dulled to sleep
|
And cherished in their place sensation's thrills;
|
The world was probed for jets of sense-appeal.
|
Here cold material intellect was the judge
|
And needed sensual prick and jog and lash
|
That its hard dryness and dead nerves might feel
|
Some passion and power and acrid point of life.
|
A new philosophy theorised evil's rights,
|
Gloried in the shimmering rot of decadence,
|
Or gave to a python Force persuasive speech
|
And armed with knowledge the primaeval brute.
|
Over life and Matter only brooding bowed,
|
Mind changed to the image of a rampant beast;
|
It scrambled into the pit to dig for truth
|
And lighted its search with the subconscient's flares.
|
Thence bubbling rose sullying the upper air,
|
The filth and festering secrets of the Abyss:
|
This it called positive fact and real life.
|
This now composed the fetid atmosphere.
|
A wild-beast passion crept from secret Night
|
To watch its prey with fascinating eyes:
|
Around him like a fire with sputtering tongues
|
There lolled and laughed a bestial ecstasy;
|
The air was packed with longings brute and fierce;
|
Crowding and stinging in a monstrous swarm
|
Pressed with a noxious hum into his mind
|
Thoughts that could poison Nature's heavenliest breath,
|
Forcing reluctant lids assailed the sight
|
Acts that revealed the mystery of Hell.
|
All that was there was on this pattern made.
|
A race possessed inhabited those parts.
|
A force demoniac lurking in man's depths
|
That heaves suppressed by the heart's human law,
|
Awed by the calm and sovereign eyes of Thought,
|
Can in a fire and earthquake of the soul
|
Arise and, calling to its native night,
|
Overthrow the reason, occupy the life
|
And stamp its hoof on Nature's shaking ground:
|
This was for them their being's flaming core.
|
A mighty energy, a monster god,
|
Hard to the strong, implacable to the weak,
|
It stared at the harsh unpitying world it made
|
With the stony eyelids of its fixed idea.
|
Its heart was drunk with a dire hunger's wine,
|
In others' suffering felt a thrilled delight
|
And of death and ruin the grandiose music heard.
|
To have power, to be master, was sole virtue and good:
|
It claimed the whole world for Evil's living room,
|
CANTO VII: The Descent into Night
|
Its party's grim totalitarian reign
|
The cruel destiny of breathing things.
|
All on one plan was shaped and standardised
|
Under a dark dictatorship's breathless weight.
|
In street and house, in councils and in courts
|
Beings he met who looked like living men
|
And climbed in speech upon high wings of thought
|
But harboured all that is subhuman, vile
|
And lower than the lowest reptile's crawl.
|
The reason meant for nearness to the gods
|
And uplift to heavenly scale by the touch of mind
|
Only enhanced by its enlightening ray
|
Their inborn nature's wry monstrosity.
|
Often, a familiar visage studying
|
Joyfully encountered at some dangerous turn,
|
Hoping to recognise a look of light,
|
His vision warned by the spirit's inward eye
|
Discovered suddenly Hell's trademark there,
|
Or saw with the inner sense that cannot err,
|
In the semblance of a fair or virile form
|
The demon and the goblin and the ghoul.
|
An insolence reigned of cold stone-hearted strength
|
Mighty, obeyed, approved by the Titan's law,
|
The huge laughter of a giant cruelty
|
And fierce glad deeds of ogre violence.
|
In that wide cynic den of thinking beasts
|
One looked in vain for a trace of pity or love;
|
There was no touch of sweetness anywhere,
|
But only Force and its acolytes, greed and hate:
|
There was no help for suffering, none to save,
|
None dared resist or speak a noble word.
|
Armed with the aegis of tyrannic Power,
|
Signing the edicts of her dreadful rule
|
And using blood and torture as a seal,
|
Darkness proclaimed her slogans to the world.
|
A servile blinkered silence hushed the mind
|
Or only it repeated lessons taught,
|
While mitred, holding the good shepherd's staff,
|
Falsehood enthroned on awed and prostrate hearts
|
The cults and creeds that organise living death
|
And slay the soul on the altar of a lie.
|
All were deceived or served their own deceit;
|
Truth in that stifling atmosphere could not live.
|
There wretchedness believed in its own joy
|
And fear and weakness hugged their abject depths;
|
All that is low and sordid-thoughted, base,
|
All that is drab and poor and miserable,
|
Breathed in a lax content its natural air
|
And felt no yearning of divine release:
|
Arrogant, gibing at more luminous states
|
The people of the gulfs despised the sun.
|
A barriered autarchy excluded light;
|
Fixed in its will to be its own grey self,
|
It vaunted its norm unique and splendid type:
|
It soothed its hunger with a plunderer's dream;
|
Flaunting its cross of servitude like a crown,
|
It clung to its dismal harsh autonomy.
|
A bull-throat bellowed with its brazen tongue;
|
Its hard and shameless clamour filling Space
|
And threatening all who dared to listen to truth
|
Claimed the monopoly of the battered ear;
|
A deafened acquiescence gave its vote,
|
And braggart dogmas shouted in the night
|
Kept for the fallen soul once deemed a god
|
The pride of its abysmal absolute.
|
A lone discoverer in these menacing realms
|
Guarded like termite cities from the sun,
|
Oppressed mid crowd and tramp and noise and flare,
|
Passing from dusk to deeper dangerous dusk,
|
He wrestled with powers that snatched from mind its light
|
And smote from him their clinging influences.
|
CANTO VII: The Descent into Night
|
Soon he emerged in a dim wall-less space.
|
For now the peopled tracts were left behind;
|
He walked between wide banks of failing eve.
|
Around him grew a gaunt spiritual blank,
|
A threatening waste, a sinister loneliness
|
That left mind bare to an unseen assault,
|
An empty page on which all that willed could write
|
Stark monstrous messages without control.
|
A travelling dot on downward roads of Dusk
|
Mid barren fields and barns and straggling huts
|
And a few crooked and phantasmal trees,
|
He faced a sense of death and conscious void.
|
But still a hostile Life unseen was there
|
Whose deathlike poise resisting light and truth
|
Made living a bleak gap in nullity.
|
He heard the grisly voices that deny;
|
Assailed by thoughts that swarmed like spectral hordes,
|
A prey to the staring phantoms of the gloom
|
And terror approaching with its lethal mouth,
|
Driven by a strange will down ever down,
|
The sky above a communique of Doom,
|
He strove to shield his spirit from despair,
|
But felt the horror of the growing Night
|
And the Abyss rising to claim his soul.
|
Then ceased the abodes of creatures and their forms
|
And solitude wrapped him in its voiceless folds.
|
All vanished suddenly like a thought expunged;
|
His spirit became an empty listening gulf
|
Void of the dead illusion of a world:
|
Nothing was left, not even an evil face.
|
He was alone with the grey python Night.
|
A dense and nameless Nothing conscious, mute,
|
Which seemed alive but without body or mind,
|
Lusted all beings to annihilate
|
That it might be for ever nude and sole.
|
As in a shapeless beast's intangible jaws,
|
Gripped, strangled by that lusting viscous blot,
|
Attracted to some black and giant mouth
|
And swallowing throat and a huge belly of doom,
|
His being from its own vision disappeared
|
Drawn towards depths that hungered for its fall.
|
A formless void oppressed his struggling brain,
|
A darkness grim and cold benumbed his flesh,
|
A whispered grey suggestion chilled his heart;
|
Haled by a serpent-force from its warm home
|
And dragged to extinction in bleak vacancy
|
Life clung to its seat with cords of gasping breath;
|
Lapped was his body by a tenebrous tongue.
|
Existence smothered travailed to survive;
|
Hope strangled perished in his empty soul,
|
Belief and memory abolished died
|
And all that helps the spirit in its course.
|
There crawled through every tense and aching nerve
|
Leaving behind its poignant quaking trail
|
A nameless and unutterable fear.
|
As a sea nears a victim bound and still,
|
The approach alarmed his mind for ever dumb
|
Of an implacable eternity
|
Of pain inhuman and intolerable.
|
This he must bear, his hope of heaven estranged;
|
He must ever exist without extinction's peace
|
In a slow suffering Time and tortured Space,
|
An anguished nothingness his endless state.
|
A lifeless vacancy was now his breast,
|
And in the place where once was luminous thought,
|
Only remained like a pale motionless ghost
|
An incapacity for faith and hope
|
And the dread conviction of a vanquished soul
|
Immortal still but with its godhead lost,
|
Self lost and God and touch of happier worlds.
|
But he endured, stilled the vain terror, bore
|
The smothering coils of agony and affright;
|
CANTO VII: The Descent into Night
|
Then peace returned and the soul's sovereign gaze.
|
To the blank horror a calm Light replied:
|
Immutable, undying and unborn,
|
Mighty and mute the Godhead in him woke
|
And faced the pain and danger of the world.
|
He mastered the tides of Nature with a look:
|
He met with his bare spirit naked Hell.
|
The World of Falsehood, the Mother of Evil
|
and the Sons of Darkness
|
THEN could he see the hidden heart of Night:
|
The labour of its stark unconsciousness
|
Revealed the endless terrible Inane.
|
A spiritless blank Infinity was there;
|
A Nature that denied the eternal Truth
|
In the vain braggart freedom of its thought
|
Hoped to abolish God and reign alone.
|
There was no sovereign Guest, no witness Light;
|
Unhelped it would create its own bleak world.
|
Its large blind eyes looked out on demon acts,
|
Its deaf ears heard the untruth its dumb lips spoke;
|
Its huge misguided fancy took vast shapes,
|
Its mindless sentience quivered with fierce conceits;
|
Engendering a brute principle of life
|
Evil and pain begot a monstrous soul.
|
The Anarchs of the formless depths arose,
|
Great Titan beings and demoniac powers,
|
World-egos racked with lust and thought and will,
|
Vast minds and lives without a spirit within:
|
Impatient architects of error's house,
|
Leaders of the cosmic ignorance and unrest
|
And sponsors of sorrow and mortality
|
Embodied the dark Ideas of the Abyss.
|
A shadow substance into emptiness came,
|
Dim forms were born in the unthinking Void
|
And eddies met and made an adverse Space
|
In whose black folds Being imagined Hell.
|
His eyes piercing the triple-plated gloom
|
Identified their sight with its blind stare:
|
Accustomed to the unnatural dark, they saw
|
CANTO VIII: The World of Falsehood
|
Unreality made real and conscious Night.
|
A violent, fierce and formidable world,
|
An ancient womb of huge calamitous dreams,
|
Coiled like a larva in the obscurity
|
That keeps it from the spear-points of Heaven's stars.
|
It was the gate of a false Infinite,
|
An eternity of disastrous absolutes,
|
An immense negation of spiritual things.
|
All once self-luminous in the spirit's sphere
|
Turned now into their own dark contraries:
|
Being collapsed into a pointless void
|
That yet was a zero parent of the worlds;
|
Inconscience swallowing up the cosmic Mind
|
Produced a universe from its lethal sleep;
|
Bliss into black coma fallen, insensible,
|
Coiled back to itself and God's eternal joy
|
Through a false poignant figure of grief and pain
|
Still dolorously nailed upon a cross
|
Fixed in the soil of a dumb insentient world
|
Where birth was a pang and death an agony,
|
Lest all too soon should change again to bliss.
|
Thought sat, a priestess of Perversity,
|
On her black tripod of the triune Snake
|
Reading by opposite signs the eternal script,
|
A sorceress reversing life's God-frame.
|
In darkling aisles with evil eyes for lamps
|
And fatal voices chanting from the apse,
|
In strange infernal dim basilicas
|
Intoning the magic of the unholy Word,
|
The ominous profound Initiate
|
Performed the ritual of her Mysteries.
|
There suffering was Nature's daily food
|
Alluring to the anguished heart and flesh,
|
And torture was the formula of delight,
|
Pain mimicked the celestial ecstasy.
|
There Good, a faithless gardener of God,
|
Watered with virtue the world's upas-tree
|
And, careful of the outward word and act,
|
Engrafted his hypocrite blooms on native ill.
|
All high things served their nether opposite:
|
The forms of Gods sustained a demon cult;
|
Heaven's face became a mask and snare of Hell.
|
There in the heart of vain phenomenon,
|
In an enormous action's wri then core
|
He saw a Shape illimitable and vague
|
Sitting on Death who swallows all things born.
|
A chill fixed face with dire and motionless eyes,
|
Her dreadful trident in her shadowy hand
|
Outstretched, she pierced all creatures with one fate.
|
When nothing was save Matter without soul
|
And a spiritless hollow was the heart of Time,
|
Then Life first touched the insensible Abyss;
|
Awaking the stark Void to hope and grief
|
Her pallid beam smote the unfathomed Night
|
In which God hid himself from his own view.
|
In all things she sought their slumbering mystic truth,
|
The unspoken Word that inspires unconscious forms;
|
She groped in his deeps for an invisible Law,
|
Fumbled in the dim subconscient for his mind
|
And strove to find a way for spirit to be.
|
But from the Night another answer came.
|
A seed was in that nether matrix cast,
|
A dumb unprobed husk of perverted truth,
|
A cell of an insentient infinite.
|
A monstrous birth prepared its cosmic form
|
In Nature's titan embryo, Ignorance.
|
Then in a fatal and stupendous hour
|
Something that sprang from the stark Inconscient's sleep
|
Unwillingly begotten by the mute Void,
|
Lifted its ominous head against the stars;
|
Overshadowing earth with its huge body of Doom
|
CANTO VIII: The World of Falsehood
|
It chilled the heavens with the menace of a face.
|
A nameless Power, a shadowy Will arose
|
Immense and alien to our universe.
|
In the inconceivable Purpose none can gauge
|
A vast Non-Being robed itself with shape,
|
The boundless Nescience of the unconscious depths
|
Covered eternity with nothingness.
|
A seeking Mind replaced the seeing Soul:
|
Life grew into a huge and hungry death,
|
The Spirit's bliss was changed to cosmic pain.
|
Assuring God's self-cowled neutrality
|
A mighty opposition conquered Space.
|
A sovereign ruling falsehood, death and grief,
|
It pressed its fierce hegemony on the earth;
|
Disharmonising the original style
|
Of the architecture of her fate's design,
|
It falsified the primal cosmic Will
|
And bound to struggle and dread vicissitudes
|
The long slow process of the patient Power.
|
Implanting error in the stuff of things
|
It made an Ignorance of the all-wise Law;
|
It baffled the sure touch of life's hid sense,
|
Kept dumb the intuitive guide in Matter's sleep,
|
Deformed the insect's instinct and the brute's,
|
Disfigured man's thought-born humanity.
|
A shadow fell across the simple Ray:
|
Obscured was the Truth-light in the cavern heart
|
That burns unwitnessed in the altar crypt
|
Behind the still velamen's secrecy
|
Companioning the Godhead of the shrine.
|
Thus was the dire antagonist Energy born
|
Who mimes the eternal Mother's mighty shape
|
And mocks her luminous infinity
|
With a grey distorted silhouette in the Night.
|
Arresting the passion of the climbing soul,
|
She forced on life a slow and faltering pace;
|
Her hand's deflecting and retarding weight
|
Is laid on the mystic evolution's curve:
|
The tortuous line of her deceiving mind
|
The Gods see not and man is impotent;
|
Oppressing the God-spark within the soul
|
She forces back to the beast the human fall.
|
Yet in her formidable instinctive mind
|
She feels the One grow in the heart of Time
|
And sees the Immortal shine through the human mould.
|
Alarmed for her rule and full of fear and rage
|
She prowls around each light that gleams through the dark
|
Casting its ray from the spirit's lonely tent,
|
Hoping to enter with fierce stealthy tread
|
And in the cradle slay the divine Child.
|
Incalculable are her strength and ruse;
|
Her touch is a fascination and a death;
|
She kills her victim with his own delight;
|
Even Good she makes a hook to drag to Hell.
|
For her the world runs to its agony.
|
Often the pilgrim on the Eternal's road
|
Ill-lit from clouds by the pale moon of Mind,
|
Or in devious byways wandering alone,
|
Or lost in deserts where no path is seen,
|
Falls overpowered by her lion leap,
|
A conquered captive under her dreadful paws.
|
Intoxicated by a burning breath
|
And amorous grown of a destroying mouth,
|
Once a companion of the sacred Fire,
|
The mortal perishes to God and Light,
|
An Adversary governs heart and brain,
|
A Nature hostile to the Mother-Force.
|
The self of life yields up its instruments
|
To Titan and demoniac agencies
|
That aggrandise earth-nature and disframe:
|
A cowled fifth-columnist is now thought's guide;
|
His subtle defeatist murmur slays the faith
|
CANTO VIII: The World of Falsehood
|
And, lodged in the breast or whispering from outside,
|
A lying inspiration fell and dark
|
A new order substitutes for the divine.
|
A silence falls upon the spirit's heights,
|
From the veiled sanctuary the God retires,
|
Empty and cold is the chamber of the Bride;
|
The golden Nimbus now is seen no more,
|
No longer burns the white spiritual ray
|
And hushed for ever is the secret Voice.
|
Then by the Angel of the Vigil Tower
|
A name is struck from the recording book;
|
A flame that sang in Heaven sinks quenched and mute;
|
In ruin ends the epic of a soul.
|
This is the tragedy of the inner death
|
When forfeited is the divine element
|
And only a mind and body live to die.
|
For terrible agencies the Spirit allows
|
And there are subtle and enormous Powers
|
That shield themselves with the covering Ignorance.
|
Offspring of the gulfs, agents of the shadowy Force,
|
Haters of light, intolerant of peace,
|
Aping to the thought the shining Friend and Guide,
|
Opposing in the heart the eternal Will,
|
They veil the occult uplifting Harmonist.
|
His wisdom's oracles are made our bonds;
|
The doors of God they have locked with keys of creed
|
And shut out by the Law his tireless Grace.
|
Along all Nature's lines they have set their posts
|
And intercept the caravans of Light;
|
Wherever the Gods act, they intervene.
|
A yoke is laid upon the world's dim heart;
|
Masked are its beats from the supernal Bliss,
|
And the closed peripheries of brilliant Mind
|
Block the fine entries of celestial Fire.
|
Always the dark Adventurers seem to win;
|
Nature they fill with evil's institutes,
|
Turn into defeats the victories of Truth,
|
Proclaim as falsehoods the eternal laws,
|
And load the dice of Doom with wizard lies;
|
The world's shrines they have occupied, usurped its thrones.
|
In scorn of the dwindling chances of the Gods
|
They claim creation as their conquered fief
|
And crown themselves the iron Lords of Time.
|
Adepts of the illusion and the mask,
|
The artificers of Nature's fall and pain
|
Have built their altars of triumphant Night
|
In the clay temple of terrestrial life.
|
In the vacant precincts of the sacred Fire,
|
In front of the reredos in the mystic rite
|
Facing the dim velamen none can pierce,
|
Intones his solemn hymn the mitred priest
|
Invoking their dreadful presence in his breast:
|
Attri buting to them the awful Name
|
He chants the syllables of the magic text
|
And summons the unseen communion's act,
|
While twixt the incense and the muttered prayer
|
All the fierce bale with which the world is racked
|
Is mixed in the foaming chalice of man's heart
|
And poured to them like sacramental wine.
|
Assuming names divine they guide and rule.
|
Opponents of the Highest they have come
|
Out of their world of soulless thought and power
|
To serve by enmity the cosmic scheme.
|
Night is their refuge and strategic base.
|
Against the sword of Flame, the luminous Eye,
|
Bastioned they live in massive forts of gloom,
|
Calm and secure in sunless privacy:
|
No wandering ray of Heaven can enter there.
|
Armoured, protected by their lethal masks,
|
As in a studio of creative Death
|
The giant sons of Darkness sit and plan
|
CANTO VIII: The World of Falsehood
|
The drama of the earth, their tragic stage.
|
All who would raise the fallen world must come
|
Under the dangerous arches of their power;
|
For even the radiant children of the gods
|
To darken their privilege is and dreadful right.
|
None can reach heaven who has not passed through hell.
|
This too the traveller of the worlds must dare.
|
A warrior in the dateless duel's strife,
|
He entered into dumb despairing Night
|
Challenging the darkness with his luminous soul.
|
Alarming with his steps the threshold gloom
|
He came into a fierce and dolorous realm
|
Peopled by souls who never had tasted bliss;
|
Ignorant like men born blind who know not light,
|
They could equate worst ill with highest good,
|
Virtue was to their eyes a face of sin
|
And evil and misery were their natural state.
|
A dire administration's penal code
|
Making of grief and pain the common law,
|
Decreeing universal joylessness
|
Had changed life into a stoic sacrament
|
And torture into a daily festival.
|
An act was passed to chastise happiness;
|
Laughter and pleasure were banned as deadly sins:
|
A questionless mind was ranked as wise content,
|
A dull heart's silent apathy as peace:
|
Sleep was not there, torpor was the sole rest,
|
Death came but neither respite gave nor end;
|
Always the soul lived on and suffered more.
|
Ever he deeper probed that kingdom of pain;
|
Around him grew the terror of a world
|
Of agony followed by worse agony,
|
And in the terror a great wicked joy
|
Glad of one's own and others' calamity.
|
There thought and life were a long punishment,
|
The breath a burden and all hope a scourge,
|
The body a field of torment, a massed unease;
|
Repose was a waiting between pang and pang.
|
This was the law of things none dreamed to change:
|
A hard sombre heart, a harsh unsmiling mind
|
Rejected happiness like a cloying sweet;
|
Tranquillity was a tedium and ennui:
|
Only by suffering life grew colourful;
|
It needed the spice of pain, the salt of tears.
|
If one could cease to be, all would be well;
|
Else only fierce sensations gave some zest:
|
A fury of jealousy burning the gnawed heart,
|
The sting of murderous spite and hate and lust,
|
The whisper that lures to the pit and treachery's stroke
|
Threw vivid spots on the dull aching hours.
|
To watch the drama of infelicity,
|
The writhing of creatures under the harrow of doom
|
And sorrow's tragic gaze into the night
|
And horror and the hammering heart of fear
|
Were the ingredients in Time's heavy cup
|
That pleased and helped to enjoy its bitter taste.
|
Of such fierce stuff was made up life's long hell:
|
These were the threads of the dark spider's-web
|
In which the soul was caught, quivering and rapt;
|
This was religion, this was Nature's rule.
|
In a fell chapel of iniquity
|
To worship a black pitiless image of Power
|
Kneeling one must cross hard-hearted stony courts,
|
A pavement like a floor of evil fate.
|
Each stone was a keen edge of ruthless force
|
And glued with the chilled blood from tortured breasts;
|
The dry gnarled trees stood up like dying men
|
Stiffened into a pose of agony,
|
And from each window peered an ominous priest
|
Chanting Te Deums for slaughter's crowning grace,
|
Uprooted cities, blasted human homes,
|
Burned wri then bodies, the bombshell's massacre.
|
CANTO VIII: The World of Falsehood
|
"Our enemies are fallen, are fallen," they sang,
|
"All who once stayed our will are smitten and dead;
|
How great we are, how merciful art Thou."
|
Thus thought they to reach God's impassive throne
|
And Him comm and whom all their acts opposed,
|
Magnifying their deeds to touch his skies,
|
And make him an accomplice of their crimes.
|
There no relenting pity could have place,
|
But ruthless strength and iron moods had sway,
|
A dateless sovereignty of terror and gloom:
|
This took the figure of a darkened God
|
Revered by the racked wretchedness he had made,
|
Who held in thrall a miserable world,
|
And helpless hearts nailed to unceasing woe
|
Adored the feet that trampled them into mire.
|
It was a world of sorrow and of hate,
|
Sorrow with hatred for its lonely joy,
|
Hatred with others' sorrow as its feast;
|
A bitter rictus curled the suffering mouth;
|
A tragic cruelty saw its ominous chance.
|
Hate was the black archangel of that realm;
|
It glowed, a sombre jewel in the heart
|
Burning the soul with its malignant rays,
|
And wallowed in its fell abysm of might.
|
These passions even objects seemed to exude, -
|
For mind overflowed into the inanimate
|
That answered with the wickedness it received, -
|
Against their users used malignant powers,
|
Hurt without hands and strangely, suddenly slew,
|
Appointed as instruments of an unseen doom.
|
Or they made themselves a fateful prison wall
|
Where men condemned wake through the creeping hours
|
Counted by the tollings of an ominous bell.
|
An evil environment worsened evil souls:
|
All things were conscious there and all perverse.
|
In this infernal realm he dared to press
|
Even into its deepest pit and darkest core,
|
Perturbed its tenebrous base, dared to contest
|
Its ancient privileged right and absolute force:
|
In Night he plunged to know her dreadful heart,
|
In Hell he sought the root and cause of Hell.
|
Its anguished gulfs opened in his own breast;
|
He listened to clamours of its crowded pain,
|
The heart-beats of its fatal loneliness.
|
Above was a chill deaf eternity.
|
In vague tremendous passages of Doom
|
He heard the goblin Voice that guides to slay,
|
And faced the enchantments of the demon Sign,
|
And traversed the ambush of the opponent Snake.
|
In menacing tracts, in tortured solitudes
|
Companionless he roamed through desolate ways
|
Where the red Wolf waits by the fordless stream
|
And Death's black eagles scream to the precipice,
|
And met the hounds of bale who hunt men's hearts
|
Baying across the veldts of Destiny,
|
In footless battlefields of the Abyss
|
Fought shadowy combats in mute eyeless depths,
|
Assaults of Hell endured and Titan strokes
|
And bore the fierce inner wounds that are slow to heal.
|
A prisoner of a hooded magic Force,
|
Captured and trailed in Falsehood's lethal net
|
And often strangled in the noose of grief,
|
Or cast in the grim morass of swallowing doubt,
|
Or shut into pits of error and despair,
|
He drank her poison draughts till none was left.
|
In a world where neither hope nor joy could come
|
The ordeal he suffered of evil's absolute reign,
|
Yet kept intact his spirit's radiant truth.
|
Incapable of motion or of force,
|
In Matter's blank denial gaoled and blind,
|
Pinned to the black inertia of our base
|
He treasured between his hands his flickering soul.
|
His being ventured into mindless Void,
|
Intolerant gulfs that knew not thought nor sense;
|
CANTO VIII: The World of Falsehood
|
Thought ceased, sense failed, his soul still saw and knew.
|
In atomic parcellings of the Infinite
|
Near to the dumb beginnings of lost Self,
|
He felt the curious small futility
|
Of the creation of material things.
|
Or, stifled in the Inconscient's hollow dusk,
|
He sounded the mystery dark and bottomless
|
Of the enormous and unmeaning deeps
|
Whence struggling life in a dead universe rose.
|
There in the stark identity lost by mind
|
He felt the sealed sense of the insensible world
|
And a mute wisdom in the unknowing Night.
|
Into the abysmal secrecy he came
|
Where darkness peers from her mattress, grey and nude,
|
And stood on the last locked subconscient's floor
|
Where Being slept unconscious of its thoughts
|
And built the world not knowing what it built.
|
There waiting its hour the future lay unknown,
|
There is the record of the vanished stars.
|
There in the slumber of the cosmic Will
|
He saw the secret key of Nature's change.
|
A light was with him, an invisible hand
|
Was laid upon the error and the pain
|
Till it became a quivering ecstasy,
|
The shock of sweetness of an arm's embrace.
|
He saw in Night the Eternal's shadowy veil,
|
Knew death for a cellar of the house of life,
|
In destruction felt creation's hasty pace,
|
Knew loss as the price of a celestial gain
|
And hell as a short cut to heaven's gates.
|
Then in Illusion's occult factory
|
And in the Inconscient's magic printing-house
|
Torn were the formats of the primal Night
|
And shattered the stereotypes of Ignorance.
|
Alive, breathing a deep spiritual breath,
|
Nature expunged her stiff mechanical code
|
And the articles of the bound soul's contract,
|
Falsehood gave back to Truth her tortured shape.
|
Annulled were the tables of the law of Pain,
|
And in their place grew luminous characters.
|
The skilful Penman's unseen finger wrote
|
His swift intuitive calligraphy;
|
Earth's forms were made his divine documents,
|
The wisdom embodied mind could not reveal,
|
Inconscience chased from the world's voiceless breast;
|
Transfigured were the fixed schemes of reasoning Thought.
|
Arousing consciousness in things inert,
|
He imposed upon dark atom and dumb mass
|
The diamond script of the Imperishable,
|
Inscribed on the dim heart of fallen things
|
A paean-song of the free Infinite
|
And the Name, foundation of eternity,
|
And traced on the awake exultant cells
|
In the ideographs of the Ineffable
|
The lyric of the love that waits through Time
|
And the mystic volume of the Book of Bliss
|
And the message of the superconscient Fire.
|
Then life beat pure in the corporeal frame;
|
The infernal Gleam died and could slay no more.
|
Hell split across its huge abrupt facade
|
As if a magic building were undone,
|
Night opened and vanished like a gulf of dream.
|
Into being's gap scooped out as empty Space
|
In which she had filled the place of absent God,
|
There poured a wide intimate and blissful Dawn;
|
Healed were all things that Time's torn heart had made
|
And sorrow could live no more in Nature's breast:
|
Division ceased to be, for God was there.
|
The soul lit the conscious body with its ray,
|
Matter and spirit mingled and were one.
|
The Paradise of the Life-Gods
|
AROUND him shone a great felicitous Day.
|
A lustre of some rapturous Infinite,
|
It held in the splendour of its golden laugh
|
Regions of the heart's happiness set free,
|
Intoxicated with the wine of God,
|
Immersed in light, perpetually divine.
|
A favourite and intimate of the Gods
|
Obeying the divine comm and to joy,
|
It was the sovereign of its own delight
|
And master of the kingdoms of its force.
|
Assured of the bliss for which all forms were made,
|
Unmoved by fear and grief and the shocks of Fate
|
And unalarmed by the breath of fleeting Time
|
And unbesieged by adverse circumstance,
|
It breathed in a sweet secure unguarded ease
|
Free from our body's frailty inviting death,
|
Far from our danger-zone of stumbling Will.
|
It needed not to curb its passionate beats;
|
Thrilled by the clasp of the warm satisfied sense
|
And the swift wonder-rush and flame and cry
|
Of the life-impulses' red magnificent race,
|
It lived in a jewel-rhythm of the laughter of God
|
And lay on the breast of universal love.
|
Immune the unfettered Spirit of Delight
|
Pastured his gleaming sun-herds and moon-flocks
|
Along the lyric speed of griefless streams
|
In fragrance of the unearthly asphodel.
|
A silence of felicity wrapped the heavens,
|
A careless radiance smiled upon the heights;
|
A murmur of inarticulate ravishment
|
Trembled in the winds and touched the enchanted soil;
|
Incessant in the arms of ecstasy
|
Repeating its sweet involuntary note
|
A sob of rapture flowed along the hours.
|
Advancing under an arch of glory and peace,
|
Traveller on plateau and on musing ridge,
|
As one who sees in the World-Magician's glass
|
A miracled imagery of soul-scapes flee
|
He traversed scenes of an immortal joy
|
And gazed into abysms of beauty and bliss.
|
Around him was a light of conscious suns
|
And a brooding gladness of great symbol things;
|
To meet him crowded plains of brilliant calm,
|
Mountains and violet valleys of the Blest,
|
Deep glens of joy and crooning waterfalls
|
And woods of quivering purple solitude;
|
Below him lay like gleaming jewelled thoughts
|
Rapt dreaming cities of Gandharva kings.
|
Across the vibrant secrecies of Space
|
A dim and happy music sweetly stole,
|
Smitten by unseen hands he heard heart-close
|
The harps' cry of the heavenly minstrels pass,
|
And voices of unearthly melody
|
Chanted the glory of eternal love
|
In the white-blue-moonbeam air of Paradise.
|
A summit and core of all that marvellous world,
|
Apart stood high Elysian nameless hills,
|
Burning like sunsets in a trance of eve.
|
As if to some new unsearched profundity,
|
Into a joyful stillness plunged their base;
|
Their slopes through a hurry of laughter and voices sank,
|
Crossed by a throng of singing rivulets,
|
Adoring blue heaven with their happy hymn,
|
Down into woods of shadowy secrecy:
|
Lifted into wide voiceless mystery
|
Their peaks climbed towards a greatness beyond life.
|
The shining Edens of the vital gods
|
CANTO IX: The Paradise of the Life-Gods
|
Received him in their deathless harmonies.
|
All things were perfect there that flower in Time;
|
Beauty was there creation's native mould,
|
Peace was a thrilled voluptuous purity.
|
There Love fulfilled her gold and roseate dreams
|
And Strength her crowned and mighty reveries;
|
Desire climbed up, a swift omnipotent flame,
|
And Pleasure had the stature of the gods;
|
Dream walked along the highways of the stars;
|
Sweet common things turned into miracles:
|
Overtaken by the spirit's sudden spell,
|
Smitten by a divine passion's alchemy,
|
Pain's self compelled transformed to potent joy
|
Curing the antithesis twixt heaven and hell.
|
All life's high visions are embodied there,
|
Her wandering hopes achieved, her aureate combs
|
Caught by the honey-eater's darting tongue,
|
Her burning guesses changed to ecstasied truths,
|
Her mighty pantings stilled in deathless calm
|
And liberated her immense desires.
|
In that paradise of perfect heart and sense
|
No lower note could break the endless charm
|
Of her sweetness ardent and immaculate;
|
Her steps are sure of their intuitive fall.
|
After the anguish of the soul's long strife
|
At length were found calm and celestial rest
|
And, lapped in a magic flood of sorrowless hours,
|
Healed were his warrior nature's wounded limbs
|
In the encircling arms of Energies
|
That brooked no stain and feared not their own bliss.
|
In scenes forbidden to our pallid sense
|
Amid miraculous scents and wonder-hues
|
He met the forms that divinise the sight,
|
To music that can immortalise the mind
|
And make the heart wide as infinity
|
Listened, and captured the inaudible
|
Cadences that awake the occult ear:
|
Out of the ineffable hush it hears them come
|
Trembling with the beauty of a wordless speech,
|
And thoughts too great and deep to find a voice,
|
Thoughts whose desire new-makes the universe.
|
A scale of sense that climbed with fiery feet
|
To heights of unimagined happiness,
|
Recast his being's aura in joy-glow,
|
His body glimmered like a skiey shell;
|
His gates to the world were swept with seas of light.
|
His earth, dowered with celestial competence,
|
Harboured a power that needed now no more
|
To cross the closed customs-line of mind and flesh
|
And smuggle godhead into humanity.
|
It shrank no more from the supreme demand
|
Of an untired capacity for bliss,
|
A might that could explore its own infinite
|
And beauty and passion and the depths' reply
|
Nor feared the swoon of glad identity
|
Where spirit and flesh in inner ecstasy join
|
Annulling the quarrel between self and shape.
|
It drew from sight and sound spiritual power,
|
Made sense a road to reach the intangible:
|
It thrilled with the supernal influences
|
That build the substance of life's deeper soul.
|
Earth-nature stood reborn, comrade of heaven.
|
A fit companion of the timeless Kings,
|
Equalled with the godheads of the living Suns,
|
He mixed in the radiant pastimes of the Unborn,
|
Heard whispers of the Player never seen
|
And listened to his voice that steals the heart
|
And draws it to the breast of God's desire,
|
And felt its honey of felicity
|
Flow through his veins like the rivers of Paradise,
|
Made body a nectar-cup of the Absolute.
|
In sudden moments of revealing flame,
|
CANTO IX: The Paradise of the Life-Gods
|
In passionate responses half-unveiled
|
He reached the rim of ecstasies unknown;
|
A touch supreme surprised his hurrying heart,
|
The clasp was remembered of the Wonderful,
|
And hints leaped down of white beatitudes.
|
Eternity drew close disguised as Love
|
And laid its hand upon the body of Time.
|
A little gift comes from the Immensitudes,
|
But measureless to life its gain of joy;
|
All the untold Beyond is mirrored there.
|
A giant drop of the Bliss unknowable
|
Overwhelmed his limbs and round his soul became
|
A fiery ocean of felicity;
|
He foundered drowned in sweet and burning vasts:
|
The dire delight that could shatter mortal flesh,
|
The rapture that the gods sustain he bore.
|
Immortal pleasure cleansed him in its waves
|
And turned his strength into undying power.
|
Immortality captured Time and carried Life.
|
The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Little Mind
|
THIS too must now be overpassed and left,
|
As all must be until the Highest is gained
|
In whom the world and self grow true and one:
|
Till That is reached our journeying cannot cease.
|
Always a nameless goal beckons beyond,
|
Always ascends the zigzag of the gods
|
And upward points the spirit's climbing Fire.
|
This breath of hundred-hued felicity
|
And its pure heightened figure of Time's joy,
|
Tossed upon waves of flawless happiness,
|
Hammered into single beats of ecstasy,
|
This fraction of the spirit's integer
|
Caught into a passionate greatness of extremes,
|
This limited being lifted to zenith bliss,
|
Happy to enjoy one touch of things supreme,
|
Packed into its sealed small infinity,
|
Its endless time-made world outfacing Time,
|
A little output of God's vast delight.
|
The moments stretched towards the eternal Now,
|
The hours discovered immortality,
|
But, satisfied with their sublime contents,
|
On peaks they ceased whose tops half-way to Heaven
|
Pointed to an apex they could never mount,
|
To a grandeur in whose air they could not live.
|
Inviting to their high and exquisite sphere,
|
To their secure and fine extremities
|
This creature who hugs his limits to feel safe,
|
These heights declined a greater adventure's call.
|
A glory and sweetness of satisfied desire
|
Tied up the spirit to golden posts of bliss.
|
It could not house the wideness of a soul
|
CANTO X: The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Little Mind
|
Which needed all infinity for its home.
|
A memory soft as grass and faint as sleep,
|
The beauty and call receding sank behind
|
Like a sweet song heard fading far away
|
Upon the long high road to Timelessness.
|
Above was an ardent white tranquillity.
|
A musing spirit looked out on the worlds
|
And like a brilliant clambering of skies
|
Passing through clarity to an unseen Light
|
Large lucent realms of Mind from stillness shone.
|
But first he met a silver-grey expanse
|
Where Day and Night had wedded and were one:
|
It was a tract of dim and shifting rays
|
Parting Life's sentient flow from Thought's self-poise.
|
A coalition of uncertainties
|
There exercised uneasy government
|
On a ground reserved for doubt and reasoned guess,
|
A rendezvous of Knowledge with Ignorance.
|
At its low extremity held difficult sway
|
A mind that hardly saw and slowly found;
|
Its nature to our earthly nature close
|
And kin to our precarious mortal thought
|
That looks from soil to sky and sky to soil
|
But knows not the below nor the beyond,
|
It only sensed itself and outward things.
|
This was the first means of our slow ascent
|
From the half-conscience of the animal soul
|
Living in a crowded press of shape-events
|
In a realm it cannot understand nor change;
|
Only it sees and acts in a given scene
|
And feels and joys and sorrows for a while.
|
The ideas that drive the obscure embodied spirit
|
Along the roads of suffering and desire
|
In a world that struggles to discover Truth,
|
Found here their power to be and Nature-force.
|
Here are devised the forms of an ignorant life
|
That sees the empiric fact as settled law,
|
Labours for the hour and not for eternity
|
And trades its gains to meet the moment's call:
|
The slow process of a material mind
|
Which serves the body it should rule and use
|
And needs to lean upon an erring sense,
|
Was born in that luminous obscurity.
|
Advancing tardily from a limping start,
|
Crutching hypothesis on argument,
|
Throning its theories as certitudes,
|
It reasons from the half-known to the unknown,
|
Ever constructing its frail house of thought,
|
Ever undoing the web that it has spun.
|
A twilight sage whose shadow seems to him self,
|
Moving from minute to brief minute lives;
|
A king dependent on his satellites
|
Signs the decrees of ignorant ministers,
|
A judge in half-possession of his proofs,
|
A voice clamant of uncertainty's postulates,
|
An architect of knowledge, not its source.
|
This powerful bondslave of his instruments
|
Thinks his low station Nature's highest top,
|
Oblivious of his share in all things made
|
And haughtily humble in his own conceit
|
Believes himself a spawn of Matter's mud
|
And takes his own creations for his cause.
|
To eternal light and knowledge meant to rise,
|
Up from man's bare beginning is our climb;
|
Out of earth's heavy smallness we must break,
|
We must search our nature with spiritual fire:
|
An insect crawl preludes our glorious flight;
|
Our human state cradles the future god,
|
Our mortal frailty an immortal force.
|
At the glow-worm top of these pale glimmer-realms
|
Where dawn-sheen gambolled with the native dusk
|
And helped the Day to grow and Night to fail,
|
CANTO X: The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Little Mind
|
Escaping over a wide and shimmering bridge,
|
He came into a realm of early Light
|
And the regency of a half-risen sun.
|
Out of its rays our mind's full orb was born.
|
Appointed by the Spirit of the Worlds
|
To mediate with the unknowing depths,
|
A prototypal deft Intelligence
|
Half-poised on equal wings of thought and doubt
|
Toiled ceaselessly twixt being's hidden ends.
|
A Secrecy breathed in life's moving act;
|
A covert nurse of Nature's miracles,
|
It shaped life's wonders out of Matter's mud:
|
It cut the pattern of the shapes of things,
|
It pitched mind's tent in the vague ignorant Vast.
|
A master Magician of measure and device
|
Has made an eternity from recurring forms
|
And to the wandering spectator thought
|
Assigned a seat on the inconscient stage.
|
On earth by the will of this Arch-Intelligence
|
A bodiless energy put on Matter's robe;
|
Proton and photon served the imager Eye
|
To change things subtle into a physical world
|
And the invisible appeared as shape
|
And the impalpable was felt as mass:
|
Magic of percept joined with concept's art
|
And lent to each object an interpreting name:
|
Idea was disguised in a body's artistry,
|
And by a strange atomic law's mystique
|
A frame was made in which the sense could put
|
Its symbol picture of the universe.
|
Even a greater miracle was done.
|
The mediating light linked body's power,
|
The sleep and dreaming of the tree and plant,
|
The animal's vibrant sense, the thought in man,
|
To the effulgence of a Ray above.
|
Its skill endorsing Matter's right to think
|
Cut sentient passages for the mind of flesh
|
And found a means for Nescience to know.
|
Offering its little squares and cubes of word
|
As figured substitutes for reality,
|
A mummified mnemonic alphabet,
|
It helped the unseeing Force to read her works.
|
A buried consciousness arose in her
|
And now she dreams herself human and awake.
|
But all was still a mobile Ignorance;
|
Still Knowledge could not come and firmly grasp
|
This huge invention seen as a universe.
|
A specialist of logic's hard machine
|
Imposed its rigid artifice on the soul;
|
An aide of the inventor intellect,
|
It cut Truth into manageable bits
|
That each might have his ration of thought-food,
|
Then new-built Truth's slain body by its art:
|
A robot exact and serviceable and false
|
Displaced the spirit's finer view of things:
|
A polished engine did the work of a god.
|
None the true body found, its soul seemed dead:
|
None had the inner look which sees Truth's whole;
|
All glorified the glittering substitute.
|
Then from the secret heights a wave swept down,
|
A brilliant chaos of rebel light arose;
|
It looked above and saw the dazzling peaks,
|
It looked within and woke the sleeping god.
|
Imagination called her shining squads
|
That venture into undiscovered scenes
|
Where all the marvels lurk none yet has known:
|
Lifting her beautiful and miraculous head,
|
She conspired with inspiration's sister brood
|
To fill thought's skies with glimmering nebulae.
|
A bright Error fringed the mystery-altar's frieze;
|
Darkness grew nurse to wisdom's occult sun,
|
Myth suckled knowledge with her lustrous milk;
|
CANTO X: The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Little Mind
|
The infant passed from dim to radiant breasts.
|
Thus worked the Power upon the growing world;
|
Its subtle craft withheld the full-orbed blaze,
|
Cherished the soul's childhood and on fictions fed
|
Far richer in their sweet and nectarous sap
|
Nourishing its immature divinity
|
Than the staple or dry straw of Reason's tilth,
|
Its heaped fodder of innumerable facts,
|
Plebeian fare on which today we thrive.
|
Thus streamed down from the realm of early Light
|
Ethereal thinkings into Matter's world;
|
Its gold-horned herds trooped into earth's cave-heart.
|
Its morning rays illume our twilight's eyes,
|
Its young formations move the mind of earth
|
To labour and to dream and new-create,
|
To feel beauty's touch and know the world and self:
|
The Golden Child began to think and see.
|
In those bright realms are Mind's first forward steps.
|
Ignorant of all but eager to know all,
|
Its curious slow enquiry there begins;
|
Ever its searching grasps at shapes around,
|
Ever it hopes to find out greater things.
|
Ardent and golden-gleamed with sunrise fires,
|
Alert it lives upon invention's verge.
|
Yet all it does is on an infant's scale,
|
As if the cosmos were a nursery game,
|
Mind, life the playthings of a Titan's babe.
|
As one it works who builds a mimic fort
|
Miraculously stable for a while,
|
Made of the sands upon a bank of Time
|
Mid an occult eternity's shoreless sea.
|
A small keen instrument the great Puissance chose,
|
An arduous pastime passionately pursues;
|
To teach the Ignorance is her difficult charge,
|
Her thought starts from an original nescient Void
|
And what she teaches she herself must learn
|
Arousing knowledge from its sleepy lair.
|
For knowledge comes not to us as a guest
|
Called into our chamber from the outer world;
|
A friend and inmate of our secret self,
|
It hid behind our minds and fell asleep
|
And slowly wakes beneath the blows of life;
|
The mighty daemon lies unshaped within,
|
To evoke, to give it form is Nature's task.
|
All was a chaos of the true and false,
|
Mind sought amid deep mists of Nescience;
|
It looked within itself but saw not God.
|
A material interim diplomacy
|
Denied the Truth that transient truths might live
|
And hid the Deity in creed and guess
|
That the World-Ignorance might grow slowly wise.
|
This was the imbroglio made by sovereign Mind
|
Looking from a gleam-ridge into the Night
|
In her first tamperings with Inconscience:
|
Its alien dusk baffles her luminous eyes;
|
Her rapid hands must learn a cautious zeal;
|
Only a slow advance the earth can bear.
|
Yet was her strength unlike the unseeing earth's
|
Compelled to handle makeshift instruments
|
Invented by the life-force and the flesh.
|
Earth all perceives through doubtful images,
|
All she conceives in hazardous jets of sight,
|
Small lights kindled by touches of groping thought.
|
Incapable of the soul's direct inlook
|
She sees by spasms and solders knowledge-scrap,
|
Makes Truth the slave-girl of her indigence,
|
Expelling Nature's mystic unity
|
Cuts into quantum and mass the moving All;
|
She takes for measuring-rod her ignorance.
|
In her own domain a pontiff and a seer,
|
That greater Power with her half-risen sun
|
CANTO X: The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Little Mind
|
Wrought within limits but possessed her field;
|
She knew by a privilege of thinking force
|
And claimed an infant sovereignty of sight.
|
In her eyes however darkly fringed was lit
|
The Archangel's gaze who knows inspired his acts
|
And shapes a world in its far-seeing flame.
|
In her own realm she stumbles not nor fails,
|
But moves in boundaries of subtle power
|
Across which mind can step towards the sun.
|
A candidate for a higher suzerainty,
|
A passage she cut through from Night to Light,
|
And searched for an ungrasped Omniscience.
|
A dwarf three-bodied trinity was her serf.
|
First, smallest of the three, but strong of limb,
|
A low-brow with a square and heavy jowl,
|
A pigmy Thought needing to live in bounds
|
For ever stooped to hammer fact and form.
|
Absorbed and cabined in external sight,
|
It takes its stand on Nature's solid base.
|
A technician admirable, a thinker crude,
|
A riveter of Life to habit's grooves,
|
Obedient to gross Matter's tyranny,
|
A prisoner of the moulds in which it works,
|
It binds itself by what itself creates.
|
A slave of a fixed mass of absolute rules,
|
It sees as Law the habits of the world,
|
It sees as Truth the habits of the mind.
|
In its realm of concrete images and events
|
Turning in a worn circle of ideas
|
And ever repeating old familiar acts,
|
It lives content with the common and the known.
|
It loves the old ground that was its dwelling-place:
|
Abhorring change as an audacious sin,
|
Distrustful of each new discovery
|
Only it advances step by careful step
|
And fears as if a deadly abyss the unknown.
|
A prudent treasurer of its ignorance,
|
It shrinks from adventure, blinks at glorious hope,
|
Preferring a safe foothold upon things
|
To the dangerous joy of wideness and of height.
|
The world's slow impressions on its labouring mind,
|
Tardy imprints almost indelible,
|
Increase their value by their poverty;
|
The old sure memories are its capital stock:
|
Only what sense can grasp seems absolute:
|
External fact it figures as sole truth,
|
Wisdom identifies with the earthward look,
|
And things long known and actions always done
|
Are to its clinging hold a balustrade
|
Of safety on the perilous stair of Time.
|
Heaven's trust to it are the established ancient ways,
|
Immutable laws man has no right to change,
|
A sacred legacy from the great dead past
|
Or the one road that God has made for life,
|
A firm shape of Nature never to be changed,
|
Part of the huge routine of the universe.
|
A smile from the Preserver of the Worlds
|
Sent down of old this guardian Mind to earth
|
That all might stand in their fixed changeless type
|
And from their secular posture never move.
|
One sees it circling faithful to its task,
|
Tireless in an assigned tradition's round;
|
In decayed and crumbling offices of Time
|
It keeps close guard in front of custom's wall,
|
Or in an ancient Night's dim environs
|
It dozes on a little courtyard's stones
|
And barks at every unfamiliar light
|
As at a foe who would break up its home,
|
A watch-dog of the spirit's sense-railed house
|
Against intruders from the Invisible,
|
Nourished on scraps of life and Matter's bones
|
CANTO X: The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Little Mind
|
In its kennel of objective certitude.
|
And yet behind it stands a cosmic might:
|
A measured Greatness keeps its vaster plan,
|
A fathomless sameness rhythms the tread of life;
|
The stars' changeless orbits furrow inert Space,
|
A million species follow one mute Law.
|
A huge inertness is the world's defence,
|
Even in change is treasured changelessness;
|
Into inertia revolution sinks,
|
In a new dress the old resumes its role;
|
The Energy acts, the stable is its seal:
|
On Shiva's breast is stayed the enormous dance.
|
A fiery spirit came, next of the three.
|
A hunchback rider of the red Wild-Ass,
|
A rash Intelligence leaped down lion-maned
|
From the great mystic Flame that rings the worlds
|
And with its dire edge eats at being's heart.
|
Thence sprang the burning vision of Desire.
|
A thousand shapes it wore, took numberless names:
|
A need of multitude and uncertainty
|
Pricks it for ever to pursue the One
|
On countless roads across the vasts of Time
|
Through circuits of unending difference.
|
It burns all breasts with an ambiguous fire.
|
A radiance gleaming on a murky stream,
|
It flamed towards heaven, then sank, engulfed, towards hell;
|
It climbed to drag down Truth into the mire
|
And used for muddy ends its brilliant Force;
|
A huge chameleon gold and blue and red
|
Turning to black and grey and lurid brown,
|
Hungry it stared from a mottled bough of life
|
To snap up insect joys, its favourite food,
|
The dingy sustenance of a sumptuous frame
|
Nursing the splendid passion of its hues.
|
A snake of flame with a dull cloud for tail,
|
Followed by a dream-brood of glittering thoughts,
|
A lifted head with many-tinged flickering crests,
|
It licked at knowledge with a smoky tongue.
|
A whirlpool sucking in an empty air,
|
It based on vacancy stupendous claims,
|
In Nothingness born to Nothingness returned,
|
Yet all the time unwittingly it drove
|
Towards the hidden Something that is All.
|
Ardent to find, incapable to retain,
|
A brilliant instability was its mark,
|
To err its inborn trend, its native cue.
|
At once to an unreflecting credence prone,
|
It thought all true that flattered its own hopes;
|
It cherished golden nothings born of wish,
|
It snatched at the unreal for provender.
|
In darkness it discovered luminous shapes;
|
Peering into a shadow-hung half-light
|
It saw hued images scrawled on Fancy's cave;
|
Or it swept in circles through conjecture's night
|
And caught in imagination's camera
|
Bright scenes of promise held by transient flares,
|
Fixed in life's air the feet of hurrying dreams,
|
Kept prints of passing Forms and hooded Powers
|
And flash-images of half-seen verities.
|
An eager spring to seize and to possess
|
Unguided by reason or the seeing soul
|
Was its first natural motion and its last,
|
It squandered life's force to achieve the impossible:
|
It scorned the straight road and ran on wandering curves
|
And left what it had won for untried things;
|
It saw unrealised aims as instant fate
|
And chose the precipice for its leap to heaven.
|
Adventure its system in the gamble of life,
|
It took fortuitous gains as safe results;
|
Error discouraged not its confident view
|
Ignorant of the deep law of being's ways
|
And failure could not slow its fiery clutch;
|
CANTO X: The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Little Mind
|
One chance made true warranted all the rest.
|
Attempt, not victory, was the charm of life.
|
An uncertain winner of uncertain stakes,
|
Instinct its dam and the life-mind its sire,
|
It ran its race and came in first or last.
|
Yet were its works nor small and vain nor null;
|
It nursed a portion of infinity's strength
|
And could create the high things its fancy willed;
|
Its passion caught what calm intelligence missed.
|
Insight of impulse laid its leaping grasp
|
On heavens high Thought had hidden in dazzling mist,
|
Caught glimmers that revealed a lurking sun:
|
It probed the void and found a treasure there.
|
A half-intuition purpled in its sense;
|
It threw the lightning's fork and hit the unseen.
|
It saw in the dark and vaguely blinked in the light,
|
Ignorance was its field, the unknown its prize.
|
Of all these Powers the greatest was the last.
|
Arriving late from a far plane of thought
|
Into a packed irrational world of Chance
|
Where all was grossly felt and blindly done,
|
Yet the haphazard seemed the inevitable,
|
Came Reason, the squat godhead artisan,
|
To her narrow house upon a ridge in Time.
|
Adept of clear contrivance and design,
|
A pensive face and close and peering eyes,
|
She took her firm and irremovable seat,
|
The strongest, wisest of the troll-like Three.
|
Armed with her lens and measuring-rod and probe,
|
She looked upon an object universe
|
And the multitudes that in it live and die
|
And the body of Space and the fleeing soul of Time,
|
And took the earth and stars into her hands
|
To try what she could make of these strange things.
|
In her strong purposeful laborious mind,
|
Inventing her scheme-lines of reality
|
And the geometric curves of her time-plan,
|
She multiplied her slow half-cuts at Truth:
|
Impatient of enigma and the unknown,
|
Intolerant of the lawless and the unique,
|
Imposing reflection on the march of Force,
|
Imposing clarity on the unfathomable,
|
She strove to reduce to rules the mystic world.
|
Nothing she knew but all things hoped to know.
|
In dark inconscient realms once void of thought,
|
Missioned by a supreme Intelligence
|
To throw its ray upon the obscure Vast,
|
An imperfect light leading an erring mass
|
By the power of sense and the idea and word,
|
She ferrets out Nature's process, substance, cause.
|
All life to harmonise by thought's control,
|
She with the huge imbroglio struggles still;
|
Ignorant of all but her own seeking mind
|
To save the world from Ignorance she came.
|
A sovereign worker through the centuries
|
Observing and remoulding all that is,
|
Confident she took up her stupendous charge.
|
There the low bent and mighty figure sits
|
Bowed under the arc-lamps of her factory home
|
Amid the clatter and ringing of her tools.
|
A rigorous stare in her creative eyes
|
Coercing the plastic stuff of cosmic Mind,
|
She sets the hard inventions of her brain
|
In a pattern of eternal fixity:
|
Indifferent to the cosmic dumb demand,
|
Unconscious of too close realities,
|
Of the unspoken thought, the voiceless heart,
|
She leans to forge her credos and iron codes
|
And metal structures to imprison life
|
And mechanic models of all things that are.
|
For the world seen she weaves a world conceived:
|
She spins in stiff but unsubstantial lines
|
CANTO X: The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Little Mind
|
Her gossamer word-webs of abstract thought,
|
Her segment systems of the Infinite,
|
Her theodicies and cosmogonic charts
|
And myths by which she explains the inexplicable.
|
At will she spaces in thin air of mind
|
Like maps in the school-house of intellect hung,
|
Forcing wide Truth into a narrow scheme,
|
Her numberless warring strict philosophies;
|
Out of Nature's body of phenomenon
|
She carves with Thought's keen edge in rigid lines,
|
Like rails for the World-Magician's power to run,
|
Her sciences precise and absolute.
|
On the huge bare walls of human nescience
|
Written round Nature's deep dumb hieroglyphs
|
She pens in clear demotic characters
|
The vast encyclopaedia of her thoughts;
|
An algebra of her mathematics' signs,
|
Her numbers and unerring formulas
|
She builds to clinch her summary of things.
|
On all sides runs as if in a cosmic mosque
|
Tracing the scriptural verses of her laws
|
The daedal of her patterned arabesques,
|
Art of her wisdom, artifice of her lore.
|
This art, this artifice are her only stock.
|
In her high works of pure intelligence,
|
In her withdrawal from the senses' trap,
|
There comes no breaking of the walls of mind,
|
There leaps no rending flash of absolute power,
|
There dawns no light of heavenly certitude.
|
A million faces wears her knowledge here
|
And every face is turbaned with a doubt.
|
All now is questioned, all reduced to nought.
|
Once monumental in their massive craft
|
Her old great mythic writings disappear
|
And into their place start strict ephemeral signs;
|
This constant change spells progress to her eyes:
|
Her thought is an endless march without a goal.
|
There is no summit on which she can stand
|
And see in a single glance the Infinite's whole.
|
An inconclusive play is Reason's toil.
|
Each strong idea can use her as its tool;
|
Accepting every brief she pleads her case.
|
Open to every thought, she cannot know.
|
The eternal Advocate seated as judge
|
Armours in logic's invulnerable mail
|
A thousand combatants for Truth's veiled throne
|
And sets on a high horse-back of argument
|
To tilt for ever with a wordy lance
|
In a mock tournament where none can win.
|
Assaying thought's values with her rigid tests
|
Balanced she sits on wide and empty air,
|
Aloof and pure in her impartial poise.
|
Absolute her judgments seem but none is sure;
|
Time cancels all her verdicts in appeal.
|
Although like sunbeams to our glow-worm mind
|
Her knowledge feigns to fall from a clear heaven,
|
Its rays are a lantern's lustres in the Night;
|
She throws a glittering robe on Ignorance.
|
But now is lost her ancient sovereign claim
|
To rule mind's high realm in her absolute right,
|
Bind thought with logic's forged infallible chain
|
Or see truth nude in a bright abstract haze.
|
A master and slave of stark phenomenon,
|
She travels on the roads of erring sight
|
Or looks upon a set mechanical world
|
Constructed for her by her instruments.
|
A bullock yoked in the cart of proven fact,
|
She drags huge knowledge-bales through Matter's dust
|
To reach utility's immense bazaar.
|
Apprentice she has grown to her old drudge;
|
An aided sense is her seeking's arbiter.
|
This now she uses as the assayer's stone.
|
CANTO X: The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Little Mind
|
As if she knew not facts are husks of truth,
|
The husks she keeps, the kernel throws aside.
|
An ancient wisdom fades into the past,
|
The ages' faith becomes an idle tale,
|
God passes out of the awakened thought,
|
An old discarded dream needed no more:
|
Only she seeks mechanic Nature's keys.
|
Interpreting stone-laws inevitable
|
She digs into Matter's hard concealing soil,
|
To unearth the processes of all things done.
|
A loaded huge self-worked machine appears
|
To her eye's eager and admiring stare,
|
An intricate and meaningless enginery
|
Of ordered fateful and unfailing Chance:
|
Ingenious and meticulous and minute,
|
Its brute unconscious accurate device
|
Unrolls an unerring march, maps a sure road;
|
It plans without thinking, acts without a will,
|
A million purposes serves with purpose none
|
And builds a rational world without a mind.
|
It has no mover, no maker, no idea:
|
Its vast self-action toils without a cause;
|
A lifeless Energy irresistibly driven,
|
Death's head on the body of Necessity,
|
Engenders life and fathers consciousness,
|
Then wonders why all was and whence it came.
|
Our thoughts are parts of the immense machine,
|
Our ponderings but a freak of Matter's law,
|
The mystic's lore was a fancy or a blind;
|
Of soul or spirit we have now no need:
|
Matter is the admirable Reality,
|
The patent unescapable miracle,
|
The hard truth of things, simple, eternal, sole.
|
A suicidal rash expenditure
|
Creating the world by a mystery of self-loss
|
Has poured its scattered works on empty Space;
|
Late shall the self-disintegrating Force
|
Contract the immense expansion it has made:
|
Then ends this mighty and unmeaning toil,
|
The Void is left bare, vacant as before.
|
Thus vindicated, crowned, the grand new Thought
|
Explained the world and mastered all its laws,
|
Touched the dumb roots, woke veiled tremendous powers;
|
It bound to service the unconscious djinns
|
That sleep unused in Matter's ignorant trance.
|
All was precise, rigid, indubitable.
|
But when on Matter's rock of ages based
|
A whole stood up firm and clear-cut and safe,
|
All staggered back into a sea of doubt;
|
This solid scheme melted in endless flux:
|
She had met the formless Power inventor of forms;
|
Suddenly she stumbled upon things unseen:
|
A lightning from the undiscovered Truth
|
Startled her eyes with its perplexing glare
|
And dug a gulf between the Real and Known
|
Till all her knowledge seemed an ignorance.
|
Once more the world was made a wonder-web,
|
A magic's process in a magical space,
|
An unintelligible miracle's depths
|
Whose source is lost in the Ineffable.
|
Once more we face the blank Unknowable.
|
In a crash of values, in a huge doom-crack,
|
In the sputter and scatter of her breaking work
|
She lost her clear conserved constructed world.
|
A quantum dance remained, a sprawl of chance
|
In Energy's stupendous tripping whirl:
|
A ceaseless motion in the unbounded Void
|
Invented forms without a thought or aim:
|
Necessity and Cause were shapeless ghosts;
|
Matter was an incident in being's flow,
|
Law but a clock-work habit of blind force.
|
Ideals, ethics, systems had no base
|
CANTO X: The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Little Mind
|
And soon collapsed or without sanction lived;
|
All grew a chaos, a heave and clash and strife.
|
Ideas warring and fierce leaped upon life;
|
A hard compression held down anarchy
|
And liberty was only a phantom's name:
|
Creation and destruction waltzed inarmed
|
On the bosom of a torn and quaking earth;
|
All reeled into a world of Kali's dance.
|
Thus tumbled, sinking, sprawling in the Void,
|
Clutching for props, a soil on which to stand,
|
She only saw a thin atomic Vast,
|
The rare-point sparse substratum universe
|
On which floats a solid world's phenomenal face.
|
Alone a process of events was there
|
And Nature's plastic and protean change
|
And, strong by death to slay or to create,
|
The riven invisible atom's omnipotent force.
|
One chance remained that here might be a power
|
To liberate man from the old inadequate means
|
And leave him sovereign of the earthly scene.
|
For Reason then might grasp the original Force
|
To drive her car upon the roads of Time.
|
All then might serve the need of the thinking race,
|
An absolute State found order's absolute,
|
To a standardised perfection cut all things,
|
In society build a just exact machine.
|
Then science and reason careless of the soul
|
Could iron out a tranquil uniform world,
|
Aeonic seekings glut with outward truths
|
And a single-patterned thinking force on mind,
|
Inflicting Matter's logic on Spirit's dreams
|
A reasonable animal make of man
|
And a symmetrical fabric of his life.
|
This would be Nature's peak on an obscure globe,
|
The grand result of the long ages' toil,
|
Earth's evolution crowned, her mission done.
|
So might it be if the spirit fell asleep;
|
Man then might rest content and live in peace,
|
Master of Nature who once her bondslave worked,
|
The world's disorder hardening into Law, -
|
If Life's dire heart arose not in revolt,
|
If God within could find no greater plan.
|
But many-visaged is the cosmic Soul;
|
A touch can alter the fixed front of Fate.
|
A sudden turn can come, a road appear.
|
A greater Mind may see a greater Truth,
|
Or we may find when all the rest has failed
|
Hid in ourselves the key of perfect change.
|
Ascending from the soil where creep our days,
|
Earth's consciousness may marry with the Sun,
|
Our mortal life ride on the spirit's wings,
|
Our finite thoughts commune with the Infinite.
|
In the bright kingdoms of the rising Sun
|
All is a birth into a power of light:
|
All here deformed guards there its happy shape,
|
Here all is mixed and marred, there pure and whole;
|
Yet each is a passing step, a moment's phase.
|
Awake to a greater Truth beyond her acts,
|
The mediatrix sat and saw her works
|
And felt the marvel in them and the force
|
But knew the power behind the face of Time:
|
She did the task, obeyed the knowledge given,
|
Her deep heart yearned towards great ideal things
|
And from the light looked out to wider light:
|
A brilliant hedge drawn round her narrowed her power;
|
Faithful to her limited sphere she toiled, but knew
|
Its highest, widest seeing was a half-search,
|
Its mightiest acts a passage or a stage.
|
For not by Reason was creation made
|
And not by Reason can the Truth be seen
|
Which through the veils of thought, the screens of sense
|
Hardly the spirit's vision can descry
|
CANTO X: The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Little Mind
|
Dimmed by the imperfection of its means:
|
The little Mind is tied to little things:
|
Its sense is but the spirit's outward touch,
|
Half-waked in a world of dark Inconscience;
|
It feels out for its beings and its forms
|
Like one left fumbling in the ignorant Night.
|
In this small mould of infant mind and sense
|
Desire is a child-heart's cry crying for bliss,
|
Our reason only a toys' artificer,
|
A rule-maker in a strange stumbling game.
|
But she her dwarf aides knew whose confident sight
|
A bounded prospect took for the far goal.
|
The world she has made is an interim report
|
Of a traveller towards the half-found truth in things
|
Moving twixt nescience and nescience.
|
For nothing is known while aught remains concealed;
|
The Truth is known only when all is seen.
|
Attracted by the All that is the One,
|
She yearns towards a higher light than hers;
|
Hid by her cults and creeds she has glimpsed God's face:
|
She knows she has but found a form, a robe,
|
But ever she hopes to see him in her heart
|
And feel the body of his reality.
|
As yet a mask is there and not a brow,
|
Although sometimes two hidden eyes appear:
|
Reason cannot tear off that glimmering mask,
|
Her efforts only make it glimmer more;
|
In packets she ties up the Indivisible;
|
Finding her hands too small to hold vast Truth
|
She breaks up knowledge into alien parts
|
Or peers through cloud-rack for a vanished sun:
|
She sees, not understanding what she has seen,
|
Through the locked visages of finite things
|
The myriad aspects of infinity.
|
One day the Face must burn out through the mask.
|
Our ignorance is Wisdom's chrysalis,
|
Our error weds new knowledge on its way,
|
Its darkness is a blackened knot of light;
|
Thought dances hand in hand with Nescience
|
On the grey road that winds towards the Sun.
|
Even while her fingers fumble at the knots
|
Which bind them to their strange companionship,
|
Into the moments of their married strife
|
Sometimes break flashes of the enlightening Fire.
|
Even now great thoughts are here that walk alone:
|
Armed they have come with the infallible word
|
In an investiture of intuitive light
|
That is a sanction from the eyes of God;
|
Announcers of a distant Truth they flame
|
Arriving from the rim of eternity.
|
A fire shall come out of the infinitudes,
|
A greater Gnosis shall regard the world
|
Crossing out of some far omniscience
|
On lustrous seas from the still rapt Alone
|
To illumine the deep heart of self and things.
|
A timeless knowledge it shall bring to Mind,
|
Its aim to life, to Ignorance its close.
|
Above in a high breathless stratosphere,
|
Overshadowing the dwarfish trinity,
|
Lived, aspirants to a limitless Beyond,
|
Captives of Space, walled by the limiting heavens,
|
In the unceasing circuit of the hours
|
Yearning for the straight paths of eternity,
|
And from their high station looked down on this world
|
Two sun-gaze Daemons witnessing all that is.
|
A power to uplift the laggard world,
|
Imperious rode a huge high-winged Life-Thought
|
Unwont to tread the firm unchanging soil:
|
Accustomed to a blue infinity,
|
It planed in sunlit sky and starlit air;
|
It saw afar the unreached Immortal's home
|
CANTO X: The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Little Mind
|
And heard afar the voices of the Gods.
|
Iconoclast and shatterer of Time's forts,
|
Overleaping limit and exceeding norm,
|
It lit the thoughts that glow through the centuries
|
And moved to acts of superhuman force.
|
As far as its self-winged air-planes could fly,
|
Visiting the future in great brilliant raids
|
It reconnoitred vistas of dream-fate.
|
Apt to conceive, unable to attain,
|
It drew its concept-maps and vision-plans
|
Too large for the architecture of mortal Space.
|
Beyond in wideness where no footing is,
|
An imagist of bodiless Ideas,
|
Impassive to the cry of life and sense,
|
A pure Thought-Mind surveyed the cosmic act.
|
Archangel of a white transcending realm,
|
It saw the world from solitary heights
|
Luminous in a remote and empty air.
|
The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Mind
|
THERE ceased the limits of the labouring Power.
|
But being and creation cease not there.
|
For Thought transcends the circles of mortal mind,
|
It is greater than its earthly instrument:
|
The godhead crammed into mind's narrow space
|
Escapes on every side into some vast
|
That is a passage to infinity.
|
It moves eternal in the spirit's field,
|
A runner towards the far spiritual light,
|
A child and servant of the spirit's force.
|
But mind too falls back from a nameless peak.
|
His being stretched beyond the sight of Thought.
|
For the spirit is eternal and unmade
|
And not by thinking was its greatness born,
|
And not by thinking can its knowledge come.
|
It knows itself and in itself it lives,
|
It moves where no thought is nor any form.
|
Its feet are steadied upon finite things,
|
Its wings can dare to cross the Infinite.
|
Arriving into his ken a wonder space
|
Of great and marvellous meetings called his steps,
|
Where Thought leaned on a Vision beyond thought
|
And shaped a world from the Unthinkable.
|
On peaks imagination cannot tread,
|
In the horizons of a tireless sight,
|
Under a blue veil of eternity
|
The splendours of ideal Mind were seen
|
Outstretched across the boundaries of things known.
|
Origin of the little that we are,
|
Instinct with the endless more that we must be,
|
A prop of all that human strength enacts,
|
CANTO XI: The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Mind
|
Creator of hopes by earth unrealised,
|
It spreads beyond the expanding universe;
|
It wings beyond the boundaries of Dream,
|
It overtops the ceiling of life's soar.
|
Awake in a luminous sphere unbound by Thought,
|
Exposed to omniscient immensities,
|
It casts on our world its great crowned influences,
|
Its speed that outstrips the ambling of the hours,
|
Its force that strides invincibly through Time,
|
Its mights that bridge the gulf twixt man and God,
|
Its lights that combat Ignorance and Death.
|
In its vast ambit of ideal Space
|
Where beauty and mightiness walk hand in hand,
|
The Spirit's truths take form as living Gods
|
And each can build a world in its own right.
|
In an air which doubt and error cannot mark
|
With the stigmata of their deformity,
|
In communion with the musing privacy
|
Of a truth that sees in an unerring light
|
Where the sight falters not nor wanders thought,
|
Exempt from our world's exorbitant tax of tears,
|
Dreaming its luminous creations gaze
|
On the Ideas that people eternity.
|
In a sun-blaze of joy and absolute power
|
Above the Masters of the Ideal throne
|
In sessions of secure felicity,
|
In regions of illumined certitude.
|
Far are those realms from our labour and yearning and call,
|
Perfection's reign and hallowed sanctuary
|
Closed to the uncertain thoughts of human mind,
|
Remote from the turbid tread of mortal life.
|
But since our secret selves are next of kin,
|
A breath of unattained divinity
|
Visits the imperfect earth on which we toil;
|
Across a gleaming ether's golden laugh
|
A light falls on our vexed unsatisfied lives,
|
A thought comes down from the ideal worlds
|
And moves us to new-model even here
|
Some image of their greatness and appeal
|
And wonder beyond the ken of mortal hope.
|
Amid the heavy sameness of the days
|
And contradicted by the human law,
|
A faith in things that are not and must be
|
Lives comrade of this world's delight and pain,
|
The child of the secret soul's forbidden desire
|
Born of its amour with eternity.
|
Our spirits break free from their environment;
|
The future brings its face of miracle near,
|
Its godhead looks at us with present eyes;
|
Acts deemed impossible grow natural;
|
We feel the hero's immortality;
|
The courage and the strength death cannot touch
|
Awake in limbs that are mortal, hearts that fail;
|
We move by the rapid impulse of a will
|
That scorns the tardy trudge of mortal time.
|
These promptings come not from an alien sphere:
|
Ourselves are citizens of that mother State,
|
Adventurers, we have colonised Matter's night.
|
But now our rights are barred, our passports void;
|
We live self-exiled from our heavenlier home.
|
An errant ray from the immortal Mind
|
Accepted the earth's blindness and became
|
Our human thought, servant of Ignorance.
|
An exile, labourer on this unsure globe
|
Captured and driven in Life's nescient grasp,
|
Hampered by obscure cell and treacherous nerve,
|
It dreams of happier states and nobler powers,
|
The natural privilege of unfallen gods,
|
Recalling still its old lost sovereignty.
|
Amidst earth's mist and fog and mud and stone
|
It still remembers its exalted sphere
|
And the high city of its splendid birth.
|
CANTO XI: The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Mind
|
A memory steals in from lost heavens of Truth,
|
A wide release comes near, a Glory calls,
|
A might looks out, an estranged felicity.
|
In glamorous passages of half-veiled light
|
Wandering, a brilliant shadow of itself,
|
This quick uncertain leader of blind gods,
|
This tender of small lamps, this minister serf
|
Hired by a mind and body for earth-use
|
Forgets its work mid crude realities;
|
It recovers its renounced imperial right,
|
It wears once more a purple robe of thought
|
And knows itself the Ideal's seer and king,
|
Communicant and prophet of the Unborn,
|
Heir to delight and immortality.
|
All things are real that here are only dreams,
|
In our unknown depths sleeps their reserve of truth,
|
On our unreached heights they reign and come to us
|
In thought and muse trailing their robes of light.
|
But our dwarf will and cold pragmatic sense
|
Admit not the celestial visitants:
|
Awaiting us on the Ideal's peaks
|
Or guarded in our secret self unseen
|
Yet flashed sometimes across the awakened soul,
|
Hide from our lives their greatness, beauty, power.
|
Our present feels sometimes their regal touch,
|
Our future strives towards their luminous thrones:
|
Out of spiritual secrecy they gaze,
|
Immortal footfalls in mind's corridors sound:
|
Our souls can climb into the shining planes,
|
The breadths from which they came can be our home.
|
His privilege regained of shadowless sight
|
The Thinker entered the immortals' air
|
And drank again his pure and mighty source.
|
Immutable in rhythmic calm and joy
|
He saw, sovereignly free in limitless light,
|
The unfallen planes, the thought-created worlds
|
Where Knowledge is the leader of the act
|
And Matter is of thinking substance made,
|
Feeling, a heaven-bird poised on dreaming wings,
|
Answers Truth's call as to a parent's voice,
|
Form luminous leaps from the all-shaping beam
|
And Will is a conscious chariot of the Gods,
|
And Life, a splendour stream of musing Force,
|
Carries the voices of the mystic Suns.
|
A happiness it brings of whispered truth;
|
There runs in its flow honeying the bosom of Space
|
A laughter from the immortal heart of Bliss,
|
And the unfathomed Joy of timelessness,
|
The sound of Wisdom's murmur in the Unknown
|
And the breath of an unseen Infinity.
|
In gleaming clarities of amethyst air
|
The chainless and omnipotent Spirit of Mind
|
Brooded on the blue lotus of the Idea.
|
A gold supernal sun of timeless Truth
|
Poured down the mystery of the eternal Ray
|
Through a silence quivering with the word of Light
|
On an endless ocean of discovery.
|
Far-off he saw the joining hemispheres.
|
On meditation's mounting edge of trance
|
Great stairs of thought climbed up to unborn heights
|
Where Time's last ridges touch eternity's skies
|
And Nature speaks to the spirit's absolute.
|
A triple realm of ordered thought came first,
|
A small beginning of immense ascent:
|
Above were bright ethereal skies of mind,
|
A packed and endless soar as if sky pressed sky
|
Buttressed against the Void on bastioned light;
|
The highest strove to neighbour eternity,
|
The largest widened into the infinite.
|
But though immortal, mighty and divine,
|
The first realms were close and kin to human mind;
|
CANTO XI: The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Mind
|
Their deities shape our greater thinking's roads,
|
A fragment of their puissance can be ours:
|
These breadths were not too broad for our souls to range,
|
These heights were not too high for human hope.
|
A triple flight led to this triple world.
|
Although abrupt for common strengths to tread,
|
Its upward slope looks down on our earth-poise:
|
On a slant not too precipitously steep
|
One could turn back travelling deep descending lines
|
To commune with the mortal's universe.
|
The mighty wardens of the ascending stair
|
Who intercede with the all-creating Word,
|
There waited for the pilgrim heaven-bound soul;
|
Holding the thousand keys of the Beyond
|
They proffered their knowledge to the climbing mind
|
And filled the life with Thought's immensities.
|
The prophet hierophants of the occult Law,
|
The flame-bright hierarchs of the divine Truth,
|
Interpreters between man's mind and God's,
|
They bring the immortal fire to mortal men.
|
Iridescent, bodying the invisible,
|
The guardians of the Eternal's bright degrees
|
Fronted the Sun in radiant phalanxes.
|
Afar they seemed a symbol imagery,
|
Illumined originals of the shadowy script
|
In which our sight transcribes the ideal Ray,
|
Or icons figuring a mystic Truth,
|
But, nearer, Gods and living Presences.
|
A march of friezes marked the lowest steps;
|
Fantastically ornate and richly small,
|
They had room for the whole meaning of a world,
|
Symbols minute of its perfection's joy,
|
Strange beasts that were Nature's forces made alive
|
And, wakened to the wonder of his role,
|
Man grown an image undefaced of God
|
And objects the fine coin of Beauty's reign;
|
But wide the terrains were those levels serve.
|
In front of the ascending epiphany
|
World-Time's enjoyers, favourites of World-Bliss,
|
The Masters of things actual, lords of the hours,
|
Playmates of youthful Nature and child God,
|
Creators of Matter by hid stress of Mind
|
Whose subtle thoughts support unconscious Life
|
And guide the fantasy of brute events,
|
Stood there, a race of young keen-visioned gods,
|
King-children born on Wisdom's early plane,
|
Taught in her school world-making's mystic play.
|
Archmasons of the eternal Thaumaturge,
|
Moulders and measurers of fragmented Space,
|
They have made their plan of the concealed and known
|
A dwelling-house for the invisible king.
|
Obeying the Eternal's deep command
|
They have built in the material front of things
|
This wide world-kindergarten of young souls
|
Where the infant spirit learns through mind and sense
|
To read the letters of the cosmic script
|
And study the body of the cosmic self
|
And search for the secret meaning of the whole.
|
To all that Spirit conceives they give a mould;
|
Persuading Nature into visible moods
|
They lend a finite shape to infinite things.
|
Each power that leaps from the Unmanifest
|
Leaving the largeness of the Eternal's peace
|
They seized and held by their precisian eye
|
And made a figurante in the cosmic dance.
|
Its free caprice they bound by rhythmic laws
|
And compelled to accept its posture and its line
|
In the wizardry of an ordered universe.
|
The All-containing was contained in form,
|
Oneness was carved into units measurable,
|
The limitless built into a cosmic sum:
|
Unending Space was beaten into a curve,
|
CANTO XI: The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Mind
|
Indivisible Time into small minutes cut,
|
The infinitesimal massed to keep secure
|
The mystery of the Formless cast into form.
|
Invincibly their craft devised for use
|
The magic of sequent number and sign's spell,
|
Design's miraculous potency was caught
|
Laden with beauty and significance
|
And by the determining mandate of their gaze
|
Figure and quality equating joined
|
In an inextricable identity.
|
On each event they stamped its curves of law
|
And its trust and charge of burdened circumstance;
|
A free and divine incident no more
|
At each moment willed or adventure of the soul,
|
It leng thened a fate-bound mysterious chain,
|
A line foreseen of an immutable plan,
|
One step more in Necessity's long march.
|
A term was set for every eager Power
|
Restraining its will to monopolise the world,
|
A groove of bronze prescribed for force and act
|
And shown to each moment its appointed place
|
Forewilled inalterably in the spiral
|
Huge Time-loop fugitive from eternity.
|
Inevitable their thoughts like links of Fate
|
Imposed on the leap and lightning race of mind
|
And on the frail fortuitous flux of life
|
And on the liberty of atomic things
|
Immutable cause and adamant consequence.
|
Idea gave up the plastic infinity
|
To which it was born and now traced out instead
|
Small separate steps of chain-work in a plot:
|
Immortal once, now tied to birth and end,
|
Torn from its immediacy of errorless sight,
|
Knowledge was rebuilt from cells of inference
|
Into a fixed body flasque and perishable;
|
Thus bound it grew, but could not last and broke
|
And to a new thinking's body left its place.
|
A cage for the Infinite's great-eyed seraphim Thoughts
|
Was closed with a criss-cross of world-laws for bars
|
And hedged into a curt horizon's arc
|
The irised vision of the Ineffable.
|
A timeless Spirit was made the slave of the hours;
|
The Unbound was cast into a prison of birth
|
To make a world that Mind could grasp and rule.
|
On an earth which looked towards a thousand suns,
|
That the created might grow Nature's lord
|
And Matter's depths be illumined with a soul
|
They tied to date and norm and finite scope
|
The million-mysteried movement of the One.
|
Above stood ranked a subtle archangel race
|
With larger lids and looks that searched the unseen.
|
A light of liberating knowledge shone
|
Across the gulfs of silence in their eyes;
|
They lived in the mind and knew truth from within;
|
A sight withdrawn in the concentrated heart
|
Could pierce behind the screen of Time's results
|
And the rigid cast and shape of visible things.
|
All that escaped conception's narrow noose
|
Vision descried and gripped; their seeing thoughts
|
Filled in the blanks left by the seeking sense.
|
High architects of possibility
|
And engineers of the impossible,
|
Mathematicians of the infinitudes
|
And theoricians of unknowable truths,
|
They formulate enigma's postulates
|
And join the unknown to the apparent worlds.
|
Acolytes they wait upon the timeless Power,
|
The cycle of her works investigate;
|
Passing her fence of wordless privacy
|
Their mind could penetrate her occult mind
|
And draw the diagram of her secret thoughts;
|
They read the codes and ciphers she had sealed,
|
CANTO XI: The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Mind
|
Copies they made of all her guarded plans,
|
For every turn of her mysterious course
|
Assigned a reason and unchanging rule.
