Canto Four

The Triple Soul-Forces

HERE from a low and prone and listless ground

The passion of the first ascent began;

A Woman sat in a pale lustrous robe.

Beneath her feet a sharp and wounding stone.

A spirit touched by the grief of all that lives,

This questionable world of outward things,

This dubious cosmos stretched in the ignorant Void,

And the difficult birth and dolorous end of life.

The Mother of the seven sorrows bore

The beauty of sadness lingered on her face,

Her heart was riven with the world's agony

An anguished music trailed in her rapt voice.

Lifting the mild ray of her patient gaze,

"O Savitri, I am thy secret soul.

I draw my children's pangs into my breast.

I am the soul of all who wailing writhe

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I tend the hands that gave me cruel blows.

I am the courted queen, the pampered doll,

I am the worshipped Angel of the House.

Mine is the prayer that climbs in vain from earth,

I am the spirit in a world of pain.

Fall'n back on heart and flesh unheard by Heaven

I have seen the peasant burning in his hut,

Heard woman's cry ravished and stripped and haled

I have looked on, I had no power to save.

God gave me love, he gave me not his force.

Pushed by the goad, encouraged by the whip;

Its long hunt for the day's precarious food,

Its pain and terror seized by beak and claw.

Its petty pleasures and its petty cares,

Earth's trail of sorrow hopeless of relief,

And the burden of misery and the strokes of fate.

And the tender smile that heals the wounded heart

Man has felt near my unseen face and hands;

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I have become the sufferer and his moan,

I have lived with the prisoner in his dungeon cell.

Nothing refusing of creation's load,

Perhaps when the world sinks into a last sleep,

I have borne the calm indifference of Heaven,

While God passed silent by nor turned to help.

Yet have I not accused his cosmic Law.

A patient prayer has risen from my breast;

Within me a blind faith and mercy dwell;

And the compassion that supports the suns.

My God who never came to me till now;

I know that one day he shall come at last."

Answering her pathos of divine complaint

A growl of thunder or roar of angry beast,

Voice of a tortured Titan once a God.

Who is nailed on the wide cross of the universe;

My passion he has made his drama's theme.

And beaten me with his rods of grief and pain

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I am Prometheus under the vulture's beak,

In the flame he kindled burning like a moth;

I am the fighter who can never win,

Hell tortures me with the edges of my thought,

What profit have I of my animal birth;

I toil like the animal, like the animal die.

Fate and my fellows cheat me of my wage.

And shake from my aching neck the oppressor's knees

My teachers lesson me in slavery,

Upon the sorry contract of my fate.

My fruit of works is given to other hands.

My sordid quarrel against God and man,

Hate of a happiness that is not mine.

It is my nature's work that cannot change:

I have lived for myself and not for others' lives.

So God has made his harsh and dreadful world,

Only by force and ruse can man survive:

His goodness is a laxity in the nerves,

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His altruism is ego's other face:

If once the Titan's strength could wake in me,

I then would reign the master of the world

But God has taken from me the ancient Force.

A fierce satisfaction with my special pangs

Only by suffering can I excel.

I am the doer of demoniac deeds;

Evil I must be and by evil live;

What Nature made me, that I must remain.

And Savitri heard the voice, the echo heard

"Madonna of suffering, Mother of grief divine,

To bear the unbearable sorrow of the world.

But ask for happiness and strive with fate;

But thine is the power to solace, not to save.

And make thee drink from the Eternal's cup;

And Wisdom's calm control thy passionate heart.

Compassion the bright key of Nature's acts:

The world shall be freed from the anger of the Beast,

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There shall be peace and joy for ever more."

On passed she in her spirit's upward route.

An ardent grandeur climbed mid ferns and rocks,

A finer perfume breathed from slender trees.

Here on a boulder carved like a huge throne

Armed with the trident and the thunderbolt,

A formidable smile curved round her lips,

Her body a mass of courage and heavenly strength,

A halo of lightnings flamed around her head

And majesty and victory sat with her

Against the flat equality of Death

The hierarchy of the ordered Powers,

The privileged aristocracy of Truth,

The triumvirate of wisdom, love and bliss

August on her seat in the inner world of Mind,

Listened to the advancing tread of Time,

And heard the thunder of the march of God.

