Canto Two

The Journey in Eternal Night

and the Voice of the Darkness

AWHILE on the chill dreadful edge of Night

And waited on the eternal silence' brink.

Of menace through the dim and voiceless hush.

Where the last depths plunge into nothingness

Were glooms like shadowy wings, behind them, pale,

Hungry beyond, the night desired her soul.

Motionless, her flame-bright spirit, mute, erect,

Pointing against the darkness' sombre breast.

Daring to journey through the eternal Night.

Into the dread and hueless vacancy;

The danger of the ruthless eyeless waste.

Mysterious motion on her human tread,

Like figures moving before eyelids closed:

The rock-gate's heavy walls were left behind;

Present and past into the Timeless lapsed;

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Amid collapsing shapes they wound obscure;

Received them, where they seemed to move and yet

A dumb procession a dim picture bounds,

A mystery of terror's boundlessness,

Surrounded slowly with its soundless depths,

Devoured her into its shadowy strangling mass,

A curtain of impenetrable dread,

As, when the trees have turned to blotted shades

Around a bullock in the forest tied

The thought that strives in the world was here unmade;

Convinced at last that it had never been;

This clotted cypher was its dark result.

Mind could not think, breath could not breathe, the soul

A hollow gulf of sterile emptiness,

An abnegation of the Maker's joy

On all that claims here to be Truth and God

And the creative rapture of the Mind

The immense refusal of the eternal No.

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Borne into distance from the eyes' desire,

There was no course, no path, no end or goal:

Or drove through some great black unknowing waste,

Assembled by the titan hands of Chance.

She saw no more the vague tremendous god,

Yet not for this her spirit failed, but held

Which grasp externally and find to lose,

She had felt him straying through the glades, the glades

Opening their secrets to his search and joy,

Whatever happy space his cherished feet

His body, passioning dumbly to his tread.

And to abysmal loneliness she fell,

Long hours, since long it seems when sluggish time

In an unreal darkness empty and drear

Lost in a blindness of extinguished souls.

She lived in spite of death, she conquered still;

Her heavy long monotony of pain

At first a faint inextinguishable gleam,

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As if a memory came to spirits dead,

Dissolved from mind in Nature's natal sleep.

Revealing to the night her soul of dread;

Its black hoods jewelled with the mystic glow;

As though they felt all light a cruel pain

Night felt assailed her heavy sombre reign;

Threatened with this faint beam of wandering Truth

Implacable in her intolerant strength

She strove to stifle the frail dangerous ray;

She reared her giant head of Nothingness,

She saw in herself the tenebrous Absolute.

And Savitri to her lost self awoke;

Her heart-beats triumphed in the grasp of pain;

The soul of the beloved now seen no more.

Once more she heard the treading of a god,

Her husband, grew into a luminous shade.

Vast like the surge in a tired swimmer's ears,

Death missioned to the night his lethal call.

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This is the home of everlasting Night,

Entombing the vanity of life's desires.

And known from what the dream thou art was made?

Hopest thou still always to last and love?"

The voice of Night that knew and Death that thought.

Through her soul's reaches unconfined she gazed;

She knew herself eternal without birth.

Death, the dire god, inflicted on her eyes

"Although thou hast survived the unborn void

The primal violence that fashioned thought,

This sorrowful victory only hast thou won

What shall the ancient goddess give to thee

The nothing dreamed existence and delays

A fragile miracle of thinking clay,

To fill the void around he feels and dreads,

He magnifies his self and names it God.

He sees above him with a longing heart

That have not even his privilege of mind,

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And peoples them with bright and merciful powers.

Beneath his steps, and fire is at his doors,

Moved by the Presences with which he yearns,

And clothes all with the beauty of his dreams.

And guide its giant stumblings through the void,

In his unwilling heart they have lit their fires

His mind is a hunter upon tracks unknown;

He deepens with thought the mystery of his fate

His mortality vexing with the immortal's dreams,

They gave him hungers which no food can fill;

His body the tether with which he is tied,

His pasture ground they have fenced with Ignorance.

They have breathed a courage that is met by death,

They have traced a journey that foresees no goal.

Lulled by inconstant pauses of his pain,

Bound to the chariot of the dreadful gods.

Return to thy body's shell, thy tie to earth,

Hope not to win back to thee Satyavan.

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Gifts I can give to soothe thy wounded life.

And the wayside sweetness earth-bound hearts would pluck,

Choose a life's hopes for thy deceiving prize."

Unendingly there rose in Savitri,

A stir of thoughts out of some silence born

At last she spoke; her voice was heard by Night:

Black lie of night to the cowed soul of man,

Thou grim jest played with the immortal spirit.

A victor spirit conscious of my force,

Unslain I have survived the clutch of Night.

My unwept tears have turned to pearls of strength:

Into the hardness of a statued soul.

My spirit shall be obstinate and strong

I stoop not with the subject mob of minds

And pick from its mire mid many trampling feet

Mine is the labour of the battling gods:

The flaming will that reigns beyond the stars,

And win the soul's wish from earth's inconscient Force.