|
The unseen grew visible to student eyes,
|
Explained was the immense Inconscient's scheme,
|
Audacious lines were traced upon the Void;
|
The Infinite was reduced to square and cube.
|
Arranging symbol and significance,
|
Tracing the curve of a transcendent Power,
|
They framed the cabbala of the cosmic Law,
|
The balancing line discovered of Life's technique
|
And structured her magic and her mystery.
|
Imposing schemes of knowledge on the Vast
|
They clamped to syllogisms of finite thought
|
The free logic of an infinite Consciousness,
|
Grammared the hidden rhythms of Nature's dance,
|
Critiqued the plot of the drama of the worlds,
|
Made figure and number a key to all that is:
|
The psycho-analysis of cosmic Self
|
Was traced, its secrets hunted down, and read
|
The unknown pathology of the Unique.
|
Assessed was the system of the probable,
|
The hazard of fleeing possibilities,
|
To account for the Actual's unaccountable sum,
|
Necessity's logarithmic tables drawn,
|
Cast into a scheme the triple act of the One.
|
Unveiled, the abrupt invisible multitude
|
Of forces whirling from the hands of Chance
|
Seemed to obey some vast imperative:
|
Their tangled motives worked out unity.
|
A wisdom read their mind to themselves unknown,
|
Their anarchy rammed into a formula
|
And from their giant randomness of Force,
|
Following the habit of their million paths,
|
Distinguishing each faintest line and stroke
|
Of a concealed unalterable design,
|
Out of the chaos of the Invisible's moods
|
Derived the calculus of Destiny.
|
In its bright pride of universal lore
|
Mind's knowledge overtopped the Omniscient's power:
|
The Eternal's winging eagle puissances
|
Surprised in their untracked empyrean
|
Stooped from their gyres to obey the beck of Thought:
|
Each mysteried God forced to revealing form,
|
Assigned his settled moves in Nature's game,
|
Zigzagged at the gesture of a chess-player Will
|
Across the chequerboard of cosmic Fate.
|
In the wide sequence of Necessity's steps
|
Predicted, every act and thought of God,
|
Its values weighed by the accountant Mind,
|
Checked in his mathematised omnipotence,
|
Lost its divine aspect of miracle
|
And was a figure in a cosmic sum.
|
The mighty Mother's whims and lightning moods
|
Arisen from her all-wise unruled delight
|
In the freedom of her sweet and passionate breast,
|
Robbed of their wonder were chained to a cause and aim;
|
An idol of bronze replaced her mystic shape
|
That captures the movements of the cosmic vasts,
|
In the sketch precise of an ideal face
|
Forgotten was her eyelashes' dream-print
|
Carrying on their curve infinity's dreams,
|
Lost the alluring marvel of her eyes;
|
The surging wave-throbs of her vast sea-heart
|
They bound to a theorem of ordered beats:
|
Her deep designs which from herself she had veiled
|
Bowed self-revealed in their confessional.
|
For the birth and death of the worlds they fixed a date,
|
The diameter of infinity was drawn,
|
Measured the distant arc of the unseen heights
|
And visualised the plumbless viewless depths,
|
Till all seemed known that in all time could be.
|
CANTO XI: The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Mind
|
All was coerced by number, name and form;
|
Nothing was left untold, incalculable.
|
Yet was their wisdom circled with a nought:
|
Truths they could find and hold but not the one Truth:
|
The Highest was to them unknowable.
|
By knowing too much they missed the whole to be known:
|
The fathomless heart of the world was left unguessed
|
And the Transcendent kept its secrecy.
|
In a sublimer and more daring soar
|
To the wide summit of the triple stairs
|
Bare steps climbed up like flaming rocks of gold
|
Burning their way to a pure absolute sky.
|
August and few the sovereign Kings of Thought
|
Have made of Space their wide all-seeing gaze
|
Surveying the enormous work of Time:
|
A breadth of all-containing Consciousness
|
Supported Being in a still embrace.
|
Intercessors with a luminous Unseen,
|
They capt in the long passage to the world
|
The imperatives of the creator Self
|
Obeyed by unknowing earth, by conscious heaven;
|
Their thoughts are partners in its vast control.
|
A great all-ruling Consciousness is there
|
And Mind unwitting serves a higher Power;
|
It is a channel, not the source of all.
|
The cosmos is no accident in Time;
|
There is a meaning in each play of Chance,
|
There is a freedom in each face of Fate.
|
A Wisdom knows and guides the mysteried world;
|
A Truth-gaze shapes its beings and events;
|
A Word self-born upon creation's heights,
|
Voice of the Eternal in the temporal spheres,
|
Prophet of the seeings of the Absolute,
|
Sows the Idea's significance in Form
|
And from that seed the growths of Time arise.
|
On peaks beyond our ken the All-Wisdom sits:
|
A single and infallible look comes down,
|
A silent touch from the supernal's air
|
Awakes to ignorant knowledge in its acts
|
The secret power in the inconscient depths,
|
Compelling the blinded Godhead to emerge,
|
Determining Necessity's nude dance
|
As she passes through the circuit of the hours
|
And vanishes from the chase of finite eyes
|
Down circling vistas of aeonic Time.
|
The unseizable forces of the cosmic whirl
|
Bear in their bacchant limbs the fixity
|
Of an original foresight that is Fate.
|
Even Nature's ignorance is Truth's instrument;
|
Our struggling ego cannot change her course:
|
Yet is it a conscious power that moves in us,
|
A seed-idea is parent of our acts
|
And destiny the unrecognised child of Will.
|
Infallibly by Truth's directing gaze
|
All creatures here their secret self disclose,
|
Forced to become what in themselves they hide.
|
For He who Is grows manifest in the years
|
And the slow Godhead shut within the cell
|
Climbs from the plasm to immortality.
|
But hidden, but denied to mortal grasp,
|
Mystic, ineffable is the spirit's truth,
|
Unspoken, caught only by the spirit's eye.
|
When naked of ego and mind it hears the Voice;
|
It looks through light to ever greater light
|
And sees Eternity ensphering Life.
|
This greater Truth is foreign to our thoughts;
|
Where a free Wisdom works, they seek for a rule;
|
Or we only see a tripping game of Chance
|
Or a labour in chains forced by bound Nature's law,
|
An absolutism of dumb unthinking Power.
|
Audacious in their sense of God-born strength
|
These dared to grasp with their thought Truth's absolute;
|
CANTO XI: The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Mind
|
By an abstract purity of godless sight,
|
By a percept nude, intolerant of forms,
|
They brought to Mind what Mind could never reach
|
And hoped to conquer Truth's supernal base.
|
A stripped imperative of conceptual phrase
|
Architectonic and inevitable
|
Translated the unthinkable into thought:
|
A silver-winged fire of naked subtle sense,
|
An ear of mind withdrawn from the outward's rhymes
|
Discovered the seed-sounds of the eternal Word,
|
The rhythm and music heard that built the worlds,
|
And seized in things the bodiless Will to be.
|
The Illimitable they measured with number's rods
|
And traced the last formula of limited things,
|
In transparent systems bodied termless truths,
|
The Timeless made accountable to Time
|
And valued the incommensurable Supreme.
|
To park and hedge the ungrasped infinitudes
|
They erected absolute walls of thought and speech
|
And made a vacuum to hold the One.
|
In their sight they drove towards an empty peak,
|
A mighty space of cold and sunlit air.
|
To unify their task, excluding life
|
Which cannot bear the nakedness of the Vast,
|
They made a cipher of a multitude,
|
In negation found the meaning of the All
|
And in nothingness the absolute positive.
|
A single law simplessed the cosmic theme,
|
Compressing Nature into a formula;
|
Their titan labour made all knowledge one,
|
A mental algebra of the Spirit's ways,
|
An abstract of the living Divinity.
|
Here the mind's wisdom stopped; it felt complete;
|
For nothing more was left to think or know:
|
In a spiritual zero it sat throned
|
And took its vast silence for the Ineffable.
|
This was the play of the bright gods of Thought.
|
Attracting into time the timeless Light,
|
Imprisoning eternity in the hours,
|
This they have planned, to snare the feet of Truth
|
In an aureate net of concept and of phrase
|
And keep her captive for the thinker's joy
|
In his little world built of immortal dreams:
|
There must she dwell mured in the human mind,
|
An empress prisoner in her subject's house,
|
Adored and pure and still on his heart's throne,
|
His splendid property cherished and apart
|
In the wall of silence of his secret muse,
|
Immaculate in white virginity,
|
The same for ever and for ever one,
|
His worshipped changeless Goddess through all time.
|
Or else, a faithful consort of his mind
|
Assenting to his nature and his will,
|
She sanctions and inspires his words and acts
|
Prolonging their resonance through the listening years,
|
Companion and recorder of his march
|
Crossing a brilliant tract of thought and life
|
Carved out of the eternity of Time.
|
A witness to his high triumphant star,
|
Her godhead servitor to a crowned Idea,
|
He shall dominate by her a prostrate world;
|
A warrant for his deeds and his beliefs,
|
She attests his right divine to lead and rule.
|
Or as a lover clasps his one beloved,
|
Godhead of his life's worship and desire,
|
Icon of his heart's sole idolatry,
|
She now is his and must live for him alone:
|
She has invaded him with her sudden bliss,
|
An exhaustless marvel in his happy grasp,
|
An allurement, a caught ravishing miracle.
|
Her now he claims after long rapt pursuit,
|
The one joy of his body and his soul:
|
CANTO XI: The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Mind
|
Inescapable is her divine appeal,
|
Her immense possession an undying thrill,
|
An intoxication and an ecstasy:
|
The passion of her self-revealing moods,
|
A heavenly glory and variety,
|
Makes ever new her body to his eyes,
|
Or else repeats the first enchantment's touch,
|
The luminous rapture of her mystic breasts
|
And beautiful vibrant limbs a living field
|
Of throbbing new discovery without end.
|
A new beginning flowers in word and laugh,
|
A new charm brings back the old extreme delight:
|
He is lost in her, she is his heaven here.
|
Truth smiled upon the gracious golden game.
|
Out of her hushed eternal spaces leaned
|
The great and boundless Goddess feigned to yield
|
The sunlit sweetness of her secrecies.
|
Incarnating her beauty in his clasp
|
She gave for a brief kiss her immortal lips
|
And drew to her bosom one glorified mortal head:
|
She made earth her home, for whom heaven was too small.
|
In a human breast her occult presence lived;
|
He carved from his own self his figure of her:
|
She shaped her body to a mind's embrace.
|
Into thought's narrow limits she has come;
|
Her greatness she has suffered to be pressed
|
Into the little cabin of the Idea,
|
The closed room of a lonely thinker's grasp:
|
She has lowered her heights to the stature of our souls
|
And dazzled our lids with her celestial gaze.
|
Thus each is satisfied with his high gain
|
And thinks himself beyond mortality blest,
|
A king of truth upon his separate throne.
|
To her possessor in the field of Time
|
A single splendour caught from her glory seems
|
The one true light, her beauty's glowing whole.
|
But thought nor word can seize eternal Truth:
|
The whole world lives in a lonely ray of her sun.
|
In our thinking's close and narrow lamp-lit house
|
The vanity of our shut mortal mind
|
Dreams that the chains of thought have made her ours;
|
But only we play with our own brilliant bonds;
|
Tying her down, it is ourselves we tie.
|
In our hypnosis by one luminous point
|
We see not what small figure of her we hold;
|
We feel not her inspiring boundlessness,
|
We share not her immortal liberty.
|
Thus is it even with the seer and sage;
|
For still the human limits the divine:
|
Out of our thoughts we must leap up to sight,
|
Brea the her divine illimitable air,
|
Her simple vast supremacy confess,
|
Dare to surrender to her absolute.
|
Then the Unmanifest reflects his form
|
In the still mind as in a living glass;
|
The timeless Ray descends into our hearts
|
And we are rapt into eternity.
|
For Truth is wider, greater than her forms.
|
A thousand icons they have made of her
|
And find her in the idols they adore;
|
But she remains herself and infinite.
|
The Heavens of the Ideal
|
ALWAYS the Ideal beckoned from afar.
|
Awakened by the touch of the Unseen,
|
Deserting the boundary of things achieved,
|
Aspired the strong discoverer, tireless Thought,
|
Revealing at each step a luminous world.
|
It left known summits for the unknown peaks:
|
Impassioned, it sought the lone unrealised Truth,
|
It longed for the Light that knows not death and birth.
|
Each stage of the soul's remote ascent was built
|
Into a constant heaven felt always here.
|
At each pace of the journey marvellous
|
A new degree of wonder and of bliss,
|
A new rung formed in Being's mighty stair,
|
A great wide step trembling with jewelled fire
|
As if a burning spirit quivered there
|
Upholding with his flame the immortal hope,
|
As if a radiant God had given his soul
|
That he might feel the tread of pilgrim feet
|
Mounting in haste to the Eternal's house.
|
At either end of each effulgent stair
|
The heavens of the ideal Mind were seen
|
In a blue lucency of dreaming Space
|
Like strips of brilliant sky clinging to the moon.
|
On one side glimmered hue on floating hue,
|
A glory of sunrise breaking on the soul,
|
In a tremulous rapture of the heart's insight
|
And the spontaneous bliss that beauty gives,
|
The lovely kingdoms of the deathless Rose.
|
Above the spirit cased in mortal sense
|
Are superconscious realms of heavenly peace,
|
Below, the Inconscient's sullen dim abyss,
|
Between, behind our life, the deathless Rose.
|
Across the covert air the spirit breathes,
|
A body of the cosmic beauty and joy
|
Unseen, unguessed by the blind suffering world,
|
Climbing from Nature's deep surrendered heart
|
It blooms for ever at the feet of God,
|
Fed by life's sacrificial mysteries.
|
Here too its bud is born in human breasts;
|
Then by a touch, a presence or a voice
|
The world is turned into a temple ground
|
And all discloses the unknown Beloved.
|
In an outburst of heavenly joy and ease
|
Life yields to the divinity within
|
And gives the rapture-offering of its all,
|
And the soul opens to felicity.
|
A bliss is felt that never can wholly cease,
|
A sudden mystery of secret Grace
|
Flowers goldening our earth of red desire.
|
All the high gods who hid their visages
|
From the soiled passionate ritual of our hopes,
|
Reveal their names and their undying powers.
|
A fiery stillness wakes the slumbering cells,
|
A passion of the flesh becoming spirit,
|
And marvellously is fulfilled at last
|
The miracle for which our life was made.
|
A flame in a white voiceless cupola
|
Is seen and faces of immortal light,
|
The radiant limbs that know not birth and death,
|
The breasts that suckle the first-born of the Sun,
|
The wings that crowd thought's ardent silences,
|
The eyes that look into spiritual Space.
|
Our hidden centres of celestial force
|
Open like flowers to a heavenly atmosphere;
|
Mind pauses thrilled with the supernal Ray,
|
And even this transient body then can feel
|
Ideal love and flawless happiness
|
CANTO XII: The Heavens of the Ideal
|
And laughter of the heart's sweetness and delight
|
Freed from the rude and tragic hold of Time,
|
And beauty and the rhythmic feet of the hours.
|
This in high realms touches immortal kind;
|
What here is in the bud has blossomed there.
|
There is the secrecy of the House of Flame,
|
The blaze of godlike thought and golden bliss,
|
The rapt idealism of heavenly sense;
|
There are the wonderful voices, the sun-laugh,
|
A gurgling eddy in rivers of God's joy,
|
And the mysteried vineyards of the gold moon-wine,
|
All the fire and sweetness of which hardly here
|
A brilliant shadow visits mortal life.
|
Although are witnessed there the joys of Time,
|
Pressed on the bosom the Immortal's touch is felt,
|
Heard are the flutings of the Infinite.
|
Here upon earth are early awakenings,
|
Moments that tremble in an air divine,
|
And grown upon the yearning of her soil
|
Time's sun-flowers' gaze at gold Eternity:
|
There are the imperishable beatitudes.
|
A million lotuses swaying on one stem,
|
World after coloured and ecstatic world
|
Climbs towards some far unseen epiphany.
|
On the other side of the eternal stairs
|
The mighty kingdoms of the deathless Flame
|
Aspired to reach the Being's absolutes.
|
Out of the sorrow and darkness of the world,
|
Out of the depths where life and thought are tombed,
|
Lonely mounts up to heaven the deathless Flame.
|
In a veiled Nature's hallowed secrecies
|
It burns for ever on the altar Mind,
|
Its priests the souls of dedicated gods,
|
Humanity its house of sacrifice.
|
Once kindled, never can its flamings cease.
|
A fire along the mystic paths of earth,
|
It rises through the mortal's hemisphere,
|
Till borne by runners of the Day and Dusk
|
It enters the occult eternal Light
|
And clambers whitening to the invisible Throne.
|
Its worlds are steps of an ascending Force:
|
A dream of giant contours, titan lines,
|
Homes of unfallen and illumined Might,
|
Heavens of unchanging Good pure and unborn,
|
Heights of the grandeur of Truth's ageless ray,
|
As in a symbol sky they start to view
|
And call our souls into a vaster air.
|
On their summits they bear up the sleepless Flame;
|
Dreaming of a mysterious Beyond,
|
Transcendent of the paths of Fate and Time,
|
They point above themselves with index peaks
|
Through a pale-sapphire ether of god-mind
|
Towards some gold Infinite's apocalypse.
|
A thunder rolling mid the hills of God,
|
Tireless, severe is their tremendous Voice:
|
Exceeding us, to exceed ourselves they call
|
And bid us rise incessantly above.
|
Far from our eager reach those summits live,
|
Too lofty for our mortal strength and height,
|
Hardly in a dire ecstasy of toil
|
Climbed by the spirit's naked athlete will.
|
Austere, intolerant they claim from us
|
Efforts too lasting for our mortal nerve
|
Our hearts cannot cleave to nor our flesh support;
|
Only the Eternal's strength in us can dare
|
To attempt the immense adventure of that climb
|
And the sacrifice of all we cherish here.
|
Our human knowledge is a candle burnt
|
On a dim altar to a sun-vast Truth;
|
Man's virtue, a coarse-spun ill-fitting dress,
|
Apparels wooden images of Good;
|
Passionate and blinded, bleeding, stained with mire
|
CANTO XII: The Heavens of the Ideal
|
His energy stumbles towards a deathless Force.
|
An imperfection dogs our highest strength;
|
Portions and pale reflections are our share.
|
Happy the worlds that have not felt our fall,
|
Where Will is one with Truth and Good with Power;
|
Impoverished not by earth-mind's indigence,
|
They keep God's natural breath of mightiness,
|
His bare spontaneous swift intensities;
|
There is his great transparent mirror, Self,
|
And there his sovereign autarchy of bliss
|
In which immortal natures have their part,
|
Heirs and cosharers of divinity.
|
He through the Ideal's kingdoms moved at will,
|
Accepted their beauty and their greatness bore,
|
Partook of the glories of their wonder fields,
|
But passed nor stayed beneath their splendour's rule.
|
All there was an intense but partial light.
|
In each a seraph-winged high-browed Idea
|
United all knowledge by one master thought,
|
Persuaded all action to one golden sense,
|
All powers subjected to a single power
|
And made a world where it could reign alone,
|
An absolute ideal's perfect home.
|
Insignia of their victory and their faith,
|
They offered to the Traveller at their gates
|
A quenchless flame or an unfading flower,
|
Emblem of a high kingdom's privilege.
|
A glorious shining Angel of the Way
|
Presented to the seeking of the soul
|
The sweetness and the might of an idea,
|
Each deemed Truth's intimate fount and summit force,
|
The heart of the meaning of the universe,
|
Perfection's key, passport to Paradise.
|
Yet were there regions where these absolutes met
|
And made a circle of bliss with married hands;
|
Light stood embraced by light, fire wedded fire,
|
But none in the other would his body lose
|
To find his soul in the world's single Soul,
|
A multiplied rapture of infinity.
|
Onward he passed to a diviner sphere:
|
There, joined in a common greatness, light and bliss,
|
All high and beautiful and desirable powers
|
Forgetting their difference and their separate reign
|
Become a single multitudinous whole.
|
Above the parting of the roads of Time,
|
Above the Silence and its thousandfold Word,
|
In the immutable and inviolate Truth
|
For ever united and inseparable,
|
The radiant children of Eternity dwell
|
On the wide spirit height where all are one.
|
In the Self of Mind
|
AT LAST there came a bare indifferent sky
|
Where Silence listened to the cosmic Voice,
|
But answered nothing to a million calls;
|
The soul's endless question met with no response.
|
An abrupt conclusion ended eager hopes,
|
A deep cessation in a mighty calm,
|
A finis-line on the last page of thought
|
And a margin and a blank of wordless peace.
|
There paused the climbing hierarchy of worlds.
|
He stood on a wide arc of summit Space
|
Alone with an enormous Self of Mind
|
Which held all life in a corner of its vasts.
|
Omnipotent, immobile and aloof,
|
In the world which sprang from it, it took no part:
|
It gave no heed to the paeans of victory,
|
It was indifferent to its own defeats,
|
It heard the cry of grief and made no sign;
|
Impartial fell its gaze on evil and good,
|
It saw destruction come and did not move.
|
An equal Cause of things, a lonely Seer
|
And Master of its multitude of forms,
|
It acted not but bore all thoughts and deeds,
|
The witness Lord of Nature's myriad acts
|
Consenting to the movements of her Force.
|
His mind reflected this vast quietism.
|
This witness hush is the Thinker's secret base:
|
Hidden in silent depths the word is formed,
|
From hidden silences the act is born
|
Into the voiceful mind, the labouring world;
|
In secrecy wraps the seed the Eternal sows
|
Silence, the mystic birthplace of the soul.
|
In God's supreme withdrawn and timeless hush
|
A seeing Self and potent Energy met;
|
The Silence knew itself and thought took form:
|
Self-made from the dual power creation rose.
|
In the still self he lived and it in him;
|
Its mute immemorable listening depths,
|
Its vastness and its stillness were his own;
|
One being with it he grew wide, powerful, free.
|
Apart, unbound, he looked on all things done.
|
As one who builds his own imagined scenes
|
And loses not himself in what he sees,
|
Spectator of a drama self-conceived,
|
He looked on the world and watched its motive thoughts
|
With the burden of luminous prophecy in their eyes,
|
Its forces with their feet of wind and fire
|
Arisen from the dumbness in his soul.
|
All now he seemed to understand and know;
|
Desire came not nor any gust of will,
|
The great perturbed inquirer lost his task;
|
Nothing was asked nor wanted any more.
|
There he could stay, the Self, the Silence won:
|
His soul had peace, it knew the cosmic Whole.
|
Then suddenly a luminous finger fell
|
On all things seen or touched or heard or felt
|
And showed his mind that nothing could be known;
|
That must be reached from which all knowledge comes.
|
The sceptic Ray disrupted all that seems
|
And smote at the very roots of thought and sense.
|
In a universe of Nescience they have grown,
|
Aspiring towards a superconscient Sun,
|
Playing in shine and rain from heavenlier skies
|
They never can win however high their reach
|
Or overpass however keen their probe.
|
A doubt corroded even the means to think,
|
Distrust was thrown upon Mind's instruments;
|
All that it takes for reality's shining coin,
|
CANTO XIII: In the Self of Mind
|
Proved fact, fixed inference, deduction clear,
|
Firm theory, assured significance,
|
Appeared as frauds upon Time's credit bank
|
Or assets valueless in Truth's treasury.
|
An Ignorance on an uneasy throne
|
Travestied with a fortuitous sovereignty
|
A figure of knowledge garbed in dubious words
|
And tinsel thought-forms brightly inadequate.
|
A labourer in the dark dazzled by half-light,
|
What it knew was an image in a broken glass,
|
What it saw was real but its sight untrue.
|
All the ideas in its vast repertory
|
Were like the mutterings of a transient cloud
|
That spent itself in sound and left no trace.
|
A frail house hanging in uncertain air,
|
The thin ingenious web round which it moves,
|
Put out awhile on the tree of the universe,
|
And gathered up into itself again,
|
Was only a trap to catch life's insect food,
|
Winged thoughts that flutter fragile in brief light
|
But dead, once captured in fixed forms of mind,
|
Aims puny but looming large in man's small scale,
|
Flickers of imagination's brilliant gauze
|
And cobweb-wrapped beliefs alive no more.
|
The magic hut of built-up certitudes
|
Made out of glittering dust and bright moonshine
|
In which it shrines its image of the Real,
|
Collapsed into the Nescience whence it rose.
|
Only a gleam was there of symbol facts
|
That shroud the mystery lurking in their glow,
|
And falsehoods based on hidden realities
|
By which they live until they fall from Time.
|
Our mind is a house haunted by the slain past,
|
Ideas soon mummified, ghosts of old truths,
|
God's spontaneities tied with formal strings
|
And packed into drawers of reason's trim bureau,
|
A grave of great lost opportunities,
|
Or an office for misuse of soul and life
|
And all the waste man makes of heaven's gifts
|
And all his squanderings of Nature's store,
|
A stage for the comedy of Ignorance.
|
The world seemed a long aeonic failure's scene:
|
All sterile grew, no base was left secure.
|
Assailed by the edge of the convicting beam
|
The builder Reason lost her confidence
|
In the successful sleight and turn of thought
|
That makes the soul the prisoner of a phrase.
|
Its highest wisdom was a brilliant guess,
|
Its mighty structured science of the worlds
|
A passing light on being's surfaces.
|
There was nothing there but a schema drawn by sense,
|
A substitute for eternal mysteries,
|
A scrawl figure of reality, a plan
|
And elevation by the architect Word
|
Imposed upon the semblances of Time.
|
Existence' self was shadowed by a doubt;
|
Almost it seemed a lotus-leaf afloat
|
On a nude pool of cosmic Nothingness.
|
This great spectator and creator Mind
|
Was only some half-seeing's delegate,
|
A veil that hung between the soul and Light,
|
An idol, not the living body of God.
|
Even the still spirit that looks upon its works
|
Was some pale front of the Unknowable;
|
A shadow seemed the wide and witness Self,
|
Its liberation and immobile calm
|
A void recoil of being from Time-made things,
|
Not the self-vision of Eternity.
|
Deep peace was there, but not the nameless Force:
|
Our sweet and mighty Mother was not there
|
Who gathers to her bosom her children's lives,
|
Her clasp that takes the world into her arms
|
CANTO XIII: In the Self of Mind
|
In the fathomless rapture of the Infinite,
|
The Bliss that is creation's splendid grain
|
Or the white passion of God-ecstasy
|
That laughs in the blaze of the boundless heart of Love.
|
A greater Spirit than the Self of Mind
|
Must answer to the questioning of his soul.
|
For here was no firm clue and no sure road;
|
High-climbing pathways ceased in the unknown;
|
An artist Sight constructed the Beyond
|
In contrary patterns and conflicting hues;
|
A part-experience fragmented the Whole.
|
He looked above, but all was blank and still:
|
A sapphire firmament of abstract Thought
|
Escaped into a formless Vacancy.
|
He looked below, but all was dark and mute.
|
A noise was heard, between, of thought and prayer,
|
A strife, a labour without end or pause;
|
A vain and ignorant seeking raised its voice.
|
A rumour and a movement and a call,
|
A foaming mass, a cry innumerable
|
Rolled ever upon the ocean surge of Life
|
Along the coasts of mortal Ignorance.
|
On its unstable and enormous breast
|
Beings and forces, forms, ideas like waves
|
Jostled for figure and supremacy,
|
And rose and sank and rose again in Time;
|
And at the bottom of the sleepless stir,
|
A Nothingness parent of the struggling worlds,
|
A huge creator Death, a mystic Void,
|
For ever sustaining the irrational cry,
|
For ever excluding the supernal Word,
|
Motionless, refusing question and response,
|
Reposed beneath the voices and the march
|
The dim Inconscient's dumb incertitude.
|
Two firmaments of darkness and of light
|
Opposed their limits to the spirit's walk;
|
It moved veiled in from Self's infinity
|
In a world of beings and momentary events
|
Where all must die to live and live to die.
|
Immortal by renewed mortality,
|
It wandered in the spiral of its acts
|
Or ran around the cycles of its thought,
|
Yet was no more than its original self
|
And knew no more than when it first began.
|
To be was a prison, extinction the escape.
|
The World-Soul
|
A COVERT answer to his seeking came.
|
In a far shimmering background of Mind-Space
|
A glowing mouth was seen, a luminous shaft;
|
A recluse gate it seemed, musing on joy,
|
A veiled retreat and escape to mystery.
|
Away from the unsatisfied surface world
|
It fled into the bosom of the unknown,
|
A well, a tunnel of the depths of God.
|
It plunged as if a mystic groove of hope
|
Through many layers of formless voiceless self
|
To reach the last profound of the world's heart,
|
And from that heart there surged a wordless call
|
Pleading with some still impenetrable Mind,
|
Voicing some passionate unseen desire.
|
As if a beckoning finger of secrecy
|
Outstretched into a crystal mood of air,
|
Pointing at him from some near hidden depth,
|
As if a message from the world's deep soul,
|
An intimation of a lurking joy
|
That flowed out from a cup of brooding bliss,
|
There shimmered stealing out into the Mind
|
A mute and quivering ecstasy of light,
|
A passion and delicacy of roseate fire.
|
As one drawn to his lost spiritual home
|
Feels now the closeness of a waiting love,
|
Into a passage dim and tremulous
|
That clasped him in from day and night's pursuit,
|
He travelled led by a mysterious sound.
|
A murmur multitudinous and lone,
|
All sounds it was in turn, yet still the same.
|
A hidden call to unforeseen delight
|
In the summoning voice of one long-known, well-loved,
|
But nameless to the unremembering mind,
|
It led to rapture back the truant heart.
|
The immortal cry ravished the captive ear.
|
Then, lowering its imperious mystery,
|
It sank to a whisper circling round the soul.
|
It seemed the yearning of a lonely flute
|
That roamed along the shores of memory
|
And filled the eyes with tears of longing joy.
|
A cricket's rash and fiery single note,
|
It marked with shrill melody night's moonless hush
|
And beat upon a nerve of mystic sleep
|
Its high insistent magical reveille.
|
A jingling silver laugh of anklet bells
|
Travelled the roads of a solitary heart;
|
Its dance solaced an eternal loneliness:
|
An old forgotten sweetness sobbing came.
|
Or from a far harmonious distance heard
|
The tinkling pace of a long caravan
|
It seemed at times, or a vast forest's hymn,
|
The solemn reminder of a temple gong,
|
A bee-croon honey-drunk in summer isles
|
Ardent with ecstasy in a slumbrous noon,
|
Or the far anthem of a pilgrim sea.
|
An incense floated in the quivering air,
|
A mystic happiness trembled in the breast
|
As if the invisible Beloved had come
|
Assuming the sudden loveliness of a face
|
And close glad hands could seize his fugitive feet
|
And the world change with the beauty of a smile.
|
Into a wonderful bodiless realm he came,
|
The home of a passion without name or voice,
|
A depth he felt answering to every height,
|
A nook was found that could embrace all worlds,
|
A point that was the conscious knot of Space,
|
An hour eternal in the heart of Time.
|
CANTO XIV: The World-Soul
|
The silent Soul of all the world was there:
|
A Being lived, a Presence and a Power,
|
A single Person who was himself and all
|
And cherished Nature's sweet and dangerous throbs
|
Transfigured into beats divine and pure.
|
One who could love without return for love,
|
Meeting and turning to the best the worst,
|
It healed the bitter cruelties of earth,
|
Transforming all experience to delight;
|
Intervening in the sorrowful paths of birth
|
It rocked the cradle of the cosmic Child
|
And stilled all weeping with its hand of joy;
|
It led things evil towards their secret good,
|
It turned racked falsehood into happy truth;
|
Its power was to reveal divinity.
|
Infinite, coeval with the mind of God,
|
It bore within itself a seed, a flame,
|
A seed from which the Eternal is new-born,
|
A flame that cancels death in mortal things.
|
All grew to all kindred and self and near;
|
The intimacy of God was everywhere,
|
No veil was felt, no brute barrier inert,
|
Distance could not divide, Time could not change.
|
A fire of passion burned in spirit-depths,
|
A constant touch of sweetness linked all hearts,
|
The throb of one adoration's single bliss
|
In a rapt ether of undying love.
|
An inner happiness abode in all,
|
A sense of universal harmonies,
|
A measureless secure eternity
|
Of truth and beauty and good and joy made one.
|
Here was the welling core of finite life;
|
A formless spirit became the soul of form.
|
All there was soul or made of sheer soul-stuff;
|
A sky of soul covered a deep soul-ground.
|
All here was known by a spiritual sense:
|
Thought was not there but a knowledge near and one
|
Seized on all things by a moved identity,
|
A sympathy of self with other selves,
|
The touch of consciousness on consciousness
|
And being's look on being with inmost gaze
|
And heart laid bare to heart without walls of speech
|
And the unanimity of seeing minds
|
In myriad forms luminous with the one God.
|
Life was not there, but an impassioned force,
|
Finer than fineness, deeper than the deeps,
|
Felt as a subtle and spiritual power,
|
A quivering out from soul to answering soul,
|
A mystic movement, a close influence,
|
A free and happy and intense approach
|
Of being to being with no screen or check,
|
Without which life and love could never have been.
|
Body was not there, for bodies were needed not,
|
The soul itself was its own deathless form
|
And met at once the touch of other souls
|
Close, blissful, concrete, wonderfully true.
|
As when one walks in sleep through luminous dreams
|
And, conscious, knows the truth their figures mean,
|
Here where reality was its own dream,
|
He knew things by their soul and not their shape:
|
As those who have lived long made one in love
|
Need word nor sign for heart's reply to heart,
|
He met and communed without bar of speech
|
With beings unveiled by a material frame.
|
There was a strange spiritual scenery,
|
A loveliness of lakes and streams and hills,
|
A flow, a fixity in a soul-space,
|
And plains and valleys, stretches of soul-joy,
|
And gardens that were flower-tracts of the spirit,
|
Its meditations of tinged reverie.
|
Air was the breath of a pure infinite.
|
CANTO XIV: The World-Soul
|
A fragrance wandered in a coloured haze
|
As if the scent and hue of all sweet flowers
|
Had mingled to copy heaven's atmosphere.
|
Appealing to the soul and not the eye
|
Beauty lived there at home in her own house,
|
There all was beautiful by its own right
|
And needed not the splendour of a robe.
|
All objects were like bodies of the Gods,
|
A spirit symbol environing a soul,
|
For world and self were one reality.
|
Immersed in voiceless internatal trance
|
The beings that once wore forms on earth sat there
|
In shining chambers of spiritual sleep.
|
Passed were the pillar-posts of birth and death,
|
Passed was their little scene of symbol deeds,
|
Passed were the heavens and hells of their long road;
|
They had returned into the world's deep soul.
|
All now was gathered into pregnant rest:
|
Person and nature suffered a slumber change.
|
In trance they gathered back their bygone selves,
|
In a background memory's foreseeing muse
|
Prophetic of new personality
|
Arranged the map of their coming destiny's course:
|
Heirs of their past, their future's discoverers,
|
Electors of their own self-chosen lot,
|
They waited for the adventure of new life.
|
A Person persistent through the lapse of worlds,
|
Although the same for ever in many shapes
|
By the outward mind unrecognisable,
|
Assuming names unknown in unknown climes
|
Imprints through Time upon the earth's worn page
|
A growing figure of its secret self,
|
And learns by experience what the spirit knew,
|
Till it can see its truth alive and God.
|
Once more they must face the problem-game of birth,
|
The soul's experiment of joy and grief
|
And thought and impulse lighting the blind act,
|
And venture on the roads of circumstance,
|
Through inner movements and external scenes
|
Travelling to self across the forms of things.
|
Into creation's centre he had come.
|
The spirit wandering from state to state
|
Finds here the silence of its starting-point
|
In the formless force and the still fixity
|
And brooding passion of the world of Soul.
|
All that is made and once again unmade,
|
The calm persistent vision of the One
|
Inevitably re-makes, it lives anew:
|
Forces and lives and beings and ideas
|
Are taken into the stillness for a while;
|
There they remould their purpose and their drift,
|
Recast their nature and re-form their shape.
|
Ever they change and changing ever grow,
|
And passing through a fruitful stage of death
|
And after long reconstituting sleep
|
Resume their place in the process of the Gods
|
Until their work in cosmic Time is done.
|
Here was the fashioning chamber of the worlds.
|
An interval was left twixt act and act,
|
Twixt birth and birth, twixt dream and waking dream,
|
A pause that gave new strength to do and be.
|
Beyond were regions of delight and peace,
|
Mute birthplaces of light and hope and love,
|
And cradles of heavenly rapture and repose.
|
In a slumber of the voices of the world
|
He of the eternal moment grew aware;
|
His knowledge stripped bare of the garbs of sense
|
Knew by identity without thought or word;
|
His being saw itself without its veils,
|
Life's line fell from the spirit's infinity.
|
Along a road of pure interior light,
|
CANTO XIV: The World-Soul
|
Alone between tremendous Presences,
|
Under the watching eyes of nameless Gods,
|
His soul passed on, a single conscious power,
|
Towards the end which ever begins again,
|
Approaching through a stillness dumb and calm
|
To the source of all things human and divine.
|
There he beheld in their mighty union's poise
|
The figure of the deathless Two-in-One,
|
A single being in two bodies clasped,
|
A diarchy of two united souls,
|
Seated absorbed in deep creative joy;
|
Their trance of bliss sustained the mobile world.
|
Behind them in a morning dusk One stood
|
Who brought them forth from the Unknowable.
|
Ever disguised she awaits the seeking spirit;
|
Watcher on the supreme unreachable peaks,
|
Guide of the traveller of the unseen paths,
|
She guards the austere approach to the Alone.
|
At the beginning of each far-spread plane
|
Pervading with her power the cosmic suns
|
She reigns, inspirer of its multiple works
|
And thinker of the symbol of its scene.
|
Above them all she stands supporting all,
|
The sole omnipotent Goddess ever-veiled
|
Of whom the world is the inscrutable mask;
|
The ages are the footfalls of her tread,
|
Their happenings the figure of her thoughts,
|
And all creation is her endless act.
|
His spirit was made a vessel of her force;
|
Mute in the fathomless passion of his will
|
He outstretched to her his folded hands of prayer.
|
Then in a sovereign answer to his heart
|
A gesture came as of worlds thrown away,
|
And from her raiment's lustrous mystery raised
|
One arm half-parted the eternal veil.
|
A light appeared still and imperishable.
|
Attracted to the large and luminous depths
|
Of the ravishing enigma of her eyes,
|
He saw the mystic outline of a face.
|
Overwhelmed by her implacable light and bliss,
|
An atom of her illimitable self
|
Mastered by the honey and lightning of her power,
|
Tossed towards the shores of her ocean-ecstasy,
|
Drunk with a deep golden spiritual wine,
|
He cast from the rent stillness of his soul
|
A cry of adoration and desire
|
And the surrender of his boundless mind
|
And the self-giving of his silent heart.
|
He fell down at her feet unconscious, prone.
|
The Kingdoms of the Greater Knowledge
|
AFTER a measureless moment of the soul
|
Again returning to these surface fields
|
Out of the timeless depths where he had sunk,
|
He heard once more the slow tread of the hours.
|
All once perceived and lived was far away;
|
Himself was to himself his only scene.
|
Above the Witness and his universe
|
He stood in a realm of boundless silences
|
Awaiting the Voice that spoke and built the worlds.
|
A light was round him wide and absolute,
|
A diamond purity of eternal sight;
|
A consciousness lay still, devoid of forms,
|
Free, wordless, uncoerced by sign or rule,
|
For ever content with only being and bliss;
|
A sheer existence lived in its own peace
|
On the single spirit's bare and infinite ground.
|
Out of the sphere of Mind he had arisen,
|
He had left the reign of Nature's hues and shades;
|
He dwelt in his self's colourless purity.
|
It was a plane of undetermined spirit
|
That could be a zero or round sum of things,
|
A state in which all ceased and all began.
|
All it became that figures the absolute,
|
A high vast peak whence Spirit could see the worlds,
|
Calm's wide epiphany, wisdom's mute home,
|
A lonely station of Omniscience,
|
A diving-board of the Eternal's power,
|
A white floor in the house of All-Delight.
|
Here came the thought that passes beyond Thought,
|
Here the still Voice which our listening cannot hear,
|
The Knowledge by which the knower is the known,
|
The Love in which beloved and lover are one.
|
All stood in an original plenitude,
|
Hushed and fulfilled before they could create
|
The glorious dream of their universal acts;
|
Here was engendered the spiritual birth,
|
Here closed the finite's crawl to the Infinite.
|
A thousand roads leaped into Eternity
|
Or singing ran to meet God's veilless face.
|
The Known released him from its limiting chain;
|
He knocked at the doors of the Unknowable.
|
Thence gazing with an immeasurable outlook
|
One with self's inlook into its own pure vasts,
|
He saw the splendour of the spirit's realms,
|
The greatness and wonder of its boundless works,
|
The power and passion leaping from its calm,
|
The rapture of its movement and its rest,
|
And its fire-sweet miracle of transcendent life,
|
The million-pointing undivided grasp
|
Of its vision of one same stupendous All,
|
Its inexhaustible acts in a timeless Time,
|
A space that is its own infinity.
|
A glorious multiple of one radiant Self,
|
Answering to joy with joy, to love with love,
|
All there were moving mansions of God-bliss;
|
Eternal and unique they lived the One.
|
There forces are great outbursts of God's truth
|
And objects are its pure spiritual shapes;
|
Spirit no more is hid from its own view,
|
All sentience is a sea of happiness
|
And all creation is an act of light.
|
Out of the neutral silence of his soul
|
He passed to its fields of puissance and of calm
|
And saw the Powers that stand above the world,
|
Traversed the realms of the supreme Idea
|
And sought the summit of created things
|
And the almighty source of cosmic change.
|
CANTO XV: The Kingdoms of the Greater Knowledge
|
There Knowledge called him to her mystic peaks
|
Where thought is held in a vast internal sense
|
And feeling swims across a sea of peace
|
And vision climbs beyond the reach of Time.
|
An equal of the first creator seers,
|
Accompanied by an all-revealing light
|
He moved through regions of transcendent Truth
|
Inward, immense, innumerably one.
|
There distance was his own huge spirit's extent;
|
Delivered from the fictions of the mind
|
Time's triple dividing step baffled no more;
|
Its inevitable and continuous stream,
|
The long flow of its manifesting course,
|
Was held in spirit's single wide regard.
|
A universal beauty showed its face:
|
The invisible deep-fraught significances,
|
Here sheltered behind form's insensible screen,
|
Uncovered to him their deathless harmony
|
And the key to the wonder-book of common things.
|
In their uniting law stood up revealed
|
The multiple measures of the upbuilding force,
|
The lines of the World-Geometer's technique,
|
The enchantments that uphold the cosmic web
|
And the magic underlying simple shapes.
|
On peaks where Silence listens with still heart
|
To the rhythmic metres of the rolling worlds,
|
He served the sessions of the triple Fire.
|
On the rim of two continents of slumber and trance
|
He heard the ever unspoken Reality's voice
|
Awaken revelation's mystic cry,
|
The birthplace found of the sudden infallible Word
|
And lived in the rays of an intuitive Sun.
|
Absolved from the ligaments of death and sleep
|
He rode the lightning seas of cosmic Mind
|
And crossed the ocean of original sound;
|
On the last step to the supernal birth
|
He trod along extinction's narrow edge
|
Near the high verges of eternity,
|
And mounted the gold ridge of the world-dream
|
Between the slayer and the saviour fires;
|
The belt he reached of the unchanging Truth,
|
Met borders of the inexpressible Light
|
And thrilled with the presence of the Ineffable.
|
Above him he saw the flaming Hierarchies,
|
The wings that fold around created Space,
|
The sun-eyed Guardians and the golden Sphinx
|
And the tiered planes and the immutable Lords.
|
A wisdom waiting on Omniscience
|
Sat voiceless in a vast passivity;
|
It judged not, measured not, nor strove to know,
|
But listened for the veiled all-seeing Thought
|
And the burden of a calm transcendent Voice.
|
He had reached the top of all that can be known:
|
His sight surpassed creation's head and base;
|
Ablaze the triple heavens revealed their suns,
|
The obscure Abyss exposed its monstrous rule.
|
All but the ultimate Mystery was his field,
|
Almost the Unknowable disclosed its rim.
|
His self's infinities began to emerge,
|
The hidden universes cried to him;
|
Eternities called to eternities
|
Sending their speechless message still remote.
|
Arisen from the marvel of the depths
|
And burning from the superconscious heights
|
And sweeping in great horizontal gyres
|
A million energies joined and were the One.
|
All flowed immeasurably to one sea:
|
All living forms became its atom homes.
|
A Panergy that harmonised all life
|
Held now existence in its vast control;
|
A portion of that majesty he was made.
|
At will he lived in the unoblivious Ray.
|
CANTO XV: The Kingdoms of the Greater Knowledge
|
In that high realm where no untruth can come,
|
Where all are different and all is one,
|
In the Impersonal's ocean without shore
|
The Person in the World-Spirit anchored rode;
|
It thrilled with the mighty marchings of World-Force,
|
Its acts were the comrades of God's infinite peace.
|
An adjunct glory and a symbol self,
|
The body was delivered to the soul, -
|
An immortal point of power, a block of poise
|
In a cosmicity's wide formless surge,
|
A conscious edge of the Transcendent's might
|
Carving perfection from a bright world-stuff,
|
It figured in it a universe's sense.
|
There consciousness was a close and single weft;
|
The far and near were one in spirit-space,
|
The moments there were pregnant with all time.
|
The superconscient's screen was ripped by thought,
|
Idea rotated symphonies of sight,
|
Sight was a flame-throw from identity;
|
Life was a marvellous journey of the spirit,
|
Feeling a wave from the universal Bliss.
|
In the kingdom of the Spirit's power and light,
|
As if one who arrived out of infinity's womb
|
He came new-born, infant and limitless
|
And grew in the wisdom of the timeless Child;
|
He was a vast that soon became a Sun.
|
A great luminous silence whispered to his heart;
|
His knowledge an inview caught unfathomable,
|
An outview by no brief horizons cut:
|
He thought and felt in all, his gaze had power.
|
He communed with the Incommunicable;
|
Beings of a wider consciousness were his friends,
|
Forms of a larger subtler make drew near;
|
The Gods conversed with him behind Life's veil.
|
Neighbour his being grew to Nature's crests.
|
The primal Energy took him in its arms;
|
His brain was wrapped in overwhelming light,
|
An all-embracing knowledge seized his heart:
|
Thoughts rose in him no earthly mind can hold,
|
Mights played that never coursed through mortal nerves:
|
He scanned the secrets of the Overmind,
|
He bore the rapture of the Oversoul.
|
A borderer of the empire of the Sun,
|
Attuned to the supernal harmonies,
|
He linked creation to the Eternal's sphere.
|
His finite parts approached their absolutes,
|
His actions framed the movements of the Gods,
|
His will took up the reins of cosmic Force.
|
The Pursuit of the Unknowable
|
ALL IS too little that the world can give:
|
Its power and knowledge are the gifts of Time
|
And cannot fill the spirit's sacred thirst.
|
Although of One these forms of greatness are
|
And by its breath of grace our lives abide,
|
Although more near to us than nearness' self,
|
It is some utter truth of what we are;
|
Hidden by its own works, it seemed far-off,
|
Impenetrable, occult, voiceless, obscure.
|
The Presence was lost by which all things have charm,
|
The Glory lacked of which they are dim signs.
|
The world lived on made empty of its Cause,
|
Like love when the beloved's face is gone.
|
The labour to know seemed a vain strife of Mind;
|
All knowledge ended in the Unknowable:
|
The effort to rule seemed a vain pride of Will;
|
A trivial achievement scorned by Time,
|
All power retired into the Omnipotent.
|
A cave of darkness guards the eternal Light.
|
A silence settled on his striving heart;
|
Absolved from the voices of the world's desire,
|
He turned to the Ineffable's timeless call.
|
A Being intimate and unnameable,
|
A wide compelling ecstasy and peace
|
Felt in himself and all and yet ungrasped,
|
Approached and faded from his soul's pursuit
|
As if for ever luring him beyond.
|
Near, it retreated; far, it called him still.
|
Nothing could satisfy but its delight:
|
Its absence left the greatest actions dull,
|
Its presence made the smallest seem divine.
|
When it was there, the heart's abyss was filled;
|
But when the uplifting Deity withdrew,
|
Existence lost its aim in the Inane.
|
The order of the immemorial planes,
|
The godlike fullness of the instruments
|
Were turned to props for an impermanent scene.
|
But who that mightiness was he knew not yet.
|
Impalpable, yet filling all that is,
|
It made and blotted out a million worlds
|
And took and lost a thousand shapes and names.
|
It wore the guise of an indiscernible Vast,
|
Or was a subtle kernel in the soul:
|
A distant greatness left it huge and dim,
|
A mystic closeness shut it sweetly in:
|
It seemed sometimes a figment or a robe
|
And seemed sometimes his own colossal shade.
|
A giant doubt overshadowed his advance.
|
Across a neutral all-supporting Void
|
Whose blankness nursed his lone immortal spirit,
|
Allured towards some recondite Supreme,
|
Aided, coerced by enigmatic Powers,
|
Aspiring and half-sinking and upborne,
|
Invincibly he ascended without pause.
|
Always a signless vague Immensity
|
Brooded, without approach, beyond response,
|
Condemning finite things to nothingness,
|
Fronting him with the incommensurable.
|
Then to the ascent there came a mighty term.
|
A height was reached where nothing made could live,
|
A line where every hope and search must cease
|
Neared some intolerant bare Reality,
|
A zero formed pregnant with boundless change.
|
On a dizzy verge where all disguises fail
|
And human mind must abdicate in Light
|
Or die like a moth in the naked blaze of Truth,
|
He stood compelled to a tremendous choice.
|
CANTO I: The Pursuit of the Unknowable
|
All he had been and all towards which he grew
|
Must now be left behind or else transform
|
Into a self of That which has no name.
|
Alone and fronting an intangible Force
|
Which offered nothing to the grasp of Thought,
|
His spirit faced the adventure of the Inane.
|
Abandoned by the worlds of Form he strove.
|
A fruitful world-wide Ignorance foundered here;
|
Thought's long far-circling journey touched its close
|
And ineffective paused the actor Will.
|
The symbol modes of being helped no more,
|
The structures Nescience builds collapsing failed,
|
And even the spirit that holds the universe
|
Fainted in luminous insufficiency.
|
In an abysmal lapse of all things built
|
Transcending every perishable support
|
And joining at last its mighty origin,
|
The separate self must melt or be reborn
|
Into a Truth beyond the mind's appeal.
|
All glory of outline, sweetness of harmony,
|
Rejected like a grace of trivial notes,
|
Expunged from Being's silence nude, austere,
|
Died into a fine and blissful Nothingness.
|
The Demiurges lost their names and forms,
|
The great schemed worlds that they had planned and wrought
|
Passed, taken and abolished one by one.
|
The universe removed its coloured veil,
|
And at the unimaginable end
|
Of the huge riddle of created things
|
Appeared the far-seen Godhead of the whole,
|
His feet firm-based on Life's stupendous wings,
|
Omnipotent, a lonely seer of Time,
|
Inward, inscrutable, with diamond gaze.
|
Attracted by the unfathomable regard
|
The unsolved slow cycles to their fount returned
|
To rise again from that invisible sea.
|
All from his puissance born was now undone;
|
Nothing remained the cosmic Mind conceives.
|
Eternity prepared to fade and seemed
|
A hue and imposition on the Void,
|
Space was the fluttering of a dream that sank
|
Before its ending into Nothing's deeps.
|
The spirit that dies not and the Godhead's self
|
Seemed myths projected from the Unknowable;
|
From It all sprang, in It is called to cease.
|
But what That was, no thought nor sight could tell.
|
Only a formless Form of self was left,
|
A tenuous ghost of something that had been,
|
The last experience of a lapsing wave
|
Before it sinks into a bourneless sea, -
|
As if it kept even on the brink of Nought
|
Its bare feeling of the ocean whence it came.
|
A Vastness brooded free from sense of Space,
|
An Everlastingness cut off from Time;
|
A strange sublime inalterable Peace
|
Silent rejected from it world and soul.
|
A stark companionless Reality
|
Answered at last to his soul's passionate search:
|
Passionless, wordless, absorbed in its fathomless hush,
|
Keeping the mystery none would ever pierce,
|
It brooded inscrutable and intangible
|
Facing him with its dumb tremendous calm.
|
It had no kinship with the universe:
|
There was no act, no movement in its Vast:
|
Life's question met by its silence died on her lips,
|
The world's effort ceased convicted of ignorance
|
Finding no sanction of supernal Light:
|
There was no mind there with its need to know,
|
There was no heart there with its need to love.
|
All person perished in its namelessness.
|
There was no second, it had no partner or peer;
|
Only itself was real to itself.
|
CANTO I: The Pursuit of the Unknowable
|
A pure existence safe from thought and mood,
|
A consciousness of unshared immortal bliss,
|
It dwelt aloof in its bare infinite,
|
One and unique, unutterably sole.
|
A Being formless, featureless and mute
|
That knew itself by its own timeless self,
|
Aware for ever in its motionless depths,
|
Uncreating, uncreated and unborn,
|
The One by whom all live, who lives by none,
|
An immeasurable luminous secrecy
|
Guarded by the veils of the Unmanifest,
|
Above the changing cosmic interlude
|
Abode supreme, immutably the same,
|
A silent Cause occult, impenetrable, -
|
Infinite, eternal, unthinkable, alone.
|
The Adoration of the Divine Mother
|
A STILLNESS absolute, incommunicable,
|
Meets the sheer self-discovery of the soul;
|
A wall of stillness shuts it from the world,
|
A gulf of stillness swallows up the sense
|
And makes unreal all that mind has known,
|
All that the labouring senses still would weave
|
Prolonging an imaged unreality.
|
Self's vast spiritual silence occupies Space;
|
Only the Inconceivable is left,
|
Only the Nameless without space and time:
|
Abolished is the burdening need of life:
|
Thought falls from us, we cease from joy and grief;
|
The ego is dead; we are freed from being and care,
|
We have done with birth and death and work and fate.
|
O soul, it is too early to rejoice!
|
Thou hast reached the boundless silence of the Self,
|
Thou hast leaped into a glad divine abyss;
|
But where hast thou thrown Self's mission and Self's power?
|
On what dead bank on the Eternal's road?
|
One was within thee who was self and world,
|
What hast thou done for his purpose in the stars?
|
Escape brings not the victory and the crown!
|
Something thou cam'st to do from the Unknown,
|
But nothing is finished and the world goes on
|
Because only half God's cosmic work is done.
|
Only the everlasting No has neared
|
And stared into thy eyes and killed thy heart:
|
But where is the Lover's everlasting Yes,
|
And immortality in the secret heart,
|
The voice that chants to the creator Fire,
|
The symbolled OM, the great assenting Word,
|
CANTO II: The Adoration of the Divine Mother
|
The bridge between the rapture and the calm,
|
The passion and the beauty of the Bride,
|
The chamber where the glorious enemies kiss,
|
The smile that saves, the golden peak of things?
|
This too is Truth at the mystic fount of Life.
|
A black veil has been lifted; we have seen
|
The mighty shadow of the omniscient Lord;
|
But who has lifted up the veil of light
|
And who has seen the body of the King?
|
The mystery of God's birth and acts remains
|
Leaving unbroken the last chapter's seal,
|
Unsolved the riddle of the unfinished Play;
|
The cosmic Player laughs within his mask,
|
And still the last inviolate secret hides
|
Behind the human glory of a Form,
|
Behind the gold eidolon of a Name.
|
A large white line has figured as a goal,
|
But far beyond the ineffable suntracks blaze:
|
What seemed the source and end was a wide gate,
|
A last bare step into eternity.
|
An eye has opened upon timelessness,
|
Infinity takes back the forms it gave,
|
And through God's darkness or his naked light
|
His million rays return into the Sun.
|
There is a zero sign of the Supreme;
|
Nature left nude and still uncovers God.
|
But in her grandiose nothingness all is there:
|
When her strong garbs are torn away from us,
|
The soul's ignorance is slain but not the soul:
|
The zero covers an immortal face.
|
A high and blank negation is not all,
|
A huge extinction is not God's last word,
|
Life's ultimate sense, the close of being's course,
|
The meaning of this great mysterious world.
|
In absolute silence sleeps an absolute Power.
|
Awaking, it can wake the trance-bound soul
|
And in the ray reveal the parent sun:
|
It can make the world a vessel of Spirit's force,
|
It can fashion in the clay God's perfect shape.
|
To free the self is but one radiant pace;
|
Here to fulfil himself was God's desire.
|
Even while he stood on being's naked edge
|
And all the passion and seeking of his soul
|
Faced their extinction in some featureless Vast,
|
The Presence he yearned for suddenly drew close.
|
Across the silence of the ultimate Calm,
|
Out of a marvellous Transcendence' core,
|
A body of wonder and translucency
|
As if a sweet mystic summary of her self
|
Escaping into the original Bliss
|
Had come enlarged out of eternity,
|
Someone came infinite and absolute.
|
A being of wisdom, power and delight,
|
Even as a mother draws her child to her arms,
|
Took to her breast Nature and world and soul.
|
Abolishing the signless emptiness,
|
Breaking the vacancy and voiceless hush,
|
Piercing the limitless Unknowable,
|
Into the liberty of the motionless depths
|
A beautiful and felicitous lustre stole.
|
The Power, the Light, the Bliss no word can speak
|
Imaged itself in a surprising beam
|
And built a golden passage to his heart
|
Touching through him all longing sentient things.
|
A moment's sweetness of the All-Beautiful
|
Cancelled the vanity of the cosmic whirl.
|
A Nature throbbing with a Heart divine
|
Was felt in the unconscious universe;
|
It made the breath a happy mystery.
|
A love that bore the cross of pain with joy
|
Eudaemonised the sorrow of the world,
|
CANTO II: The Adoration of the Divine Mother
|
Made happy the weight of long unending Time,
|
The secret caught of God's felicity.
|
Affirming in life a hidden ecstasy
|
It held the spirit to its miraculous course;
|
Carrying immortal values to the hours
|
It justified the labour of the suns.
|
For one was there supreme behind the God.
|
A Mother Might brooded upon the world;
|
A Consciousness revealed its marvellous front
|
Transcending all that is, denying none:
|
Imperishable above our fallen heads
|
He felt a rapturous and unstumbling Force.
|
The undying Truth appeared, the enduring Power
|
Of all that here is made and then destroyed,
|
The Mother of all godheads and all strengths
|
Who, mediatrix, binds earth to the Supreme.
|
The Enigma ceased that rules our nature's night,
|
The covering Nescience was unmasked and slain;
|
Its mind of error was stripped off from things
|
And the dull moods of its perverting will.
|
Illumined by her all-seeing identity
|
Knowledge and Ignorance could strive no more;
|
No longer could the titan Opposites,
|
Antagonist poles of the world's artifice,
|
Impose the illusion of their twofold screen
|
Throwing their figures between us and her.
|
The Wisdom was near, disguised by its own works,
|
Of which the darkened universe is the robe.
|
No more existence seemed an aimless fall,
|
Extinction was no more the sole release.
|
The hidden Word was found, the long-sought clue,
|
Revealed was the meaning of our spirit's birth,
|
Condemned to an imperfect body and mind,
|
In the inconscience of material things
|
And the indignity of mortal life.
|
A Heart was felt in the spaces wide and bare,
|
A burning Love from white spiritual founts
|
Annulled the sorrow of the ignorant depths;
|
Suffering was lost in her immortal smile.
|
A Life from beyond grew conqueror here of death;
|
To err no more was natural to mind;
|
Wrong could not come where all was light and love.
|
The Formless and the Formed were joined in her:
|
Immensity was exceeded by a look,
|
A Face revealed the crowded Infinite.
|
Incarnating inexpressibly in her limbs
|
The boundless joy the blind world-forces seek,
|
Her body of beauty mooned the seas of bliss.
|
At the head she stands of birth and toil and fate,
|
In their slow round the cycles turn to her call;
|
Alone her hands can change Time's dragon base.
|
Hers is the mystery the Night conceals;
|
The spirit's alchemist energy is hers;
|
She is the golden bridge, the wonderful fire.
|
The luminous heart of the Unknown is she,
|
A power of silence in the depths of God;
|
She is the Force, the inevitable Word,
|
The magnet of our difficult ascent,
|
The Sun from which we kindle all our suns,
|
The Light that leans from the unrealised Vasts,
|
The joy that beckons from the impossible,
|
The Might of all that never yet came down.
|
All Nature dumbly calls to her alone
|
To heal with her feet the aching throb of life
|
And break the seals on the dim soul of man
|
And kindle her fire in the closed heart of things.
|
All here shall be one day her sweetness' home,
|
All contraries prepare her harmony;
|
Towards her our knowledge climbs, our passion gropes;
|
In her miraculous rapture we shall dwell,
|
Her clasp shall turn to ecstasy our pain.
|
Our self shall be one self with all through her.
|
CANTO II: The Adoration of the Divine Mother
|
In her confirmed because transformed in her,
|
Our life shall find in its fulfilled response
|
Above, the boundless hushed beatitudes,
|
Below, the wonder of the embrace divine.
|
This known as in a thunder-flash of God,
|
The rapture of things eternal filled his limbs;
|
Amazement fell upon his ravished sense;
|
His spirit was caught in her intolerant flame.
|
Once seen, his heart acknowledged only her.
|
Only a hunger of infinite bliss was left.
|
All aims in her were lost, then found in her;
|
His base was gathered to one pointing spire.
|
This was a seed cast into endless Time.
|
A Word is spoken or a Light is shown,
|
A moment sees, the ages toil to express.
|
So flashing out of the Timeless leaped the worlds;
|
An eternal instant is the cause of the years.
|
All he had done was to prepare a field;
|
His small beginnings asked for a mighty end:
|
For all that he had been must now new-shape
|
In him her joy to embody, to enshrine
|
Her beauty and greatness in his house of life.
|
But now his being was too wide for self;
|
His heart's demand had grown immeasurable:
|
His single freedom could not satisfy,
|
Her light, her bliss he asked for earth and men.
|
But vain are human power and human love
|
To break earth's seal of ignorance and death;
|
His nature's might seemed now an infant's grasp;
|
Heaven is too high for outstretched hands to seize.
|
This Light comes not by struggle or by thought;
|
In the mind's silence the Transcendent acts
|
And the hushed heart hears the unuttered Word.
|
A vast surrender was his only strength.
|
A Power that lives upon the heights must act,
|
Bring into life's closed room the Immortal's air
|
And fill the finite with the Infinite.
|
All that denies must be torn out and slain
|
And crushed the many longings for whose sake
|
We lose the One for whom our lives were made.
|
Now other claims had hushed in him their cry:
|
Only he longed to draw her presence and power
|
Into his heart and mind and breathing frame;
|
Only he yearned to call for ever down
|
Her healing touch of love and truth and joy
|
Into the darkness of the suffering world.
|
His soul was freed and given to her alone.
|
The House of the Spirit and the New Creation
|
A MIGHTIER task remained than all he had done.
|
To That he turned from which all being comes,
|
A sign attending from the Secrecy
|
Which knows the Truth ungrasped behind our thoughts
|
And guards the world with its all-seeing gaze.
|
In the unapproachable stillness of his soul,
|
Intense, one-pointed, monumental, lone,
|
Patient he sat like an incarnate hope
|
Motionless on a pedestal of prayer.
|
A strength he sought that was not yet on earth,
|
Help from a Power too great for mortal will,
|
The light of a Truth now only seen afar,
|
A sanction from his high omnipotent Source.
|
But from the appalling heights there stooped no voice;
|
The timeless lids were closed; no opening came.
|
A neutral helpless void oppressed the years.
|
In the texture of our bound humanity
|
He felt the stark resistance huge and dumb
|
Of our inconscient and unseeing base,
|
The stubborn mute rejection in life's depths,
|
The ignorant No in the origin of things.
|
A veiled collaboration with the Night
|
Even in himself survived and hid from his view:
|
Still something in his earthly being kept
|
Its kinship with the Inconscient whence it came.
|
A shadowy unity with a vanished past
|
Treasured in an old-world frame was lurking there,
|
Secret, unnoted by the illumined mind,
|
And in subconscious whispers and in dream
|
Still murmured at the mind's and spirit's choice.
|
Its treacherous elements spread like slippery grains
|
Hoping the incoming Truth might stumble and fall,
|
And old ideal voices wandering moaned
|
And pleaded for a heavenly leniency
|
To the gracious imperfections of our earth
|
And the sweet weaknesses of our mortal state.
|
This now he willed to discover and exile,
|
The element in him betraying God.
|
All Nature's recondite spaces were stripped bare,
|
All her dim crypts and corners searched with fire
|
Where refugee instincts and unshaped revolts
|
Could shelter find in darkness' sanctuary
|
Against the white purity of heaven's cleansing flame.
|
All seemed to have perished that was undivine:
|
Yet some minutest dissident might escape
|
And still a centre lurk of the blind force.
|
For the Inconscient too is infinite;
|
The more its abysses we insist to sound,
|
The more it stretches, stretches endlessly.
|
Then lest a human cry should spoil the Truth
|
He tore desire up from its bleeding roots
|
And offered to the gods the vacant place.
|
Thus could he bear the touch immaculate.
|
A last and mightiest transformation came.
|
His soul was all in front like a great sea
|
Flooding the mind and body with its waves;
|
His being, spread to embrace the universe,
|
United the within and the without
|
To make of life a cosmic harmony,
|
An empire of the immanent Divine.
|
In this tremendous universality
|
Not only his soul-nature and mind-sense
|
Included every soul and mind in his,
|
But even the life of flesh and nerve was changed
|
And grew one flesh and nerve with all that lives;
|
He felt the joy of others as his joy,
|
He bore the grief of others as his grief;
|
CANTO III: The House of the Spirit and the New Creation
|
His universal sympathy upbore,
|
Immense like ocean, the creation's load
|
As earth upbears all beings' sacrifice,
|
Thrilled with the hidden Transcendent's joy and peace.
|
There was no more division's endless scroll;
|
One grew the Spirit's secret unity,
|
All Nature felt again the single bliss.
|
There was no cleavage between soul and soul,
|
There was no barrier between world and God.
|
Overpowered were form and memory's limiting line;
|
The covering mind was seized and torn apart;
|
It was dissolved and now no more could be,
|
The one Consciousness that made the world was seen;
|
All now was luminosity and force.
|
Abolished in its last thin fainting trace
|
The circle of the little self was gone;
|
The separate being could no more be felt;
|
It disappeared and knew itself no more,
|
Lost in the spirit's wide identity.
|
His nature grew a movement of the All,
|
Exploring itself to find that all was He,
|
His soul was a delegation of the All
|
That turned from itself to join the one Supreme.
|
Transcended was the human formula;
|
Man's heart that had obscured the Inviolable
|
Assumed the mighty beating of a god's;
|
His seeking mind ceased in the Truth that knows;
|
His life was a flow of the universal life.
|
He stood fulfilled on the world's highest line
|
Awaiting the ascent beyond the world,
|
Awaiting the descent the world to save.
|
A Splendour and a Symbol wrapped the earth,
|
Serene epiphanies looked and hallowed vasts
|
Surrounded, wise infinitudes were close
|
And bright remotenesses leaned near and kin.
|
Sense failed in that tremendous lucency;
|
Ephemeral voices from his hearing fell
|
And Thought potent no more sank large and pale
|
Like a tired god into mysterious seas.
|
The robes of mortal thinking were cast down
|
Leaving his knowledge bare to absolute sight;
|
Fate's driving ceased and Nature's sleepless spur:
|
The athlete heavings of the will were stilled
|
In the Omnipotent's unmoving peace.
|
Life in his members lay down vast and mute;
|
Naked, unwalled, unterrified it bore
|
The immense regard of Immortality.
|
The last movement died and all at once grew still.
|
A weight that was the unseen Transcendent's hand
|
Laid on his limbs the Spirit's measureless seal,
|
Infinity swallowed him into shoreless trance.
|
As one who sets his sail towards mysteried shores
|
Driven through huge oceans by the breath of God,
|
The fathomless below, the unknown around,
|
His soul abandoned the blind star-field, Space.
|
Afar from all that makes the measured world,
|
Plunging to hidden eternities it withdrew
|
Back from mind's foaming surface to the Vasts
|
Voiceless within us in omniscient sleep.
|
Above the imperfect reach of word and thought,
|
Beyond the sight that seeks support of form,
|
Lost in deep tracts of superconscient Light,
|
Or voyaging in blank featureless Nothingness,
|
Sole in the trackless Incommensurable,
|
Or past not-self and self and selflessness,
|
Transgressing the dream-shores of conscious mind
|
He reached at last his sempiternal base.
|
On sorrowless heights no winging cry disturbs,
|
Pure and untouched above this mortal play
|
Is spread the spirit's hushed immobile air.
|
There no beginning is and there no end;
|
CANTO III: The House of the Spirit and the New Creation
|
There is the stable force of all that moves;
|
There the aeonic labourer is at rest.
|
There turns no keyed creation in the void,
|
No giant mechanism watched by a soul;
|
There creaks no fate-turned huge machinery;
|
The marriage of evil with good within one breast,
|
The clash of strife in the very clasp of love,
|
The dangerous pain of life's experiment
|
In the values of Inconsequence and Chance,
|
The peril of mind's gamble, throwing our lives
|
As stake in a wager of indifferent gods
|
And the shifting lights and shadows of the idea
|
Falling upon the surface consciousness,
|
And in the dream of a mute witness soul
|
Creating the error of a half-seen world
|
Where knowledge is a seeking ignorance,
|
Life's steps a stumbling series without suit,
|
Its aspect of fortuitous design,
|
Its equal measure of the true and false
|
In that immobile and immutable realm
|
Find no access, no cause, no right to live:
|
There only reigns the spirit's motionless power
|
Poised in itself through still eternity
|
And its omniscient and omnipotent peace.
|
Thought clashes not with thought and truth with truth,
|
There is no war of right with rival right;
|
There are no stumbling and half-seeing lives
|
Passing from chance to unexpected chance,
|
No suffering of hearts compelled to beat
|
In bodies of the inert Inconscient's make.
|
Armed with the immune occult unsinking Fire
|
The guardians of Eternity keep its law
|
For ever fixed upon Truth's giant base
|
In her magnificent and termless home.
|
There Nature on her dumb spiritual couch
|
Immutably transcendent knows her source
|
And to the stir of multitudinous worlds
|
Assents unmoved in a perpetual calm.
|
All-causing, all-sustaining and aloof,
|
The Witness looks from his unshaken poise,
|
An Eye immense regarding all things done.
|
Apart, at peace above creation's stir,
|
Immersed in the eternal altitudes,
|
He abode defended in his shoreless self,
|
Companioned only by the all-seeing One.
|
A Mind too mighty to be bound by Thought,
|
A Life too boundless for the play in Space,
|
A Soul without borders unconvinced of Time,
|
He felt the extinction of the world's long pain,
|
He became the unborn Self that never dies,
|
He joined the sessions of Infinity.
|
On the cosmic murmur primal loneliness fell,
|
Annulled was the contact formed with time-born things,
|
Empty grew Nature's wide community.
|
All things were brought back to their formless seed,
|
The world was silent for a cyclic hour.
|
Although the afflicted Nature he had left
|
Maintained beneath him her broad numberless fields,
|
Her enormous act, receding, failed remote
|
As if a soulless dream at last had ceased.
|
No voice came down from the high Silences,
|
None answered from her desolate solitudes.
|
A stillness of cessation reigned, the wide
|
Immortal hush before the gods are born;
|
A universal Force awaited, mute,
|
The veiled Transcendent's ultimate decree.
|
Then suddenly there came a downward look.
|
As if a sea exploring its own depths,
|
A living Oneness widened at its core
|
And joined him to unnumbered multitudes.
|
A Bliss, a Light, a Power, a flame-white Love
|
CANTO III: The House of the Spirit and the New Creation
|
Caught all into a sole immense embrace;
|
Existence found its truth on Oneness' breast
|
And each became the self and space of all.
|
The great world-rhythms were heart-beats of one Soul,
|
To feel was a flame-discovery of God,
|
All mind was a single harp of many strings,
|
All life a song of many meeting lives;
|
For worlds were many, but the Self was one.
|
This knowledge now was made a cosmos' seed:
|
This seed was cased in the safety of the Light,
|
It needed not a sheath of Ignorance.
|
Then from the trance of that tremendous clasp
|
And from the throbbings of that single Heart
|
And from the naked Spirit's victory
|
A new and marvellous creation rose.
|
Incalculable outflowing infinitudes
|
Laughing out an unmeasured happiness
|
Lived their innumerable unity;
|
Worlds where the being is unbound and wide
|
Bodied unthinkably the egoless Self;
|
Rapture of beatific energies
|
Joined Time to the Timeless, poles of a single joy;
|
White vasts were seen where all is wrapped in all.
|
There were no contraries, no sundered parts,
|
All by spiritual links were joined to all
|
And bound indissolubly to the One:
|
Each was unique, but took all lives as his own,
|
And, following out these tones of the Infinite,
|
Recognised in himself the universe.
|
A splendid centre of infinity's whirl
|
Pushed to its zenith's height, its last expanse,
|
Felt the divinity of its own self-bliss
|
Repeated in its numberless other selves:
|
It took up tirelessly into its scope
|
Persons and figures of the Impersonal,
|
As if prolonging in a ceaseless count,
|
In a rapturous multiplication's sum,
|
The recurring decimals of eternity.
|
None was apart, none lived for himself alone,
|
Each lived for God in him and God in all,
|
Each soleness inexpressibly held the whole.
|
There Oneness was not tied to monotone;
|
It showed a thousand aspects of itself,
|
Its calm immutable stability
|
Upbore on a changeless ground for ever safe,
|
Compelled to a spontaneous servitude,
|
The ever-changing incalculable steps,
|
The seeming-reckless dance's subtle plan
|
Of immense world-forces in their perfect play.
|
Appearance looked back to its hidden truth
|
And made of difference oneness' smiling play;
|
It made all persons fractions of the Unique,
|
Yet all were being's secret integers.
|
All struggle was turned to a sweet strife of love
|
In the harmonised circle of a sure embrace.
|
Identity's reconciling happiness gave
|
A rich security to difference.
|
On a meeting line of hazardous extremes
|
The game of games was played to its breaking-point,
|
Where through self-finding by divine self-loss
|
There leaps out unity's supreme delight
|
Whose blissful undivided sweetness feels
|
A communality of the Absolute.
|
There was no sob of suffering anywhere;
|
Experience ran from point to point of joy:
|
Bliss was the pure undying truth of things.
|
All Nature was a conscious front of God:
|
A wisdom worked in all, self-moved, self-sure,
|
A plenitude of illimitable Light,
|
An au thenticity of intuitive Truth,
|
A glory and passion of creative Force.
|
Infallible, leaping from eternity,
|
CANTO III: The House of the Spirit and the New Creation
|
The moment's thought inspired the passing act.
|
A word, a laughter, sprang from Silence' breast,
|
A rhythm of Beauty in the calm of Space,
|
A knowledge in the fathomless heart of Time.
|
All turned to all without reserve's recoil:
|
A single ecstasy without a break,
|
Love was a close and thrilled identity
|
In the throbbing heart of all that luminous life.
|
A universal vision that unites,
|
A sympathy of nerve replying to nerve,
|
Hearing that listens to thought's inner sound
|
And follows the rhythmic meanings of the heart,
|
A touch that needs not hands to feel, to clasp,
|
Were there the native means of consciousness
|
And heightened the intimacy of soul with soul.
|
A grand orchestra of spiritual powers,
|
A diapason of soul-interchange
|
Harmonised a Oneness deep, immeasurable.
|
In these new worlds projected he became
|
A portion of the universal gaze,
|
A station of the all-inhabiting light,
|
A ripple on a single sea of peace.
|
His mind answered to countless communing minds,
|
His words were syllables of the cosmos' speech,
|
His life a field of the vast cosmic stir.
|
He felt the footsteps of a million wills
|
Moving in unison to a single goal.
|
A stream ever new-born that never dies,
|
Caught in its thousandfold current's ravishing flow,
|
With eddies of immortal sweetness thrilled,
|
He bore coiling through his members as they passed
|
Calm movements of interminable delight,
|
The bliss of a myriad myriads who are one.
|
In this vast outbreak of perfection's law
|
Imposing its fixity on the flux of things
|
He saw a hierarchy of lucent planes
|
Enfeoffed to this highest kingdom of God-state.
|
Attuning to one Truth their own right rule
|
Each housed the gladness of a bright degree,
|
Alone in beauty, perfect in self-kind,
|
An image cast by one deep truth's absolute,
|
Married to all in happy difference.
|
Each gave its powers to help its neighbours' parts,
|
But suffered no diminution by the gift;
|
Profiteers of a mystic interchange,
|
They grew by what they took and what they gave,
|
All others they felt as their own complements,
|
One in the might and joy of multitude.
|
Even in the poise where Oneness draws apart
|
To feel the rapture of its separate selves,
|
The Sole in its solitude yearned towards the All
|
And the Many turned to look back at the One.
|
An all-revealing all-creating Bliss,
|
Seeking for forms to manifest truths divine,
|
Aligned in their significant mystery
|
The gleams of the symbols of the Ineffable
|
Blazoned like hues upon a colourless air
|
On the white purity of the Witness Soul.
|
These hues were the very prism of the Supreme,
|
His beauty, power, delight creation's cause.
|
A vast Truth-Consciousness took up these signs
|
To pass them on to some divine child Heart
|
That looked on them with laughter and delight
|
And joyed in these transcendent images
|
Living and real as the truths they house.
|
The Spirit's white neutrality became
|
A playground of miracles, a rendezvous
|
For the secret powers of a mystic Timelessness:
|
It made of Space a marvel house of God,
|
It poured through Time its works of ageless might,
|
Unveiled seen as a luring rapturous face
|
CANTO III: The House of the Spirit and the New Creation
|
The wonder and beauty of its Love and Force.
|
The eternal Goddess moved in her cosmic house
|
Sporting with God as a Mother with her child:
|
To him the universe was her bosom of love,
|
His toys were the immortal verities.
|
All here self-lost had there its divine place.
|
The Powers that here betray our hearts and err,
|
Were there sovereign in truth, perfect in joy,
|
Masters in a creation without flaw,
|
Possessors of their own infinitude.
|
There Mind, a splendid sun of vision's rays,
|
Shaped substance by the glory of its thoughts
|
And moved amidst the grandeur of its dreams.
|
Imagination's great ensorcelling rod
|
Summoned the unknown and gave to it a home,
|
Outspread luxuriantly in golden air
|
Truth's iris-coloured wings of fantasy,
|
Or sang to the intuitive heart of joy
|
Wonder's dream-notes that bring the Real close.
|
Its power that makes the unknowable near and true,
|
In the temple of the ideal shrined the One:
|
It peopled thought and mind and happy sense
|
Filled with bright aspects of the might of God
|
And living persons of the one Supreme,
|
The speech that voices the ineffable,
|
The ray revealing unseen Presences,
|
The virgin forms through which the Formless shines,
|
The Word that ushers divine experience
|
And the Ideas that crowd the Infinite.
|
There was no gulf between the thought and fact,
|
Ever they replied like bird to calling bird;
|
The will obeyed the thought, the act the will.
|
There was a harmony woven twixt soul and soul.
|
A marriage with eternity divinised Time.
|
There Life pursued, unwearied of her sport,
|
Joy in her heart and laughter on her lips,
|
The bright adventure of God's game of chance.
|
In her ingenious ardour of caprice,
|
In her transfiguring mirth she mapped on Time
|
A fascinating puzzle of events,
|
Lured at each turn by new vicissitudes
|
To self-discovery that could never cease.
|
Ever she framed stark bonds for the will to break,
|
Brought new creations for the thought's surprise
|
And passionate ventures for the heart to dare,
|
Where Truth recurred with an unexpected face
|
Or else repeated old familiar joy
|
Like the return of a delightful rhyme.
|
At hide-and-seek on a Mother-Wisdom's breast,
|
An artist teeming with her world-idea,
|
She never could exhaust its numberless thoughts
|
And vast adventure into thinking shapes
|
And trial and lure of a new living's dreams.
|
Untired of sameness and untired of change,
|
Endlessly she unrolled her moving act,
|
A mystery drama of divine delight,
|
A living poem of world-ecstasy,
|
A kakemono of significant forms,
|
A coiled perspective of developing scenes,
|
A brilliant chase of self-revealing shapes,
|
An ardent hunt of soul looking for soul,
|
A seeking and a finding as of gods.
|
There Matter is the Spirit's firm density,
|
An artistry of glad outwardness of self,
|
A treasure-house of lasting images
|
Where sense can build a world of pure delight:
|
The home of a perpetual happiness,
|
It lodged the hours as in a pleasant inn.
|
The senses there were outlets of the soul;
|
Even the youngest child-thought of the mind
|
Incarnated some touch of highest things.
|
There substance was a resonant harp of self,
|
CANTO III: The House of the Spirit and the New Creation
|
A net for the constant lightnings of the spirit,
|
A magnet power of love's intensity
|
Whose yearning throb and adoration's cry
|
Drew God's approaches close, sweet, wonderful.
|
Its solidity was a mass of heavenly make;
|
Its fixity and sweet permanence of charm
|
Made a bright pedestal for felicity.
|
Its bodies woven by a divine sense
|
Prolonged the nearness of soul's clasp with soul;
|
Its warm play of external sight and touch
|
Reflected the glow and thrill of the heart's joy,
|
Mind's climbing brilliant thoughts, the spirit's bliss;
|
Life's rapture kept for ever its flame and cry.
|
All that now passes lived immortal there
|
In the proud beauty and fine harmony
|
Of Matter plastic to spiritual light.
|
Its ordered hours proclaimed the eternal Law;
|
Vision reposed on a safety of deathless forms;
|
Time was Eternity's transparent robe.
|
An architect hewing out self's living rock,
|
Phenomenon built Reality's summer-house
|
On the beaches of the sea of Infinity.
|
Against this glory of spiritual states,
|
Their parallels and yet their opposites,
|
Floated and swayed, eclipsed and shadowlike
|
As if a doubt made substance, flickering, pale,
|
This other scheme two vast negations found.
|
A world that knows not its inhabiting Self
|
Labours to find its cause and need to be;
|
A spirit ignorant of the world it made,
|
Obscured by Matter, travestied by Life,
|
Struggles to emerge, to be free, to know and reign;
|
These were close-tied in one disharmony,
|
Yet the divergent lines met not at all.
|
Three Powers governed its irrational course,
|
In the beginning an unknowing Force,
|
In the middle an embodied striving soul,
|
In its end a silent spirit denying life.
|
A dull and infelicitous interlude
|
Unrolls its dubious truth to a questioning Mind
|
Compelled by the ignorant Power to play its part
|
And to record her inconclusive tale,
|
The mystery of her inconscient plan
|
And the riddle of a being born from Night
|
By a marriage of Necessity with Chance.
