Canto Four

The Quest

THE WORLD-WAYS opened before Savitri.

At first a strangeness of new brilliant scenes

But as she moved across the changing earth

A citizen of many scenes and climes,

It took all clans and peoples for her own,

These unfamiliar spaces on her way

Landscapes recurred like lost forgotten fields,

Like slow-recurring memories in front,

The winds murmured to her of ancient things

All was a part of old forgotten selves:

Her acts recalled a line of bygone power,

Traveller to a prefigured high event,

To trace again a journey often made.

And in the eager body of their speed

Assigned to man immutably from his birth,

At once the agents of his spirit's will

Page – 377

They hold his nature's sequence in their guard

Attendants on his destiny's measured walk

Even in his casual steps they intervene.

Each is an energy loosed and holds its course.

Have made our fate the child of our own acts,

We reap the fruit of our forgotten deeds.

And we live in a present born from an unknown past,

To a mechanic mind tied by earth's laws;

Watched by a still all-seeing Eye above.

Who builds our lives on a foreseen design

And watches the inferior stumbling powers.

Of a calm Presence throned above her brows

It used the body for its pedestal;

The hands that held the reins its living tools;

A way proposed by an unerring Guide.

She met with Nature and with human forms

Driven from within she followed her long road,

Like a bright cloud through the resplendent day.

Page – 378

Admitted to the lion eye of States

Her carven chariot with its fretted wheels

Past figured gates and high dream-sculptured fronts

Pillared assembly halls with armoured guards,

And temples hewn as if by exiled gods

Often from gilded dusk to argent dawn,

And the stone lattice stared at moonlit boughs,

Dimly she glided between banks of sleep

Hamlet and village saw the fate-wain pass,

For sustenance of its short and passing days

Unchanging in the circle of a sky

Away from this thinking creature's burdened hours

Not yet perturbed by human joys and fears.

Here timeless musings large and glad and still,

Imperial acres of the eternal sower

Or mid green musing of woods and rough-browed hills,

Or past the long lapsing voice of silver floods

Hastened the chariot of the golden bride.

Page – 379

Tract-memories and ageless remnants came,

Listened to the unaccustomed sound of hooves

Absorbed her into emerald secrecy

Environed with their coloured snare her wheels.

Along these lonely ways, his titan pace

The inner ear that listens to solitude,

The rhythm of the intenser wordless Thought

And the low sweet inarticulate voice of earth

Ascended with its yearning undertone.

The quieted all-seeking mind could feel,

The unwearied clasp of her mute patient love

This spirit stumbling in the fields of sense,

Could find in her broad spaces of release.

The bosom of our mother kept for us still

Her impersonal reaches lonely and inspired

Muse-lipped she nursed her symbol mysteries

The valley clefts between her breasts of joy,

And nuptial beaches where the ocean couched

Page – 380

Fields had she of her solitary mirth,

Alone with the cry of birds and hue of flowers,

And grey seer-evenings kindling with the stars

August, exulting in her Maker's eye,

Conversed still with a Light behind the veil,

A few and fit inhabitants she called

The breadth, the summit were their natural home.

Freed from the warrior tension of their task,

The strife was over, the respite lay in front.

And sunlight and the rustle of the leaves,

Mused with the stars in their mute constant ranks,

And with the glory of the noons were one.

Beckoned into a fiery privacy

They sojourned with an everliving Bliss;

They heard, beheld an all-revealing Light.

The world was fibred with their own heart-strings;

They reached the one self in all through boundless love.

They loosened the knot of the imprisoning mind;

Page – 381

Unsealed was Nature's great spiritual eye;

Truth leaned to them from her supernal realm;

Nameless the austere ascetics without home

Aloof from creatures sat absorbed, alone,

On concentration's luminous voiceless peaks,

Immobile as the passionless great hills

Awaiting the Infinite's behest to end.

Content in Him who smiles behind earth's forms,

About them like green trees girdling a hill

Trained to the simple act and conscious word,

Far-wandering seekers on the Eternal's path

And spent the treasure of a silent hour

That, uninsistent, ruled them from its peace,

The Infants of the monarchy of the worlds,

King-children nurtured in that spacious air

Received half-consciously their godlike stamp:

They learned the wide magnificence of mood

No longer chained to their small separate selves,

Page – 382

Met Nature with a bold and friendly clasp

One-souled to all and free from narrowing bonds,

In wide equality's impartial joy,

Assisting the slow entries of the gods,

Taught the great Truth to which man's race must rise

Imparting to our struggling world the Light

Comrades and vessels of the cosmic Force,

Their speech, their silence was a help to earth.

Oneness was sovereign in that sylvan peace,

Persuading the hatred and the strife to cease

Healed with their hearts the hard and wounded world.

To where Mind motionless sleeps waiting Light's birth,

Drunk with a wine of lightning in their cells;

Seized, vibrant, kindling with the inspired word,

Carrying the splendour that has lit the suns,

In metres that reflect the moving worlds,

Some lost to the person and his strip of thought

Sat mighty, visioned with the Infinite's light,

Page – 383

Surveyed the plan of past and future Time.

And vanished into a bright and featureless Vast:

Or helped the world by world-indifference.

Absorbed in the trance from which no soul returns,

The chains of birth and person cast away:

As floats a sunbeam through a shady place,

Came gliding among meditation's seats.

Of cattle thickening with their dust the shades

Arriving in a peaceful hermit grove

Its spirit of patient muse and potent prayer.

And trees that worshipped on a praying shore,

Beckoned to her hurrying wheels to stay their speed.

A mind remembering ancient silences,

And the large liberty of brooding seers

Awake in candid dawn or darkness mooned,

Drank in hushed splendour between tranquil lids

But morn broke in reminding her of her quest

Page – 384

And went impelled on her unfinished way

Like a desire that questions silent gods

Thence to great solitary tracts she came,

Or sole in Nature's vastness strove to live

Overwhelmed by the immensity of his world

The earth multiplied to her a changing brow

The mountains in their anchorite solitude,

Disclosed to her the masked divinity's doors.

The death-bed of a pale enchanted eve

Impassive she lay as at an age's end,

Lifting their heads to hunt a lairlike sky,

Where desolate summits camped in a weird heaven,

Or wandered in some lone tremendous wood

Or followed a long glistening serpent road

Or reached the wild beauty of a desert space

And slumbered upon stripped and thirsty sands

Still unaccomplished was the fateful quest;

For which she sought amid the sons of men.

Page – 385

And now his burning breath assailed the soil.

All was licked up as by a lolling tongue.

END OF CANTO FOUR

END OF BOOK FOUR

Page – 386