Canto Two

The Way of Fate and the Problem of Pain

A SILENCE sealed the irrevocable decree,

The word of Fate that fell from heavenly lips

Unless heaven's will itself could change its course.

One voice that questioned changeless destiny,

A mother's heart had heard the fateful speech

And came like a chill close to life and hope.

She felt the leaden inevitable hand

And smite with sudden pain its still content

Awhile she fell to the level of human mind,

She shared, she bore the common lot of men

Voicing earth's question to the inscrutable power

Assailed by the discontent in Nature's depths,

And all the misery, all the ignorant cry,

Lending her speech to the surface soul on earth

And man's revolt against his ignorant fate.

By what pitiless adverse Necessity

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That shaped a rule out of fortuitous steps,

Into the unreadable mystery of Time

Is it thy God who made this cruel law?

And he stands helpless to defend or save?

When evil twinned with good on earthly soil.

Its pang of thought, its quest for the aim of life.

The frank simplicity of the animal's acts;

Followed the zigzag of the uncertain course

In the pale starlight falling from thought's skies,

Lost was the instinct's safe identity

Marred the sure steps of Nature's simple walk

Out of some ageless innocence and peace,

Cast down to suffer on this hard dangerous earth

Although earth-nature welcomes heaven's breath

A thousand ills assail the mortal's hours

Our bodies are an engine cunningly made,

Contrived ingeniously with demon skill,

Of mortal danger and peculiar pain,

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Its way to suffer and its way to die.

The sign and stamp of our humanity.

Come, licensed lodgers, into man's bodily house,

In the malignant hollows of the world,

Ambushed they lie waiting their hour to leap,

Admitted into the citadel of man's days

Ourselves within us lethal forces nurse;

Out of their holes like beasts they creep and gnaw

Till frayed and thin the music dies away

All that we are is like a fort beset:

In the grey sleep of Matter's ignorance.

And the unloveliness of human things.

In the bazaar of a blind destiny,

Lost or mislaid in an uncaring world,

A seeker in a dark and obscure place,

An imperfect worker given a baffling task,

Its heavenward flights reach closed and keyless gates,

On Nature's gifts to man a curse was laid:

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Error is the comrade of our mortal thought

Sin poisons with its vivid flowers of joy

Virtue is a grey bondage and a gaol.

Alien to reason and the spirit's light,

In ignorance and nescience are our roots.

Is the past's account, the future's book of Fate:

Upon the countless crowd of Nature's ills;

A crop of miseries obstinately is sown

The vast increasing tragic harvest reaped

He walks by his own choice into Hell's trap;

His science is an artificer of doom;

He slays his happiness and others' good.

Even as of old in the raw youth of Time,

Old forms of evil cling to the world's soul:

Battle and rapine, ruin and massacre

An idiot hour destroys what centuries made,

The beauty and greatness by his genius wrought

All he has achieved he drags to the precipice.

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His littleness crawls content through squalor and mud,

And wallows in his self-made misery.

His will conspires with death and time and fate.

Ever recurs but brings no high result

That shut his life in their vast longevity.

Pursue the useless orbit of their course

Across a track of soon forgotten lives.

Why is it all and wherefore are we here?

It is our spirit's destiny to return

Since That we are and out of That we came,

Lasting in vain through interminable Time?

In the cold and endless emptiness of Space?

What need had the soul of ignorance and tears?

Or all came helplessly without a cause?

The eternal witness once of eternity,

He camps in life's half-lit obscurity

Or who persuaded it to fall from bliss

Who laid on it the ceaseless will to live

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And bear its load of joy and grief and love?

What hard impersonal Necessity

A great Illusion then has built the stars.

Its poise in this circling of unreal suns?

Who strayed into a blind alley of Time and chance

Or where begins and ends Illusion's reign?

Eternal self a fiction sensed in trance."

Then after a silence Narad made reply:

Tuning his lips to earthly sound he spoke,

Weighted the fragile hints of mortal speech.

Turned to a tablet of supernal thoughts

Had left in its breadth the inscriptions of the gods.

Detected; the broad-flung far-seeing schemes

Were mapped already in that world-wide look.

Hidden in the mortal's heart the Eternal lives:

A Light shines there nor pain nor grief can cross.

Thou canst not hear or feel the marvellous Guest,

O queen, thy thought is a light of the Ignorance,

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But hides the Immortal's meaning in the world.

Thy heart's hopes hide from thee the Eternal's will,

Thence rose the need of a dark intruding god,

Where Ignorance is, there suffering too must come;

Pain was the first-born of the Inconscience

Already slept there pain's subconscient shape:

Till life shall move, it waits to wake and be.