|
This darkness hides our nobler destiny.
|
A chrysalis of a great and glorious truth,
|
It stifles the winged marvel in its sheath
|
Lest from the prison of Matter it escape
|
And, wasting its beauty on the formless Vast,
|
Merged into the Unknowable's mystery,
|
Leave unfulfilled the world's miraculous fate.
|
As yet thought only some high spirit's dream
|
Or a vexed illusion in man's toiling mind,
|
A new creation from the old shall rise,
|
A Knowledge inarticulate find speech,
|
Beauty suppressed burst into paradise bloom,
|
Pleasure and pain dive into absolute bliss.
|
A tongueless oracle shall speak at last,
|
The Superconscient conscious grow on earth,
|
The Eternal's wonders join the dance of Time.
|
But now all seemed a vainly teeming vast
|
Upheld by a deluded Energy
|
To a spectator self-absorbed and mute,
|
Careless of the unmeaning show he watched,
|
Regarding the bizarre procession pass
|
Like one who waits for an expected end.
|
He saw a world that is from a world to be.
|
There he divined rather than saw or felt,
|
Far off upon the rim of consciousness,
|
Transient and frail this little whirling globe
|
CANTO III: The House of the Spirit and the New Creation
|
And on it left like a lost dream's vain mould,
|
A fragile copy of the spirit's shell,
|
His body gathered into mystic sleep.
|
A foreign shape it seemed, a mythic shade.
|
Alien now seemed that dim far universe,
|
Self and eternity alone were true.
|
Then memory climbed to him from the striving planes
|
Bringing a cry from once-loved cherished things,
|
And to the cry as to its own lost call
|
A ray replied from the occult Supreme.
|
For even there the boundless Oneness dwells.
|
To its own sight unrecognisable,
|
It lived still sunk in its own tenebrous seas,
|
Upholding the world's inconscient unity
|
Hidden in Matter's insentient multitude.
|
This seed-self sown in the Indeterminate
|
Forfeits its glory of divinity,
|
Concealing the omnipotence of its Force,
|
Concealing the omniscience of its Soul;
|
An agent of its own transcendent Will,
|
It merges knowledge in the inconscient deep;
|
Accepting error, sorrow, death and pain,
|
It pays the ransom of the ignorant Night,
|
Redeeming by its substance Nature's fall.
|
Himself he knew and why his soul had gone
|
Into earth's passionate obscurity
|
To share the labour of an errant Power
|
Which by division hopes to find the One.
|
Two beings he was, one wide and free above,
|
One struggling, bound, intense, its portion here.
|
A tie between them still could bridge two worlds;
|
There was a dim response, a distant breath;
|
All had not ceased in the unbounded hush.
|
His heart lay somewhere conscious and alone
|
Far down below him like a lamp in night;
|
Abandoned it lay, alone, imperishable,
|
Immobile with excess of passionate will,
|
His living, sacrificed and offered heart
|
Absorbed in adoration mystical,
|
Turned to its far-off fount of light and love.
|
In the luminous stillness of its mute appeal
|
It looked up to the heights it could not see;
|
It yearned from the longing depths it could not leave.
|
In the centre of his vast and fateful trance
|
Half-way between his free and fallen selves,
|
Interceding twixt God's day and the mortal's night,
|
Accepting worship as its single law,
|
Accepting bliss as the sole cause of things,
|
Refusing the austere joy which none can share,
|
Refusing the calm that lives for calm alone,
|
To her it turned for whom it willed to be.
|
In the passion of its solitary dream
|
It lay like a closed soundless oratory
|
Where sleeps a consecrated argent floor
|
Lit by a single and untrembling ray
|
And an invisible Presence kneels in prayer.
|
On some deep breast of liberating peace
|
All else was satisfied with quietude;
|
This only knew there was a truth beyond.
|
All other parts were dumb in centred sleep
|
Consenting to the slow deliberate Power
|
Which tolerates the world's error and its grief,
|
Consenting to the cosmic long delay,
|
Timelessly waiting through the patient years
|
Her coming they had asked for earth and men;
|
This was the fiery point that called her now.
|
Extinction could not quench that lonely fire;
|
Its seeing filled the blank of mind and will;
|
Thought dead, its changeless force abode and grew.
|
Armed with the intuition of a bliss
|
To which some moved tranquillity was the key,
|
CANTO III: The House of the Spirit and the New Creation
|
It persevered through life's huge emptiness
|
Amid the blank denials of the world.
|
It sent its voiceless prayer to the Unknown;
|
It listened for the footsteps of its hopes
|
Returning through the void immensities,
|
It waited for the fiat of the Word
|
That comes through the still self from the Supreme.
|
The Vision and the Boon
|
THEN suddenly there rose a sacred stir.
|
Amid the lifeless silence of the Void
|
In a solitude and an immensity
|
A sound came quivering like a loved footfall
|
Heard in the listening spaces of the soul;
|
A touch perturbed his fibres with delight.
|
An Influence had approached the mortal range,
|
A boundless Heart was near his longing heart,
|
A mystic Form enveloped his earthly shape.
|
All at her contact broke from silence' seal;
|
Spirit and body thrilled identified,
|
Linked in the grasp of an unspoken joy;
|
Mind, members, life were merged in ecstasy.
|
Intoxicated as with nectarous rain
|
His nature's passioning stretches flowed to her,
|
Flashing with lightnings, mad with luminous wine.
|
All was a limitless sea that heaved to the moon.
|
A divinising stream possessed his veins,
|
His body's cells awoke to spirit sense,
|
Each nerve became a burning thread of joy:
|
Tissue and flesh partook beatitude.
|
Alight, the dun unplumbed subconscient caves
|
Thrilled with the prescience of her longed-for tread
|
And filled with flickering crests and praying tongues.
|
Even lost in slumber, mute, inanimate
|
His very body answered to her power.
|
The One he worshipped was within him now:
|
Flame-pure, ethereal-tressed, a mighty Face
|
Appeared and lips moved by immortal words;
|
Lids, Wisdom's leaves, drooped over rapture's orbs.
|
A marble monument of ponderings, shone
|
CANTO IV: The Vision and the Boon
|
A forehead, sight's crypt, and large like ocean's gaze
|
Towards Heaven, two tranquil eyes of boundless thought
|
Looked into man's and saw the god to come.
|
A Shape was seen on threshold Mind, a Voice
|
Absolute and wise in the heart's chambers spoke:
|
"O Son of Strength who climbst creation's peaks,
|
No soul is thy companion in the light;
|
Alone thou standest at the eternal doors.
|
What thou hast won is thine, but ask no more.
|
O Spirit aspiring in an ignorant frame,
|
O Voice arisen from the Inconscient's world,
|
How shalt thou speak for men whose hearts are dumb,
|
Make purblind earth the soul's seer-vision's home
|
Or lighten the burden of the senseless globe?
|
I am the Mystery beyond reach of mind,
|
I am the goal of the travail of the suns;
|
My fire and sweetness are the cause of life.
|
But too immense my danger and my joy.
|
Awake not the immeasurable descent,
|
Speak not my secret name to hostile Time;
|
Man is too weak to bear the Infinite's weight.
|
Truth born too soon might break the imperfect earth.
|
Leave the all-seeing Power to hew its way:
|
In thy single vast achievement reign apart
|
Helping the world with thy great lonely days.
|
I ask thee not to merge thy heart of flame
|
In the Immobile's wide uncaring bliss,
|
Turned from the fruitless motion of the years,
|
Deserting the fierce labour of the worlds,
|
Aloof from beings, lost in the Alone.
|
How shall thy mighty spirit brook repose
|
While Death is still unconquered on the earth
|
And Time a field of suffering and pain?
|
Thy soul was born to share the laden Force;
|
Obey thy nature and fulfil thy fate:
|
Accept the difficulty and godlike toil,
|
For the slow-paced omniscient purpose live.
|
The Enigma's knot is tied in humankind.
|
A lightning from the heights that think and plan,
|
Ploughing the air of life with vanishing trails,
|
Man, sole awake in an unconscious world,
|
Aspires in vain to change the cosmic dream.
|
Arrived from some half-luminous Beyond
|
He is a stranger in the mindless vasts;
|
A traveller in his oft-shifting home
|
Amid the tread of many infinities,
|
He has pitched a tent of life in desert Space.
|
Heaven's fixed regard beholds him from above,
|
In the house of Nature a perturbing guest,
|
A voyager twixt Thought's inconstant shores,
|
A hunter of unknown and beautiful Powers,
|
A nomad of the far mysterious Light,
|
In the wide ways a little spark of God.
|
Against his spirit all is in dire league,
|
A Titan influence stops his Godward gaze.
|
Around him hungers the unpitying Void,
|
The eternal Darkness seeks him with her hands,
|
Inscrutable Energies drive him and deceive,
|
Immense implacable deities oppose.
|
An inert Soul and a somnambulist Force
|
Have made a world estranged from life and thought;
|
The Dragon of the dark foundations keeps
|
Unalterable the law of Chance and Death;
|
On his long way through Time and Circumstance
|
The grey-hued riddling nether shadow-Sphinx,
|
Her dreadful paws upon the swallowing sands,
|
Awaits him armed with the soul-slaying word:
|
Across his path sits the dim camp of Night.
|
His day is a moment in perpetual Time;
|
He is the prey of the minutes and the hours.
|
Assailed on earth and unassured of heaven,
|
Descended here unhappy and sublime,
|
CANTO IV: The Vision and the Boon
|
A link between the demigod and the beast,
|
He knows not his own greatness nor his aim;
|
He has forgotten why he has come and whence.
|
His spirit and his members are at war;
|
His heights break off too low to reach the skies,
|
His mass is buried in the animal mire.
|
A strange antinomy is his nature's rule.
|
A riddle of opposites is made his field:
|
Freedom he asks but needs to live in bonds,
|
He has need of darkness to perceive some light
|
And need of grief to feel a little bliss;
|
He has need of death to find a greater life.
|
All sides he sees and turns to every call;
|
He has no certain light by which to walk;
|
His life is a blind-man's-buff, a hide-and-seek;
|
He seeks himself and from himself he runs;
|
Meeting himself, he thinks it other than he.
|
Always he builds, but finds no constant ground,
|
Always he journeys, but nowhere arrives;
|
He would guide the world, himself he cannot guide;
|
He would save his soul, his life he cannot save.
|
The light his soul had brought his mind has lost;
|
All he has learned is soon again in doubt;
|
A sun to him seems the shadow of his thoughts,
|
Then all is shadow again and nothing true:
|
Unknowing what he does or whither he tends
|
He fabricates signs of the Real in Ignorance.
|
He has hitched his mortal error to Truth's star.
|
Wisdom attracts him with her luminous masks,
|
But never has he seen the face behind:
|
A giant Ignorance surrounds his lore.
|
Assigned to meet the cosmic mystery
|
In the dumb figure of a material world,
|
His passport of entry false and his personage,
|
He is compelled to be what he is not;
|
He obeys the Inconscience he had come to rule
|
And sinks in Matter to fulfil his soul.
|
Awakened from her lower driven forms
|
The Earth-Mother gave her forces to his hands
|
And painfully he guards the heavy trust;
|
His mind is a lost torch-bearer on her roads.
|
Illumining breath to think and plasm to feel,
|
He labours with his slow and sceptic brain
|
Helped by the reason's vacillating fires,
|
To make his thought and will a magic door
|
For knowledge to enter the darkness of the world
|
And love to rule a realm of strife and hate.
|
A mind impotent to reconcile heaven and earth
|
And tied to Matter with a thousand bonds,
|
He lifts himself to be a conscious god.
|
Even when a glory of wisdom crowns his brow,
|
When mind and spirit shed a grandiose ray
|
To exalt this product of the sperm and gene,
|
This alchemist's miracle from plasm and gas,
|
And he who shared the animal's run and crawl
|
Lifts his thought-stature to the Immortal's heights,
|
His life still keeps the human middle way;
|
His body he resigns to death and pain,
|
Abandoning Matter, his too heavy charge.
|
A thaumaturge sceptic of miracles,
|
A spirit left sterile of its occult power
|
By an unbelieving brain and credulous heart,
|
He leaves the world to end where it began:
|
His work unfinished he claims a heavenly prize.
|
Thus has he missed creation's absolute.
|
Half-way he stops his star of destiny:
|
A vast and vain long-tried experiment,
|
An ill-served high conception doubtfully done,
|
The world's life falters on not seeing its goal, -
|
A zigzag towards unknown dangerous ground
|
Ever repeating its habitual walk,
|
Ever retreating after marches long
|
CANTO IV: The Vision and the Boon
|
And hardiest victories without sure result,
|
Drawn endlessly an inconclusive game.
|
In an ill-fitting and voluminous robe
|
A radiant purpose still conceals its face,
|
A mighty blindness stumbles hoping on,
|
Feeding its strength on gifts of luminous Chance.
|
Because the human instrument has failed,
|
The Godhead frustrate sleeps within its seed,
|
A spirit entangled in the forms it made.
|
His failure is not failure whom God leads;
|
Through all the slow mysterious march goes on:
|
An immutable Power has made this mutable world;
|
A self-fulfilling transcendence treads man's road;
|
The driver of the soul upon its path,
|
It knows its steps, its way is inevitable,
|
And how shall the end be vain when God is guide?
|
However man's mind may tire or fail his flesh,
|
A will prevails cancelling his conscious choice:
|
The goal recedes, a bourneless vastness calls
|
Retreating into an immense Unknown;
|
There is no end to the world's stupendous march,
|
There is no rest for the embodied soul.
|
It must live on, describe all Time's huge curve.
|
An Influx presses from the closed Beyond
|
Forbidding to him rest and earthly ease,
|
Till he has found himself he cannot pause.
|
A Light there is that leads, a Power that aids;
|
Unmarked, unfelt it sees in him and acts:
|
Ignorant, he forms the All-Conscient in his depths,
|
Human, looks up to superhuman peaks:
|
A borrower of Supernature's gold,
|
He paves his road to Immortality.
|
The high gods look on man and watch and choose
|
Today's impossibles for the future's base.
|
His transience trembles with the Eternal's touch,
|
His barriers cede beneath the Infinite's tread;
|
The Immortals have their entries in his life:
|
The Ambassadors of the Unseen draw near.
|
A splendour sullied by the mortal air,
|
Love passes through his heart, a wandering guest.
|
Beauty surrounds him for a magic hour,
|
He has visits of a large revealing joy,
|
Brief widenesses release him from himself,
|
Enticing towards a glory ever in front
|
Hopes of a deathless sweetness lure and leave.
|
His mind is crossed by strange discovering fires,
|
Rare intimations lift his stumbling speech
|
To a moment's kinship with the eternal Word;
|
A masque of Wisdom circles through his brain
|
Perturbing him with glimpses half divine.
|
He lays his hands sometimes on the Unknown;
|
He communes sometimes with Eternity.
|
A strange and grandiose symbol was his birth
|
And immortality and spirit-room
|
And pure perfection and a shadowless bliss
|
Are this afflicted creature's mighty fate.
|
In him the Earth-Mother sees draw near the change
|
Foreshadowed in her dumb and fiery depths,
|
A godhead drawn from her transmuted limbs,
|
An alchemy of Heaven on Nature's base.
|
Adept of the self-born unfailing line,
|
Leave not the light to die the ages bore,
|
Help still humanity's blind and suffering life:
|
Obey thy spirit's wide omnipotent urge.
|
A witness to God's parley with the Night,
|
It leaned compassionate from immortal calm
|
And housed desire, the troubled seed of things.
|
Assent to thy high self, create, endure.
|
Cease not from knowledge, let thy toil be vast.
|
No more can earthly limits pen thy force;
|
Equal thy work with long unending Time's.
|
Traveller upon the bare eternal heights,
|
CANTO IV: The Vision and the Boon
|
Tread still the difficult and dateless path
|
Joining the cycles with its austere curve
|
Measured for man by the initiate Gods.
|
My light shall be in thee, my strength thy force.
|
Let not the impatient Titan drive thy heart,
|
Ask not the imperfect fruit, the partial prize.
|
Only one boon, to greaten thy spirit, demand;
|
Only one joy, to raise thy kind, desire.
|
Above blind fate and the antagonist powers
|
Moveless there stands a high unchanging Will;
|
To its omnipotence leave thy work's result.
|
All things shall change in God's transfiguring hour."
|
August and sweet sank hushed that mighty Voice.
|
Nothing now moved in the vast brooding space:
|
A stillness came upon the listening world,
|
A mute immensity of the Eternal's peace.
|
But Aswapati's heart replied to her,
|
A cry amid the silence of the Vasts:
|
"How shall I rest content with mortal days
|
And the dull measure of terrestrial things,
|
I who have seen behind the cosmic mask
|
The glory and the beauty of thy face?
|
Hard is the doom to which thou bindst thy sons!
|
How long shall our spirits battle with the Night
|
And bear defeat and the brute yoke of Death,
|
We who are vessels of a deathless Force
|
And builders of the godhead of the race?
|
Or if it is thy work I do below
|
Amid the error and waste of human life
|
In the vague light of man's half-conscious mind,
|
Why breaks not in some distant gleam of thee?
|
Ever the centuries and millenniums pass.
|
Where in the greyness is thy coming's ray?
|
Where is the thunder of thy victory's wings?
|
Only we hear the feet of passing gods.
|
A plan in the occult eternal Mind
|
Mapped out to backward and prophetic sight,
|
The aeons ever repeat their changeless round,
|
The cycles all rebuild and ever aspire.
|
All we have done is ever still to do.
|
All breaks and all renews and is the same.
|
Huge revolutions of life's fruitless gyre,
|
The new-born ages perish like the old,
|
As if the sad Enigma kept its right
|
Till all is done for which this scene was made.
|
Too little the strength that now with us is born,
|
Too faint the light that steals through Nature's lids,
|
Too scant the joy with which she buys our pain.
|
In a brute world that knows not its own sense,
|
Thought-racked upon the wheel of birth we live,
|
The instruments of an impulse not our own
|
Moved to achieve with our heart's blood for price
|
Half-knowledge, half-creations that soon tire.
|
A foiled immortal soul in perishing limbs,
|
Baffled and beaten back we labour still;
|
Annulled, frustrated, spent, we still survive.
|
In anguish we labour that from us may rise
|
A larger-seeing man with nobler heart,
|
A golden vessel of the incarnate Truth,
|
The executor of the divine attempt
|
Equipped to wear the earthly body of God,
|
Communicant and prophet and lover and king.
|
I know that thy creation cannot fail:
|
For even through the mists of mortal thought
|
Infallible are thy mysterious steps,
|
And, though Necessity dons the garb of Chance,
|
Hidden in the blind shifts of Fate she keeps
|
The slow calm logic of Infinity's pace
|
And the inviolate sequence of its will.
|
All life is fixed in an ascending scale
|
And adamantine is the evolving Law;
|
CANTO IV: The Vision and the Boon
|
In the beginning is prepared the close.
|
This strange irrational product of the mire,
|
This compromise between the beast and god,
|
Is not the crown of thy miraculous world.
|
I know there shall inform the inconscient cells,
|
At one with Nature and at height with heaven,
|
A spirit vast as the containing sky
|
And swept with ecstasy from invisible founts,
|
A god come down and greater by the fall.
|
A Power arose out of my slumber's cell.
|
Abandoning the tardy limp of the hours
|
And the inconstant blink of mortal sight,
|
There where the Thinker sleeps in too much light
|
And intolerant flames the lone all-witnessing Eye
|
Hearing the word of Fate from Silence' heart
|
In the endless moment of Eternity,
|
It saw from timelessness the works of Time.
|
Overpassed were the leaden formulas of the Mind,
|
Overpowered the obstacle of mortal Space:
|
The unfolding Image showed the things to come.
|
A giant dance of Shiva tore the past;
|
There was a thunder as of worlds that fall;
|
Earth was o'errun with fire and the roar of Death
|
Clamouring to slay a world his hunger had made;
|
There was a clangour of Destruction's wings:
|
The Titan's battle-cry was in my ears,
|
Alarm and rumour shook the armoured Night.
|
I saw the Omnipotent's flaming pioneers
|
Over the heavenly verge which turns towards life
|
Come crowding down the amber stairs of birth;
|
Forerunners of a divine multitude,
|
Out of the paths of the morning star they came
|
Into the little room of mortal life.
|
I saw them cross the twilight of an age,
|
The sun-eyed children of a marvellous dawn,
|
The great creators with wide brows of calm,
|
The massive barrier-breakers of the world
|
And wrestlers with destiny in her lists of will,
|
The labourers in the quarries of the gods,
|
The messengers of the Incommunicable,
|
The architects of immortality.
|
Into the fallen human sphere they came,
|
Faces that wore the Immortal's glory still,
|
Voices that communed still with the thoughts of God,
|
Bodies made beautiful by the spirit's light,
|
Carrying the magic word, the mystic fire,
|
Carrying the Dionysian cup of joy,
|
Approaching eyes of a diviner man,
|
Lips chanting an unknown anthem of the soul,
|
Feet echoing in the corridors of Time.
|
High priests of wisdom, sweetness, might and bliss,
|
Discoverers of beauty's sunlit ways
|
And swimmers of Love's laughing fiery floods
|
And dancers within rapture's golden doors,
|
Their tread one day shall change the suffering earth
|
And justify the light on Nature's face.
|
Although Fate lingers in the high Beyond
|
And the work seems vain on which our heart's force was spent,
|
All shall be done for which our pain was borne.
|
Even as of old man came behind the beast
|
This high divine successor surely shall come
|
Behind man's inefficient mortal pace,
|
Behind his vain labour, sweat and blood and tears:
|
He shall know what mortal mind barely durst think,
|
He shall do what the heart of the mortal could not dare.
|
Inheritor of the toil of human time,
|
He shall take on him the burden of the gods;
|
All heavenly light shall visit the earth's thoughts,
|
The might of heaven shall fortify earthly hearts;
|
Earth's deeds shall touch the superhuman's height,
|
Earth's seeing widen into the infinite.
|
Heavy unchanged weighs still the imperfect world;
|
CANTO IV: The Vision and the Boon
|
The splendid youth of Time has passed and failed;
|
Heavy and long are the years our labour counts
|
And still the seals are firm upon man's soul
|
And weary is the ancient Mother's heart.
|
O Truth defended in thy secret sun,
|
Voice of her mighty musings in shut heavens
|
On things withdrawn within her luminous depths,
|
O Wisdom-Splendour, Mother of the universe,
|
Creatrix, the Eternal's artist Bride,
|
Linger not long with thy transmuting hand
|
Pressed vainly on one golden bar of Time,
|
As if Time dare not open its heart to God.
|
O radiant fountain of the world's delight
|
World-free and unattainable above,
|
O Bliss who ever dwellst deep-hid within
|
While men seek thee outside and never find,
|
Mystery and Muse with hieratic tongue,
|
Incarnate the white passion of thy force,
|
Mission to earth some living form of thee.
|
One moment fill with thy eternity,
|
Let thy infinity in one body live,
|
All-Knowledge wrap one mind in seas of light,
|
All-Love throb single in one human heart.
|
Immortal, treading the earth with mortal feet
|
All heaven's beauty crowd in earthly limbs!
|
Omnipotence, girdle with the power of God
|
Movements and moments of a mortal will,
|
Pack with the eternal might one human hour
|
And with one gesture change all future time.
|
Let a great word be spoken from the heights
|
And one great act unlock the doors of Fate."
|
His prayer sank down in the resisting Night
|
Oppressed by the thousand forces that deny,
|
As if too weak to climb to the Supreme.
|
But there arose a wide consenting Voice;
|
The spirit of beauty was revealed in sound:
|
Light floated round the marvellous Vision's brow
|
And on her lips the Immortal's joy took shape.
|
"O strong forerunner, I have heard thy cry.
|
One shall descend and break the iron Law,
|
Change Nature's doom by the lone spirit's power.
|
A limitless Mind that can contain the world,
|
A sweet and violent heart of ardent calms
|
Moved by the passions of the gods shall come.
|
All mights and greatnesses shall join in her;
|
Beauty shall walk celestial on the earth,
|
Delight shall sleep in the cloud-net of her hair,
|
And in her body as on his homing tree
|
Immortal Love shall beat his glorious wings.
|
A music of griefless things shall weave her charm;
|
The harps of the Perfect shall attune her voice,
|
The streams of Heaven shall murmur in her laugh,
|
Her lips shall be the honeycombs of God,
|
Her limbs his golden jars of ecstasy,
|
Her breasts the rapture-flowers of Paradise.
|
She shall bear Wisdom in her voiceless bosom,
|
Strength shall be with her like a conqueror's sword
|
And from her eyes the Eternal's bliss shall gaze.
|
A seed shall be sown in Death's tremendous hour,
|
A branch of heaven transplant to human soil;
|
Nature shall overleap her mortal step;
|
Fate shall be changed by an unchanging will."
|
As a flame disappears in endless Light
|
Immortally extinguished in its source,
|
Vanished the splendour and was stilled the word.
|
An echo of delight that once was close,
|
The harmony journeyed towards some distant hush,
|
A music failing in the ear of trance,
|
A cadence called by distant cadences,
|
A voice that trembled into strains withdrawn.
|
CANTO IV: The Vision and the Boon
|
Her form retreated from the longing earth
|
Forsaking nearness to the abandoned sense,
|
Ascending to her unattainable home.
|
Lone, brilliant, vacant lay the inner fields;
|
All was unfilled inordinate spirit space,
|
Indifferent, waste, a desert of bright peace.
|
Then a line moved on the far edge of calm:
|
The warm-lipped sentient soft terrestrial wave,
|
A quick and many-murmured moan and laugh,
|
Came gliding in upon white feet of sound.
|
Unlocked was the deep glory of Silence' heart;
|
The absolute unmoving stillnesses
|
Surrendered to the breath of mortal air,
|
Dissolving boundlessly the heavens of trance
|
Collapsed to waking mind. Eternity
|
Cast down its incommunicable lids
|
Over its solitudes remote from ken
|
Behind the voiceless mystery of sleep.
|
The grandiose respite failed, the wide release.
|
Across the light of fast-receding planes
|
That fled from him as from a falling star,
|
Compelled to fill its human house in Time
|
His soul drew back into the speed and noise
|
Of the vast business of created things.
|
A chariot of the marvels of the heavens
|
Broad-based to bear the gods on fiery wheels,
|
Flaming he swept through the spiritual gates.
|
The mortal stir received him in its midst.
|
Once more he moved amid material scenes,
|
Lifted by intimations from the heights
|
And in the pauses of the building brain
|
Touched by the thoughts that skim the fathomless surge
|
Of Nature and wing back to hidden shores.
|
The eternal seeker in the aeonic field
|
Besieged by the intolerant press of hours
|
Again was strong for great swift-footed deeds.
|
Awake beneath the ignorant vault of Night,
|
He saw the unnumbered people of the stars
|
And heard the questioning of the unsatisfied flood
|
And toiled with the form-maker, measuring Mind.
|
A wanderer from the occult invisible suns
|
Accomplishing the fate of transient things,
|
A god in the figure of the arisen beast,
|
He raised his brow of conquest to the heavens
|
Establishing the empire of the soul
|
On Matter and its bounded universe
|
As on a solid rock in infinite seas.
|
The Lord of Life resumed his mighty rounds
|
In the scant field of the ambiguous globe.
|
END OF PART ONE
|
PART TWO
|
The Birth and Childhood of the Flame
|
A MAENAD of the cycles of desire
|
Around a Light she must not dare to touch,
|
Hastening towards a far-off unknown goal
|
Earth followed the endless journey of the Sun.
|
A mind but half-awake in the swing of the void
|
On the bosom of Inconscience dreamed out life
|
And bore this finite world of thought and deed
|
Across the immobile trance of the Infinite.
|
A vast immutable silence with her ran:
|
Prisoner of speed upon a jewelled wheel,
|
She communed with the mystic heart in Space.
|
Amid the ambiguous stillness of the stars
|
She moved towards some undisclosed event
|
And her rhythm measured the long whirl of Time.
|
In ceaseless motion round the purple rim
|
Day after day sped by like coloured spokes,
|
And through a glamour of shifting hues of air
|
The seasons drew in linked significant dance
|
The symbol pageant of the changing year.
|
Across the burning languor of the soil
|
Paced Summer with his pomp of violent noons
|
And stamped his tyranny of torrid light
|
And the blue seal of a great burnished sky.
|
Next through its fiery swoon or clotted knot
|
Rain-tide burst in upon torn wings of heat,
|
Startled with lightnings air's unquiet drowse,
|
Lashed with life-giving streams the torpid soil,
|
Overcast with flare and sound and storm-winged dark
|
The star-defended doors of heaven's dim sleep,
|
Or from the gold eye of her paramour
|
Covered with packed cloud-veils the earth's brown face.
|
Armies of revolution crossed the time-field,
|
The clouds' unending march besieged the world,
|
Tempests' pronunciamentos claimed the sky
|
And thunder drums announced the embattled gods.
|
A traveller from unquiet neighbouring seas,
|
The dense-maned monsoon rode neighing through earth's hours:
|
Thick now the emissary javelins:
|
Enormous lightnings split the horizon's rim
|
And, hurled from the quarters as from contending camps,
|
Married heaven's edges steep and bare and blind:
|
A surge and hiss and onset of huge rain,
|
The long straight sleet-drift, clamours of winged storm-charge,
|
Throngs of wind-faces, rushing of wind-feet
|
Hurrying swept through the prone afflicted plains:
|
Heaven's waters trailed and dribbled through the drowned land.
|
Then all was a swift stride, a sibilant race,
|
Or all was tempest's shout and water's fall.
|
A dimness sagged on the grey floor of day,
|
Its dingy sprawling length joined morn to eve,
|
Wallowing in sludge and shower it reached black dark.
|
Day a half darkness wore as its dull dress.
|
Light looked into dawn's tarnished glass and met
|
Its own face there, twin to a half-lit night's:
|
Downpour and drip and seeping mist swayed all
|
And turned dry soil to bog and reeking mud:
|
Earth was a quagmire, heaven a dismal block.
|
None saw through dank drenched weeks the dungeon sun.
|
Even when no turmoil vexed air's sombre rest,
|
Or a faint ray glimmered through weeping clouds
|
As a sad smile gleams veiled by returning tears,
|
All promised brightness failed at once denied
|
Or, soon condemned, died like a brief-lived hope.
|
Then a last massive deluge thrashed dead mire
|
And a subsiding mutter left all still,
|
Or only the muddy creep of sinking floods
|
Or only a whisper and green toss of trees.
|
CANTO I: The Birth and Childhood of the Flame
|
Earth's mood now changed; she lay in lulled repose,
|
The hours went by with slow contented tread:
|
A wide and tranquil air remembered peace,
|
Earth was the comrade of a happy sun.
|
A calmness neared as of the approach of God,
|
A light of musing trance lit soil and sky
|
And an identity and ecstasy
|
Filled meditation's solitary heart.
|
A dream loitered in the dumb mind of Space,
|
Time opened its chambers of felicity,
|
An exaltation entered and a hope:
|
An inmost self looked up to a heavenlier height,
|
An inmost thought kindled a hidden flame
|
And the inner sight adored an unseen sun.
|
Three thoughtful seasons passed with shining tread
|
And scanning one by one the pregnant hours
|
Watched for a flame that lurked in luminous depths,
|
The vigil of some mighty birth to come.
|
Autumn led in the glory of her moons
|
And dreamed in the splendour of her lotus pools
|
And Winter and Dew-time laid their calm cool hands
|
On Nature's bosom still in a half sleep
|
And deepened with hues of lax and mellow ease
|
The tranquil beauty of the waning year.
|
Then Spring, an ardent lover, leaped through leaves
|
And caught the earth-bride in his eager clasp;
|
His advent was a fire of irised hues,
|
His arms were a circle of the arrival of joy.
|
His voice was a call to the Transcendent's sphere
|
Whose secret touch upon our mortal lives
|
Keeps ever new the thrill that made the world,
|
Remoulds an ancient sweetness to new shapes
|
And guards intact unchanged by death and Time
|
The answer of our hearts to Nature's charm
|
And keeps for ever new, yet still the same,
|
The throb that ever wakes to the old delight
|
And beauty and rapture and the joy to live.
|
His coming brought the magic and the spell;
|
At his touch life's tired heart grew glad and young;
|
He made joy a willing prisoner in her breast.
|
His grasp was a young god's upon earth's limbs:
|
Changed by the passion of his divine outbreak
|
He made her body beautiful with his kiss.
|
Impatient for felicity he came,
|
High-fluting with the col's happy voice,
|
His peacock turban trailing on the trees;
|
His breath was a warm summons to delight,
|
The dense voluptuous azure was his gaze.
|
A soft celestial urge surprised the blood
|
Rich with the instinct of God's sensuous joys;
|
Revealed in beauty, a cadence was abroad
|
Insistent on the rapture-thrill in life:
|
Immortal movements touched the fleeting hours.
|
A godlike packed intensity of sense
|
Made it a passionate pleasure even to breathe;
|
All sights and voices wove a single charm.
|
The life of the enchanted globe became
|
A storm of sweetness and of light and song,
|
A revel of colour and of ecstasy,
|
A hymn of rays, a litany of cries:
|
A strain of choral priestly music sang
|
And, swung on the swaying censer of the trees,
|
A sacrifice of perfume filled the hours.
|
Asocas burned in crimson spots of flame,
|
Pure like the breath of an unstained desire
|
White jasmines haunted the enamoured air,
|
Pale mango-blossoms fed the liquid voice
|
Of the love-maddened col, and the brown bee
|
Muttered in fragrance mid the honey-buds.
|
The sunlight was a great god's golden smile.
|
All Nature was at beauty's festival.
|
CANTO I: The Birth and Childhood of the Flame
|
In this high signal moment of the gods
|
Answering earth's yearning and her cry for bliss,
|
A greatness from our other countries came.
|
A silence in the noise of earthly things
|
Immutably revealed the secret Word,
|
A mightier influx filled the oblivious clay:
|
A lamp was lit, a sacred image made.
|
A mediating ray had touched the earth
|
Bridging the gulf between man's mind and God's;
|
Its brightness linked our transience to the Unknown.
|
A spirit of its celestial source aware
|
Translating heaven into a human shape
|
Descended into earth's imperfect mould
|
And wept not fallen to mortality,
|
But looked on all with large and tranquil eyes.
|
One had returned from the transcendent planes
|
And bore anew the load of mortal breath,
|
Who had striven of old with our darkness and our pain;
|
She took again her divine unfinished task:
|
Survivor of death and the aeonic years,
|
Once more with her fathomless heart she fronted Time.
|
Again there was renewed, again revealed
|
The ancient closeness by earth-vision veiled,
|
The secret contact broken off in Time,
|
A consanguinity of earth and heaven,
|
Between the human portion toiling here
|
And an as yet unborn and limitless Force.
|
Again the mystic deep attempt began,
|
The daring wager of the cosmic game.
|
For since upon this blind and whirling globe
|
Earth-plasm first quivered with the illumining mind
|
And life invaded the material sheath
|
Afflicting Inconscience with the need to feel,
|
Since in Infinity's silence woke a word,
|
A Mother-wisdom works in Nature's breast
|
To pour delight on the heart of toil and want
|
And press perfection on life's stumbling powers,
|
Impose heaven-sentience on the obscure abyss
|
And make dumb Matter conscious of its God.
|
Although our fallen minds forget to climb,
|
Although our human stuff resists or breaks,
|
She keeps her will that hopes to divinise clay;
|
Failure cannot repress, defeat o'erthrow;
|
Time cannot weary her nor the Void subdue,
|
The ages have not made her passion less;
|
No victory she admits of Death or Fate.
|
Always she drives the soul to new attempt;
|
Always her magical infinitude
|
Forces to aspire the inert brute elements;
|
As one who has all infinity to waste,
|
She scatters the seed of the Eternal's strength
|
On a half-animate and crumbling mould,
|
Plants heaven's delight in the heart's passionate mire,
|
Pours godhead's seekings into a bare beast frame,
|
Hides immortality in a mask of death.
|
Once more that Will put on an earthly shape.
|
A Mind empowered from Truth's immutable seat
|
Was framed for vision and interpreting act
|
And instruments were sovereignly designed
|
To express divinity in terrestrial signs.
|
Outlined by the pressure of this new descent
|
A lovelier body formed than earth had known.
|
As yet a prophecy only and a hint,
|
The glowing arc of a charmed unseen whole,
|
It came into the sky of mortal life
|
Bright like the crescent horn of a gold moon
|
Returning in a faint illumined eve.
|
At first glimmering like an unshaped idea
|
Passive she lay sheltered in wordless sleep,
|
Involved and drowned in Matter's giant trance,
|
An infant heart of the deep-caved world-plan
|
In cradle of divine inconscience rocked
|
CANTO I: The Birth and Childhood of the Flame
|
By the universal ecstasy of the suns.
|
Some missioned Power in the half-wakened frame
|
Nursed a transcendent birth's dumb glorious seed
|
For which this vivid tenement was made.
|
But soon the link of soul with form grew sure;
|
Flooded was the dim cave with slow conscient light,
|
The seed grew into a delicate marvellous bud,
|
The bud disclosed a great and heavenly bloom.
|
At once she seemed to found a mightier race.
|
Arrived upon the strange and dubious globe
|
The child remembering inly a far home
|
Lived guarded in her spirit's luminous cell,
|
Alone mid men in her diviner kind.
|
Even in her childish movements could be felt
|
The nearness of a light still kept from earth,
|
Feelings that only eternity could share,
|
Thoughts natural and native to the gods.
|
As needing nothing but its own rapt flight
|
Her nature dwelt in a strong separate air
|
Like a strange bird with large rich-coloured breast
|
That sojourns on a secret fruited bough,
|
Lost in the emerald glory of the woods
|
Or flies above divine unreachable tops.
|
Harmoniously she impressed the earth with heaven.
|
Aligned to a swift rhythm of sheer delight
|
And singing to themselves her days went by;
|
Each minute was a throb of beauty's heart;
|
The hours were tuned to a sweet-toned content
|
Which asked for nothing, but took all life gave
|
Sovereignly as her nature's inborn right.
|
Near was her spirit to its parent Sun,
|
The Breath within to the eternal joy.
|
The first fair life that breaks from Nature's swoon,
|
Mounts in a line of rapture to the skies;
|
Absorbed in its own happy urge it lives,
|
Sufficient to itself, yet turned to all:
|
It has no seen communion with its world,
|
No open converse with surrounding things.
|
There is a oneness native and occult
|
That needs no instruments and erects no form;
|
In unison it grows with all that is.
|
All contacts it assumes into its trance,
|
Laugh-tossed consents to the wind's kiss and takes
|
Transmutingly the shocks of sun and breeze:
|
A blissful yearning riots in its leaves,
|
A magic passion trembles in its blooms,
|
Its boughs aspire in hushed felicity.
|
An occult godhead of this beauty is cause,
|
The spirit and intimate guest of all this charm,
|
This sweetness's priestess and this reverie's muse.
|
Invisibly protected from our sense
|
The Dryad lives drenched in a deeper ray
|
And feels another air of storms and calms
|
And quivers inwardly with mystic rain.
|
This at a heavenlier height was shown in her.
|
Even when she bent to meet earth's intimacies
|
Her spirit kept the stature of the gods;
|
It stooped but was not lost in Matter's reign.
|
A world translated was her gleaming mind,
|
And marvel-mooned bright crowding fantasies
|
Fed with spiritual sustenance of dreams
|
The ideal goddess in her house of gold.
|
Aware of forms to which our eyes are closed,
|
Conscious of nearnesses we cannot feel,
|
The Power within her shaped her moulding sense
|
In deeper figures than our surface types.
|
An invisible sunlight ran within her veins
|
And flooded her brain with heavenly brilliances
|
That woke a wider sight than earth could know.
|
Outlined in the sincerity of that ray
|
Her springing childlike thoughts were richly turned
|
Into luminous patterns of her soul's deep truth,
|
CANTO I: The Birth and Childhood of the Flame
|
And from her eyes she cast another look
|
On all around her than man's ignorant view.
|
All objects were to her shapes of living selves
|
And she perceived a message from her kin
|
In each awakening touch of outward things.
|
Each was a symbol power, a vivid flash
|
In the circuit of infinities half-known;
|
Nothing was alien or inanimate,
|
Nothing without its meaning or its call.
|
For with a greater Nature she was one.
|
As from the soil sprang glory of branch and flower,
|
As from the animal's life rose thinking man,
|
A new epiphany appeared in her.
|
A mind of light, a life of rhythmic force,
|
A body instinct with hidden divinity
|
Prepared an image of the coming god;
|
And when the slow rhyme of the expanding years
|
And the rich murmurous swarm-work of the days
|
Had honey-packed her sense and filled her limbs,
|
Accomplishing the moon-orb of her grace,
|
Self-guarded in the silence of her strength
|
Her solitary greatness was not less.
|
Nearer the godhead to the surface pressed,
|
A sun replacing childhood's nebula
|
Sovereign in a blue and lonely sky.
|
Upward it rose to grasp the human scene:
|
The strong Inhabitant turned to watch her field.
|
A lovelier light assumed her spirit brow
|
And sweet and solemn grew her musing gaze;
|
Celestial-human deep warm slumbrous fires
|
Woke in the long fringed glory of her eyes
|
Like altar-burnings in a mysteried shrine.
|
Out of those crystal windows gleamed a will
|
That brought a large significance to life.
|
Holding her forehead's candid stainless space
|
Behind the student arch a noble power
|
Of wisdom looked from light on transient things.
|
A scout of victory in a vigil tower,
|
Her aspiration called high destiny down;
|
A silent warrior paced in her city of strength
|
Inviolate, guarding Truth's diamond throne.
|
A nectarous haloed moon her passionate heart
|
Loved all and spoke no word and made no sign,
|
But kept her bosom's rapturous secrecy
|
A blissful ardent moved and voiceless world.
|
Proud, swift and joyful ran the wave of life
|
Within her like a stream in Paradise.
|
Many high gods dwelt in one beautiful home;
|
Yet was her nature's orb a perfect whole,
|
Harmonious like a chant with many tones,
|
Immense and various like a universe.
|
The body that held this greatness seemed almost
|
An image made of heaven's transparent light.
|
Its charm recalled things seen in vision's hours,
|
A golden bridge spanning a faery flood,
|
A moon-touched palm-tree single by a lake
|
Companion of the wide and glimmering peace,
|
A murmur as of leaves in Paradise
|
Moving when feet of the Immortals pass,
|
A fiery halo over sleeping hills,
|
A strange and starry head alone in Night.
|
The Growth of the Flame
|
A LAND of mountains and wide sun-beat plains
|
And giant rivers pacing to vast seas,
|
A field of creation and spiritual hush,
|
Silence swallowing life's acts into the deeps,
|
Of thought's transcendent climb and heavenward leap,
|
A brooding world of reverie and trance,
|
Filled with the mightiest works of God and man,
|
Where Nature seemed a dream of the Divine
|
And beauty and grace and grandeur had their home,
|
Harboured the childhood of the incarnate Flame.
|
Over her watched millennial influences
|
And the deep godheads of a grandiose past
|
Looked on her and saw the future's godheads come
|
As if this magnet drew their powers unseen.
|
Earth's brooding wisdom spoke to her still breast;
|
Mounting from mind's last peaks to mate with gods,
|
Making earth's brilliant thoughts a springing-board
|
To dive into the cosmic vastnesses,
|
The knowledge of the thinker and the seer
|
Saw the unseen and thought the unthinkable,
|
Opened the enormous doors of the unknown,
|
Rent man's horizons into infinity.
|
A shoreless sweep was lent to the mortal's acts,
|
And art and beauty sprang from the human depths;
|
Nature and soul vied in nobility.
|
Ethics the human keyed to imitate heaven;
|
The harmony of a rich culture's tones
|
Refined the sense and magnified its reach
|
To hear the unheard and glimpse the invisible
|
And taught the soul to soar beyond things known,
|
Inspiring life to greaten and break its bounds,
|
Aspiring to the Immortals' unseen world.
|
Leaving earth's safety daring wings of Mind
|
Bore her above the trodden fields of thought
|
Crossing the mystic seas of the Beyond
|
To live on eagle heights near to the Sun.
|
There Wisdom sits on her eternal throne.
|
All her life's turns led her to symbol doors
|
Admitting to secret Powers that were her kin;
|
Adept of truth, initiate of bliss,
|
A mystic acolyte trained in Nature's school,
|
Aware of the marvel of created things
|
She laid the secrecies of her heart's deep muse
|
Upon the altar of the Wonderful;
|
Her hours were a ritual in a timeless fane;
|
Her acts became gestures of sacrifice.
|
Invested with a rhythm of higher spheres
|
The word was used as a hieratic means
|
For the release of the imprisoned spirit
|
Into communion with its comrade gods.
|
Or it helped to beat out new expressive forms
|
Of that which labours in the heart of life,
|
Some immemorial Soul in men and things,
|
Seeker of the unknown and the unborn
|
Carrying a light from the Ineffable
|
To rend the veil of the last mysteries.
|
Intense philosophies pointed earth to heaven
|
Or on foundations broad as cosmic Space
|
Upraised the earth-mind to superhuman heights.
|
Overpassing lines that please the outward eyes
|
But hide the sight of that which lives within
|
Sculpture and painting concentrated sense
|
Upon an inner vision's motionless verge,
|
Revealed a figure of the invisible,
|
Unveiled all Nature's meaning in a form,
|
Or caught into a body the Divine.
|
The architecture of the Infinite
|
CANTO II: The Growth of the Flame
|
Discovered here its inward-musing shapes
|
Captured into wide breadths of soaring stone:
|
Music brought down celestial yearnings, song
|
Held the merged heart absorbed in rapturous depths,
|
Linking the human with the cosmic cry;
|
The world-interpreting movements of the dance
|
Moulded idea and mood to a rhythmic sway
|
And posture; crafts minute in subtle lines
|
Eternised a swift moment's memory
|
Or showed in a carving's sweep, a cup's design
|
The underlying patterns of the unseen:
|
Poems in largeness cast like moving worlds
|
And metres surging with the ocean's voice
|
Translated by grandeurs locked in Nature's heart
|
But thrown now into a crowded glory of speech
|
The beauty and sublimity of her forms,
|
The passion of her moments and her moods
|
Lifting the human word nearer to the god's.
|
Man's eyes could look into the inner realms;
|
His scrutiny discovered number's law
|
And organised the motions of the stars,
|
Mapped out the visible fashioning of the world,
|
Questioned the process of his thoughts or made
|
A theorised diagram of mind and life.
|
These things she took in as her nature's food,
|
But these alone could fill not her wide Self:
|
A human seeking limited by its gains,
|
To her they seemed the great and early steps
|
Hazardous of a young discovering spirit
|
Which saw not yet by its own native light;
|
It tapped the universe with testing knocks
|
Or stretched to find truth mind's divining rod;
|
There was a growing out to numberless sides,
|
But not the widest seeing of the soul,
|
Not yet the vast direct immediate touch,
|
Nor yet the art and wisdom of the Gods.
|
A boundless knowledge greater than man's thought,
|
A happiness too high for heart and sense
|
Locked in the world and yearning for release
|
She felt in her; waiting as yet for form,
|
It asked for objects around which to grow
|
And natures strong to bear without recoil
|
The splendour of her native royalty,
|
Her greatness and her sweetness and her bliss,
|
Her might to possess and her vast power to love:
|
Earth made a stepping-stone to conquer heaven,
|
The soul saw beyond heaven's limiting boundaries,
|
Met a great light from the Unknowable
|
And dreamed of a transcendent action's sphere.
|
Aware of the universal Self in all
|
She turned to living hearts and human forms,
|
Her soul's reflections, complements, counterparts,
|
The close outlying portions of her being
|
Divided from her by walls of body and mind
|
Yet to her spirit bound by ties divine.
|
Overcoming invisible hedge and masked defence
|
And the loneliness that separates soul from soul,
|
She wished to make all one immense embrace
|
That she might house in it all living things
|
Raised into a splendid point of seeing light
|
Out of division's dense inconscient cleft,
|
And make them one with God and world and her.
|
Only a few responded to her call:
|
Still fewer felt the screened divinity
|
And strove to mate its godhead with their own,
|
Approaching with some kinship to her heights.
|
Uplifted towards luminous secrecies
|
Or conscious of some splendour hidden above
|
They leaped to find her in a moment's flash,
|
Glimpsing a light in a celestial vast,
|
But could not keep the vision and the power
|
And fell back to life's dull ordinary tone.
|
CANTO II: The Growth of the Flame
|
A mind daring heavenly experiment,
|
Growing towards some largeness they felt near,
|
Testing the unknown's bound with eager touch
|
They still were prisoned by their human grain:
|
They could not keep up with her tireless step;
|
Too small and eager for her large-paced will,
|
Too narrow to look with the unborn Infinite's gaze
|
Their nature weary grew of things too great.
|
For even the close partners of her thoughts
|
Who could have walked the nearest to her ray,
|
Worshipped the power and light they felt in her
|
But could not match the measure of her soul.
|
A friend and yet too great wholly to know,
|
She walked in their front towards a greater light,
|
Their leader and queen over their hearts and souls,
|
One close to their bosoms, yet divine and far.
|
Admiring and amazed they saw her stride
|
Attempting with a godlike rush and leap
|
Heights for their human stature too remote
|
Or with a slow great many-sided toil
|
Pushing towards aims they hardly could conceive;
|
Yet forced to be the satellites of her sun
|
They moved unable to forego her light,
|
Desiring they clutched at her with outstretched hands
|
Or followed stumbling in the paths she made.
|
Or longing with their self of life and flesh
|
They clung to her for heart's nourishment and support:
|
The rest they could not see in visible light;
|
Vaguely they bore her inner mightiness.
|
Or bound by the senses and the longing heart,
|
Adoring with a turbid human love,
|
They could not grasp the mighty spirit she was
|
Or change by closeness to be even as she.
|
Some felt her with their souls and thrilled with her,
|
A greatness felt near yet beyond mind's grasp;
|
To see her was a summons to adore,
|
To be near her drew a high communion's force.
|
So men worship a god too great to know,
|
Too high, too vast to wear a limiting shape;
|
They feel a Presence and obey a might,
|
Adore a love whose rapture invades their breasts;
|
To a divine ardour quickening the heart-beats,
|
A law they follow greatening heart and life.
|
Opened to the breath is a new diviner air,
|
Opened to man is a freer, happier world:
|
He sees high steps climbing to Self and Light.
|
Her divine parts the soul's allegiance called:
|
It saw, it felt, it knew the deity.
|
Her will was puissant on their nature's acts,
|
Her heart's inexhaustible sweetness lured their hearts,
|
A being they loved whose bounds exceeded theirs;
|
Her measure they could not reach but bore her touch,
|
Answering with the flower's answer to the sun
|
They gave themselves to her and asked no more.
|
One greater than themselves, too wide for their ken,
|
Their minds could not understand nor wholly know,
|
Their lives replied to hers, moved at her words:
|
They felt a godhead and obeyed a call,
|
Answered to her lead and did her work in the world;
|
Their lives, their natures moved compelled by hers
|
As if the truth of their own larger selves
|
Put on an aspect of divinity
|
To exalt them to a pitch beyond their earth's.
|
They felt a larger future meet their walk;
|
She held their hands, she chose for them their paths:
|
They were moved by her towards great unknown things,
|
Faith drew them and the joy to feel themselves hers;
|
They lived in her, they saw the world with her eyes.
|
Some turned to her against their nature's bent;
|
Divided between wonder and revolt,
|
Drawn by her charm and mastered by her will,
|
Possessed by her, her striving to possess,
|
CANTO II: The Growth of the Flame
|
Impatient subjects, their tied longing hearts
|
Hugging the bonds close of which they most complained,
|
Murmured at a yoke they would have wept to lose,
|
The splendid yoke of her beauty and her love:
|
Others pursued her with life's blind desires
|
And claiming all of her as their lonely own,
|
Hastened to engross her sweetness meant for all.
|
As earth claims light for its lone separate need
|
Demanding her for their sole jealous clasp,
|
They asked from her movements bounded like their own
|
And to their smallness craved a like response.
|
Or they repined that she surpassed their grip,
|
And hoped to bind her close with longing's cords.
|
Or finding her touch desired too strong to bear
|
They blamed her for a tyranny they loved,
|
Shrank into themselves as from too bright a sun,
|
Yet hankered for the splendour they refused.
|
Angrily enamoured of her sweet passionate ray
|
The weakness of their earth could hardly bear,
|
They longed but cried out at the touch desired
|
Inapt to meet divinity so close,
|
Intolerant of a Force they could not house.
|
Some drawn unwillingly by her divine sway
|
Endured it like a sweet but alien spell;
|
Unable to mount to levels too sublime,
|
They yearned to draw her down to their own earth.
|
Or forced to centre round her their passionate lives,
|
They hoped to bind to their heart's human needs
|
Her glory and grace that had enslaved their souls.
|
But mid this world, these hearts that answered her call,
|
None could stand up her equal and her mate.
|
In vain she stooped to equal them with her heights,
|
Too pure that air was for small souls to breathe.
|
These comrade selves to raise to her own wide breadths
|
Her heart desired and fill with her own power
|
That a diviner Force might enter life,
|
A breath of Godhead greaten human time.
|
Although she leaned down to their littleness
|
Covering their lives with her strong passionate hands
|
And knew by sympathy their needs and wants
|
And dived in the shallow wave-depths of their lives
|
And met and shared their heart-beats of grief and joy
|
And bent to heal their sorrow and their pride,
|
Lavishing the might that was hers on her lone peak
|
To lift to it their aspiration's cry,
|
And though she drew their souls into her vast
|
And surrounded with the silence of her deeps
|
And held as the great Mother holds her own,
|
Only her earthly surface bore their charge
|
And mixed its fire with their mortality:
|
Her greater self lived sole, unclaimed, within.
|
Oftener in dumb Nature's stir and peace
|
A nearness she could feel serenely one;
|
The Force in her drew earth's subhuman broods;
|
And to her spirit's large and free delight
|
She joined the ardent-hued magnificent lives
|
Of animal and bird and flower and tree.
|
They answered to her with the simple heart.
|
In man a dim disturbing somewhat lives;
|
It knows but turns away from divine Light
|
Preferring the dark ignorance of the fall.
|
Among the many who came drawn to her
|
Nowhere she found her partner of high tasks,
|
The comrade of her soul, her other self
|
Who was made with her, like God and Nature, one.
|
Some near approached, were touched, caught fire, then failed,
|
Too great was her demand, too pure her force.
|
Thus lighting earth around her like a sun,
|
Yet in her inmost sky an orb aloof,
|
A distance severed her from those most close.
|
Puissant, apart her soul as the gods live.
|
CANTO II: The Growth of the Flame
|
As yet unlinked with the broad human scene,
|
In a small circle of young eager hearts,
|
Her being's early school and closed domain,
|
Apprentice in the business of earth-life,
|
She schooled her heavenly strain to bear its touch,
|
Content in her little garden of the gods
|
As blooms a flower in an unvisited place.
|
Earth nursed, unconscious still, the inhabiting flame,
|
Yet something deeply stirred and dimly knew;
|
There was a movement and a passionate call,
|
A rainbow dream, a hope of golden change;
|
Some secret wing of expectation beat,
|
A growing sense of something new and rare
|
And beautiful stole across the heart of Time.
|
Then a faint whisper of her touched the soil,
|
Breathed like a hidden need the soul divines;
|
The eye of the great world discovered her
|
And wonder lifted up its bardic voice.
|
A key to a Light still kept in being's cave,
|
The sun-word of an ancient mystery's sense,
|
Her name ran murmuring on the lips of men
|
Exalted and sweet like an inspired verse
|
Struck from the epic lyre of rumour's winds
|
Or sung like a chanted thought by the poet Fame.
|
But like a sacred symbol's was that cult.
|
Admired, unsought, intangible to the grasp
|
Her beauty and flaming strength were seen afar
|
Like lightning playing with the fallen day,
|
A glory unapproachably divine.
|
No equal heart came close to join her heart,
|
No transient earthly love assailed her calm,
|
No hero passion had the strength to seize;
|
No eyes demanded her replying eyes.
|
A Power within her awed the imperfect flesh;
|
The self-protecting genius in our clay
|
Divined the goddess in the woman's shape
|
And drew back from a touch beyond its kind
|
The earth-nature bound in sense-life's narrow make.
|
The hearts of men are amorous of clay-kin
|
And bear not spirits lone and high who bring
|
Fire-intimations from the deathless planes
|
Too vast for souls not born to mate with heaven.
|
Whoever is too great must lonely live.
|
Adored he walks in mighty solitude;
|
Vain is his labour to create his kind,
|
His only comrade is the Strength within.
|
Thus was it for a while with Savitri.
|
All worshipped marvellingly, none dared to claim.
|
Her mind sat high pouring its golden beams,
|
Her heart was a crowded temple of delight.
|
A single lamp lit in perfection's house,
|
A bright pure image in a priestless shrine,
|
Midst those encircling lives her spirit dwelt,
|
Apart in herself until her hour of fate.
|
The Call to the Quest
|
A MORN that seemed a new creation's front,
|
Bringing a greater sunlight, happier skies,
|
Came burdened with a beauty moved and strange
|
Out of the changeless origin of things.
|
An ancient longing struck again new roots:
|
The air drank deep of unfulfilled desire;
|
The high trees trembled with a wandering wind
|
Like souls that quiver at the approach of joy,
|
And in a bosom of green secrecy
|
For ever of its one love-note untired
|
A lyric col cried among the leaves.
|
Away from the terrestrial murmur turned
|
Where transient calls and answers mix their flood,
|
King Aswapati listened through the ray
|
To other sounds than meet the sense-formed ear.
|
On a subtle interspace which rings our life,
|
Unlocked were the inner spirit's trance-closed doors:
|
The inaudible strain in Nature could be caught;
|
Across this cyclic tramp of eager lives,
|
Across the deep urgency of present cares,
|
Earth's wordless hymn to the Ineffable
|
Arose from the silent heart of the cosmic Void;
|
He heard the voice repressed of unborn Powers
|
Murmuring behind the luminous bars of Time.
|
Again the mighty yearning raised its flame
|
That asks a perfect life on earth for men
|
And prays for certainty in the uncertain mind
|
And shadowless bliss for suffering human hearts
|
And Truth embodied in an ignorant world
|
And godhead divinising mortal forms.
|
A word that leaped from some far sky of thought,
|
Admitted by the cowled receiving scribe
|
Traversed the echoing passages of his brain
|
And left its stamp on the recording cells.
|
"O Force-compelled, Fate-driven earth-born race,
|
O petty adventurers in an infinite world
|
And prisoners of a dwarf humanity,
|
How long will you tread the circling tracks of mind
|
Around your little self and petty things?
|
But not for a changeless littleness were you meant,
|
Not for vain repetition were you built;
|
Out of the Immortal's substance you were made;
|
Your actions can be swift revealing steps,
|
Your life a changeful mould for growing gods.
|
A Seer, a strong Creator, is within,
|
The immaculate Grandeur broods upon your days,
|
Almighty powers are shut in Nature's cells.
|
A greater destiny waits you in your front:
|
This transient earthly being if he wills
|
Can fit his acts to a transcendent scheme.
|
He who now stares at the world with ignorant eyes
|
Hardly from the Inconscient's night aroused,
|
That look at images and not at Truth,
|
Can fill those orbs with an immortal's sight.
|
Yet shall the godhead grow within your hearts,
|
You shall awake into the spirit's air
|
And feel the breaking walls of mortal mind
|
And hear the message which left life's heart dumb
|
And look through Nature with sun-gazing lids
|
And blow your conch-shells at the Eternal's gate.
|
Authors of earth's high change, to you it is given
|
To cross the dangerous spaces of the soul
|
And touch the mighty Mother stark awake
|
And meet the Omnipotent in this house of flesh
|
And make of life the million-bodied One.
|
The earth you tread is a border screened from heaven;
|
The life you lead conceals the light you are.
|
CANTO III: The Call to the Quest
|
Immortal Powers sweep flaming past your doors;
|
Far-off upon your tops the god-chant sounds
|
While to exceed yourselves thought's trumpets call,
|
Heard by a few, but fewer dare aspire,
|
The nympholepts of the ecstasy and the blaze.
|
An epic of hope and failure breaks earth's heart;
|
Her force and will exceed her form and fate.
|
A goddess in a net of transience caught,
|
Self-bound in the pastures of death she dreams of life,
|
Self-racked with the pains of hell aspires to joy,
|
And builds to hope her altars of despair,
|
Knows that one high step might enfranchise all
|
And, suffering, looks for greatness in her sons.
|
But dim in human hearts the ascending fire,
|
The invisible Grandeur sits unworshipped there;
|
Man sees the Highest in a limiting form
|
Or looks upon a Person, hears a Name.
|
He turns for little gains to ignorant Powers
|
Or kindles his altar lights to a demon face.
|
He loves the Ignorance fathering his pain.
|
A spell is laid upon his glorious strengths;
|
He has lost the inner Voice that led his thoughts,
|
And masking the oracular tripod seat
|
A specious Idol fills the marvel shrine.
|
The great Illusion wraps him in its veils,
|
The soul's deep intimations come in vain,
|
In vain is the unending line of seers,
|
The sages ponder in unsubstantial light,
|
The poets lend their voice to outward dreams,
|
A homeless fire inspires the prophet tongues.
|
Heaven's flaming lights descend and back return,
|
The luminous Eye approaches and retires;
|
Eternity speaks, none understands its word;
|
Fate is unwilling and the Abyss denies;
|
The Inconscient's mindless waters block all done.
|
Only a little lifted is Mind's screen;
|
The Wise who know see but one half of Truth,
|
The strong climb hardly to a low-peaked height,
|
The hearts that yearn are given one hour to love.
|
His tale half told, falters the secret Bard;
|
The gods are still too few in mortal forms."
|
The Voice withdrew into its hidden skies.
|
But like a shining answer from the gods
|
Approached through sun-bright spaces Savitri.
|
Advancing amid tall heaven-pillaring trees,
|
Apparelled in her flickering-coloured robe
|
She seemed, burning towards the eternal realms,
|
A bright moved torch of incense and of flame
|
That from the sky-roofed temple-soil of earth
|
A pilgrim hand lifts in an invisible shrine.
|
There came the gift of a revealing hour:
|
He saw through depths that reinterpret all,
|
Limited not now by the dull body's eyes,
|
New-found through an arch of clear discovery,
|
This intimation of the world's delight,
|
This wonder of the divine Artist's make
|
Carved like a nectar-cup for thirsty gods,
|
This breathing Scripture of the Eternal's joy,
|
This net of sweetness woven of aureate fire.
|
Transformed the delicate image-face became
|
A deeper Nature's self-revealing sign,
|
A gold-leaf palimpsest of sacred births,
|
A grave world-symbol chiselled out of life.
|
Her brow, a copy of clear unstained heavens,
|
Was meditation's pedestal and defence,
|
The very room and smile of musing Space,
|
Its brooding line infinity's symbol curve.
|
Amid her tresses' cloudy multitude
|
Her long eyes shadowed as by wings of Night
|
Under that moon-gold forehead's dreaming breadth
|
Were seas of love and thought that held the world;
|
Marvelling at life and earth they saw truths far.
|
CANTO III: The Call to the Quest
|
A deathless meaning filled her mortal limbs;
|
As in a golden vase's poignant line
|
They seemed to carry the rhythmic sob of bliss
|
Of earth's mute adoration towards heaven
|
Released in beauty's cry of living form
|
Towards the perfection of eternal things.
|
Transparent grown the ephemeral living dress
|
Bared the expressive deity to his view.
|
Escaped from surface sight and mortal sense
|
The seizing harmony of its shapes became
|
The strange significant icon of a Power
|
Renewing its inscrutable descent
|
Into a human figure of its works
|
That stood out in life's bold abrupt relief
|
On the soil of the evolving universe,
|
A godhead sculptured on a wall of thought,
|
Mirrored in the flowing hours and dimly shrined
|
In Matter as in a cathedral cave.
|
Annulled were the transient values of the mind,
|
The body's sense renounced its earthly look;
|
Immortal met immortal in their gaze.
|
Awaked from the close spell of daily use
|
That hides soul-truth with the outward form's disguise,
|
He saw through the familiar cherished limbs
|
The great and unknown spirit born his child.
|
An impromptu from the deeper sight within,
|
Thoughts rose in him that knew not their own scope.
|
Then to those large and brooding depths whence Love
|
Regarded him across the straits of mind,
|
He spoke in sentences from the unseen Heights.
|
For the hidden prompters of our speech sometimes
|
Can use the formulas of a moment's mood
|
To weigh unconscious lips with words from Fate:
|
A casual passing phrase can change our life.
|
"O spirit, traveller of eternity,
|
Who cam'st from the immortal spaces here
|
Armed for the splendid hazard of thy life
|
To set thy conquering foot on Chance and Time,
|
The moon shut in her halo dreams like thee.
|
A mighty Presence still defends thy frame.
|
Perhaps the heavens guard thee for some great soul,
|
Thy fate, thy work are kept somewhere afar.
|
Thy spirit came not down a star alone.
|
O living inscription of the beauty of love
|
Missalled in aureate virginity,
|
What message of heavenly strength and bliss in thee
|
Is written with the Eternal's sun-white script,
|
One shall discover and greaten with it his life
|
To whom thou loosenest thy heart's jewelled strings.
|
O rubies of silence, lips from which there stole
|
Low laughter, music of tranquillity,
|
Star-lustrous eyes awake in sweet large night
|
And limbs like fine-linked poems made of gold
|
Stanzaed to glimmering curves by artist gods,
|
Depart where love and destiny call your charm.
|
Venture through the deep world to find thy mate.
|
For somewhere on the longing breast of earth,
|
Thy unknown lover waits for thee the unknown.
|
Thy soul has strength and needs no other guide
|
Than One who burns within thy bosom's powers.
|
There shall draw near to meet thy approaching steps
|
The second self for whom thy nature asks,
|
He who shall walk until thy body's end
|
A close-bound traveller pacing with thy pace,
|
The lyrist of thy soul's most intimate chords
|
Who shall give voice to what in thee is mute.
|
Then shall you grow like vibrant kindred harps,
|
One in the beats of difference and delight,
|
Responsive in divine and equal strains,
|
Discovering new notes of the eternal theme.
|
One force shall be your mover and your guide,
|
One light shall be around you and within;
|
CANTO III: The Call to the Quest
|
Hand in strong hand confront Heaven's question, life:
|
Challenge the ordeal of the immense disguise.
|
Ascend from Nature to divinity's heights;
|
Face the high gods, crowned with felicity,
|
Then meet a greater god, thy self beyond Time."
|
This word was seed of all the thing to be:
|
A hand from some Greatness opened her heart's locked doors
|
And showed the work for which her strength was born.
|
As when the mantra sinks in Yoga's ear,
|
Its message enters stirring the blind brain
|
And keeps in the dim ignorant cells its sound;
|
The hearer understands a form of words
|
And, musing on the index thought it holds,
|
He strives to read it with the labouring mind,
|
But finds bright hints, not the embodied truth:
|
Then, falling silent in himself to know
|
He meets the deeper listening of his soul:
|
The Word repeats itself in rhythmic strains:
|
Thought, vision, feeling, sense, the body's self
|
Are seized unutterably and he endures
|
An ecstasy and an immortal change;
|
He feels a Wideness and becomes a Power,
|
All knowledge rushes on him like a sea:
|
Transmuted by the white spiritual ray
|
He walks in naked heavens of joy and calm,
|
Sees the God-face and hears transcendent speech:
|
An equal greatness in her life was sown.
|
Accustomed scenes were now an ended play:
|
Moving in muse amid familiar powers,
|
Touched by new magnitudes and fiery signs,
|
She turned to vastnesses not yet her own;
|
Allured her heart throbbed to unknown sweetnesses;
|
The secrets of an unseen world were close.
|
The morn went up into a smiling sky;
|
Cast from its sapphire pinnacle of trance
|
Day sank into the burning gold of eve;
|
The moon floated, a luminous waif through heaven
|
And sank below the oblivious edge of dream;
|
Night lit the watch-fires of eternity.
|
Then all went back into mind's secret caves;
|
A darkness stooping on the heaven-bird's wings
|
Sealed in her senses from external sight
|
And opened the stupendous depths of sleep.
|
When the pale dawn slipped through Night's shadowy guard,
|
Vainly the new-born light desired her face;
|
The palace woke to its own emptiness;
|
The sovereign of its daily joys was far;
|
Her moonbeam feet tinged not the lucent floors:
|
The beauty and divinity were gone.
|
Delight had fled to search the spacious world.
|
The Quest
|
THE WORLD-WAYS opened before Savitri.
|
At first a strangeness of new brilliant scenes
|
Peopled her mind and kept her body's gaze.
|
But as she moved across the changing earth
|
A deeper consciousness welled up in her:
|
A citizen of many scenes and climes,
|
Each soil and country it had made its home;
|
It took all clans and peoples for her own,
|
Till the whole destiny of mankind was hers.
|
These unfamiliar spaces on her way
|
Were known and neighbours to a sense within,
|
Landscapes recurred like lost forgotten fields,
|
Cities and rivers and plains her vision claimed
|
Like slow-recurring memories in front,
|
The stars at night were her past's brilliant friends,
|
The winds murmured to her of ancient things
|
And she met nameless comrades loved by her once.
|
All was a part of old forgotten selves:
|
Vaguely or with a flash of sudden hints
|
Her acts recalled a line of bygone power,
|
Even her motion's purpose was not new:
|
Traveller to a prefigured high event,
|
She seemed to her remembering witness soul
|
To trace again a journey often made.
|
A guidance turned the dumb revolving wheels
|
And in the eager body of their speed
|
The dim-masked hooded godheads rode who move
|
Assigned to man immutably from his birth,
|
Receivers of the inner and outer law,
|
At once the agents of his spirit's will
|
And witnesses and executors of his fate.
|
Inexorably faithful to their task,
|
They hold his nature's sequence in their guard
|
Carrying the unbroken thread old lives have spun.
|
Attendants on his destiny's measured walk
|
Leading to joys he has won and pains he has called,
|
Even in his casual steps they intervene.
|
Nothing we think or do is void or vain;
|
Each is an energy loosed and holds its course.
|
The shadowy keepers of our deathless past
|
Have made our fate the child of our own acts,
|
And from the furrows laboured by our will
|
We reap the fruit of our forgotten deeds.
|
But since unseen the tree that bore this fruit
|
And we live in a present born from an unknown past,
|
They seem but parts of a mechanic Force
|
To a mechanic mind tied by earth's laws;
|
Yet are they instruments of a Will supreme,
|
Watched by a still all-seeing Eye above.
|
A prescient architect of Fate and Chance
|
Who builds our lives on a foreseen design
|
The meaning knows and consequence of each step
|
And watches the inferior stumbling powers.
|
Upon her silent heights she was aware
|
Of a calm Presence throned above her brows
|
Who saw the goal and chose each fateful curve;
|
It used the body for its pedestal;
|
The eyes that wandered were its searchlight fires,
|
The hands that held the reins its living tools;
|
All was the working of an ancient plan,
|
A way proposed by an unerring Guide.
|
Across wide noons and glowing afternoons,
|
She met with Nature and with human forms
|
And listened to the voices of the world;
|
Driven from within she followed her long road,
|
Mute in the luminous cavern of her heart,
|
Like a bright cloud through the resplendent day.
|
CANTO IV: The Quest
|
At first her path ran far through peopled tracts:
|
Admitted to the lion eye of States
|
And theatres of the loud act of man,
|
Her carven chariot with its fretted wheels
|
Threaded through clamorous marts and sentinel towers
|
Past figured gates and high dream-sculptured fronts
|
And gardens hung in the sapphire of the skies,
|
Pillared assembly halls with armoured guards,
|
Small fanes where one calm Image watched man's life
|
And temples hewn as if by exiled gods
|
To imitate their lost eternity.
|
Often from gilded dusk to argent dawn,
|
Where jewel-lamps flickered on frescoed walls
|
And the stone lattice stared at moonlit boughs,
|
Half-conscious of the tardy listening night
|
Dimly she glided between banks of sleep
|
At rest in the slumbering palaces of kings.
|
Hamlet and village saw the fate-wain pass,
|
Homes of a life bent to the soil it ploughs
|
For sustenance of its short and passing days
|
That, transient, keep their old repeated course,
|
Unchanging in the circle of a sky
|
Which alters not above our mortal toil.
|
Away from this thinking creature's burdened hours
|
To free and griefless spaces now she turned
|
Not yet perturbed by human joys and fears.
|
Here was the childhood of primaeval earth,
|
Here timeless musings large and glad and still,
|
Men had forborne as yet to fill with cares,
|
Imperial acres of the eternal sower
|
And wind-stirred grass-lands winking in the sun:
|
Or mid green musing of woods and rough-browed hills,
|
In the grove's murmurous bee-air humming wild
|
Or past the long lapsing voice of silver floods
|
Like a swift hope journeying among its dreams
|
Hastened the chariot of the golden bride.
|
Out of the world's immense unhuman past
|
Tract-memories and ageless remnants came,
|
Domains of light enfeoffed to antique calm
|
Listened to the unaccustomed sound of hooves
|
And large immune entangled silences
|
Absorbed her into emerald secrecy
|
And slow hushed wizard nets of fiery bloom
|
Environed with their coloured snare her wheels.
|
The strong importunate feet of Time fell soft
|
Along these lonely ways, his titan pace
|
Forgotten and his stark and ruinous rounds.
|
The inner ear that listens to solitude,
|
Leaning self-rapt unboundedly could hear
|
The rhythm of the intenser wordless Thought
|
That gathers in the silence behind life,
|
And the low sweet inarticulate voice of earth
|
In the great passion of her sun-kissed trance
|
Ascended with its yearning undertone.
|
Afar from the brute noise of clamorous needs
|
The quieted all-seeking mind could feel,
|
At rest from its blind outwardness of will,
|
The unwearied clasp of her mute patient love
|
And know for a soul the mother of our forms.
|
This spirit stumbling in the fields of sense,
|
This creature bruised in the mortar of the days
|
Could find in her broad spaces of release.
|
Not yet was a world all occupied by care.
|
The bosom of our mother kept for us still
|
Her austere regions and her musing depths,
|
Her impersonal reaches lonely and inspired
|
And the mightinesses of her rapture haunts.
|
Muse-lipped she nursed her symbol mysteries
|
And guarded for her pure-eyed sacraments
|
The valley clefts between her breasts of joy,
|
Her mountain altars for the fires of dawn
|
And nuptial beaches where the ocean couched
|
CANTO IV: The Quest
|
And the huge chanting of her prophet woods.
|
Fields had she of her solitary mirth,
|
Plains hushed and happy in the embrace of light,
|
Alone with the cry of birds and hue of flowers,
|
And wildernesses of wonder lit by her moons
|
And grey seer-evenings kindling with the stars
|
And dim movement in the night's infinitude.
|
August, exulting in her Maker's eye,
|
She felt her nearness to him in earth's breast,
|
Conversed still with a Light behind the veil,
|
Still communed with Eternity beyond.
|
A few and fit inhabitants she called
|
To share the glad communion of her peace;
|
The breadth, the summit were their natural home.
|
The strong king-sages from their labour done,
|
Freed from the warrior tension of their task,
|
Came to her serene sessions in these wilds;
|
The strife was over, the respite lay in front.
|
Happy they lived with birds and beasts and flowers
|
And sunlight and the rustle of the leaves,
|
And heard the wild winds wandering in the night,
|
Mused with the stars in their mute constant ranks,
|
And lodged in the mornings as in azure tents,
|
And with the glory of the noons were one.
|
Some deeper plunged; from life's external clasp
|
Beckoned into a fiery privacy
|
In the soul's unprofaned star-white recess
|
They sojourned with an everliving Bliss;
|
A Voice profound in the ecstasy and the hush
|
They heard, beheld an all-revealing Light.
|
All time-made difference they overcame;
|
The world was fibred with their own heart-strings;
|
Close drawn to the heart that beats in every breast,
|
They reached the one self in all through boundless love.
|
Attuned to Silence and to the world-rhyme,
|
They loosened the knot of the imprisoning mind;
|
Achieved was the wide untroubled witness gaze,
|
Unsealed was Nature's great spiritual eye;
|
To the height of heights rose now their daily climb:
|
Truth leaned to them from her supernal realm;
|
Above them blazed eternity's mystic suns.
|
Nameless the austere ascetics without home
|
Abandoning speech and motion and desire
|
Aloof from creatures sat absorbed, alone,
|
Immaculate in tranquil heights of self
|
On concentration's luminous voiceless peaks,
|
World-naked hermits with their matted hair
|
Immobile as the passionless great hills
|
Around them grouped like thoughts of some vast mood
|
Awaiting the Infinite's behest to end.
|
The seers attuned to the universal Will,
|
Content in Him who smiles behind earth's forms,
|
Abode ungrieved by the insistent days.
|
About them like green trees girdling a hill
|
Young grave disciples fashioned by their touch,
|
Trained to the simple act and conscious word,
|
Greatened within and grew to meet their heights.
|
Far-wandering seekers on the Eternal's path
|
Brought to these quiet founts their spirit's thirst
|
And spent the treasure of a silent hour
|
Bathed in the purity of the mild gaze
|
That, uninsistent, ruled them from its peace,
|
And by its influence found the ways of calm.
|
The Infants of the monarchy of the worlds,
|
The heroic leaders of a coming time,
|
King-children nurtured in that spacious air
|
Like lions gambolling in sky and sun
|
Received half-consciously their godlike stamp:
|
Formed in the type of the high thoughts they sang
|
They learned the wide magnificence of mood
|
That makes us comrades of the cosmic urge,
|
No longer chained to their small separate selves,
|
CANTO IV: The Quest
|
Plastic and firm beneath the eternal hand,
|
Met Nature with a bold and friendly clasp
|
And served in her the Power that shapes her works.
|
One-souled to all and free from narrowing bonds,
|
Large like a continent of warm sunshine
|
In wide equality's impartial joy,
|
These sages breathed for God's delight in things.
|
Assisting the slow entries of the gods,
|
Sowing in young minds immortal thoughts they lived,
|
Taught the great Truth to which man's race must rise
|
Or opened the gates of freedom to a few.
|
Imparting to our struggling world the Light
|
They breathed like spirits from Time's dull yoke released,
|
Comrades and vessels of the cosmic Force,
|
Using a natural mastery like the sun's:
|
Their speech, their silence was a help to earth.
|
A magic happiness flowed from their touch;
|
Oneness was sovereign in that sylvan peace,
|
The wild beast joined in friendship with its prey;
|
Persuading the hatred and the strife to cease
|
The love that flows from the one Mother's breast
|
Healed with their hearts the hard and wounded world.
|
Others escaped from the confines of thought
|
To where Mind motionless sleeps waiting Light's birth,
|
And came back quivering with a nameless Force,
|
Drunk with a wine of lightning in their cells;
|
Intuitive knowledge leaping into speech,
|
Seized, vibrant, kindling with the inspired word,
|
Hearing the subtle voice that clothes the heavens,
|
Carrying the splendour that has lit the suns,
|
They sang Infinity's names and deathless powers
|
In metres that reflect the moving worlds,
|
Sight's sound-waves breaking from the soul's great deeps.
|
Some lost to the person and his strip of thought
|
In a motionless ocean of impersonal Power,
|
Sat mighty, visioned with the Infinite's light,
|
Or, comrades of the everlasting Will,
|
Surveyed the plan of past and future Time.
|
Some winged like birds out of the cosmic sea
|
And vanished into a bright and featureless Vast:
|
Some silent watched the universal dance,
|
Or helped the world by world-indifference.
|
Some watched no more merged in a lonely Self,
|
Absorbed in the trance from which no soul returns,
|
All the occult world-lines for ever closed,
|
The chains of birth and person cast away:
|
Some uncompanioned reached the Ineffable.
|
As floats a sunbeam through a shady place,
|
The golden virgin in her carven car
|
Came gliding among meditation's seats.
|
Often in twilight mid returning troops
|
Of cattle thickening with their dust the shades
|
When the loud day had slipped below the verge,
|
Arriving in a peaceful hermit grove
|
She rested drawing round her like a cloak
|
Its spirit of patient muse and potent prayer.
|
Or near to a lion river's tawny mane
|
And trees that worshipped on a praying shore,
|
A domed and templed air's serene repose
|
Beckoned to her hurrying wheels to stay their speed.
|
In the solemnity of a space that seemed
|
A mind remembering ancient silences,
|
Where to the heart great bygone voices called
|
And the large liberty of brooding seers
|
Had left the long impress of their soul's scene,
|
Awake in candid dawn or darkness mooned,
|
To the still touch inclined the daughter of Flame
|
Drank in hushed splendour between tranquil lids
|
And felt the kinship of eternal calm.
|
But morn broke in reminding her of her quest
|
And from low rustic couch or mat she rose
|
CANTO IV: The Quest
|
And went impelled on her unfinished way
|
And followed the fateful orbit of her life
|
Like a desire that questions silent gods
|
Then passes starlike to some bright Beyond.
|
Thence to great solitary tracts she came,
|
Where man was a passer-by towards human scenes
|
Or sole in Nature's vastness strove to live
|
And called for help to ensouled invisible Powers,
|
Overwhelmed by the immensity of his world
|
And unaware of his own infinity.
|
The earth multiplied to her a changing brow
|
And called her with a far and nameless voice.
|
The mountains in their anchorite solitude,
|
The forests with their multitudinous chant
|
Disclosed to her the masked divinity's doors.
|
On dreaming plains, an indolent expanse,
|
The death-bed of a pale enchanted eve
|
Under the glamour of a sunken sky,
|
Impassive she lay as at an age's end,
|
Or crossed an eager pack of huddled hills
|
Lifting their heads to hunt a lairlike sky,
|
Or travelled in a strange and empty land
|
Where desolate summits camped in a weird heaven,
|
Mute sentinels beneath a drifting moon,
|
Or wandered in some lone tremendous wood
|
Ringing for ever with the crickets' cry
|
Or followed a long glistening serpent road
|
Through fields and pastures lapped in moveless light
|
Or reached the wild beauty of a desert space
|
Where never plough was driven nor herd had grazed
|
And slumbered upon stripped and thirsty sands
|
Amid the savage wild-beast night's appeal.
|
Still unaccomplished was the fateful quest;
|
Still she found not the one predestined face
|
For which she sought amid the sons of men.
|
A grandiose silence wrapped the regal day:
|
The months had fed the passion of the sun
|
And now his burning breath assailed the soil.
|
The tiger heats prowled through the fainting earth;
|
All was licked up as by a lolling tongue.
|
The spring winds failed; the sky was set like bronze.
|
The Destined Meeting-Place
|
BUT NOW the destined spot and hour were close;
|
Unknowing she had neared her nameless goal.
|
For though a dress of blind and devious chance
|
Is laid upon the work of all-wise Fate,
|
Our acts interpret an omniscient Force
|
That dwells in the compelling stuff of things,
|
And nothing happens in the cosmic play
|
But at its time and in its foreseen place.
|
To a space she came of soft and delicate air
|
That seemed a sanctuary of youth and joy,
|
A highl and world of free and green delight
|
Where spring and summer lay together and strove
|
In indolent and amicable debate,
|
Inarmed, disputing with laughter who should rule.
|
There expectation beat wide sudden wings
|
As if a soul had looked out from earth's face,
|
And all that was in her felt a coming change
|
And forgetting obvious joys and common dreams,
|
Obedient to Time's call, to the spirit's fate,
|
Was lifted to a beauty calm and pure
|
That lived under the eyes of Eternity.
|
A crowd of mountainous heads assailed the sky
|
Pushing towards rival shoulders nearer heaven,
|
The armoured leaders of an iron line;
|
Earth prostrate lay beneath their feet of stone.
|
Below them crouched a dream of emerald woods
|
And gleaming borders solitary as sleep:
|
Pale waters ran like glimmering threads of pearl.
|
A sigh was straying among happy leaves;
|
Cool-perfumed with slow pleasure-burdened feet
|
Faint stumbling breezes faltered among flowers.
|
The white crane stood, a vivid motionless streak,
|
Peacock and parrot jewelled soil and tree,
|
The dove's soft moan enriched the enamoured air
|
And fire-winged wild-drakes swam in silvery pools.
|
Earth couched alone with her great lover Heaven,
|
Uncovered to her consort's azure eye.
|
In a luxurious ecstasy of joy
|
She squandered the love-music of her notes,
|
Wasting the passionate pattern of her blooms
|
And festival riot of her scents and hues.
|
A cry and leap and hurry was around,
|
The stealthy footfalls of her chasing things,
|
The shaggy emerald of her centaur mane,
|
The gold and sapphire of her warmth and blaze.
|
Magician of her rapt felicities,
|
Blithe, sensuous-hearted, careless and divine,
|
Life ran or hid in her delightful rooms;
|
Behind all brooded Nature's grandiose calm.
|
Primaeval peace was there and in its bosom
|
Held undisturbed the strife of bird and beast.
|
Man the deep-browed artificer had not come
|
To lay his hand on happy inconscient things,
|
Thought was not there nor the measurer, strong-eyed toil,
|
Life had not learned its discord with its aim.
|
The Mighty Mother lay outstretched at ease.
|
All was in line with her first satisfied plan;
|
Moved by a universal will of joy
|
The trees bloomed in their green felicity
|
And the wild children brooded not on pain.
|
At the end reclined a stern and giant tract
|
Of tangled depths and solemn questioning hills,
|
Peaks like a bare austerity of the soul,
|
Armoured, remote and desolately grand
|
Like the thought-screened infinities that lie
|
Behind the rapt smile of the Almighty's dance.
|
A matted forest-head invaded heaven
|
CANTO I: The Destined Meeting-Place
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As if a blue-throated ascetic peered
|
From the stone fastness of his mountain cell
|
Regarding the brief gladness of the days;
|
His vast extended spirit couched behind.
|
A mighty murmur of immense retreat
|
Besieged the ear, a sad and limitless call
|
As of a soul retiring from the world.
|
This was the scene which the ambiguous Mother
|
Had chosen for her brief felicitous hour;
|
Here in this solitude far from the world
|
Her part she began in the world's joy and strife.
|
Here were disclosed to her the mystic courts,
|
The lurking doors of beauty and surprise,
|
The wings that murmur in the golden house,
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The temple of sweetness and the fiery aisle.
