BOOK SEVEN

The Book of Yoga

Canto One

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

And lead his blind will towards an unknown goal.

Its face and form already are born in him,

Here Matter seems to mould the body's life

Nature and Fate compel his free-will's choice.

And make the soul the artist of its fate.

Doom is a passage for our inborn force,

Ananke is our being's own decree.

Flower-sweet and adamant, passionate and calm,

Forced to its issue the long cosmic curve.

A speed of armoured squadrons and a voice

A couchant earth wakened in its dumb muse

Hills wallowing in a bright haze, large lands

Region on region spacious in the sun,

And yellow rivers pacing lion-maned

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A happy front to iron vastnesses

Once more was near the fair and fated place,

Where first she met the face of Satyavan

Some timeless beauty and reality,

The past receded and the future neared:

The white carved pillars, the cool dim alcoves,

The towered pavilions, the wind-rippled pools

Forgotten soon or a pale memory

The thoughtful noontide's brooding solemn trance,

The slow moonrise gliding in front of Night.

The happy silken babble on laughter's lips

And adoration's light in cherished eyes

Nature's primaeval loneliness was here:

The ascetic's exile in the dim-souled huge

Of man's blithe converse and his crowded days.

Through a narrow opening, a green flowered cleft,

Into a mighty home of emerald dusk.

Which toiled through the shadow of enormous trunks

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They saw low thatched roofs of a hermitage

In a sunlit clearing that seemed the outbreak

A rude refuge of the thought and will of man

Arrived in that rough-hewn homestead they gave,

Their pride and loved one to the great blind king,

And the stately care-worn woman once a queen

But all things only hoped for her one child,

All joy of earth, all heaven's beatitude.

She saw him loved by heaven as by herself,

And knew not of the evil drawing near.

Like men who lengthen out departure's pain,

Unwilling to see for the last time a face,

And wondering at the carelessness of Fate

They parted from her with pain-fraught burdened hearts

From one whom we shall never see again;

Helpless against the choice of Savitri's heart

In the tremendous forest's savage charge.

All welcomed that henceforth was his and hers,

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Priceless she deemed her joy so close to death;

As if self-poised above the march of days,

A statue of passion and invincible force,

A tranquillity and a violence of the gods

At first to her beneath the sapphire heavens

An altar of the summer's splendour and fire,

And all its scenes a smile on rapture's lips

There was a chanting in the casual wind,

Night was a chrysoprase on velvet cloth,

Day was a purple pageant and a hymn,

His absence was a dream of memory,

A fusing of the joys of earth and heaven,

A rushing of two spirits to be one,

Opened were gates of unforgettable bliss:

And fate and grief fled from that fiery hour.

And throngs of blue-black clouds crept through the sky

And storm became the forest's titan voice.

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And the long unsatisfied panting of the wind

The grief of all the world came near to her.

The shadow of her lover's doom arose

The moments swift and ruthless raced; alarmed

A trembling moved accountant of her riches,

A dire expectancy knocked at her breast;

Grief came, a passionate stranger to her gate:

It rose at morn to look into her face.

From her pursuing foresight of the end.

Her deepest grief from sweetest gulfs arose.

Each day a golden leaf torn cruelly out

Thus swaying in strong gusts of happiness

And feeding sorrow and terror with her heart, —

Or in her inner chamber paced apart, —

Out of her separate self she looked and saw,

In mind a stranger though in heart so near,

Upon its way towards an unknown doom

As if in different worlds they walked, though close,

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They wrapped in little hourly hopes and tasks, —

The rich and happy secrecy that once

Apart in a bright nest of thoughts and dreams

And lonely grief that none could share or know,

And the fragile happiness of its mortal love.

Her graceful daily acts were now a mask;

A ground of stillness and the spirit's peace.

Who sees life's drama pass with unmoved eyes,

And bears in human breasts the world and fate.

Only her violent heart and passionate will

Defenceless, nude, bound to her human lot

These she controlled, nothing was shown outside:

The sorrowing woman they saw not within.

A worshipped empress all once vied to serve,

Nor spared the labour of broom and jar and well,

Of altar and kitchen, no slight task allowed

In all her acts a strange divinity shone:

A oneness with earth's glowing robe of light,

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Bound all to all with her as golden tie.

These things, once gracious adjuncts of her joy,

Or were a round mechanical and void,

Always behind this strange divided life

Possessed her lover and to his body clung,

At night she woke through the slow silent hours

Hung o'er the sleep-bound beauty of his brow

Waking at morn her lips endlessly clung to his,

Or lose that honeyed drain of lingering joy,

The warm inadequate signs that love must use.

Her passion catching at the fugitive hours

Of prodigal love and the surf of ecstasy;

To build a little room for timelessness

Her soul secluded shut into his soul.

Even by his strong embrace unsatisfied,

O lover of my soul, give more, give more

Imprint thyself for every nerve to keep

For soon we part and who shall know how long

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Too well she loved to speak a fateful word

She pressed the outsurging grief back into her breast

But Satyavan sometimes half understood,

Of our thought-blinded hearts the unuttered need,

All of his speeding days that he could spare

And hunting food in the wild sylvan glades

He gave to her and helped to increase the hours

And lavish softness of heart-seeking words

All was too little for her bottomless need.

Grief filled his absence with its aching touch;

Imaged in every solitary hour.

Of fiery union through death's door of escape

She knew she must not clutch that happiness

Across our other countries, travellers glad

For those sad parents still would need her here

Often it seemed to her the ages' pain

Concentrating in her a tortured world.

Cloistering her love to live with secret grief

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Lifting to them her sorrow like frankincense,

Yet ever they grew into each other more

Since even the body's walls could not divide.

Her conscious spirit walked with him and knew

He, less aware, thrilled with her from afar.

Grief, fear became the food of mighty love.

It was all her life, became her whole earth and heaven.

Immortal it walked unslayable as the gods:

An anvil for the blows of Fate and Time:

Grief's self became calm, dull-eyed, resolute,

Some deed in which it might for ever cease,

The year now paused upon the brink of change.

And thunder strode in wrath across the world,

And rain dripped wearily through the mournful air

So her grief's heavy sky shut in her heart.

No voice came down from the forgotten heights;

Her human heart spoke to the body's fate.

END OF CANTO ONE

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