In life's breast it was born hiding its twin;

Pain ploughed the first hard ground of the world-drowse.

By pain Life stirred in the subliminal deep.

Awoke to itself the dreamer, sleeping Mind;

It drew its shapes from the subconscient depths,

By pain and joy, the bright and tenebrous twins,

Else had the Inconscient never suffered change.

A dead resistance in the mortal's heart,

If the heart were not forced to want and weep,

And never thought to exceed the human start

This earth is full of labour, packed with pain;

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The centuries end, the ages vainly pass

The ancient Mother faces all with joy,

For with pain and labour all creation comes.

Ever they travail driven by Time's goad,

And shape the life divine in mortal forms.

Against the Evil that rises from the gulfs,

Against the stumblings of man's pervert will,

Against the blind reluctance of his heart.

There is a clamour of battle, a tramp, a march:

A desperate laughter under the blows of death,

Men die that man may live and God be born.

Pain is the hand of Nature sculpturing men

With heavenly cruelty an unwilling mould.

Lifting the hammers of titanic toil

They shape with giant strokes their own; their sons

Although the shaping god's tremendous touch

The fiery spirit grows in strength within

He who would save himself lives bare and calm;

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He who would save the race must share its pain:

The Great who came to save this suffering world

Must pass beneath the yoke of grief and pain;

On their shoulders they must bear man's load of fate.

Or they pay the gift of knowledge with their lives.

Has drunk the bitter cup, owned Godhead's debt,

His will has bound to death and struggling life

Now is the debt paid, wiped off the original score.

He has signed salvation's testament with his blood:

The Deity compensates the creature's claim,

A retribution smites the incarnate God.

He has given his life and light to balance here

It is finished, the dread mysterious sacrifice,

Gethsemane and Calvary are his lot,

His escort is the curses of the crowd;

Two thieves slain with him mock his mighty death.

He who has found his identity with God

His knowledge immortal triumphs by his death.

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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:

But when God's messenger comes to help the world

He too must carry the yoke he came to unloose;

Exempt and unafflicted by earth's fate,

He covers the world's agony with his calm;

And peace is given to our torn human hearts,

The fire, the strife, the wrestle are within.

Its sins weigh on his thoughts, its grief is his:

Night and its powers beleaguer his tardy steps,

His march is a battle and a pilgrimage.

A million wounds gape in his secret heart.

Antagonist forces crowd across his path;

Even worse may be the cost, direr the pain:

Shall bring the cosmic anguish into his depths,

And knock at his doors and live within his house;

All suffering into his single grief and make

He meets an ancient adversary Force,

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The weeping of the centuries visits his eyes:

The poison of the world has stained his throat.

Amidst the chafferings of the affair called life

He burns on an unseen original verge

He is the victim in his own sacrifice.

Appearing and perishing on the roads of Time

He dies that the world may be new-born and live.

Even if the world breaks not in, a drowning sea,

He must face the fight, the pang who would conquer Hell.

In the human depths, in the hidden heart of Time

A secret enmity ambushes the world's march;

It stamps stain and defect on all things done;

There is no visible foe, but the unseen

Touches from alien realms, thoughts not our own

Our lives are caught in an ambiguous net.

Invader of the life of mortal man,

A power came in to veil the eternal Light,

Diverts the messages of the infallible Word,

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A whisper lures to evil the human heart,

It is the origin of our suffering here,

This all must conquer who would bring down God's peace.

Man must overcome or miss his higher fate.

"Hard is the world-redeemer's heavy task;

Those he would save are his antagonists:

Its darkness turns away from the saviour light,

His work is a trickle of splendour in a long night;

A few are saved, the rest strive on and fail:

Yes, there are happy ways near to God's sun;

Only the pure in soul can walk in light.

From the sorrow and the darkness and the chain;

The human mass lingers beneath the yoke.

Life that is left behind on a fallen earth.

Or bring to it victory and the reign of God.

Although Light grows on earth and Night recedes,

And Light invades the world's inconscient base

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One yet may come armoured, invincible;

The world's blows cannot bend that victor head;

The goal recedes, he hurries not his pace,

He asks no aid from the inferior gods;

Man turns aside or chooses easier paths;

That sole can climb to the Eternal's peaks;

He has made heaven and earth his instruments,

Their law he transcends but uses as his means.

The feints of Nature mislead not his sight,

Fate's deaf resistance cannot break his will.

Invulnerable his soul, his heart unslain,

And Nature's ambushes and the world's attacks.