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A stranger on the sorrowful roads of Time,
|
Immortal under the yoke of death and fate,
|
A sacrificant of the bliss and pain of the spheres,
|
Love in the wilderness met Savitri.
|
Satyavan
|
ALL SHE remembered on this day of Fate,
|
The road that hazarded not the solemn depths
|
But turned away to flee to human homes,
|
The wilderness with its mighty monotone,
|
The morning like a lustrous seer above,
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The passion of the summits lost in heaven,
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The titan murmur of the endless woods.
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As if a wicket gate to joy were there
|
Ringed in with voiceless hint and magic sign,
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Upon the margin of an unknown world
|
Reclined the curve of a sun-held recess;
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Groves with strange flowers like eyes of gazing nymphs
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Peered from their secrecy into open space,
|
Boughs whispering to a constancy of light
|
Sheltered a dim and screened felicity,
|
And slowly a supine inconstant breeze
|
Ran like a fleeting sigh of happiness
|
Over slumbrous grasses pranked with green and gold.
|
Hidden in the forest's bosom of loneliness
|
Amid the leaves the inmate voices called,
|
Sweet like desires enamoured and unseen,
|
Cry answering to low insistent cry.
|
Behind slept emerald dumb remotenesses,
|
Haunt of a Nature passionate, veiled, denied
|
To all but her own vision lost and wild.
|
Earth in this beautiful refuge free from cares
|
Murmured to the soul a song of strength and peace.
|
Only one sign was there of a human tread:
|
A single path, shot thin and arrowlike
|
Into this bosom of vast and secret life,
|
Pierced its enormous dream of solitude.
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CANTO II: Satyavan
|
Here first she met on the uncertain earth
|
The one for whom her heart had come so far.
|
As might a soul on Nature's background limned
|
Stand out for a moment in a house of dream
|
Created by the ardent breath of life,
|
So he appeared against the forest verge
|
Inset twixt green relief and golden ray.
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As if a weapon of the living Light,
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Erect and lofty like a spear of God
|
His figure led the splendour of the morn.
|
Noble and clear as the broad peaceful heavens
|
A tablet of young wisdom was his brow;
|
Freedom's imperious beauty curved his limbs,
|
The joy of life was on his open face.
|
His look was a wide daybreak of the gods,
|
His head was a youthful Rishi's touched with light,
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His body was a lover's and a king's.
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In the magnificent dawning of his force
|
Built like a moving statue of delight
|
He illumined the border of the forest page.
|
Out of the ignorant eager toil of the years
|
Abandoning man's loud drama he had come
|
Led by the wisdom of an adverse Fate
|
To meet the ancient Mother in her groves.
|
In her divine communion he had grown
|
A foster-child of beauty and solitude,
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Heir to the centuries of the lonely wise,
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A brother of the sunshine and the sky,
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A wanderer communing with depth and marge.
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A Veda-knower of the unwritten book
|
Perusing the mystic scripture of her forms,
|
He had caught her hierophant significances,
|
Her sphered immense imaginations learned,
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Taught by sublimities of stream and wood
|
And voices of the sun and star and flame
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And chant of the magic singers on the boughs
|
And the dumb teaching of four-footed things.
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Helping with confident steps her slow great hands
|
He leaned to her influence like a flower to rain
|
And, like the flower and tree a natural growth,
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Widened with the touches of her shaping hours.
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The mastery free natures have was his
|
And their assent to joy and spacious calm;
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One with the single Spirit inhabiting all,
|
He laid experience at the Godhead's feet;
|
His mind was open to her infinite mind,
|
His acts were rhythmic with her primal force;
|
He had subdued his mortal thought to hers.
|
That day he had turned from his accustomed paths;
|
For One who, knowing every moment's load,
|
Can move in all our studied or careless steps,
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Had laid the spell of destiny on his feet
|
And drawn him to the forest's flowering verge.
|
At first her glance that took life's million shapes
|
Impartially to people its treasure-house
|
Along with sky and flower and hill and star,
|
Dwelt rather on the bright harmonious scene.
|
It saw the green-gold of the slumbrous sward,
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The grasses quivering with the slow wind's tread,
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The branches haunted by the wild bird's call.
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Awake to Nature, vague as yet to life,
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The eager prisoner from the Infinite,
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The immortal wrestler in its mortal house,
|
Its pride, power, passion of a striving God,
|
It saw this image of veiled deity,
|
This thinking master creature of the earth,
|
This last result of the beauty of the stars,
|
But only saw like fair and common forms
|
The artist spirit needs not for its work
|
And puts aside in memory's shadowy rooms.
|
A look, a turn decides our ill-poised fate.
|
Thus in the hour that most concerned her all,
|
CANTO II: Satyavan
|
Wandering unwarned by the slow surface mind,
|
The heedless scout beneath her tenting lids
|
Admired indifferent beauty and cared not
|
To wake her body's spirit to its king.
|
So might she have passed by on chance ignorant roads
|
Missing the call of Heaven, losing life's aim,
|
But the god touched in time her conscious soul.
|
Her vision settled, caught and all was changed.
|
Her mind at first dwelt in ideal dreams,
|
Those intimate transmuters of earth's signs
|
That make known things a hint of unseen spheres,
|
And saw in him the genius of the spot,
|
A symbol figure standing mid earth's scenes,
|
A king of life outlined in delicate air.
|
Yet this was but a moment's reverie;
|
For suddenly her heart looked out at him,
|
The passionate seeing used thought cannot match,
|
And knew one nearer than its own close strings.
|
All in a moment was surprised and seized,
|
All in inconscient ecstasy lain wrapped
|
Or under imagination's coloured lids
|
Held up in a large mirror-air of dream,
|
Broke forth in flame to recreate the world,
|
And in that flame to new things she was born.
|
A mystic tumult from her depths arose;
|
Haled, smitten erect like one who dreamed at ease,
|
Life ran to gaze from every gate of sense:
|
Thoughts indistinct and glad in moon-mist heavens,
|
Feelings as when a universe takes birth,
|
Swept through the turmoil of her bosom's space
|
Invaded by a swarm of golden gods:
|
Arising to a hymn of wonder's priests
|
Her soul flung wide its doors to this new sun.
|
An alchemy worked, the transmutation came;
|
The missioned face had wrought the Master's spell.
|
In the nameless light of two approaching eyes
|
A swift and fated turning of her days
|
Appeared and stretched to a gleam of unknown worlds.
|
Then trembling with the mystic shock her heart
|
Moved in her breast and cried out like a bird
|
Who hears his mate upon a neighbouring bough.
|
Hooves trampling fast, wheels largely stumbling ceased;
|
The chariot stood like an arrested wind.
|
And Satyavan looked out from his soul's doors
|
And felt the enchantment of her liquid voice
|
Fill his youth's purple ambience and endured
|
The haunting miracle of a perfect face.
|
Mastered by the honey of a strange flower-mouth,
|
Drawn to soul-spaces opening round a brow,
|
He turned to the vision like a sea to the moon
|
And suffered a dream of beauty and of change,
|
Discovered the aureole round a mortal's head,
|
Adored a new divinity in things.
|
His self-bound nature foundered as in fire;
|
His life was taken into another's life.
|
The splendid lonely idols of his brain
|
Fell prostrate from their bright sufficiencies,
|
As at the touch of a new infinite,
|
To worship a godhead greater than their own.
|
An unknown imperious force drew him to her.
|
Marvelling he came across the golden sward:
|
Gaze met close gaze and clung in sight's embrace.
|
A visage was there, noble and great and calm,
|
As if encircled by a halo of thought,
|
A span, an arch of meditating light,
|
As though some secret nimbus half was seen;
|
Her inner vision still remembering knew
|
A forehead that wore the crown of all her past,
|
Two eyes her constant and eternal stars,
|
Comrade and sovereign eyes that claimed her soul,
|
Lids known through many lives, large frames of love.
|
He met in her regard his future's gaze,
|
CANTO II: Satyavan
|
A promise and a presence and a fire,
|
Saw an embodiment of aeonic dreams,
|
A mystery of the rapture for which all
|
Yearns in this world of brief mortality
|
Made in material shape his very own.
|
This golden figure given to his grasp
|
Hid in its breast the key of all his aims,
|
A spell to bring the Immortal's bliss on earth,
|
To mate with heaven's truth our mortal thought,
|
To lift earth-hearts nearer the Eternal's sun.
|
In these great spirits now incarnate here
|
Love brought down power out of eternity
|
To make of life his new undying base.
|
His passion surged a wave from fathomless deeps;
|
It leaped to earth from far forgotten heights,
|
But kept its nature of infinity.
|
On the dumb bosom of this oblivious globe
|
Although as unknown beings we seem to meet,
|
Our lives are not aliens nor as strangers join,
|
Moved to each other by a causeless force.
|
The soul can recognise its answering soul
|
Across dividing Time and, on life's roads
|
Absorbed wrapped traveller, turning it recovers
|
Familiar splendours in an unknown face
|
And touched by the warning finger of swift love
|
It thrills again to an immortal joy
|
Wearing a mortal body for delight.
|
There is a Power within that knows beyond
|
Our knowings; we are greater than our thoughts,
|
And sometimes earth unveils that vision here.
|
To live, to love are signs of infinite things,
|
Love is a glory from eternity's spheres.
|
Abased, disfigured, mocked by baser mights
|
That steal his name and shape and ecstasy,
|
He is still the godhead by which all can change.
|
A mystery wakes in our inconscient stuff,
|
A bliss is born that can remake our life.
|
Love dwells in us like an unopened flower
|
Awaiting a rapid moment of the soul,
|
Or he roams in his charmed sleep mid thoughts and things;
|
The child-god is at play, he seeks himself
|
In many hearts and minds and living forms:
|
He lingers for a sign that he can know
|
And, when it comes, wakes blindly to a voice,
|
A look, a touch, the meaning of a face.
|
His instrument the dim corporeal mind,
|
Of celestial insight now forgetful grown,
|
He seizes on some sign of outward charm
|
To guide him mid the throng of Nature's hints,
|
Reads heavenly truths into earth's semblances,
|
Desires the image for the godhead's sake,
|
Divines the immortalities of form
|
And takes the body for the sculptured soul.
|
Love's adoration like a mystic seer
|
Through vision looks at the invisible,
|
In earth's alphabet finds a godlike sense;
|
But the mind only thinks, "Behold the one
|
For whom my life has waited long unfilled,
|
Behold the sudden sovereign of my days."
|
Heart feels for heart, limb cries for answering limb;
|
All strives to enforce the unity all is.
|
Too far from the Divine, Love seeks his truth
|
And Life is blind and the instruments deceive
|
And Powers are there that labour to debase.
|
Still can the vision come, the joy arrive.
|
Rare is the cup fit for love's nectar wine,
|
As rare the vessel that can hold God's birth;
|
A soul made ready through a thousand years
|
Is the living mould of a supreme Descent.
|
These knew each other though in forms thus strange.
|
Although to sight unknown, though life and mind
|
Had altered to hold a new significance,
|
CANTO II: Satyavan
|
These bodies summed the drift of numberless births,
|
And the spirit to the spirit was the same.
|
Amazed by a joy for which they had waited long,
|
The lovers met upon their different paths,
|
Travellers across the limitless plains of Time
|
Together drawn from fate-led journeyings
|
In the self-closed solitude of their human past,
|
To a swift rapturous dream of future joy
|
And the unexpected present of these eyes.
|
By the revealing greatness of a look,
|
Form-smitten the spirit's memory woke in sense.
|
The mist was torn that lay between two lives;
|
Her heart unveiled and his to find her turned;
|
Attracted as in heaven star by star,
|
They wondered at each other and rejoiced
|
And wove affinity in a silent gaze.
|
A moment passed that was eternity's ray,
|
An hour began, the matrix of new Time.
|
Satyavan and Savitri
|
OUT OF the voiceless mystery of the past
|
In a present ignorant of forgotten bonds
|
These spirits met upon the roads of Time.
|
Yet in the heart their secret conscious selves
|
At once aware grew of each other warned
|
By the first call of a delightful voice
|
And a first vision of the destined face.
|
As when being cries to being from its depths
|
Behind the screen of the external sense
|
And strives to find the heart-disclosing word,
|
The passionate speech revealing the soul's need,
|
But the mind's ignorance veils the inner sight,
|
Only a little breaks through our earth-made bounds,
|
So now they met in that momentous hour,
|
So utter the recognition in the deeps,
|
The remembrance lost, the oneness felt and missed.
|
Thus Satyavan spoke first to Savitri:
|
"O thou who com'st to me out of Time's silences,
|
Yet thy voice has wakened my heart to an unknown bliss,
|
Immortal or mortal only in thy frame,
|
For more than earth speaks to me from thy soul
|
And more than earth surrounds me in thy gaze,
|
How art thou named among the sons of men?
|
Whence hast thou dawned filling my spirit's days,
|
Brighter than summer, brighter than my flowers,
|
Into the lonely borders of my life,
|
O sunlight moulded like a golden maid?
|
I know that mighty gods are friends of earth.
|
Amid the pageantries of day and dusk,
|
Long have I travelled with my pilgrim soul
|
Moved by the marvel of familiar things.
|
CANTO III: Satyavan and Savitri
|
Earth could not hide from me the powers she veils:
|
Even though moving mid an earthly scene
|
And the common surfaces of terrestrial things,
|
My vision saw unblinded by her forms;
|
The Godhead looked at me from familiar scenes.
|
I witnessed the virgin bridals of the dawn
|
Behind the glowing curtains of the sky
|
Or vying in joy with the bright morning's steps
|
I paced along the slumbrous coasts of noon,
|
Or the gold desert of the sunlight crossed
|
Traversing great wastes of splendour and of fire,
|
Or met the moon gliding amazed through heaven
|
In the uncertain wideness of the night,
|
Or the stars marched on their long sentinel routes
|
Pointing their spears through the infinitudes:
|
The day and dusk revealed to me hidden shapes;
|
Figures have come to me from secret shores
|
And happy faces looked from ray and flame.
|
I have heard strange voices cross the ether's waves,
|
The Centaur's wizard song has thrilled my ear;
|
I have glimpsed the Apsaras bathing in the pools,
|
I have seen the wood-nymphs peering through the leaves;
|
The winds have shown to me their trampling lords,
|
I have beheld the princes of the Sun
|
Burning in thousand-pillared homes of light.
|
So now my mind could dream and my heart fear
|
That from some wonder-couch beyond our air
|
Risen in a wide morning of the gods
|
Thou drov'st thy horses from the Thunderer's worlds.
|
Although to heaven thy beauty seems allied,
|
Much rather would my thoughts rejoice to know
|
That mortal sweetness smiles between thy lids
|
And thy heart can beat beneath a human gaze
|
And thy aureate bosom quiver with a look
|
And its tumult answer to an earth-born voice.
|
If our time-vexed affections thou canst feel,
|
Earth's ease of simple things can satisfy,
|
If thy glance can dwell content on earthly soil,
|
And this celestial summary of delight,
|
Thy golden body, dally with fatigue
|
Oppressing with its grace our terrain, while
|
The frail sweet passing taste of earthly food
|
Delays thee and the torrent's leaping wine,
|
Descend. Let thy journey cease, come down to us.
|
Close is my father's creepered hermitage
|
Screened by the tall ranks of these silent kings,
|
Sung to by voices of the hue-robed choirs
|
Whose chants repeat transcribed in music's notes
|
The passionate coloured lettering of the boughs
|
And fill the hours with their melodious cry.
|
Amid the welcome-hum of many bees
|
Invade our honied kingdom of the woods;
|
There let me lead thee into an opulent life.
|
Bare, simple is the sylvan hermit-life;
|
Yet is it clad with the jewelry of earth.
|
Wild winds run - visitors midst the swaying tops,
|
Through the calm days heaven's sentinels of peace
|
Couched on a purple robe of sky above
|
Look down on a rich secrecy and hush
|
And the chambered nuptial waters chant within.
|
Enormous, whispering, many-formed around
|
High forest gods have taken in their arms
|
The human hour, a guest of their centuried pomps.
|
Apparelled are the morns in gold and green,
|
Sunlight and shadow tapestry the walls
|
To make a resting chamber fit for thee."
|
Awhile she paused as if hearing still his voice,
|
Unwilling to break the charm, then slowly spoke.
|
Musing she answered, "I am Savitri,
|
Princess of Madra. Who art thou? What name
|
Musical on earth expresses thee to men?
|
What trunk of kings watered by fortunate streams
|
CANTO III: Satyavan and Savitri
|
Has flowered at last upon one happy branch?
|
Why is thy dwelling in the pathless wood
|
Far from the deeds thy glorious youth demands,
|
Haunt of the anchorites and earth's wilder broods,
|
Where only with thy witness self thou roamst
|
In Nature's green unhuman loneliness
|
Surrounded by enormous silences
|
And the blind murmur of primaeval calms?"
|
And Satyavan replied to Savitri:
|
"In days when yet his sight looked clear on life,
|
King Dyumatsena once, the Shalwa, reigned
|
Through all the tract which from behind these tops
|
Passing its days of emerald delight
|
In trusting converse with the traveller winds
|
Turns, looking back towards the southern heavens,
|
And leans its flank upon the musing hills.
|
But equal Fate removed her covering hand.
|
A living night enclosed the strong man's paths,
|
Heaven's brilliant gods recalled their careless gifts,
|
Took from blank eyes their glad and helping ray
|
And led the uncertain goddess from his side.
|
Outcast from empire of the outer light,
|
Lost to the comradeship of seeing men,
|
He sojourns in two solitudes, within
|
And in the solemn rustle of the woods.
|
Son of that king, I, Satyavan, have lived
|
Contented, for not yet of thee aware,
|
In my high-peopled loneliness of spirit
|
And this huge vital murmur kin to me,
|
Nursed by the vastness, pupil of solitude.
|
Great Nature came to her recovered child;
|
I reigned in a kingdom of a nobler kind
|
Than men can build upon dull Matter's soil;
|
I met the frankness of the primal earth,
|
I enjoyed the intimacy of infant God.
|
In the great tapestried chambers of her state,
|
Free in her boundless palace I have dwelt
|
Indulged by the warm mother of us all,
|
Reared with my natural brothers in her house.
|
I lay in the wide bare embrace of heaven,
|
The sunlight's radiant blessing clasped my brow,
|
The moonbeams' silver ecstasy at night
|
Kissed my dim lids to sleep. Earth's morns were mine;
|
Lured by faint murmurings with the green-robed hours
|
I wandered lost in woods, prone to the voice
|
Of winds and waters, partner of the sun's joy,
|
A listener to the universal speech:
|
My spirit satisfied within me knew
|
Godlike our birthright, luxuried our life
|
Whose close belongings are the earth and skies.
|
Before Fate led me into this emerald world,
|
Aroused by some foreshadowing touch within,
|
An early prescience in my mind approached
|
The great dumb animal consciousness of earth
|
Now grown so close to me who have left old pomps
|
To live in this grandiose murmur dim and vast.
|
Already I met her in my spirit's dream.
|
As if to a deeper country of the soul
|
Transposing the vivid imagery of earth,
|
Through an inner seeing and sense a wakening came.
|
A visioned spell pursued my boyhood's hours,
|
All things the eye had caught in coloured lines
|
Were seen anew through the interpreting mind
|
And in the shape it sought to seize the soul.
|
An early child-god took my hand that held,
|
Moved, guided by the seeking of his touch,
|
Bright forms and hues which fled across his sight;
|
Limned upon page and stone they spoke to men.
|
High beauty's visitants my intimates were.
|
The neighing pride of rapid life that roams
|
Wind-maned through our pastures, on my seeing mood
|
Cast shapes of swiftness; trooping spotted deer
|
CANTO III: Satyavan and Savitri
|
Against the vesper sky became a song
|
Of evening to the silence of my soul.
|
I caught for some eternal eye the sudden
|
King-fisher flashing to a darkling pool;
|
A slow swan silvering the azure lake,
|
A shape of magic whiteness, sailed through dream;
|
Leaves trembling with the passion of the wind,
|
Pranked butterflies, the conscious flowers of air,
|
And wandering wings in blue infinity
|
Lived on the tablets of my inner sight;
|
Mountains and trees stood there like thoughts from God.
|
The brilliant long-bills in their vivid dress,
|
The peacock scattering on the breeze his moons
|
Painted my memory like a frescoed wall.
|
I carved my vision out of wood and stone;
|
I caught the echoes of a word supreme
|
And metred the rhythm-beats of infinity
|
And listened through music for the eternal Voice.
|
I felt a covert touch, I heard a call,
|
But could not clasp the body of my God
|
Or hold between my hands the World-Mother's feet.
|
In men I met strange portions of a Self
|
That sought for fragments and in fragments lived:
|
Each lived in himself and for himself alone
|
And with the rest joined only fleeting ties;
|
Each passioned over his surface joy and grief,
|
Nor saw the Eternal in his secret house.
|
I conversed with Nature, mused with the changeless stars,
|
God's watch-fires burning in the ignorant Night,
|
And saw upon her mighty visage fall
|
A ray prophetic of the Eternal's sun.
|
I sat with the forest sages in their trance:
|
There poured awakening streams of diamond light,
|
I glimpsed the presence of the One in all.
|
But still there lacked the last transcendent power
|
And Matter still slept empty of its Lord.
|
The Spirit was saved, the body lost and mute
|
Lived still with Death and ancient Ignorance;
|
The Inconscient was its base, the Void its fate.
|
But thou hast come and all will surely change:
|
I shall feel the World-Mother in thy golden limbs
|
And hear her wisdom in thy sacred voice.
|
The child of the Void shall be reborn in God,
|
My Matter shall evade the Inconscient's trance.
|
My body like my spirit shall be free.
|
It shall escape from Death and Ignorance."
|
And Savitri, musing still, replied to him:
|
"Speak more to me, speak more, O Satyavan,
|
Speak of thyself and all thou art within;
|
I would know thee as if we had ever lived
|
Together in the chamber of our souls.
|
Speak till a light shall come into my heart
|
And my moved mortal mind shall understand
|
What all the deathless being in me feels.
|
It knows that thou art he my spirit has sought
|
Amidst earth's thronging visages and forms
|
Across the golden spaces of my life."
|
And Satyavan like a replying harp
|
To the insistent calling of a flute
|
Answered her questioning and let stream to her
|
His heart in many-coloured waves of speech:
|
"O golden princess, perfect Savitri,
|
More I would tell than failing words can speak,
|
Of all that thou hast meant to me, unknown,
|
All that the lightning-flash of love reveals
|
In one great hour of the unveiling gods.
|
Even a brief nearness has reshaped my life.
|
For now I know that all I lived and was
|
Moved towards this moment of my heart's rebirth;
|
I look back on the meaning of myself,
|
A soul made ready on earth's soil for thee.
|
Once were my days like days of other men:
|
CANTO III: Satyavan and Savitri
|
To think and act was all, to enjoy and breathe;
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This was the width and height of mortal hope:
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Yet there came glimpses of a deeper self
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That lives behind Life and makes her act its scene.
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A truth was felt that screened its shape from mind,
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A Greatness working towards a hidden end,
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And vaguely through the forms of earth there looked
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Something that life is not and yet must be.
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I groped for the Mystery with the lantern, Thought.
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Its glimmerings lighted with the abstract word
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A half-visible ground and travelling yard by yard
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It mapped a system of the Self and God.
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I could not live the truth it spoke and thought.
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I turned to seize its form in visible things,
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Hoping to fix its rule by mortal mind,
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Imposed a narrow structure of world-law
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Upon the freedom of the Infinite,
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A hard firm skeleton of outward Truth,
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A mental scheme of a mechanic Power.
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This light showed more the darknesses unsearched;
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It made the original Secrecy more occult;
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It could not analyse its cosmic Veil
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Or glimpse the Wonder-worker's hidden hand
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And trace the pattern of his magic plans.
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I plunged into an inner seeing Mind
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And knew the secret laws and sorceries
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That make of Matter mind's bewildered slave:
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The mystery was not solved but deepened more.
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I strove to find its hints through Beauty and Art,
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But Form cannot unveil the indwelling Power;
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Only it throws its symbols at our hearts.
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It evoked a mood of self, invoked a sign
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Of all the brooding glory hidden in sense:
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I lived in the ray but faced not to the sun.
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I looked upon the world and missed the Self,
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And when I found the Self, I lost the world,
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My other selves I lost and the body of God,
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The link of the finite with the Infinite,
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The bridge between the appearance and the Truth,
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The mystic aim for which the world was made,
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The human sense of Immortality.
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But now the gold link comes to me with thy feet
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And His gold sun has shone on me from thy face.
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For now another realm draws near with thee
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And now diviner voices fill my ear,
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A strange new world swims to me in thy gaze
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Approaching like a star from unknown heavens;
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A cry of spheres comes with thee and a song
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Of flaming gods. I draw a wealthier breath
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And in a fierier march of moments move.
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My mind transfigures to a rapturous seer.
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A foam-leap travelling from the waves of bliss
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Has changed my heart and changed the earth around:
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All with thy coming fills. Air, soil and stream
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Wear bridal raiment to be fit for thee
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And sunlight grows a shadow of thy hue
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Because of change within me by thy look.
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Come nearer to me from thy car of light
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On this green sward disdaining not our soil.
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For here are secret spaces made for thee
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Whose caves of emerald long to screen thy form.
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Wilt thou not make this mortal bliss thy sphere?
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Descend, O happiness, with thy moon-gold feet
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Enrich earth's floors upon whose sleep we lie.
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O my bright beauty's princess Savitri,
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By my delight and thy own joy compelled
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Enter my life, thy chamber and thy shrine.
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In the great quietness where spirits meet,
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Led by my hushed desire into my woods
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Let the dim rustling arches over thee lean;
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One with the breath of things eternal live,
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Thy heart-beats near to mine, till there shall leap
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CANTO III: Satyavan and Savitri
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Enchanted from the fragrance of the flowers
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A moment which all murmurs shall recall
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And every bird remember in its cry."
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Allured to her lashes by his passionate words
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Her fathomless soul looked out at him from her eyes;
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Passing her lips in liquid sounds it spoke.
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This word alone she uttered and said all:
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"O Satyavan, I have heard thee and I know;
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I know that thou and only thou art he."
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Then down she came from her high carven car
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Descending with a soft and faltering haste;
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Her many-hued raiment glistening in the light
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Hovered a moment over the wind-stirred grass,
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Mixed with a glimmer of her body's ray
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Like lovely plumage of a settling bird.
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Her gleaming feet upon the green-gold sward
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Scattered a memory of wandering beams
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And lightly pressed the unspoken desire of earth
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Cherished in her too brief passing by the soil.
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Then flitting like pale-brilliant moths her hands
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Took from the sylvan verge's sunlit arms
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A load of their jewel-faces' clustering swarms,
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Companions of the spring-time and the breeze.
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A candid garl and set with simple forms
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Her rapid fingers taught a flower song,
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The stanzaed movement of a marriage hymn.
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Profound in perfume and immersed in hue
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They mixed their yearning's coloured signs and made
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The bloom of their purity and passion one.
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A sacrament of joy in treasuring palms
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She brought, flower-symbol of her offered life,
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Then with raised hands that trembled a little now
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At the very closeness that her soul desired,
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This bond of sweetness, their bright union's sign,
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She laid on the bosom coveted by her love.
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As if inclined before some gracious god
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Who has out of his mist of greatness shone
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To fill with beauty his adorer's hours,
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She bowed and touched his feet with worshipping hands;
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She made her life his world for him to tread
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And made her body the room of his delight,
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Her beating heart a remembrancer of bliss.
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He bent to her and took into his own
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Their married yearning joined like folded hopes;
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As if a whole rich world suddenly possessed,
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Wedded to all he had been, became himself,
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An inexhaustible joy made his alone,
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He gathered all Savitri into his clasp.
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Around her his embrace became the sign
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Of a locked closeness through slow intimate years,
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A first sweet summary of delight to come,
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One brevity intense of all long life.
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In a wide moment of two souls that meet
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She felt her being flow into him as in waves
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A river pours into a mighty sea.
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As when a soul is merging into God
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To live in Him for ever and know His joy,
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Her consciousness grew aware of him alone
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And all her separate self was lost in his.
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As a starry heaven encircles happy earth,
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He shut her into himself in a circle of bliss
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And shut the world into himself and her.
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A boundless isolation made them one;
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He was aware of her enveloping him
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And let her penetrate his very soul
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As is a world by the world's spirit filled,
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As the mortal wakes into Eternity,
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As the finite opens to the Infinite.
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Thus were they in each other lost awhile,
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Then drawing back from their long ecstasy's trance
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Came into a new self and a new world.
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CANTO III: Satyavan and Savitri
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Each now was a part of the other's unity,
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The world was but their twin self-finding's scene
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Or their own wedded being's vaster frame.
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On the high glowing cupola of the day
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Fate tied a knot with morning's halo threads
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While by the ministry of an auspice-hour
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Heart-bound before the sun, their marriage fire,
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The wedding of the eternal Lord and Spouse
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Took place again on earth in human forms:
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In a new act of the drama of the world
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The united Two began a greater age.
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In the silence and murmur of that emerald world
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And the mutter of the priest-wind's sacred verse,
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Amid the choral whispering of the leaves
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Love's twain had joined together and grew one.
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The natural miracle was wrought once more:
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In the immutable ideal world
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One human moment was eternal made.
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Then down the narrow path where their lives had met
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He led and showed to her her future world,
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Love's refuge and corner of happy solitude.
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At the path's end through a green cleft in the trees
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She saw a clustering line of hermit-roofs
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And looked now first on her heart's future home,
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The thatch that covered the life of Satyavan.
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Adorned with creepers and red climbing flowers
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It seemed a sylvan beauty in her dreams
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Slumbering with brown body and tumbled hair
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In her chamber inviolate of emerald peace.
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Around it stretched the forest's anchorite mood
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Lost in the depths of its own solitude.
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Then moved by the deep joy she could not speak,
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A little depth of it quivering in her words,
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Her happy voice cried out to Satyavan:
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"My heart will stay here on this forest verge
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And close to this thatched roof while I am far:
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Now of more wandering it has no need.
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But I must haste back to my father's house
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Which soon will lose one loved accustomed tread
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And listen in vain for a once cherished voice.
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For soon I shall return nor ever again
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Oneness must sever its recovered bliss
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Or fate sunder our lives while life is ours."
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Once more she mounted on the carven car
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And under the ardour of a fiery noon
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Less bright than the splendour of her thoughts and dreams
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She sped swift-reined, swift-hearted but still saw
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In still lucidities of sight's inner world
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Through the cool-scented wood's luxurious gloom
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On shadowy paths between great rugged trunks
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Pace towards a tranquil clearing Satyavan.
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A nave of trees enshrined the hermit thatch,
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The new deep covert of her felicity,
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Preferred to heaven her soul's temple and home.
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This now remained with her, her heart's constant scene.
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The Word of Fate
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IN SILENT bounds bordering the mortal's plane
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Crossing a wide expanse of brilliant peace
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Narad the heavenly sage from Paradise
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Came chanting through the large and lustrous air.
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Attracted by the golden summer-earth
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That lay beneath him like a glowing bowl
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Tilted upon a table of the Gods,
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Turning as if moved round by an unseen hand
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To catch the warmth and blaze of a small sun,
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He passed from the immortals' happy paths
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To a world of toil and quest and grief and hope,
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To these rooms of the see-saw game of death with life.
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Across an intangible border of soul-space
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He passed from Mind into material things
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Amid the inventions of the inconscient Self
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And the workings of a blind somnambulist Force.
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Below him circling burned the myriad suns:
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He bore the ripples of the etheric sea;
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A primal Air brought the first joy of touch;
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A secret Spirit drew its mighty breath
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Contracting and expanding this huge world
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In its formidable circuit through the Void;
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The secret might of the creative Fire
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Displayed its triple power to build and form,
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Its infinitesimal wave-sparks' weaving dance,
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Its nebulous units grounding shape and mass,
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Magic foundation and pattern of a world,
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Its radiance bursting into the light of stars;
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He felt a sap of life, a sap of death;
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Into solid Matter's dense communion
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Plunging and its obscure oneness of forms
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He shared with a dumb Spirit identity.
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He beheld the cosmic Being at his task,
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His eyes measured the spaces, gauged the depths,
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His inner gaze the movements of the soul,
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He saw the eternal labour of the Gods,
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And looked upon the life of beasts and men.
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A change now fell upon the singer's mood,
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A rapture and a pathos moved his voice;
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He sang no more of Light that never wanes,
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And oneness and pure everlasting bliss,
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He sang no more the deathless heart of Love,
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His chant was a hymn of Ignorance and Fate.
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He sang the name of Vishnu and the birth
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And joy and passion of the mystic world,
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And how the stars were made and life began
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And the mute regions stirred with the throb of a Soul.
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He sang the Inconscient and its secret self,
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Its power omnipotent knowing not what it does,
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All-shaping without will or thought or sense,
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Its blind unerring occult mystery,
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And darkness yearning towards the eternal Light,
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And Love that broods within the dim abyss
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And waits the answer of the human heart,
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And death that climbs to immortality.
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He sang of the Truth that cries from Night's blind deeps,
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And the Mother-Wisdom hid in Nature's breast
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And the Idea that through her dumbness works
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And the miracle of her transforming hands,
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Of life that slumbers in the stone and sun
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And Mind subliminal in mindless life,
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And the Consciousness that wakes in beasts and men.
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He sang of the glory and marvel still to be born,
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Of Godhead throwing off at last its veil,
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Of bodies made divine and life made bliss,
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Immortal sweetness clasping immortal might,
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Heart sensing heart, thought looking straight at thought,
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CANTO I: The Word of Fate
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And the delight when every barrier falls,
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And the transfiguration and the ecstasy.
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And as he sang the demons wept with joy
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Foreseeing the end of their long dreadful task
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And the defeat for which they hoped in vain,
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And glad release from their self-chosen doom
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And return into the One from whom they came.
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He who has conquered the Immortals' seats,
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Came down to men on earth the Man divine.
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As darts a lightning streak, a glory fell
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Nearing until the rapt eyes of the sage
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Looked out from luminous cloud and, strangely limned,
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His face, a beautiful mask of antique joy,
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Appearing in light descended where arose
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King Aswapati's palace to the winds
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In Madra, flowering up in delicate stone.
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There welcomed him the sage and thoughtful king,
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At his side a creature beautiful, passionate, wise,
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Aspiring like a sacrificial flame
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Skyward from its earth-seat through luminous air,
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Queen-browed, the human mother of Savitri.
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There for an hour untouched by the earth's siege
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They ceased from common life and care and sat
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Inclining to the high and rhythmic voice,
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While in his measured chant the heavenly seer
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Spoke of the toils of men and what the gods
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Strive for on earth, and joy that throbs behind
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The marvel and the mystery of pain.
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He sang to them of the lotus-heart of love
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With all its thousand luminous buds of truth,
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Which quivering sleeps veiled by apparent things.
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It trembles at each touch, it strives to wake
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And one day it shall hear a blissful voice
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And in the garden of the Spouse shall bloom
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When she is seized by her discovered lord.
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A mighty shuddering coil of ecstasy
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Crept through the deep heart of the universe.
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Out of her Matter's stupor, her mind's dreams,
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She woke, she looked upon God's unveiled face.
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Even as he sang and rapture stole through earth-time
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And caught the heavens, came with a call of hooves,
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As of her swift heart hastening, Savitri;
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Her radiant tread glimmered across the floor.
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A happy wonder in her fathomless gaze,
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Changed by the halo of her love she came;
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Her eyes rich with a shining mist of joy
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As one who comes from a heavenly embassy
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Discharging the proud mission of her heart,
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One carrying the sanction of the gods
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To her love and its luminous eternity,
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She stood before her mighty father's throne
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And, eager for beauty on discovered earth
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Transformed and new in her heart's miracle-light,
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Saw like a rose of marvel, worshipping,
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The fire-tinged sweetness of the son of Heaven.
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He flung on her his vast immortal look;
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His inner gaze surrounded her with its light
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And reining back knowledge from his immortal lips
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He cried to her, "Who is this that comes, the bride,
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The flame-born, and round her illumined head
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Pouring their lights her hymeneal pomps
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Move flashing about her? From what green glimmer of glades
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Retreating into dewy silences
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Or half-seen verge of waters moon-betrayed
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Bringst thou this glory of enchanted eyes?
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Earth has gold-hued expanses, shadowy hills
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That cowl their dreaming phantom heads in night,
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And, guarded in a cloistral joy of woods,
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Screened banks sink down into felicity
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Seized by the curved incessant yearning hands
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And ripple-passion of the upgazing stream:
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CANTO I: The Word of Fate
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Amid cool-lipped murmurs of its pure embrace
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They lose their souls on beds of trembling reeds.
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And all these are mysterious presences
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In which some spirit's immortal bliss is felt,
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And they betray the earth-born heart to joy.
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There hast thou paused, and marvelling borne eyes
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Unknown, or heard a voice that forced thy life
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To strain its rapture through thy listening soul?
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Or, if my thought could trust this shimmering gaze,
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It would say thou hast not drunk from an earthly cup,
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But stepping through azure curtains of the noon
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Thou wast surrounded on a magic verge
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In brighter countries than man's eyes can bear.
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Assailed by trooping voices of delight
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And seized mid a sunlit glamour of the boughs
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In faery woods, led down the gleaming slopes
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Of Gandhamadan where the Apsaras roam,
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Thy limbs have shared the sports which none has seen,
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And in god-haunts thy human footsteps strayed,
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Thy mortal bosom quivered with god-speech
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And thy soul answered to a Word unknown.
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What feet of gods, what ravishing flutes of heaven
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Have thrilled high melodies round, from near and far
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Approaching through the soft and revelling air,
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Which still surprised thou hearest? They have fed
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Thy silence on some red strange-ecstasied fruit
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And thou hast trod the dim moon-peaks of bliss.
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Reveal, O winged with light, whence thou hast flown
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Hastening bright-hued through the green tangled earth,
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Thy body rhythmical with the spring-bird's call.
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The empty roses of thy hands are filled
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Only with their own beauty and the thrill
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Of a remembered clasp, and in thee glows
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A heavenly jar, thy firm deep-honied heart,
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New-brimming with a sweet and nectarous wine.
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Thou hast not spoken with the kings of pain.
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Life's perilous music rings yet to thy ear
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Far-melodied, rapid and grand, a Centaur's song,
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Or soft as water plashing mid the hills,
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Or mighty as a great chant of many winds.
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Moon-bright thou livest in thy inner bliss.
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Thou comest like a silver deer through groves
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Of coral flowers and buds of glowing dreams,
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Or fleest like a wind-goddess through leaves,
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Or roamst, O ruby-eyed and snow-winged dove,
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Flitting through thickets of thy pure desires
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In the unwounded beauty of thy soul.
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These things are only images to thy earth,
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But truest truth of that which in thee sleeps.
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For such is thy spirit, a sister of the gods,
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Thy earthly body lovely to the eyes
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And thou art kin in joy to heaven's sons.
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O thou who hast come to this great perilous world
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Now only seen through the splendour of thy dreams,
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Where hardly love and beauty can live safe,
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Thyself a being dangerously great,
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A soul alone in a golden house of thought
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Has lived walled in by the safety of thy dreams.
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On heights of happiness leaving doom asleep
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Who hunts unseen the unconscious lives of men,
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If thy heart could live locked in the ideal's gold,
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As high, as happy might thy waking be!
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If for all time doom could be left to sleep!"
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He spoke but held his knowledge back from words.
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As a cloud plays with lightnings' vivid laugh,
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But still holds back the thunder in its heart,
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Only he let bright images escape.
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His speech like glimmering music veiled his thoughts;
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As a wind flatters the bright summer air,
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Pitiful to mortals, only to them it spoke
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Of living beauty and of present bliss:
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He hid in his all-knowing mind the rest.
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CANTO I: The Word of Fate
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To those who hearkened to his celestial voice,
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The veil heaven's pity throws on future pain
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The Immortals' sanction seemed of endless joy.
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But Aswapati answered to the seer; -
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His listening mind had marked the dubious close,
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An ominous shadow felt behind the words,
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But calm like one who ever sits facing Fate
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Here mid the dangerous contours of earth's life,
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He answered covert thought with guarded speech:
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"O deathless sage who knowest all things here,
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If I could read by the ray of my own wish
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Through the carved shield of symbol images
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Which thou hast thrown before thy heavenly mind
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I might see the steps of a young godlike life
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Happily beginning luminous-eyed on earth;
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Between the Unknowable and the Unseen
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Born on the borders of two wonder-worlds,
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It flames out symbols of the infinite
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And lives in a great light of inner suns.
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For it has read and broken the wizard seals;
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It has drunk of the Immortal's wells of joy,
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It has looked across the jewel bars of heaven,
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It has entered the aspiring Secrecy,
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It sees beyond terrestrial common things
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And communes with the Powers that build the worlds,
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Till through the shining gates and mystic streets
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Of the city of lapis lazuli and pearl
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Proud deeds step forth, a rank and march of gods.
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Although in pauses of our human lives
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Earth keeps for man some short and perfect hours
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When the inconstant tread of Time can seem
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The eternal moment which the deathless live,
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Yet rare that touch upon the mortal's world:
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Hardly a soul and body here are born
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In the fierce difficult movement of the stars,
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Whose life can keep the paradisal note,
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Its rhythm repeat the many-toned melody
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Tirelessly throbbing through the rapturous air
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Caught in the song that sways the Apsara's limbs
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When she floats gleaming like a cloud of light,
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A wave of joy on heaven's moonstone floor.
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Behold this image cast by light and love,
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A stanza of the ardour of the gods
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Perfectly rhymed, a pillared ripple of gold!
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Her body like a brimmed pitcher of delight
|
Shaped in a splendour of gold-coloured bronze
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As if to seize earth's truth of hidden bliss.
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Dream-made illumined mirrors are her eyes
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Draped subtly in a slumbrous fringe of jet,
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Retaining heaven's reflections in their depths.
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Even as her body, such is she within.
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Heaven's lustrous mornings gloriously recur,
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Like drops of fire upon a silver page,
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In her young spirit yet untouched with tears.
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All beautiful things eternal seem and new
|
To virgin wonder in her crystal soul.
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The unchanging blue reveals its spacious thought;
|
Marvellous the moon floats on through wondering skies;
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Earth's flowers spring up and laugh at time and death;
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The charmed mutations of the enchanter life
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Race like bright children past the smiling hours.
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If but this joy of life could last, nor pain
|
Throw its bronze note into her rhythmed days!
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Behold her, singer with the prescient gaze,
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And let thy blessing chant that this fair child
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Shall pour the nectar of a sorrowless life
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Around her from her lucid heart of love,
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Heal with her bliss the tired breast of earth
|
And cast like a happy snare felicity.
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As grows the great and golden bounteous tree
|
Flowering by Alacananda's murmuring waves,
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Where with enamoured speed the waters run
|
CANTO I: The Word of Fate
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Lisping and babbling to the splendour of morn
|
And cling with lyric laughter round the knees
|
Of heaven's daughters dripping magic rain
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Pearl-bright from moon-gold limbs and cloudy hair,
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So are her dawns like jewelled leaves of light,
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So casts she her felicity on men.
|
A flame of radiant happiness she was born
|
And surely will that flame set earth alight:
|
Doom surely will see her pass and say no word!
|
But too often here the careless Mother leaves
|
Her chosen in the envious hands of Fate:
|
The harp of God falls mute, its call to bliss
|
Discouraged fails mid earth's unhappy sounds;
|
The strings of the siren Ecstasy cry not here
|
Or soon are silenced in the human heart.
|
Of sorrow's songs we have enough: bid once
|
Her glad and griefless days bring heaven here.
|
Or must fire always test the great of soul?
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Along the dreadful causeway of the Gods,
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Armoured with love and faith and sacred joy,
|
A traveller to the Eternal's house,
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Once let unwounded pass a mortal life."
|
But Narad answered not; silent he sat,
|
Knowing that words are vain and Fate is lord.
|
He looked into the unseen with seeing eyes,
|
Then, dallying with the mortal's ignorance
|
Like one who knows not, questioning, he cried:
|
"On what high mission went her hastening wheels?
|
Whence came she with this glory in her heart
|
And Paradise made visible in her eyes?
|
What sudden God has met, what face supreme?"
|
To whom the king, "The red asoca watched
|
Her going forth which now sees her return.
|
Arisen into an air of flaming dawn
|
Like a bright bird tired of her lonely branch,
|
To find her own lord, since to her on earth
|
He came not yet, this sweetness wandered forth
|
Cleaving her way with the beat of her rapid wings.
|
Led by a distant call her vague swift flight
|
Threaded the summer morns and sunlit lands.
|
The happy rest her burdened lashes keep
|
And these charmed guardian lips hold treasured still.
|
Virgin who comest perfected by joy,
|
Reveal the name thy sudden heart-beats learned.
|
Whom hast thou chosen, kingliest among men?"
|
And Savitri answered with her still calm voice
|
As one who speaks beneath the eyes of Fate:
|
"Father and king, I have carried out thy will.
|
One whom I sought I found in distant lands;
|
I have obeyed my heart, I have heard its call.
|
On the borders of a dreaming wilderness
|
Mid Shalwa's giant hills and brooding woods
|
In his thatched hermitage Dyumatsena dwells,
|
Blind, exiled, outcast, once a mighty king.
|
The son of Dyumatsena, Satyavan,
|
I have met on the wild forest's lonely verge.
|
My father, I have chosen. This is done."
|
Astonished, all sat silent for a space.
|
Then Aswapati looked within and saw
|
A heavy shadow float above the name
|
Chased by a sudden and stupendous light;
|
He looked into his daughter's eyes and spoke:
|
"Well hast thou done and I approve thy choice.
|
If this is all, then all is surely well;
|
If there is more, then all can still be well.
|
Whether it seem good or evil to men's eyes,
|
Only for good the secret Will can work.
|
Our destiny is written in double terms:
|
Through Nature's contraries we draw nearer God;
|
Out of the darkness we still grow to light.
|
Death is our road to immortality.
|
'Cry woe, cry woe,' the world's lost voices wail,
|
CANTO I: The Word of Fate
|
Yet conquers the eternal Good at last."
|
Then might the sage have spoken, but the king
|
In haste broke out and stayed the dangerous word:
|
"O singer of the ultimate ecstasy,
|
Lend not a dangerous vision to the blind
|
Because by native right thou hast seen clear.
|
Impose not on the mortal's tremulous breast
|
The dire ordeal that foreknowledge brings;
|
Demand not now the Godhead in our acts.
|
Here are not happy peaks the heaven-nymphs roam
|
Or Coilas or Vaicountha's starry stair:
|
Abrupt, jagged hills only the mighty climb
|
Are here where few dare even think to rise;
|
Far voices call down from the dizzy rocks,
|
Chill, slippery, precipitous are the paths.
|
Too hard the gods are with man's fragile race;
|
In their large heavens they dwell exempt from Fate
|
And they forget the wounded feet of man,
|
His limbs that faint beneath the whips of grief,
|
His heart that hears the tread of time and death.
|
The future's road is hid from mortal sight:
|
He moves towards a veiled and secret face.
|
To light one step in front is all his hope
|
And only for a little strength he asks
|
To meet the riddle of his shrouded fate.
|
Awaited by a vague and half-seen force,
|
Aware of danger to his uncertain hours
|
He guards his flickering yearnings from her breath;
|
He feels not when the dreadful fingers close
|
Around him with the grasp none can elude.
|
If thou canst loose her grip, then only speak.
|
Perhaps from the iron snare there is escape:
|
Our mind perhaps deceives us with its words
|
And gives the name of doom to our own choice;
|
Perhaps the blindness of our will is Fate."
|
He said and Narad answered not the king.
|
But now the queen alarmed lifted her voice:
|
"O seer, thy bright arrival has been timed
|
To this high moment of a happy life;
|
Then let the speech benign of griefless spheres
|
Confirm this bli the conjunction of two stars
|
And sanction joy with thy celestial voice.
|
Here drag not in the peril of our thoughts,
|
Let not our words create the doom they fear.
|
Here is no cause for dread, no chance for grief
|
To raise her ominous head and stare at love.
|
A single spirit in a multitude,
|
Happy is Satyavan mid earthly men
|
Whom Savitri has chosen for her mate,
|
And fortunate the forest hermitage
|
Where leaving her palace and riches and a throne
|
My Savitri will dwell and bring in heaven.
|
Then let thy blessing put the immortals' seal
|
On these bright lives' unstained felicity
|
Pushing the ominous Shadow from their days.
|
Too heavy falls a Shadow on man's heart;
|
It dares not be too happy upon earth.
|
It dreads the blow dogging too vivid joys,
|
A lash unseen in Fate's extended hand,
|
The danger lurking in fortune's proud extremes,
|
An irony in life's indulgent smile,
|
And trembles at the laughter of the gods.
|
Or if crouches unseen a panther doom,
|
If wings of Evil brood above that house,
|
Then also speak, that we may turn aside
|
And rescue our lives from hazard of wayside doom
|
And chance entanglement of an alien fate."
|
And Narad slowly answered to the queen:
|
"What help is in prevision to the driven?
|
Safe doors cry opening near, the doomed pass on.
|
A future knowledge is an added pain,
|
A torturing burden and a fruitless light
|
CANTO I: The Word of Fate
|
On the enormous scene that Fate has built.
|
The eternal poet, universal Mind,
|
Has paged each line of his imperial act;
|
Invisible the giant actors tread
|
And man lives like some secret player's mask.
|
He knows not even what his lips shall speak.
|
For a mysterious Power compels his steps
|
And life is stronger than his trembling soul.
|
None can refuse what the stark Force demands:
|
Her eyes are fixed upon her mighty aim;
|
No cry or prayer can turn her from her path.
|
She has leaped an arrow from the bow of God."
|
His words were theirs who live unforced to grieve
|
And help by calm the swaying wheels of life
|
And the long restlessness of transient things
|
And the trouble and passion of the unquiet world.
|
As though her own bosom were pierced the mother saw
|
The ancient human sentence strike her child,
|
Her sweetness that deserved another fate
|
Only a larger measure given of tears.
|
Aspiring to the nature of the gods,
|
A mind proof-armoured mailed in mighty thoughts,
|
A will entire couchant behind wisdom's shield,
|
Though to still heavens of knowledge she had risen,
|
Though calm and wise and Aswapati's queen,
|
Human was she still and opened her doors to grief;
|
The stony-eyed injustice she accused
|
Of the marble godhead of inflexible Law,
|
Nor sought the strength extreme adversity brings
|
To lives that stand erect and front the World-Power:
|
Her heart appealed against the impartial judge,
|
Taxed with perversity the impersonal One.
|
Her tranquil spirit she called not to her aid,
|
But as a common man beneath his load
|
Grows faint and breathes his pain in ignorant words,
|
So now she arraigned the world's impassive will:
|
"What stealthy doom has crept across her path
|
Emerging from the dark forest's sullen heart,
|
What evil thing stood smiling by the way
|
And wore the beauty of the Shalwa boy?
|
Perhaps he came an enemy from her past
|
Armed with a hidden force of ancient wrongs,
|
Himself unknowing, and seized her unknown.
|
Here dreadfully entangled love and hate
|
Meet us blind wanderers mid the perils of Time.
|
Our days are links of a disastrous chain,
|
Necessity avenges casual steps;
|
Old cruelties come back unrecognised,
|
The gods make use of our forgotten deeds.
|
Yet all in vain the bitter law was made.
|
Our own minds are the justicers of doom.
|
For nothing have we learned, but still repeat
|
Our stark misuse of self and others' souls.
|
There are dire alchemies of the human heart
|
And fallen from his ethereal element
|
Love darkens to the spirit of nether gods.
|
The dreadful angel, angry with his joys
|
Woundingly sweet he cannot yet forego,
|
Is pitiless to the soul his gaze disarmed,
|
He visits with his own pangs his quivering prey
|
Forcing us to cling enamoured to his grip
|
As if in love with our own agony.
|
This is one poignant misery in the world,
|
And grief has other lassoes for our life.
|
Our sympathies become our torturers.
|
Strength have I my own punishment to bear,
|
Knowing it just, but on this earth perplexed,
|
Smitten in the sorrow of scourged and helpless things,
|
Often it faints to meet other suffering eyes.
|
We are not as the gods who know not grief
|
And look impassive on a suffering world,
|
Calm they gaze down on the little human scene
|
CANTO I: The Word of Fate
|
And the short-lived passion crossing mortal hearts.
|
An ancient tale of woe can move us still,
|
We keep the ache of breasts that brea the no more,
|
We are shaken by the sight of human pain,
|
And share the miseries that others feel.
|
Ours not the passionless lids that cannot age.
|
Too hard for us is heaven's indifference:
|
Our own tragedies are not enough for us,
|
All pathos and all sufferings we make ours;
|
We have sorrow for a greatness passed away
|
And feel the touch of tears in mortal things.
|
Even a stranger's anguish rends my heart,
|
And this, O Narad, is my well-loved child.
|
Hide not from us our doom, if doom is ours.
|
This is the worst, an unknown face of Fate,
|
A terror ominous, mute, felt more than seen
|
Behind our seat by day, our couch by night,
|
A Fate lurking in the shadow of our hearts,
|
The anguish of the unseen that waits to strike.
|
To know is best, however hard to bear."
|
Then cried the sage piercing the mother's heart,
|
Forcing to steel the will of Savitri,
|
His words set free the spring of cosmic Fate.
|
The great Gods use the pain of human hearts
|
As a sharp axe to hew their cosmic road:
|
They squander lavishly men's blood and tears
|
For a moment's purpose in their fateful work.
|
This cosmic Nature's balance is not ours
|
Nor the mystic measure of her need and use.
|
A single word lets loose vast agencies;
|
A casual act determines the world's fate.
|
So now he set free destiny in that hour.
|
"The truth thou hast claimed; I give to thee the truth.
|
A marvel of the meeting earth and heavens
|
Is he whom Savitri has chosen mid men,
|
His figure is the front of Nature's march,
|
His single being excels the works of Time.
|
A sapphire cutting from the sleep of heaven,
|
Delightful is the soul of Satyavan,
|
A ray out of the rapturous Infinite,
|
A silence waking to a hymn of joy.
|
A divinity and kingliness gird his brow;
|
His eyes keep a memory from a world of bliss.
|
As brilliant as a lonely moon in heaven,
|
Gentle like the sweet bud that spring desires,
|
Pure like a stream that kisses silent banks,
|
He takes with bright surprise spirit and sense.
|
A living knot of golden Paradise,
|
A blue Immense he leans to the longing world,
|
Time's joy borrowed out of eternity,
|
A star of splendour or a rose of bliss.
|
In him soul and Nature, equal Presences,
|
Balance and fuse in a wide harmony.
|
The Happy in their bright ether have not hearts
|
More sweet and true than this of mortal make
|
That takes all joy as the world's native gift
|
And to all gives joy as the world's natural right.
|
His speech carries a light of inner truth,
|
And a large-eyed communion with the Power
|
In common things has made veilless his mind,
|
A seer in earth-shapes of garbless deity.
|
A tranquil breadth of sky windless and still
|
Watching the world like a mind of unplumbed thought,
|
A silent space musing and luminous
|
Uncovered by the morning to delight,
|
A green tangle of trees upon a happy hill
|
Made into a murmuring nest by southern winds,
|
These are his images and parallels,
|
His kin in beauty and in depth his peers.
|
A will to climb lifts a delight to live,
|
Heaven's height companion of earth-beauty's charm,
|
An aspiration to the immortals' air
|
CANTO I: The Word of Fate
|
Lain on the lap of mortal ecstasy.
|
His sweetness and his joy attract all hearts
|
To live with his own in a glad tenancy,
|
His strength is like a tower built to reach heaven,
|
A godhead quarried from the stones of life.
|
O loss, if death into its elements
|
Of which his gracious envelope was built,
|
Shatter this vase before it breathes its sweets,
|
As if earth could not keep too long from heaven
|
A treasure thus unique loaned by the gods,
|
A being so rare, of so divine a make!
|
In one brief year when this bright hour flies back
|
And perches careless on a branch of Time,
|
This sovereign glory ends heaven lent to earth,
|
This splendour vanishes from the mortal's sky:
|
Heaven's greatness came, but was too great to stay.
|
Twelve swift-winged months are given to him and her;
|
This day returning Satyavan must die."
|
A lightning bright and nude the sentence fell.
|
But the queen cried: "Vain then can be heaven's grace!
|
Heaven mocks us with the brilliance of its gifts,
|
For Death is a cupbearer of the wine
|
Of too brief joy held up to mortal lips
|
For a passionate moment by the careless gods.
|
But I reject the grace and the mockery.
|
Mounting thy car go forth, O Savitri,
|
And travel once more through the peopled lands.
|
Alas, in the green gladness of the woods
|
Thy heart has stooped to a misleading call.
|
Choose once again and leave this fated head,
|
Death is the gardener of this wonder-tree;
|
Love's sweetness sleeps in his pale marble hand.
|
Advancing in a honeyed line but closed,
|
A little joy would buy too bitter an end.
|
Plead not thy choice, for death has made it vain.
|
Thy youth and radiance were not born to lie
|
A casket void dropped on a careless soil;
|
A choice less rare may call a happier fate."
|
But Savitri answered from her violent heart, -
|
Her voice was calm, her face was fixed like steel:
|
"Once my heart chose and chooses not again.
|
The word I have spoken can never be erased,
|
It is written in the record book of God.
|
The truth once uttered, from the earth's air effaced,
|
By mind forgotten, sounds immortally
|
For ever in the memory of Time.
|
Once the dice fall thrown by the hand of Fate
|
In an eternal moment of the gods.
|
My heart has sealed its troth to Satyavan:
|
Its signature adverse Fate cannot efface,
|
Its seal not Fate nor Death nor Time dissolve.
|
Those who shall part who have grown one being within?
|
Death's grip can break our bodies, not our souls;
|
If death take him, I too know how to die.
|
Let Fate do with me what she will or can;
|
I am stronger than death and greater than my fate;
|
My love shall outlast the world, doom falls from me
|
Helpless against my immortality.
|
Fate's law may change, but not my spirit's will."
|
An adamant will, she cast her speech like bronze.
|
But in the queen's mind listening her words
|
Rang like the voice of a self-chosen Doom
|
Denying every issue of escape.
|
To her own despair answer the mother made;
|
As one she cried who in her heavy heart
|
Labours amid the sobbing of her hopes
|
To wake a note of help from sadder strings:
|
"O child, in the magnificence of thy soul
|
Dwelling on the border of a greater world
|
And dazzled by thy superhuman thoughts,
|
Thou lendst eternity to a mortal hope.
|
Here on this mutable and ignorant earth
|
CANTO I: The Word of Fate
|
Who is the lover and who is the friend?
|
All passes here, nothing remains the same.
|
None is for any on this transient globe.
|
He whom thou lovest now, a stranger came
|
And into a far strangeness shall depart:
|
His moment's part once done upon life's stage
|
Which for a time was given him from within,
|
To other scenes he moves and other players
|
And laughs and weeps mid faces new, unknown.
|
The body thou hast loved is cast away
|
Amidst the brute unchanging stuff of worlds
|
To indifferent mighty Nature and becomes
|
Crude matter for the joy of others' lives.
|
But for our souls, upon the wheel of God
|
For ever turning, they arrive and go,
|
Married and sundered in the magic round
|
Of the great Dancer of the boundless dance.
|
Our emotions are but high and dying notes
|
Of his wild music changed compellingly
|
By the passionate movements of a seeking Heart
|
In the inconstant links of hour with hour.
|
To call down heaven's distant answering song,
|
To cry to an unseized bliss is all we dare;
|
Once seized, we lose the heavenly music's sense;
|
Too near, the rhythmic cry has fled or failed;
|
All sweetnesses are baffling symbols here.
|
Love dies before the lover in our breast:
|
Our joys are perfumes in a brittle vase.
|
O then what wreck is this upon Time's sea
|
To spread life's sails to the hurricane desire
|
And call for pilot the unseeing heart!
|
O child, wilt thou proclaim, wilt thou then follow
|
Against the Law that is the eternal will
|
The autarchy of the rash Titan's mood
|
To whom his own fierce will is the one law
|
In a world where Truth is not, nor Light nor God?
|
Only the gods can speak what now thou speakst.
|
Thou who art human, think not like a god.
|
For man, below the god, above the brute,
|
Is given the calm reason as his guide;
|
He is not driven by an unthinking will
|
As are the actions of the bird and beast;
|
He is not moved by stark Necessity
|
Like the senseless motion of inconscient things.
|
The giant's and the Titan's furious march
|
Climbs to usurp the kingdom of the gods
|
Or skirts the demon magnitudes of Hell;
|
In the unreflecting passion of their hearts
|
They dash their lives against the eternal Law
|
And fall and break by their own violent mass:
|
The middle path is made for thinking man.
|
To choose his steps by reason's vigilant light,
|
To choose his path among the many paths
|
Is given him, for each his difficult goal
|
Hewn out of infinite possibility.
|
Leave not thy goal to follow a beautiful face.
|
Only when thou hast climbed above thy mind
|
And liv'st in the calm vastness of the One
|
Can love be eternal in the eternal Bliss
|
And love divine replace the human tie.
|
There is a shrouded law, an austere force:
|
It bids thee streng then thy undying spirit;
|
It offers its severe benignancies
|
Of work and thought and measured grave delight
|
As steps to climb to God's far secret heights.
|
Then is our life a tranquil pilgrimage,
|
Each year a mile upon the heavenly Way,
|
Each dawn opens into a larger Light.
|
Thy acts are thy helpers, all events are signs,
|
Waking and sleep are opportunities
|
Given to thee by an immortal Power.
|
So canst thou raise thy pure unvanquished spirit,
|
CANTO I: The Word of Fate
|
Till spread to heaven in a wide vesper calm,
|
Indifferent and gentle as the sky,
|
It greatens slowly into timeless peace."
|
But Savitri replied with steadfast eyes:
|
"My will is part of the eternal Will,
|
My fate is what my spirit's strength can make,
|
My fate is what my spirit's strength can bear;
|
My strength is not the Titan's; it is God's.
|
I have discovered my glad reality
|
Beyond my body in another's being:
|
I have found the deep unchanging soul of love.
|
Then how shall I desire a lonely good,
|
Or slay, aspiring to white vacant peace,
|
The endless hope that made my soul spring forth
|
Out of its infinite solitude and sleep?
|
My spirit has glimpsed the glory for which it came,
|
The beating of one vast heart in the flame of things,
|
My eternity clasped by his eternity
|
And, tireless of the sweet abysms of Time,
|
Deep possibility always to love.
|
This, this is first, last joy and to its throb
|
The riches of a thousand fortunate years
|
Are poverty. Nothing to me are death and grief
|
Or ordinary lives and happy days.
|
And what to me are common souls of men
|
Or eyes and lips that are not Satyavan's?
|
I have no need to draw back from his arms
|
And the discovered paradise of his love
|
And journey into a still infinity.
|
Only now for my soul in Satyavan
|
I treasure the rich occasion of my birth:
|
In sunlight and a dream of emerald ways
|
I shall walk with him like gods in Paradise.
|
If for a year, that year is all my life.
|
And yet I know this is not all my fate
|
Only to live and love awhile and die.
|
For I know now why my spirit came on earth
|
And who I am and who he is I love.
|
I have looked at him from my immortal Self,
|
I have seen God smile at me in Satyavan;
|
I have seen the Eternal in a human face."
|
Then none could answer to her words. Silent
|
They sat and looked into the eyes of Fate.
|
The Way of Fate and the Problem of Pain
|
A SILENCE sealed the irrevocable decree,
|
The word of Fate that fell from heavenly lips
|
Fixing a doom no power could ever reverse
|
Unless heaven's will itself could change its course.
|
Or so it seemed: yet from the silence rose
|
One voice that questioned changeless destiny,
|
A will that strove against the immutable Will.
|
A mother's heart had heard the fateful speech
|
That rang like a sanction to the call of death
|
And came like a chill close to life and hope.
|
Yet hope sank down like an extinguished fire.
|
She felt the leaden inevitable hand
|
Invade the secrecy of her guarded soul
|
And smite with sudden pain its still content
|
And the empire of her hard-won quietude.
|
Awhile she fell to the level of human mind,
|
A field of mortal grief and Nature's law;
|
She shared, she bore the common lot of men
|
And felt what common hearts endure in Time.
|
Voicing earth's question to the inscrutable power
|
The queen now turned to the still immobile seer:
|
Assailed by the discontent in Nature's depths,
|
Partner in the agony of dumb driven things
|
And all the misery, all the ignorant cry,
|
Passionate like sorrow questioning heaven she spoke.
|
Lending her speech to the surface soul on earth
|
She uttered the suffering in the world's dumb heart
|
And man's revolt against his ignorant fate.
|
"O seer, in the earth's strange twi-natured life
|
By what pitiless adverse Necessity
|
Or what cold freak of a Creator's will,
|
By what random accident or governed Chance
|
That shaped a rule out of fortuitous steps,
|
Made destiny from an hour's emotion, came
|
Into the unreadable mystery of Time
|
The direr mystery of grief and pain?
|
Is it thy God who made this cruel law?
|
Or some disastrous Power has marred his work
|
And he stands helpless to defend or save?
|
A fatal seed was sown in life's false start
|
When evil twinned with good on earthly soil.
|
Then first appeared the malady of mind,
|
Its pang of thought, its quest for the aim of life.
|
It twisted into forms of good and ill
|
The frank simplicity of the animal's acts;
|
It turned the straight path hewn by the body's gods,
|
Followed the zigzag of the uncertain course
|
Of life that wanders seeking for its aim
|
In the pale starlight falling from thought's skies,
|
Its guides the unsure idea, the wavering will.
|
Lost was the instinct's safe identity
|
With the arrow-point of being's inmost sight,
|
Marred the sure steps of Nature's simple walk
|
And truth and freedom in the growing soul.
|
Out of some ageless innocence and peace,
|
Privilege of souls not yet betrayed to birth,
|
Cast down to suffer on this hard dangerous earth
|
Our life was born in pain and with a cry.
|
Although earth-nature welcomes heaven's breath
|
Inspiring Matter with the will to live,
|
A thousand ills assail the mortal's hours
|
And wear away the natural joy of life;
|
Our bodies are an engine cunningly made,
|
But for all its parts as cunningly are planned,
|
Contrived ingeniously with demon skill,
|
Its apt inevitable heritage
|
Of mortal danger and peculiar pain,
|
CANTO II: The Way of Fate and the Problem of Pain
|
Its payment of the tax of Time and Fate,
|
Its way to suffer and its way to die.
|
This is the ransom of our high estate,
|
The sign and stamp of our humanity.
|
A grisly company of maladies
|
Come, licensed lodgers, into man's bodily house,
|
Purveyors of death and torturers of life.
|
In the malignant hollows of the world,
|
In its subconscient cavern-passages
|
Ambushed they lie waiting their hour to leap,
|
Surrounding with danger the sieged city of life:
|
Admitted into the citadel of man's days
|
They mine his force and maim or suddenly kill.
|
Ourselves within us lethal forces nurse;
|
We make of our own enemies our guests:
|
Out of their holes like beasts they creep and gnaw
|
The chords of the divine musician's lyre
|
Till frayed and thin the music dies away
|
Or crashing snaps with a last tragic note.
|
All that we are is like a fort beset:
|
All that we strive to be alters like a dream
|
In the grey sleep of Matter's ignorance.
|
Mind suffers lamed by the world's disharmony
|
And the unloveliness of human things.
|
A treasure misspent or cheaply, fruitlessly sold
|
In the bazaar of a blind destiny,
|
A gift of priceless value from Time's gods
|
Lost or mislaid in an uncaring world,
|
Life is a marvel missed, an art gone wry;
|
A seeker in a dark and obscure place,
|
An ill-armed warrior facing dreadful odds,
|
An imperfect worker given a baffling task,
|
An ignorant judge of problems Ignorance made,
|
Its heavenward flights reach closed and keyless gates,
|
Its glorious outbursts peter out in mire.
|
On Nature's gifts to man a curse was laid:
|
All walks inarmed by its own opposites,
|
Error is the comrade of our mortal thought
|
And falsehood lurks in the deep bosom of truth,
|
Sin poisons with its vivid flowers of joy
|
Or leaves a red scar burnt across the soul;
|
Virtue is a grey bondage and a gaol.
|
At every step is laid for us a snare.
|
Alien to reason and the spirit's light,
|
Our fount of action from a darkness wells;
|
In ignorance and nescience are our roots.
|
A growing register of calamities
|
Is the past's account, the future's book of Fate:
|
The centuries pile man's follies and man's crimes
|
Upon the countless crowd of Nature's ills;
|
As if the world's stone load was not enough,
|
A crop of miseries obstinately is sown
|
By his own hand in the furrows of the gods,
|
The vast increasing tragic harvest reaped
|
From old misdeeds buried by oblivious Time.
|
He walks by his own choice into Hell's trap;
|
This mortal creature is his own worst foe.
|
His science is an artificer of doom;
|
He ransacks earth for means to harm his kind;
|
He slays his happiness and others' good.
|
Nothing has he learned from Time and its history;
|
Even as of old in the raw youth of Time,
|
When Earth ignorant ran on the highways of Fate,
|
Old forms of evil cling to the world's soul:
|
War making nought the sweet smiling calm of life,
|
Battle and rapine, ruin and massacre
|
Are still the fierce pastimes of man's warring tribes;
|
An idiot hour destroys what centuries made,
|
His wanton rage or frenzied hate lays low
|
The beauty and greatness by his genius wrought
|
And the mighty output of a nation's toil.
|
All he has achieved he drags to the precipice.
|
CANTO II: The Way of Fate and the Problem of Pain
|
His grandeur he turns to an epic of doom and fall;
|
His littleness crawls content through squalor and mud,
|
He calls heaven's retri bution on his head
|
And wallows in his self-made misery.
|
A part author of the cosmic tragedy,
|
His will conspires with death and time and fate.
|
His brief appearance on the enigmaed earth
|
Ever recurs but brings no high result
|
To this wanderer through the aeon-rings of God
|
That shut his life in their vast longevity.
|
His soul's wide search and ever returning hopes
|
Pursue the useless orbit of their course
|
In a vain repetition of lost toils
|
Across a track of soon forgotten lives.
|
All is an episode in a meaningless tale.
|
Why is it all and wherefore are we here?
|
If to some being of eternal bliss
|
It is our spirit's destiny to return
|
Or some still impersonal height of endless calm,
|
Since That we are and out of That we came,
|
Whence rose the strange and sterile interlude
|
Lasting in vain through interminable Time?
|
Who willed to form or feign a universe
|
In the cold and endless emptiness of Space?
|
Or if these beings must be and their brief lives,
|
What need had the soul of ignorance and tears?
|
Whence rose the call for sorrow and for pain?
|
Or all came helplessly without a cause?
|
What power forced the immortal spirit to birth?
|
The eternal witness once of eternity,
|
A deathless sojourner mid transient scenes,
|
He camps in life's half-lit obscurity
|
Amid the debris of his thoughts and dreams.
|
Or who persuaded it to fall from bliss
|
And forfeit its immortal privilege?
|
Who laid on it the ceaseless will to live
|
A wanderer in this beautiful, sorrowful world,
|
And bear its load of joy and grief and love?
|
Or if no being watches the works of Time,
|
What hard impersonal Necessity
|
Compels the vain toil of brief living things?
|
A great Illusion then has built the stars.
|
But where then is the soul's security,
|
Its poise in this circling of unreal suns?
|
Or else it is a wanderer from its home
|
Who strayed into a blind alley of Time and chance
|
And finds no issue from a meaningless world.
|
Or where begins and ends Illusion's reign?
|
Perhaps the soul we feel is only a dream,
|
Eternal self a fiction sensed in trance."
|
Then after a silence Narad made reply:
|
Tuning his lips to earthly sound he spoke,
|
And something now of the deep sense of fate
|
Weighted the fragile hints of mortal speech.
|
His forehead shone with vision solemnised,
|
Turned to a tablet of supernal thoughts
|
As if characters of an unwritten tongue
|
Had left in its breadth the inscriptions of the gods.
|
Bare in that light Time toiled, his unseen works
|
Detected; the broad-flung far-seeing schemes
|
Unfinished which his aeoned flight unrolls
|
Were mapped already in that world-wide look.
|
"Was then the sun a dream because there is night?
|
Hidden in the mortal's heart the Eternal lives:
|
He lives secret in the chamber of thy soul,
|
A Light shines there nor pain nor grief can cross.
|
A darkness stands between thyself and him,
|
Thou canst not hear or feel the marvellous Guest,
|
Thou canst not see the beatific sun.
|
O queen, thy thought is a light of the Ignorance,
|
Its brilliant curtain hides from thee God's face.
|
CANTO II: The Way of Fate and the Problem of Pain
|
It illumes a world born from the Inconscience
|
But hides the Immortal's meaning in the world.
|
Thy mind's light hides from thee the Eternal's thought,
|
Thy heart's hopes hide from thee the Eternal's will,
|
Earth's joys shut from thee the Immortal's bliss.
|
Thence rose the need of a dark intruding god,
|
The world's dread teacher, the creator, pain.
|
Where Ignorance is, there suffering too must come;
|
Thy grief is a cry of darkness to the Light;
|
Pain was the first-born of the Inconscience
|
Which was thy body's dumb original base;
|
Already slept there pain's subconscient shape:
|
A shadow in a shadowy tenebrous womb,
|
Till life shall move, it waits to wake and be.
|
In one caul with joy came forth the dreadful Power.
|
In life's breast it was born hiding its twin;
|
But pain came first, then only joy could be.
|
Pain ploughed the first hard ground of the world-drowse.
|
By pain a spirit started from the clod,
|
By pain Life stirred in the subliminal deep.
|
Interned, submerged, hidden in Matter's trance
|
Awoke to itself the dreamer, sleeping Mind;
|
It made a visible realm out of its dreams,
|
It drew its shapes from the subconscient depths,
|
Then turned to look upon the world it had made.
|
By pain and joy, the bright and tenebrous twins,
|
The inanimate world perceived its sentient soul,
|
Else had the Inconscient never suffered change.
|
Pain is the hammer of the Gods to break
|
A dead resistance in the mortal's heart,
|
His slow inertia as of living stone.
|
If the heart were not forced to want and weep,
|
His soul would have lain down content, at ease,
|
And never thought to exceed the human start
|
And never learned to climb towards the Sun.
|
This earth is full of labour, packed with pain;
|
Throes of an endless birth coerce her still;
|
The centuries end, the ages vainly pass
|
And yet the Godhead in her is not born.
|
The ancient Mother faces all with joy,
|
Calls for the ardent pang, the grandiose thrill;
|
For with pain and labour all creation comes.
|
This earth is full of the anguish of the gods;
|
Ever they travail driven by Time's goad,
|
And strive to work out the eternal Will
|
And shape the life divine in mortal forms.
|
His will must be worked out in human breasts
|
Against the Evil that rises from the gulfs,
|
Against the world's Ignorance and its obstinate strength,
|
Against the stumblings of man's pervert will,
|
Against the deep folly of his human mind,
|
Against the blind reluctance of his heart.
|
The spirit is doomed to pain till man is free.
|
There is a clamour of battle, a tramp, a march:
|
A cry arises like a moaning sea,
|
A desperate laughter under the blows of death,
|
A doom of blood and sweat and toil and tears.
|
Men die that man may live and God be born.
|
An awful Silence watches tragic Time.
|
Pain is the hand of Nature sculpturing men
|
To greatness: an inspired labour chisels
|
With heavenly cruelty an unwilling mould.
|
Implacable in the passion of their will,
|
Lifting the hammers of titanic toil
|
The demiurges of the universe work;
|
They shape with giant strokes their own; their sons
|
Are marked with their enormous stamp of fire.
|
Although the shaping god's tremendous touch
|
Is torture unbearable to mortal nerves,
|
The fiery spirit grows in strength within
|
And feels a joy in every titan pang.
|
He who would save himself lives bare and calm;
|
CANTO II: The Way of Fate and the Problem of Pain
|
He who would save the race must share its pain:
|
This he shall know who obeys that grandiose urge.
|
The Great who came to save this suffering world
|
And rescue out of Time's shadow and the Law,
|
Must pass beneath the yoke of grief and pain;
|
They are caught by the Wheel that they had hoped to break,
|
On their shoulders they must bear man's load of fate.
|
Heaven's riches they bring, their sufferings count the price
|
Or they pay the gift of knowledge with their lives.
|
The Son of God born as the Son of man
|
Has drunk the bitter cup, owned Godhead's debt,
|
The debt the Eternal owes to the fallen kind
|
His will has bound to death and struggling life
|
That yearns in vain for rest and endless peace.
|
Now is the debt paid, wiped off the original score.
|
The Eternal suffers in a human form,
|
He has signed salvation's testament with his blood:
|
He has opened the doors of his undying peace.
|
The Deity compensates the creature's claim,
|
The Creator bears the law of pain and death;
|
A retri bution smites the incarnate God.
|
His love has paved the mortal's road to Heaven:
|
He has given his life and light to balance here
|
The dark account of mortal ignorance.
|
It is finished, the dread mysterious sacrifice,
|
Offered by God's martyred body for the world;
|
Gethsemane and Calvary are his lot,
|
He carries the cross on which man's soul is nailed;
|
His escort is the curses of the crowd;
|
Insult and jeer are his right's acknowledgment;
|
Two thieves slain with him mock his mighty death.
|
He has trod with bleeding brow the Saviour's way.
|
He who has found his identity with God
|
Pays with the body's death his soul's vast light.
|
His knowledge immortal triumphs by his death.
|
Hewn, quartered on the scaffold as he falls,
|
His crucified voice proclaims, 'I, I am God;'
|
'Yes, all is God,' peals back Heaven's deathless call.
|
The seed of Godhead sleeps in mortal hearts,
|
The flower of Godhead grows on the world-tree:
|
All shall discover God in self and things.
|
But when God's messenger comes to help the world
|
And lead the soul of earth to higher things,
|
He too must carry the yoke he came to unloose;
|
He too must bear the pang that he would heal:
|
Exempt and unafflicted by earth's fate,
|
How shall he cure the ills he never felt?
|
He covers the world's agony with his calm;
|
But though to the outward eye no sign appears
|
And peace is given to our torn human hearts,
|
The struggle is there and paid the unseen price;
|
The fire, the strife, the wrestle are within.
|
He carries the suffering world in his own breast;
|
Its sins weigh on his thoughts, its grief is his:
|
Earth's ancient load lies heavy on his soul;
|
Night and its powers beleaguer his tardy steps,
|
The Titan adversary's clutch he bears;
|
His march is a battle and a pilgrimage.
|
Life's evil smites, he is stricken with the world's pain:
|
A million wounds gape in his secret heart.
|
He journeys sleepless through an unending night;
|
Antagonist forces crowd across his path;
|
A siege, a combat is his inner life.
|
Even worse may be the cost, direr the pain:
|
His large identity and all-harbouring love
|
Shall bring the cosmic anguish into his depths,
|
The sorrow of all living things shall come
|
And knock at his doors and live within his house;
|
A dreadful cord of sympathy can tie
|
All suffering into his single grief and make
|
All agony in all the worlds his own.
|
He meets an ancient adversary Force,
|
CANTO II: The Way of Fate and the Problem of Pain
|
He is lashed with the whips that tear the world's worn heart;
|
The weeping of the centuries visits his eyes:
|
He wears the blood-glued fiery Centaur shirt,
|
The poison of the world has stained his throat.
|
In the market-place of Matter's capital
|
Amidst the chafferings of the affair called life
|
He is tied to the stake of a perennial Fire;
|
He burns on an unseen original verge
|
That Matter may be turned to spirit stuff:
|
He is the victim in his own sacrifice.
