Canto Two

The Parable of the Search for the Soul

AS IN the vigilance of the sleepless night

Through the slow heavy-footed silent hours,

She sat staring at the dumb tread of Time

A summons from her being's summit came,

Above her brows where will and knowledge meet

It seemed to come from inaccessible heights

And knew the meaning of the steps of Time

Filling the far prospect of the cosmic gaze.

And rigid golden statue of motionless trance,

Around her body's stillness all grew still:

Her mind renouncing thought heard and was mute:

This ignorant life beneath indifferent skies

O spirit, O immortal energy,

Or with hard tearless eyes await thy doom?

But Savitri's heart replied in the dim night:

Why should I lift my hands to the shut heavens

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Or hope in vain to uplift an ignorant race

And see in Mind wisdom's sole tabernacle,

A rock of safety and an anchor of sleep?

He sits in peace and leaves the mortal's strength

And Inconscience and the almighty hands of Death.

To avoid the black-meshed net, the dismal door,

A greater Law into man's little world?

Or stave off death's inevitable hour?

And follow close behind my lover's steps

Across the tenebrous river that divides

Then could we lie inarmed breast upon breast,

Forgetting man and life and time and its hours,

The Voice replied: "Is this enough, O spirit?

The work was left undone for which it came?

Charged with a mandate from eternity,

A follower of the footprints of the gods,

Shall there be no new tables, no new Word,

Delivering her from her unconsciousness,

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The iron doors that seemed for ever closed,

That runs through finite things to eternity?

My head bowed with shame before the Eternal's seat, —

His labourer returns, her task undone?"

But holding back her troubled rebel heart,

Surmounting the seas of mortal ignorance,

A Power within her answered the still Voice:

As thou myself seated for ever above,

Command, for I am here to do thy will."

Find out thy soul, recover thy hid self,

Then mortal nature change to the divine.

Cast Thought from thee, that nimble ape of Light:

His vast Truth wake within and know and see.

In the enormous emptiness of thy mind

Know him in every voice heard by thy soul,

All things shall fold thee into his embrace.

Thy nature shall be the engine of his works,

Then shalt thou harbour my force and conquer Death."

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Still rigid in her golden motionless pose,

In the black night the wrath of storm swept by,

Its million footsteps pattered on the roof.

Witness of the thoughts of mind, the moods of life,

A dream disclosed to her the cosmic past,

The shadowy beginnings of world-fate:

Imaged to her the world's significance.

Creation took its first mysterious steps,

And Matter learned to think and person grew;

And saw the human creature born in Time.

Of being emerging out of infinite Nought:

And pleasure and pain stirred in the insensible Void.

Unconscious of her own exploits she worked,

In fragmentary beings she grew aware:

Gathered round a small ego's pin-point head;

It moved and lived a breathing, thinking whole.

A formless surface consciousness awoke:

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A bright crust of habitual sense and thought,

And recurrent habits mimicked permanence.

It built a mobile house on shifting sands,

A conscious being was by this labour made;

In the green wonderful and perilous earth;

Relying on Matter's false eternity.

It saw blue heavens, dreamed immortality.

A conscious soul in the Inconscient's world,

Hidden behind our thoughts and hopes and dreams,

Leaves the vicegerent mind a seeming king.

The regent sits at work and never rests:

He is driven by the hours, the moment's call

And the babel of the voices of the world.

In the incessant circling of its steps

It toils like a machine and cannot stop.

Endless crowd down the dream-god's messages.

There is a tireless running to and fro,

The hurried servant senses answer apace

Bring in time's visitors, report each call,

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And the messages of communicating minds

And all the thousandfold commerce of the world.

He mocks life's steps in strange subconscient dreams,

His night with thin-air visions and dim forms

And only a moment spends in silent Self.

He unfolds his wings of thought in inner air,

Crosses the globe, journeys beneath the stars,

Visits the Gods on Life's miraculous peaks,

This is the little surface of man's life.

He scales the Unseen, his depths dare the Abyss;

Unknown to himself he lives a hidden king

An epicure of the spirit's unseen joys,

A nameless god in an unapproachable fane,

He guards the being's covered mysteries

Or shut in vast cellars of inconscient sleep.

Casts into the argent purity of his soul

Of self-creation in Time's infinity

Man in the world's life works out the dreams of God.

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He is a little front of Nature's works,

All she reveals in him that is in her,

Man's house of life holds not the gods alone:

Inhabitants of life's ominous nether rooms,

A careless guardian of his nature's powers,

The Titan and the Fury and the Djinn

And the Beast grovels in his antre den:

Insurgent sometimes raises its huge head

The mystery of dark and fallen worlds,

The dreadful powers held down within his depths

Enormous they invade his bodily house,

Inferno surges into the human air

Grey forces like a thin miasma creep,

Discolouring the walls of upper mind

And leave behind a stench of sin and death:

And formidable formless influences,

Tremendous forms and faces mount dim steps

Or called up for a moment's passionate work

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Aroused from sleep, they can be bound no more.