He fronts evil and good with calm and equal eyes.

And plunge into her long obscurity.

That veil themselves even from their own regard:

He has watched the dumb God fashioning Matter's frame,

And watched the unconscious Force that built the stars.

Its incoherent thoughts and rigid acts,

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The chaos of its mechanic frequencies,

Misleaders of the hooded listening soul.

All rose from the silence, all goes back to its hush.

Its obscure waking makes the world seem vain.

Its dark and potent nescience was earth's start;

Into its deeps creation can collapse.

It is the mother of our ignorance.

Else never can Truth conquer Matter's sleep

All things obscure his knowledge must relume,

He must pass to the other shore of falsehood's sea,

The heart of evil must be bared to his eyes,

Its right and its dire roots in Nature's soil.

And justifies the Titan's erring pride

He must enter the eternity of Night

For this he must go down into the pit,

Imperishable and wise and infinite,

Into the eternal Light he shall emerge

There on the verge of Nature's summit steps

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All contraries heal their long dissidence.

There pain becomes a violent fiery joy;

And sorrow lies upon the breasts of Bliss:

Her gaze is charged with a wistful ecstasy.

Earth shall be made a home of Heaven's light,

The superconscient beam shall touch men's eyes

Invading Matter with the Spirit's ray,

Awaking the dumb heart to the living Word.

The body's self taste immortality.

"Till then must life carry its seed of death

O mortal, bear this great world's law of pain,

Lean for thy soul's support on Heaven's strength,

A little bliss is lent thee from above,

Make of thy daily way a pilgrimage,

Haste not towards Godhead on a dangerous road,

Climb not to Godhead by the Titan's road.

Across its way he throws his pride of might.

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He strives with a giant strength to wrest by force

He takes by storm the world and fate and heaven.

He waits not for the outstretched hand of God

All he would make his own, leave nothing free,

Obstructing the gods' open ways he makes

A monopolist of the world-energy,

His pain and others' pain he makes his means:

In the hurry and clangour of his acts of might,

By his magnitudes of hate and violence,

He matches himself against the Eternal's calm

Power is his image of celestial self.

He exults in the death of things and ruin and fall,

In the world's pathos and passion he takes delight,

He glories in the sufferings of the flesh

His eyes blinded and visionless stare at the sun,

Can find no more the light of eternity;

And takes his night for a dark infinite.

And sees in Nought the sole reality:

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Obsess the world's rumours with his single name.

He sees his little self as very God.

His ego has stretched into infinity.

Ciphers his thought on a slate of hourless Time.

A huge philosophy of Nothingness.

Impossibly creating a universe.

His spirit the void impersonal absolute.

Cast not thy self into that night of God.

Or ransom by sorrow heaven's demand on life.

Too soon will grief and anguish find thee out.

Only in limits can man's strength be safe;

Its bliss is there behind the world's face of tears.

Thou art a vessel of the imprisoned spark.

And while thou shutst it in, the seal is pain:

Unburdened by life's blind mystery of pain:

Attesting the secret god denied by life:

Calm is self's victory overcoming fate.

Bliss is the secret stuff of all that lives,

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It hides behind thy sorrow and thy cry.

Because afflicted by the little self

As it walks in the vague penumbra of the flesh

Thou criest out and sayst that there is pain.

Attire of the rapturous Dancer in the ways,

Thy spirit's strength shall make thee one with God,

Indifference deepen into infinity's calm

"O mortal who complainst of death and fate,

This troubled world thou hast chosen for thy home,

Once in the immortal boundlessness of Self,

The soul looked out from its felicity.

It knew itself deathless, timeless, spaceless, one,

Then, curious of a shadow thrown by Truth,

It was drawn to an unknown Face peering through night.

A void supernal whose immense excess

Offered a ground for Nature's adverse birth

Harbouring the brilliance of a transient soul

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A Mind arose that stared at Nothingness

It housed the contrary of all that is.

Its dumb support in a blank infinite,

A darkened Nature lived and held the seed

Eternal Consciousness became a freak

And, breathed no more as spirit's native air,

A stranger in the insentient universe.

The soul attracted leaned to the Abyss:

And the marvel and surprise of the Unknown

In the womb of Chaos and in Nothing's gulf

It tired of its unchanging happiness,

It was drawn to hazard's call and danger's charm,

Perdition's peril, the wounded bare escape,

The savour of pity and the gamble of love

A world of hard endeavour and difficult toil,

A clash of forces, a vast incertitude,

Strange meetings on the roads of Ignorance

Or the solitary greatness and lonely force

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A huge descent began, a giant fall:

And what the soul imagines is made a world.

