Canto Two

The Gospel of Death and Vanity of the Ideal

THEN pealed the calm inexorable voice:

Abolishing hope, cancelling life's golden truths,

That lovely world swam thin and frail, most like

On the faint verge of dusk in moonless eves.

Thought's creature in the ideal's realm enjoying

The subtle marvellous mind of man has feigned,

When it would build eternity from the dust,

Prophesying glories it shall never see,

Behold this fleeing of light-tasselled shapes,

A rapture of things that never can be born,

Cloud satisfies cloud, phantom to longing phantom

This is the stuff from which the ideal is formed:

But nothing real answers to their call.

A bright delirium of man's ardour of hope

It is a brilliant shadow's dreamy trail.

Thy vision's error drew the rainbow's arch;

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This angel in thy body thou callst love,

In a ferment of thy body has been born

It is a passion of thy yearning cells,

It is thy mind that seeks an answering mind

It is thy life that asks a human prop

Or feeds its hunger on another's life.

It crouches under a bush in splendid flower

This beast thou dreamst immortal and a god.

An hour's delight to stretch through infinity's

Persuading the insensible Abyss

And trickst the fragile movements of thy heart

All here emerges born from Nothingness;

Awhile upheld by an unknowing Force,

Only the mute Alone can for ever be.

In vain to clothe love's perishable mud

The ideal's gorgeous and unfading robe.

Imprisoned in form that glory cannot live;

Intangible, remote, for ever pure,

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Unwillingly it descends to earthly air

In his heart it shines rejected by his life.

Immobile on its shining throne it sits;

It has no voice to answer to his call,

Aerial statue of the nude Idea,

Its light stirs man the thinker to create

Its hued reflection falls upon man's acts;

He signs his dead conventions with its name;

And a nimbus of the outline of its face:

Yet insufficient is the bright pretence

Earth only is there and not some heavenly source.

If a Truth eternal somewhere reigns unknown,

For truth shines far from the falsehoods of the world;

Or the eternal lodge in drifting time?

Where life is only a labour and a hope,

A fire flaming low in Nature's grate,

A journey's toilsome trudge with death for goal?

Vain was the sage's thought, the prophet's voice;

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Earth lies unchanged beneath the circling sun;

Her mortal imperfections can erase,

Or colonise a world of death with gods.

High priestess in thy holy fancy's shrine

Worshippest ideal and eternal love,

This sacred legend and immortal myth?

It is a glorious burning of thy nerves,

A great red rapture and torture of thy heart.

It passes and the world is as before.

A thrill in its yearning makes it seem divine,

A cord tying thee to eternity.

This treasure wasted by the gods on man,

This honey of the body's companionship,

This strange illumination of the sense!

But Satyavan is dead and love shall live

His face and body fade on memory's wall

When love breaks suddenly into the life

In his passion he feels his heavenly element:

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The marvellous aspect took of heaven's outburst;

A word, a moment's act can slay the god;

He has a thousand ways to suffer and die.

Only on sap of earth can it survive.

A hunger of the body and the heart;

Or love may meet a dire and pitiless end

Separate, or thy unsatisfied will to others

A dull indifference replaces fire

An outward and uneasy union lasts

Where once the seed of oneness had been cast

By a divine adventure of heavenly powers

Two egos straining in a single leash,

Two spirits disjoined, for ever separate.

Trivial or sombre, disillusion comes,

Heaven's hour adjourned flees into bodiless Time.

He now is safe, delivered from himself;

Call him not back to the treacheries of earth

In my vast tranquil spaces let him sleep

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Where love lies slumbering on the breast of peace.

Chastise thy heart with knowledge, unhood to see,

The heaven-bird's view from unimagined peaks.

Soon hard necessity will smite thee awake:

Thou too shalt know, thy heart no anchor swinging,

Vain are the cycles of thy brilliant mind.

Thy passionate nature in the bosom profound

Delivered into my mysterious rest.

Forget thy fruitless spirit's waste of force,

Forget the joy and the struggle and the pain,

When worlds broke forth like clusters of fire-flowers,

And Time and its aeons crawled across the vasts

But Savitri replied to the dark Power:

Melting thy speech into harmonious pain,

Thy falsehoods mingled with sad strains of truth.

My love is not a hunger of the heart,

It came to me from God, to God returns.

A whisper of divinity still is heard,

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Allowed by Heaven and wonderful to man

There is a hope in its wild infinite cry;

And when its strains are hushed to high-winged souls

Survives beyond, the rapturous core of suns

A voice of the eternal Ecstasy.

Put off the dire disguises of the gods,

Appeased we shall draw near our mother's face,

Then shall we clasp the ecstasy we chase,

Then shall we find Heaven's unexpected strain.