|
The Immortal bound to earth's mortality
|
Appearing and perishing on the roads of Time
|
Creates God's moment by eternity's beats.
|
He dies that the world may be new-born and live.
|
Even if he escapes the fiercest fires,
|
Even if the world breaks not in, a drowning sea,
|
Only by hard sacrifice is high heaven earned:
|
He must face the fight, the pang who would conquer Hell.
|
A dark concealed hostility is lodged
|
In the human depths, in the hidden heart of Time
|
That claims the right to change and mar God's work.
|
A secret enmity ambushes the world's march;
|
It leaves a mark on thought and speech and act:
|
It stamps stain and defect on all things done;
|
Till it is slain peace is forbidden on earth.
|
There is no visible foe, but the unseen
|
Is round us, forces intangible besiege,
|
Touches from alien realms, thoughts not our own
|
Overtake us and compel the erring heart;
|
Our lives are caught in an ambiguous net.
|
An adversary Force was born of old:
|
Invader of the life of mortal man,
|
It hides from him the straight immortal path.
|
A power came in to veil the eternal Light,
|
A power opposed to the eternal will
|
Diverts the messages of the infallible Word,
|
Contorts the contours of the cosmic plan:
|
A whisper lures to evil the human heart,
|
It seals up wisdom's eyes, the soul's regard,
|
It is the origin of our suffering here,
|
It binds earth to calamity and pain.
|
This all must conquer who would bring down God's peace.
|
This hidden foe lodged in the human breast
|
Man must overcome or miss his higher fate.
|
This is the inner war without escape.
|
"Hard is the world-redeemer's heavy task;
|
The world itself becomes his adversary,
|
Those he would save are his antagonists:
|
This world is in love with its own ignorance,
|
Its darkness turns away from the saviour light,
|
It gives the cross in payment for the crown.
|
His work is a trickle of splendour in a long night;
|
He sees the long march of Time, the little won;
|
A few are saved, the rest strive on and fail:
|
A Sun has passed, on earth Night's shadow falls.
|
Yes, there are happy ways near to God's sun;
|
But few are they who tread the sunlit path;
|
Only the pure in soul can walk in light.
|
An exit is shown, a road of hard escape
|
From the sorrow and the darkness and the chain;
|
But how shall a few escaped release the world?
|
The human mass lingers beneath the yoke.
|
Escape, however high, redeems not life,
|
Life that is left behind on a fallen earth.
|
Escape cannot uplift the abandoned race
|
Or bring to it victory and the reign of God.
|
A greater power must come, a larger light.
|
Although Light grows on earth and Night recedes,
|
Yet till the evil is slain in its own home
|
And Light invades the world's inconscient base
|
And perished has the adversary Force,
|
CANTO II: The Way of Fate and the Problem of Pain
|
He still must labour on, his work half done.
|
One yet may come armoured, invincible;
|
His will immobile meets the mobile hour;
|
The world's blows cannot bend that victor head;
|
Calm and sure are his steps in the growing Night;
|
The goal recedes, he hurries not his pace,
|
He turns not to high voices in the night;
|
He asks no aid from the inferior gods;
|
His eyes are fixed on his immutable aim.
|
Man turns aside or chooses easier paths;
|
He keeps to the one high and difficult road
|
That sole can climb to the Eternal's peaks;
|
The ineffable planes already have felt his tread;
|
He has made heaven and earth his instruments,
|
But the limits fall from him of earth and heaven;
|
Their law he transcends but uses as his means.
|
He has seized life's hands, he has mastered his own heart.
|
The feints of Nature mislead not his sight,
|
Inflexible his look towards Truth's far end;
|
Fate's deaf resistance cannot break his will.
|
In the dreadful passages, the fatal paths,
|
Invulnerable his soul, his heart unslain,
|
He lives through the opposition of earth's Powers
|
And Nature's ambushes and the world's attacks.
|
His spirit's stature transcending pain and bliss,
|
He fronts evil and good with calm and equal eyes.
|
He too must grapple with the riddling Sphinx
|
And plunge into her long obscurity.
|
He has broken into the Inconscient's depths
|
That veil themselves even from their own regard:
|
He has seen God's slumber shape these magic worlds.
|
He has watched the dumb God fashioning Matter's frame,
|
Dreaming the dreams of its unknowing sleep,
|
And watched the unconscious Force that built the stars.
|
He has learned the Inconscient's workings and its law,
|
Its incoherent thoughts and rigid acts,
|
Its hazard wastes of impulse and idea,
|
The chaos of its mechanic frequencies,
|
Its random calls, its whispers falsely true,
|
Misleaders of the hooded listening soul.
|
All things come to its ear but nothing abides;
|
All rose from the silence, all goes back to its hush.
|
Its somnolence founded the universe,
|
Its obscure waking makes the world seem vain.
|
Arisen from Nothingness and towards Nothingness turned,
|
Its dark and potent nescience was earth's start;
|
It is the waste stuff from which all was made;
|
Into its deeps creation can collapse.
|
Its opposition clogs the march of the soul,
|
It is the mother of our ignorance.
|
He must call light into its dark abysms,
|
Else never can Truth conquer Matter's sleep
|
And all earth look into the eyes of God.
|
All things obscure his knowledge must relume,
|
All things perverse his power must unknot:
|
He must pass to the other shore of falsehood's sea,
|
He must enter the world's dark to bring there light.
|
The heart of evil must be bared to his eyes,
|
He must learn its cosmic dark necessity,
|
Its right and its dire roots in Nature's soil.
|
He must know the thought that moves the demon act
|
And justifies the Titan's erring pride
|
And the falsehood lurking in earth's crooked dreams:
|
He must enter the eternity of Night
|
And know God's darkness as he knows his Sun.
|
For this he must go down into the pit,
|
For this he must invade the dolorous Vasts.
|
Imperishable and wise and infinite,
|
He still must travel Hell the world to save.
|
Into the eternal Light he shall emerge
|
On borders of the meeting of all worlds;
|
There on the verge of Nature's summit steps
|
CANTO II: The Way of Fate and the Problem of Pain
|
The secret Law of each thing is fulfilled,
|
All contraries heal their long dissidence.
|
There meet and clasp the eternal opposites,
|
There pain becomes a violent fiery joy;
|
Evil turns back to its original good,
|
And sorrow lies upon the breasts of Bliss:
|
She has learned to weep glad tears of happiness;
|
Her gaze is charged with a wistful ecstasy.
|
Then shall be ended here the Law of Pain.
|
Earth shall be made a home of Heaven's light,
|
A seer heaven-born shall lodge in human breasts;
|
The superconscient beam shall touch men's eyes
|
And the truth-conscious world come down to earth
|
Invading Matter with the Spirit's ray,
|
Awaking its silence to immortal thoughts,
|
Awaking the dumb heart to the living Word.
|
This mortal life shall house Eternity's bliss,
|
The body's self taste immortality.
|
Then shall the world-redeemer's task be done.
|
"Till then must life carry its seed of death
|
And sorrow's plaint be heard in the slow Night.
|
O mortal, bear this great world's law of pain,
|
In thy hard passage through a suffering world
|
Lean for thy soul's support on Heaven's strength,
|
Turn towards high Truth, aspire to love and peace.
|
A little bliss is lent thee from above,
|
A touch divine upon thy human days.
|
Make of thy daily way a pilgrimage,
|
For through small joys and griefs thou mov'st towards God.
|
Haste not towards Godhead on a dangerous road,
|
Open not thy doorways to a nameless Power,
|
Climb not to Godhead by the Titan's road.
|
Against the Law he pits his single will,
|
Across its way he throws his pride of might.
|
Heavenward he clambers on a stair of storms
|
Aspiring to live near the deathless sun.
|
He strives with a giant strength to wrest by force
|
From life and Nature the immortals' right;
|
He takes by storm the world and fate and heaven.
|
He comes not to the high World-maker's seat,
|
He waits not for the outstretched hand of God
|
To raise him out of his mortality.
|
All he would make his own, leave nothing free,
|
Stretching his small self to cope with the infinite.
|
Obstructing the gods' open ways he makes
|
His own estate of the earth's air and light;
|
A monopolist of the world-energy,
|
He dominates the life of common men.
|
His pain and others' pain he makes his means:
|
On death and suffering he builds his throne.
|
In the hurry and clangour of his acts of might,
|
In a riot and excess of fame and shame,
|
By his magnitudes of hate and violence,
|
By the quaking of the world beneath his tread
|
He matches himself against the Eternal's calm
|
And feels in himself the greatness of a god:
|
Power is his image of celestial self.
|
The Titan's heart is a sea of fire and force;
|
He exults in the death of things and ruin and fall,
|
He feeds his strength with his own and others' pain;
|
In the world's pathos and passion he takes delight,
|
His pride, his might call for the struggle and pang.
|
He glories in the sufferings of the flesh
|
And covers the stigmata with the Stoic's name.
|
His eyes blinded and visionless stare at the sun,
|
The seeker's Sight receding from his heart
|
Can find no more the light of eternity;
|
He sees the beyond as an emptiness void of soul
|
And takes his night for a dark infinite.
|
His nature magnifies the unreal's blank
|
And sees in Nought the sole reality:
|
CANTO II: The Way of Fate and the Problem of Pain
|
He would stamp his single figure on the world,
|
Obsess the world's rumours with his single name.
|
His moments centre the vast universe.
|
He sees his little self as very God.
|
His little 'I' has swallowed the whole world,
|
His ego has stretched into infinity.
|
His mind, a beat in original Nothingness,
|
Ciphers his thought on a slate of hourless Time.
|
He builds on a mighty vacancy of soul
|
A huge philosophy of Nothingness.
|
In him Nirvana lives and speaks and acts
|
Impossibly creating a universe.
|
An eternal zero is his formless self,
|
His spirit the void impersonal absolute.
|
Take not that stride, O growing soul of man;
|
Cast not thy self into that night of God.
|
The soul suffering is not eternity's key,
|
Or ransom by sorrow heaven's demand on life.
|
O mortal, bear, but ask not for the stroke,
|
Too soon will grief and anguish find thee out.
|
Too enormous is that venture for thy will;
|
Only in limits can man's strength be safe;
|
Yet is infinity thy spirit's goal;
|
Its bliss is there behind the world's face of tears.
|
A power is in thee that thou knowest not;
|
Thou art a vessel of the imprisoned spark.
|
It seeks relief from Time's envelopment,
|
And while thou shutst it in, the seal is pain:
|
Bliss is the Godhead's crown, eternal, free,
|
Unburdened by life's blind mystery of pain:
|
Pain is the signature of the Ignorance
|
Attesting the secret god denied by life:
|
Until life finds him pain can never end.
|
Calm is self's victory overcoming fate.
|
Bear; thou shalt find at last thy road to bliss.
|
Bliss is the secret stuff of all that lives,
|
Even pain and grief are garbs of world-delight,
|
It hides behind thy sorrow and thy cry.
|
Because thy strength is a part and not God's whole,
|
Because afflicted by the little self
|
Thy consciousness forgets to be divine
|
As it walks in the vague penumbra of the flesh
|
And cannot bear the world's tremendous touch,
|
Thou criest out and sayst that there is pain.
|
Indifference, pain and joy, a triple disguise,
|
Attire of the rapturous Dancer in the ways,
|
Withhold from thee the body of God's bliss.
|
Thy spirit's strength shall make thee one with God,
|
Thy agony shall change to ecstasy,
|
Indifference deepen into infinity's calm
|
And joy laugh nude on the peaks of the Absolute.
|
"O mortal who complainst of death and fate,
|
Accuse none of the harms thyself hast called;
|
This troubled world thou hast chosen for thy home,
|
Thou art thyself the author of thy pain.
|
Once in the immortal boundlessness of Self,
|
In a vast of Truth and Consciousness and Light
|
The soul looked out from its felicity.
|
It felt the Spirit's interminable bliss,
|
It knew itself deathless, timeless, spaceless, one,
|
It saw the Eternal, lived in the Infinite.
|
Then, curious of a shadow thrown by Truth,
|
It strained towards some otherness of self,
|
It was drawn to an unknown Face peering through night.
|
It sensed a negative infinity,
|
A void supernal whose immense excess
|
Imitating God and everlasting Time
|
Offered a ground for Nature's adverse birth
|
And Matter's rigid hard unconsciousness
|
Harbouring the brilliance of a transient soul
|
That lights up birth and death and ignorant life.
|
CANTO II: The Way of Fate and the Problem of Pain
|
A Mind arose that stared at Nothingness
|
Till figures formed of what could never be;
|
It housed the contrary of all that is.
|
A Nought appeared as Being's huge sealed cause,
|
Its dumb support in a blank infinite,
|
In whose abysm spirit must disappear:
|
A darkened Nature lived and held the seed
|
Of Spirit hidden and feigning not to be.
|
Eternal Consciousness became a freak
|
Of an unsouled almighty Inconscient
|
And, breathed no more as spirit's native air,
|
Bliss was an incident of a mortal hour,
|
A stranger in the insentient universe.
|
As one drawn by the grandeur of the Void
|
The soul attracted leaned to the Abyss:
|
It longed for the adventure of Ignorance
|
And the marvel and surprise of the Unknown
|
And the endless possibility that lurked
|
In the womb of Chaos and in Nothing's gulf
|
Or looked from the unfathomed eyes of Chance.
|
It tired of its unchanging happiness,
|
It turned away from immortality:
|
It was drawn to hazard's call and danger's charm,
|
It yearned to the pathos of grief, the drama of pain,
|
Perdition's peril, the wounded bare escape,
|
The music of ruin and its glamour and crash,
|
The savour of pity and the gamble of love
|
And passion and the ambiguous face of Fate.
|
A world of hard endeavour and difficult toil,
|
And battle on extinction's perilous verge,
|
A clash of forces, a vast incertitude,
|
The joy of creation out of Nothingness,
|
Strange meetings on the roads of Ignorance
|
And the companionship of half-known souls
|
Or the solitary greatness and lonely force
|
Of a separate being conquering its world,
|
Called it from its too safe eternity.
|
A huge descent began, a giant fall:
|
For what the spirit sees, creates a truth
|
And what the soul imagines is made a world.
|
A Thought that leaped from the Timeless can become,
|
Indicator of cosmic consequence
|
And the itinerary of the gods,
|
A cyclic movement in eternal Time.
|
Thus came, born from a blind tremendous choice,
|
This great perplexed and discontented world,
|
This haunt of Ignorance, this home of Pain:
|
There are pitched desire's tents, grief's headquarters.
|
A vast disguise conceals the Eternal's bliss."
|
Then Aswapati answered to the seer:
|
"Is then the spirit ruled by an outward world?
|
O seer, is there no remedy within?
|
But what is Fate if not the spirit's will
|
After long time fulfilled by cosmic Force?
|
I deemed a mighty Power had come with her;
|
Is not that Power the high compeer of Fate?"
|
But Narad answered covering truth with truth:
|
"O Aswapati, random seem the ways
|
Along whose banks your footsteps stray or run
|
In casual hours or moments of the gods,
|
Yet your least stumblings are foreseen above.
|
Infallibly the curves of life are drawn
|
Following the stream of Time through the unknown;
|
They are led by a clue the calm immortals keep.
|
This blazoned hieroglyph of prophet morns
|
A meaning more sublime in symbols writes
|
Than sealed Thought wakes to, but of this high script
|
How shall my voice convince the mind of earth?
|
Heaven's wiser love rejects the mortal's prayer;
|
Unblinded by the breath of his desire,
|
Unclouded by the mists of fear and hope,
|
CANTO II: The Way of Fate and the Problem of Pain
|
It bends above the strife of love with death;
|
It keeps for her her privilege of pain.
|
A greatness in thy daughter's soul resides
|
That can transform herself and all around
|
But must cross on stones of suffering to its goal.
|
Although designed like a nectar cup of heaven,
|
Of heavenly ether made she sought this air,
|
She too must share the human need of grief
|
And all her cause of joy transmute to pain.
|
The mind of mortal man is led by words,
|
His sight retires behind the walls of Thought
|
And looks out only through half-opened doors.
|
He cuts the boundless Truth into sky-strips
|
And every strip he takes for all the heavens.
|
He stares at infinite possibility
|
And gives to the plastic Vast the name of Chance;
|
He sees the long results of an all-wise Force
|
Planning a sequence of steps in endless Time
|
But in its links imagines a senseless chain
|
Or the dead hand of cold Necessity;
|
He answers not to the mystic Mother's heart,
|
Misses the ardent heavings of her breast
|
And feels cold rigid limbs of lifeless Law.
|
The will of the Timeless working out in Time
|
In the free absolute steps of cosmic Truth
|
He thinks a dead machine or unconscious Fate.
|
A Magician's formulas have made Matter's laws
|
And while they last, all things by them are bound;
|
But the spirit's consent is needed for each act
|
And Freedom walks in the same pace with Law.
|
All here can change if the Magician choose.
|
If human will could be made one with God's,
|
If human thought could echo the thoughts of God,
|
Man might be all-knowing and omnipotent;
|
But now he walks in Nature's doubtful ray.
|
Yet can the mind of man receive God's light,
|
The force of man can be driven by God's force,
|
Then is he a miracle doing miracles.
|
For only so can he be Nature's king.
|
It is decreed and Satyavan must die;
|
The hour is fixed, chosen the fatal stroke.
|
What else shall be is written in her soul
|
But till the hour reveals the fateful script,
|
The writing waits illegible and mute.
|
Fate is Truth working out in Ignorance.
|
O King, thy fate is a transaction done
|
At every hour between Nature and thy soul
|
With God for its foreseeing arbiter.
|
Fate is a balance drawn in Destiny's book.
|
Man can accept his fate, he can refuse.
|
Even if the One maintains the unseen decree
|
He writes thy refusal in thy credit page:
|
For doom is not a close, a mystic seal.
|
Arisen from the tragic crash of life,
|
Arisen from the body's torture and death,
|
The spirit rises mightier by defeat;
|
Its godlike wings grow wider with each fall.
|
Its splendid failures sum to victory.
|
O man, the events that meet thee on thy road,
|
Though they smite thy body and soul with joy and grief,
|
Are not thy fate, - they touch thee awhile and pass;
|
Even death can cut not short thy spirit's walk:
|
Thy goal, the road thou choosest are thy fate.
|
On the altar throwing thy thoughts, thy heart, thy works,
|
Thy fate is a long sacrifice to the gods
|
Till they have opened to thee thy secret self
|
And made thee one with the indwelling God.
|
O soul, intruder in Nature's ignorance,
|
Armed traveller to the unseen supernal heights,
|
Thy spirit's fate is a battle and ceaseless march
|
Against invisible opponent Powers,
|
A passage from Matter into timeless self.
|
CANTO II: The Way of Fate and the Problem of Pain
|
Adventurer through blind unforeseeing Time,
|
A forced advance through a long line of lives,
|
It pushes its spearhead through the centuries.
|
Across the dust and mire of the earthly plain,
|
On many guarded lines and dangerous fronts,
|
In dire assaults, in wounded slow retreats,
|
Holding the ideal's ringed and battered fort
|
Or fighting against odds in lonely posts,
|
Or camped in night around the bivouac's fires
|
Awaiting the tardy trumpets of the dawn,
|
In hunger and in plenty and in pain,
|
Through peril and through triumph and through fall,
|
Through life's green lanes and over her desert sands,
|
Up the bald moor, along the sunlit ridge,
|
In serried columns with a straggling rear
|
Led by its nomad vanguard's signal fires,
|
Marches the army of the waylost god.
|
Then late the joy ineffable is felt,
|
Then he remembers his forgotten self;
|
He has refound the skies from which he fell.
|
At length his front's indomitable line
|
Forces the last passes of the Ignorance:
|
Advancing beyond Nature's last known bounds,
|
Reconnoitring the formidable unknown,
|
Beyond the landmarks of things visible,
|
It mounts through a miraculous upper air
|
Till climbing the mute summit of the world
|
He stands upon the splendour-peaks of God.
|
In vain thou mournst that Satyavan must die;
|
His death is a beginning of greater life,
|
Death is the spirit's opportunity.
|
A vast intention has brought two souls close
|
And love and death conspire towards one great end.
|
For out of danger and pain heaven-bliss shall come,
|
Time's unforeseen event, God's secret plan.
|
This world was not built with random bricks of Chance,
|
A blind god is not destiny's architect;
|
A conscious power has drawn the plan of life,
|
There is a meaning in each curve and line.
|
It is an architecture high and grand
|
By many named and nameless masons built
|
In which unseeing hands obey the Unseen,
|
And of its master-builders she is one.
|
"Queen, strive no more to change the secret will;
|
Time's accidents are steps in its vast scheme.
|
Bring not thy brief and helpless human tears
|
Across the fathomless moments of a heart
|
That knows its single will and God's as one:
|
It can embrace its hostile destiny;
|
It sits apart with grief and facing death,
|
Affronting adverse fate armed and alone.
|
In this enormous world standing apart
|
In the mightiness of her silent spirit's will,
|
In the passion of her soul of sacrifice
|
Her lonely strength facing the universe,
|
Affronting fate, asks not man's help nor god's:
|
Sometimes one life is charged with earth's destiny,
|
It cries not for succour from the time-bound powers.
|
Alone she is equal to her mighty task.
|
Intervene not in a strife too great for thee,
|
A struggle too deep for mortal thought to sound,
|
Its question to this Nature's rigid bounds
|
When the soul fronts nude of garbs the infinite,
|
Its too vast theme of a lonely mortal will
|
Pacing the silence of eternity.
|
As a star, uncompanioned, moves in heaven
|
Unastonished by the immensities of Space,
|
Travelling infinity by its own light,
|
The great are strongest when they stand alone.
|
A God-given might of being is their force,
|
A ray from self's solitude of light the guide;
|
The soul that can live alone with itself meets God;
|
CANTO II: The Way of Fate and the Problem of Pain
|
Its lonely universe is their rendezvous.
|
A day may come when she must stand unhelped
|
On a dangerous brink of the world's doom and hers,
|
Carrying the world's future on her lonely breast,
|
Carrying the human hope in a heart left sole
|
To conquer or fail on a last desperate verge,
|
Alone with death and close to extinction's edge.
|
Her single greatness in that last dire scene
|
Must cross alone a perilous bridge in Time
|
And reach an apex of world-destiny
|
Where all is won or all is lost for man.
|
In that tremendous silence lone and lost
|
Of a deciding hour in the world's fate,
|
In her soul's climbing beyond mortal time
|
When she stands sole with Death or sole with God
|
Apart upon a silent desperate brink,
|
Alone with her self and death and destiny
|
As on some verge between Time and Timelessness
|
When being must end or life rebuild its base,
|
Alone she must conquer or alone must fall.
|
No human aid can reach her in that hour,
|
No armoured god stand shining at her side.
|
Cry not to heaven, for she alone can save.
|
For this the silent Force came missioned down;
|
In her the conscious Will took human shape:
|
She only can save herself and save the world.
|
O queen, stand back from that stupendous scene,
|
Come not between her and her hour of Fate.
|
Her hour must come and none can intervene:
|
Think not to turn her from her heaven-sent task,
|
Strive not to save her from her own high will.
|
Thou hast no place in that tremendous strife;
|
Thy love and longing are not arbiters there;
|
Leave the world's fate and her to God's sole guard.
|
Even if he seems to leave her to her lone strength,
|
Even though all falters and falls and sees an end
|
And the heart fails and only are death and night,
|
God-given her strength can battle against doom
|
Even on a brink where Death alone seems close
|
And no human strength can hinder or can help.
|
Think not to intercede with the hidden Will,
|
Intrude not twixt her spirit and its force
|
But leave her to her mighty self and Fate."
|
He spoke and ceased and left the earthly scene.
|
Away from the strife and suffering on our globe,
|
He turned towards his far-off blissful home.
|
A brilliant arrow pointing straight to heaven,
|
The luminous body of the ethereal seer
|
Assailed the purple glory of the noon
|
And disappeared like a receding star
|
Vanishing into the light of the Unseen.
|
But still a cry was heard in the infinite,
|
And still to the listening soul on mortal earth
|
A high and far imperishable voice
|
Chanted the anthem of eternal love.
|
The Joy of Union; the Ordeal of the Foreknowledge
|
of Death and the Heart's Grief and Pain
|
FATE followed her foreseen immutable road.
|
Man's hopes and longings build the journeying wheels
|
That bear the body of his destiny
|
And lead his blind will towards an unknown goal.
|
His fate within him shapes his acts and rules;
|
Its face and form already are born in him,
|
Its parentage is in his secret soul:
|
Here Matter seems to mould the body's life
|
And the soul follows where its nature drives.
|
Nature and Fate compel his free-will's choice.
|
But greater spirits this balance can reverse
|
And make the soul the artist of its fate.
|
This is the mystic truth our ignorance hides:
|
Doom is a passage for our inborn force,
|
Our ordeal is the hidden spirit's choice,
|
Ananke is our being's own decree.
|
All was fulfilled the heart of Savitri
|
Flower-sweet and adamant, passionate and calm,
|
Had chosen and on her strength's unbending road
|
Forced to its issue the long cosmic curve.
|
Once more she sat behind loud hastening hooves;
|
A speed of armoured squadrons and a voice
|
Far-heard of chariots bore her from her home.
|
A couchant earth wakened in its dumb muse
|
Looked up at her from a vast indolence:
|
Hills wallowing in a bright haze, large lands
|
That lolled at ease beneath the summer heavens,
|
Region on region spacious in the sun,
|
Cities like chrysolites in the wide blaze
|
And yellow rivers pacing lion-maned
|
Led to the Shalwa marches' emerald line,
|
A happy front to iron vastnesses
|
And austere peaks and titan solitudes.
|
Once more was near the fair and fated place,
|
The borders gleaming with the groves' delight
|
Where first she met the face of Satyavan
|
And he saw like one waking into a dream
|
Some timeless beauty and reality,
|
The moon-gold sweetness of heaven's earth-born child.
|
The past receded and the future neared:
|
Far now behind lay Madra's spacious halls,
|
The white carved pillars, the cool dim alcoves,
|
The tinged mosaic of the crystal floors,
|
The towered pavilions, the wind-rippled pools
|
And gardens humming with the murmur of bees,
|
Forgotten soon or a pale memory
|
The fountain's plash in the white stone-bound pool,
|
The thoughtful noontide's brooding solemn trance,
|
The colonnade's dream grey in the quiet eve,
|
The slow moonrise gliding in front of Night.
|
Left far behind were now the faces known,
|
The happy silken babble on laughter's lips
|
And the close-clinging clasp of intimate hands
|
And adoration's light in cherished eyes
|
Offered to the one sovereign of their life.
|
Nature's primaeval loneliness was here:
|
Here only was the voice of bird and beast, -
|
The ascetic's exile in the dim-souled huge
|
Inhuman forest far from cheerful sound
|
Of man's bli the converse and his crowded days.
|
In a broad eve with one red eye of cloud,
|
Through a narrow opening, a green flowered cleft,
|
Out of the stare of sky and soil they came
|
Into a mighty home of emerald dusk.
|
There onward led by a faint brooding path
|
Which toiled through the shadow of enormous trunks
|
CANTO I: The Joy of Union; the Ordeal of Foreknowledge
|
And under arches misers of sunshine,
|
They saw low thatched roofs of a hermitage
|
Huddled beneath a patch of azure hue
|
In a sunlit clearing that seemed the outbreak
|
Of a glad smile in the forest's monstrous heart,
|
A rude refuge of the thought and will of man
|
Watched by the crowding giants of the wood.
|
Arrived in that rough-hewn homestead they gave,
|
Questioning no more the strangeness of her fate,
|
Their pride and loved one to the great blind king,
|
A regal pillar of fallen mightiness
|
And the stately care-worn woman once a queen
|
Who now hoped nothing for herself from life,
|
But all things only hoped for her one child,
|
Calling on that single head from partial Fate
|
All joy of earth, all heaven's beatitude.
|
Adoring wisdom and beauty like a young god's,
|
She saw him loved by heaven as by herself,
|
She rejoiced in his brightness and believed in his fate
|
And knew not of the evil drawing near.
|
Lingering some days upon the forest verge
|
Like men who leng then out departure's pain,
|
Unwilling to separate sorrowful clinging hands,
|
Unwilling to see for the last time a face,
|
Heavy with the sorrow of a coming day
|
And wondering at the carelessness of Fate
|
Who breaks with idle hands her supreme works,
|
They parted from her with pain-fraught burdened hearts
|
As forced by inescapable fate we part
|
From one whom we shall never see again;
|
Driven by the singularity of her fate,
|
Helpless against the choice of Savitri's heart
|
They left her to her rapture and her doom
|
In the tremendous forest's savage charge.
|
All put behind her that was once her life,
|
All welcomed that henceforth was his and hers,
|
She abode with Satyavan in the wild woods:
|
Priceless she deemed her joy so close to death;
|
Apart with love she lived for love alone.
|
As if self-poised above the march of days,
|
Her immobile spirit watched the haste of Time,
|
A statue of passion and invincible force,
|
An absolutism of sweet imperious will,
|
A tranquillity and a violence of the gods
|
Indomitable and immutable.
|
At first to her beneath the sapphire heavens
|
The sylvan solitude was a gorgeous dream,
|
An altar of the summer's splendour and fire,
|
A sky-topped flower-hung palace of the gods
|
And all its scenes a smile on rapture's lips
|
And all its voices bards of happiness.
|
There was a chanting in the casual wind,
|
There was a glory in the least sunbeam;
|
Night was a chrysoprase on velvet cloth,
|
A nestling darkness or a moonlit deep;
|
Day was a purple pageant and a hymn,
|
A wave of the laughter of light from morn to eve.
|
His absence was a dream of memory,
|
His presence was the empire of a god.
|
A fusing of the joys of earth and heaven,
|
A tremulous blaze of nuptial rapture passed,
|
A rushing of two spirits to be one,
|
A burning of two bodies in one flame.
|
Opened were gates of unforgettable bliss:
|
Two lives were locked within an earthly heaven
|
And fate and grief fled from that fiery hour.
|
But soon now failed the summer's ardent breath
|
And throngs of blue-black clouds crept through the sky
|
And rain fled sobbing over the dripping leaves
|
And storm became the forest's titan voice.
|
Then listening to the thunder's fatal crash
|
CANTO I: The Joy of Union; the Ordeal of Foreknowledge
|
And the fugitive pattering footsteps of the showers
|
And the long unsatisfied panting of the wind
|
And sorrow muttering in the sound-vexed night,
|
The grief of all the world came near to her.
|
Night's darkness seemed her future's ominous face.
|
The shadow of her lover's doom arose
|
And fear laid hands upon her mortal heart.
|
The moments swift and ruthless raced; alarmed
|
Her thoughts, her mind remembered Narad's date.
|
A trembling moved accountant of her riches,
|
She reckoned the insufficient days between:
|
A dire expectancy knocked at her breast;
|
Dreadful to her were the footsteps of the hours:
|
Grief came, a passionate stranger to her gate:
|
Banished when in his arms, out of her sleep
|
It rose at morn to look into her face.
|
Vainly she fled into abysms of bliss
|
From her pursuing foresight of the end.
|
The more she plunged into love that anguish grew;
|
Her deepest grief from sweetest gulfs arose.
|
Remembrance was a poignant pang, she felt
|
Each day a golden leaf torn cruelly out
|
From her too slender book of love and joy.
|
Thus swaying in strong gusts of happiness
|
And swimming in foreboding's sombre waves
|
And feeding sorrow and terror with her heart, -
|
For now they sat among her bosom's guests
|
Or in her inner chamber paced apart, -
|
Her eyes stared blind into the future's night.
|
Out of her separate self she looked and saw,
|
Moving amid the unconscious faces loved,
|
In mind a stranger though in heart so near,
|
The ignorant smiling world go happily by
|
Upon its way towards an unknown doom
|
And wondered at the careless lives of men.
|
As if in different worlds they walked, though close,
|
They confident of the returning sun,
|
They wrapped in little hourly hopes and tasks, -
|
She in her dreadful knowledge was alone.
|
The rich and happy secrecy that once
|
Enshrined her as if in a silver bower
|
Apart in a bright nest of thoughts and dreams
|
Made room for tragic hours of solitude
|
And lonely grief that none could share or know,
|
A body seeing the end too soon of joy
|
And the fragile happiness of its mortal love.
|
Her quiet visage still and sweet and calm,
|
Her graceful daily acts were now a mask;
|
In vain she looked upon her depths to find
|
A ground of stillness and the spirit's peace.
|
Still veiled from her was the silent Being within
|
Who sees life's drama pass with unmoved eyes,
|
Supports the sorrow of the mind and heart
|
And bears in human breasts the world and fate.
|
A glimpse or flashes came, the Presence was hid.
|
Only her violent heart and passionate will
|
Were pushed in front to meet the immutable doom;
|
Defenceless, nude, bound to her human lot
|
They had no means to act, no way to save.
|
These she controlled, nothing was shown outside:
|
She was still to them the child they knew and loved;
|
The sorrowing woman they saw not within.
|
No change was in her beautiful motions seen:
|
A worshipped empress all once vied to serve,
|
She made herself the diligent serf of all,
|
Nor spared the labour of broom and jar and well,
|
Or close gentle tending or to heap the fire
|
Of altar and kitchen, no slight task allowed
|
To others that her woman's strength might do.
|
In all her acts a strange divinity shone:
|
Into a simplest movement she could bring
|
A oneness with earth's glowing robe of light,
|
A lifting up of common acts by love.
|
CANTO I: The Joy of Union; the Ordeal of Foreknowledge
|
All-love was hers and its one heavenly cord
|
Bound all to all with her as golden tie.
|
But when her grief to the surface pressed too close,
|
These things, once gracious adjuncts of her joy,
|
Seemed meaningless to her, a gleaming shell,
|
Or were a round mechanical and void,
|
Her body's actions shared not by her will.
|
Always behind this strange divided life
|
Her spirit like a sea of living fire
|
Possessed her lover and to his body clung,
|
One locked embrace to guard its threatened mate.
|
At night she woke through the slow silent hours
|
Brooding on the treasure of his bosom and face,
|
Hung o'er the sleep-bound beauty of his brow
|
Or laid her burning cheek upon his feet.
|
Waking at morn her lips endlessly clung to his,
|
Unwilling ever to separate again
|
Or lose that honeyed drain of lingering joy,
|
Unwilling to loose his body from her breast,
|
The warm inadequate signs that love must use.
|
Intolerant of the poverty of Time
|
Her passion catching at the fugitive hours
|
Willed the expense of centuries in one day
|
Of prodigal love and the surf of ecstasy;
|
Or else she strove even in mortal time
|
To build a little room for timelessness
|
By the deep union of two human lives,
|
Her soul secluded shut into his soul.
|
After all was given she demanded still;
|
Even by his strong embrace unsatisfied,
|
She longed to cry, "O tender Satyavan,
|
O lover of my soul, give more, give more
|
Of love while yet thou canst, to her thou lov'st.
|
Imprint thyself for every nerve to keep
|
That thrills to thee the message of my heart.
|
For soon we part and who shall know how long
|
Before the great wheel in its monstrous round
|
Restore us to each other and our love?"
|
Too well she loved to speak a fateful word
|
And lay her burden on his happy head;
|
She pressed the outsurging grief back into her breast
|
To dwell within silent, unhelped, alone.
|
But Satyavan sometimes half understood,
|
Or felt at least with the uncertain answer
|
Of our thought-blinded hearts the unuttered need,
|
The unplumbed abyss of her deep passionate want.
|
All of his speeding days that he could spare
|
From labour in the forest hewing wood
|
And hunting food in the wild sylvan glades
|
And service to his father's sightless life
|
He gave to her and helped to increase the hours
|
By the nearness of his presence and his clasp,
|
And lavish softness of heart-seeking words
|
And the close beating felt of heart on heart.
|
All was too little for her bottomless need.
|
If in his presence she forgot awhile,
|
Grief filled his absence with its aching touch;
|
She saw the desert of her coming days
|
Imaged in every solitary hour.
|
Although with a vain imaginary bliss
|
Of fiery union through death's door of escape
|
She dreamed of her body robed in funeral flame,
|
She knew she must not clutch that happiness
|
To die with him and follow, seizing his robe
|
Across our other countries, travellers glad
|
Into the sweet or terrible Beyond.
|
For those sad parents still would need her here
|
To help the empty remnant of their day.
|
Often it seemed to her the ages' pain
|
Had pressed their quintessence into her single woe,
|
Concentrating in her a tortured world.
|
Thus in the silent chamber of her soul
|
Cloistering her love to live with secret grief
|
She dwelt like a dumb priest with hidden gods
|
CANTO I: The Joy of Union; the Ordeal of Foreknowledge
|
Unappeased by the wordless offering of her days,
|
Lifting to them her sorrow like frankincense,
|
Her life the altar, herself the sacrifice.
|
Yet ever they grew into each other more
|
Until it seemed no power could rend apart,
|
Since even the body's walls could not divide.
|
For when he wandered in the forest, oft
|
Her conscious spirit walked with him and knew
|
His actions as if in herself he moved;
|
He, less aware, thrilled with her from afar.
|
Always the stature of her passion grew;
|
Grief, fear became the food of mighty love.
|
Increased by its torment it filled the whole world;
|
It was all her life, became her whole earth and heaven.
|
Although life-born, an infant of the hours,
|
Immortal it walked unslayable as the gods:
|
Her spirit stretched measureless in strength divine,
|
An anvil for the blows of Fate and Time:
|
Or tired of sorrow's passionate luxury,
|
Grief's self became calm, dull-eyed, resolute,
|
Awaiting some issue of its fiery struggle,
|
Some deed in which it might for ever cease,
|
Victorious over itself and death and tears.
|
The year now paused upon the brink of change.
|
No more the storms sailed with stupendous wings
|
And thunder strode in wrath across the world,
|
But still was heard a muttering in the sky
|
And rain dripped wearily through the mournful air
|
And grey slow-drifting clouds shut in the earth.
|
So her grief's heavy sky shut in her heart.
|
A still self hid behind but gave no light:
|
No voice came down from the forgotten heights;
|
Only in the privacy of its brooding pain
|
Her human heart spoke to the body's fate.
|
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
|
CANTO II: The Parable of the Search for the Soul
|
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?
|
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."
|
CANTO II: The Parable of the Search for the Soul
|
Then Savitri by her doomed husb and 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 pin-point 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,
|
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
|
The 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 time's visitors, report each call,
|
CANTO II: The Parable of the Search for the Soul
|
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 subtle 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 he 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.
|
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
|
CANTO II: The Parable of the Search for the Soul
|
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:
|
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
|
CANTO II: The Parable of the Search for the Soul
|
Finds out its settled poise and fated hour.
|
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 had 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
|
And visit mind's nocturnal walks in sleep,
|
Its stifled impulses brea the 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.
|
CANTO II: The Parable of the Search for the Soul
|
Our larger being sits behind cryptic walls:
|
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 earth-born 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 demigod.
|
Out of the dim recesses of the self
|
The occult seeker into the open came:
|
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 the 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 last 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
|
CANTO II: The Parable of the Search for the Soul
|
The heavenly Psyche must put off her veil
|
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 comm and 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.
|
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
|
CANTO III: The Entry into the Inner Countries
|
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
|
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.
|
CANTO III: The Entry into the Inner Countries
|
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.
|
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,
|
CANTO III: The Entry into the Inner Countries
|
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:
|
An inner voice could speak the unreal's Word;
|
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 bli the 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 the 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.
|
CANTO III: The Entry into the Inner Countries
|
Then smiled again a large and tranquil air:
|
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.
|
A royalty without freedom was her lot;
|
The sovereign throned obeyed her ministers:
|
Her servants mind and sense governed her house:
|
Her spirit's bounds they cast in rigid lines
|
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,
|
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 high-bred 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
|
CANTO III: The Entry into the Inner Countries
|
Meet with the heart's passion the Adorable
|
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.
|
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;
|
The 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.
|
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.
|
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.
|
CANTO III: The Entry into the Inner Countries
|
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
|
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 limbs 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
|
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 the 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.
|
CANTO III: The Entry into the Inner Countries
|
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
|
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.
|
The Triple Soul-Forces
|
HERE from a low and prone and listless ground
|
The passion of the first ascent began;
|
A moon-bright face in a sombre cloud of hair,
|
A Woman sat in a pale lustrous robe.
|
A rugged and ragged soil was her bare seat,
|
Beneath her feet a sharp and wounding stone.
|
A divine pity on the peaks of the world,
|
A spirit touched by the grief of all that lives,
|
She looked out far and saw from inner mind
|
This questionable world of outward things,
|
Of false appearances and plausible shapes,
|
This dubious cosmos stretched in the ignorant Void,
|
The pangs of earth, the toil and speed of the stars
|
And the difficult birth and dolorous end of life.
|
Accepting the universe as her body of woe,
|
The Mother of the seven sorrows bore
|
The seven stabs that pierced her bleeding heart:
|
The beauty of sadness lingered on her face,
|
Her eyes were dim with the ancient stain of tears.
|
Her heart was riven with the world's agony
|
And burdened with the sorrow and struggle in Time,
|
An anguished music trailed in her rapt voice.
|
Absorbed in a deep compassion's ecstasy,
|
Lifting the mild ray of her patient gaze,
|
In soft sweet training words slowly she spoke:
|
"O Savitri, I am thy secret soul.
|
To share the suffering of the world I came,
|
I draw my children's pangs into my breast.
|
I am the nurse of the dolour beneath the stars;
|
I am the soul of all who wailing writhe
|
Under the ruthless harrow of the Gods.
|
I am woman, nurse and slave and beaten beast;
|
I tend the hands that gave me cruel blows.
|
The hearts that spurned my love and zeal I serve;
|
I am the courted queen, the pampered doll,
|
I am the giver of the bowl of rice,
|
I am the worshipped Angel of the House.
|
I am in all that suffers and that cries.
|
Mine is the prayer that climbs in vain from earth,
|
I am traversed by my creatures' agonies,
|
I am the spirit in a world of pain.
|
The scream of tortured flesh and tortured hearts
|
Fall'n back on heart and flesh unheard by Heaven
|
Has rent with helpless grief and wrath my soul.
|
I have seen the peasant burning in his hut,
|
I have seen the slashed corpse of the slaughtered child,
|
Heard woman's cry ravished and stripped and haled
|
Amid the bayings of the hell-hound mob,
|
I have looked on, I had no power to save.
|
I have brought no arm of strength to aid or slay;
|
God gave me love, he gave me not his force.
|
I have shared the toil of the yoked animal drudge
|
Pushed by the goad, encouraged by the whip;
|
I have shared the fear-filled life of bird and beast,
|
Its long hunt for the day's precarious food,
|
Its covert slink and crouch and hungry prowl,
|
Its pain and terror seized by beak and claw.
|
I have shared the daily life of common men,
|
Its petty pleasures and its petty cares,
|
Its press of troubles and haggard horde of ills,
|
Earth's trail of sorrow hopeless of relief,
|
The unwanted tedious labour without joy,
|
And the burden of misery and the strokes of fate.
|
I have been pity, leaning over pain
|
And the tender smile that heals the wounded heart
|
And sympathy making life less hard to bear.
|
Man has felt near my unseen face and hands;
|
CANTO IV: The Triple Soul-Forces
|
I have become the sufferer and his moan,
|
I have lain down with the mangled and the slain,
|
I have lived with the prisoner in his dungeon cell.
|
Heavy on my shoulders weighs the yoke of Time:
|
Nothing refusing of creation's load,
|
I have borne all and know I still must bear:
|
Perhaps when the world sinks into a last sleep,
|
I too may sleep in dumb eternal peace.
|
I have borne the calm indifference of Heaven,
|
Watched Nature's cruelty to suffering things
|
While God passed silent by nor turned to help.
|
Yet have I cried not out against his will,
|
Yet have I not accused his cosmic Law.
|
Only to change this great hard world of pain
|
A patient prayer has risen from my breast;
|
A pallid resignation lights my brow,
|
Within me a blind faith and mercy dwell;
|
I carry the fire that never can be quenched
|
And the compassion that supports the suns.
|
I am the hope that looks towards my God,
|
My God who never came to me till now;
|
His voice I hear that ever says 'I come':
|
I know that one day he shall come at last."
|
She ceased, and like an echo from below
|
Answering her pathos of divine complaint
|
A voice of wrath took up the dire refrain,
|
A growl of thunder or roar of angry beast,
|
The beast that crouching growls within man's depths, -
|
Voice of a tortured Titan once a God.
|
"I am the Man of Sorrows, I am he
|
Who is nailed on the wide cross of the universe;
|
To enjoy my agony God built the earth,
|
My passion he has made his drama's theme.
|
He has sent me naked into his bitter world
|
And beaten me with his rods of grief and pain
|
That I might cry and grovel at his feet
|
And offer him worship with my blood and tears.
|
I am Prometheus under the vulture's beak,
|
Man the discoverer of the undying fire,
|
In the flame he kindled burning like a moth;
|
I am the seeker who can never find,
|
I am the fighter who can never win,
|
I am the runner who never touched his goal:
|
Hell tortures me with the edges of my thought,
|
Heaven tortures me with the splendour of my dreams.
|
What profit have I of my animal birth;
|
What profit have I of my human soul?
|
I toil like the animal, like the animal die.
|
I am man the rebel, man the helpless serf;
|
Fate and my fellows cheat me of my wage.
|
I loosen with my blood my servitude's seal
|
And shake from my aching neck the oppressor's knees
|
Only to seat new tyrants on my back:
|
My teachers lesson me in slavery,
|
I am shown God's stamp and my own signature
|
Upon the sorry contract of my fate.
|
I have loved, but none has loved me since my birth;
|
My fruit of works is given to other hands.
|
All that is left me is my evil thoughts,
|
My sordid quarrel against God and man,
|
Envy of the riches that I cannot share,
|
Hate of a happiness that is not mine.
|
I know my fate will ever be the same,
|
It is my nature's work that cannot change:
|
I have loved for mine, not for the beloved's sake,
|
I have lived for myself and not for others' lives.
|
Each in himself is sole by Nature's law.
|
So God has made his harsh and dreadful world,
|
So has he built the petty heart of man.
|
Only by force and ruse can man survive:
|
For pity is a weakness in his breast,
|
His goodness is a laxity in the nerves,
|
CANTO IV: The Triple Soul-Forces
|
His kindness an investment for return,
|
His altruism is ego's other face:
|
He serves the world that him the world may serve.
|
If once the Titan's strength could wake in me,
|
If Enceladus from Etna could arise,
|
I then would reign the master of the world
|
And like a god enjoy man's bliss and pain.
|
But God has taken from me the ancient Force.
|
There is a dull consent in my sluggish heart,
|
A fierce satisfaction with my special pangs
|
As if they made me taller than my kind;
|
Only by suffering can I excel.
|
I am the victim of titanic ills,
|
I am the doer of demoniac deeds;
|
I was made for evil, evil is my lot;
|
Evil I must be and by evil live;
|
Nought other can I do but be myself;
|
What Nature made me, that I must remain.
|
I suffer and toil and weep; I moan and hate."
|
And Savitri heard the voice, the echo heard
|
And turning to her being of pity spoke:
|
"Madonna of suffering, Mother of grief divine,
|
Thou art a portion of my soul put forth
|
To bear the unbearable sorrow of the world.
|
Because thou art, men yield not to their doom,
|
But ask for happiness and strive with fate;
|
Because thou art, the wretched still can hope.
|
But thine is the power to solace, not to save.
|
One day I will return, a bringer of strength,
|
And make thee drink from the Eternal's cup;
|
His streams of force shall triumph in thy limbs
|
And Wisdom's calm control thy passionate heart.
|
Thy love shall be the bond of humankind,
|
Compassion the bright key of Nature's acts:
|
Misery shall pass abolished from the earth;
|
The world shall be freed from the anger of the Beast,
|
From the cruelty of the Titan and his pain.
|
There shall be peace and joy for ever more."
|
On passed she in her spirit's upward route.
|
An ardent grandeur climbed mid ferns and rocks,
|
A quiet wind flattered the heart to warmth,
|
A finer perfume breathed from slender trees.
|
All beautiful grew, subtle and high and strange.
|
Here on a boulder carved like a huge throne
|
A Woman sat in gold and purple sheen,
|
Armed with the trident and the thunderbolt,
|
Her feet upon a couchant lion's back.
|
A formidable smile curved round her lips,
|
Heaven-fire laughed in the corners of her eyes;
|
Her body a mass of courage and heavenly strength,
|
She menaced the triumph of the nether gods.
|
A halo of lightnings flamed around her head
|
And sovereignty, a great cestus, zoned her robe
|
And majesty and victory sat with her
|
Guarding in the wide cosmic battlefield
|
Against the flat equality of Death
|
And the all-levelling insurgent Night
|
The hierarchy of the ordered Powers,
|
The high changeless values, the peaked eminences,
|
The privileged aristocracy of Truth,
|
And in the governing Ideal's sun
|
The triumvirate of wisdom, love and bliss
|
And the sole autocracy of the absolute Light.
|
August on her seat in the inner world of Mind,
|
The Mother of Might looked down on passing things,
|
Listened to the advancing tread of Time,
|
Saw the irresistible wheeling of the suns
|
And heard the thunder of the march of God.
|
Amid the swaying Forces in their strife
|
Sovereign was her word of luminous command,
|
Her speech like a war-cry rang or a pilgrim chant.
|
CANTO IV: The Triple Soul-Forces
|
A charm restoring hope in failing hearts
|
Aspired the harmony of her puissant voice:
|
"O Savitri, I am thy secret soul.
|
I have come down into the human world
|
And the movement watched by an unsleeping Eye
|
And the dark contrariety of earth's fate
|
And the battle of the bright and sombre Powers.
|
I stand upon earth's paths of danger and grief
|
And help the unfortunate and save the doomed.
|
To the strong I bring the guerdon of their strength,
|
To the weak I bring the armour of my force;
|
To men who long I carry their coveted joy:
|
I am fortune justifying the great and wise
|
By the sanction of the plaudits of the crowd,
|
Then trampling them with the armed heel of fate.
|
My ear is leaned to the cry of the oppressed,
|
I topple down the thrones of tyrant kings:
|
A cry comes from proscribed and hunted lives
|
Appealing to me against a pitiless world,
|
A voice of the forsaken and desolate
|
And the lone prisoner in his dungeon cell.
|
Men hail in my coming the Almighty's force
|
Or praise with thankful tears his saviour Grace.
|
I smite the Titan who bestrides the world
|
And slay the ogre in his blood-stained den.
|
I am Durga, goddess of the proud and strong,
|
And Lakshmi, queen of the fair and fortunate;
|
I wear the face of Kali when I kill,
|
I trample the corpses of the demon hordes.
|
I am charged by God to do his mighty work,
|
Uncaring I serve his will who sent me forth,
|
Reckless of peril and earthly consequence.
|
I reason not of virtue and of sin
|
But do the deed he has put into my heart.
|
I fear not for the angry frown of Heaven,
|
I flinch not from the red assault of Hell;
|
I crush the opposition of the gods,
|
Tread down a million goblin obstacles.
|
I guide man to the path of the Divine
|
And guard him from the red Wolf and the Snake.
|
I set in his mortal hand my heavenly sword
|
And put on him the breastplate of the gods.
|
I break the ignorant pride of human mind
|
And lead the thought to the wideness of the Truth;
|
I rend man's narrow and successful life
|
And force his sorrowful eyes to gaze at the sun
|
That he may die to earth and live in his soul.
|
I know the goal, I know the secret route;
|
I have studied the map of the invisible worlds;
|
I am the battle's head, the journey's star.
|
But the great obstinate world resists my Word,
|
And the crookedness and evil in man's heart
|
Is stronger than Reason, profounder than the Pit,
|
And the malignancy of hostile Powers
|
Puts craftily back the clock of destiny
|
And mightier seems than the eternal Will.
|
The cosmic evil is too deep to unroot,
|
The cosmic suffering is too vast to heal.
|
A few I guide who pass me towards the Light;
|
A few I save, the mass falls back unsaved;
|
A few I help, the many strive and fail.
|
But my heart I have hardened and I do my work:
|
Slowly the light grows greater in the East,
|
Slowly the world progresses on God's road.
|
His seal is on my task, it cannot fail:
|
I shall hear the silver swing of heaven's gates
|
When God comes out to meet the soul of the world."
|
She spoke and from the lower human world
|
An answer, a warped echo met her speech;
|
The voice came through the spaces of the mind
|
Of the dwarf-Titan, the deformed chained god
|
Who strives to master his nature's rebel stuff
|
CANTO IV: The Triple Soul-Forces
|
And make the universe his instrument.
|
The Ego of this great world of desire
|
Claimed earth and the wide heavens for the use
|
Of man, head of the life it shapes on earth,
|
Its representative and conscious soul,
|
And symbol of evolving light and force
|
And vessel of the godhead that must be.
|
A thinking animal, Nature's struggling lord,
|
Has made of her his nurse and tool and slave
|
And pays to her as wage and emolument
|
Inescapably by a deep law in things
|
His heart's grief and his body's death and pain:
|
His pains are her means to grow, to see and feel;
|
His death assists her immortality.
|
A tool and slave of his own slave and tool,
|
He praises his free will and his master mind
|
And is pushed by her upon her chosen paths;
|
Possessor he is possessed and, ruler, ruled,
|
Her conscious automaton, her desire's dupe.
|
His soul is her guest, a sovereign mute, inert,
|
His body her robot, his life her way to live,
|
His conscious mind her strong revolted serf.
|
The voice rose up and smote some inner sun.
|
"I am the heir of the forces of the earth,
|
Slowly I make good my right to my estate;
|
A growing godhead in her divinised mud,
|
I climb, a claimant to the throne of heaven.
|
The last-born of the earth I stand the first;
|
Her slow millenniums waited for my birth.
|
Although I live in Time besieged by Death,
|
Precarious owner of my body and soul
|
Housed on a little speck amid the stars,
|
For me and my use the universe was made.
|
Immortal spirit in the perishing clay,
|
I am God still unevolved in human form;
|
Even if he is not, he becomes in me.
|
The sun and moon are lights upon my path;
|
Air was invented for my lungs to breathe,
|
Conditioned as a wide and wall-less space
|
For my winged chariot's wheels to cleave a road,
|
The sea was made for me to swim and sail
|
And bear my golden commerce on its back:
|
It laughs cloven by my pleasure's gliding keel,
|
I laugh at its black stare of fate and death.
|
The earth is my floor, the sky my living's roof.
|
All was prepared through many a silent age,
|
God made experiments with animal shapes,
|
Then only when all was ready I was born.
|
I was born weak and small and ignorant,
|
A helpless creature in a difficult world
|
Travelling through my brief years with death at my side;
|
I have grown greater than Nature, wiser than God.
|
I have made real what she never dreamed,
|
I have seized her powers and harnessed for my work,
|
I have shaped her metals and new metals made;
|
I will make glass and raiment out of milk,
|
Make iron velvet, water unbreakable stone,
|
Like God in his astuce of artist skill,
|
Mould from one primal plasm protean forms,
|
In single Nature multitudinous lives,
|
All that imagination can conceive
|
In mind intangible, remould anew
|
In Matter's plastic solid and concrete.
|
No magic can surpass my magic's skill.
|
There is no miracle I shall not achieve.
|
What God imperfect left, I will complete,
|
Out of a tangled mind and half-made soul
|
His sin and error I will eliminate;
|
What he invented not, I shall invent:
|
He was the first creator, I am the last.
|
I have found the atoms from which he built the worlds:
|
The first tremendous cosmic energy
|
CANTO IV: The Triple Soul-Forces
|
Missioned shall leap to slay my enemy kin,
|
Expunge a nation or abolish a race,
|
Death's silence leave where there was laughter and joy.
|
Or the fissured invisible shall spend God's force
|
To extend my comforts and expand my wealth,
|
To speed my car which now the lightnings drive
|
And turn the engines of my miracles.
|
I will take his means of sorcery from his hands
|
And do with them greater wonders than his best.
|
Yet through it all I have kept my balanced thought;
|
I have studied my being, I have examined the world,
|
I have grown a master of the arts of life.
|
I have tamed the wild beast, trained to be my friend;
|
He guards my house, looks up waiting my will.
|
I have taught my kind to serve and to obey.
|
I have used the mystery of the cosmic waves
|
To see far distance and to hear far words;
|
I have conquered Space and knitted close all earth.
|
Soon I shall know the secrets of the Mind;
|
I play with knowledge and with ignorance
|
And sin and virtue my inventions are
|
I can transcend or sovereignly use.
|
I shall know mystic truths, seize occult powers.
|
I shall slay my enemies with a look or thought,
|
I shall sense the unspoken feelings of all hearts
|
And see and hear the hidden thoughts of men.
|
When earth is mastered, I shall conquer heaven;
|
The gods shall be my aides or menial folk,
|
No wish I harbour unfulfilled shall die:
|
Omnipotence and omniscience shall be mine."
|
And Savitri heard the voice, the warped echo heard
|
And turning to her being of power she spoke:
|
"Madonna of might, Mother of works and force,
|
Thou art a portion of my soul put forth
|
To help mankind and help the travail of Time.
|
Because thou art in him, man hopes and dares;
|
Because thou art, men's souls can climb the heavens
|
And walk like gods in the presence of the Supreme.
|
But without wisdom power is like a wind,
|
It can brea the upon the heights and kiss the sky,
|
It cannot build the extreme eternal things.
|
Thou hast given men strength, wisdom thou couldst not give.
|
One day I will return, a bringer of light;
|
Then will I give to thee the mirror of God;
|
Thou shalt see self and world as by him they are seen
|
Reflected in the bright pool of thy soul.
|
Thy wisdom shall be vast as vast thy power.
|
Then hate shall dwell no more in human hearts,
|
And fear and weakness shall desert men's lives,
|
The cry of the ego shall be hushed within,
|
Its lion roar that claims the world as food,
|
All shall be might and bliss and happy force."
|
Ascending still her spirit's upward route
|
She came into a high and happy space,
|
A wide tower of vision whence all could be seen
|
And all was centred in a single view
|
As when by distance separate scenes grow one
|
And a harmony is made of hues at war.
|
The wind was still and fragrance packed the air.
|
There was a carol of birds and murmur of bees,
|
And all that is common and natural and sweet,
|
Yet intimately divine to heart and soul.
|
A nearness thrilled of the spirit to its source
|
And deepest things seemed obvious, close and true.
|
Here, living centre of that vision of peace,
|
A Woman sat in clear and crystal light:
|
Heaven had unveiled its lustre in her eyes,
|
Her feet were moonbeams, her face was a bright sun,
|
Her smile could persuade a dead lacerated heart
|
To live again and feel the hands of calm.
|
A low music heard became her floating voice:
|
CANTO IV: The Triple Soul-Forces
|
"O Savitri, I am thy secret soul.
|
I have come down to the wounded desolate earth
|
To heal her pangs and lull her heart to rest
|
And lay her head upon the Mother's lap
|
That she may dream of God and know his peace
|
And draw the harmony of higher spheres
|
Into the rhythm of earth's rude troubled days.
|
I show to her the figures of bright gods
|
And bring strength and solace to her struggling life;
|
High things that now are only words and forms
|
I reveal to her in the body of their power.
|
I am peace that steals into man's war-worn breast,
|
Amid the reign of Hell his acts create
|
A hostel where Heaven's messengers can lodge;
|
I am charity with the kindly hands that bless,
|
I am silence mid the noisy tramp of life;
|
I am Knowledge poring on her cosmic map.
|
In the anomalies of the human heart
|
Where Good and Evil are close bedfellows
|
And Light is by Darkness dogged at every step,
|
Where his largest knowledge is an ignorance,
|
I am the Power that labours towards the best
|
And works for God and looks up towards the heights.
|
I make even sin and error stepping-stones
|
And all experience a long march towards Light.
|
Out of the Inconscient I build consciousness,
|
And lead through death to reach immortal Life.
|
Many are God's forms by which he grows in man;
|
They stamp his thoughts and deeds with divinity,
|
Uplift the stature of the human clay
|
Or slowly transmute it into heaven's gold.
|
He is the Good for which men fight and die,
|
He is the war of Right with Titan wrong;
|
He is Freedom rising deathless from her pyre;
|
He is Valour guarding still the desperate pass
|
Or lone and erect on the shattered barricade
|
Or a sentinel in the dangerous echoing Night.
|
He is the crown of the martyr burned in flame
|
And the glad resignation of the saint
|
And courage indifferent to the wounds of Time
|
And the hero's might wrestling with death and fate.
|
He is Wisdom incarnate on a glorious throne
|
And the calm autocracy of the sage's rule.
|
He is the high and solitary Thought
|
Aloof above the ignorant multitude:
|
He is the prophet's voice, the sight of the seer.
|
He is Beauty, nectar of the passionate soul,
|
He is the Truth by which the spirit lives.
|
He is the riches of the spiritual Vast
|
Poured out in healing streams on indigent Life;
|
He is Eternity lured from hour to hour,
|
He is infinity in a little space:
|
He is immortality in the arms of death.
|
These powers I am and at my call they come.
|
Thus slowly I lift man's soul nearer the Light.
|
But human mind clings to its ignorance
|
And to its littleness the human heart
|
And to its right to grief the earthly life.
|
Only when Eternity takes Time by the hand,
|
Only when infinity weds the finite's thought,
|
Can man be free from himself and live with God.
|
I bring meanwhile the gods upon the earth;
|
I bring back hope to the despairing heart;
|
I give peace to the humble and the great,
|
And shed my grace on the foolish and the wise.
|
I shall save earth, if earth consents to be saved.
|
Then Love shall at last unwounded tread earth's soil;
|
Man's mind shall admit the sovereignty of Truth
|
And body bear the immense descent of God."
|
She spoke and from the ignorant nether plane
|
A cry, a warped echo naked and shuddering came.
|
A voice of the sense-shackled human mind
|
CANTO IV: The Triple Soul-Forces
|
Carried its proud complaint of godlike power
|
Hedged by the limits of a mortal's thoughts,
|
Bound in the chains of earthly ignorance.
|
Imprisoned in his body and his brain
|
The mortal cannot see God's mighty whole,
|
Or share in his vast and deep identity
|
Who stands unguessed within our ignorant hearts
|
And knows all things because he is one with all.
|
Man only sees the cosmic surfaces.
|
Then wondering what may lie hid from the sense
|
A little way he delves to depths below:
|
But soon he stops, he cannot reach life's core
|
Or commune with the throbbing heart of things.
|
He sees the naked body of the Truth
|
Though often baffled by her endless garbs,
|
But cannot look upon her soul within.
|
Then, furious for a knowledge absolute,
|
He tears all details out and stabs and digs:
|
Only the shape's contents he holds for use;
|
The spirit escapes or dies beneath his knife.
|
He sees as a blank stretch, a giant waste
|
The crowding riches of infinity.
|
The finite he has made his central field,
|
Its plan dissects, masters its processes,
|
That which moves all is hidden from his gaze,
|
His poring eyes miss the unseen behind.
|
He has the blind man's subtle unerring touch
|
Or the slow traveller's sight of distant scenes;
|
The soul's revealing contacts are not his.
|
Yet is he visited by intuitive light
|
And inspiration comes from the Unknown;
|
But only reason and sense he feels as sure,
|
They only are his trusted witnesses.
|
Thus is he baulked, his splendid effort vain;
|
His knowledge scans bright pebbles on the shore
|
Of the huge ocean of his ignorance.
|
Yet grandiose were the accents of that cry,
|
A cosmic pathos trembled in its tone.
|
"I am the mind of God's great ignorant world
|
Ascending to knowledge by the steps he made;
|
I am the all-discovering Thought of man.
|
I am a god fettered by Matter and sense,
|
An animal prisoned in a fence of thorns,
|
A beast of labour asking for his food,
|
A smith tied to his anvil and his forge.
|
Yet have I loosened the cord, enlarged my room.
|
I have mapped the heavens and analysed the stars,
|
Described their orbits through the grooves of Space,
|
Measured the miles that separate the suns,
|
Computed their longevity in Time.
|
I have delved into earth's bowels and torn out
|
The riches guarded by her dull brown soil.
|
I have classed the changes of her stony crust
|
And of her biography discovered the dates,
|
Rescued the pages of all Nature's plan.
|
The tree of evolution I have sketched,
|
Each branch and twig and leaf in its own place,
|
In the embryo tracked the history of forms,
|
And the genealogy framed of all that lives.
|
I have detected plasm and cell and gene,
|
The protozoa traced, man's ancestors,
|
The humble originals from whom he rose;
|
I know how he was born and how he dies:
|
Only what end he serves I know not yet
|
Or if there is aim at all or any end
|
Or push of rich creative purposeful joy
|
In the wide works of the terrestrial power.
|
I have caught her intricate processes, none is left:
|
Her huge machinery is in my hands;
|
I have seized the cosmic energies for my use.
|
I have pored on her infinitesimal elements
|
And her invisible atoms have unmasked:
|
CANTO IV: The Triple Soul-Forces
|
All Matter is a book I have perused;
|
Only some pages now are left to read.
|
I have seen the ways of life, the paths of mind;
|
I have studied the methods of the ant and ape
|
And the behaviour learned of man and worm.
|
If God is at work, his secrets I have found.
|
But still the Cause of things is left in doubt,
|
Their truth flees from pursuit into a void;
|
When all has been explained nothing is known.
|
What chose the process, whence the Power sprang
|
I know not and perhaps shall never know.
|
A mystery is this mighty Nature's birth;
|
A mystery is the elusive stream of mind,
|
A mystery the protean freak of life.
|
What I have learned, Chance leaps to contradict;
|
What I have built is seized and torn by Fate.
|
I can foresee the acts of Matter's force,
|
But not the march of the destiny of man:
|
He is driven upon paths he did not choose,
|
He falls trampled underneath the rolling wheels.
|
My great philosophies are a reasoned guess;
|
The mystic heavens that claim the human soul
|
Are a charlatanism of the imagining brain:
|
All is a speculation or a dream.
|
In the end the world itself becomes a doubt:
|
The infinitesimal's jest mocks mass and shape,
|
A laugh peals from the infinite's finite mask.
|
Perhaps the world is an error of our sight,
|
A trick repeated in each flash of sense,
|
An unreal mind hallucinates the soul
|
With a stress-vision of false reality,
|
Or a dance of Maya veils the void Unborn.
|
Even if a greater consciousness I could reach,
|
What profit is it then for Thought to win
|
A Real which is for ever ineffable
|
Or hunt to its lair the bodiless Self or make
|
The Unknowable the target of the soul?
|
Nay, let me work within my mortal bounds,
|
Not live beyond life nor think beyond the mind;
|
Our smallness saves us from the Infinite.
|
In a frozen grandeur lone and desolate
|
Call me not to die the great eternal death,
|
Left naked of my own humanity
|
In the chill vast of the spirit's boundlessness.
|
Each creature by its nature's limits lives,
|
And how can one evade his native fate?
|
Human I am, human let me remain
|
Till in the Inconscient I fall dumb and sleep.
|
A high insanity, a chimaera is this,
|
To think that God lives hidden in the clay
|
And that eternal Truth can dwell in Time,
|
And call to her to save our self and world.
|
How can man grow immortal and divine
|
Transmuting the very stuff of which he is made?
|
This wizard gods may dream, not thinking men."
|
And Savitri heard the voice, the warped answer heard
|
And turning to her being of light she spoke:
|
"Madonna of light, Mother of joy and peace,
|
Thou art a portion of my self put forth
|
To raise the spirit to its forgotten heights
|
And wake the soul by touches of the heavens.
|
Because thou art, the soul draws near to God;
|
Because thou art, love grows in spite of hate
|
And knowledge walks unslain in the pit of Night.
|
But not by showering heaven's golden rain
|
Upon the intellect's hard and rocky soil
|
Can the tree of Paradise flower on earthly ground
|
And the Bird of Paradise sit upon life's boughs
|
And the winds of Paradise visit mortal air.
|
Even if thou rain down intuition's rays,
|
The mind of man will think it earth's own gleam,
|
His spirit by spiritual ego sink,
|
CANTO IV: The Triple Soul-Forces
|
Or his soul dream shut in sainthood's brilliant cell
|
Where only a bright shadow of God can come.
|
His hunger for the eternal thou must nurse
|
And fill his yearning heart with heaven's fire
|
And bring God down into his body and life.
|
One day I will return, His hand in mine,
|
And thou shalt see the face of the Absolute.
|
Then shall the holy marriage be achieved,
|
Then shall the divine family be born.
|
There shall be light and peace in all the worlds."
|
The Finding of the Soul
|
ONWARD she passed seeking the soul's mystic cave.
|
At first she stepped into a night of God.
|
The light was quenched that helps the labouring world,
|
The power that struggles and stumbles in our life;
|
This inefficient mind gave up its thoughts,
|
The striving heart its unavailing hopes.
|
All knowledge failed and the Idea's forms
|
And Wisdom screened in awe her lowly head
|
Feeling a Truth too great for thought or speech,
|
Formless, ineffable, for ever the same.
|
An innocent and holy Ignorance
|
Adored like one who worships formless God
|
The unseen Light she could not claim nor own.
|
In a simple purity of emptiness
|
Her mind knelt down before the unknowable.
|
All was abolished save her naked self
|
And the prostrate yearning of her surrendered heart:
|
There was no strength in her, no pride of force;
|
The lofty burning of desire had sunk
|
Ashamed, a vanity of separate self,
|
The hope of spiritual greatness fled,
|
Salvation she asked not nor a heavenly crown:
|
Humility seemed now too proud a state.
|
Her self was nothing, God alone was all,
|
Yet God she knew not but only knew he was.
|
A sacred darkness brooded now within,
|
The world was a deep darkness great and nude.
|
This void held more than all the teeming worlds,
|
This blank felt more than all that Time has borne,
|
This dark knew dumbly, immensely the Unknown.
|
But all was formless, voiceless, infinite.
|
CANTO V: The Finding of the Soul
|
As might a shadow walk in a shadowy scene,
|
A small nought passing through a mightier Nought,
|
A night of person in a bare outline
|
Crossing a fathomless impersonal Night,
|
Silent she moved, empty and absolute.
|
In endless Time her soul reached a wide end,
|
The spaceless Vast became her spirit's place.
|
At last a change approached, the emptiness broke;
|
A wave rippled within, the world had stirred;
|
Once more her inner self became her space.
|
There was felt a blissful nearness to the goal;
|
Heaven leaned low to kiss the sacred hill,
|
The air trembled with passion and delight.
|
A rose of splendour on a tree of dreams,
|
The face of Dawn out of mooned twilight grew.
|
Day came, priest of a sacrifice of joy
|
Into the worshipping silence of her world;
|
He carried immortal lustre as his robe,
|
Trailed heaven like a purple scarf and wore
|
As his vermilion caste-mark a red sun.
|
As if an old remembered dream come true,
|
She recognised in her prophetic mind
|
The imperishable lustre of that sky,
|
The tremulous sweetness of that happy air
|
And, covered from mind's view and life's approach,
|
The mystic cavern in the sacred hill
|
And knew the dwelling of her secret soul.
|
As if in some Elysian occult depth,
|
Truth's last retreat from thought's profaning touch,
|
As if in a rock-temple's solitude hid,
|
God's refuge from an ignorant worshipping world,
|
It lay withdrawn even from life's inner sense,
|
Receding from the entangled heart's desire.
|
A marvellous brooding twilight met the eyes
|
And a holy stillness held that voiceless space.
|
An awful dimness wrapped the great rock-doors
|
Carved in the massive stone of Matter's trance.
|
Two golden serpents round the lintel curled,
|
Enveloping it with their pure and dreadful strength,
|
Looked out with wisdom's deep and luminous eyes.
|
An eagle covered it with wide conquering wings:
|
Flames of self-lost immobile reverie,
|
Doves crowded the grey musing cornices
|
Like sculptured postures of white-bosomed peace.
|
Across the threshold's sleep she entered in
|
And found herself amid great figures of gods
|
Conscious in stone and living without breath,
|
Watching with fixed regard the soul of man,
|
Executive figures of the cosmic self,
|
World-symbols of immutable potency.
|
On the walls covered with significant shapes
|
Looked at her the life-scene of man and beast
|
And the high meaning of the life of gods,
|
The power and necessity of these numberless worlds,
|
And faces of beings and stretches of world-space
|
Spoke the succinct and inexhaustible
|
Hieratic message of the climbing planes.
|
In their immensitude signing infinity
|
They were the extension of the self of God
|
And housed, impassively receiving all,
|
His figures and his small and mighty acts
|
And his passion and his birth and life and death
|
And his return to immortality.
|
To the abiding and eternal is their climb,
|
To the pure existence everywhere the same,
|
To the sheer consciousness and the absolute force
|
And the unimaginable and formless bliss,
|
To the mirth in Time and the timeless mystery
|
Of the triune being who is all and one
|
And yet is no one but himself apart.
|
There was no step of breathing men, no sound,
|
Only the living nearness of the soul.
|
CANTO V: The Finding of the Soul
|
Yet all the worlds and God himself were there,
|
For every symbol was a reality
|
And brought the presence which had given it life.
|
All this she saw and inly felt and knew
|
Not by some thought of mind but by the self.
|
A light not born of sun or moon or fire,
|
A light that dwelt within and saw within
|
Shedding an intimate visibility
|
Made secrecy more revealing than the word:
|
Our sight and sense are a fallible gaze and touch
|
And only the spirit's vision is wholly true.
|
As thus she passed in that mysterious place
|
Through room and room, through door and rock-hewn door,
|
She felt herself made one with all she saw.
|
A sealed identity within her woke;
|
She knew herself the Beloved of the Supreme:
|
These Gods and Goddesses were he and she:
|
The Mother was she of Beauty and Delight,
|
The Word in Brahma's vast creating clasp,
|
The World-Puissance on almighty Shiva's lap, -
|
The Master and the Mother of all lives
|
Watching the worlds their twin regard had made,
|
And Krishna and Radha for ever entwined in bliss,
|
The Adorer and Adored self-lost and one.
|
In the last chamber on a golden seat
|
One sat whose shape no vision could define;
|
Only one felt the world's unattainable fount,
|
A Power of which she was a straying Force,
|
An invisible Beauty, goal of the world's desire,
|
A Sun of which all knowledge is a beam,
|
A Greatness without whom no life could be.
|
Thence all departed into silent self,
|
And all became formless and pure and bare.
|
Then through a tunnel dug in the last rock
|
She came out where there shone a deathless sun.
|
A house was there all made of flame and light
|
And crossing a wall of doorless living fire
|
There suddenly she met her secret soul.
|
A being stood immortal in transience,
|
Deathless dallying with momentary things,
|
In whose wide eyes of tranquil happiness
|
Which pity and sorrow could not abrogate
|
Infinity turned its gaze on finite shapes:
|
Observer of the silent steps of the hours,
|
Eternity upheld the minute's acts
|
And the passing scenes of the Everlasting's play.
|
In the mystery of its selecting will,
|
In the Divine Comedy a participant,
|
The Spirit's conscious representative,
|
God's delegate in our humanity,
|
Comrade of the universe, the Transcendent's ray,
|
She had come into the mortal body's room
|
To play at ball with Time and Circumstance.
|
A joy in the world her master movement here,
|
The passion of the game lighted her eyes:
|
A smile on her lips welcomed earth's bliss and grief,
|
A laugh was her return to pleasure and pain.
|
All things she saw as a masquerade of Truth
|
Disguised in the costumes of Ignorance,
|
Crossing the years to immortality;
|
All she could front with the strong spirit's peace.
|
But since she knows the toil of mind and life
|
As a mother feels and shares her children's lives,
|
She puts forth a small portion of herself,
|
A being no bigger than the thumb of man
|
Into a hidden region of the heart
|
To face the pang and to forget the bliss,
|
To share the suffering and endure earth's wounds
|
And labour mid the labour of the stars.
|
This in us laughs and weeps, suffers the stroke,
|
Exults in victory, struggles for the crown;
|
CANTO V: The Finding of the Soul
|
Identified with the mind and body and life,
|
It takes on itself their anguish and defeat,
|
Bleeds with Fate's whips and hangs upon the cross,
|
Yet is the unwounded and immortal self
|
Supporting the actor in the human scene.
|
Through this she sends us her glory and her powers,
|
Pushes to wisdom's heights, through misery's gulfs;
|
She gives us strength to do our daily task
|
And sympathy that partakes of others' grief
|
And the little strength we have to help our race,
|
We who must fill the role of the universe
|
Acting itself out in a slight human shape
|
And on our shoulders carry the struggling world.
|
This is in us the godhead small and marred;
|
In this human portion of divinity
|
She seats the greatness of the Soul in Time
|
To uplift from light to light, from power to power,
|
Till on a heavenly peak it stands, a king.
|
In body weak, in its heart an invincible might,
|
It climbs stumbling, held up by an unseen hand,
|
A toiling spirit in a mortal shape.
|
Here in this chamber of flame and light they met;
|
They looked upon each other, knew themselves,
|
The secret deity and its human part,
|
The calm immortal and the struggling soul.
|
Then with a magic transformation's speed
|
They rushed into each other and grew one.
|
Once more she was human upon earthly soil
|
In the muttering night amid the rain-swept woods
|
And the rude cottage where she sat in trance:
|
That subtle world withdrew deeply within
|
Behind the sun-veil of the inner sight.
|
But now the half-opened lotus bud of her heart
|
Had bloomed and stood disclosed to the earthly ray;
|
In an image shone revealed her secret soul.
|
There was no wall severing the soul and mind,
|
No mystic fence guarding from the claims of life.
|
In its deep lotus home her being sat
|
As if on concentration's marble seat,
|
Calling the mighty Mother of the worlds
|
To make this earthly tenement her house.
|
As in a flash from a supernal light,
|
A living image of the original Power,
|
A face, a form came down into her heart
|
And made of it its temple and pure abode.
|
But when its feet had touched the quivering bloom,
|
A mighty movement rocked the inner space
|
As if a world were shaken and found its soul:
|
Out of the Inconscient's soulless mindless night
|
A flaming Serpent rose released from sleep.
|
It rose billowing its coils and stood erect
|
And climbing mightily, stormily on its way
|
It touched her centres with its flaming mouth;
|
As if a fiery kiss had broken their sleep,
|
They bloomed and laughed surcharged with light and bliss.
|
Then at the crown it joined the Eternal's space.
|
In the flower of the head, in the flower of Matter's base,
|
In each divine stronghold and Nature-knot
|
It held together the mystic stream which joins
|
The viewless summits with the unseen depths,
|
The string of forts that make the frail defence
|
Safeguarding us against the enormous world,
|
Our lines of self-expression in its Vast.
|
An image sat of the original Power
|
Wearing the mighty Mother's form and face.
|
Armed, bearer of the weapon and the sign
|
Whose occult might no magic can imitate,
|
Manifold yet one she sat, a guardian force:
|
A saviour gesture stretched her lifted arm,
|
And symbol of some native cosmic strength,
|
A sacred beast lay prone below her feet,
|
CANTO V: The Finding of the Soul
|
A silent flame-eyed mass of living force.
|
All underwent a high celestial change:
|
Breaking the black Inconscient's blind mute wall,
|
Effacing the circles of the Ignorance,
|
Powers and divinities burst flaming forth;
|
Each part of the being trembling with delight
|
Lay overwhelmed with tides of happiness
|
And saw her hand in every circumstance
|
And felt her touch in every limb and cell.
|
In the country of the lotus of the head
|
Which thinking mind has made its busy space,
|
In the castle of the lotus twixt the brows
|
Whence it shoots the arrows of its sight and will,
|
In the passage of the lotus of the throat
|
Where speech must rise and the expressing mind
|
And the heart's impulse run towards word and act,
|
A glad uplift and a new working came.
|
The immortal's thoughts displaced our bounded view,
|
The immortal's thoughts earth's drab idea and sense;
|
All things now bore a deeper heavenlier sense.
|
A glad clear harmony marked their truth's outline,
|
Reset the balance and measures of the world.
|
Each shape showed its occult design, unveiled
|
God's meaning in it for which it was made
|
And the vivid splendour of his artist thought.
|
A channel of the mighty Mother's choice,
|
The immortal's will took into its calm control
|
Our blind or erring government of life;
|
A loose republic once of wants and needs,
|
Then bowed to the uncertain sovereign mind,
|
Life now obeyed to a diviner rule
|
And every act became an act of God.
|
In the kingdom of the lotus of the heart
|
Love chanting its pure hymeneal hymn
|
Made life and body mirrors of sacred joy
|
And all the emotions gave themselves to God.
|
In the navel lotus' broad imperial range
|
Its proud ambitions and its master lusts
|
Were tamed into instruments of a great calm sway
|
To do a work of God on earthly soil.
|
In the narrow nether centre's petty parts
|
Its childish game of daily dwarf desires
|
Was changed into a sweet and boisterous play,
|
A romp of little gods with life in Time.
|
In the deep place where once the Serpent slept,
|
There came a grip on Matter's giant powers
|
For large utilities in life's little space;
|
A firm ground was made for Heaven's descending might.
|
Behind all reigned her sovereign deathless soul:
|
Casting aside its veil of Ignorance,
|
Allied to gods and cosmic beings and powers
|
It built the harmony of its human state;
|
Surrendered into the great World-Mother's hands
|
Only she obeyed her sole supreme behest
|
In the enigma of the Inconscient's world.
|
A secret soul behind supporting all
|
Is master and witness of our ignorant life,
|
Admits the Person's look and Nature's role.
|
But once the hidden doors are flung apart
|
Then the veiled king steps out in Nature's front;
|
A Light comes down into the Ignorance,
|
Its heavy painful knot loosens its grasp:
|
The mind becomes a mastered instrument
|
And life a hue and figure of the soul.
|
All happily grows towards knowledge and towards bliss.
|
A divine Puissance then takes Nature's place
|
And pushes the movements of our body and mind;
|
Possessor of our passionate hopes and dreams,
|
The beloved despot of our thoughts and acts,
|
She streams into us with her unbound force,
|
Into mortal limbs the Immortal's rapture and power.
|
An inner law of beauty shapes our lives;
|
CANTO V: The Finding of the Soul
|
Our words become the natural speech of Truth,
|
Each thought is a ripple on a sea of Light.
|
Then sin and virtue leave the cosmic lists;
|
They struggle no more in our delivered hearts:
|
Our acts chime with God's simple natural good
|
Or serve the rule of a supernal Right.
|
All moods unlovely, evil and untrue
|
Forsake their stations in fierce disarray
|
And hide their shame in the subconscient's dusk.
|
Then lifts the mind a cry of victory:
|
"O soul, my soul, we have created Heaven,
|
Within we have found the kingdom here of God,
|
His fortress built in a loud ignorant world.
|
Our life is entrenched between two rivers of Light,
|
We have turned space into a gulf of peace
|
And made the body a Capitol of bliss.
|
What more, what more, if more must still be done?"
|
In the slow process of the evolving spirit,
|
In the brief stade between a death and birth
|
A first perfection's stage is reached at last;
|
Out of the wood and stone of our nature's stuff
|
A temple is shaped where the high gods could live.
|
Even if the struggling world is left outside
|
One man's perfection still can save the world.