Indicator of cosmic consequence

A cyclic movement in eternal Time.

This great perplexed and discontented world,

There are pitched desire's tents, grief's headquarters.

Then Aswapati answered to the seer:

O seer, is there no remedy within?

After long time fulfilled by cosmic Force?

Is not that Power the high compeer of Fate?"

"O Aswapati, random seem the ways

In casual hours or moments of the gods,

Infallibly the curves of life are drawn

They are led by a clue the calm immortals keep.

A meaning more sublime in symbols writes

How shall my voice convince the mind of earth?

Unblinded by the breath of his desire,

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It keeps for her her privilege of pain.

That can transform herself and all around

Although designed like a nectar cup of heaven,

She too must share the human need of grief

The mind of mortal man is led by words,

And looks out only through half-opened doors.

And every strip he takes for all the heavens.

And gives to the plastic Vast the name of Chance;

Planning a sequence of steps in endless Time

Or the dead hand of cold Necessity;

Misses the ardent heavings of her breast

The will of the Timeless working out in Time

He thinks a dead machine or unconscious Fate.

And while they last, all things by them are bound;

And Freedom walks in the same pace with Law.

If human will could be made one with God's,

Man might be all-knowing and omnipotent;

Yet can the mind of man receive God's light,

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Then is he a miracle doing miracles.

It is decreed and Satyavan must die;

What else shall be is written in her soul

The writing waits illegible and mute.

O King, thy fate is a transaction done

With God for its foreseeing arbiter.

Man can accept his fate, he can refuse.

He writes thy refusal in thy credit page:

Arisen from the tragic crash of life,

The spirit rises mightier by defeat;

Its splendid failures sum to victory.

Though they smite thy body and soul with joy and grief,

Even death can cut not short thy spirit's walk:

On the altar throwing thy thoughts, thy heart, thy works,

Till they have opened to thee thy secret self

O soul, intruder in Nature's ignorance,

Thy spirit's fate is a battle and ceaseless march

A passage from Matter into timeless self.

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A forced advance through a long line of lives,

Across the dust and mire of the earthly plain,

In dire assaults, in wounded slow retreats,

Or fighting against odds in lonely posts,

Awaiting the tardy trumpets of the dawn,

Through peril and through triumph and through fall,

Up the bald moor, along the sunlit ridge,

Led by its nomad vanguard's signal fires,

Then late the joy ineffable is felt,

He has refound the skies from which he fell.

Forces the last passes of the Ignorance:

Reconnoitring the formidable unknown,

It mounts through a miraculous upper air

He stands upon the splendour-peaks of God.

His death is a beginning of greater life,

A vast intention has brought two souls close

For out of danger and pain heaven-bliss shall come,

This world was not built with random bricks of Chance,

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A conscious power has drawn the plan of life,

It is an architecture high and grand

In which unseeing hands obey the Unseen,

"Queen, strive no more to change the secret will;

Bring not thy brief and helpless human tears

That knows its single will and God's as one:

It sits apart with grief and facing death,

In this enormous world standing apart

In the passion of her soul of sacrifice

Affronting fate, asks not man's help nor god's:

It cries not for succour from the time-bound powers.

Intervene not in a strife too great for thee,

Its question to this Nature's rigid bounds

Its too vast theme of a lonely mortal will

As a star, uncompanioned, moves in heaven

Travelling infinity by its own light,

A God-given might of being is their force,

The soul that can live alone with itself meets God;

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A day may come when she must stand unhelped

Carrying the world's future on her lonely breast,

To conquer or fail on a last desperate verge,

Her single greatness in that last dire scene

And reach an apex of world-destiny

In that tremendous silence lone and lost

In her soul's climbing beyond mortal time

Apart upon a silent desperate brink,

As on some verge between Time and Timelessness

Alone she must conquer or alone must fall.

No armoured god stand shining at her side.

For this the silent Force came missioned down;

She only can save herself and save the world.

Come not between her and her hour of Fate.

Think not to turn her from her heaven-sent task,

Thou hast no place in that tremendous strife;

Leave the world's fate and her to God's sole guard.

Even though all falters and falls and sees an end

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God-given her strength can battle against doom

And no human strength can hinder or can help.

Intrude not twixt her spirit and its force

He spoke and ceased and left the earthly scene.

He turned towards his far-off blissful home.

The luminous body of the ethereal seer

And disappeared like a receding star

But still a cry was heard in the infinite,

A high and far imperishable voice

END OF CANTO TWO

END OF BOOK SIX

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