Invading at will his outer tenement,

Mounting into God's light all light perturb.

In Nature's basement lodge, mind's passages fill,

Break through the soul's stillness with a noise and cry

Invite the instincts to forbidden joys,

And with nether riot and revel shake life's floor.

Appalled the householder helpless sits above,

He is bound and forced, a victim of the play,

His nature's dangerous forces have arisen

Aroused from the darkness where they crouched in the depths,

His nature's impulses are now his lords.

Infernal elements, demon powers are there.

Their vast contagion grips sometimes man's world.

In house and house the huge uprising grows:

Into the earth-ways they break out from all doors,

And fill with horror and carnage God's fair world.

The terrible Angel smites at every door:

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And massacre and torture grin at Heaven:

Creation rocks and tremble top and base.

A foreign inhabitant, a dangerous guest:

Expel the householder, possess the house.

A momentary Evil's almightiness

It imitates the Godhead it denies,

A Manichean creator and destroyer,

But there is a guardian power, there are Hands that save,

All the world's possibilities in man

His past lives in him; it drives his future's pace;

The unborn gods hide in his house of Life.

Casting their dreams into live moulds of thought,

His mind creates around him its universe.

All that can be is figured in his soul.

Obscure to the interpreting reason's guess,

In strange directions runs the intricate plan;

And the far intention of some ordering Will

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Our surface watched in vain by reason's gaze,

Helpless records the accidents of Time,

Only a little of us foresees its steps,

A vast subliminal is man's measureless part.

Abolished vainly in the walks of Time

And by the weight of its hidden influences

Thus all is an inevitable chain

The unremembering hours repeat the old acts,

And drags back the new nature's glorious stride,

Old thoughts, old longings, dead passions live again,

To words that force the barrier of the lips,

His head of reason and his guardian will.

Hardly we escape from what we once had been:

In the subconscient's darkling corridors

And nothing checked by subterranean mind,

And passed by a blind instinctive memory,

Nothing is wholly dead that once had lived;

The old rejected nature still survives;

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And visit mind's nocturnal walks in sleep,

All keeps a phantom immortality.

The seeds of sins renounced sprout from hid soil;

Our dead selves come to slay our living soul.

A secret mass in dim inconscience gropes;

Arisen, we live in mind's uncertain light

Whose purpose and meaning are hidden from our sight.

Hidden in the mystery of his own light:

Lit by the uncertain ray of human mind,

But this is only Matter's first self-view,

This is not all we are or all our world.

A supreme light in the truth-conscious Vast:

It moves in a splendid air transcending life.

Truth made the world, not a blind Nature-Force.

Our summits in the superconscient's blaze

There is our aspect of eternity,

His young unaging look on deathless things,

His immortality and light and bliss.

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Our larger being sits behind cryptic walls:

That wait their hour to step into life's front:

One speaks within, Light comes to us from above.

Its influence pressing on our heart and mind

It seeks for Good and Beauty and for God;

We gaze through our world's glass at half-seen vasts,

Our inner Mind dwells in a larger light,

Our members luminous grow and Wisdom's face

When she enters into our house of outward sense,

A mighty life-self with its inner powers

It can graft upon our crawl two puissant wings.

In its viewless palace of veridical dreams

In the prone obscure beginnings of the race

He stood erect, a godlike form and force,

Man stood erect, he wore the thinker's brow:

A vision came of beauty and greater birth

And moved in a white lucent air of dreams.

He aspired and housed the nascent demigod.

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He heard the far and touched the intangible,

He used the powers earth-instruments cannot use,

He caught up fragments of the Omniscient's thought,

Thus man in his little house made of earth's dust

Looking into the vast vistas of his mind

At last climbing a long and narrow stair

And saw the light of a spiritual sun.

He stands in the largeness of his soul new-born,

And moves in a pure free spiritual realm

A last end of far lines of divinity,

He reaches his fount of immortality,

All this the spirit concealed had done in her:

Into her as into its own human part:

It marked her the centre of a wide-drawn scheme,

To mould humanity into God's own shape

Or a new world discover or create.

Or Heaven descend into earth's mortal state.

Out of the mystic cavern in man's heart

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And step into common nature's crowded rooms

And rule its thoughts and fill the body and life.

Time, life and death were passing incidents

Her sight that must break through and liberate the god

The inferior nature born into ignorance

And must be pushed aside to find her soul.

END OF CANTO TWO

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