|
There is won a new proximity to the skies,
|
A first betrothal of the Earth to Heaven,
|
A deep concordat between Truth and Life:
|
A camp of God is pitched in human time.
|
Nirvana and the Discovery of the
|
All-Negating Absolute
|
A CALM slow sun looked down from tranquil heavens.
|
A routed sullen rearguard of retreat,
|
The last rains had fled murmuring across the woods
|
Or failed, a sibilant whisper mid the leaves,
|
And the great blue enchantment of the sky
|
Recovered the deep rapture of its smile.
|
Its mellow splendour unstressed by storm-licked heats
|
Found room for a luxury of warm mild days,
|
The night's gold treasure of autumnal moons
|
Came floating shipped through ripples of faery air.
|
And Savitri's life was glad, fulfilled like earth's;
|
She had found herself, she knew her being's aim.
|
Although her kingdom of marvellous change within
|
Remained unspoken in her secret breast,
|
All that lived round her felt its magic's charm:
|
The trees' rustling voices told it to the winds,
|
Flowers spoke in ardent hues an unknown joy,
|
The birds' carolling became a canticle,
|
The beasts forgot their strife and lived at ease.
|
Absorbed in wide communion with the Unseen
|
The mild ascetics of the wood received
|
A sudden greatening of their lonely muse.
|
This bright perfection of her inner state
|
Poured overflowing into her outward scene,
|
Made beautiful dull common natural things
|
And action wonderful and time divine.
|
Even the smallest meanest work became
|
A sweet or glad and glorious sacrament,
|
An offering to the self of the great world
|
Or a service to the One in each and all.
|
CANTO VI: Nirvana and the All-Negating Absolute
|
A light invaded all from her being's light;
|
Her heart-beats' dance communicated bliss:
|
Happiness grew happier, shared with her, by her touch
|
And grief some solace found when she drew near.
|
Above the cherished head of Satyavan
|
She saw not now Fate's dark and lethal orb;
|
A golden circle round a mystic sun
|
Disclosed to her new-born predicting sight
|
The cyclic rondure of a sovereign life.
|
In her visions and deep-etched veridical dreams,
|
In brief shiftings of the future's heavy screen,
|
He lay not by a dolorous decree
|
A victim in the dismal antre of death
|
Or borne to blissful regions far from her
|
Forgetting the sweetness of earth's warm delight,
|
Forgetting the passionate oneness of love's clasp,
|
Absolved in the self-rapt immortal's bliss.
|
Always he was with her, a living soul
|
That met her eyes with close enamoured eyes,
|
A living body near to her body's joy.
|
But now no longer in these great wild woods
|
In kinship with the days of bird and beast
|
And levelled to the bareness of earth's brown breast,
|
But mid the thinking high-built lives of men
|
In tapestried chambers and on crystal floors,
|
In armoured town or gardened pleasure-walks,
|
Even in distance closer than her thoughts,
|
Body to body near, soul near to soul,
|
Moving as if by a common breath and will
|
They were tied in the single circling of their days
|
Together by love's unseen atmosphere,
|
Inseparable like the earth and sky.
|
Thus for a while she trod the Golden Path;
|
This was the sun before abysmal Night.
|
Once as she sat in deep felicitous muse,
|
Still quivering from her lover's strong embrace,
|
And made her joy a bridge twixt earth and heaven,
|
An abyss yawned suddenly beneath her heart.
|
A vast and nameless fear dragged at her nerves
|
As drags a wild beast its half-slaughtered prey;
|
It seemed to have no den from which it sprang:
|
It was not hers, but hid its unseen cause.
|
Then rushing came its vast and fearful Fount.
|
A formless Dread with shapeless endless wings
|
Filling the universe with its dangerous breath,
|
A denser darkness than the Night could bear,
|
Enveloped the heavens and possessed the earth.
|
A rolling surge of silent death, it came
|
Curving round the far edge of the quaking globe;
|
Effacing heaven with its enormous stride
|
It willed to expunge the choked and anguished air
|
And end the fable of the joy of life.
|
It seemed her very being to forbid,
|
Abolishing all by which her nature lived,
|
And laboured to blot out her body and soul,
|
A clutch of some half-seen Invisible,
|
An ocean of terror and of sovereign might,
|
A person and a black infinity.
|
It seemed to cry to her without thought or word
|
The message of its dark eternity
|
And the awful meaning of its silences:
|
Out of some sullen monstrous vast arisen,
|
Out of an abysmal deep of grief and fear
|
Imagined by some blind regardless self,
|
A consciousness of being without its joy,
|
Empty of thought, incapable of bliss,
|
That felt life blank and nowhere found a soul,
|
A voice to the dumb anguish of the heart
|
Conveyed a stark sense of unspoken words;
|
In her own depths she heard the unuttered thought
|
That made unreal the world and all life meant.
|
"Who art thou who claimst thy crown of separate birth,
|
CANTO VI: Nirvana and the All-Negating Absolute
|
The illusion of thy soul's reality
|
And personal godhead on an ignorant globe
|
In the animal body of imperfect man?
|
Hope not to be happy in a world of pain
|
And dream not, listening to the unspoken Word
|
And dazzled by the inexpressible Ray,
|
Transcending the mute Superconscient's realm,
|
To give a body to the Unknowable,
|
Or for a sanction to thy heart's delight
|
To burden with bliss the silent still Supreme
|
Profaning its bare and formless sanctity,
|
Or call into thy chamber the Divine
|
And sit with God tasting a human joy.
|
I have created all, all I devour;
|
I am Death and the dark terrible Mother of life,
|
I am Kali black and naked in the world,
|
I am Maya and the universe is my cheat.
|
I lay waste human happiness with my breath
|
And slay the will to live, the joy to be
|
That all may pass back into nothingness
|
And only abide the eternal and absolute.
|
For only the blank Eternal can be true.
|
All else is shadow and flash in Mind's bright glass,
|
Mind, hollow mirror in which Ignorance sees
|
A splendid figure of its own false self
|
And dreams it sees a glorious solid world.
|
O soul, inventor of man's thoughts and hopes,
|
Thyself the invention of the moments' stream,
|
Illusion's centre or subtle apex point,
|
At last know thyself, from vain existence cease."
|
A shadow of the negating Absolute,
|
The intolerant Darkness travelled surging past
|
And ebbed in her the formidable Voice.
|
It left behind her inner world laid waste:
|
A barren silence weighed upon her heart,
|
Her kingdom of delight was there no more;
|
Only her soul remained, its emptied stage,
|
Awaiting the unknown eternal Will.
|
Then from the heights a greater Voice came down,
|
The Word that touches the heart and finds the soul,
|
The voice of Light after the voice of Night:
|
The cry of the Abyss drew Heaven's reply,
|
A might of storm chased by the might of the Sun.
|
"O soul, bare not thy kingdom to the foe;
|
Consent to hide thy royalty of bliss
|
Lest Time and Fate find out its avenues
|
And beat with thunderous knock upon thy gates.
|
Hide whilst thou canst thy treasure of separate self
|
Behind the luminous rampart of thy depths
|
Till of a vaster empire it grows part.
|
But not for self alone the Self is won:
|
Content abide not with one conquered realm;
|
Adventure all to make the whole world thine,
|
To break into greater kingdoms turn thy force.
|
Fear not to be nothing that thou mayst be all;
|
Assent to the emptiness of the Supreme
|
That all in thee may reach its absolute.
|
Accept to be small and human on the earth,
|
Interrupting thy new-born divinity,
|
That man may find his utter self in God.
|
If for thy own sake only thou hast come,
|
An immortal spirit into the mortal's world,
|
To found thy luminous kingdom in God's dark,
|
In the Inconscient's realm one shining star,
|
One door in the Ignorance opened upon light,
|
Why hadst thou any need to come at all?
|
Thou hast come down into a struggling world
|
To aid a blind and suffering mortal race,
|
To open to Light the eyes that could not see,
|
To bring down bliss into the heart of grief,
|
To make thy life a bridge twixt earth and heaven;
|
If thou wouldst save the toiling universe,
|
CANTO VI: Nirvana and the All-Negating Absolute
|
The vast universal suffering feel as thine:
|
Thou must bear the sorrow that thou claimst to heal;
|
The day-bringer must walk in darkest night.
|
He who would save the world must share its pain.
|
If he knows not grief, how shall he find grief's cure?
|
If far he walks above mortality's head,
|
How shall the mortal reach that too high path?
|
If one of theirs they see scale heaven's peaks,
|
Men then can hope to learn that titan climb.
|
God must be born on earth and be as man
|
That man being human may grow even as God.
|
He who would save the world must be one with the world,
|
All suffering things contain in his heart's space
|
And bear the grief and joy of all that lives.
|
His soul must be wider than the universe
|
And feel eternity as its very stuff,
|
Rejecting the moment's personality
|
Know itself older than the birth of Time,
|
Creation an incident in its consciousness,
|
Arcturus and Belphegor grains of fire
|
Circling in a corner of its boundless self,
|
The world's destruction a small transient storm
|
In the calm infinity it has become.
|
If thou wouldst a little loosen the vast chain,
|
Draw back from the world that the Idea has made,
|
Thy mind's selection from the Infinite,
|
Thy senses' gloss on the Infinitesimal's dance,
|
Then shalt thou know how the great bondage came.
|
Banish all thought from thee and be God's void.
|
Then shalt thou uncover the Unknowable
|
And the Superconscient conscious grow on thy tops;
|
Infinity's vision through thy gaze shall pierce;
|
Thou shalt look into the eyes of the Unknown,
|
Find the hid Truth in things seen null and false,
|
Behind things known discover Mystery's rear.
|
Thou shalt be one with God's bare reality
|
And the miraculous world he has become
|
And the diviner miracle still to be
|
When Nature who is now unconscious God
|
Translucent grows to the Eternal's light,
|
Her seeing his sight, her walk his steps of power
|
And life is filled with a spiritual joy
|
And Matter is the Spirit's willing bride.
|
Consent to be nothing and none, dissolve Time's work,
|
Cast off thy mind, step back from form and name.
|
Annul thyself that only God may be."
|
Thus spoke the mighty and uplifting Voice,
|
And Savitri heard; she bowed her head and mused
|
Plunging her deep regard into herself
|
In her soul's privacy in the silent Night.
|
Aloof and standing back detached and calm,
|
A witness of the drama of herself,
|
A student of her own interior scene,
|
She watched the passion and the toil of life
|
And heard in the crowded thoroughfares of mind
|
The unceasing tread and passage of her thoughts.
|
All she allowed to rise that chose to stir;
|
Calling, compelling nought, forbidding nought,
|
She left all to the process formed in Time
|
And the free initiative of Nature's will.
|
Thus following the complex human play
|
She heard the prompter's voice behind the scenes,
|
Perceived the original libretto's set
|
And the organ theme of the composer Force.
|
All she beheld that surges from man's depths,
|
The animal instincts prowling mid life's trees,
|
The impulses that whisper to the heart
|
And passion's thunder-chase sweeping the nerves;
|
She saw the Powers that stare from the Abyss
|
And the wordless Light that liberates the soul.
|
But most her gaze pursued the birth of thought.
|
CANTO VI: Nirvana and the All-Negating Absolute
|
Affranchised from the look of surface mind
|
She paused not to survey the official case,
|
The issue of forms from the office of the brain,
|
Its factory of thought-sounds and soundless words
|
And voices stored within unheard by men,
|
Its mint and treasury of shining coin.
|
These were but counters in mind's symbol game,
|
A gramophone's discs, a reproduction's film,
|
A list of signs, a cipher and a code.
|
In our unseen subtle body thought is born
|
Or there it enters from the cosmic field.
|
Oft from her soul stepped out a naked thought
|
Luminous with mysteried lips and wonderful eyes;
|
Or from her heart emerged some burning face
|
And looked for life and love and passionate truth,
|
Aspired to heaven or embraced the world
|
Or led the fancy like a fleeting moon
|
Across the dull sky of man's common days,
|
Amidst the doubtful certitudes of earth's lore,
|
To the celestial beauty of faith gave form,
|
As if at flower-prints in a dingy room
|
Laughed in a golden vase one living rose.
|
A thaumaturgist sat in her heart's deep,
|
Compelled the forward stride, the upward look,
|
Till wonder leaped into the illumined breast
|
And life grew marvellous with transfiguring hope.
|
A seeing will pondered between the brows;
|
Thoughts, glistening Angels, stood behind the brain
|
In flashing armour, folding hands of prayer,
|
And poured heaven's rays into the earthly form.
|
Imaginations flamed up from her breast,
|
Unearthly beauty, touches of surpassing joy
|
And plans of miracle, dreams of delight:
|
Around her navel lotus clustering close
|
Her large sensations of the teeming worlds
|
Streamed their dumb movements of the unformed Idea;
|
Invading the small sensitive flower of the throat
|
They brought their mute unuttered resonances
|
To kindle the figures of a heavenly speech.
|
Below, desires formed their wordless wish,
|
And longings of physical sweetness and ecstasy
|
Translated into the accents of a cry
|
Their grasp on objects and their clasp on souls.
|
Her body's thoughts climbed from her conscious limbs
|
And carried their yearnings to its mystic crown
|
Where Nature's murmurs meet the Ineffable.
|
But for the mortal prisoned in outward mind
|
All must present their passports at its door;
|
Disguised they must don the official cap and mask
|
Or pass as manufactures of the brain,
|
Unknown their secret truth and hidden source.
|
Only to the inner mind they speak direct,
|
Put on a body and assume a voice,
|
Their passage seen, their message heard and known,
|
Their birthplace and their natal mark revealed,
|
And stand confessed to an immortal's sight,
|
Our nature's messengers to the witness soul.
|
Impenetrable, withheld from mortal sense,
|
The inner chambers of the spirit's house
|
Disclosed to her their happenings and their guests;
|
Eyes looked through crevices in the invisible wall
|
And through the secrecy of unseen doors
|
There came into mind's little frontal room
|
Thoughts that enlarged our limited human range,
|
Lifted the ideal's half-quenched or sinking torch
|
Or peered through the finite at the infinite.
|
A sight opened upon the invisible
|
And sensed the shapes that mortal eyes see not,
|
The sounds that mortal listening cannot hear,
|
The blissful sweetness of the intangible's touch;
|
The objects that to us are empty air,
|
Are there the stuff of daily experience
|
CANTO VI: Nirvana and the All-Negating Absolute
|
And the common pabulum of sense and thought.
|
The beings of the subtle realms appeared
|
And scenes concealed behind our earthly scene;
|
She saw the life of remote continents
|
And distance deafened not to voices far;
|
She felt the movements crossing unknown minds;
|
The past's events occurred before her eyes.
|
The great world's thoughts were part of her own thought,
|
The feelings dumb for ever and unshared,
|
The ideas that never found an utterance.
|
The dim subconscient's incoherent hints
|
Laid bare a meaning twisted, deep and strange,
|
The bizarre secret of their fumbling speech,
|
Their links with underlying reality.
|
The unseen grew visible and audible:
|
Thoughts leaped down from a superconscient field
|
Like eagles swooping from a viewless peak,
|
Thoughts gleamed up from the screened subliminal depths
|
Like golden fishes from a hidden sea.
|
This world is a vast unbroken totality,
|
A deep solidarity joins its contrary powers;
|
God's summits look back on the mute Abyss.
|
So man evolving to divinest heights
|
Colloques still with the animal and the Djinn;
|
The human godhead with star-gazer eyes
|
Lives still in one house with the primal beast.
|
The high meets the low, all is a single plan.
|
So she beheld the many births of thought,
|
If births can be of what eternal is;
|
For the Eternal's powers are like himself,
|
Timeless in the Timeless, in Time ever born.
|
This too she saw that all in outer mind
|
Is made, not born, a product perishable,
|
Forged in the body's factory by earth-force.
|
This mind is a dynamic small machine
|
Producing ceaselessly, till it wears out,
|
With raw material drawn from the outside world,
|
The patterns sketched out by an artist God.
|
Often our thoughts are finished cosmic wares
|
Admitted by a silent office gate
|
And passed through the subconscient's galleries,
|
Then issued in Time's mart as private make.
|
For now they bear the living person's stamp;
|
A trick, a special hue claims them his own.
|
All else is Nature's craft and this too hers.
|
Our tasks are given, we are but instruments;
|
Nothing is all our own that we create:
|
The Power that acts in us is not our force.
|
The genius too receives from some high fount
|
Concealed in a supernal secrecy
|
The work that gives him an immortal name.
|
The word, the form, the charm, the glory and grace
|
Are missioned sparks from a stupendous Fire;
|
A sample from the laboratory of God
|
Of which he holds the patent upon earth,
|
Comes to him wrapped in golden coverings;
|
He listens for Inspiration's postman knock
|
And takes delivery of the priceless gift
|
A little spoilt by the receiver mind
|
Or mixed with the manufacture of his brain;
|
When least defaced, then is it most divine.
|
Although his ego claims the world for its use,
|
Man is a dynamo for the cosmic work;
|
Nature does most in him, God the high rest:
|
Only his soul's acceptance is his own.
|
This independent, once a power supreme,
|
Self-born before the universe was made,
|
Accepting cosmos, binds himself Nature's serf
|
Till he becomes her freedman - or God's slave.
|
This is the appearance in our mortal front;
|
Our greater truth of being lies behind:
|
Our consciousness is cosmic and immense,
|
CANTO VI: Nirvana and the All-Negating Absolute
|
But only when we break through Matter's wall
|
In that spiritual vastness can we stand
|
Where we can live the masters of our world
|
And mind is only a means and body a tool.
|
For above the birth of body and of thought
|
Our spirit's truth lives in the naked self
|
And from that height, unbound, surveys the world.
|
Out of the mind she rose to escape its law
|
That it might sleep in some deep shadow of self
|
Or fall silent in the silence of the Unseen.
|
High she attained and stood from Nature free
|
And saw creation's life from far above,
|
Thence upon all she laid her sovereign will
|
To dedicate it to God's timeless calm:
|
Then all grew tranquil in her being's space,
|
Only sometimes small thoughts arose and fell
|
Like quiet waves upon a silent sea
|
Or ripples passing over a lonely pool
|
When a stray stone disturbs its dreaming rest.
|
Yet the mind's factory had ceased to work,
|
There was no sound of the dynamo's throb,
|
There came no call from the still fields of life.
|
Then even those stirrings rose in her no more;
|
Her mind now seemed like a vast empty room
|
Or like a peaceful landscape without sound.
|
This men call quietude and prize as peace.
|
But to her deeper sight all yet was there,
|
Effervescing like a chaos under a lid;
|
Feelings and thoughts cried out for word and act
|
But found no response in the silenced brain:
|
All was suppressed but nothing yet expunged;
|
At every moment might explosion come.
|
Then this too paused; the body seemed a stone.
|
All now was a wide mighty vacancy,
|
But still excluded from eternity's hush;
|
For still was far the repose of the Absolute
|
And the ocean silence of Infinity.
|
Even now some thoughts could cross her solitude;
|
These surged not from the depths or from within
|
Cast up from formlessness to seek a form,
|
Spoke not the body's need nor voiced life's call.
|
These seemed not born nor made in human Time:
|
Children of cosmic Nature from a far world,
|
Idea's shapes in complete armour of words
|
Posted like travellers in an alien space.
|
Out of some far expanse they seemed to come
|
As if carried on vast wings like large white sails,
|
And with easy access reached the inner ear
|
As though they used a natural privileged right
|
To the high royal entries of the soul.
|
As yet their path lay deep-concealed in light.
|
Then looking to know whence the intruders came
|
She saw a spiritual immensity
|
Pervading and encompassing the world-space
|
As ether our transparent tangible air,
|
And through it sailing tranquilly a thought.
|
As smoothly glides a ship nearing its port,
|
Ignorant of embargo and blockade,
|
Confident of entrance and the visa's seal,
|
It came to the silent city of the brain
|
Towards its accustomed and expectant quay,
|
But met a barring will, a blow of Force
|
And sank vanishing in the immensity.
|
After a long vacant pause another appeared
|
And others one by one suddenly emerged,
|
Mind's unexpected visitors from the Unseen
|
Like far-off sails upon a lonely sea.
|
But soon that commerce failed, none reached mind's coast.
|
Then all grew still, nothing moved any more:
|
Immobile, self-rapt, timeless, solitary
|
A silent spirit pervaded silent Space.
|
CANTO VI: Nirvana and the All-Negating Absolute
|
In that absolute stillness bare and formidable
|
There was glimpsed an all-negating Void Supreme
|
That claimed its mystic Nihil's sovereign right
|
To cancel Nature and deny the soul.
|
Even the nude sense of self grew pale and thin:
|
Impersonal, signless, featureless, void of forms
|
A blank pure consciousness had replaced the mind.
|
Her spirit seemed the substance of a name,
|
The world a pictured symbol drawn on self,
|
A dream of images, a dream of sounds
|
Built up the semblance of a universe
|
Or lent to spirit the appearance of a world.
|
This was self-seeing; in that intolerant hush
|
No notion and no concept could take shape,
|
There was no sense to frame the figure of things,
|
A sheer self-sight was there, no thought arose.
|
Emotion slept deep down in the still heart
|
Or lay buried in a cemetery of peace:
|
All feelings seemed quiescent, calm or dead,
|
As if the heart-strings rent could work no more
|
And joy and grief could never rise again.
|
The heart beat on with an unconscious rhythm
|
But no response came from it and no cry.
|
Vain was the provocation of events;
|
Nothing within answered an outside touch,
|
No nerve was stirred and no reaction rose.
|
Yet still her body saw and moved and spoke;
|
It understood without the aid of thought,
|
It said whatever needed to be said,
|
It did whatever needed to be done.
|
There was no person there behind the act,
|
No mind that chose or passed the fitting word:
|
All wrought like an unerring apt machine.
|
As if continuing old habitual turns,
|
And pushed by an old unexhausted force
|
The engine did the work for which it was made:
|
Her consciousness looked on and took no part;
|
All it upheld, in nothing had a share.
|
There was no strong initiator will;
|
An incoherence crossing a firm void
|
Slipped into an order of related chance.
|
A pure perception was the only power
|
That stood behind her action and her sight.
|
If that retired, all objects would be extinct,
|
Her private universe would cease to be,
|
The house she had built with bricks of thought and sense
|
In the beginning after the birth of Space.
|
This seeing was identical with the seen;
|
It knew without knowledge all that could be known,
|
It saw impartially the world go by,
|
But in the same supine unmoving glance
|
Saw too its abysmal unreality.
|
It watched the figure of the cosmic game,
|
But the thought and inner life in forms seemed dead,
|
Abolished by her own collapse of thought:
|
A hollow physical shell persisted still.
|
All seemed a brilliant shadow of itself,
|
A cosmic film of scenes and images:
|
The enduring mass and outline of the hills
|
Was a design sketched on a silent mind
|
And held to a tremulous false solidity
|
By constant beats of visionary sight.
|
The forest with its emerald multitudes
|
Clothed with its show of hues vague empty Space,
|
A painting's colours hiding a surface void
|
That flickered upon dissolution's edge;
|
The blue heavens, an illusion of the eyes,
|
Roofed in the mind's illusion of a world.
|
The men who walked beneath an unreal sky
|
Seemed mobile puppets out of cardboard cut
|
And pushed by unseen hands across the soil
|
Or moving pictures upon Fancy's film:
|
CANTO VI: Nirvana and the All-Negating Absolute
|
There was no soul within, no power of life.
|
The brain's vibrations that appear like thought,
|
The nerve's brief answer to each contact's knock,
|
The heart's quiverings felt as joy and grief and love
|
Were twitchings of the body, their seeming self,
|
That body forged from atoms and from gas
|
A manufactured lie of Maya's make,
|
Its life a dream seen by the sleeping Void.
|
The animals lone or trooping through the glades
|
Fled like a passing vision of beauty and grace
|
Imagined by some all-creating Eye.
|
Yet something was there behind the fading scene;
|
Wherever she turned, at whatsoever she looked,
|
It was perceived, yet hid from mind and sight.
|
The One only real shut itself from Space
|
And stood aloof from the idea of Time.
|
Its truth escaped from shape and line and hue.
|
All else grew unsubstantial, self-annulled,
|
This only everlasting seemed and true,
|
Yet nowhere dwelt, it was outside the hours.
|
This only could justify the labour of sight,
|
But sight could not define for it a form;
|
This only could appease the unsatisfied ear
|
But hearing listened in vain for a missing sound;
|
This answered not the sense, called not to Mind.
|
It met her as the uncaught inaudible Voice
|
That speaks for ever from the Unknowable.
|
It met her like an omnipresent point
|
Pure of dimensions, unfixed, invisible,
|
The single oneness of its multiplied beat
|
Accentuating its sole eternity.
|
It faced her as some vast Nought's immensity,
|
An endless No to all that seems to be,
|
An endless Yes to things ever unconceived
|
And all that is unimagined and unthought,
|
An eternal zero or untotalled Aught,
|
A spaceless and a placeless Infinite.
|
Yet eternity and infinity seemed but words
|
Vainly affixed by mind's incompetence
|
To its stupendous lone reality.
|
The world is but a spark-burst from its light,
|
All moments flashes from its Timelessness,
|
All objects glimmerings of the Bodiless
|
That disappear from Mind when That is seen.
|
It held, as if a shield before its face,
|
A consciousness that saw without a seer,
|
The Truth where knowledge is not nor knower nor known,
|
The Love enamoured of its own delight
|
In which the Lover is not nor the Beloved
|
Bringing their personal passion into the Vast,
|
The Force omnipotent in quietude,
|
The Bliss that none can ever hope to taste.
|
It cancelled the convincing cheat of self;
|
A truth in nothingness was its mighty clue.
|
If all existence could renounce to be
|
And Being take refuge in Non-being's arms
|
And Non-being could strike out its ciphered round,
|
Some lustre of that Reality might appear.
|
A formless liberation came on her.
|
Once sepulchred alive in brain and flesh
|
She had risen up from body, mind and life;
|
She was no more a Person in a world,
|
She had escaped into infinity.
|
What once had been herself had disappeared;
|
There was no frame of things, no figure of soul.
|
A refugee from the domain of sense,
|
Evading the necessity of thought,
|
Delivered from Knowledge and from Ignorance
|
And rescued from the true and the untrue,
|
She shared the Superconscient's high retreat
|
Beyond the self-born Word, the nude Idea,
|
The first bare solid ground of consciousness;
|
CANTO VI: Nirvana and the All-Negating Absolute
|
Beings were not there, existence had no place,
|
There was no temptation of the joy to be.
|
Unutterably effaced, no one and null,
|
A vanishing vestige like a violet trace,
|
A faint record merely of a self now past,
|
She was a point in the unknowable.
|
Only some last annulment now remained,
|
Annihilation's vague indefinable step:
|
A memory of being still was there
|
And kept her separate from nothingness:
|
She was in That but still became not That.
|
This shadow of herself so close to nought
|
Could be again self's point d'appui to live,
|
Return out of the Inconceivable
|
And be what some mysterious vast might choose.
|
Even as the Unknowable decreed,
|
She might be nought or new-become the All,
|
Or if the omnipotent Nihil took a shape
|
Emerge as someone and redeem the world.
|
Even, she might learn what the mystic cipher held,
|
This seeming exit or closed end of all
|
Could be a blind tenebrous passage screened from sight,
|
Her state the eclipsing shell of a darkened sun
|
On its secret way to the Ineffable.
|
Even now her splendid being might flame back
|
Out of the silence and the nullity,
|
A gleaming portion of the All-Wonderful,
|
A power of some all-affirming Absolute,
|
A shining mirror of the eternal Truth
|
To show to the One-in-all its manifest face,
|
To the souls of men their deep identity.
|
Or she might wake into God's quietude
|
Beyond the cosmic day and cosmic night
|
And rest appeased in his white eternity.
|
But this was now unreal or remote
|
Or covered in the mystic fathomless blank.
|
In infinite Nothingness was the ultimate sign
|
Or else the Real was the Unknowable.
|
A lonely Absolute negated all:
|
It effaced the ignorant world from its solitude
|
And drowned the soul in its everlasting peace.
|
The Discovery of the Cosmic Spirit
|
and the Cosmic Consciousness
|
IN THE little hermitage in the forest's heart,
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In the sunlight and the moonlight and the dark
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The daily human life went plodding on
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Even as before with its small unchanging works
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And its spare outward body of routine
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And happy quiet of ascetic peace.
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The old beauty smiled of the terrestrial scene;
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She too was her old gracious self to men.
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The Ancient Mother clutched her child to her breast
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Pressing her close in her environing arms,
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As if earth ever the same could for ever keep
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The living spirit and body in her clasp,
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As if death were not there nor end nor change.
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Accustomed only to read outward signs
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None saw aught new in her, none divined her state;
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They saw a person where was only God's vast,
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A still being or a mighty nothingness.
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To all she was the same perfect Savitri:
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A greatness and a sweetness and a light
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Poured out from her upon her little world.
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Life showed to all the same familiar face,
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Her acts followed the old unaltered round,
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She spoke the words that she was wont to speak
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And did the things that she had always done.
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Her eyes looked out on earth's unchanging face,
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Around her soul's muteness all moved as of old;
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A vacant consciousness watched from within,
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Empty of all but bare Reality.
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There was no will behind the word and act,
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No thought formed in her brain to guide the speech:
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An impersonal emptiness walked and spoke in her,
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Something perhaps unfelt, unseen, unknown
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Guarded the body for its future work,
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Or Nature moved in her old stream of force.
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Perhaps she bore made conscious in her breast
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The miraculous Nihil, origin of our souls
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And source and sum of the vast world's events,
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The womb and grave of thought, a cipher of God,
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A zero circle of being's totality.
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It used her speech and acted in her acts,
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It was beauty in her limbs, life in her breath;
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The original Mystery wore her human face.
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Thus was she lost within to separate self;
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Her mortal ego perished in God's night.
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Only a body was left, the ego's shell
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Afloat mid drift and foam of the world-sea,
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A sea of dream watched by a motionless sense
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In a figure of unreal reality.
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An impersonal foresight could already see, -
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In the unthinking knowledge of the spirit
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Even now it seemed nigh done, inevitable, -
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The individual die, the cosmos pass;
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These gone, the transcendental grew a myth,
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The Holy Ghost without the Father and Son,
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Or, a substratum of what once had been,
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Being that never willed to bear a world
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Restored to its original loneliness,
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Impassive, sole, silent, intangible.
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Yet all was not extinct in this deep loss;
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The being travelled not towards nothingness.
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There was some high surpassing Secrecy,
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And when she sat alone with Satyavan,
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Her moveless mind with his that searched and strove,
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In the hush of the profound and intimate night
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She turned to the face of a veiled voiceless Truth
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Hid in the dumb recesses of the heart
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CANTO VII: The Cosmic Spirit and the Cosmic Consciousness
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Or waiting beyond the last peak climbed by Thought, -
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Unseen itself it sees the struggling world
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And prompts our quest, but cares not to be found, -
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Out of that distant Vast came a reply.
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Something unknown, unreached, inscrutable
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Sent down the messages of its bodiless Light,
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Cast lightning flashes of a thought not ours
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Crossing the immobile silence of her mind:
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In its might of irresponsible sovereignty
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It seized on speech to give those flamings shape,
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Made beat the heart of wisdom in a word
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And spoke immortal things through mortal lips.
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Or, listening to the sages of the woods,
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In question and in answer broke from her
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High strange revealings impossible to men,
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Something or someone secret and remote
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Took hold of her body for his mystic use,
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Her mouth was seized to channel ineffable truths,
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Knowledge unthinkable found an utterance.
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Astonished by a new enlightenment,
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Invaded by a streak of the Absolute,
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They marvelled at her, for she seemed to know
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What they had only glimpsed at times afar.
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These thoughts were formed not in her listening brain,
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Her vacant heart was like a stringless harp;
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Impassive the body claimed not its own voice,
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But let the luminous greatness through it pass.
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A dual Power at being's occult poles
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Still acted, nameless and invisible:
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Her divine emptiness was their instrument.
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Inconscient Nature dealt with the world it had made,
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And using still the body's instruments
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Slipped through the conscious void she had become;
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The superconscient Mystery through that Void
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Missioned its word to touch the thoughts of men.
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As yet this great impersonal speech was rare.
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But now the unmoving wide spiritual space
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In which her mind survived tranquil and bare,
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Admitted a traveller from the cosmic breadths:
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A thought came through draped as an outer voice.
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It called not for the witness of the mind,
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It spoke not to the hushed receiving heart;
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It came direct to the pure perception's seat,
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An only centre now of consciousness,
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If centre could be where all seemed only space;
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No more shut in by body's walls and gates
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Her being, a circle without circumference,
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Already now surpassed all cosmic bounds
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And more and more spread into infinity.
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This being was its own unbounded world,
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A world without form or feature or circumstance;
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It had no ground, no wall, no roof of thought,
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Yet saw itself and looked on all around
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In a silence motionless and illimitable.
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There was no person there, no centred mind,
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No seat of feeling on which beat events
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Or objects wrought and shaped reaction's stress.
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There was no motion in this inner world,
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All was a still and even infinity.
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In her the Unseen, the Unknown waited his hour.
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But now she sat by sleeping Satyavan,
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Awake within, and the enormous Night
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Surrounded her with the Unknowable's vast.
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A voice began to speak from her own heart
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That was not hers, yet mastered thought and sense.
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As it spoke all changed within her and without;
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All was, all lived; she felt all being one;
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The world of unreality ceased to be:
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There was no more a universe built by mind,
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Convicted as a structure or a sign;
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A spirit, a being saw created things
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CANTO VII: The Cosmic Spirit and the Cosmic Consciousness
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And cast itself into unnumbered forms
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And was what it saw and made; all now became
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An evidence of one stupendous truth,
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A Truth in which negation had no place,
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A being and a living consciousness,
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A stark and absolute Reality.
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There the unreal could not find a place,
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The sense of unreality was slain:
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There all was conscious, made of the Infinite,
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All had a substance of Eternity.
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Yet this was the same Indecipherable;
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It seemed to cast from it universe like a dream
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Vanishing for ever into an original Void.
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But this was no more some vague ubiquitous point
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Or a cipher of vastness in unreal Nought.
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It was the same but now no more seemed far
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To the living clasp of her recovered soul.
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It was her self, it was the self of all,
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It was the reality of existing things,
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It was the consciousness of all that lived
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And felt and saw; it was Timelessness and Time,
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It was the Bliss of formlessness and form.
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It was all Love and the one Beloved's arms,
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It was sight and thought in one all-seeing Mind,
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It was joy of Being on the peaks of God.
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She passed beyond Time into eternity,
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Slipped out of space and became the Infinite;
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Her being rose into unreachable heights
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And found no end of its journey in the Self.
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It plunged into the unfathomable deeps
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And found no end to the silent mystery
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That held all world within one lonely breast,
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Yet harboured all creation's multitudes.
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She was all vastness and one measureless point,
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She was a height beyond heights, a depth beyond depths,
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She lived in the everlasting and was all
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That harbours death and bears the wheeling hours.
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All contraries were true in one huge spirit
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Surpassing measure, change and circumstance.
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An individual, one with cosmic self
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In the heart of the Transcendent's miracle
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And the secret of World-personality
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Was the creator and the lord of all.
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Mind was a single innumerable look
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Upon himself and all that he became.
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Life was his drama and the Vast a stage,
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The universe was his body, God its soul.
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All was one single immense reality,
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All its innumerable phenomenon.
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Her spirit saw the world as living God;
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It saw the One and knew that all was He.
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She knew him as the Absolute's self-space,
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One with her self and ground of all things here
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In which the world wanders seeking for the Truth
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Guarded behind its face of ignorance:
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She followed him through the march of endless Time.
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All Nature's happenings were events in her,
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The heart-beats of the cosmos were her own,
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All beings thought and felt and moved in her;
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She inhabited the vastness of the world,
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Its distances were her nature's boundaries,
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Its closenesses her own life's intimacies.
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Her mind became familiar with its mind,
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Its body was her body's larger frame
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In which she lived and knew herself in it
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One, multitudinous in its multitudes.
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She was a single being, yet all things;
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The world was her spirit's wide circumference,
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The thoughts of others were her intimates,
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Their feelings close to her universal heart,
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Their bodies her many bodies kin to her;
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She was no more herself but all the world.
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CANTO VII: The Cosmic Spirit and the Cosmic Consciousness
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Out of the infinitudes all came to her,
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Into the infinitudes sentient she spread,
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Infinity was her own natural home.
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Nowhere she dwelt, her spirit was everywhere,
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The distant constellations wheeled round her;
|
Earth saw her born, all worlds were her colonies,
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The greater worlds of life and mind were hers;
|
All Nature reproduced her in its lines,
|
Its movements were large copies of her own.
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She was the single self of all these selves,
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She was in them and they were all in her.
|
This first was an immense identity
|
In which her own identity was lost:
|
What seemed herself was an image of the Whole.
|
She was a subconscient life of tree and flower,
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The outbreak of the honied buds of spring;
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She burned in the passion and splendour of the rose,
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She was the red heart of the passion-flower,
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The dream-white of the lotus in its pool.
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Out of subconscient life she climbed to mind,
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She was thought and the passion of the world's heart,
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She was the godhead hid in the heart of man,
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She was the climbing of his soul to God.
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The cosmos flowered in her, she was its bed.
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She was Time and the dreams of God in Time;
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She was Space and the wideness of his days.
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From this she rose where Time and Space were not;
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The superconscient was her native air,
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Infinity was her movement's natural space;
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Eternity looked out from her on Time.
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Death in the Forest
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NOW it was here in this great golden dawn.
|
By her still sleeping husb and lain she gazed
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Into her past as one about to die
|
Looks back upon the sunlit fields of life
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Where he too ran and sported with the rest,
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Lifting his head above the huge dark stream
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Into whose depths he must for ever plunge.
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All she had been and done she lived again.
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The whole year in a swift and eddying race
|
Of memories swept through her and fled away
|
Into the irrecoverable past.
|
Then silently she rose and, service done,
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Bowed down to the great goddess simply carved
|
By Satyavan upon a forest stone.
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What prayer she breathed her soul and Durga knew.
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Perhaps she felt in the dim forest huge
|
The infinite Mother watching over her child,
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Perhaps the shrouded Voice spoke some still word.
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At last she came to the pale mother queen.
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She spoke but with guarded lips and tranquil face
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Lest some stray word or some betraying look
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Should let pass into the mother's unknowing breast,
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Slaying all happiness and need to live,
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A dire foreknowledge of the grief to come.
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Only the needed utterance passage found:
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All else she pressed back into her anguished heart
|
And forced upon her speech an outward peace.
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1
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only six cantos and an epilogue. It was slightly revised at a late stage and a number of new
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lines were added, but it was never fully worked into the final version of the poem. Its original
|
designation, "Canto Three", has been retained as a reminder of this.
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"One year that I have lived with Satyavan
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Here on the emerald edge of the vast woods
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In the iron ring of the enormous peaks
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Under the blue rifts of the forest sky,
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I have not gone into the silences
|
Of this great woodl and that enringed my thoughts
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With mystery, nor in its green miracles
|
Wandered, but this small clearing was my world.
|
Now has a strong desire seized all my heart
|
To go with Satyavan holding his hand
|
Into the life that he has loved and touch
|
Herbs he has trod and know the forest flowers
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And hear at ease the birds and the scurrying life
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That starts and ceases, rich far rustle of boughs
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And all the mystic whispering of the woods.
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Release me now and let my heart have rest."
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She answered: "Do as thy wise mind desires,
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O calm child-sovereign with the eyes that rule.
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I hold thee for a strong goddess who has come
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Pitying our barren days; so dost thou serve
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Even as a slave might, yet art thou beyond
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All that thou doest, all our minds conceive,
|
Like the strong sun that serves earth from above."
|
Then the doomed husb and and the woman who knew
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Went with linked hands into that solemn world
|
Where beauty and grandeur and unspoken dream,
|
Where Nature's mystic silence could be felt
|
Communing with the secrecy of God.
|
Beside her Satyavan walked full of joy
|
Because she moved with him through his green haunts:
|
He showed her all the forest's riches, flowers
|
Innumerable of every odour and hue
|
And soft thick clinging creepers red and green
|
And strange rich-plumaged birds, to every cry
|
That haunted sweetly distant boughs replied
|
With the shrill singer's name more sweetly called.
|
Death in the Forest
|
He spoke of all the things he loved: they were
|
His boyhood's comrades and his playfellows,
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Coevals and companions of his life
|
Here in this world whose every mood he knew:
|
Their thoughts which to the common mind are blank,
|
He shared, to every wild emotion felt
|
An answer. Deeply she listened, but to hear
|
The voice that soon would cease from tender words
|
And treasure its sweet cadences beloved
|
For lonely memory when none by her walked
|
And the beloved voice could speak no more.
|
But little dwelt her mind upon their sense;
|
Of death, not life she thought or life's lone end.
|
Love in her bosom hurt with the jagged edges
|
Of anguish moaned at every step with pain
|
Crying, "Now, now perhaps his voice will cease
|
For ever." Even by some vague touch oppressed
|
Sometimes her eyes looked round as if their orbs
|
Might see the dim and dreadful god's approach.
|
But Satyavan had paused. He meant to finish
|
His labour here that happy, linked, uncaring
|
They two might wander free in the green deep
|
Primaeval mystery of the forest's heart.
|
A tree that raised its tranquil head to heaven
|
Luxuriating in verdure, summoning
|
The breeze with amorous wideness of its boughs,
|
He chose and with his steel assailed the arm
|
Brown, rough and strong hidden in its emerald dress.
|
Wordless but near she watched, no turn to lose
|
Of the bright face and body which she loved.
|
Her life was now in seconds, not in hours,
|
And every moment she economised
|
Like a pale merchant leaned above his store,
|
The miser of his poor remaining gold.
|
But Satyavan wielded a joyous axe.
|
He sang high snatches of a sage's chant
|
That pealed of conquered death and demons slain,
|
And sometimes paused to cry to her sweet speech
|
Of love and mockery tenderer than love:
|
She like a pantheress leaped upon his words
|
And carried them into her cavern heart.
|
But as he worked, his doom upon him came.
|
The violent and hungry hounds of pain
|
Travelled through his body biting as they passed
|
Silently, and all his suffering breath besieged
|
Strove to rend life's strong heart-cords and be free.
|
Then helped, as if a beast had left its prey,
|
A moment in a wave of rich relief
|
Reborn to strength and happy ease he stood
|
Rejoicing and resumed his confident toil
|
But with less seeing strokes. Now the great woodsman
|
Hewed at him and his labour ceased: lifting
|
His arm he flung away the poignant axe
|
Far from him like an instrument of pain.
|
She came to him in silent anguish and clasped,
|
And he cried to her, "Savitri, a pang
|
Cleaves through my head and breast as if the axe
|
Were piercing it and not the living branch.
|
Such agony rends me as the tree must feel
|
When it is sundered and must lose its life.
|
Awhile let me lay my head upon thy lap
|
And guard me with thy hands from evil fate:
|
Perhaps because thou touchest, death may pass."
|
Then Savitri sat under branches wide,
|
Cool, green against the sun, not the hurt tree
|
Which his keen axe had cloven, - that she shunned;
|
But leaned beneath a fortunate kingly trunk
|
She guarded him in her bosom and strove to soothe
|
His anguished brow and body with her hands.
|
All grief and fear were dead within her now
|
And a great calm had fallen. The wish to lessen
|
His suffering, the impulse that opposes pain
|
Death in the Forest
|
Were the one mortal feeling left. It passed:
|
Griefless and strong she waited like the gods.
|
But now his sweet familiar hue was changed
|
Into a tarnished greyness and his eyes
|
Dimmed over, forsaken of the clear light she loved.
|
Only the dull and physical mind was left,
|
Vacant of the bright spirit's luminous gaze.
|
But once before it faded wholly back,
|
He cried out in a clinging last despair,
|
"Savitri, Savitri, O Savitri,
|
Lean down, my soul, and kiss me while I die."
|
And even as her pallid lips pressed his,
|
His failed, losing last sweetness of response;
|
His cheek pressed down her golden arm. She sought
|
His mouth still with her living mouth, as if
|
She could persuade his soul back with her kiss;
|
Then grew aware they were no more alone.
|
Something had come there conscious, vast and dire.
|
Near her she felt a silent shade immense
|
Chilling the noon with darkness for its back.
|
An awful hush had fallen upon the place:
|
There was no cry of birds, no voice of beasts.
|
A terror and an anguish filled the world,
|
As if annihilation's mystery
|
Had taken a sensible form. A cosmic mind
|
Looked out on all from formidable eyes
|
Contemning all with its unbearable gaze
|
And with immortal lids and a vast brow
|
It saw in its immense destroying thought
|
All things and beings as a pitiful dream,
|
Rejecting with calm disdain Nature's delight,
|
The wordless meaning of its deep regard
|
Voicing the unreality of things
|
And life that would be for ever but never was
|
And its brief and vain recurrence without cease,
|
As if from a Silence without form or name
|
The Shadow of a remote uncaring god
|
Doomed to his Nought the illusory universe,
|
Cancelling its show of idea and act in Time
|
And its imitation of eternity.
|
She knew that visible Death was standing there
|
And Satyavan had passed from her embrace.
|
END OF PART TWO
|
PART THREE
|
Towards the Black Void
|
SO WAS she left alone in the huge wood,
|
Surrounded by a dim unthinking world,
|
Her husband's corpse on her forsaken breast.
|
In her vast silent spirit motionless
|
She measured not her loss with helpless thoughts,
|
Nor rent with tears the marble seals of pain:
|
She rose not yet to face the dreadful god.
|
Over the body she loved her soul leaned out
|
In a great stillness without stir or voice,
|
As if her mind had died with Satyavan.
|
But still the human heart in her beat on.
|
Aware still of his being near to hers,
|
Closely she clasped to her the mute lifeless form
|
As though to guard the oneness they had been
|
And keep the spirit still within its frame.
|
Then suddenly there came on her the change
|
Which in tremendous moments of our lives
|
Can overtake sometimes the human soul
|
And hold it up towards its luminous source.
|
The veil is torn, the thinker is no more:
|
Only the spirit sees and all is known.
|
Then a calm Power seated above our brows
|
Is seen, unshaken by our thoughts and deeds,
|
Its stillness bears the voices of the world:
|
Immobile, it moves Nature, looks on life.
|
It shapes immutably its far-seen ends;
|
Untouched and tranquil amid error and tears
|
And measureless above our striving wills,
|
Its gaze controls the turbulent whirl of things.
|
To mate with the Glory it sees, the spirit grows:
|
The voice of life is tuned to infinite sounds,
|
The moments on great wings of lightning come
|
And godlike thoughts surprise the mind of earth.
|
Into the soul's splendour and intensity
|
A crescent of miraculous birth is tossed,
|
Whose horn of mystery floats in a bright void.
|
As into a heaven of strength and silence thought
|
Is ravished, all this living mortal clay
|
Is seized and in a swift and fiery flood
|
Of touches shaped by a Harmonist unseen.
|
A new sight comes, new voices in us form
|
A body of the music of the Gods.
|
Immortal yearnings without name leap down,
|
Large quiverings of godhead seeking run
|
And weave upon a puissant field of calm
|
A high and lonely ecstasy of will.
|
This in a moment's depths was born in her.
|
Now to the limitless gaze disclosed that sees
|
Things barred from human thinking's earthly lids,
|
The Spirit who had hidden in Nature soared
|
Out of his luminous nest within the worlds:
|
Like a vast fire it climbed the skies of night.
|
Thus were the cords of self-oblivion torn:
|
Like one who looks up to far heights she saw,
|
Ancient and strong as on a windless summit
|
Above her where she had worked in her lone mind
|
Labouring apart in a sole tower of self,
|
The source of all which she had seemed or wrought,
|
A power projected into cosmic space,
|
A slow embodiment of the aeonic will,
|
A starry fragment of the eternal Truth,
|
The passionate instrument of an unmoved Power.
|
A Presence was there that filled the listening world;
|
A central All assumed her boundless life.
|
A sovereignty, a silence and a swiftness,
|
One brooded over abysses who was she.
|
As in a choric robe of unheard sounds
|
CANTO I: Towards the Black Void
|
A Force descended trailing endless lights;
|
Linking Time's seconds to infinity,
|
Illimitably it girt the earth and her:
|
It sank into her soul and she was changed.
|
Then like a thought fulfilled by some great word
|
That mightiness assumed a symbol form:
|
Her being's spaces quivered with its touch,
|
It covered her as with immortal wings;
|
On its lips the curve of the unuttered Truth,
|
A halo of Wisdom's lightnings for its crown,
|
It entered the mystic lotus in her head,
|
A thousand-petalled home of power and light.
|
Immortal leader of her mortality,
|
Doer of her works and fountain of her words,
|
Invulnerable by Time, omnipotent,
|
It stood above her calm, immobile, mute.
|
All in her mated with that mighty hour,
|
As if the last remnant had been slain by Death
|
Of the humanity that once was hers.
|
Assuming a spiritual wide control,
|
Making life's sea a mirror of heaven's sky,
|
The young divinity in her earthly limbs
|
Filled with celestial strength her mortal part.
|
Over was the haunted pain, the rending fear:
|
Her grief had passed away, her mind was still,
|
Her heart beat quietly with a sovereign force.
|
There came a freedom from the heart-strings' clutch,
|
Now all her acts sprang from a godhead's calm.
|
Calmly she laid upon the forest soil
|
The dead who still reposed upon her breast
|
And bore to turn away from the dead form:
|
Sole now she rose to meet the dreadful god.
|
That mightier spirit turned its mastering gaze
|
On life and things, inheritor of a work
|
Left to it unfinished from her halting past,
|
When yet the mind, a passionate learner, toiled
|
And ill-shaped instruments were crudely moved.
|
Transcended now was the poor human rule;
|
A sovereign power was there, a godlike will.
|
A moment yet she lingered motionless
|
And looked down on the dead man at her feet;
|
Then like a tree recovering from a wind
|
She raised her noble head; fronting her gaze
|
Something stood there, unearthly, sombre, grand,
|
A limitless denial of all being
|
That wore the terror and wonder of a shape.
|
In its appalling eyes the tenebrous Form
|
Bore the deep pity of destroying gods;
|
A sorrowful irony curved the dreadful lips
|
That speak the word of doom. Eternal Night
|
In the dire beauty of an immortal face
|
Pitying arose, receiving all that lives
|
For ever into its fathomless heart, refuge
|
Of creatures from their anguish and world-pain.
|
His shape was nothingness made real, his limbs
|
Were monuments of transience and beneath
|
Brows of unwearying calm large godlike lids
|
Silent beheld the writhing serpent, life.
|
Unmoved their timeless wide unchanging gaze
|
Had seen the unprofitable cycles pass,
|
Survived the passing of unnumbered stars
|
And sheltered still the same immutable orbs.
|
The two opposed each other with their eyes,
|
Woman and universal god: around her,
|
Piling their void unbearable loneliness
|
Upon her mighty uncompanioned soul,
|
Many inhuman solitudes came close.
|
Vacant eternities forbidding hope
|
Laid upon her their huge and lifeless look,
|
And to her ears, silencing earthly sounds,
|
A sad and formidable voice arose
|
CANTO I: Towards the Black Void
|
Which seemed the whole adverse world's. "Unclasp", it cried,
|
"Thy passionate influence and relax, O slave
|
Of Nature, changing tool of changeless Law,
|
Who vainly writh'st rebellion to my yoke,
|
Thy elemental grasp; weep and forget.
|
Entomb thy passion in its living grave.
|
Leave now the once-loved spirit's abandoned robe:
|
Pass lonely back to thy vain life on earth."
|
It ceased, she moved not, and it spoke again,
|
Lowering its mighty key to human chords, -
|
Yet a dread cry behind the uttered sounds,
|
Echoing all sadness and immortal scorn,
|
Moaned like a hunger of far wandering waves.
|
"Wilt thou for ever keep thy passionate hold,
|
Thyself a creature doomed like him to pass,
|
Denying his soul death's calm and silent rest?
|
Relax thy grasp; this body is earth's and thine,
|
His spirit now belongs to a greater power.
|
Woman, thy husb and suffers." Savitri
|
Drew back her heart's force that clasped his body still
|
Where from her lap renounced on the smooth grass
|
Softly it lay, as often before in sleep
|
When from their couch she rose in the white dawn
|
Called by her daily tasks: now too, as if called,
|
She rose and stood gathered in lonely strength,
|
Like one who drops his mantle for a race
|
And waits the signal, motionlessly swift.
|
She knew not to what course: her spirit above
|
On the crypt-summit of her secret form
|
Like one left sentinel on a mountain crest,
|
A fiery-footed splendour puissant-winged,
|
Watched flaming-silent, with her voiceless soul
|
Like a still sail upon a windless sea.
|
White passionless it rode, an anchored might,
|
Waiting what far-ridged impulse should arise
|
Out of the eternal depths and cast its surge.
|
Then Death the king leaned boundless down, as leans
|
Night over tired lands, when evening pales
|
And fading gleams break down the horizon's walls,
|
Nor yet the dusk grows mystic with the moon.
|
The dim and awful godhead rose erect
|
From his brief stooping to his touch on earth,
|
And, like a dream that wakes out of a dream,
|
Forsaking the poor mould of that dead clay,
|
Another luminous Satyavan arose,
|
Starting upright from the recumbent earth
|
As if someone over viewless borders stepped
|
Emerging on the edge of unseen worlds.
|
In the earth's day the silent marvel stood
|
Between the mortal woman and the god.
|
Such seemed he as if one departed came
|
Wearing the light of a celestial shape
|
Splendidly alien to the mortal air.
|
The mind sought things long loved and fell back foiled
|
From unfamiliar hues, beheld yet longed,
|
By the sweet radiant form unsatisfied,
|
Incredulous of its too bright hints of heaven;
|
Too strange the brilliant phantasm to life's clasp
|
Desiring the warm creations of the earth
|
Reared in the ardour of material suns,
|
The senses seized in vain a glorious shade:
|
Only the spirit knew the spirit still,
|
And the heart divined the old loved heart, though changed.
|
Between two realms he stood, not wavering,
|
But fixed in quiet strong expectancy,
|
Like one who, sightless, listens for a command.
|
So were they immobile on that earthly field,
|
Powers not of earth, though one in human clay.
|
On either side of one two spirits strove;
|
Silence battled with silence, vast with vast.
|
But now the impulse of the Path was felt
|
Moving from the Silence that supports the stars
|
CANTO I: Towards the Black Void
|
To touch the confines of the visible world.
|
Luminous he moved away; behind him Death
|
Went slowly with his noiseless tread, as seen
|
In dream-built fields a shadowy herdsman glides
|
Behind some wanderer from his voiceless herds,
|
And Savitri moved behind eternal Death,
|
Her mortal pace was equalled with the god's.
|
Wordless she travelled in her lover's steps,
|
Planting her human feet where his had trod,
|
Into the perilous silences beyond.
|
At first in a blind stress of woods she moved
|
With strange inhuman paces on the soil,
|
Journeying as if upon an unseen road.
|
Around her on the green and imaged earth
|
The flickering screen of forests ringed her steps;
|
Its thick luxurious obstacle of boughs
|
Besieged her body pressing dimly through
|
In a rich realm of whispers palpable,
|
And all the murmurous beauty of the leaves
|
Rippled around her like an emerald robe.
|
But more and more this grew an alien sound,
|
And her old intimate body seemed to her
|
A burden which her being remotely bore.
|
Herself lived far in some uplifted scene
|
Where to the trance-claimed vision of pursuit,
|
Sole presences in a high spaceless dream,
|
The luminous spirit glided stilly on
|
And the great shadow travelled vague behind.
|
Still with an amorous crowd of seeking hands
|
Softly entreated by their old desires
|
Her senses felt earth's close and gentle air
|
Cling round them and in troubled branches knew
|
Uncertain treadings of a faint-foot wind:
|
She bore dim fragrances, far callings touched;
|
The wild bird's voice and its winged rustle came
|
As if a sigh from some forgotten world.
|
Earth stood aloof, yet near: round her it wove
|
Its sweetness and its greenness and delight,
|
Its brilliance suave of well-loved vivid hues,
|
Sunlight arriving to its golden noon,
|
And the blue heavens and the caressing soil.
|
The ancient mother offered to her child
|
Her simple world of kind familiar things.
|
But now, as if the body's sensuous hold
|
Curbing the godhead of her infinite walk
|
Had freed those spirits to their grander road
|
Across some boundary's intangible bar,
|
The silent god grew mighty and remote
|
In other spaces, and the soul she loved
|
Lost its consenting nearness to her life.
|
Into a deep and unfamiliar air
|
Enormous, windless, without stir or sound
|
They seemed to enlarge away, drawn by some wide
|
Pale distance, from the warm control of earth
|
And her grown far: now, now they would escape.
|
Then flaming from her body's nest alarmed
|
Her violent spirit soared at Satyavan.
|
Out mid the plunge of heaven-surrounded rocks
|
So in a terror and a wrath divine
|
From her eyrie streams against the ascending death,
|
Indignant at its crouching point of steel,
|
A fierce she-eagle threatened in her brood,
|
Borne on a rush of puissance and a cry,
|
Outwinging like a mass of golden fire.
|
So on a spirit's flaming outrush borne
|
She crossed the borders of dividing sense;
|
Like pale discarded sheaths dropped dully down
|
Her mortal members fell back from her soul.
|
A moment of a secret body's sleep,
|
Her trance knew not of sun or earth or world;
|
Thought, time and death were absent from her grasp:
|
CANTO I: Towards the Black Void
|
She knew not self, forgotten was Savitri.
|
All was the violent ocean of a will
|
Where lived captive to an immense caress,
|
Possessed in a supreme identity,
|
Her aim, joy, origin, Satyavan alone.
|
Her sovereign prisoned in her being's core,
|
He beat there like a rhythmic heart, - herself
|
But different still, one loved, enveloped, clasped,
|
A treasure saved from the collapse of space.
|
Around him nameless, infinite she surged,
|
Her spirit fulfilled in his spirit, rich with all Time,
|
As if Love's deathless moment had been found,
|
A pearl within eternity's white shell.
|
Then out of the engulfing sea of trance
|
Her mind rose drenched to light streaming with hues
|
Of vision and, awake once more to Time,
|
Returned to shape the lineaments of things
|
And live in borders of the seen and known.
|
Onward the three still moved in her soul-scene.
|
As if pacing through fragments of a dream,
|
She seemed to travel on, a visioned shape
|
Imagining other musers like herself,
|
By them imagined in their lonely sleep.
|
Ungrasped, unreal, yet familiar, old,
|
Like clefts of unsubstantial memory,
|
Scenes often traversed, never lived in, fled
|
Past her unheeding to forgotten goals.
|
In voiceless regions they were travellers
|
Alone in a new world where souls were not,
|
But only living moods: a strange hushed weird
|
Country was round them, strange far skies above,
|
A doubting space where dreaming objects lived
|
Within themselves their one unchanged idea.
|
Weird were the grasses, weird the treeless plains;
|
Weird ran the road which like fear hastening
|
Towards that of which it has most terror, passed
|
Phantasmal between pillared conscious rocks
|
Sombre and high, gates brooding, whose stone thoughts
|
Lost their huge sense beyond in giant night.
|
Enigma of the Inconscient's sculptural sleep,
|
Symbols of the approach to darkness old
|
And monuments of her titanic reign,
|
Opening to depths like dumb appalling jaws
|
That wait a traveller down a haunted path
|
Attracted to a mystery that slays,
|
They watched across her road, cruel and still;
|
Sentinels they stood of dumb Necessity,
|
Mute heads of vigilant and sullen gloom,
|
Carved muzzle of a dim enormous world.
|
Then, to that chill sere heavy line arrived
|
Where his feet touched the shadowy marches' brink,
|
Turning arrested luminous Satyavan
|
Looked back with his wonderful eyes at Savitri.
|
But Death pealed forth his vast abysmal cry:
|
"O mortal, turn back to thy transient kind;
|
Aspire not to accompany Death to his home,
|
As if thy breath could live where Time must die.
|
Think not thy mind-born passion strength from heaven
|
To uplift thy spirit from its earthly base
|
And, breaking out from the material cage,
|
To upbuoy thy feet of dream in groundless Nought
|
And bear thee through the pathless infinite.
|
Only in human limits man lives safe.
|
Trust not in the unreal Lords of Time,
|
Immortal deeming this image of thyself
|
Which they have built on a Dream's floating ground.
|
Let not the dreadful goddess move thy soul
|
To enlarge thy vehement trespass into worlds
|
Where it shall perish like a helpless thought.
|
Know the cold term-stones of thy hopes in life.
|
Armed vainly with the Ideal's borrowed might,
|
Dare not to outstep man's bound and measured force:
|
CANTO I: Towards the Black Void
|
Ignorant and stumbling, in brief boundaries pent,
|
He crowns himself the world's mock suzerain,
|
Tormenting Nature with the works of Mind.
|
O sleeper, dreaming of divinity,
|
Wake trembling mid the indifferent silences
|
In which thy few weak chords of being die.
|
Impermanent creatures, sorrowful foam of Time,
|
Your transient loves bind not the eternal gods."
|
The dread voice ebbed in the consenting hush
|
Which seemed to close upon it, wide, intense,
|
A wordless sanction from the jaws of Night.
|
The Woman answered not. Her high nude soul,
|
Stripped of the girdle of mortality,
|
Against fixed destiny and the grooves of law
|
Stood up in its sheer will a primal force.
|
Still like a statue on its pedestal,
|
Lone in the silence and to vastness bared,
|
Against midnight's dumb abysses piled in front
|
A columned shaft of fire and light she rose.
|
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
|
Present and past into the Timeless lapsed;
|
Arrested upon dim adventure's brink,
|
CANTO II: The Journey in Eternal Night
|
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.
|
As disappears a golden lamp in gloom
|
Borne into distance from the eyes' 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,
|
CANTO II: The Journey in Eternal Night
|
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.
|
"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 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,
|
CANTO II: The Journey in Eternal Night
|
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, thy tie to earth,
|
And with thy heart's little remnants try to live.
|
Hope not to win back to thee Satyavan.
|
Yet since thy strength deserves no trivial crown,
|
Gifts I can give to soo the 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 refusal 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.
|
CANTO II: The Journey in Eternal Night
|
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.
|
My will too is a law, my strength a god.
|
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
|
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 have 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.
|
CANTO II: The Journey in Eternal Night
|
Mortal, whose spirit is my wandering breath,
|
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 exiguous dole
|
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?
|
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,
|
CANTO II: The Journey in Eternal Night
|
I am a timeless Nothingness carrying all,
|
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
|
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 unmoved 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 was man born among the monstrous stars
|
CANTO II: The Journey in Eternal Night
|
Dowered with a mind and heart to conquer thee."
|
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.
|
The Dream Twilight of the Ideal
|
ALL STILL was darkness dread and desolate;
|
There was no change nor any hope of change.
|
In this black dream which was a house of Void,
|
A walk to Nowhere in a land of Nought,
|
Ever they drifted without aim or goal;
|
Gloom led to worse gloom, depth to an emptier depth,
|
In some positive Non-being's purposeless Vast
|
Through formless wastes dumb and unknowable.
|
An ineffectual beam of suffering light
|
Through the despairing darkness dogged their steps
|
Like the remembrance of a glory lost;
|
Even while it grew, it seemed unreal there,
|
Yet haunted Nihil's chill stupendous realm,
|
Unquenchable, perpetual, lonely, null,
|
A pallid ghost of some dead eternity.
|
It was as if she must pay now her debt,
|
Her vain presumption to exist and think,
|
To some brilliant Maya that conceived her soul.
|
This most she must absolve with endless pangs,
|
Her deep original sin, the will to be
|
And the sin last, greatest, the spiritual pride,
|
That, made of dust, equalled itself with heaven,
|
Its scorn of the worm writhing in the mud,
|
Condemned ephemeral, born from Nature's dream,
|
Refusal of the transient creature's role,
|
The claim to be a living fire of God,
|
The will to be immortal and divine.
|
In that tremendous darkness heavy and bare
|
She atoned for all since the first act whence sprang
|
The error of the consciousness of Time,
|
The rending of the Inconscient's seal of sleep,
|
The primal and unpardoned revolt that broke
|
The peace and silence of the Nothingness
|
Which was before a seeming universe
|
Appeared in a vanity of imagined Space
|
And life arose engendering grief and pain:
|
A great Negation was the Real's face
|
Prohibiting the vain process of Time:
|
And when there is no world, no creature more,
|
When Time's intrusion has been blotted out,
|
It shall last, unbodied, saved from thought, at peace.
|
Accursed in what had been her godhead source,
|
Condemned to live for ever empty of bliss,
|
Her immortality her chastisement,
|
Her spirit, guilty of being, wandered doomed,
|
Moving for ever through eternal Night.
|
But Maya is a veil of the Absolute;
|
A Truth occult has made this mighty world:
|
The Eternal's wisdom and self-knowledge act
|
In ignorant Mind and in the body's steps.
|
The Inconscient is the Superconscient's sleep.
|
An unintelligible Intelligence
|
Invents creation's paradox profound;
|
Spiritual thought is crammed in Matter's forms,
|
Unseen it throws out a dumb energy
|
And works a miracle by a machine.
|
All here is a mystery of contraries:
|
Darkness a magic of self-hidden Light,
|
Suffering some secret rapture's tragic mask
|
And death an instrument of perpetual life.
|
Although Death walks beside us on Life's road,
|
A dim bystander at the body's start
|
And a last judgment on man's futile works,
|
Other is the riddle of its ambiguous face:
|
Death is a stair, a door, a stumbling stride
|
The soul must take to cross from birth to birth,
|
A grey defeat pregnant with victory,
|
CANTO I: The Dream Twilight of the Ideal
|
A whip to lash us towards our deathless state.
|
The inconscient world is the spirit's self-made room,
|
Eternal Night shadow of eternal Day.
|
Night is not our beginning nor our end;
|
She is the dark Mother in whose womb we have hid
|
Safe from too swift a waking to world-pain.
|
We came to her from a supernal Light,
|
By Light we live and to the Light we go.
|
Here in this seat of Darkness mute and lone,
|
In the heart of everlasting Nothingness
|
Light conquered now even by that feeble beam:
|
Its faint infiltration drilled the blind deaf mass;
|
Almost it changed into a glimmering sight
|
That housed the phantom of an aureate Sun
|
Whose orb pupilled the eye of Nothingness.
|
A golden fire came in and burned Night's heart;
|
Her dusky mindlessness began to dream;
|
The Inconscient conscious grew, Night felt and thought.
|
Assailed in the sovereign emptiness of its reign
|
The intolerant Darkness paled and drew apart
|
Till only a few black remnants stained that Ray.
|
But on a failing edge of dumb lost space
|
Still a great dragon body sullenly loomed;
|
Adversary of the slow struggling Dawn
|
Defending its ground of tortured mystery,
|
It trailed its coils through the dead martyred air
|
And curving fled down a grey slope of Time.
|
There is a morning twilight of the gods;
|
Miraculous from sleep their forms arise
|
And God's long nights are justified by dawn.
|
There breaks a passion and splendour of new birth
|
And hue-winged visions stray across the lids,
|
Heaven's chanting heralds waken dim-eyed Space.
|
The dreaming deities look beyond the seen
|
And fashion in their thoughts the ideal worlds
|
Sprung from a limitless moment of desire
|
That once had lodged in some abysmal heart.
|
Passed was the heaviness of the eyeless dark
|
And all the sorrow of the night was dead:
|
Surprised by a blind joy with groping hands
|
Like one who wakes to find his dreams were true,
|
Into a happy misty twilit world
|
Where all ran after light and joy and love
|
She slipped; there far-off raptures drew more close
|
And deep anticipations of delight,
|
For ever eager to be grasped and held,
|
Were never grasped, yet breathed strange ecstasy.
|
A pearl-winged indistinctness fleeting swam,
|
An air that dared not suffer too much light.
|
Vague fields were there, vague pastures gleamed, vague trees,
|
Vague scenes dim-hearted in a drifting haze;
|
Vague cattle white roamed glimmering through the mist;
|
Vague spirits wandered with a bodiless cry,
|
Vague melodies touched the soul and fled pursued
|
Into harmonious distances unseized;
|
Forms subtly elusive and half-luminous powers
|
Wishing no goal for their unearthly course
|
Strayed happily through vague ideal lands,
|
Or floated without footing or their walk
|
Left steps of reverie on sweet memory's ground;
|
Or they paced to the mighty measure of their thoughts
|
Led by a low far chanting of the gods.
|
A ripple of gleaming wings crossed the far sky;
|
Birds like pale-bosomed imaginations flew
|
With low disturbing voices of desire,
|
And half-heard lowings drew the listening ear,
|
As if the Sun-god's brilliant kine were there
|
Hidden in mist and passing towards the sun.
|
These fugitive beings, these elusive shapes
|
Were all that claimed the eye and met the soul,
|
The natural inhabitants of that world.
|
CANTO I: The Dream Twilight of the Ideal
|
But nothing there was fixed or stayed for long;
|
No mortal feet could rest upon that soil,
|
No breath of life lingered embodied there.
|
In that fine chaos joy fled dancing past
|
And beauty evaded settled line and form
|
And hid its sense in mysteries of hue;
|
Yet gladness ever repeated the same notes
|
And gave the sense of an enduring world;
|
There was a strange consistency of shapes,
|
And the same thoughts were constant passers-by
|
And all renewed unendingly its charm
|
Alluring ever the expectant heart
|
Like music that one always waits to hear,
|
Like the recurrence of a haunting rhyme.
|
One touched incessantly things never seized,
|
A skirt of worlds invisibly divine.
|
As if a trail of disappearing stars
|
There showered upon the floating atmosphere
|
Colours and lights and evanescent gleams
|
That called to follow into a magic heaven,
|
And in each cry that fainted on the ear
|
There was the voice of an unrealised bliss.
|
An adoration reigned in the yearning heart,
|
A spirit of purity, an elusive presence
|
Of faery beauty and ungrasped delight
|
Whose momentary and escaping thrill,
|
However unsubstantial to our flesh,
|
And brief even in imperishableness,
|
Much sweeter seemed than any rapture known
|
Earth or all-conquering heaven can ever give.
|
Heaven ever young and earth too firm and old
|
Delay the heart by immobility:
|
Their raptures of creation last too long,
|
Their bold formations are too absolute;
|
Carved by an anguish of divine endeavour
|
They stand up sculptured on the eternal hills,
|
Or quarried from the living rocks of God
|
Win immortality by perfect form.
|
They are too intimate with eternal things:
|
Vessels of infinite significances,
|
They are too clear, too great, too meaningful;
|
No mist or shadow soothes the vanquished sight,
|
No soft penumbra of incertitude.
|
These only touched a golden hem of bliss,
|
The gleaming shoulder of some godlike hope,
|
The flying feet of exquisite desires.
|
On a slow trembling brink between night and day
|
They shone like visitants from the morning star,
|
Satisfied beginnings of perfection, first
|
Tremulous imaginings of a heavenly world:
|
They mingle in a passion of pursuit,
|
Thrilled with a spray of joy too slight to tire.
|
All in this world was shadowed forth, not limned,
|
Like faces leaping on a fan of fire
|
Or shapes of wonder in a tinted blur,
|
Like fugitive landscapes painting silver mists.
|
Here vision fled back from the sight alarmed,
|
And sound sought refuge from the ear's surprise,
|
And all experience was a hasty joy.
|
The joys here snatched were half-forbidden things,
|
Timorous soul-bridals delicately veiled
|
As when a goddess' bosom dimly moves
|
To first desire and her white soul transfigured,
|
A glimmering Eden crossed by faery gleams,
|
Trembles to expectation's fiery wand,
|
But nothing is familiar yet with bliss.
|
All things in this fair realm were heavenly strange
|
In a fleeting gladness of untired delight,
|
In an insistency of magic change.
|
Past vanishing hedges, hurrying hints of fields,
|
Mid swift escaping lanes that fled her feet
|
Journeying she wished no end: as one through clouds
|
CANTO I: The Dream Twilight of the Ideal
|
Travels upon a mountain ridge and hears
|
Arising to him out of hidden depths
|
Sound of invisible streams, she walked besieged
|
By the illusion of a mystic space,
|
A charm of bodiless touches felt and heard
|
A sweetness as of voices high and dim
|
Calling like travellers upon seeking winds
|
Melodiously with an alluring cry.
|
As if a music old yet ever new,
|
Moving suggestions on her heart-strings dwelt,
|
Thoughts that no habitation found, yet clung
|
With passionate repetition to her mind,
|
Desires that hurt not, happy only to live
|
Always the same and always unfulfilled
|
Sang in the breast like a celestial lyre.
|
Thus all could last yet nothing ever be.
|
In this beauty as of mind made visible,
|
Dressed in its rays of wonder Satyavan
|
Before her seemed the centre of its charm,
|
Head of her loveliness of longing dreams
|
And captain of the fancies of her soul.
|
Even the dreadful majesty of Death's face
|
And its sombre sadness could not darken nor slay
|
The intangible lustre of those fleeting skies.
|
The sombre Shadow sullen, implacable
|
Made beauty and laughter more imperative;
|
Enhanced by his grey, joy grew more bright and dear;
|
His dark contrast edging ideal sight
|
Deepened unuttered meanings to the heart;
|
Pain grew a trembling undertone of bliss
|
And transience immortality's floating hem,
|
A moment's robe in which she looked more fair,
|
Its antithesis sharpening her divinity.
|
A comrade of the Ray and Mist and Flame,
|
By a moon-bright face a brilliant moment drawn,
|
Almost she seemed a thought mid floating thoughts,
|
Seen hardly by a visionary mind
|
Amid the white inward musings of the soul.
|
Half-vanquished by the dream-happiness around,
|
Awhile she moved on an enchantment's soil,
|
But still remained possessor of her soul.
|
Above, her spirit in its mighty trance
|
Saw all, but lived for its transcendent task,
|
Immutable like a fixed eternal star.
|
The Gospel of Death and Vanity of the Ideal
|
THEN pealed the calm inexorable voice:
|
Abolishing hope, cancelling life's golden truths,
|
Fatal its accents smote the trembling air.
|
That lovely world swam thin and frail, most like
|
Some pearly evanescent farewell gleam
|
On the faint verge of dusk in moonless eves.
|
"Prisoner of Nature, many-visioned spirit,
|
Thought's creature in the ideal's realm enjoying
|
Thy unsubstantial immortality
|
The subtle marvellous mind of man has feigned,
|
This is the world from which thy yearnings came.
|
When it would build eternity from the dust,
|
Man's thought paints images illusion rounds;
|
Prophesying glories it shall never see,
|
It labours delicately among its dreams.
|
Behold this fleeing of light-tasselled shapes,
|
Aerial raiment of unbodied gods;
|
A rapture of things that never can be born,
|
Hope chants to hope a bright immortal choir;
|
Cloud satisfies cloud, phantom to longing phantom
|
Leans sweetly, sweetly is clasped or sweetly chased.
|
This is the stuff from which the ideal is formed:
|
Its builder is thought, its base the heart's desire,
|
But nothing real answers to their call.
|
The ideal dwells not in heaven, nor on the earth,
|
A bright delirium of man's ardour of hope
|
Drunk with the wine of its own fantasy.
|
It is a brilliant shadow's dreamy trail.
|
Thy vision's error builds the azure skies,
|
Thy vision's error drew the rainbow's arch;
|
Thy mortal longing made for thee a soul.
|
This angel in thy body thou callst love,
|
Who shapes his wings from thy emotion's hues,
|
In a ferment of thy body has been born
|
And with the body that housed it it must die.
|
It is a passion of thy yearning cells,
|
It is flesh that calls to flesh to serve its lust;
|
It is thy mind that seeks an answering mind
|
And dreams awhile that it has found its mate;
|
It is thy life that asks a human prop
|
To uphold its weakness lonely in the world
|
Or feeds its hunger on another's life.
|
A beast of prey that pauses in its prowl,
|
It crouches under a bush in splendid flower
|
To seize a heart and body for its food:
|
This beast thou dreamst immortal and a god.
|
O human mind, vainly thou torturest
|
An hour's delight to stretch through infinity's
|
Long void and fill its formless, passionless gulfs,
|
Persuading the insensible Abyss
|
To lend eternity to perishing things,
|
And trickst the fragile movements of thy heart
|
With thy spirit's feint of immortality.
|
All here emerges born from Nothingness;
|
Encircled it lasts by the emptiness of Space,
|
Awhile upheld by an unknowing Force,
|
Then crumbles back into its parent Nought:
|
Only the mute Alone can for ever be.
|
In the Alone there is no room for love.
|
In vain to clo the love's perishable mud
|
Thou hast woven on the Immortals' borrowed loom
|
The ideal's gorgeous and unfading robe.
|
The ideal never yet was real made.
|
Imprisoned in form that glory cannot live;
|
Into a body shut it breathes no more.
|
Intangible, remote, for ever pure,
|
CANTO II: The Gospel of Death and Vanity of the Ideal
|
A sovereign of its own brilliant void,
|
Unwillingly it descends to earthly air
|
To inhabit a white temple in man's heart:
|
In his heart it shines rejected by his life.
|
Immutable, bodiless, beautiful, grand and dumb,
|
Immobile on its shining throne it sits;
|
Dumb it receives his offering and his prayer.
|
It has no voice to answer to his call,
|
No feet that move, no hands to take his gifts:
|
Aerial statue of the nude Idea,
|
Virgin conception of a bodiless god,
|
Its light stirs man the thinker to create
|
An earthly semblance of diviner things.
|
Its hued reflection falls upon man's acts;
|
His institutions are its cenotaphs,
|
He signs his dead conventions with its name;
|
His virtues don the Ideal's skiey robe
|
And a nimbus of the outline of its face:
|
He hides their littleness with the divine Name.
|
Yet insufficient is the bright pretence
|
To screen their indigent and earthy make:
|
Earth only is there and not some heavenly source.
|
If heavens there are they are veiled in their own light,
|
If a Truth eternal somewhere reigns unknown,
|
It burns in a tremendous void of God;
|
For truth shines far from the falsehoods of the world;
|
How can the heavens come down to unhappy earth
|
Or the eternal lodge in drifting time?
|
How shall the Ideal tread earth's dolorous soil
|
Where life is only a labour and a hope,
|
A child of Matter and by Matter fed,
|
A fire flaming low in Nature's grate,
|
A wave that breaks upon a shore in Time,
|
A journey's toilsome trudge with death for goal?
|
The Avatars have lived and died in vain,
|
Vain was the sage's thought, the prophet's voice;
|
In vain is seen the shining upward Way.
|
Earth lies unchanged beneath the circling sun;
|
She loves her fall and no omnipotence
|
Her mortal imperfections can erase,
|
Force on man's crooked ignorance Heaven's straight line
|
Or colonise a world of death with gods.
|
O traveller in the chariot of the Sun,
|
High priestess in thy holy fancy's shrine
|
Who with a magic ritual in earth's house
|
Worshippest ideal and eternal love,
|
What is this love thy thought has deified,
|
This sacred legend and immortal myth?
|
It is a conscious yearning of thy flesh,
|
It is a glorious burning of thy nerves,
|
A rose of dream-splendour petalling thy mind,
|
A great red rapture and torture of thy heart.
|
A sudden transfiguration of thy days,
|
It passes and the world is as before.
|
A ravishing edge of sweetness and of pain,
|
A thrill in its yearning makes it seem divine,
|
A golden bridge across the roar of the years,
|
A cord tying thee to eternity.
|
And yet how brief and frail! how soon is spent
|
This treasure wasted by the gods on man,
|
This happy closeness as of soul to soul,
|
This honey of the body's companionship,
|
This heightened joy, this ecstasy in the veins,
|
This strange illumination of the sense!
|
If Satyavan had lived, love would have died;
|
But Satyavan is dead and love shall live
|
A little while in thy sad breast, until
|
His face and body fade on memory's wall
|
Where other bodies, other faces come.
|
When love breaks suddenly into the life
|
At first man steps into a world of the sun;
|
In his passion he feels his heavenly element:
|
CANTO II: The Gospel of Death and Vanity of the Ideal
|
But only a fine sunlit patch of earth
|
The marvellous aspect took of heaven's outburst;
|
The snake is there and the worm in the heart of the rose.
|
A word, a moment's act can slay the god;
|
Precarious is his immortality,
|
He has a thousand ways to suffer and die.
|
Love cannot live by heavenly food alone,
|
Only on sap of earth can it survive.
|
For thy passion was a sensual want refined,
|
A hunger of the body and the heart;
|
Thy want can tire and cease or turn elsewhere.
|
Or love may meet a dire and pitiless end
|
By bitter treason, or wrath with cruel wounds
|
Separate, or thy unsatisfied will to others
|
Depart when first love's joy lies stripped and slain:
|
A dull indifference replaces fire
|
Or an endearing habit imitates love:
|
An outward and uneasy union lasts
|
Or the routine of a life's compromise:
|
Where once the seed of oneness had been cast
|
Into a semblance of spiritual ground
|
By a divine adventure of heavenly powers
|
Two strive, constant associates without joy,
|
Two egos straining in a single leash,
|
Two minds divided by their jarring thoughts,
|
Two spirits disjoined, for ever separate.
|
Thus is the ideal falsified in man's world;
|
Trivial or sombre, disillusion comes,
|
Life's harsh reality stares at the soul:
|
Heaven's hour adjourned flees into bodiless Time.
|
Death saves thee from this and saves Satyavan:
|
He now is safe, delivered from himself;
|
He travels to silence and felicity.
|
Call him not back to the treacheries of earth
|
And the poor petty life of animal Man.
|
In my vast tranquil spaces let him sleep
|
In harmony with the mighty hush of death
|
Where love lies slumbering on the breast of peace.
|
And thou, go back alone to thy frail world:
|
Chastise thy heart with knowledge, unhood to see,
|
Thy nature raised into clear living heights,
|
The heaven-bird's view from unimagined peaks.
|
For when thou givest thy spirit to a dream
|
Soon hard necessity will smite thee awake:
|
Purest delight began and it must end.
|
Thou too shalt know, thy heart no anchor swinging,
|
Thy cradled soul moored in eternal seas.
|
Vain are the cycles of thy brilliant mind.
|
Renounce, forgetting joy and hope and tears,
|
Thy passionate nature in the bosom profound
|
Of a happy Nothingness and worldless Calm,
|
Delivered into my mysterious rest.
|
One with my fathomless Nihil all forget.
|
Forget thy fruitless spirit's waste of force,
|
Forget the weary circle of thy birth,
|
Forget the joy and the struggle and the pain,
|
The vague spiritual quest which first began
|
When worlds broke forth like clusters of fire-flowers,
|
And great burning thoughts voyaged through the sky of mind
|
And Time and its aeons crawled across the vasts
|
And souls emerged into mortality."
|
But Savitri replied to the dark Power:
|
"A dangerous music now thou findst, O Death,
|
Melting thy speech into harmonious pain,
|
And flut'st alluringly to tired hopes
|
Thy falsehoods mingled with sad strains of truth.
|
But I forbid thy voice to slay my soul.
|
My love is not a hunger of the heart,
|
My love is not a craving of the flesh;
|
It came to me from God, to God returns.