Sovereign was her word of luminous command,

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Aspired the harmony of her puissant voice:

I have come down into the human world

And the dark contrariety of earth's fate

I stand upon earth's paths of danger and grief

To the strong I bring the guerdon of their strength,

To men who long I carry their coveted joy:

By the sanction of the plaudits of the crowd,

My ear is leaned to the cry of the oppressed,

A cry comes from proscribed and hunted lives

A voice of the forsaken and desolate

Men hail in my coming the Almighty's force

I smite the Titan who bestrides the world

I am Durga, goddess of the proud and strong,

I wear the face of Kali when I kill,

I am charged by God to do his mighty work,

Reckless of peril and earthly consequence.

But do the deed he has put into my heart.

I flinch not from the red assault of Hell;

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Tread down a million goblin obstacles.

And guard him from the red Wolf and the Snake.

And put on him the breastplate of the gods.

And lead the thought to the wideness of the Truth;

And force his sorrowful eyes to gaze at the sun

I know the goal, I know the secret route;

I am the battle's head, the journey's star.

And the crookedness and evil in man's heart

And the malignancy of hostile Powers

And mightier seems than the eternal Will.

The cosmic suffering is too vast to heal.

A few I save, the mass falls back unsaved;

But my heart I have hardened and I do my work:

Slowly the world progresses on God's road.

I shall hear the silver swing of heaven's gates

She spoke and from the lower human world

The voice came through the spaces of the mind

Who strives to master his nature's rebel stuff

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The Ego of this great world of desire

Of man, head of the life it shapes on earth,

And symbol of evolving light and force

A thinking animal, Nature's struggling lord,

And pays to her as wage and emolument

His heart's grief and his body's death and pain:

His death assists her immortality.

He praises his free will and his master mind

Possessor he is possessed and, ruler, ruled,

His soul is her guest, a sovereign mute, inert,

His conscious mind her strong revolted serf.

"I am the heir of the forces of the earth,

A growing godhead in her divinised mud,

The last-born of the earth I stand the first;

Although I live in Time besieged by Death,

Housed on a little speck amid the stars,

Immortal spirit in the perishing clay,

Even if he is not, he becomes in me.

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Air was invented for my lungs to breathe,

For my winged chariot's wheels to cleave a road,

And bear my golden commerce on its back:

I laugh at its black stare of fate and death.

All was prepared through many a silent age,

Then only when all was ready I was born.

A helpless creature in a difficult world

I have grown greater than Nature, wiser than God.

I have seized her powers and harnessed for my work,

I will make glass and raiment out of milk,

Like God in his astuce of artist skill,

In single Nature multitudinous lives,

In mind intangible, remould anew

No magic can surpass my magic's skill.

What God imperfect left, I will complete,

His sin and error I will eliminate;

He was the first creator, I am the last.

The first tremendous cosmic energy

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Expunge a nation or abolish a race,

Or the fissured invisible shall spend God's force

To speed my car which now the lightnings drive

I will take his means of sorcery from his hands

Yet through it all I have kept my balanced thought;

I have grown a master of the arts of life.

He guards my house, looks up waiting my will.

I have used the mystery of the cosmic waves

I have conquered Space and knitted close all earth.

I play with knowledge and with ignorance

I can transcend or sovereignly use.

I shall slay my enemies with a look or thought,

And see and hear the hidden thoughts of men.

The gods shall be my aides or menial folk,

Omnipotence and omniscience shall be mine."

And turning to her being of power she spoke:

Thou art a portion of my soul put forth

Because thou art in him, man hopes and dares;

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And walk like gods in the presence of the Supreme.

It can breathe upon the heights and kiss the sky,

Thou hast given men strength, wisdom thou couldst not give.

Then will I give to thee the mirror of God;

Reflected in the bright pool of thy soul.

Then hate shall dwell no more in human hearts,

The cry of the ego shall be hushed within,

All shall be might and bliss and happy force."

Ascending still her spirit's upward route

She came into a high and happy space,

And all was centred in a single view

And a harmony is made of hues at war.

There was a carol of birds and murmur of bees,

Yet intimately divine to heart and soul.

And deepest things seemed obvious, close and true.

A Woman sat in clear and crystal light:

Her feet were moonbeams, her face was a bright sun,

To live again and feel the hands of calm.

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"O Savitri, I am thy secret soul.

To heal her pangs and lull her heart to rest

That she may dream of God and know his peace

Into the rhythm of earth's rude troubled days.

