Canto Two

Satyavan

ALL SHE remembered on this day of Fate,

The road that hazarded not the solemn depths

The wilderness with its mighty monotone,

The passion of the summits lost in heaven,

As if a wicket gate to joy were there

Upon the margin of an unknown world

Groves with strange flowers like eyes of gazing nymphs

Boughs whispering to a constancy of light

And slowly a supine inconstant breeze

Over slumbrous grasses pranked with green and gold.

Amid the leaves the inmate voices called,

Cry answering to low insistent cry.

Haunt of a Nature passionate, veiled, denied

Earth in this beautiful refuge free from cares

Only one sign was there of a human tread:

Into this bosom of vast and secret life,

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The one for whom her heart had come so far.

Stand out for a moment in a house of dream

So he appeared against the forest verge

As if a weapon of the living Light,

His figure led the splendour of the morn.

A tablet of young wisdom was his brow;

The joy of life was on his open face.

His head was a youthful Rishi's touched with light,

In the magnificent dawning of his force

He illumined the border of the forest page.

Abandoning man's loud drama he had come

To meet the ancient Mother in her groves.

A foster-child of beauty and solitude,

A brother of the sunshine and the sky,

A Veda-knower of the unwritten book

He had caught her hierophant significances,

Taught by sublimities of stream and wood

And chant of the magic singers on the boughs

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Helping with confident steps her slow great hands

And, like the flower and tree a natural growth,

The mastery free natures have was his

One with the single Spirit inhabiting all,

His mind was open to her infinite mind,

He had subdued his mortal thought to hers.

For One who, knowing every moment's load,

Had laid the spell of destiny on his feet

At first her glance that took life's million shapes

Along with sky and flower and hill and star,

It saw the green-gold of the slumbrous sward,

The branches haunted by the wild bird's call.

The eager prisoner from the Infinite,

Its pride, power, passion of a striving God,

This thinking master creature of the earth,

But only saw like fair and common forms

And puts aside in memory's shadowy rooms.

Thus in the hour that most concerned her all,

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Wandering unwarned by the slow surface mind,

Admired indifferent beauty and cared not

So might she have passed by on chance ignorant roads

But the god touched in time her conscious soul.

Her mind at first dwelt in ideal dreams,

That make known things a hint of unseen spheres,

A symbol figure standing mid earth's scenes,

Yet this was but a moment's reverie;

The passionate seeing used thought cannot match,

All in a moment was surprised and seized,

Or under imagination's coloured lids

Broke forth in flame to recreate the world,

A mystic tumult from her depths arose;

Life ran to gaze from every gate of sense:

Feelings as when a universe takes birth,

Invaded by a swarm of golden gods:

Her soul flung wide its doors to this new sun.

The missioned face had wrought the Master's spell.

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Appeared and stretched to a gleam of unknown worlds.

Moved in her breast and cried out like a bird

Hooves trampling fast, wheels largely stumbling ceased;

And Satyavan looked out from his soul's doors

Fill his youth's purple ambience and endured

Mastered by the honey of a strange flower-mouth,

He turned to the vision like a sea to the moon

Discovered the aureole round a mortal's head,

His self-bound nature foundered as in fire;

The splendid lonely idols of his brain

As at the touch of a new infinite,

An unknown imperious force drew him to her.

Gaze met close gaze and clung in sight's embrace.

As if encircled by a halo of thought,

As though some secret nimbus half was seen;

A forehead that wore the crown of all her past,

Comrade and sovereign eyes that claimed her soul,

He met in her regard his future's gaze,

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Saw an embodiment of aeonic dreams,

Yearns in this world of brief mortality

This golden figure given to his grasp

A spell to bring the Immortal's bliss on earth,

To lift earth-hearts nearer the Eternal's sun.

Love brought down power out of eternity

His passion surged a wave from fathomless deeps;

But kept its nature of infinity.

Although as unknown beings we seem to meet,

Moved to each other by a causeless force.

Across dividing Time and, on life's roads

Familiar splendours in an unknown face

It thrills again to an immortal joy

There is a Power within that knows beyond

And sometimes earth unveils that vision here.

Love is a glory from eternity's spheres.

That steal his name and shape and ecstasy,

A mystery wakes in our inconscient stuff,

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Love dwells in us like an unopened flower

Or he roams in his charmed sleep mid thoughts and things;

In many hearts and minds and living forms:

And, when it comes, wakes blindly to a voice,

His instrument the dim corporeal mind,

He seizes on some sign of outward charm

Reads heavenly truths into earth's semblances,

Divines the immortalities of form

Love's adoration like a mystic seer

In earth's alphabet finds a godlike sense;

For whom my life has waited long unfilled,

Heart feels for heart, limb cries for answering limb;

Too far from the Divine, Love seeks his truth

And Powers are there that labour to debase.

Rare is the cup fit for love's nectar wine,

A soul made ready through a thousand years

These knew each other though in forms thus strange.

Had altered to hold a new significance,

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And the spirit to the spirit was the same.

The lovers met upon their different paths,

Together drawn from fate-led journeyings

To a swift rapturous dream of future joy

By the revealing greatness of a look,

The mist was torn that lay between two lives;

Attracted as in heaven star by star,

And wove affinity in a silent gaze.

An hour began, the matrix of new Time.

END OF CANTO TWO

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