|
Even in all that life and man have marred,
|
A whisper of divinity still is heard,
|
CANTO II: The Gospel of Death and Vanity of the Ideal
|
A breath is felt from the eternal spheres.
|
Allowed by Heaven and wonderful to man
|
A sweet fire-rhythm of passion chants to love.
|
There is a hope in its wild infinite cry;
|
It rings with callings from forgotten heights,
|
And when its strains are hushed to high-winged souls
|
In their empyrean, its burning breath
|
Survives beyond, the rapturous core of suns
|
That flame for ever pure in skies unseen,
|
A voice of the eternal Ecstasy.
|
One day I shall behold my great sweet world
|
Put off the dire disguises of the gods,
|
Unveil from terror and disrobe from sin.
|
Appeased we shall draw near our mother's face,
|
We shall cast our candid souls upon her lap;
|
Then shall we clasp the ecstasy we chase,
|
Then shall we shudder with the long-sought god,
|
Then shall we find Heaven's unexpected strain.
|
Not only is there hope for godheads pure;
|
The violent and darkened deities
|
Leaped down from the one breast in rage to find
|
What the white gods had missed: they too are safe;
|
A mother's eyes are on them and her arms
|
Stretched out in love desire her rebel sons.
|
One who came love and lover and beloved
|
Eternal, built himself a wondrous field
|
And wove the measures of a marvellous dance.
|
There in its circles and its magic turns
|
Attracted he arrives, repelled he flees.
|
In the wild devious promptings of his mind
|
He tastes the honey of tears and puts off joy
|
Repenting, and has laughter and has wrath,
|
And both are a broken music of the soul
|
Which seeks out reconciled its heavenly rhyme.
|
Ever he comes to us across the years
|
Bearing a new sweet face that is the old.
|
His bliss laughs to us or it calls concealed
|
Like a far-heard unseen entrancing flute
|
From moonlit branches in the throbbing woods,
|
Tempting our angry search and passionate pain.
|
Disguised the Lover seeks and draws our souls.
|
He named himself for me, grew Satyavan.
|
For we were man and woman from the first,
|
The twin souls born from one undying fire.
|
Did he not dawn on me in other stars?
|
How has he through the thickets of the world
|
Pursued me like a lion in the night
|
And come upon me suddenly in the ways
|
And seized me with his glorious golden leap!
|
Unsatisfied he yearned for me through time,
|
Sometimes with wrath and sometimes with sweet peace
|
Desiring me since first the world began.
|
He rose like a wild wave out of the floods
|
And dragged me helpless into seas of bliss.
|
Out of my curtained past his arms arrive;
|
They have touched me like the soft persuading wind,
|
They have plucked me like a glad and trembling flower,
|
And clasped me happily burned in ruthless flame.
|
I too have found him charmed in lovely forms
|
And run delighted to his distant voice
|
And pressed to him past many dreadful bars.
|
If there is a yet happier greater god,
|
Let him first wear the face of Satyavan
|
And let his soul be one with him I love;
|
So let him seek me that I may desire.
|
For only one heart beats within my breast
|
And one god sits there throned. Advance, O Death,
|
Beyond the phantom beauty of this world;
|
For of its citizens I am not one.
|
I cherish God the Fire, not God the Dream."
|
But Death once more inflicted on her heart
|
The majesty of his calm and dreadful voice:
|
CANTO II: The Gospel of Death and Vanity of the Ideal
|
"A bright hallucination are thy thoughts.
|
A prisoner haled by a spiritual cord,
|
Of thy own sensuous will the ardent slave,
|
Thou sendest eagle-poised to meet the sun
|
Words winged with the red splendour of thy heart.
|
But knowledge dwells not in the passionate heart;
|
The heart's words fall back unheard from Wisdom's throne.
|
Vain is thy longing to build heaven on earth.
|
Artificer of Ideal and Idea,
|
Mind, child of Matter in the womb of Life,
|
To higher levels persuades his parents' steps:
|
Inapt, they follow ill the daring guide.
|
But Mind, a glorious traveller in the sky,
|
Walks lamely on the earth with footsteps slow;
|
Hardly he can mould the life's rebellious stuff,
|
Hardly can he hold the galloping hooves of sense:
|
His thoughts look straight into the very heavens;
|
They draw their gold from a celestial mine,
|
His acts work painfully a common ore.
|
All thy high dreams were made by Matter's mind
|
To solace its dull work in Matter's jail,
|
Its only house where it alone seems true.
|
A solid image of reality
|
Carved out of being to prop the works of Time,
|
Matter on the firm earth sits strong and sure.
|
It is the first-born of created things,
|
It stands the last when mind and life are slain,
|
And if it ended all would cease to be.
|
All else is only its outcome or its phase:
|
Thy soul is a brief flower by the gardener Mind
|
Created in thy matter's terrain plot;
|
It perishes with the plant on which it grows,
|
For from earth's sap it draws its heavenly hue:
|
Thy thoughts are gleams that pass on Matter's verge,
|
Thy life a lapsing wave on Matter's sea.
|
A careful steward of Truth's limited means,
|
Treasuring her founded facts from the squandering Power,
|
It tethers mind to the tent-posts of sense,
|
To a leaden grey routine clamps Life's caprice
|
And ties all creatures with the cords of Law.
|
A vessel of transmuting alchemies,
|
A glue that sticks together mind and life,
|
If Matter fails, all crumbling cracks and falls.
|
All upon Matter stands as on a rock.
|
Yet this security and guarantor
|
Pressed for credentials an impostor proves:
|
A cheat of substance where no substance is,
|
An appearance and a symbol and a nought,
|
Its forms have no original right to birth:
|
Its aspect of a fixed stability
|
Is the cover of a captive motion's swirl,
|
An order of the steps of Energy's dance
|
Whose footmarks leave for ever the same signs,
|
A concrete face of unsubstantial Time,
|
A trickle dotting the emptiness of Space:
|
A stable-seeming movement without change,
|
Yet change arrives and the last change is death.
|
What seemed most real once, is Nihil's show.
|
Its figures are snares that trap and prison the sense;
|
The beginningless Void was its artificer:
|
Nothing is there but aspects limned by Chance
|
And seeming shapes of seeming Energy.
|
All by Death's mercy brea the and live awhile,
|
All think and act by the Inconscient's grace.
|
Addict of the roseate luxury of thy thoughts,
|
Turn not thy gaze within thyself to look
|
At visions in the gleaming crystal, Mind,
|
Close not thy lids to dream the forms of Gods.
|
At last to open thy eyes consent and see
|
The stuff of which thou and the world are made.
|
Inconscient in the dumb inconscient Void
|
Inexplicably a moving world sprang forth:
|
CANTO II: The Gospel of Death and Vanity of the Ideal
|
Awhile secure, happily insensible,
|
It could not rest content with its own truth.
|
For something on its nescient breast was born
|
Condemned to see and know, to feel and love,
|
It watched its acts, imagined a soul within;
|
It groped for truth and dreamed of Self and God.
|
When all unconscious was, then all was well.
|
I, Death, was king and kept my regal state,
|
Designing my unwilled, unerring plan,
|
Creating with a calm insentient heart.
|
In my sovereign power of unreality
|
Obliging nothingness to take a form,
|
Infallibly my blind unthinking force
|
Making by chance a fixity like fate's,
|
By whim the formulas of Necessity,
|
Founded on the hollow ground of the Inane
|
The sure bizarrerie of Nature's scheme.
|
I curved the vacant ether into Space;
|
A huge expanding and contracting Breath
|
Harboured the fires of the universe:
|
I struck out the supreme original spark
|
And spread its sparse ranked armies through the Inane,
|
Manufactured the stars from the occult radiances,
|
Marshalled the platoons of the invisible dance;
|
I formed earth's beauty out of atom and gas,
|
And built from chemic plasm the living man.
|
Then Thought came in and spoiled the harmonious world:
|
Matter began to hope and think and feel,
|
Tissue and nerve bore joy and agony.
|
The inconscient cosmos strove to learn its task;
|
An ignorant personal God was born in Mind
|
And to understand invented reason's law,
|
The impersonal Vast throbbed back to man's desire,
|
A trouble rocked the great world's blind still heart
|
And Nature lost her wide immortal calm.
|
Thus came this warped incomprehensible scene
|
Of souls emmeshed in life's delight and pain
|
And Matter's sleep and Mind's mortality,
|
Of beings in Nature's prison waiting death
|
And consciousness left in seeking ignorance
|
And evolution's slow arrested plan.
|
This is the world in which thou mov'st, astray
|
In the tangled pathways of the human mind,
|
In the issueless circling of thy human life,
|
Searching for thy soul and thinking God is here.
|
But where is room for soul or place for God
|
In the brute immensity of a machine?
|
A transient Breath thou takest for thy soul,
|
Born from a gas, a plasm, a sperm, a gene,
|
A magnified image of man's mind for God,
|
A shadow of thyself thrown upon Space.
|
Interposed between the upper and nether Void,
|
Thy consciousness reflects the world around
|
In the distorting mirror of Ignorance
|
Or upwards turns to catch imagined stars.
|
Or if a half-Truth is playing with the earth
|
Throwing its light on a dark shadowy ground,
|
It touches only and leaves a luminous smudge.
|
Immortality thou claimest for thy spirit,
|
But immortality for imperfect man,
|
A god who hurts himself at every step,
|
Would be a cycle of eternal pain.
|
Wisdom and love thou claimest as thy right;
|
But knowledge in this world is error's mate,
|
A brilliant procuress of Nescience,
|
And human love a posturer on earth-stage
|
Who imitates with verve a faery dance.
|
An extract pressed from hard experience,
|
Man's knowledge casked in the barrels of Memory
|
Has the harsh savour of a mortal draught:
|
A sweet secretion from the erotic glands
|
Flattering and torturing the burning nerves,
|
CANTO II: The Gospel of Death and Vanity of the Ideal
|
Love is a honey and poison in the breast
|
Drunk by it as the nectar of the gods.
|
Earth's human wisdom is no great-browed power,
|
And love no gleaming angel from the skies;
|
If they aspire beyond earth's dullard air,
|
Arriving sunwards with frail waxen wings,
|
How high could reach that forced unnatural flight?
|
But not on earth can divine wisdom reign
|
And not on earth can divine love be found;
|
Heaven-born, only in heaven can they live;
|
Or else there too perhaps they are shining dreams.
|
Nay, is not all thou art and doest a dream?
|
Thy mind and life are tricks of Matter's force.
|
If thy mind seems to thee a radiant sun,
|
If thy life runs a swift and glorious stream,
|
This is the illusion of thy mortal heart
|
Dazzled by a ray of happiness or light.
|
Impotent to live by their own right divine,
|
Convinced of their brilliant unreality,
|
When their supporting ground is cut away,
|
These children of Matter into Matter die.
|
Even Matter vanishes into Energy's vague
|
And Energy is a motion of old Nought.
|
How shall the Ideal's unsubstantial hues
|
Be painted stiff on earth's vermilion blur,
|
A dream within a dream come doubly true?
|
How shall the will-o'-the-wisp become a star?
|
The Ideal is a malady of thy mind,
|
A bright delirium of thy speech and thought,
|
A strange wine of beauty lifting thee to false sight.
|
A noble fiction of thy yearnings made,
|
Thy human imperfection it must share:
|
Its forms in Nature disappoint the heart,
|
And never shall it find its heavenly shape
|
And never can it be fulfilled in Time.
|
O soul misled by the splendour of thy thoughts,
|
O earthly creature with thy dream of heaven,
|
Obey, resigned and still, the earthly law.
|
Accept the brief light that falls upon thy days;
|
Take what thou canst of Life's permitted joy;
|
Submitting to the ordeal of fate's scourge
|
Suffer what thou must of toil and grief and care.
|
There shall approach silencing thy passionate heart
|
My long calm night of everlasting sleep:
|
There into the hush from which thou cam'st retire."
|
The Debate of Love and Death
|
A SAD destroying cadence the voice sank;
|
It seemed to lead the advancing march of Life
|
Into some still original Inane.
|
But Savitri answered to almighty Death:
|
"O dark-browed sophist of the universe
|
Who veilst the Real with its own Idea,
|
Hiding with brute objects Nature's living face,
|
Masking eternity with thy dance of death,
|
Thou hast woven the ignorant mind into a screen
|
And made of Thought error's purveyor and scribe,
|
And a false witness of mind's servant sense.
|
An aesthete of the sorrow of the world,
|
Champion of a harsh and sad philosophy
|
Thou hast used words to shutter out the Light
|
And called in Truth to vindicate a lie.
|
A lying reality is falsehood's crown
|
And a perverted truth her richest gem.
|
O Death, thou speakest truth but truth that slays,
|
I answer to thee with the Truth that saves.
|
A traveller new-discovering himself,
|
One made of Matter's world his starting-point,
|
He made of Nothingness his living-room
|
And Night a process of the eternal light
|
And death a spur towards immortality.
|
God wrapped his head from sight in Matter's cowl,
|
His consciousness dived into inconscient depths,
|
All-Knowledge seemed a huge dark Nescience;
|
Infinity wore a boundless zero's form.
|
His abysms of bliss became insensible deeps,
|
Eternity a blank spiritual Vast.
|
Annulling an original nullity
|
The Timeless took its ground in emptiness
|
And drew the figure of a universe,
|
That the spirit might adventure into Time
|
And wrestle with adamant Necessity
|
And the soul pursue a cosmic pilgrimage.
|
A spirit moved in black immensities
|
And built a Thought in ancient Nothingness;
|
A soul was lit in God's tremendous Void,
|
A secret labouring glow of nascent fire.
|
In Nihil's gulf his mighty Puissance wrought;
|
She swung her formless motion into shapes,
|
Made Matter the body of the Bodiless.
|
Infant and dim the eternal Mights awoke.
|
In inert Matter breathed a slumbering Life,
|
In a subconscient Life Mind lay asleep;
|
In waking Life it stretched its giant limbs
|
To shake from it the torpor of its drowse;
|
A senseless substance quivered into sense,
|
The world's heart commenced to beat, its eyes to see,
|
In the crowded dumb vibrations of a brain
|
Thought fumbled in a ring to find itself,
|
Discovered speech and fed the new-born Word
|
That bridged with spans of light the world's ignorance.
|
In waking Mind, the Thinker built his house.
|
A reasoning animal willed and planned and sought;
|
He stood erect among his brute compeers,
|
He built life new, measured the universe,
|
Opposed his fate and wrestled with unseen Powers,
|
Conquered and used the laws that rule the world,
|
And hoped to ride the heavens and reach the stars,
|
A master of his huge environment.
|
Now through Mind's windows stares the demigod
|
Hidden behind the curtains of man's soul:
|
He has seen the Unknown, looked on Truth's veilless face;
|
A ray has touched him from the eternal sun;
|
Motionless, voiceless in foreseeing depths,
|
CANTO III: The Debate of Love and Death
|
He stands awake in Supernature's light
|
And sees a glory of arisen wings
|
And sees the vast descending might of God.
|
"O Death, thou lookst on an unfinished world
|
Assailed by thee and of its road unsure,
|
Peopled by imperfect minds and ignorant lives,
|
And sayest God is not and all is vain.
|
How shall the child already be the man?
|
Because he is infant, shall he never grow?
|
Because he is ignorant, shall he never learn?
|
In a small fragile seed a great tree lurks,
|
In a tiny gene a thinking being is shut;
|
A little element in a little sperm,
|
It grows and is a conqueror and a sage.
|
Then wilt thou spew out, Death, God's mystic truth,
|
Deny the occult spiritual miracle?
|
Still wilt thou say there is no spirit, no God?
|
A mute material Nature wakes and sees;
|
She has invented speech, unveiled a will.
|
Something there waits beyond towards which she strives,
|
Something surrounds her into which she grows:
|
To uncover the spirit, to change back into God,
|
To exceed herself is her transcendent task.
|
In God concealed the world began to be,
|
Tardily it travels towards manifest God:
|
Our imperfection towards perfection toils,
|
The body is the chrysalis of a soul:
|
The infinite holds the finite in its arms,
|
Time travels towards revealed eternity.
|
A miracle structure of the eternal Mage,
|
Matter its mystery hides from its own eyes,
|
A scripture written out in cryptic signs,
|
An occult document of the All-Wonderful's art.
|
All here bears witness to his secret might,
|
In all we feel his presence and his power.
|
A blaze of his sovereign glory is the sun,
|
A glory is the gold and glimmering moon,
|
A glory is his dream of purple sky.
|
A march of his greatness are the wheeling stars.
|
His laughter of beauty breaks out in green trees,
|
His moments of beauty triumph in a flower;
|
The blue sea's chant, the rivulet's wandering voice
|
Are murmurs falling from the Eternal's harp.
|
This world is God fulfilled in outwardness.
|
His ways challenge our reason and our sense;
|
By blind brute movements of an ignorant Force,
|
By means we slight as small, obscure or base,
|
A greatness founded upon little things,
|
He has built a world in the unknowing Void.
|
His forms he has massed from infinitesimal dust;
|
His marvels are built from insignificant things.
|
If mind is crippled, life untaught and crude,
|
If brutal masks are there and evil acts,
|
They are incidents of his vast and varied plot,
|
His great and dangerous drama's needed steps;
|
He makes with these and all his passion-play,
|
A play and yet no play but the deep scheme
|
Of a transcendent Wisdom finding ways
|
To meet her Lord in the shadow and the Night:
|
Above her is the vigil of the stars;
|
Watched by a solitary Infinitude
|
She embodies in dumb Matter the Divine,
|
In symbol minds and lives the Absolute.
|
A miracle-monger her mechanical craft;
|
Matter's machine worked out the laws of thought,
|
Life's engines served the labour of a soul:
|
The Mighty Mother her creation wrought,
|
A huge caprice self-bound by iron laws,
|
And shut God into an enigmatic world:
|
She lulled the Omniscient into nescient sleep,
|
Omnipotence on Inertia's back she drove,
|
Trod perfectly with divine unconscious steps
|
CANTO III: The Debate of Love and Death
|
The enormous circle of her wonder-works.
|
Immortality assured itself by death;
|
The Eternal's face was seen through drifts of Time.
|
His knowledge he disguised as Ignorance,
|
His Good he sowed in Evil's monstrous bed,
|
Made error a door by which Truth could enter in,
|
His plant of bliss watered with Sorrow's tears.
|
A thousand aspects point back to the One;
|
A dual Nature covered the Unique.
|
In this meeting of the Eternal's mingling masques,
|
This tangle-dance of passionate contraries
|
Locking like lovers in a forbidden embrace
|
The quarrel of their lost identity,
|
Through this wrestle and wrangle of the extremes of Power
|
Earth's million roads struggled towards deity.
|
All stumbled on behind a stumbling Guide,
|
Yet every stumble is a needed pace
|
On unknown routes to an unknowable goal.
|
All blundered and straggled towards the One Divine.
|
As if transmuted by a titan spell
|
The eternal Powers assumed a dubious face:
|
Idols of an oblique divinity,
|
They wore the heads of animal or troll,
|
Assumed ears of the faun, the satyr's hoof,
|
Or harboured the demoniac in their gaze:
|
A crooked maze they made of thinking mind,
|
They suffered a metamorphosis of the heart,
|
Admitting bacchant revellers from the Night
|
Into its sanctuary of delights,
|
As in a Dionysian masquerade.
|
On the highways, in the gardens of the world
|
They wallowed oblivious of their divine parts,
|
As drunkards of a dire Circean wine
|
Or a child who sprawls and sports in Nature's mire.
|
Even wisdom, hewer of the roads of God,
|
Is a partner in the deep disastrous game:
|
Lost is the pilgrim's wallet and the scrip,
|
She fails to read the map and watch the star.
|
A poor self-righteous virtue is her stock
|
And reason's pragmatic grope or abstract sight,
|
Or the technique of a brief hour's success
|
She teaches, an usher in utility's school.
|
On the ocean surface of vast Consciousness
|
Small thoughts in shoals are fished up into a net
|
But the great truths escape her narrow cast;
|
Guarded from vision by creation's depths,
|
Obscure they swim in blind enormous gulfs
|
Safe from the little sounding leads of mind,
|
Too far for the puny diver's shallow plunge.
|
Our mortal vision peers with ignorant eyes;
|
It has no gaze on the deep heart of things.
|
Our knowledge walks leaning on Error's staff,
|
A worshipper of false dogmas and false gods,
|
Or fanatic of a fierce intolerant creed
|
Or a seeker doubting every truth he finds,
|
A sceptic facing Light with adamant No
|
Or chilling the heart with dry ironic smile,
|
A cynic stamping out the god in man;
|
A darkness wallows in the paths of Time
|
Or lifts its giant head to blot the stars;
|
It makes a cloud of the interpreting mind
|
And intercepts the oracles of the Sun.
|
Yet Light is there; it stands at Nature's doors:
|
It holds a torch to lead the traveller in.
|
It waits to be kindled in our secret cells;
|
It is a star lighting an ignorant sea,
|
A lamp upon our poop piercing the night.
|
As knowledge grows Light flames up from within:
|
It is a shining warrior in the mind,
|
An eagle of dreams in the divining heart,
|
An armour in the fight, a bow of God.
|
Then larger dawns arrive and Wisdom's pomps
|
CANTO III: The Debate of Love and Death
|
Cross through the being's dim half-lighted fields;
|
Philosophy climbs up Thought's cloud-bank peaks
|
And Science tears out Nature's occult powers,
|
Enormous djinns who serve a dwarf's small needs,
|
Exposes the sealed minutiae of her art
|
And conquers her by her own captive force.
|
On heights unreached by mind's most daring soar,
|
Upon a dangerous edge of failing Time
|
The soul draws back into its deathless Self;
|
Man's knowledge becomes God's supernal Ray.
|
There is the mystic realm whence leaps the power
|
Whose fire burns in the eyes of seer and sage;
|
A lightning flash of visionary sight,
|
It plays upon an inward verge of mind:
|
Thought silenced gazes into a brilliant Void.
|
A voice comes down from mystic unseen peaks:
|
A cry of splendour from a mouth of storm,
|
It is the voice that speaks to night's profound,
|
It is the thunder and the flaming call.
|
Above the planes that climb from nescient earth,
|
A hand is lifted towards the Invisible's realm,
|
Beyond the superconscient's blinding line
|
And plucks away the screens of the Unknown;
|
A spirit within looks into the Eternal's eyes.
|
It hears the Word to which our hearts were deaf,
|
It sees through the blaze in which our thoughts grew blind;
|
It drinks from the naked breasts of glorious Truth,
|
It learns the secrets of eternity.
|
Thus all was plunged into the riddling Night,
|
Thus all is raised to meet a dazzling Sun.
|
O Death, this is the mystery of thy reign.
|
In earth's anomalous and magic field
|
Carried in its aimless journey by the sun
|
Mid the forced marches of the great dumb stars,
|
A darkness occupied the fields of God,
|
And Matter's world was governed by thy shape.
|
Thy mask has covered the Eternal's face,
|
The Bliss that made the world has fallen asleep.
|
Abandoned in the Vast she slumbered on:
|
An evil transmutation overtook
|
Her members till she knew herself no more.
|
Only through her creative slumber flit
|
Frail memories of the joy and beauty meant
|
Under the sky's blue laugh mid green-scarfed trees
|
And happy squanderings of scents and hues,
|
In the field of the golden promenade of the sun
|
And the vigil of the dream-light of the stars,
|
Amid high meditating heads of hills,
|
On the bosom of voluptuous rain-kissed earth
|
And by the sapphire tumblings of the sea.
|
But now the primal innocence is lost
|
And Death and Ignorance govern the mortal world
|
And Nature's visage wears a greyer hue.
|
Earth still has kept her early charm and grace,
|
The grandeur and the beauty still are hers,
|
But veiled is the divine Inhabitant.
|
The souls of men have wandered from the Light
|
And the great Mother turns away her face.
|
The eyes of the creatrix Bliss are closed
|
And sorrow's touch has found her in her dreams.
|
As she turns and tosses on her bed of Void,
|
Because she cannot wake and find herself
|
And cannot build again her perfect shape,
|
Oblivious of her nature and her state,
|
Forgetting her instinct of felicity,
|
Forgetting to create a world of joy,
|
She weeps and makes her creatures' eyes to weep;
|
Testing with sorrow's edge her children's breasts,
|
She spends on life's vain waste of hope and toil
|
The poignant luxury of grief and tears.
|
In the nightmare change of her half-conscious dream,
|
Tortured herself and torturing by her touch,
|
CANTO III: The Debate of Love and Death
|
She comes to our hearts and bodies and our lives
|
Wearing a hard and cruel mask of pain.
|
Our nature twisted by the abortive birth
|
Returns wry answers to life's questioning shocks,
|
An acrid relish finds in the world's pangs,
|
Drinks the sharp wine of grief's perversity.
|
A curse is laid on the pure joy of life:
|
Delight, God's sweetest sign and Beauty's twin,
|
Dreaded by aspiring saint and austere sage,
|
Is shunned, a dangerous and ambiguous cheat,
|
A specious trick of an infernal Power
|
It tempts the soul to its self-hurt and fall.
|
A puritan God made pleasure a poisonous fruit,
|
Or red drug in the market-place of Death,
|
And sin the child of Nature's ecstasy.
|
Yet every creature hunts for happiness,
|
Buys with harsh pangs or tears by violence
|
From the dull breast of the inanimate globe
|
Some fragment or some broken shard of bliss.
|
Even joy itself becomes a poisonous draught;
|
Its hunger is made a dreadful hook of Fate.
|
All means are held good to catch a single beam,
|
Eternity sacrificed for a moment's bliss:
|
Yet for joy and not for sorrow earth was made
|
And not as a dream in endless suffering Time.
|
Although God made the world for his delight,
|
An ignorant Power took charge and seemed his Will
|
And Death's deep falsity has mastered Life.
|
All grew a play of Chance simulating Fate.
|
"A secret air of pure felicity
|
Deep like a sapphire heaven our spirits breathe;
|
Our hearts and bodies feel its obscure call,
|
Our senses grope for it and touch and lose.
|
If this withdrew, the world would sink in the Void;
|
If this were not, nothing could move or live.
|
A hidden Bliss is at the root of things.
|
A mute Delight regards Time's countless works:
|
To house God's joy in things Space gave wide room,
|
To house God's joy in self our souls were born.
|
This universe an old enchantment guards;
|
Its objects are carved cups of World-Delight
|
Whose charmed wine is some deep soul's rapture-drink:
|
The All-Wonderful has packed heaven with his dreams,
|
He has made blank ancient Space his marvel-house;
|
He spilled his spirit into Matter's signs:
|
His fires of grandeur burn in the great sun,
|
He glides through heaven shimmering in the moon;
|
He is beauty carolling in the fields of sound;
|
He chants the stanzas of the odes of Wind;
|
He is silence watching in the stars at night;
|
He wakes at dawn and calls from every bough,
|
Lies stunned in the stone and dreams in flower and tree.
|
Even in this labour and dolour of Ignorance,
|
On the hard perilous ground of difficult earth,
|
In spite of death and evil circumstance
|
A will to live persists, a joy to be.
|
There is a joy in all that meets the sense,
|
A joy in all experience of the soul,
|
A joy in evil and a joy in good,
|
A joy in virtue and a joy in sin:
|
Indifferent to the threat of Karmic law,
|
Joy dares to grow upon forbidden soil,
|
Its sap runs through the plant and flowers of Pain:
|
It thrills with the drama of fate and tragic doom,
|
It tears its food from sorrow and ecstasy,
|
On danger and difficulty whets its strength;
|
It wallows with the reptile and the worm
|
And lifts its head, an equal of the stars;
|
It shares the faeries' dance, dines with the gnome:
|
It basks in the light and heat of many suns,
|
The sun of Beauty and the sun of Power
|
CANTO III: The Debate of Love and Death
|
Flatter and foster it with golden beams;
|
It grows towards the Titan and the God.
|
On earth it lingers drinking its deep fill,
|
Through the symbol of her pleasure and her pain,
|
Of the grapes of Heaven and the flowers of the Abyss,
|
Of the flame-stabs and the torment-craft of Hell
|
And dim fragments of the glory of Paradise.
|
In the small paltry pleasures of man's life,
|
In his petty passions and joys it finds a taste,
|
A taste in tears and torture of broken hearts,
|
In the crown of gold and in the crown of thorns,
|
In life's nectar of sweetness and its bitter wine.
|
All being it explores for unknown bliss,
|
Sounds all experience for things new and strange.
|
Life brings into the earthly creature's days
|
A tongue of glory from a brighter sphere:
|
It deepens in his musings and his Art,
|
It leaps at the splendour of some perfect word,
|
It exults in his high resolves and noble deeds,
|
Wanders in his errors, dares the abyss's brink,
|
It climbs in his climbings, wallows in his fall.
|
Angel and demon brides his chamber share,
|
Possessors or competitors for life's heart.
|
To the enjoyer of the cosmic scene
|
His greatness and his littleness equal are,
|
His magnanimity and meanness hues
|
Cast on some neutral background of the gods:
|
The Artist's skill he admires who planned it all.
|
But not for ever endures this danger game:
|
Beyond the earth, but meant for delivered earth,
|
Wisdom and joy prepare their perfect crown;
|
Truth superhuman calls to thinking man.
|
At last the soul turns to eternal things,
|
In every shrine it cries for the clasp of God.
|
Then is there played the crowning Mystery,
|
Then is achieved the longed-for miracle.
|
Immortal Bliss her wide celestial eyes
|
Opens on the stars, she stirs her mighty limbs;
|
Time thrills to the sapphics of her amour-song
|
And Space fills with a white beatitude.
|
Then leaving to its grief the human heart,
|
Abandoning speech and the name-determined realms,
|
Through a gleaming far-seen sky of wordless thought,
|
Through naked thought-free heavens of absolute sight,
|
She climbs to the summits where the unborn Idea
|
Remembering the future that must be
|
Looks down upon the works of labouring Force,
|
Immutable above the world it made.
|
In the vast golden laughter of Truth's sun
|
Like a great heaven-bird on a motionless sea
|
Is poised her winged ardour of creative joy
|
On the still deep of the Eternal's peace.
|
This was the aim, this the supernal Law,
|
Nature's allotted task when beauty-drenched
|
In dim mist-waters of inconscient sleep,
|
Out of the Void this grand creation rose, -
|
For this the Spirit came into the Abyss
|
And charged with its power Matter's unknowing force,
|
In Night's bare session to cathedral Light,
|
In Death's realm repatriate immortality.
|
A mystic slow transfiguration works.
|
All our earth starts from mud and ends in sky,
|
And Love that was once an animal's desire,
|
Then a sweet madness in the rapturous heart,
|
An ardent comradeship in the happy mind,
|
Becomes a wide spiritual yearning's space.
|
A lonely soul passions for the Alone,
|
The heart that loved man thrills to the love of God,
|
A body is his chamber and his shrine.
|
Then is our being rescued from separateness;
|
All is itself, all is new-felt in God:
|
A Lover leaning from his cloister's door
|
CANTO III: The Debate of Love and Death
|
Gathers the whole world into his single breast.
|
Then shall the business fail of Night and Death:
|
When unity is won, when strife is lost
|
And all is known and all is clasped by Love
|
Who would turn back to ignorance and pain?
|
"O Death, I have triumphed over thee within;
|
I quiver no more with the assault of grief;
|
A mighty calmness seated deep within
|
Has occupied my body and my sense:
|
It takes the world's grief and transmutes to strength,
|
It makes the world's joy one with the joy of God.
|
My love eternal sits throned on God's calm;
|
For Love must soar beyond the very heavens
|
And find its secret sense ineffable;
|
It must change its human ways to ways divine,
|
Yet keep its sovereignty of earthly bliss.
|
O Death, not for my heart's sweet poignancy
|
Nor for my happy body's bliss alone
|
I have claimed from thee the living Satyavan,
|
But for his work and mine, our sacred charge.
|
Our lives are God's messengers beneath the stars;
|
To dwell under death's shadow they have come
|
Tempting God's light to earth for the ignorant race,
|
His love to fill the hollow in men's hearts,
|
His bliss to heal the unhappiness of the world.
|
For I, the woman, am the force of God,
|
He the Eternal's delegate soul in man.
|
My will is greater than thy law, O Death;
|
My love is stronger than the bonds of Fate:
|
Our love is the heavenly seal of the Supreme.
|
I guard that seal against thy rending hands.
|
Love must not cease to live upon the earth;
|
For Love is the bright link twixt earth and heaven,
|
Love is the far Transcendent's angel here;
|
Love is man's lien on the Absolute."
|
But to the woman Death the god replied,
|
With the ironic laughter of his voice
|
Discouraging the labour of the stars:
|
"Even so men cheat the Truth with splendid thoughts.
|
Thus wilt thou hire the glorious charlatan, Mind,
|
To weave from his Ideal's gossamer air
|
A fine raiment for thy body's nude desires
|
And thy heart's clutching greedy passion clothe?
|
Daub not the web of life with magic hues:
|
Make rather thy thought a plain and faithful glass
|
Reflecting Matter and mortality,
|
And know thy soul a product of the flesh,
|
A made-up self in a constructed world.
|
Thy words are large murmurs in a mystic dream.
|
For how in the soiled heart of man could dwell
|
The immaculate grandeur of thy dream-built God,
|
Or who can see a face and form divine
|
In the naked two-legged worm thou callest man?
|
O human face, put off mind-painted masks:
|
The animal be, the worm that Nature meant;
|
Accept thy futile birth, thy narrow life.
|
For truth is bare like stone and hard like death;
|
Bare in the bareness, hard with truth's hardness live."
|
But Savitri replied to the dire God:
|
"Yes, I am human. Yet shall man by me,
|
Since in humanity waits his hour the God,
|
Trample thee down to reach the immortal heights,
|
Transcending grief and pain and fate and death.
|
Yes, my humanity is a mask of God:
|
He dwells in me, the mover of my acts,
|
Turning the great wheel of his cosmic work.
|
I am the living body of his light,
|
I am the thinking instrument of his power,
|
I incarnate Wisdom in an earthly breast,
|
I am his conquering and unslayable will.
|
The formless Spirit drew in me its shape;
|
In me are the Nameless and the secret Name."
|
CANTO III: The Debate of Love and Death
|
Death from the incredulous Darkness sent its cry:
|
"O priestess in Imagination's house,
|
Persuade first Nature's fixed immutable laws
|
And make the impossible thy daily work.
|
How canst thou force to wed two eternal foes?
|
Irreconcilable in their embrace
|
They cancel the glory of their pure extremes:
|
An unhappy wedlock maims their stunted force.
|
How shall thy will make one the true and false?
|
Where Matter is all, there Spirit is a dream:
|
If all are the Spirit, Matter is a lie,
|
And who was the liar who forged the universe?
|
The Real with the unreal cannot mate.
|
He who would turn to God, must leave the world;
|
He who would live in the Spirit, must give up life;
|
He who has met the Self, renounces self.
|
The voyagers of the million routes of mind
|
Who have travelled through Existence to its end,
|
Sages exploring the world-ocean's vasts,
|
Have found extinction the sole harbour safe.
|
Two only are the doors of man's escape,
|
Death of his body Matter's gate to peace,
|
Death of his soul his last felicity.
|
In me all take refuge, for I, Death, am God."
|
But Savitri replied to mighty Death:
|
"My heart is wiser than the Reason's thoughts,
|
My heart is stronger than thy bonds, O Death.
|
It sees and feels the one Heart beat in all,
|
It feels the high Transcendent's sunlike hands,
|
It sees the cosmic Spirit at its work;
|
In the dim Night it lies alone with God.
|
My heart's strength can carry the grief of the universe
|
And never falter from its luminous track,
|
Its white tremendous orbit through God's peace.
|
It can drink up the sea of All-Delight
|
And never lose the white spiritual touch,
|
The calm that broods in the deep Infinite."
|
He said, "Art thou indeed so strong, O heart,
|
O soul, so free? And canst thou gather then
|
Bright pleasure from my wayside flowering boughs,
|
Yet falter not from thy hard journey's goal,
|
Meet the world's dangerous touch and never fall?
|
Show me thy strength and freedom from my laws."
|
But Savitri answered, "Surely I shall find
|
Among the green and whispering woods of Life
|
Close-bosomed pleasures, only mine since his,
|
Or mine for him, because our joys are one.
|
And if I linger, Time is ours and God's,
|
And if I fall, is not his hand near mine?
|
All is a single plan; each wayside act
|
Deepens the soul's response, brings nearer the goal."
|
Death the contemptuous Nihil answered her:
|
"So prove thy absolute force to the wise gods,
|
By choosing earthly joy! For self demand
|
And yet from self and its gross masks live free.
|
Then will I give thee all thy soul desires,
|
All the brief joys earth keeps for mortal hearts.
|
Only the one dearest wish that outweighs all,
|
Hard laws forbid and thy ironic fate.
|
My will once wrought remains unchanged through Time,
|
And Satyavan can never again be thine."
|
But Savitri replied to the vague Power:
|
"If the eyes of Darkness can look straight at Truth,
|
Look in my heart and, knowing what I am,
|
Give what thou wilt or what thou must, O Death.
|
Nothing I claim but Satyavan alone."
|
There was a hush as if of doubtful fates.
|
As one disdainful still who yields a point
|
Death bowed his sovereign head in cold assent:
|
"I give to thee, saved from death and poignant fate
|
Whatever once the living Satyavan
|
Desired in his heart for Savitri.
|
CANTO III: The Debate of Love and Death
|
Bright noons I give thee and unwounded dawns,
|
Daughters of thy own shape in heart and mind,
|
Fair hero sons and sweetness undisturbed
|
Of union with thy husb and dear and true.
|
And thou shalt harvest in thy joyful house
|
Felicity of thy surrounded eves.
|
Love shall bind by thee many gathered hearts.
|
The opposite sweetness in thy days shall meet
|
Of tender service to thy life's desired
|
And loving empire over all thy loved,
|
Two poles of bliss made one, O Savitri.
|
Return, O child, to thy forsaken earth."
|
But Savitri replied, "Thy gifts resist.
|
Earth cannot flower if lonely I return."
|
Then Death sent forth once more his angry cry,
|
As chides a lion his escaping prey:
|
"What knowst thou of earth's rich and changing life
|
Who thinkst that one man dead all joy must cease?
|
Hope not to be unhappy till the end:
|
For grief dies soon in the tired human heart;
|
Soon other guests the empty chambers fill.
|
A transient painting on a holiday's floor
|
Traced for a moment's beauty love was made.
|
Or if a voyager on the eternal trail,
|
Its objects fluent change in its embrace
|
Like waves to a swimmer upon infinite seas."
|
But Savitri replied to the vague god,
|
"Give me back Satyavan, my only lord.
|
Thy thoughts are vacant to my soul that feels
|
The deep eternal truth in transient things."
|
Death answered her, "Return and try thy soul!
|
Soon shalt thou find appeased that other men
|
On lavish earth have beauty, strength and truth,
|
And when thou hast half forgotten, one of these
|
Shall wind himself around thy heart that needs
|
Some human answering heart against thy breast;
|
For who, being mortal, can dwell glad alone?
|
Then Satyavan shall glide into the past,
|
A gentle memory pushed away from thee
|
By new love and thy children's tender hands,
|
Till thou shalt wonder if thou lov'dst at all.
|
Such is the life earth's travail has conceived,
|
A constant stream that never is the same."
|
But Savitri replied to mighty Death:
|
"O dark ironic critic of God's work,
|
Thou mockst the mind and body's faltering search
|
For what the heart holds in a prophet hour
|
And the immortal spirit shall make its own.
|
Mine is a heart that worshipped, though forsaken,
|
The image of the god its love adored;
|
I have burned in flame to travel in his steps.
|
Are we not they who bore vast solitude
|
Seated upon the hills alone with God?
|
Why dost thou vainly strive with me, O Death,
|
A mind delivered from all twilight thoughts,
|
To whom the secrets of the gods are plain?
|
For now at last I know beyond all doubt,
|
The great stars burn with my unceasing fire
|
And life and death are both its fuel made.
|
Life only was my blind attempt to love:
|
Earth saw my struggle, heaven my victory;
|
All shall be seized, transcended; there shall kiss
|
Casting their veils before the marriage fire
|
The eternal bridegroom and eternal bride.
|
The heavens accept our broken flights at last.
|
On our life's prow that breaks the waves of Time
|
No signal light of hope has gleamed in vain."
|
She spoke; the boundless members of the god
|
As if by secret ecstasy assailed,
|
Shuddered in silence as obscurely stir
|
Ocean's dim fields delivered to the moon.
|
Then lifted up as by a sudden wind
|
CANTO III: The Debate of Love and Death
|
Around her in that vague and glimmering world
|
The twilight trembled like a bursting veil.
|
Thus with armed speech the great opponents strove.
|
Around those spirits in the glittering mist
|
A deepening half-light fled with pearly wings
|
As if to reach some far ideal Morn.
|
Outlined her thoughts flew through the gleaming haze
|
Mingling bright-pinioned with its lights and veils
|
And all her words like dazzling jewels were caught
|
Into the glow of a mysterious world,
|
Or tricked in the rainbow shifting of its hues
|
Like echoes swam fainting into far sound.
|
All utterance, all mood must there become
|
An unenduring tissue sewn by mind
|
To make a gossamer robe of beautiful change.
|
Intent upon her silent will she walked
|
On the dim grass of vague unreal plains,
|
A floating veil of visions in her front,
|
A trailing robe of dreams behind her feet.
|
But now her spirit's flame of conscient force
|
Retiring from a sweetness without fruit
|
Called back her thoughts from speech to sit within
|
In a deep room in meditation's house.
|
For only there could dwell the soul's firm truth:
|
Imperishable, a tongue of sacrifice,
|
It flamed unquenched upon the central hearth
|
Where burns for the high houselord and his mate
|
The homestead's sentinel and witness fire
|
From which the altars of the gods are lit.
|
All still compelled went gliding on unchanged,
|
Still was the order of these worlds reversed:
|
The mortal led, the god and spirit obeyed
|
And she behind was leader of their march
|
And they in front were followers of her will.
|
Onward they journeyed through the drifting ways
|
Vaguely companioned by the glimmering mists.
|
But faster now all fled as if perturbed
|
Escaping from the clearness of her soul.
|
A heaven-bird upon jewelled wings of wind
|
Borne like a coloured and embosomed fire,
|
By spirits carried in a pearl-hued cave,
|
On through the enchanted dimness moved her soul.
|
Death walked in front of her and Satyavan,
|
In the dark front of Death, a failing star.
|
Above was the unseen balance of his fate.
|
The Dream Twilight of the Earthly Real
|
THERE came a slope that slowly downward sank;
|
It slipped towards a stumbling grey descent.
|
The dim-heart marvel of the ideal was lost;
|
Its crowding wonder of bright delicate dreams
|
And vague half-limned sublimities she had left:
|
Thought fell towards lower levels; hard and tense
|
It passioned for some crude reality.
|
The twilight floated still but changed its hues
|
And heavily swathed a less delightful dream;
|
It settled in tired masses on the air;
|
Its symbol colours tuned with duller reds
|
And almost seemed a lurid mist of day.
|
A straining taut and dire besieged her heart;
|
Heavy her sense grew with a dangerous load,
|
And sadder, greater sounds were in her ears,
|
And through stern breakings of the lambent glare
|
Her vision caught a hurry of driving plains
|
And cloudy mountains and wide tawny streams,
|
And cities climbed in minarets and towers
|
Towards an unavailing changeless sky:
|
Long quays and ghauts and harbours white with sails
|
Challenged her sight awhile and then were gone.
|
Amidst them travailed toiling multitudes
|
In ever shifting perishable groups,
|
A foiled cinema of lit shadowy shapes
|
Enveloped in the grey mantle of a dream.
|
Imagining meanings in life's heavy drift,
|
They trusted in the uncertain environment
|
And waited for death to change their spirit's scene.
|
A savage din of labour and a tramp
|
Of armoured life and the monotonous hum
|
Of thoughts and acts that ever were the same,
|
As if the dull reiterated drone
|
Of a great brute machine, beset her soul, -
|
A grey dissatisfied rumour like a ghost
|
Of the moaning of a loud unquiet sea.
|
A huge inhuman cyclopean voice,
|
A Babel-builders' song towering to heaven,
|
A throb of engines and the clang of tools
|
Brought the deep undertone of labour's pain.
|
As when pale lightnings tear a tortured sky,
|
High overhead a cloud-rimmed series flared
|
Chasing like smoke from a red funnel driven,
|
The forced creations of an ignorant Mind:
|
Drifting she saw like pictured fragments flee
|
Phantoms of human thought and baffled hopes,
|
The shapes of Nature and the arts of man,
|
Philosophies and disciplines and laws,
|
And the dead spirit of old societies,
|
Constructions of the Titan and the worm.
|
As if lost remnants of forgotten light,
|
Before her mind there fled with trailing wings
|
Dimmed revelations and delivering words,
|
Emptied of their mission and their strength to save,
|
The messages of the evangelist gods,
|
Voices of prophets, scripts of vanishing creeds.
|
Each in its hour eternal claimed went by:
|
Ideals, systems, sciences, poems, crafts
|
Tireless there perished and again recurred,
|
Sought restlessly by some creative Power;
|
But all were dreams crossing an empty vast.
|
Ascetic voices called of lonely seers
|
On mountain summits or by river banks
|
Or from the desolate heart of forest glades
|
Seeking heaven's rest or the spirit's worldless peace,
|
Or in bodies motionless like statues, fixed
|
In tranced cessations of their sleepless thought
|
CANTO IV: The Dream Twilight of the Earthly Real
|
Sat sleeping souls, and this too was a dream.
|
All things the past has made and slain were there,
|
Its lost forgotten forms that once had lived,
|
And all the present loves as new-revealed
|
And all the hopes the future brings had failed
|
Already, caught and spent in efforts vain,
|
Repeated fruitlessly age after age.
|
Unwearied all returned insisting still
|
Because of joy in the anguish of pursuit
|
And joy to labour and to win and lose
|
And joy to create and keep and joy to kill.
|
The rolling cycles passed and came again,
|
Brought the same toils and the same barren end,
|
Forms ever new and ever old, the long
|
Appalling revolutions of the world.
|
Once more arose the great destroying Voice:
|
Across the fruitless labour of the worlds
|
His huge denial's all-defeating might
|
Pursued the ignorant march of dolorous Time.
|
"Behold the figures of this symbol realm,
|
Its solid outlines of creative dream
|
Inspiring the great concrete tasks of earth.
|
In its motion-parable of human life
|
Here thou canst trace the outcome Nature gives
|
To the sin of being and the error in things
|
And the desire that compels to live
|
And man's incurable malady of hope.
|
In an immutable order's hierarchy
|
Where Nature changes not, man cannot change:
|
Ever he obeys her fixed mutation's law;
|
In a new version of her oft-told tale
|
In ever-wheeling cycles turns the race.
|
His mind is pent in circling boundaries:
|
For mind is man, beyond thought he cannot soar.
|
If he could leave his limits he would be safe:
|
He sees but cannot mount to his greater heavens;
|
Even winged, he sinks back to his native soil.
|
He is a captive in his net of mind
|
And beats soul-wings against the walls of life.
|
In vain his heart lifts up its yearning prayer,
|
Peopling with brilliant Gods the formless Void;
|
Then disappointed to the Void he turns
|
And in its happy nothingness asks release,
|
The calm Nirvana of his dream of self:
|
The Word in silence ends, in Nought the name.
|
Apart amid the mortal multitudes,
|
He calls the Godhead incommunicable
|
To be the lover of his lonely soul
|
Or casts his spirit into its void embrace.
|
Or he finds his copy in the impartial All;
|
He imparts to the Immobile his own will,
|
Attributes to the Eternal wrath and love
|
And to the Ineffable lends a thousand names.
|
Hope not to call God down into his life.
|
How shalt thou bring the Everlasting here?
|
There is no house for him in hurrying Time.
|
Vainly thou seekst in Matter's world an aim;
|
No aim is there, only a will to be.
|
All walk by Nature bound for ever the same.
|
Look on these forms that stay awhile and pass,
|
These lives that long and strive, then are no more,
|
These structures that have no abiding truth,
|
The saviour creeds that cannot save themselves,
|
But perish in the strangling hands of the years,
|
Discarded from man's thought, proved false by Time,
|
Philosophies that strip all problems bare
|
But nothing ever have solved since earth began,
|
And sciences omnipotent in vain
|
By which men learn of what the suns are made,
|
Transform all forms to serve their outward needs,
|
Ride through the sky and sail beneath the sea,
|
CANTO IV: The Dream Twilight of the Earthly Real
|
But learn not what they are or why they came;
|
These polities, architectures of man's brain,
|
That, bricked with evil and good, wall in man's spirit
|
And, fissured houses, palace at once and jail,
|
Rot while they reign and crumble before they crash;
|
These revolutions, demon or drunken god,
|
Convulsing the wounded body of mankind
|
Only to paint in new colours an old face;
|
These wars, carnage triumphant, ruin gone mad,
|
The work of centuries vanishing in an hour,
|
The blood of the vanquished and the victor's crown
|
Which men to be born must pay for with their pain,
|
The hero's face divine on satyr's limbs,
|
The demon's grandeur mixed with the demigod's,
|
The glory and the beasthood and the shame;
|
Why is it all, the labour and the din,
|
The transient joys, the timeless sea of tears,
|
The longing and the hoping and the cry,
|
The battle and the victory and the fall,
|
The aimless journey that can never pause,
|
The waking toil, the incoherent sleep,
|
Song, shouts and weeping, wisdom and idle words,
|
The laughter of men, the irony of the gods?
|
Where leads the march, whither the pilgrimage?
|
Who keeps the map of the route or planned each stage?
|
Or else self-moved the world walks its own way,
|
Or nothing is there but only a Mind that dreams:
|
The world is a myth that happened to come true,
|
A legend told to itself by conscious Mind,
|
Imaged and played on a feigned Matter's ground
|
On which it stands in an unsubstantial Vast.
|
Mind is the author, spectator, actor, stage:
|
Mind only is and what it thinks is seen.
|
If Mind is all, renounce the hope of bliss;
|
If Mind is all, renounce the hope of Truth.
|
For Mind can never touch the body of Truth
|
And Mind can never see the soul of God;
|
Only his shadow it grasps nor hears his laugh
|
As it turns from him to the vain seeming of things.
|
Mind is a tissue woven of light and shade
|
Where right and wrong have sewn their mingled parts;
|
Or Mind is Nature's marriage of convenance
|
Between truth and falsehood, between joy and pain:
|
This struggling pair no court can separate.
|
Each thought is a gold coin with bright alloy
|
And error and truth are its obverse and reverse:
|
This is the imperial mintage of the brain
|
And of this kind is all its currency.
|
Think not to plant on earth the living Truth
|
Or make of Matter's world the home of God;
|
Truth comes not there but only the thought of Truth,
|
God is not there but only the name of God.
|
If Self there is it is bodiless and unborn;
|
It is no one and it is possessed by none.
|
On what shalt thou then build thy happy world?
|
Cast off thy life and mind, then art thou Self,
|
An all-seeing omnipresence stark, alone.
|
If God there is he cares not for the world;
|
All things he sees with calm indifferent gaze,
|
He has doomed all hearts to sorrow and desire,
|
He has bound all life with his implacable laws;
|
He answers not the ignorant voice of prayer.
|
Eternal while the ages toil beneath,
|
Unmoved, untouched by aught that he has made,
|
He sees as minute details mid the stars
|
The animal's agony and the fate of man:
|
Immeasurably wise, he exceeds thy thought;
|
His solitary joy needs not thy love.
|
His truth in human thinking cannot dwell:
|
If thou desirest Truth, then still thy mind
|
For ever, slain by the dumb unseen Light.
|
Immortal bliss lives not in human air:
|
CANTO IV: The Dream Twilight of the Earthly Real
|
How shall the mighty Mother her calm delight
|
Keep fragrant in this narrow fragile vase,
|
Or lodge her sweet unbroken ecstasy
|
In hearts which earthly sorrow can assail
|
And bodies careless Death can slay at will?
|
Dream not to change the world that God has planned,
|
Strive not to alter his eternal law.
|
If heavens there are whose gates are shut to grief,
|
There seek the joy thou couldst not find on earth;
|
Or in the imperishable hemisphere
|
Where Light is native and Delight is king
|
And Spirit is the deathless ground of things,
|
Choose thy high station, child of Eternity.
|
If thou art Spirit and Nature is thy robe,
|
Cast off thy garb and be thy naked self
|
Immutable in its undying truth,
|
Alone for ever in the mute Alone.
|
Turn then to God, for him leave all behind;
|
Forgetting love, forgetting Satyavan,
|
Annul thyself in his immobile peace.
|
O soul, drown in his still beatitude.
|
For thou must die to thyself to reach God's height:
|
I, Death, am the gate of immortality."
|
But Savitri answered to the sophist God:
|
"Once more wilt thou call Light to blind Truth's eyes,
|
Make Knowledge a catch of the snare of Ignorance
|
And the Word a dart to slay my living soul?
|
Offer, O King, thy boons to tired spirits
|
And hearts that could not bear the wounds of Time,
|
Let those who were tied to body and to mind,
|
Tear off those bonds and flee into white calm
|
Crying for a refuge from the play of God.
|
Surely thy boons are great since thou art He!
|
But how shall I seek rest in endless peace
|
Who house the mighty Mother's violent force,
|
Her vision turned to read the enigmaed world,
|
Her will tempered in the blaze of Wisdom's sun
|
And the flaming silence of her heart of love?
|
The world is a spiritual paradox
|
Invented by a need in the Unseen,
|
A poor translation to the creature's sense
|
Of That which for ever exceeds idea and speech,
|
A symbol of what can never be symbolised,
|
A language mispronounced, misspelt, yet true.
|
Its powers have come from the eternal heights
|
And plunged into the inconscient dim Abyss
|
And risen from it to do their marvellous work.
|
The soul is a figure of the Unmanifest,
|
The mind labours to think the Unthinkable,
|
The life to call the Immortal into birth,
|
The body to enshrine the Illimitable.
|
The world is not cut off from Truth and God.
|
In vain thou hast dug the dark unbridgeable gulf,
|
In vain thou hast built the blind and doorless wall:
|
Man's soul crosses through thee to Paradise,
|
Heaven's sun forces its way through death and night;
|
Its light is seen upon our being's verge.
|
My mind is a torch lit from the eternal sun,
|
My life a breath drawn by the immortal Guest,
|
My mortal body is the Eternal's house.
|
Already the torch becomes the undying ray,
|
Already the life is the Immortal's force,
|
The house grows of the householder part and one.
|
How sayst thou Truth can never light the human mind
|
And Bliss can never invade the mortal's heart
|
Or God descend into the world he made?
|
If in the meaningless Void creation rose,
|
If from a bodiless Force Matter was born,
|
If Life could climb in the unconscious tree,
|
Its green delight break into emerald leaves
|
And its laughter of beauty blossom in the flower,
|
If sense could wake in tissue, nerve and cell
|
CANTO IV: The Dream Twilight of the Earthly Real
|
And Thought seize the grey matter of the brain,
|
And soul peep from its secrecy through the flesh,
|
How shall the nameless Light not leap on men,
|
And unknown powers emerge from Nature's sleep?
|
Even now hints of a luminous Truth like stars
|
Arise in the mind-mooned splendour of Ignorance;
|
Even now the deathless Lover's touch we feel:
|
If the chamber's door is even a little ajar,
|
What then can hinder God from stealing in
|
Or who forbid his kiss on the sleeping soul?
|
Already God is near, the Truth is close:
|
Because the dark atheist body knows him not,
|
Must the sage deny the Light, the seer his soul?
|
I am not bound by thought or sense or shape;
|
I live in the glory of the Infinite,
|
I am near to the Nameless and Unknowable,
|
The Ineffable is now my household mate.
|
But standing on Eternity's luminous brink
|
I have discovered that the world was He;
|
I have met Spirit with spirit, Self with self,
|
But I have loved too the body of my God.
|
I have pursued him in his earthly form.
|
A lonely freedom cannot satisfy
|
A heart that has grown one with every heart:
|
I am a deputy of the aspiring world,
|
My spirit's liberty I ask for all."
|
Then rang again a deeper cry of Death.
|
As if beneath its weight of sterile law
|
Oppressed by its own obstinate meaningless will,
|
Disdainful, weary and compassionate,
|
It kept no more its old intolerant sound,
|
But seemed like life's in her unnumbered paths
|
Toiling for ever and achieving nought
|
Because of birth and change, her mortal powers
|
By which she lasts, around the term-posts fixed
|
Turning of a wide circling aimless race
|
Whose course for ever speeds and is the same.
|
In its long play with Fate and Chance and Time
|
Assured of the game's vanity lost or won,
|
Crushed by its load of ignorance and doubt
|
Which knowledge seems to increase and growth to enlarge,
|
The earth-mind sinks and it despairs and looks
|
Old, weary and discouraged on its work.
|
Yet was all nothing then or vainly achieved?
|
Some great thing has been done, some light, some power
|
Delivered from the huge Inconscient's grasp:
|
It has emerged from night; it sees its dawns
|
Circling for ever though no dawn can stay.
|
This change was in the godhead's far-flung voice;
|
His form of dread was altered and admitted
|
Our transient effort at eternity,
|
Yet flung vast doubts of what might else have been
|
On grandiose hints of an impossible day.
|
The great voice surging cried to Savitri:
|
"Because thou knowst the wisdom that transcends
|
Both veil of forms and the contempt of forms,
|
Arise delivered by the seeing gods.
|
If free thou hadst kept thy mind from life's fierce stress,
|
Thou mightst have been like them omniscient, calm.
|
But the violent and passionate heart forbids.
|
It is the storm bird of an anarch Power
|
That would upheave the world and tear from it
|
The indecipherable scroll of Fate,
|
Death's rule and Law and the unknowable Will.
|
Hasteners to action, violators of God
|
Are these great spirits who have too much love,
|
And they who formed like thee, for both art thou,
|
Have come into the narrow bounds of life
|
With too large natures overleaping time.
|
Worshippers of force who know not her recoil,
|
Their giant wills compel the troubled years.
|
CANTO IV: The Dream Twilight of the Earthly Real
|
The wise are tranquil; silent the great hills
|
Rise ceaselessly towards their unreached sky,
|
Seated on their unchanging base, their heads
|
Dreamless in heaven's immutable domain.
|
On their aspiring tops, sublime and still,
|
Lifting half-way to heaven the climbing soul
|
The mighty mediators stand content
|
To watch the revolutions of the stars:
|
Motionlessly moving with the might of earth,
|
They see the ages pass and are the same.
|
The wise think with the cycles, they hear the tread
|
Of far-off things; patient, unmoved they keep
|
Their dangerous wisdom in their depths restrained,
|
Lest man's frail days into the unknown should sink
|
Dragged like a ship by bound leviathan
|
Into the abyss of his stupendous seas.
|
Lo, how all shakes when the gods tread too near!
|
All moves, is in peril, anguished, torn, upheaved.
|
The hurrying aeons would stumble on too swift
|
If strength from heaven surprised the imperfect earth
|
And veilless knowledge smote these unfit souls.
|
The deities have screened their dreadful power:
|
God hides his thought and, even, he seems to err.
|
Be still and tardy in the slow wise world.
|
Mighty art thou with the dread goddess filled,
|
To whom thou criedst at dawn in the dim woods.
|
Use not thy strength like the wild Titan souls!
|
Touch not the seated lines, the ancient laws,
|
Respect the calm of great established things."
|
But Savitri replied to the huge god:
|
"What is the calm thou vauntst, O Law, O Death?
|
Is it not the dull-visioned tread inert
|
Of monstrous energies chained in a stark round
|
Soulless and stone-eyed with mechanic dreams?
|
Vain the soul's hope if changeless Law is all:
|
Ever to the new and the unknown press on
|
The speeding aeons justifying God.
|
What were earth's ages if the grey restraint
|
Were never broken and glories sprang not forth
|
Bursting their obscure seed, while man's slow life
|
Leaped hurried into sudden splendid paths
|
By divine words and human gods revealed?
|
Impose not upon sentient minds and hearts
|
The dull fixity that binds inanimate things.
|
Well is the unconscious rule for the animal breeds
|
Content to live beneath the immutable yoke;
|
Man turns to a nobler walk, a master path.
|
I trample on thy law with living feet;
|
For to arise in freedom I was born.
|
If I am mighty let my force be unveiled
|
Equal companion of the dateless powers,
|
Or else let my frustrated soul sink down
|
Unworthy of Godhead in the original sleep.
|
I claim from Time my will's eternity,
|
God from his moments." Death replied to her,
|
"Why should the noble and immortal will
|
Stoop to the petty works of transient earth,
|
Freedom forgotten and the Eternal's path?
|
Or is this the high use of strength and thought,
|
To struggle with the bonds of death and time
|
And spend the labour that might earn the gods
|
And battle and bear agony of wounds
|
To grasp the trivial joys that earth can guard
|
In her small treasure-chest of passing things?
|
Child, hast thou trodden the gods beneath thy feet
|
Only to win poor shreds of earthly life
|
For him thou lov'st cancelling the grand release,
|
Keeping from early rapture of the heavens
|
His soul the lenient deities have called?
|
Are thy arms sweeter than the courts of God?"
|
She answered, "Straight I trample on the road
|
The strong hand hewed for me which planned our paths.
|
CANTO IV: The Dream Twilight of the Earthly Real
|
I run where his sweet dreadful voice commands
|
And I am driven by the reins of God.
|
Why drew he wide his scheme of mighty worlds
|
Or filled infinity with his passionate breath?
|
Or wherefore did he build my mortal form
|
And sow in me his bright and proud desires,
|
If not to achieve, to flower in me, to love,
|
Carving his human image richly shaped
|
In thoughts and largenesses and golden powers?
|
Far Heaven can wait our coming in its calm.
|
Easy the heavens were to build for God.
|
Earth was his difficult matter, earth the glory
|
Gave of the problem and the race and strife.
|
There are the ominous masks, the terrible powers;
|
There it is greatness to create the gods.
|
Is not the spirit immortal and absolved
|
Always, delivered from the grasp of Time?
|
Why came it down into the mortal's Space?
|
A charge he gave to his high spirit in man
|
And wrote a hidden decree on Nature's tops.
|
Freedom is this with ever seated soul,
|
Large in life's limits, strong in Matter's knots,
|
Building great stuff of action from the worlds
|
To make fine wisdom from coarse, scattered strands
|
And love and beauty out of war and night,
|
The wager wonderful, the game divine.
|
What liberty has the soul which feels not free
|
Unless stripped bare and cannot kiss the bonds
|
The Lover winds around his playmate's limbs,
|
Choosing his tyranny, crushed in his embrace?
|
To seize him better with her boundless heart
|
She accepts the limiting circle of his arms,
|
Bows full of bliss beneath his mastering hands
|
And laughs in his rich constraints, most bound, most free.
|
This is my answer to thy lures, O Death."
|
Immutable, Death's denial met her cry:
|
"However mighty, whatever thy secret name
|
Uttered in hidden conclaves of the gods,
|
Thy heart's ephemeral passion cannot break
|
The iron rampart of accomplished things
|
With which the great Gods fence their camp in Space.
|
Whoever thou art behind thy human mask,
|
Even if thou art the Mother of the worlds
|
And pegst thy claim upon the realms of Chance,
|
The cosmic Law is greater than thy will.
|
Even God himself obeys the Laws he made:
|
The Law abides and never can it change,
|
The Person is a bubble on Time's sea.
|
A forerunner of a greater Truth to come,
|
Thy soul creator of its freer Law,
|
Vaunting a Force behind on which it leans,
|
A Light above which none but thou hast seen,
|
Thou claimst the first fruits of Truth's victory.
|
But what is Truth and who can find her form
|
Amid the specious images of sense,
|
Amid the crowding guesses of the mind
|
And the dark ambiguities of a world
|
Peopled with the incertitudes of Thought?
|
For where is Truth and when was her footfall heard
|
Amid the endless clamour of Time's mart
|
And which is her voice amid the thousand cries
|
That cross the listening brain and cheat the soul?
|
Or is Truth aught but a high starry name
|
Or a vague and splendid word by which man's thought
|
Sanctions and consecrates his nature's choice,
|
The heart's wish donning knowledge as its robe,
|
The cherished idea elect among the elect,
|
Thought's favourite mid the children of half-light
|
Who high-voiced crowd the playgrounds of the mind
|
Or people its dormitories in infant sleep?
|
All things hang here between God's yes and no,
|
CANTO IV: The Dream Twilight of the Earthly Real
|
Two Powers real but to each other untrue,
|
Two consort stars in the mooned night of mind
|
That towards two opposite horizons gaze,
|
The white head and black tail of the mystic drake,
|
The swift and the lame foot, wing strong, wing broken
|
Sustaining the body of the uncertain world,
|
A great surreal dragon in the skies.
|
Too dangerously thy high proud truth must live
|
Entangled in Matter's mortal littleness.
|
All in this world is true, yet all is false:
|
Its thoughts into an eternal cipher run,
|
Its deeds swell to Time's rounded zero sum.
|
Thus man at once is animal and god,
|
A disparate enigma of God's make
|
Unable to free the Godhead's form within,
|
A being less than himself, yet something more,
|
The aspiring animal, the frustrate god
|
Yet neither beast nor deity but man,
|
But man tied to the kind earth's labour strives to exceed
|
Climbing the stairs of God to higher things.
|
Objects are seemings and none knows their truth,
|
Ideas are guesses of an ignorant god.
|
Truth has no home in earth's irrational breast:
|
Yet without reason life is a tangle of dreams,
|
But reason is poised above a dim abyss
|
And stands at last upon a plank of doubt.
|
Eternal truth lives not with mortal men.
|
Or if she dwells within thy mortal heart,
|
Show me the body of the living Truth
|
Or draw for me the outline of her face
|
That I too may obey and worship her.
|
Then will I give thee back thy Satyavan.
|
But here are only facts and steel-bound Law.
|
This truth I know that Satyavan is dead
|
And even thy sweetness cannot lure him back.
|
No magic Truth can bring the dead to life,
|
No power of earth cancel the thing once done,
|
No joy of the heart can last surviving death,
|
No bliss persuade the past to live again.
|
But Life alone can solace the mute Void
|
And fill with thought the emptiness of Time.
|
Leave then thy dead, O Savitri, and live."
|
The Woman answered to the mighty Shade,
|
And as she spoke, mortality disappeared;
|
Her Goddess self grew visible in her eyes,
|
Light came, a dream of heaven, into her face.
|
"O Death, thou too art God and yet not He,
|
But only his own black shadow on his path
|
As leaving the Night he takes the upward Way
|
And drags with him its clinging inconscient Force.
|
Of God unconscious thou art the dark head,
|
Of his Ignorance thou art the impenitent sign,
|
Of its vast tenebrous womb the natural child,
|
On his immortality the sinister bar.
|
All contraries are aspects of God's face.
|
The Many are the innumerable One,
|
The One carries the multitude in his breast;
|
He is the Impersonal, inscrutable, sole,
|
He is the one infinite Person seeing his world;
|
The Silence bears the Eternal's great dumb seal,
|
His light inspires the eternal Word;
|
He is the Immobile's deep and deathless hush,
|
Its white and signless blank negating calm,
|
Yet stands the creator Self, the almighty Lord
|
And watches his will done by the forms of Gods
|
And the desire that goads half-conscious man
|
And the reluctant and unseeing Night.
|
These wide divine extremes, these inverse powers
|
Are the right and left side of the body of God;
|
Existence balanced twixt two mighty arms
|
Confronts the mind with unsolved abysms of Thought.
|
Darkness below, a fathomless Light above,
|
CANTO IV: The Dream Twilight of the Earthly Real
|
In Light are joined, but sundered by severing Mind
|
Stand face to face, opposite, inseparable,
|
Two contraries needed for his great World-task,
|
Two poles whose currents wake the immense World-Force.
|
In the stupendous secrecy of his Self,
|
Above the world brooding with equal wings,
|
He is both in one, beginningless, without end:
|
Transcending both, he enters the Absolute.
|
His being is a mystery beyond mind,
|
His ways bewilder mortal ignorance;
|
The finite in its little sections parked,
|
Amazed, credits not God's audacity
|
Who dares to be the unimagined All
|
And see and act as might one Infinite.
|
Against human reason this is his offence,
|
Being known to be for ever unknowable,
|
To be all and yet transcend the mystic whole,
|
Absolute, to lodge in a relative world of Time,
|
Eternal and all-knowing, to suffer birth,
|
Omnipotent, to sport with Chance and Fate,
|
Spirit, yet to be Matter and the Void,
|
Illimitable, beyond form or name,
|
To dwell within a body, one and supreme
|
To be animal and human and divine:
|
A still deep sea, he laughs in rolling waves;
|
Universal, he is all, - transcendent, none.
|
To man's righteousness this is his cosmic crime,
|
Almighty beyond good and evil to dwell
|
Leaving the good to their fate in a wicked world
|
And evil to reign in this enormous scene.
|
All opposition seems and strife and chance,
|
An aimless labour with but scanty sense,
|
To eyes that see a part and miss the whole;
|
The surface men scan, the depths refuse their search:
|
A hybrid mystery challenges the view,
|
Or a discouraging sordid miracle.
|
Yet in the exact Inconscient's stark conceit,
|
In the casual error of the world's ignorance
|
A plan, a hidden Intelligence is glimpsed.
|
There is a purpose in each stumble and fall;
|
Nature's most careless lolling is a pose
|
Preparing some forward step, some deep result.
|
Ingenious notes plugged into a motived score,
|
These million discords dot the harmonious theme
|
Of the evolution's huge orchestral dance.
|
A Truth supreme has forced the world to be;
|
It has wrapped itself in Matter as in a shroud,
|
A shroud of Death, a shroud of Ignorance.
|
It compelled the suns to burn through silent Space,
|
Flame-signs of its uncomprehended Thought
|
In a wide brooding ether's formless muse:
|
It made of Knowledge a veiled and struggling light,
|
Of Being a substance nescient, dense and dumb,
|
Of Bliss the beauty of an insentient world.
|
In finite things the conscious Infinite dwells:
|
Involved it sleeps in Matter's helpless trance,
|
It rules the world from its sleeping senseless Void;
|
Dreaming it throws out mind and heart and soul
|
To labour crippled, bound, on the hard earth;
|
A broken whole it works through scattered points;
|
Its gleaming shards are Wisdom's diamond thoughts,
|
Its shadowy reflex our ignorance.
|
It starts from the mute mass in countless jets,
|
It fashions a being out of brain and nerve,
|
A sentient creature from its pleasures and pangs.
|
A pack of feelings obscure, a dot of sense
|
Survives awhile answering the shocks of life,
|
Then, crushed or its force spent, leaves the dead form,
|
Leaves the huge universe in which it lived
|
An insignificant unconsidered guest.
|
But the soul grows concealed within its house;
|
It gives to the body its strength and magnificence;
|
CANTO IV: The Dream Twilight of the Earthly Real
|
It follows aims in an ignorant aimless world,
|
It lends significance to earth's meaningless life.
|
A demigod animal, came thinking man;
|
He wallows in mud, yet heavenward soars in thought;
|
He plays and ponders, laughs and weeps and dreams,
|
Satisfies his little longings like the beast;
|
He pores upon life's book with student eyes.
|
Out of this tangle of intellect and sense,
|
Out of the narrow scope of finite thought
|
At last he wakes into spiritual mind;
|
A high liberty begins and luminous room:
|
He glimpses eternity, touches the infinite,
|
He meets the gods in great and sudden hours,
|
He feels the universe as his larger self,
|
Makes Space and Time his opportunity
|
To join the heights and depths of being in light,
|
In the heart's cave speaks secretly with God.
|
But these are touches and high moments lived;
|
Fragments of Truth supreme have lit his soul,
|
Reflections of the sun in waters still.
|
A few have dared the last supreme ascent
|
And break through borders of blinding light above,
|
And feel a breath around of mightier air,
|
Receive a vaster being's messages
|
And ba the in its immense intuitive Ray.
|
On summit Mind are radiant altitudes
|
Exposed to the lustre of Infinity,
|
Outskirts and dependencies of the house of Truth,
|
Upraised estates of Mind and measureless.
|
There man can visit but there he cannot live.
|
A cosmic Thought spreads out its vastitudes;
|
Its smallest parts are here philosophies
|
Challenging with their detailed immensity,
|
Each figuring an omniscient scheme of things.
|
But higher still can climb the ascending light;
|
There are vasts of vision and eternal suns,
|
Oceans of an immortal luminousness,
|
Flame-hills assaulting heaven with their peaks,
|
There dwelling all becomes a blaze of sight;
|
A burning head of vision leads the mind,
|
Thought trails behind it its long comet tail;
|
The heart glows, an illuminate and seer,
|
And sense is kindled into identity.
|
A highest flight climbs to a deepest view:
|
In a wide opening of its native sky
|
Intuition's lightnings range in a bright pack
|
Hunting all hidden truths out of their lairs,
|
Its fiery edge of seeing absolute
|
Cleaves into locked unknown retreats of self,
|
Rummages the sky-recesses of the brain,
|
Lights up the occult chambers of the heart;
|
Its spear-point ictus of discovery
|
Pressed on the cover of name, the screen of form,
|
Strips bare the secret soul of all that is.
|
Thought there has revelation's sun-bright eyes;
|
The Word, a mighty and inspiring Voice,
|
Enters Truth's inmost cabin of privacy
|
And tears away the veil from God and life.
|
Then stretches the boundless finite's last expanse,
|
The cosmic empire of the Overmind,
|
Time's buffer state bordering Eternity,
|
Too vast for the experience of man's soul:
|
All here gathers beneath one golden sky:
|
The Powers that build the cosmos station take
|
In its house of infinite possibility;
|
Each god from there builds his own nature's world;
|
Ideas are phalanxed like a group of suns,
|
Each marshalling his company of rays.
|
Thought crowds in masses seized by one regard;
|
All Time is one body, Space a single look:
|
There is the Godhead's universal gaze
|
And there the boundaries of immortal Mind:
|
CANTO IV: The Dream Twilight of the Earthly Real
|
The line that parts and joins the hemispheres
|
Closes in on the labour of the Gods
|
Fencing eternity from the toil of Time.
|
In her glorious kingdom of eternal light
|
All-ruler, ruled by none, the Truth supreme,
|
Omnipotent, omniscient and alone,
|
In a golden country keeps her measureless house;
|
In its corridor she hears the tread that comes
|
Out of the Unmanifest never to return
|
Till the Unknown is known and seen by men.
|
Above the stretch and blaze of cosmic Sight,
|
Above the silence of the wordless Thought,
|
Formless creator of immortal forms,
|
Nameless, investitured with the name divine,
|
Transcending Time's hours, transcending Timelessness,
|
The Mighty Mother sits in lucent calm
|
And holds the eternal Child upon her knees
|
Attending the day when he shall speak to Fate.
|
There is the image of our future's hope;
|
There is the sun for which all darkness waits,
|
There is the imperishable harmony;
|
The world's contradictions climb to her and are one:
|
There is the Truth of which the world's truths are shreds,
|
The Light of which the world's ignorance is the shade
|
Till Truth draws back the shade that it has cast,
|
The Love our hearts call down to heal all strife,
|
The Bliss for which the world's derelict sorrows yearn:
|
Thence comes the glory sometimes seen on earth,
|
The visits of Godhead to the human soul,
|
The Beauty and the dream on Nature's face.
|
There the perfection born from eternity
|
Calls to it the perfection born in Time,
|
The truth of God surprising human life,
|
The image of God overtaking finite shapes.
|
There in a world of everlasting Light,
|
In the realms of the immortal Supermind
|
Truth who hides here her head in mystery,
|
Her riddle deemed by reason impossible
|
In the stark structure of material form,
|
Unenigmaed lives, unmasked her face and there
|
Is Nature and the common law of things.
|
There in a body made of spirit stuff,
|
The hearth-stone of the everliving Fire,
|
Action translates the movements of the soul,
|
Thought steps infallible and absolute
|
And life is a continual worship's rite,
|
A sacrifice of rapture to the One.
|
A cosmic vision, a spiritual sense
|
Feels all the Infinite lodged in finite form
|
And seen through a quivering ecstasy of light
|
Discovers the bright face of the Bodiless,
|
In the truth of a moment, in the moment's soul
|
Can sip the honey-wine of Eternity.
|
A Spirit who is no one and innumerable,
|
The one mystic infinite Person of his world
|
Multiplies his myriad personality,
|
On all his bodies seals his divinity's stamp
|
And sits in each immortal and unique.
|
The Immobile stands behind each daily act,
|
A background of the movement and the scene,
|
Upholding creation on its might and calm
|
And change on the Immutable's deathless poise.
|
The Timeless looks out from the travelling hours;
|
The Ineffable puts on a robe of speech
|
Where all its words are woven like magic threads
|
Moving with beauty, inspiring with their gleam,
|
And every thought takes up its destined place
|
Recorded in the memory of the world.
|
The Truth supreme, vast and impersonal
|
Fits faultlessly the hour and circumstance,
|
Its substance a pure gold ever the same
|
But shaped into vessels for the spirit's use,
|
CANTO IV: The Dream Twilight of the Earthly Real
|
Its gold becomes the wine jar and the vase.
|
All there is a supreme epiphany:
|
The All-Wonderful makes a marvel of each event,
|
The All-Beautiful is a miracle in each shape;
|
The All-Blissful smites with rapture the heart's throbs,
|
A pure celestial joy is the use of sense.
|
Each being there is a member of the Self,
|
A portion of the million-thoughted All,
|
A claimant to the timeless Unity,
|
The many's sweetness, the joy of difference
|
Edged with the intimacy of the One.
|
"But who can show to thee Truth's glorious face?
|
Our human words can only shadow her.
|
To thought she is an unthinkable rapture of light,
|
To speech a marvel inexpressible.
|
O Death, if thou couldst touch the Truth supreme
|
Thou wouldst grow suddenly wise and cease to be.
|
If our souls could see and love and clasp God's Truth,
|
Its infinite radiance would seize our hearts,
|
Our being in God's image be remade
|
And earthly life become the life divine."
|
Then Death the last time answered Savitri:
|
"If Truth supreme transcends her shadow here
|
Severed by Knowledge and the climbing vasts,
|
What bridge can cross the gulf that she has left
|
Between her and the dream-world she has made?
|
Or who could hope to bring her down to men
|
And persuade to tread the harsh globe with wounded feet
|
Leaving her unapproachable glory and bliss,
|
Wasting her splendour on pale earthly air?
|
Is thine that strength, O beauty of mortal limbs,
|
O soul who flutterest to escape my net?
|
Who then art thou hiding in human guise?
|
Thy voice carries the sound of infinity,
|
Knowledge is with thee, Truth speaks through thy words;
|
The light of things beyond shines in thy eyes.
|
But where is thy strength to conquer Time and Death?
|
Hast thou God's force to build heaven's values here?
|
For truth and knowledge are an idle gleam
|
If Knowledge brings not power to change the world,
|
If Might comes not to give to Truth her right.
|
A blind Force, not Truth has made this ignorant world,
|
A blind Force, not Truth orders the lives of men:
|
By Power, not Light, the great Gods rule the world;
|
Power is the arm of God, the seal of Fate.
|
O human claimant to immortality,
|
Reveal thy power, lay bare thy spirit's force,
|
Then will I give back to thee Satyavan.
|
Or if the Mighty Mother is with thee,
|
Show me her face that I may worship her;
|
Let deathless eyes look into the eyes of Death,
|
An imperishable Force touching brute things
|
Transform earth's death into immortal life.
|
Then can thy dead return to thee and live.
|
The prostrate earth perhaps shall lift her gaze
|
And feel near her the secret body of God
|
And love and joy overtake fleeing Time."
|
And Savitri looked on Death and answered not.
|
Almost it seemed as if in his symbol shape
|
The world's darkness had consented to Heaven-light
|
And God needed no more the Inconscient's screen.
|
A mighty transformation came on her.
|
A halo of the indwelling Deity,
|
The Immortal's lustre that had lit her face
|
And tented its radiance in her body's house,
|
Overflowing made the air a luminous sea.
|
In a flaming moment of apocalypse
|
The Incarnation thrust aside its veil.
|
A little figure in infinity
|
Yet stood and seemed the Eternal's very house,
|
As if the world's centre was her very soul
|
CANTO IV: The Dream Twilight of the Earthly Real
|
And all wide space was but its outer robe.
|
A curve of the calm hauteur of far heaven
|
Descending into earth's humility,
|
Her forehead's span vaulted the Omniscient's gaze,
|
Her eyes were two stars that watched the universe.
|
The Power that from her being's summit reigned,
|
The Presence chambered in lotus secrecy,
|
Came down and held the centre in her brow
|
Where the mind's Lord in his control-room sits;
|
There throned on concentration's native seat
|
He opens that third mysterious eye in man,
|
The Unseen's eye that looks at the unseen,
|
When Light with a golden ecstasy fills his brain
|
And the Eternal's wisdom drives his choice
|
And eternal Will seizes the mortal's will.
|
It stirred in the lotus of her throat of song,
|
And in her speech throbbed the immortal Word,
|
Her life sounded with the steps of the world-soul
|
Moving in harmony with the cosmic Thought.
|
As glides God's sun into the mystic cave
|
Where hides his light from the pursuing gods,
|
It glided into the lotus of her heart
|
And woke in it the Force that alters Fate.
|
It poured into her navel's lotus depth,
|
Lodged in the little life-nature's narrow home,
|
On the body's longings grew heaven-rapture's flower
|
And made desire a pure celestial flame,
|
Broke into the cave where coiled World-Energy sleeps
|
And smote the thousand-hooded serpent Force
|
That blazing towered and clasped the World-Self above,
|
Joined Matter's dumbness to the Spirit's hush
|
And filled earth's acts with the Spirit's silent power.
|
Thus changed she waited for the Word to speak.
|
Eternity looked into the eyes of Death
|
And Darkness saw God's living Reality.
|
Then a Voice was heard that seemed the stillness' self
|
Or the low calm utterance of infinity
|
When it speaks to the silence in the heart of sleep.
|
"I hail thee, almighty and victorious Death,
|
Thou grandiose Darkness of the Infinite.
|
O Void that makest room for all to be,
|
Hunger that gnawest at the universe
|
Consuming the cold remnants of the suns
|
And eatst the whole world with thy jaws of fire,
|
Waster of the energy that has made the stars,
|
Inconscience, carrier of the seeds of thought,
|
Nescience in which All-Knowledge sleeps entombed
|
And slowly emerges in its hollow breast
|
Wearing the mind's mask of bright Ignorance.
|
Thou art my shadow and my instrument.
|
I have given thee thy awful shape of dread
|
And thy sharp sword of terror and grief and pain
|
To force the soul of man to struggle for light
|
On the brevity of his half-conscious days.
|
Thou art his spur to greatness in his works,
|
The whip to his yearning for eternal bliss,
|
His poignant need of immortality.
|
Live, Death, awhile, be still my instrument.