The violent and darkened deities

What the white gods had missed: they too are safe;

Stretched out in love desire her rebel sons.

Eternal, built himself a wondrous field

There in its circles and its magic turns

In the wild devious promptings of his mind

Repenting, and has laughter and has wrath,

Which seeks out reconciled its heavenly rhyme.

Bearing a new sweet face that is the old.

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Like a far-heard unseen entrancing flute

Tempting our angry search and passionate pain.

He named himself for me, grew Satyavan.

The twin souls born from one undying fire.

How has he through the thickets of the world

And come upon me suddenly in the ways

Unsatisfied he yearned for me through time,

Desiring me since first the world began.

And dragged me helpless into seas of bliss.

They have touched me like the soft persuading wind,

And clasped me happily burned in ruthless flame.

And run delighted to his distant voice

If there is a yet happier greater god,

And let his soul be one with him I love;

For only one heart beats within my breast

Beyond the phantom beauty of this world;

I cherish God the Fire, not God the Dream."

The majesty of his calm and dreadful voice:

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"A bright hallucination are thy thoughts.

Of thy own sensuous will the ardent slave,

Words winged with the red splendour of thy heart.

The heart's words fall back unheard from Wisdom's throne.

Artificer of Ideal and Idea,

To higher levels persuades his parents' steps:

But Mind, a glorious traveller in the sky,

Hardly he can mould the life's rebellious stuff,

His thoughts look straight into the very heavens;

His acts work painfully a common ore.

To solace its dull work in Matter's jail,

A solid image of reality

Matter on the firm earth sits strong and sure.

It stands the last when mind and life are slain,

All else is only its outcome or its phase:

Created in thy matter's terrain plot;

For from earth's sap it draws its heavenly hue:

Thy life a lapsing wave on Matter's sea.

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It tethers mind to the tent-posts of sense,

And ties all creatures with the cords of Law.

A glue that sticks together mind and life,

All upon Matter stands as on a rock.

Pressed for credentials an impostor proves:

An appearance and a symbol and a nought,

Its aspect of a fixed stability

An order of the steps of Energy's dance

A concrete face of unsubstantial Time,

A stable-seeming movement without change,

What seemed most real once, is Nihil's show.

The beginningless Void was its artificer:

And seeming shapes of seeming Energy.

All think and act by the Inconscient's grace.

Turn not thy gaze within thyself to look

Close not thy lids to dream the forms of Gods.

The stuff of which thou and the world are made.

Inexplicably a moving world sprang forth:

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It could not rest content with its own truth.

Condemned to see and know, to feel and love,

It groped for truth and dreamed of Self and God.

I, Death, was king and kept my regal state,

Creating with a calm insentient heart.

Obliging nothingness to take a form,

Making by chance a fixity like fate's,

Founded on the hollow ground of the Inane

I curved the vacant ether into Space;

Harboured the fires of the universe:

And spread its sparse ranked armies through the Inane,

Marshalled the platoons of the invisible dance;

And built from chemic plasm the living man.

Matter began to hope and think and feel,

The inconscient cosmos strove to learn its task;

And to understand invented reason's law,

A trouble rocked the great world's blind still heart

Thus came this warped incomprehensible scene

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And Matter's sleep and Mind's mortality,

And consciousness left in seeking ignorance

This is the world in which thou mov'st, astray

In the issueless circling of thy human life,

But where is room for soul or place for God

A transient Breath thou takest for thy soul,

A magnified image of man's mind for God,

Interposed between the upper and nether Void,

In the distorting mirror of Ignorance

Or if a half-Truth is playing with the earth

It touches only and leaves a luminous smudge.

But immortality for imperfect man,

Would be a cycle of eternal pain.

But knowledge in this world is error's mate,

And human love a posturer on earth-stage

An extract pressed from hard experience,

Has the harsh savour of a mortal draught:

Flattering and torturing the burning nerves,

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Drunk by it as the nectar of the gods.

And love no gleaming angel from the skies;

Arriving sunwards with frail waxen wings,

But not on earth can divine wisdom reign

Heaven-born, only in heaven can they live;

Nay, is not all thou art and doest a dream?

If thy mind seems to thee a radiant sun,

This is the illusion of thy mortal heart

Impotent to live by their own right divine,

When their supporting ground is cut away,

Even Matter vanishes into Energy's vague

How shall the Ideal's unsubstantial hues

A dream within a dream come doubly true?

The Ideal is a malady of thy mind,

A strange wine of beauty lifting thee to false sight.

Thy human imperfection it must share:

And never shall it find its heavenly shape

O soul misled by the splendour of thy thoughts,

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Obey, resigned and still, the earthly law.

Take what thou canst of Life's permitted joy;

Suffer what thou must of toil and grief and care.

My long calm night of everlasting sleep:

END OF CANTO TWO

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