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My husband, waking in the forest's charm

Desired and had not for his beautiful life.

Death bowed his head in scornful cold assent,

Who has mocked with vanity all gifts he gave.

"Indulgent to the dreams my touch shall break,

Kingdom and power and friends and greatness lost

The pallid pomps of man's declining days,

To one who wiser grew by adverse Fate,

To impersonal nothingness's bare sublime.

To eyes which could have found a larger realm,

For that this man desired and asked in vain

Back from the grandeur of my perilous realms

Hasten swift-footed, lest to slay thy life

Open at last on thee their marble eyes."

"World-spirit, I was thy equal spirit born.

I am immortal in my mortality.

Of the unchanging marble hierarchies

My soul can meet them with its living fire.

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Into earth's flowering spaces Satyavan

To do with him my spirit's burning will.

I will follow with him earth's path that leads to God.

While round us strange horizons far recede,

For I who have trod with him the tracts of Time,

Or unimaginable stupendous dawn

Wherever thou leadst his soul I shall pursue."

Insisting on the immutable Decree,

And the insignificance of created things,

Born from the enigma of the unknowable depths

As when the storm-haired Titan-striding sea

Remembering all the joy its waves have drowned,

Against the Woman's boundless heart arose

"Hast thou god-wings or feet that tread my stars,

Forgetting thy bounds of thought, thy mortal role?

I, Death, created them out of my void;

I made the worlds my net, each joy a mesh.

Life that devours, my image see in things.

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Whose transience was imagined by my smile,

Pierced by my pangs Time shall not soon appease.

To sin that I may punish, to desire

And thou come bleeding to me at the last,

Turn nor attempt forbidden happy fields

Lest in their sombre shrines thy tread awake

The Furies who avenge fulfilled desire.

The Unknown's lightnings start and, terrified,

A wounded and forsaken soul thou flee

Nor many lives exhaust the tireless Wrath

I will take from thee the black eternal grip:

Depart in peace, if peace for man is just."

The mortal woman to the dreadful Lord:

Contemptuously creating worlds disdained,

Not he who has reared his temple in my thoughts

My God is will and triumphs in his paths,

To him I have offered hope for sacrifice

Who shall prohibit or hedge in his course,

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A traveller of the million roads of life,

Tread without pain the sword-paved courts of hell;

Love's golden wings have power to fan thy void:

The feet of love tread naked hardest worlds.

He shall remake thy universe, O Death."

While still they travelled through the trackless night

Troubling the darkness with its doubtful gaze.

In that unreal journey through blind Nought;

And Death made answer to the human soul:

This is thy body's sweetest lure of bliss,

To please for a few years thy faltering sense

And, a vain oneness seeking, to embrace

And thou, what art thou, soul, thou glorious dream

A thin dance of fireflies speeding through the night,

Wilt thou claim immortality, O heart,

That thou and he are endless powers and last?

I only am eternal and endure.

I am the emptiness that men call Space,

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I am the Illimitable, the mute Alone.

All from my depths are born, they live by death;

I have made a world by my inconscient Force.

The hearts that hope, the limbs that long to live.

His body I made my banquet, his life my food.

He comes to me at his end for rest and peace.

The Gods to whom man prays can help not man;

Reflected in him by illusion's power.

Is a shadowy icon of my infinite,

I am the Immobile in which all things move,

I have no body and no tongue to speak,

Only thy thought gave a figure to my void.

Thou calledst me to wrestle with thy soul,

But if there were a Being witnessing all,

Aloof he watches sole and absolute,

His being is pure, unwounded, motionless, one.

Where all things perish, as the foam the stars.

Changing was born and there no Savitri

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Came never with his fretful eyes of tears,

It wears no living face, it has no name,

To aid its being or to share its joys.

If thou desirest immortality,

Live in thyself; forget the man thou lov'st.

Then shalt thou rise into thy unmoved source."

"O Death, who reasonest, I reason not,

Or builds in vain because she doubts her work.

Death answered her, one deep surrounding cry:

And cease to will, delivered from thy heart.

Consenting to the impermanence of things."

"When I have loved for ever, I shall know.

I know that knowledge is a vast embrace:

In every heart is hidden the myriad One.

The veiled Inhabitant, the silent Lord:

I hear the murmur of the cosmic Voice.

For all his suns were conscient in my birth,

Then was man born among the monstrous stars

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Dowered with a mind and heart to conquer thee."

Sure of his empire and his armoured might,

From victim lips Death answered not again.

A figure motionless, a shadow vague,

Half-seen in clouds appeared a sombre face;

The ashes of the pyre his forehead's sign.

Blindly forbidden by dead vacant eyes,

Around her rolled the shuddering waste of gloom,

Resentful of her thought and life and love.

Gliding half-seen on their unearthly path,

END OF CANTO TWO

END OF BOOK NINE

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