And bring strength and solace to her struggling life;

I reveal to her in the body of their power.

Amid the reign of Hell his acts create

I am charity with the kindly hands that bless,

I am Knowledge poring on her cosmic map.

Where Good and Evil are close bedfellows

Where his largest knowledge is an ignorance,

And works for God and looks up towards the heights.

And all experience a long march towards Light.

And lead through death to reach immortal Life.

They stamp his thoughts and deeds with divinity,

Or slowly transmute it into heaven's gold.

He is the war of Right with Titan wrong;

He is Valour guarding still the desperate pass

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He is the crown of the martyr burned in flame

And courage indifferent to the wounds of Time

He is Wisdom incarnate on a glorious throne

He is the high and solitary Thought

He is the prophet's voice, the sight of the seer.

He is the Truth by which the spirit lives.

Poured out in healing streams on indigent Life;

He is infinity in a little space:

These powers I am and at my call they come.

But human mind clings to its ignorance

And to its right to grief the earthly life.

Only when infinity weds the finite's thought,

I bring meanwhile the gods upon the earth;

I give peace to the humble and the great,

I shall save earth, if earth consents to be saved.

Man's mind shall admit the sovereignty of Truth

She spoke and from the ignorant nether plane

A voice of the sense-shackled human mind

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Hedged by the limits of a mortal's thoughts,

Imprisoned in his body and his brain

Or share in his vast and deep identity

And knows all things because he is one with all.

Then wondering what may lie hid from the sense

But soon he stops, he cannot reach life's core

He sees the naked body of the Truth

But cannot look upon her soul within.

He tears all details out and stabs and digs:

The spirit escapes or dies beneath his knife.

The crowding riches of infinity.

Its plan dissects, masters its processes,

His poring eyes miss the unseen behind.

Or the slow traveller's sight of distant scenes;

Yet is he visited by intuitive light

But only reason and sense he feels as sure,

Thus is he baulked, his splendid effort vain;

Of the huge ocean of his ignorance.

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A cosmic pathos trembled in its tone.

Ascending to knowledge by the steps he made;

I am a god fettered by Matter and sense,

A beast of labour asking for his food,

Yet have I loosened the cord, enlarged my room.

Described their orbits through the grooves of Space,

Computed their longevity in Time.

The riches guarded by her dull brown soil.

And of her biography discovered the dates,

The tree of evolution I have sketched,

In the embryo tracked the history of forms,

I have detected plasm and cell and gene,

The humble originals from whom he rose;

Only what end he serves I know not yet

Or push of rich creative purposeful joy

I have caught her intricate processes, none is left:

I have seized the cosmic energies for my use.

And her invisible atoms have unmasked:

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Only some pages now are left to read.

I have studied the methods of the ant and ape

If God is at work, his secrets I have found.

Their truth flees from pursuit into a void;

What chose the process, whence the Power sprang

A mystery is this mighty Nature's birth;

A mystery the protean freak of life.

What I have built is seized and torn by Fate.

But not the march of the destiny of man:

He falls trampled underneath the rolling wheels.

The mystic heavens that claim the human soul

All is a speculation or a dream.

The infinitesimal's jest mocks mass and shape,

Perhaps the world is an error of our sight,

An unreal mind hallucinates the soul

Or a dance of Maya veils the void Unborn.

What profit is it then for Thought to win

Or hunt to its lair the bodiless Self or make

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Nay, let me work within my mortal bounds,

Our smallness saves us from the Infinite.

Call me not to die the great eternal death,

In the chill vast of the spirit's boundlessness.

And how can one evade his native fate?

Till in the Inconscient I fall dumb and sleep.

To think that God lives hidden in the clay

And call to her to save our self and world.

Transmuting the very stuff of which he is made?

And Savitri heard the voice, the warped answer heard

"Madonna of light, Mother of joy and peace,

To raise the spirit to its forgotten heights

Because thou art, the soul draws near to God;

And knowledge walks unslain in the pit of Night.

Upon the intellect's hard and rocky soil

And the Bird of Paradise sit upon life's boughs

Even if thou rain down intuition's rays,

His spirit by spiritual ego sink,

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Where only a bright shadow of God can come.

And fill his yearning heart with heaven's fire

One day I will return, His hand in mine,

Then shall the holy marriage be achieved,

There shall be light and peace in all the worlds."

END OF CANTO FOUR

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