|
One day man too shall know thy fathomless heart
|
Of silence and the brooding peace of Night
|
And grave obedience to eternal Law
|
And the calm inflexible pity in thy gaze.
|
But now, O timeless Mightiness, stand aside
|
And leave the path of my incarnate Force.
|
Relieve the radiant God from thy black mask:
|
Release the soul of the world called Satyavan
|
Freed from thy clutch of pain and ignorance
|
That he may stand master of life and fate,
|
Man's representative in the house of God,
|
The mate of Wisdom and the spouse of Light,
|
The eternal bridegroom of the eternal bride."
|
She spoke; Death unconvinced resisted still,
|
CANTO IV: The Dream Twilight of the Earthly Real
|
Although he knew refusing still to know,
|
Although he saw refusing still to see.
|
Unshakable he stood claiming his right.
|
His spirit bowed; his will obeyed the law
|
Of its own nature binding even on Gods.
|
The Two opposed each other face to face.
|
His being like a huge fort of darkness towered;
|
Around it her light grew, an ocean's siege.
|
Awhile the Shade survived defying heaven:
|
Assailing in front, oppressing from above,
|
A concrete mass of conscious power, he bore
|
The tyranny of her divine desire.
|
A pressure of intolerable force
|
Weighed on his unbowed head and stubborn breast;
|
Light like a burning tongue licked up his thoughts,
|
Light was a luminous torture in his heart,
|
Light coursed, a splendid agony, through his nerves;
|
His darkness muttered perishing in her blaze.
|
Her mastering Word commanded every limb
|
And left no room for his enormous will
|
That seemed pushed out into some helpless space
|
And could no more re-enter but left him void.
|
He called to Night but she fell shuddering back,
|
He called to Hell but sullenly it retired:
|
He turned to the Inconscient for support,
|
From which he was born, his vast sustaining self;
|
It drew him back towards boundless vacancy
|
As if by himself to swallow up himself:
|
He called to his strength, but it refused his call.
|
His body was eaten by light, his spirit devoured.
|
At last he knew defeat inevitable
|
And left crumbling the shape that he had worn,
|
Abandoning hope to make man's soul his prey
|
And force to be mortal the immortal spirit.
|
Afar he fled shunning her dreaded touch
|
And refuge took in the retreating Night.
|
In the dream twilight of that symbol world
|
The dire universal Shadow disappeared
|
Vanishing into the Void from which it came.
|
As if deprived of its original cause,
|
The twilight realm passed fading from their souls,
|
And Satyavan and Savitri were alone.
|
But neither stirred: between those figures rose
|
A mute invisible and translucent wall.
|
In the long blank moment's pause nothing could move:
|
All waited on the unknown inscrutable Will.
|
The Eternal Day: The Soul's Choice
|
and the Supreme Consummation
|
A MARVELLOUS sun looked down from ecstasy's skies
|
On worlds of deathless bliss, perfection's home,
|
Magical unfoldings of the Eternal's smile
|
Capturing his secret heart-beats of delight.
|
God's everlasting day surrounded her,
|
Domains appeared of sempiternal light
|
Invading all Nature with the Absolute's joy.
|
Her body quivered with eternity's touch,
|
Her soul stood close to the founts of the infinite.
|
Infinity's finite fronts she lived in, new
|
For ever to an everliving sight.
|
Eternity multiplied its vast self-look
|
Translating its endless mightiness and joy
|
Into delight souls playing with Time could share
|
In grandeurs ever new-born from the unknown depths,
|
In powers that leaped immortal from unknown heights,
|
In passionate heart-beats of an undying love,
|
In scenes of a sweetness that can never fade.
|
Immortal to the rapturous heart and eyes,
|
In serene arches of translucent calm
|
From Wonder's dream-vasts cloudless skies slid down
|
An abyss of sapphire; sunlight visited eyes
|
Which suffered without pain the absolute ray
|
And saw immortal clarities of form.
|
Twilight and mist were exiles from that air,
|
Night was impossible to such radiant heavens.
|
Firm in the bosom of immensity
|
Spiritual breadths were seen, sublimely born
|
From a still beauty of creative joy;
|
Embodied thoughts to sweet dimensions held
|
To please some carelessness of divine peace,
|
Answered the deep demand of an infinite sense
|
And its need of forms to house its bodiless thrill.
|
A march of universal powers in Time,
|
The harmonic order of self's vastitudes
|
In cyclic symmetries and metric planes
|
Harboured a cosmic rapture's revelry,
|
An endless figuring of the spirit in things
|
Planned by the artist who has dreamed the worlds;
|
Of all the beauty and the marvel here,
|
Of all Time's intricate variety
|
Eternity was the substance and the source;
|
Not from a plastic mist of Matter made,
|
They offered the suggestion of their depths
|
And opened the great series of their powers.
|
Arisen beneath a triple mystic heaven
|
The seven immortal earths were seen, sublime:
|
Homes of the blest released from death and sleep
|
Where grief can never come nor any pang
|
Arriving from self-lost and seeking worlds
|
Alter Heaven-nature's changeless quietude
|
And mighty posture of eternal calm,
|
Its pose of ecstasy immutable.
|
Plains lay that seemed the expanse of God's wide sleep,
|
Thought's wings climbed up towards heaven's vast repose
|
Lost in blue deeps of immortality.
|
A changed earth-nature felt the breath of peace.
|
Air seemed an ocean of felicity
|
Or the couch of the unknown spiritual rest,
|
A vast quiescence swallowing up all sound
|
Into a voicelessness of utter bliss;
|
Even Matter brought a close spiritual touch,
|
All thrilled with the immanence of one divine.
|
The lowest of these earths was still a heaven
|
Translating into the splendour of things divine
|
The beauty and brightness of terrestrial scenes.
|
The Soul's Choice and the Supreme Consummation
|
Eternal mountains ridge on gleaming ridge
|
Whose lines were graved as on a sapphire plate
|
And etched the borders of heaven's lustrous noon
|
Climbed like piled temple stairs and from their heads
|
Of topless meditation heard below
|
The approach of a blue pilgrim multitude
|
And listened to a great arriving voice
|
Of the wide travel hymn of timeless seas.
|
A chanting crowd from mountain bosoms slipped
|
Past branches fragrant with a sigh of flowers
|
Hurrying through sweetnesses with revel leaps;
|
The murmurous rivers of felicity
|
Divinely rippled honey-voiced desires,
|
Mingling their sister eddies of delight,
|
Then, widening to a pace of calm-lipped muse,
|
Down many-glimmered estuaries of dream
|
Went whispering into lakes of liquid peace.
|
On a brink held of senseless ecstasy
|
And guarding an eternal poise of thought
|
Sat sculptured souls dreaming by rivers of sound
|
In changeless attitudes of marble bliss.
|
Around her lived the children of God's day
|
In an unspeakable felicity,
|
A happiness never lost, the immortal's ease,
|
A glad eternity's blissful multitude.
|
Around, the deathless nations moved and spoke,
|
Souls of a luminous celestial joy,
|
Faces of stark beauty, limbs of the moulded Ray;
|
In cities cut like gems of conscious stone
|
And wonderful pastures and on gleaming coasts
|
Bright forms were seen, eternity's luminous tribes.
|
Above her rhythming godheads whirled the spheres,
|
Rapt mobile fixities here blindly sought
|
By the huge erring orbits of our stars.
|
Ecstatic voices smote at hearing's chords,
|
Each movement found a music all its own;
|
Songs thrilled of birds upon unfading boughs
|
The colours of whose plumage had been caught
|
From the rainbow of imagination's wings.
|
Immortal fragrance packed the quivering breeze.
|
In groves that seemed moved bosoms and trembling depths
|
The million children of the undying spring
|
Bloomed, pure unnumbered stars of hued delight
|
Nestling for shelter in their emerald sky:
|
Faery flower-masses looked with laughing eyes.
|
A dancing chaos, an iridescent sea
|
Eternised to Heaven's ever-wakeful sight
|
The crowding petal-glow of marvel's tints
|
Which float across the curtained lids of dream.
|
Immortal harmonies filled her listening ear;
|
A great spontaneous utterance of the heights
|
On Titan wings of rhythmic grandeur borne
|
Poured from some deep spiritual heart of sound,
|
Strains trembling with the secrets of the gods.
|
A spirit wandered happily in the wind,
|
A spirit brooded in the leaf and stone;
|
The voices of thought-conscious instruments
|
Along a living verge of silence strayed,
|
And from some deep, a wordless tongue of things
|
Unfathomed, inexpressible, chantings rose
|
Translating into a voice the Unknown.
|
A climber on the invisible stair of sound,
|
Music not with these few and striving steps
|
Aspired that wander upon transient strings,
|
But changed its ever new uncounted notes
|
In a passion of unforeseeing discovery,
|
And kept its old unforgotten ecstasies
|
A growing treasure in the mystic heart.
|
A consciousness that yearned through every cry
|
Of unexplored attraction and desire,
|
It found and searched again the unsatisfied deeps
|
Hunting as if in some deep secret heart
|
The Soul's Choice and the Supreme Consummation
|
To find some lost or missed felicity.
|
In those far-lapsing symphonies she could hear,
|
Breaking through enchantments of the ravished sense,
|
The lyric voyage of a divine soul
|
Mid spume and laughter tempting with its prow
|
The charm of innocent Circean isles,
|
Adventures without danger beautiful
|
In lands where siren Wonder sings its lures
|
From rhythmic rocks in ever-foaming seas.
|
In the harmony of an original sight
|
Delivered from our limiting ray of thought,
|
And the reluctance of our blinded hearts
|
To embrace the Godhead in whatever guise,
|
She saw all Nature marvellous without fault.
|
Invaded by beauty's universal revel
|
Her being's fibre reached out vibrating
|
And claimed deep union with its outer selves,
|
And on the heart's chords made pure to seize all tones
|
Heaven's subtleties of touch unwearying forced
|
More vivid raptures than earth's life can bear.
|
What would be suffering here, was fiery bliss.
|
All here but passionate hint and mystic shade
|
Divined by the inner prophet who perceives
|
The spirit of delight in sensuous things,
|
Turned to more sweetness than can now be dreamed.
|
The mighty signs of which earth fears the stress,
|
Trembling because she cannot understand,
|
And must keep obscure in forms strange and sublime,
|
Were here the first lexicon of an infinite mind
|
Translating the language of eternal bliss.
|
Here rapture was a common incident;
|
The lovelinesses of whose captured thrill
|
Our human pleasure is a fallen thread,
|
Lay, symbol shapes, a careless ornament,
|
Sewn on the rich brocade of Godhead's dress.
|
Things fashioned were the imaged homes where mind
|
Arrived to fathom a deep physical joy;
|
The heart was a torch lit from infinity,
|
The limbs were trembling densities of soul.
|
These were the first domains, the outer courts
|
Immense but least in range and least in price,
|
The slightest ecstasies of the undying gods.
|
Higher her swing of vision swept and knew,
|
Admitted through large sapphire opening gates
|
Into the wideness of a light beyond,
|
These were but sumptuous decorated doors
|
To worlds nobler, more felicitously fair.
|
Endless aspired the climbing of those heavens;
|
Realm upon realm received her soaring view.
|
Then on what seemed one crown of the ascent
|
Where finite and the infinite are one,
|
Immune she beheld the strong immortals' seats
|
Who live for a celestial joy and rule,
|
The middle regions of the unfading Ray.
|
Great forms of deities sat in deathless tiers,
|
Eyes of an unborn gaze towards her leaned
|
Through a transparency of crystal fire.
|
In the beauty of bodies wrought from rapture's lines,
|
Shapes of entrancing sweetness spilling bliss,
|
Feet glimmering upon the sunstone courts of mind,
|
Heaven's cupbearers bore round the Eternal's wine.
|
A tangle of bright bodies, of moved souls
|
Tracing the close and intertwined delight,
|
The harmonious tread of lives for ever joined
|
In the passionate oneness of a mystic joy
|
As if sunbeams made living and divine,
|
The golden-bosomed Apsara goddesses,
|
In groves flooded from an argent disk of bliss
|
That floated through a luminous sapphire dream,
|
In a cloud of raiment lit with golden limbs
|
And gleaming footfalls treading faery swards,
|
Virgin motions of bacchant innocences
|
The Soul's Choice and the Supreme Consummation
|
Who know their riot for a dance of God,
|
Whirled linked in moonlit revels of the heart.
|
Impeccable artists of unerring forms,
|
Magician builders of sound and rhythmic words,
|
Wind-haired Gandharvas chanted to the ear
|
The odes that shape the universal thought,
|
The lines that tear the veil from Deity's face,
|
The rhythms that bring the sounds of wisdom's sea.
|
Immortal figures and illumined brows,
|
Our great forefa thers in those splendours moved;
|
Termless in power and satisfied of light,
|
They enjoyed the sense of all for which we strive.
|
High seers, moved poets saw the eternal thoughts
|
That, travellers from on high, arrive to us
|
Deformed by our search, tricked by costuming mind,
|
Like gods disfigured by the pangs of birth,
|
Seized the great words which now are frail sounds caught
|
By difficult rapture on a mortal tongue.
|
The strong who stumble and sin were calm proud gods.
|
There lightning-filled with glory and with flame,
|
Melting in waves of sympathy and sight,
|
Smitten like a lyre that throbs to others' bliss,
|
Drawn by the cords of ecstasies unknown,
|
Her human nature faint with heaven's delight,
|
She beheld the clasp to earth denied and bore
|
The imperishable eyes of veilless love.
|
More climbed above, level to level reached,
|
Beyond what tongue can utter or mind dream:
|
Worlds of an infinite reach crowned Nature's stir.
|
There was a greater tranquil sweetness there,
|
A subtler and profounder ether's field
|
And mightier scheme than heavenliest sense can give.
|
There breath carried a stream of seeing mind,
|
Form was a tenuous raiment of the soul:
|
Colour was a visible tone of ecstasy;
|
Shapes seen half immaterial by the gaze
|
And yet voluptuously palpable
|
Made sensible to touch the indwelling spirit.
|
The high perfected sense illumined lived
|
A happy vassal of the inner ray,
|
Each feeling was the Eternal's mighty child
|
And every thought was a sweet burning god.
|
Air was a luminous feeling, sound a voice,
|
Sunlight the soul's vision and moonlight its dream.
|
On a wide living base of wordless calm
|
All was a potent and a lucid joy.
|
Into those heights her spirit went floating up
|
Like an upsoaring bird who mounts unseen
|
Voicing to the ascent his throbbing heart
|
Of melody till a pause of closing wings
|
Comes quivering in his last contented cry
|
And he is silent with his soul discharged,
|
Delivered of his heart's burden of delight.
|
Experience mounted on joy's coloured breast
|
To inaccessible spheres in spiral flight.
|
There Time dwelt with eternity as one;
|
Immense felicity joined rapt repose.
|
As one drowned in a sea of splendour and bliss,
|
Mute in the maze of these surprising worlds,
|
Turning she saw their living knot and source,
|
Key to their charm and fount of their delight,
|
And knew him for the same who snares our lives
|
Captured in his terrifying pitiless net,
|
And makes the universe his prison camp
|
And makes in his immense and vacant vasts
|
The labour of the stars a circuit vain
|
And death the end of every human road
|
And grief and pain the wages of man's toil.
|
One whom her soul had faced as Death and Night
|
A sum of all sweetness gathered into his limbs
|
And blinded her heart to the beauty of the suns.
|
The Soul's Choice and the Supreme Consummation
|
Transfigured was the formidable shape.
|
His darkness and his sad destroying might
|
Abolishing for ever and disclosing
|
The mystery of his high and violent deeds,
|
A secret splendour rose revealed to sight
|
Where once the vast embodied Void had stood.
|
Night the dim mask had grown a wonderful face.
|
The vague infinity was slain whose gloom
|
Had outlined from the terrible unknown
|
The obscure disastrous figure of a god,
|
Fled was the error that arms the hands of grief,
|
And lighted the ignorant gulf whose hollow deeps
|
Had given to nothingness a dreadful voice.
|
As when before the eye that wakes in sleep
|
Is opened the sombre binding of a book,
|
Illumined letterings are seen which kept
|
A golden blaze of thought inscribed within,
|
A marvellous form responded to her gaze
|
Whose sweetness justified life's blindest pain;
|
All Nature's struggle was its easy price,
|
The universe and its agony seemed worth while.
|
As if the choric calyx of a flower
|
Aerial, visible on music's waves,
|
A lotus of light-petalled ecstasy
|
Took shape out of the tremulous heart of things.
|
There was no more the torment under the stars,
|
The evil sheltered behind Nature's mask;
|
There was no more the dark pretence of hate,
|
The cruel rictus on Love's altered face.
|
Hate was the grip of a dreadful amour's strife;
|
A ruthless love intent only to possess
|
Has here replaced the sweet original god.
|
Forgetting the Will-to-love that gave it birth,
|
The passion to lock itself in and to unite,
|
It would swallow all into one lonely self,
|
Devouring the soul that it had made its own,
|
By suffering and annihilation's pain
|
Punishing the unwillingness to be one,
|
Angry with the refusals of the world,
|
Passionate to take but knowing not how to give.
|
Death's sombre cowl was cast from Nature's brow;
|
There lightened on her the godhead's lurking laugh.
|
All grace and glory and all divinity
|
Were here collected in a single form;
|
All worshipped eyes looked through his from one face;
|
He bore all godheads in his grandiose limbs.
|
An oceanic spirit dwelt within;
|
Intolerant and invincible in joy
|
A flood of freedom and transcendent bliss
|
Into immortal lines of beauty rose.
|
In him the fourfold Being bore its crown
|
That wears the mystery of a nameless Name,
|
The universe writing its tremendous sense
|
In the inexhaustible meaning of a word.
|
In him the architect of the visible world,
|
At once the art and artist of his works,
|
Spirit and seer and thinker of things seen,
|
Virat, who lights his camp-fires in the suns
|
And the star-entangled ether is his hold,
|
Expressed himself with Matter for his speech:
|
Objects are his letters, forces are his words,
|
Events are the crowded history of his life,
|
And sea and land are the pages for his tale.
|
Matter is his means and his spiritual sign;
|
He hangs the thought upon a lash's lift,
|
In the current of the blood makes flow the soul.
|
His is the dumb will of atom and of clod;
|
A Will that without sense or motive acts,
|
An Intelligence needing not to think or plan,
|
The world creates itself invincibly;
|
For its body is the body of the Lord
|
And in its heart stands Virat, King of Kings.
|
The Soul's Choice and the Supreme Consummation
|
In him shadows his form the Golden Child
|
Who in the Sun-capped Vast cradles his birth:
|
Hiranyagarbha, author of thoughts and dreams,
|
Who sees the invisible and hears the sounds
|
That never visited a mortal ear,
|
Discoverer of unthought realities
|
Truer to Truth than all we have ever known,
|
He is the leader on the inner roads;
|
A seer, he has entered the forbidden realms;
|
A magician with the omnipotent wand of thought,
|
He builds the secret uncreated worlds.
|
Armed with the golden speech, the diamond eye,
|
His is the vision and the prophecy:
|
Imagist casting the formless into shape,
|
Traveller and hewer of the unseen paths,
|
He is the carrier of the hidden fire,
|
He is the voice of the Ineffable,
|
He is the invisible hunter of the light,
|
The Angel of mysterious ecstasies,
|
The conqueror of the kingdoms of the soul.
|
A third spirit stood behind, their hidden cause,
|
A mass of superconscience closed in light,
|
Creator of things in his all-knowing sleep.
|
All from his stillness came as grows a tree;
|
He is our seed and core, our head and base.
|
All light is but a flash from his closed eyes:
|
An all-wise Truth is mystic in his heart,
|
The omniscient Ray is shut behind his lids:
|
He is the Wisdom that comes not by thought,
|
His wordless silence brings the immortal word.
|
He sleeps in the atom and the burning star,
|
He sleeps in man and god and beast and stone:
|
Because he is there the Inconscient does its work,
|
Because he is there the world forgets to die.
|
He is the centre of the circle of God,
|
He the circumference of Nature's run.
|
His slumber is an Almightiness in things,
|
Awake, he is the Eternal and Supreme.
|
Above was the brooding bliss of the Infinite,
|
Its omniscient and omnipotent repose,
|
Its immobile silence absolute and alone.
|
All powers were woven in countless concords here.
|
The bliss that made the world in his body lived,
|
Love and delight were the head of the sweet form.
|
In the alluring meshes of their snare
|
Recaptured, the proud blissful members held
|
All joys outrunners of the panting heart
|
And fugitive from life's outstripped desire.
|
Whatever vision has escaped the eye,
|
Whatever happiness comes in dream and trance,
|
The nectar spilled by love with trembling hands,
|
The joy the cup of Nature cannot hold,
|
Had crowded to the beauty of his face,
|
Were waiting in the honey of his laugh.
|
Things hidden by the silence of the hours,
|
The ideas that find no voice on living lips,
|
The soul's pregnant meeting with infinity
|
Had come to birth in him and taken fire:
|
The secret whisper of the flower and star
|
Revealed its meaning in his fathomless look.
|
His lips curved eloquent like a rose of dawn;
|
His smile that played with the wonder of the mind
|
And stayed in the heart when it had left his mouth
|
Glimmered with the radiance of the morning star
|
Gemming the wide discovery of heaven.
|
His gaze was the regard of eternity;
|
The spirit of its sweet and calm intent
|
Was a wise home of gladness and divulged
|
The light of the ages in the mirth of the hours,
|
A sun of wisdom in a miracled grove.
|
In the orchestral largeness of his mind
|
All contrary seekings their close kinship knew,
|
The Soul's Choice and the Supreme Consummation
|
Rich-hearted, wonderful to each other met
|
In the mutual marvelling of their myriad notes
|
And dwelt like brothers of one family
|
Who had found their common and mysterious home.
|
As from the harp of some ecstatic god
|
There springs a harmony of lyric bliss
|
Striving to leave no heavenly joy unsung,
|
Such was the life in that embodied Light.
|
He seemed the wideness of a boundless sky,
|
He seemed the passion of a sorrowless earth,
|
He seemed the burning of a world-wide sun.
|
Two looked upon each other, Soul saw Soul.
|
Then like an anthem from the heart's lucent cave
|
A voice soared up whose magic sound could turn
|
The poignant weeping of the earth to sobs
|
Of rapture and her cry to spirit song.
|
"O human image of the deathless word,
|
How hast thou seen beyond the topaz walls
|
The gleaming sisters of the divine gate,
|
Summoned the genii of their wakeful sleep,
|
And under revelation's arches forced
|
The carved thought-shrouded doors to swing apart,
|
Unlocked the avenues of spiritual sight
|
And taught the entries of a heavenlier state
|
To thy rapt soul that bore the golden key?
|
In thee the secret sight man's blindness missed
|
Has opened its view past Time, my chariot-course,
|
And death, my tunnel which I drive through life
|
To reach my unseen distances of bliss.
|
I am the hushed search of the jealous gods
|
Pursuing my wisdom's vast mysterious work
|
Seized in the thousand meeting ways of heaven.
|
I am the beauty of the unveiled ray
|
Drawing through the deep roads of the infinite night
|
The unconquerable pilgrim soul of earth
|
Beneath the flaring torches of the stars.
|
I am the inviolable Ecstasy;
|
They who have looked on me, shall grieve no more.
|
The eyes that live in night shall see my form.
|
On the pale shores of foaming steely straits
|
That flow beneath a grey tormented sky,
|
Two powers from one original ecstasy born
|
Pace near but parted in the life of man;
|
One leans to earth, the other yearns to the skies:
|
Heaven in its rapture dreams of perfect earth,
|
Earth in its sorrow dreams of perfect heaven.
|
The two longing to join, yet walk apart,
|
Idly divided by their vain conceits;
|
They are kept from their oneness by enchanted fears;
|
Sundered mysteriously by miles of thought,
|
They gaze across the silent gulfs of sleep.
|
Or side by side reclined upon my vasts
|
Like bride and bridegroom magically divorced
|
They wake to yearn, but never can they clasp
|
While thinly flickering hesitates uncrossed
|
Between the lovers on their nuptial couch
|
The shadowy eidolon of a sword.
|
But when the phantom flame-edge fails undone,
|
Then never more can space or time divide
|
The lover from the loved; Space shall draw back
|
Her great translucent curtain, Time shall be
|
The quivering of the spirit's endless bliss.
|
Attend that moment of celestial fate.
|
Meanwhile you two shall serve the dual law
|
Which only now the scouts of vision glimpse
|
Who pressing through the forest of their thoughts
|
Have found the narrow bridges of the gods.
|
Wait patient of the brittle bars of form
|
Making division your delightful means
|
Of happy oneness rapturously enhanced
|
By attraction in the throbbing air between.
|
The Soul's Choice and the Supreme Consummation
|
Yet if thou wouldst abandon the vexed world,
|
Careless of the dark moan of things below,
|
Tread down the isthmus, overleap the flood,
|
Cancel thy contract with the labouring Force;
|
Renounce the tie that joins thee to earth-kind,
|
Cast off thy sympathy with mortal hearts.
|
Arise, vindicate thy spirit's conquered right:
|
Relinquishing thy charge of transient breath,
|
Under the cold gaze of the indifferent stars
|
Leaving thy borrowed body on the sod,
|
Ascend, O soul, into thy blissful home.
|
Here in the playground of the eternal Child
|
Or in domains the wise Immortals tread
|
Roam with thy comrade splendour under skies
|
Spiritual lit by an unsetting sun,
|
As godheads live who care not for the world
|
And share not in the toil of Nature's powers:
|
Absorbed in their self-ecstasy they dwell.
|
Cast off the ambiguous myth of earth's desire,
|
O immortal, to felicity arise."
|
On Savitri listening in her tranquil heart
|
To the harmony of the ensnaring voice
|
A joy exceeding earth's and heaven's poured down,
|
The bliss of an unknown eternity,
|
A rapture from some waiting Infinite.
|
A smile came rippling out in her wide eyes,
|
Its confident felicity's messenger
|
As if the first beam of the morning sun
|
Rippled along two wakened lotus-pools.
|
"O besetter of man's soul with life and death
|
And the world's pleasure and pain and Day and Night,
|
Tempting his heart with the far lure of heaven,
|
Testing his strength with the close touch of hell,
|
I climb not to thy everlasting Day,
|
Even as I have shunned thy eternal Night.
|
To me who turn not from thy terrestrial Way,
|
Give back the other self my nature asks.
|
Thy spaces need him not to help their joy;
|
Earth needs his beautiful spirit made by thee
|
To fling delight down like a net of gold.
|
Earth is the chosen place of mightiest souls;
|
Earth is the heroic spirit's battlefield,
|
The forge where the Archmason shapes his works.
|
Thy servitudes on earth are greater, King,
|
Than all the glorious liberties of heaven.
|
The heavens were once to me my natural home,
|
I too have wandered in star-jewelled groves,
|
Paced sun-gold pastures and moon-silver swards
|
And heard the harping laughter of their streams
|
And lingered under branches dropping myrrh;
|
I too have revelled in the fields of light
|
Touched by the ethereal raiment of the winds,
|
Thy wonder-rounds of music I have trod,
|
Lived in the rhyme of bright unlabouring thoughts,
|
I have beat swift harmonies of rapture vast,
|
Danced in spontaneous measures of the soul
|
The great and easy dances of the gods.
|
O fragrant are the lanes thy children walk
|
And lovely is the memory of their feet
|
Amid the wonder-flowers of Paradise:
|
A heavier tread is mine, a mightier touch.
|
There where the gods and demons battle in night
|
Or wrestle on the borders of the Sun,
|
Taught by the sweetness and the pain of life
|
To bear the uneven strenuous beat that throbs
|
Against the edge of some divinest hope,
|
To dare the impossible with these pangs of search,
|
In me the spirit of immortal love
|
Stretches its arms out to embrace mankind.
|
Too far thy heavens for me from suffering men.
|
Imperfect is the joy not shared by all.
|
O to spread forth, O to encircle and seize
|
The Soul's Choice and the Supreme Consummation
|
More hearts till love in us has filled thy world!
|
O life, the life beneath the wheeling stars!
|
For victory in the tournament with death,
|
For bending of the fierce and difficult bow,
|
For flashing of the splendid sword of God!
|
O thou who soundst the trumpet in the lists,
|
Part not the handle from the untried steel,
|
Take not the warrior with his blow unstruck.
|
Are there not still a million fights to wage?
|
O king-smith, clang on still thy toil begun,
|
Weld us to one in thy strong smithy of life.
|
Thy fine-curved jewelled hilt call Savitri,
|
Thy blade's exultant smile name Satyavan.
|
Fashion to beauty, point us through the world.
|
Break not the lyre before the song is found;
|
Are there not still unnumbered chants to weave?
|
O subtle-souled musician of the years,
|
Play out what thou hast fluted on my stops;
|
Arise from the strain their first wild plaint divined
|
And that discover which is yet unsung.
|
I know that I can lift man's soul to God,
|
I know that he can bring the Immortal down.
|
Our will labours permitted by thy will
|
And without thee an empty roar of storm,
|
A senseless whirlwind is the Titan's force
|
And without thee a snare the strength of gods.
|
Let not the inconscient gulf swallow man's race
|
That through earth's ignorance struggles towards thy Light.
|
O Thunderer with the lightnings of the soul,
|
Give not to darkness and to death thy sun,
|
Achieve thy wisdom's hidden firm decree
|
And the mandate of thy secret world-wide love."
|
Her words failed lost in thought's immensities
|
Which seized them at the limits of their cry
|
And hid their meaning in the distances
|
That stir to more than ever speech has won
|
From the Unthinkable, end of all our thought,
|
And the Ineffable from whom all words come.
|
Then with a smile august as noonday heavens
|
The godhead of the vision wonderful:
|
"How shall earth-nature and man's nature rise
|
To the celestial levels, yet earth abide?
|
Heaven and earth towards each other gaze
|
Across a gulf that few can cross, none touch,
|
Arriving through a vague ethereal mist
|
Out of which all things form that move in space,
|
The shore that all can see but never reach.
|
Heaven's light visits sometimes the mind of earth;
|
Its thoughts burn in her sky like lonely stars;
|
In her heart there move celestial seekings soft
|
And beautiful like fluttering wings of birds,
|
Visions of joy that she can never win
|
Traverse the fading mirror of her dreams.
|
Faint seeds of light and bliss bear sorrowful flowers,
|
Faint harmonies caught from a half-heard song
|
Fall swooning mid the wandering voices' jar,
|
Foam from the tossing luminous seas where dwells
|
The beautiful and far delight of gods,
|
Raptures unknown, a miracled happiness
|
Thrill her and pass half-shaped to mind and sense.
|
Above her little finite steps she feels,
|
Careless of knot or pause, worlds which weave out
|
A strange perfection beyond law and rule,
|
A universe of self-found felicity,
|
An inexpressible rhythm of timeless beats,
|
The many-movemented heart-beats of the One,
|
Magic of the boundless harmonies of self,
|
Order of the freedom of the infinite,
|
The wonder-plastics of the Absolute.
|
There is the All-Truth and there the timeless bliss.
|
But hers are fragments of a star-lost gleam,
|
The Soul's Choice and the Supreme Consummation
|
Hers are but careless visits of the gods.
|
They are a Light that fails, a Word soon hushed
|
And nothing they mean can stay for long on earth.
|
There are high glimpses, not the lasting sight.
|
A few can climb to an unperishing sun,
|
Or live on the edges of the mystic moon
|
And channel to earth-mind the wizard ray.
|
The heroes and the demigods are few
|
To whom the close immortal voices speak
|
And to their acts the heavenly clan are near.
|
Few are the silences in which Truth is heard,
|
Unveiling the timeless utterance in her deeps;
|
Few are the splendid moments of the seers.
|
Heaven's call is rare, rarer the heart that heeds;
|
The doors of light are sealed to common mind
|
And earth's needs nail to earth the human mass,
|
Only in an uplifting hour of stress
|
Men answer to the touch of greater things:
|
Or, raised by some strong hand to brea the heaven-air,
|
They slide back to the mud from which they climbed;
|
In the mud of which they are made, whose law they know
|
They joy in safe return to a friendly base,
|
And, though something in them weeps for glory lost
|
And greatness murdered, they accept their fall.
|
To be the common man they think the best,
|
To live as others live is their delight.
|
For most are built on Nature's early plan
|
And owe small debt to a superior plane;
|
The human average is their level pitch,
|
A thinking animal's material range.
|
In the long ever-mounting hierarchy,
|
In the stark economy of cosmic life
|
Each creature to its appointed task and place
|
Is bound by his nature's form, his spirit's force.
|
If this were easily disturbed, it would break
|
The settled balance of created things;
|
The perpetual order of the universe
|
Would tremble, and a gap yawn in woven Fate.
|
If men were not and all were brilliant gods,
|
The mediating stair would then be lost
|
By which the spirit awake in Matter winds
|
Accepting the circuits of the middle Way,
|
By heavy toil and slow aeonic steps
|
Reaching the bright miraculous fringe of God,
|
Into the glory of the Oversoul.
|
My will, my call is there in men and things;
|
But the Inconscient lies at the world's grey back
|
And draws to its breast of Night and Death and Sleep.
|
Imprisoned in its dark and dumb abyss
|
A little consciousness it lets escape
|
But jealous of the growing light holds back
|
Close to the obscure edges of its cave
|
As if a fond ignorant mother kept her child
|
Tied to her apron strings of Nescience.
|
The Inconscient could not read without man's mind
|
The mystery of the world its sleep has made:
|
Man is its key to unlock a conscious door.
|
But still it holds him dangled in its grasp:
|
It draws its giant circle round his thoughts,
|
It shuts his heart to the supernal Light.
|
A high and dazzling limit shines above,
|
A black and blinding border rules below:
|
His mind is closed between two firmaments.
|
He seeks through words and images the Truth,
|
And, poring on surfaces and brute outsides
|
Or dipping cautious feet in shallow seas,
|
Even his Knowledge is an Ignorance.
|
He is barred out from his own inner depths;
|
He cannot look on the face of the Unknown.
|
How shall he see with the Omniscient's eyes,
|
How shall he will with the Omnipotent's force?
|
O too compassionate and eager Dawn,
|
The Soul's Choice and the Supreme Consummation
|
Leave to the circling aeons' tardy pace
|
And to the working of the inconscient Will,
|
Leave to its imperfect light the earthly race:
|
All shall be done by the long act of Time.
|
Although the race is bound by its own kind,
|
The soul in man is greater than his fate:
|
Above the wash and surge of Time and Space,
|
Disengaging from the cosmic commonalty
|
By which all life is kin in grief and joy,
|
Delivered from the universal Law
|
The sunlike single and transcendent spirit
|
Can blaze its way through the mind's barrier wall
|
And burn alone in the eternal sky,
|
Inhabitant of a wide and endless calm.
|
O flame, withdraw into thy luminous self.
|
Or else return to thy original might
|
On a seer-summit above thought and world;
|
Partner of my unhoured eternity,
|
Be one with the infinity of my power:
|
For thou art the World-Mother and the Bride.
|
Out of the fruitless yearning of earth's life,
|
Out of her feeble unconvincing dream,
|
Recovering wings that cross infinity
|
Pass back into the Power from which thou cam'st.
|
To that thou canst uplift thy formless flight,
|
Thy heart can rise from its unsatisfied beats
|
And feel the immortal and spiritual joy
|
Of a soul that never lost felicity.
|
Lift up the fallen heart of love which flutters
|
Cast down desire's abyss into the gulfs.
|
For ever rescued out of Nature's shapes
|
Discover what the aimless cycles want,
|
There intertwined with all thy life has meant,
|
Here vainly sought in a terrestrial form.
|
Break into eternity thy mortal mould;
|
Melt, lightning, into thy invisible flame!
|
Clasp, Ocean, deep into thyself thy wave,
|
Happy for ever in the embosoming surge.
|
Grow one with the still passion of the depths.
|
Then shalt thou know the Lover and the Loved,
|
Leaving the limits dividing him and thee.
|
Receive him into boundless Savitri,
|
Lose thyself into infinite Satyavan.
|
O miracle, where thou beganst, there cease!"
|
But Savitri answered to the radiant God:
|
"In vain thou temptst with solitary bliss
|
Two spirits saved out of a suffering world;
|
My soul and his indissolubly linked
|
In the one task for which our lives were born,
|
To raise the world to God in deathless Light,
|
To bring God down to the world on earth we came,
|
To change the earthly life to life divine.
|
I keep my will to save the world and man;
|
Even the charm of thy alluring voice,
|
O blissful Godhead, cannot seize and snare.
|
I sacrifice not earth to happier worlds.
|
Because there dwelt the Eternal's vast Idea
|
And his dynamic will in men and things,
|
So only could the enormous scene begin.
|
Whence came this profitless wilderness of stars,
|
This mighty barren wheeling of the suns?
|
Who made the soul of futile life in Time,
|
Planted a purpose and a hope in the heart,
|
Set Nature to a huge and meaningless task
|
Or planned her million-aeoned effort's waste?
|
What force condemned to birth and death and tears
|
These conscious creatures crawling on the globe?
|
If earth can look up to the light of heaven
|
And hear an answer to her lonely cry,
|
Not vain their meeting, nor heaven's touch a snare.
|
If thou and I are true, the world is true;
|
Although thou hide thyself behind thy works,
|
The Soul's Choice and the Supreme Consummation
|
To be is not a senseless paradox;
|
Since God has made earth, earth must make in her God;
|
What hides within her breast she must reveal.
|
I claim thee for the world that thou hast made.
|
If man lives bound by his humanity,
|
If he is tied for ever to his pain,
|
Let a greater being then arise from man,
|
The superhuman with the Eternal mate
|
And the Immortal shine through earthly forms.
|
Else were creation vain and this great world
|
A nothing that in Time's moments seems to be.
|
But I have seen through the insentient mask;
|
I have felt a secret spirit stir in things
|
Carrying the body of the growing God:
|
It looks through veiling forms at veilless truth;
|
It pushes back the curtain of the gods;
|
It climbs towards its own eternity."
|
But the god answered to the woman's heart:
|
"O living power of the incarnate Word,
|
All that the Spirit has dreamed thou canst create:
|
Thou art the force by which I made the worlds,
|
Thou art my vision and my will and voice.
|
But knowledge too is thine, the world-plan thou knowest
|
And the tardy process of the pace of Time.
|
In the impetuous drive of thy heart of flame,
|
In thy passion to deliver man and earth,
|
Indignant at the impediments of Time
|
And the slow evolution's sluggard steps,
|
Lead not the spirit in an ignorant world
|
To dare too soon the adventure of the Light,
|
Pushing the bound and slumbering god in man
|
Awakened mid the ineffable silences
|
Into endless vistas of the unknown and unseen,
|
Across the last confines of the limiting Mind
|
And the Superconscient's perilous border line
|
Into the danger of the Infinite.
|
But if thou wilt not wait for Time and God,
|
Do then thy work and force thy will on Fate.
|
As I have taken from thee my load of night
|
And taken from thee my twilight's doubts and dreams,
|
So now I take my light of utter Day.
|
These are my symbol kingdoms but not here
|
Can the great choice be made that fixes fate
|
Or uttered the sanction of the Voice supreme.
|
Arise upon a ladder of greater worlds
|
To the infinity where no world can be.
|
But not in the wide air where a greater Life
|
Uplifts its mystery and its miracle,
|
And not on the luminous peaks of summit Mind,
|
Or in the hold where subtle Matter's spirit
|
Hides in its light of shimmering secrecies,
|
Can there be heard the Eternal's firm command
|
That joins the head of destiny to its base.
|
These only are the mediating links;
|
Not theirs is the originating sight
|
Nor the fulfilling act or last support
|
That bears perpetually the cosmic pile.
|
Two are the Powers that hold the ends of Time;
|
Spirit foresees, Matter unfolds its thought,
|
The dumb executor of God's decrees,
|
Omitting no iota and no dot,
|
Agent unquestioning, inconscient, stark,
|
Evolving inevitably a charged content,
|
Intention of his force in Time and Space,
|
In animate beings and inanimate things;
|
Immutably it fulfils its ordered task,
|
It cancels not a tittle of things done;
|
Unswerving from the oracular command
|
It alters not the steps of the Unseen.
|
If thou must indeed deliver man and earth
|
On the spiritual heights look down on life,
|
Discover the truth of God and man and world;
|
The Soul's Choice and the Supreme Consummation
|
Then do thy task knowing and seeing all.
|
Ascend, O soul, into thy timeless self;
|
Choose destiny's curve and stamp thy will on Time."
|
He ended and upon the falling sound
|
A power went forth that shook the founded spheres
|
And loosed the stakes that hold the tents of form.
|
Absolved from vision's grip and the folds of thought,
|
Rapt from her sense like disappearing scenes
|
In the stupendous theatre of Space
|
The heaven-worlds vanished in spiritual light.
|
A movement was abroad, a cry, a word,
|
Beginningless in its vast discovery,
|
Momentless in its unthinkable return:
|
Choired in calm seas she heard the eternal Thought
|
Rhythming itself abroad unutterably
|
In spaceless orbits and on timeless roads.
|
In an ineffable world she lived fulfilled.
|
An energy of the triune Infinite,
|
In a measureless Reality she dwelt,
|
A rapture and a being and a force,
|
A linked and myriad-motioned plenitude,
|
A virgin unity, a luminous spouse,
|
Housing a multitudinous embrace
|
To marry all in God's immense delight,
|
Bearing the eternity of every spirit,
|
Bearing the burden of universal love,
|
A wonderful mother of unnumbered souls.
|
All things she knew, all things imagined or willed:
|
Her ear was opened to ideal sound,
|
Shape the convention bound no more her sight,
|
A thousand doors of oneness was her heart.
|
A crypt and sanctuary of brooding light
|
Appeared, the last recess of things beyond.
|
Then in its rounds the enormous fiat paused,
|
Silence gave back to the Unknowable
|
All it had given. Still was her listening thought.
|
The form of things had ceased within her soul.
|
Invisible that perfect godhead now.
|
Around her some tremendous spirit lived,
|
Mysterious flame around a melting pearl,
|
And in the phantom of abolished Space
|
There was a voice unheard by ears that cried:
|
"Choose, spirit, thy supreme choice not given again;
|
For now from my highest being looks at thee
|
The nameless formless peace where all things rest.
|
In a happy vast sublime cessation know, -
|
An immense extinction in eternity,
|
A point that disappears in the infinite, -
|
Felicity of the extinguished flame,
|
Last sinking of a wave in a boundless sea,
|
End of the trouble of thy wandering thoughts,
|
Close of the journeying of thy pilgrim soul.
|
Accept, O music, weariness of thy notes,
|
O stream, wide breaking of thy channel banks."
|
The moments fell into eternity.
|
But someone yearned within a bosom unknown
|
And silently the woman's heart replied:
|
"Thy peace, O Lord, a boon within to keep
|
Amid the roar and ruin of wild Time
|
For the magnificent soul of man on earth.
|
Thy calm, O Lord, that bears thy hands of joy."
|
Limitless like ocean round a lonely isle
|
A second time the eternal cry arose:
|
"Wide open are the ineffable gates in front.
|
My spirit leans down to break the knot of earth,
|
Amorous of oneness without thought or sign
|
To cast down wall and fence, to strip heaven bare,
|
See with the large eye of infinity,
|
Unweave the stars and into silence pass."
|
In an immense and world-destroying pause
|
She heard a million creatures cry to her.
|
Through the tremendous stillness of her thoughts
|
The Soul's Choice and the Supreme Consummation
|
Immeasurably the woman's nature spoke:
|
"Thy oneness, Lord, in many approaching hearts,
|
My sweet infinity of thy numberless souls."
|
Mightily retreating like a sea in ebb
|
A third time swelled the great admonishing call:
|
"I spread abroad the refuge of my wings.
|
Out of its incommunicable deeps
|
My power looks forth of mightiest splendour, stilled
|
Into its majesty of sleep, withdrawn
|
Above the dreadful whirlings of the world."
|
A sob of things was answer to the voice,
|
And passionately the woman's heart replied:
|
"Thy energy, Lord, to seize on woman and man,
|
To take all things and creatures in their grief
|
And gather them into a mother's arms."
|
Solemn and distant like a seraph's lyre
|
A last great time the warning sound was heard:
|
"I open the wide eye of solitude
|
To uncover the voiceless rapture of my bliss,
|
Where in a pure and exquisite hush it lies
|
Motionless in its slumber of ecstasy,
|
Resting from the sweet madness of the dance
|
Out of whose beat the throb of hearts was born."
|
Breaking the Silence with appeal and cry
|
A hymn of adoration tireless climbed,
|
A music beat of winged uniting souls,
|
Then all the woman yearningly replied:
|
"Thy embrace which rends the living knot of pain,
|
Thy joy, O Lord, in which all creatures breathe,
|
Thy magic flowing waters of deep love,
|
Thy sweetness give to me for earth and men."
|
Then after silence a still blissful cry
|
Began, such as arose from the Infinite
|
When the first whisperings of a strange delight
|
Imagined in its deep the joy to seek,
|
The passion to discover and to touch,
|
The enamoured laugh which rhymed the chanting worlds:
|
"O beautiful body of the incarnate Word,
|
Thy thoughts are mine, I have spoken with thy voice.
|
My will is thine, what thou hast chosen I choose:
|
All thou hast asked I give to earth and men.
|
All shall be written out in destiny's book
|
By my trustee of thought and plan and act,
|
The executor of my will, eternal Time.
|
But since thou hast refused my maimless Calm
|
And turned from my termless peace in which is expunged
|
The visage of Space and the shape of Time is lost,
|
And from happy extinction of thy separate self
|
In my uncompanioned lone eternity, -
|
For not for thee the nameless worldless Nought,
|
Annihilation of thy living soul
|
And the end of thought and hope and life and love
|
In the blank measureless Unknowable, -
|
I lay my hands upon thy soul of flame,
|
I lay my hands upon thy heart of love,
|
I yoke thee to my power of work in Time.
|
Because thou hast obeyed my timeless will,
|
Because thou hast chosen to share earth's struggle and fate
|
And leaned in pity over earth-bound men
|
And turned aside to help and yearned to save,
|
I bind by thy heart's passion thy heart to mine
|
And lay my splendid yoke upon thy soul.
|
Now will I do in thee my marvellous works.
|
I will fasten thy nature with my cords of strength,
|
Subdue to my delight thy spirit's limbs
|
And make thee a vivid knot of all my bliss
|
And build in thee my proud and crystal home.
|
Thy days shall be my shafts of power and light,
|
Thy nights my starry mysteries of joy
|
And all my clouds lie tangled in thy hair
|
And all my springtides marry in thy mouth.
|
The Soul's Choice and the Supreme Consummation
|
O Sun-Word, thou shalt raise the earth-soul to Light
|
And bring down God into the lives of men;
|
Earth shall be my work-chamber and my house,
|
My garden of life to plant a seed divine.
|
When all thy work in human time is done
|
The mind of earth shall be a home of light,
|
The life of earth a tree growing towards heaven,
|
The body of earth a tabernacle of God.
|
Awakened from the mortal's ignorance
|
Men shall be lit with the Eternal's ray
|
And the glory of my sun-lift in their thoughts
|
And feel in their hearts the sweetness of my love
|
And in their acts my Power's miraculous drive.
|
My will shall be the meaning of their days;
|
Living for me, by me, in me they shall live.
|
In the heart of my creation's mystery
|
I will enact the drama of thy soul,
|
Inscribe the long romance of Thee and Me.
|
I will pursue thee across the centuries;
|
Thou shalt be hunted through the world by love,
|
Naked of ignorance' protecting veil
|
And without covert from my radiant gods.
|
No shape shall screen thee from my divine desire,
|
Nowhere shalt thou escape my living eyes.
|
In the nudity of thy discovered self,
|
In a bare identity with all that is,
|
Disrobed of thy covering of humanity,
|
Divested of the dense veil of human thought,
|
Made one with every mind and body and heart,
|
Made one with all Nature and with Self and God,
|
Summing in thy single soul my mystic world
|
I will possess in thee my universe,
|
The universe find all I am in thee.
|
Thou shalt bear all things that all things may change,
|
Thou shalt fill all with my splendour and my bliss,
|
Thou shalt meet all with thy transmuting soul.
|
Assailed by my infinitudes above,
|
And quivering in immensities below,
|
Pursued by me through my mind's wall-less vast,
|
Oceanic with the surges of my life,
|
A swimmer lost between two leaping seas
|
By my outer pains and inner sweetnesses
|
Finding my joy in my opposite mysteries
|
Thou shalt respond to me from every nerve.
|
A vision shall compel thy coursing breath,
|
Thy heart shall drive thee on the wheel of works,
|
Thy mind shall urge thee through the flames of thought,
|
To meet me in the abyss and on the heights,
|
To feel me in the tempest and the calm,
|
And love me in the noble and the vile,
|
In beautiful things and terrible desire.
|
The pains of hell shall be to thee my kiss,
|
The flowers of heaven persuade thee with my touch.
|
My fiercest masks shall my attractions bring.
|
Music shall find thee in the voice of swords,
|
Beauty pursue thee through the core of flame.
|
Thou shalt know me in the rolling of the spheres
|
And cross me in the atoms of the whirl.
|
The wheeling forces of my universe
|
Shall cry to thee the summons of my name.
|
Delight shall drop down from my nectarous moon,
|
My fragrance seize thee in the jasmine's snare,
|
My eye shall look upon thee from the sun.
|
Mirror of Nature's secret spirit made,
|
Thou shalt reflect my hidden heart of joy,
|
Thou shalt drink down my sweetness unalloyed
|
In my pure lotus-cup of starry brim.
|
My dreadful hands laid on thy bosom shall force
|
Thy being bathed in fiercest longing's streams.
|
Thou shalt discover the one and quivering note,
|
And cry, the harp of all my melodies,
|
And roll, my foaming wave in seas of love.
|
The Soul's Choice and the Supreme Consummation
|
Even my disasters' clutch shall be to thee
|
The ordeal of my rapture's contrary shape:
|
In pain's self shall smile on thee my secret face:
|
Thou shalt bear my ruthless beauty unabridged
|
Amid the world's intolerable wrongs,
|
Trampled by the violent misdeeds of Time
|
Cry out to the ecstasy of my rapture's touch.
|
All beings shall be to thy life my emissaries;
|
Drawn to me on the bosom of thy friend,
|
Compelled to meet me in thy enemy's eyes,
|
My creatures shall demand me from thy heart.
|
Thou shalt not shrink from any brother soul.
|
Thou shalt be attracted helplessly to all.
|
Men seeing thee shall feel my hands of joy,
|
In sorrow's pangs feel steps of the world's delight,
|
Their life experience its tumultuous shock
|
In the mutual craving of two opposites.
|
Hearts touched by thy love shall answer to my call,
|
Discover the ancient music of the spheres
|
In the revealing accents of thy voice
|
And nearer draw to me because thou art:
|
Enamoured of thy spirit's loveliness
|
They shall embrace my body in thy soul,
|
Hear in thy life the beauty of my laugh,
|
Know the thrilled bliss with which I made the worlds.
|
All that thou hast, shall be for others' bliss,
|
All that thou art, shall to my hands belong.
|
I will pour delight from thee as from a jar,
|
I will whirl thee as my chariot through the ways,
|
I will use thee as my sword and as my lyre,
|
I will play on thee my minstrelsies of thought.
|
And when thou art vibrant with all ecstasy,
|
And when thou liv'st one spirit with all things,
|
Then will I spare thee not my living fires,
|
But make thee a channel for my timeless force.
|
My hidden presence led thee unknowing on
|
From thy beginning in earth's voiceless bosom
|
Through life and pain and time and will and death,
|
Through outer shocks and inner silences
|
Along the mystic roads of Space and Time
|
To the experience which all Nature hides.
|
Who hunts and seizes me, my captive grows:
|
This shalt thou henceforth learn from thy heart-beats.
|
For ever love, O beautiful slave of God!
|
O lasso of my rapture's widening noose,
|
Become my cord of universal love.
|
The spirit ensnared by thee force to delight
|
Of creation's oneness sweet and fathomless,
|
Compelled to embrace my myriad unities
|
And all my endless forms and divine souls.
|
O Mind, grow full of the eternal peace;
|
O Word, cry out the immortal litany:
|
Built is the golden tower, the flame-child born.
|
"Descend to life with him thy heart desires.
|
O Satyavan, O luminous Savitri,
|
I sent you forth of old beneath the stars,
|
A dual power of God in an ignorant world,
|
In a hedged creation shut from limitless self,
|
Bringing down God to the insentient globe,
|
Lifting earth-beings to immortality.
|
In the world of my knowledge and my ignorance
|
Where God is unseen and only is heard a Name
|
And knowledge is trapped in the boundaries of mind
|
And life is hauled in the drag-net of desire
|
And Matter hides the soul from its own sight,
|
You are my Force at work to uplift earth's fate,
|
My self that moves up the immense incline
|
Between the extremes of the spirit's night and day.
|
He is my soul that climbs from nescient Night
|
Through life and mind and supernature's Vast
|
To the supernal light of Timelessness
|
And my eternity hid in moving Time
|
The Soul's Choice and the Supreme Consummation
|
And my boundlessness cut by the curve of Space.
|
It climbs to the greatness it has left behind
|
And to the beauty and joy from which it fell,
|
To the closeness and sweetness of all things divine,
|
To light without bounds and life illimitable,
|
Taste of the depths of the Ineffable's bliss,
|
Touch of the immortal and the infinite.
|
He is my soul that gropes out of the beast
|
To reach humanity's heights of lucent thought
|
And the vicinity of Truth's sublime.
|
He is the godhead growing in human lives
|
And in the body of earth-being's forms:
|
He is the soul of man climbing to God
|
In Nature's surge out of earth's ignorance.
|
O Savitri, thou art my spirit's Power,
|
The revealing voice of my immortal Word,
|
The face of Truth upon the roads of Time
|
Pointing to the souls of men the routes to God.
|
While the dim light from the veiled Spirit's peak
|
Falls upon Matter's stark inconscient sleep
|
As if a pale moonbeam on a dense glade,
|
And Mind in a half-light moves amid half-truths
|
And the human heart knows only human love
|
And life is a stumbling and imperfect force
|
And the body counts out its precarious days,
|
You shall be born into man's dubious hours
|
In forms that hide the soul's divinity
|
And show through veils of the earth's doubting air
|
My glory breaking as through clouds a sun,
|
Or burning like a rare and inward fire,
|
And with my nameless influence fill men's lives.
|
Yet shall they look up as to peaks of God
|
And feel God like a circumambient air
|
And rest on God as on a motionless base.
|
Yet shall there glow on mind like a horned moon
|
The Spirit's crescent splendour in pale skies
|
And light man's life upon his Godward road.
|
But more there is concealed in God's Beyond
|
That shall one day reveal its hidden face.
|
Now mind is all and its uncertain ray,
|
Mind is the leader of the body and life,
|
Mind the thought-driven chariot of the soul
|
Carrying the luminous wanderer in the night
|
To vistas of a far uncertain dawn,
|
To the end of the Spirit's fathomless desire,
|
To its dream of absolute truth and utter bliss.
|
There are greater destinies mind cannot surmise
|
Fixed on the summit of the evolving Path
|
The Traveller now treads in the Ignorance,
|
Unaware of his next step, not knowing his goal.
|
Mind is not all his tireless climb can reach,
|
There is a fire on the apex of the worlds,
|
There is a house of the Eternal's light,
|
There is an infinite truth, an absolute power.
|
The Spirit's mightiness shall cast off its mask;
|
Its greatness shall be felt shaping the world's course:
|
It shall be seen in its own veilless beams,
|
A star rising from the Inconscient's night,
|
A sun climbing to Supernature's peak.
|
Abandoning the dubious middle Way,
|
A few shall glimpse the miraculous Origin
|
And some shall feel in you the secret Force
|
And they shall turn to meet a nameless tread,
|
Adventurers into a mightier Day.
|
Ascending out of the limiting breadths of mind,
|
They shall discover the world's huge design
|
And step into the Truth, the Right, the Vast.
|
You shall reveal to them the hidden eternities,
|
The breath of infinitudes not yet revealed,
|
Some rapture of the bliss that made the world,
|
Some rush of the force of God's omnipotence,
|
Some beam of the omniscient Mystery.
|
The Soul's Choice and the Supreme Consummation
|
But when the hour of the Divine draws near
|
The Mighty Mother shall take birth in Time
|
And God be born into the human clay
|
In forms made ready by your human lives.
|
Then shall the Truth supreme be given to men:
|
There is a being beyond the being of mind,
|
An Immeasurable cast into many forms,
|
A miracle of the multitudinous One,
|
There is a consciousness mind cannot touch,
|
Its speech cannot utter nor its thought reveal.
|
It has no home on earth, no centre in man,
|
Yet is the source of all things thought and done,
|
The fount of the creation and its works,
|
It is the origin of all truth here,
|
The sun-orb of mind's fragmentary rays,
|
Infinity's heaven that spills the rain of God,
|
The Immense that calls to man to expand the Spirit,
|
The wide Aim that justifies his narrow attempts,
|
A channel for the little he tastes of bliss.
|
Some shall be made the glory's receptacles
|
And vehicles of the Eternal's luminous power.
|
These are the high forerunners, the heads of Time,
|
The great deliverers of earth-bound mind,
|
The high transfigurers of human clay,
|
The first-born of a new supernal race.
|
The incarnate dual Power shall open God's door,
|
Eternal supermind touch earthly Time.
|
The superman shall wake in mortal man
|
And manifest the hidden demigod
|
Or grow into the God-Light and God-Force
|
Revealing the secret deity in the cave.
|
Then shall the earth be touched by the Supreme,
|
His bright unveiled Transcendence shall illumine
|
The mind and heart and force the life and act
|
To interpret his inexpressible mystery
|
In a heavenly alphabet of Divinity's signs.
|
His living cosmic spirit shall enring,
|
Annulling the decree of death and pain,
|
Erasing the formulas of the Ignorance,
|
With the deep meaning of beauty and life's hid sense,
|
The being ready for immortality,
|
His regard crossing infinity's mystic waves
|
Bring back to Nature her early joy to live,
|
The metred heart-beats of a lost delight,
|
The cry of a forgotten ecstasy,
|
The dance of the first world-creating Bliss.
|
The Immanent shall be the witness God
|
Watching on his many-petalled lotus-throne
|
His actionless being and his silent might
|
Ruling earth-nature by eternity's law,
|
A thinker waking the Inconscient's world,
|
An immobile centre of many infinitudes
|
In his thousand-pillared temple by Time's sea.
|
Then shall the embodied being live as one
|
Who is a thought, a will of the Divine,
|
A mask or robe of his divinity,
|
An instrument and partner of his Force,
|
A point or line drawn in the infinite,
|
A manifest of the Imperishable.
|
The supermind shall be his nature's fount,
|
The Eternal's truth shall mould his thoughts and acts,
|
The Eternal's truth shall be his light and guide.
|
All then shall change, a magic order come
|
Overtopping this mechanical universe.
|
A mightier race shall inhabit the mortal's world.
|
On Nature's luminous tops, on the Spirit's ground,
|
The superman shall reign as king of life,
|
Make earth almost the mate and peer of heaven,
|
And lead towards God and truth man's ignorant heart
|
And lift towards godhead his mortality.
|
A power released from circumscribing bounds,
|
Its height pushed up beyond death's hungry reach,
|
The Soul's Choice and the Supreme Consummation
|
Life's tops shall flame with the Immortal's thoughts,
|
Light shall invade the darkness of its base.
|
Then in the process of evolving Time
|
All shall be drawn into a single plan,
|
A divine harmony shall be earth's law,
|
Beauty and joy remould her way to live:
|
Even the body shall remember God,
|
Nature shall draw back from mortality
|
And Spirit's fires shall guide the earth's blind force;
|
Knowledge shall bring into the aspirant Thought
|
A high proximity to Truth and God.
|
The supermind shall claim the world for Light
|
And thrill with love of God the enamoured heart
|
And place Light's crown on Nature's lifted head
|
And found Light's reign on her unshaking base.
|
A greater truth than earth's shall roof-in earth
|
And shed its sunlight on the roads of mind;
|
A power infallible shall lead the thought,
|
A seeing Puissance govern life and act,
|
In earthly hearts kindle the Immortal's fire.
|
A soul shall wake in the Inconscient's house;
|
The mind shall be God-vision's tabernacle,
|
The body intuition's instrument,
|
And life a channel for God's visible power.
|
All earth shall be the Spirit's manifest home,
|
Hidden no more by the body and the life,
|
Hidden no more by the mind's ignorance;
|
An unerring Hand shall shape event and act.
|
The Spirit's eyes shall look through Nature's eyes,
|
The Spirit's force shall occupy Nature's force.
|
This world shall be God's visible garden-house,
|
The earth shall be a field and camp of God,
|
Man shall forget consent to mortality
|
And his embodied frail impermanence.
|
This universe shall unseal its occult sense,
|
Creation's process change its antique front,
|
An ignorant evolution's hierarchy
|
Release the Wisdom chained below its base.
|
The Spirit shall be the master of his world
|
Lurking no more in form's obscurity
|
And Nature shall reverse her action's rule,
|
The outward world disclose the Truth it veils;
|
All things shall manifest the covert God,
|
All shall reveal the Spirit's light and might
|
And move to its destiny of felicity.
|
Even should a hostile force cling to its reign
|
And claim its right's perpetual sovereignty
|
And man refuse his high spiritual fate,
|
Yet shall the secret Truth in things prevail.
|
For in the march of all-fulfilling Time
|
The hour must come of the Transcendent's will:
|
All turns and winds towards his predestined ends
|
In Nature's fixed inevitable course
|
Decreed since the beginning of the worlds
|
In the deep essence of created things:
|
Even there shall come as a high crown of all
|
The end of Death, the death of Ignorance.
|
But first high Truth must set her feet on earth
|
And man aspire to the Eternal's light
|
And all his members feel the Spirit's touch
|
And all his life obey an inner Force.
|
This too shall be; for a new life shall come,
|
A body of the Superconscient's truth,
|
A native field of Supernature's mights:
|
It shall make earth's nescient ground Truth's colony,
|
Make even the Ignorance a transparent robe
|
Through which shall shine the brilliant limbs of Truth
|
And Truth shall be a sun on Nature's head
|
And Truth shall be the guide of Nature's steps
|
And Truth shall gaze out of her nether deeps.
|
When superman is born as Nature's king
|
His presence shall transfigure Matter's world:
|
The Soul's Choice and the Supreme Consummation
|
He shall light up Truth's fire in Nature's night,
|
He shall lay upon the earth Truth's greater law;
|
Man too shall turn towards the Spirit's call.
|
Awake to his hidden possibility,
|
Awake to all that slept within his heart
|
And all that Nature meant when earth was formed
|
And the Spirit made this ignorant world his home,
|
He shall aspire to Truth and God and Bliss.
|
Interpreter of a diviner law
|
And instrument of a supreme design,
|
The higher kind shall lean to lift up man.
|
Man shall desire to climb to his own heights.
|
The truth above shall wake a nether truth,
|
Even the dumb earth become a sentient force.
|
The Spirit's tops and Nature's base shall draw
|
Near to the secret of their separate truth
|
And know each other as one deity.
|
The Spirit shall look out through Matter's gaze
|
And Matter shall reveal the Spirit's face.
|
Then man and superman shall be at one
|
And all the earth become a single life.
|
Even the multitude shall hear the Voice
|
And turn to commune with the Spirit within
|
And strive to obey the high spiritual law:
|
This earth shall stir with impulses sublime,
|
Humanity awake to deepest self,
|
Nature the hidden godhead recognise.
|
Even the many shall some answer make
|
And bear the splendour of the Divine's rush
|
And his impetuous knock at unseen doors.
|
A heavenlier passion shall upheave men's lives,
|
Their mind shall share in the ineffable gleam,
|
Their heart shall feel the ecstasy and the fire.
|
Earth's bodies shall be conscious of a soul;
|
Mortality's bondslaves shall unloose their bonds,
|
Mere men into spiritual beings grow
|
And see awake the dumb divinity.
|
Intuitive beams shall touch the nature's peaks,
|
A revelation stir the nature's depths;
|
The Truth shall be the leader of their lives,
|
Truth shall dictate their thought and speech and act,
|
They shall feel themselves lifted nearer to the sky,
|
As if a little lower than the gods.
|
For knowledge shall pour down in radiant streams
|
And even darkened mind quiver with new life
|
And kindle and burn with the Ideal's fire
|
And turn to escape from mortal ignorance.
|
The frontiers of the Ignorance shall recede,
|
More and more souls shall enter into light,
|
Minds lit, inspired, the occult summoner hear
|
And lives blaze with a sudden inner flame
|
And hearts grow enamoured of divine delight
|
And human wills tune to the divine will,
|
These separate selves the Spirit's oneness feel,
|
These senses of heavenly sense grow capable,
|
The flesh and nerves of a strange ethereal joy
|
And mortal bodies of immortality.
|
A divine force shall flow through tissue and cell
|
And take the charge of breath and speech and act
|
And all the thoughts shall be a glow of suns
|
And every feeling a celestial thrill.
|
Often a lustrous inner dawn shall come
|
Lighting the chambers of the slumbering mind;
|
A sudden bliss shall run through every limb
|
And Nature with a mightier Presence fill.
|
Thus shall the earth open to divinity
|
And common natures feel the wide uplift,
|
Illumine common acts with the Spirit's ray
|
And meet the deity in common things.
|
Nature shall live to manifest secret God,
|
The Spirit shall take up the human play,
|
This earthly life become the life divine."
|
The Soul's Choice and the Supreme Consummation
|
The measure of that subtle music ceased.
|
Down with a hurried swimming floating lapse
|
Through unseen worlds and bottomless spaces forced
|
Sank like a star the soul of Savitri.
|
Amidst a laughter of unearthly lyres
|
She heard around her nameless voices cry
|
Triumphing, an innumerable sound.
|
A choir of rushing winds to meet her came.
|
She bore the burden of infinity
|
And felt the stir of all ethereal space.
|
Pursuing her in her fall, implacably sweet,
|
A face was over her which seemed a youth's,
|
Symbol of all the beauty eyes see not,
|
Crowned as with peacock plumes of gorgeous hue
|
Framing a sapphire, whose heart-disturbing smile
|
Insatiably attracted to delight,
|
Voluptuous to the embraces of her soul.
|
Changed in its shape, yet rapturously the same,
|
It grew a woman's dark and beautiful
|
Like a mooned night with drifting star-gemmed clouds,
|
A shadowy glory and a stormy depth,
|
Turbulent in will and terrible in love.
|
Eyes in which Nature's blind ecstatic life
|
Sprang from some spirit's passionate content,
|
Missioned her to the whirling dance of earth.
|
Amidst the headlong rapture of her fall
|
Held like a bird in a child's satisfied hands,
|
In an enamoured grasp her spirit strove
|
Admitting no release till Time should end,
|
And, as the fruit of the mysterious joy,
|
She kept within her strong embosoming soul
|
Like a flower hidden in the heart of spring
|
The soul of Satyavan drawn down by her
|
Inextricably in that mighty lapse.
|
Invisible heavens in a thronging flight
|
Soared past her as she fell. Then all the blind
|
And near attraction of the earth compelled
|
Fearful rapidities of downward bliss.
|
Lost in the giddy proneness of that speed,
|
Whirled, sinking, overcome she disappeared,
|
Like a leaf spinning from the tree of heaven,
|
In broad unconsciousness as in a pool;
|
A hospitable softness drew her in
|
Into a wonder of miraculous depths,
|
Above her closed a darkness of great wings
|
And she was buried in a mother's breast.
|
Then from a timeless plane that watches Time,
|
A Spirit gazed out upon destiny,
|
In its endless moment saw the ages pass.
|
All still was in a silence of the gods.
|
The prophet moment covered limitless Space
|
And cast into the heart of hurrying Time
|
A diamond light of the Eternal's peace,
|
A crimson seed of God's felicity;
|
A glance from the gaze fell of undying Love.
|
A wonderful face looked out with deathless eyes;
|
A hand was seen drawing the golden bars
|
That guard the imperishable secrecies.
|
A key turned in a mystic lock of Time.
|
But where the silence of the gods had passed,
|
A greater harmony from the stillness born
|
Surprised with joy and sweetness yearning hearts,
|
An ecstasy and a laughter and a cry.
|
A power leaned down, a happiness found its home.
|
Over wide earth brooded the infinite bliss.
|
Epilogue
|
Epilogue
|
The Return to Earth
|
OUT OF abysmal trance her spirit woke.
|
Lain on the earth-mother's calm inconscient breast
|
She saw the green-clad branches lean above
|
Guarding her sleep with their enchanted life,
|
And overhead a blue-winged ecstasy
|
Fluttered from bough to bough with high-pitched call.
|
Into the magic secrecy of the woods
|
Peering through an emerald lattice-window of leaves,
|
In indolent skies reclined, the thinning day
|
Turned to its slow fall into evening's peace.
|
She pressed the living body of Satyavan:
|
On her body's wordless joy to be and breathe
|
She bore the blissful burden of his head
|
Between her breasts' warm labour of delight,
|
The waking gladness of her members felt
|
The weight of heaven in his limbs, a touch
|
Summing the whole felicity of things,
|
And all her life was conscious of his life
|
And all her being rejoiced enfolding his.
|
The immense remoteness of her trance had passed;
|
Human she was once more, earth's Savitri,
|
Yet felt in her illimitable change.
|
A power dwelt in her soul too great for earth,
|
A bliss lived in her heart too large for heaven;
|
Light too intense for thought and love too boundless
|
For earth's emotions lit her skies of mind
|
And spread through her deep and happy seas of soul.
|
All that is sacred in the world drew near
|
To her divine passivity of mood.
|
A marvellous voice of silence breathed its thoughts.
|
All things in Time and Space she had taken for hers;
|
In her they moved, by her they lived and were,
|
The whole wide world clung to her for delight,
|
Created for her rapt embrace of love.
|
Now in her spaceless self released from bounds
|
Unnumbered years seemed moments long drawn out,
|
The brilliant time-flakes of eternity.
|
Outwingings of a bird from its bright home,
|
Her earthly morns were radiant flights of joy.
|
Boundless she was, a form of infinity.
|
Absorbed no longer by the moment's beat
|
Her spirit the unending future felt
|
And lived with all the unbeginning past.
|
Her life was a dawn's victorious opening,
|
The past and unborn days had joined their dreams,
|
Old vanished eves and far arriving noons
|
Hinted to her a vision of prescient hours.
|
Supine in musing bliss she lay awhile
|
Given to the wonder of a waking trance;
|
Half-risen then she sent her gaze around,
|
As if to recover old sweet trivial threads,
|
Old happy thoughts, small treasured memories,
|
And weave them into one immortal day.
|
Ever she held on the paradise of her breast
|
Her lover charmed into a fathomless sleep,
|
Lain like an infant spirit unaware
|
Lulled on the verge of two consenting worlds.
|
But soon she leaned down over her loved to call
|
His mind back to her with her travelling touch
|
On his closed eyelids; settled was her still look
|
Of strong delight, not yearning now, but large
|
With limitless joy or sovereign last content,
|
Pure, passionate with the passion of the gods.
|
Desire stirred not its wings; for all was made
|
An overarching of celestial rays
|
Like the absorbed control of sky on plain,
|
Heaven's leaning down to embrace from all sides earth,
|
The Return to Earth
|
A quiet rapture, a vast security.
|
Then sighing to her touch the soft-winged sleep
|
Rose hovering from his flowerlike lids and flew
|
Murmurous away. Awake, he found her eyes
|
Waiting for his, and felt her hands, and saw
|
The earth his home given back to him once more
|
And her made his again, his passion's all.
|
With his arms' encircling hold around her locked,
|
A living knot to make possession close,
|
He murmured with hesitating lips her name,
|
And vaguely recollecting wonder cried,
|
"Whence hast thou brought me captive back, love-chained,
|
To thee and sunlight's walls, O golden beam
|
And casket of all sweetness, Savitri,
|
Godhead and woman, moonlight of my soul?
|
For surely I have travelled in strange worlds
|
By thee companioned, a pursuing spirit,
|
Together we have disdained the gates of night.
|
I have turned away from the celestials' joy
|
And heaven's insufficient without thee.
|
Where now has passed that formidable Shape
|
Which rose against us, the Spirit of the Void,
|
Claiming the world for Death and Nothingness,
|
Denying God and soul? Or was all a dream
|
Or a vision seen in a spiritual sleep,
|
A symbol of the oppositions of Time
|
Or a mind-lit beacon of significance
|
In some stress of darkness lighting on the Way
|
Or guiding a swimmer through the straits of Death,
|
Or finding with the succour of its ray
|
In a gully mid the crowded streets of Chance
|
The soul that into the world-adventure came,
|
A scout and voyager from Eternity?"
|
But she replied, "Our parting was the dream;
|
We are together, we live, O Satyavan.
|
Look round thee and behold, glad and unchanged
|
Our home, this forest with its thousand cries
|
And the whisper of the wind among the leaves
|
And, through rifts in emerald scene, the evening sky,
|
God's canopy of blue sheltering our lives,
|
And the birds crying for heart's happiness,
|
Winged poets of our solitary reign,
|
Our friends on earth where we are king and queen.
|
Only our souls have left Death's night behind,
|
Changed by a mighty dream's reality,
|
Illumined by the light of symbol worlds
|
And the stupendous summit self of things,
|
And stood at Godhead's gates limitless, free."
|
Then filled with the glory of their happiness
|
They rose and with safe clinging fingers locked
|
Hung on each other in a silent look.
|
But he with a new wonder in his heart
|
And a new flame of worship in his eyes:
|
"What high change is in thee, O Savitri? Bright
|
Ever thou wast, a goddess still and pure,
|
Yet dearer to me by thy sweet human parts
|
Earth gave thee making thee yet more divine.
|
My adoration mastered, my desire
|
Bent down to make its subject, my daring clasped,
|
Claiming by body and soul my life's estate,
|
Rapture's possession, love's sweet property,
|
A statue of silence in my templed spirit,
|
A yearning godhead and a golden bride.
|
But now thou seemst almost too high and great
|
For mortal worship; Time lies below thy feet
|
And the whole world seems only a part of thee,
|
Thy presence the hushed heaven I inhabit,
|
And thou lookst on me in the gaze of the stars,
|
Yet art the earthly keeper of my soul,
|
My life a whisper of thy dreaming thoughts,
|
My morns a gleaming of thy spirit's wings,
|
And day and night are of thy beauty part.
|
The Return to Earth
|
Hast thou not taken my heart to treasure it
|
In the secure environment of thy breast?
|
Awakened from the silence and the sleep,
|
I have consented for thy sake to be.
|
By thee I have greatened my mortal arc of life,
|
But now far heavens, unmapped infinitudes
|
Thou hast brought me, thy illimitable gift!
|
If to fill these thou lift thy sacred flight,
|
My human earth will still demand thy bliss.
|
Make still my life through thee a song of joy
|
And all my silence wide and deep with thee."
|
A heavenly queen consenting to his will,
|
She clasped his feet, by her enshrining hair
|
Enveloped in a velvet cloak of love,
|
And answered softly like a murmuring lute:
|
"All now is changed, yet all is still the same.
|
Lo, we have looked upon the face of God,
|
Our life has opened with divinity.
|
We have borne identity with the Supreme
|
And known his meaning in our mortal lives.
|
Our love has grown greater by that mighty touch
|
And learned its heavenly significance,
|
Yet nothing is lost of mortal love's delight.
|
Heaven's touch fulfils but cancels not our earth:
|
Our bodies need each other in the same last;
|
Still in our breasts repeat heavenly secret rhythm
|
Our human heart-beats passionately close.
|
Still am I she who came to thee mid the murmur
|
Of sunlit leaves upon this forest verge;
|
I am the Madran, I am Savitri.
|
All that I was before, I am to thee still,
|
Close comrade of thy thoughts and hopes and toils,
|
All happy contraries I would join for thee.
|
All sweet relations marry in our life;
|
I am thy kingdom even as thou art mine,
|
The sovereign and the slave of thy desire,
|
Thy prone possessor, sister of thy soul
|
And mother of thy wants; thou art my world,
|
The earth I need, the heaven my thoughts desire,
|
The world I inhabit and the god I adore.
|
Thy body is my body's counterpart
|
Whose every limb my answering limb desires,
|
Whose heart is key to all my heart-beats, - this
|
I am and thou to me, O Satyavan.
|
Our wedded walk through life begins anew,
|
No gladness lost, no depth of mortal joy.
|
Let us go through this new world that is the same,
|
For it is given back, but it is known,
|
A playing-ground and dwelling-house of God
|
Who hides himself in bird and beast and man
|
Sweetly to find himself again by love,
|
By oneness. His presence leads the rhythms of life
|
That seek for mutual joy in spite of pain.
|
We have each other found, O Satyavan,
|
In the great light of the discovered soul.
|
Let us go back, for eve is in the skies.
|
Now grief is dead and serene bliss remains
|
The heart of all our days for evermore.
|
Lo, all these beings in this wonderful world!
|
Let us give joy to all, for joy is ours.
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For not for ourselves alone our spirits came
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Out of the veil of the Unmanifest,
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Out of the deep immense Unknowable
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Upon the ignorant breast of dubious earth,
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Into the ways of labouring, seeking men,
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Two fires that burn towards that parent Sun,
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Two rays that travel to the original Light.
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To lead man's soul towards truth and God we are born,
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To draw the chequered scheme of mortal life
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Into some semblance of the Immortal's plan,
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To shape it closer to an image of God,
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A little nearer to the Idea divine."
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The Return to Earth
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She closed her arms about his breast and head
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As if to keep him on her bosom worn
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For ever through the journeying of the years.
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So for a while they stood entwined, their kiss
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And passion-tranced embrace a meeting-point
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In their commingling spirits one for ever,
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Two-souled, two-bodied for the joys of Time.
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Then hand in hand they left that solemn place
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Full now of mute unusual memories,
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To the green distance of their sylvan home
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Returning slowly through the forest's heart.
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Round them the afternoon to evening changed;
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Light slipped down to the brightly sleeping verge,
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And the birds came back winging to their nests,
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And day and night leaned to each other's arms.
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Now the dusk shadowy trees stood close around
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Like dreaming spirits and, delaying night,
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The grey-eyed pensive evening heard their steps,
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And from all points the cries and movements came
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Of the four-footed wanderers of the night
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Approaching. Then a human rumour rose
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Long alien to their solitary days,
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Invading the charmed wilderness of leaves
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Once sacred to secluded loneliness
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With violent breaking of its virgin sleep.
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Through the screened dusk it deepened still and there neared
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Floating of many voices and the sound
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Of many feet, till on their sight broke in
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As if a coloured wave upon the eye
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The brilliant strenuous crowded days of man.
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Topped by a flaring multitude of lights
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A great resplendent company arrived.
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Life in its ordered tumult wavering came
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Bringing its stream of unknown faces, thronged
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With gold-fringed headdresses, gold-broidered robes,
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Glittering of ornaments, fluttering of hems,
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Hundreds of hands parted the forest-boughs,
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Hundreds of eyes searched the entangled glades.
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Calm white-clad priests their grave-eyed sweetness brought,
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Strong warriors in their glorious armour shone,
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The proud-hooved steeds came trampling through the wood.
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In front King Dyumatsena walked, no more
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Blind, faltering-limbed, but his far-questing eyes
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Restored to all their confidence in light
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Took seeingly this imaged outer world;
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Firmly he trod with monarch step the soil.
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By him that queen and mother's anxious face
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Came changed from its habitual burdened look
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Which in its drooping strength of tired toil
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Had borne the fallen life of those she loved.
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Her patient paleness wore a pensive glow
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Like evening's subdued gaze of gathered light
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Departing, which foresees sunrise her child.
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Sinking in quiet splendours of her sky,
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She lives awhile to muse upon that hope,
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The brilliance of her rich receding gleam
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A thoughtful prophecy of lyric dawn.
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Her eyes were first to find her children's forms.
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But at the vision of the beautiful twain
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The air awoke perturbed with scaling cries,
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And the swift parents hurrying to their child, -
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Their cause of life now who had given him breath, -
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Possessed him with their arms. Then tenderly
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Cried Dyumatsena chiding Satyavan:
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"The fortunate gods have looked on me today,
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A kingdom seeking came and heaven's rays.
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But where wast thou? Thou hast tormented gladness
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With fear's dull shadow, O my child, my life.
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What danger kept thee for the darkening woods?
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Or how could pleasure in her ways forget
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That useless orbs without thee are my eyes
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The Return to Earth
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Which only for thy sake rejoice at light?
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Not like thyself was this done, Savitri,
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Who ledst not back thy husb and to our arms,
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Knowing with him beside me only is taste
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In food and for his touch evening and morn
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I live content with my remaining days."
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But Satyavan replied with smiling lips,
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"Lay all on her; she is the cause of all.
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With her enchantments she has twined me round.
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Behold, at noon leaving this house of clay
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I wandered in far-off eternities,
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Yet still, a captive in her golden hands,
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I tread your little hillock called green earth
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And in the moments of your transient sun
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Live glad among the busy works of men."
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Then all eyes turned their wondering looks where stood,
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A deepening redder gold upon her cheeks,
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With lowered lids the noble lovely child,
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And one consenting thought moved every breast.
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"What gleaming marvel of the earth or skies
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Stands silently by human Satyavan
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To mark a brilliance in the dusk of eve?
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If this is she of whom the world has heard,
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Wonder no more at any happy change.
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Each easy miracle of felicity
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Of her transmuting heart the alchemy is."
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Then one spoke there who seemed a priest and sage:
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"O woman soul, what light, what power revealed,
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Working the rapid marvels of this day,
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Opens for us by thee a happier age?"
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Her lashes fluttering upwards gathered in
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To a vision which had scanned immortal things,
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Rejoicing, human forms for their delight.
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They claimed for their deep childlike motherhood
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The life of all these souls to be her life,
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Then falling veiled the light. Low she replied,
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"Awakened to the meaning of my heart
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That to feel love and oneness is to live
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And this the magic of our golden change,
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Is all the truth I know or seek, O sage."
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Wondering at her and her too luminous words
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Westward they turned in the fast-gathering night.
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From the entangling verges freed they came
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Into a dimness of the sleeping earth
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And travelled through her faint and slumbering plains.
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Murmur and movement and the tread of men
|
Broke the night's solitude; the neigh of steeds
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Rose from that indistinct and voiceful sea
|
Of life and all along its marchings swelled
|
The rhyme of hooves, the chariot's homeward voice.
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Drawn by white manes upon a high-roofed car
|
In flare of the unsteady torches went
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With linked hands Satyavan and Savitri,
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Hearing a marriage march and nuptial hymn,
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Where waited them the many-voiced human world.
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Numberless the stars swam on their shadowy field
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Describing in the gloom the ways of light.
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Then while they skirted yet the southward verge,
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Lost in the halo of her musing brows
|
Night, splendid with the moon dreaming in heaven
|
In silver peace, possessed her luminous reign.
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She brooded through her stillness on a thought
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Deep-guarded by her mystic folds of light,
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And in her bosom nursed a greater dawn.
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