It seemed to lead the advancing march of Life

But Savitri answered to almighty Death:

Who veilst the Real with its own Idea,

Masking eternity with thy dance of death,

And made of Thought error's purveyor and scribe,

An aesthete of the sorrow of the world,

Thou hast used words to shutter out the Light

A lying reality is falsehood's crown

O Death, thou speakest truth but truth that slays,

A traveller new-discovering himself,

He made of Nothingness his living-room

And death a spur towards immortality.

His consciousness dived into inconscient depths,

Infinity wore a boundless zero's form.

Eternity a blank spiritual Vast.

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And drew the figure of a universe,

And wrestle with adamant Necessity

A spirit moved in black immensities

A soul was lit in God's tremendous Void,

In Nihil's gulf his mighty Puissance wrought;

Made Matter the body of the Bodiless.

In inert Matter breathed a slumbering Life,

In waking Life it stretched its giant limbs

A senseless substance quivered into sense,

In the crowded dumb vibrations of a brain

Discovered speech and fed the new-born Word

In waking Mind, the Thinker built his house.

He stood erect among his brute compeers,

Opposed his fate and wrestled with unseen Powers,

And hoped to ride the heavens and reach the stars,

Now through Mind's windows stares the demigod

He has seen the Unknown, looked on Truth's veilless face;

Motionless, voiceless in foreseeing depths,

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And sees a glory of arisen wings

"O Death, thou lookst on an unfinished world

Peopled by imperfect minds and ignorant lives,

How shall the child already be the man?

Because he is ignorant, shall he never learn?

In a tiny gene a thinking being is shut;

It grows and is a conqueror and a sage.

Deny the occult spiritual miracle?

A mute material Nature wakes and sees;

Something there waits beyond towards which she strives,

To uncover the spirit, to change back into God,

In God concealed the world began to be,

Our imperfection towards perfection toils,

The infinite holds the finite in its arms,

A miracle structure of the eternal Mage,

A scripture written out in cryptic signs,

All here bears witness to his secret might,

A blaze of his sovereign glory is the sun,

Page – 623

A glory is his dream of purple sky.

His laughter of beauty breaks out in green trees,

The blue sea's chant, the rivulet's wandering voice

This world is God fulfilled in outwardness.

By blind brute movements of an ignorant Force,

A greatness founded upon little things,

His forms he has massed from infinitesimal dust;

If mind is crippled, life untaught and crude,

They are incidents of his vast and varied plot,

He makes with these and all his passion-play,

Of a transcendent Wisdom finding ways

Above her is the vigil of the stars;

She embodies in dumb Matter the Divine,

A miracle-monger her mechanical craft;

Life's engines served the labour of a soul:

A huge caprice self-bound by iron laws,

She lulled the Omniscient into nescient sleep,

Trod perfectly with divine unconscious steps

Page – 624

The enormous circle of her wonder-works.

The Eternal's face was seen through drifts of Time.

His Good he sowed in Evil's monstrous bed,

His plant of bliss watered with Sorrow's tears.

A dual Nature covered the Unique.

This tangle-dance of passionate contraries

The quarrel of their lost identity,

Earth's million roads struggled towards deity.

Yet every stumble is a needed pace

All blundered and straggled towards the One Divine.

The eternal Powers assumed a dubious face:

They wore the heads of animal or troll,

Or harboured the demoniac in their gaze:

They suffered a metamorphosis of the heart,

Into its sanctuary of delights,

On the highways, in the gardens of the world

As drunkards of a dire Circean wine

Even wisdom, hewer of the roads of God,

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She fails to read the map and watch the star.

And reason's pragmatic grope or abstract sight,

She teaches, an usher in utility's school.

Small thoughts in shoals are fished up into a net

Guarded from vision by creation's depths,

Safe from the little sounding leads of mind,

Our mortal vision peers with ignorant eyes;

Our knowledge walks leaning on Error's staff,

Or fanatic of a fierce intolerant creed

A sceptic facing Light with adamant No

A cynic stamping out the god in man;

Or lifts its giant head to blot the stars;

And intercepts the oracles of the Sun.

It holds a torch to lead the traveller in.

It is a star lighting an ignorant sea,

As knowledge grows Light flames up from within:

An eagle of dreams in the divining heart,

Then larger dawns arrive and Wisdom's pomps

Page – 626

Philosophy climbs up Thought's cloud-bank peaks

Enormous djinns who serve a dwarf's small needs,

And conquers her by her own captive force.

Upon a dangerous edge of failing Time

Man's knowledge becomes God's supernal Ray.

Whose fire burns in the eyes of seer and sage;

It plays upon an inward verge of mind:

A voice comes down from mystic unseen peaks:

It is the voice that speaks to night's profound,

Above the planes that climb from nescient earth,

Beyond the superconscient's blinding line

A spirit within looks into the Eternal's eyes.

It sees through the blaze in which our thoughts grew blind;

It learns the secrets of eternity.

Thus all is raised to meet a dazzling Sun.

In earth's anomalous and magic field

Mid the forced marches of the great dumb stars,

And Matter's world was governed by thy shape.

Page – 627

The Bliss that made the world has fallen asleep.

An evil transmutation overtook

Only through her creative slumber flit

Under the sky's blue laugh mid green-scarfed trees

In the field of the golden promenade of the sun

Amid high meditating heads of hills,

And by the sapphire tumblings of the sea.

And Death and Ignorance govern the mortal world

Earth still has kept her early charm and grace,

But veiled is the divine Inhabitant.

And the great Mother turns away her face.

And sorrow's touch has found her in her dreams.

Because she cannot wake and find herself

Oblivious of her nature and her state,

Forgetting to create a world of joy,

Testing with sorrow's edge her children's breasts,

The poignant luxury of grief and tears.

Tortured herself and torturing by her touch,

Page – 628

Wearing a hard and cruel mask of pain.

Returns wry answers to life's questioning shocks,

Drinks the sharp wine of grief's perversity.

Delight, God's sweetest sign and Beauty's twin,

Is shunned, a dangerous and ambiguous cheat,

It tempts the soul to its self-hurt and fall.

Or red drug in the market-place of Death,

Yet every creature hunts for happiness,

From the dull breast of the inanimate globe

Even joy itself becomes a poisonous draught;

All means are held good to catch a single beam,

Yet for joy and not for sorrow earth was made

Although God made the world for his delight,

And Death's deep falsity has mastered Life.

"A secret air of pure felicity

Our hearts and bodies feel its obscure call,

If this withdrew, the world would sink in the Void;

Page – 629

A mute Delight regards Time's countless works:

To house God's joy in self our souls were born.

Its objects are carved cups of World-Delight

The All-Wonderful has packed heaven with his dreams,

He spilled his spirit into Matter's signs:

He glides through heaven shimmering in the moon;

He chants the stanzas of the odes of Wind;

He wakes at dawn and calls from every bough,

Even in this labour and dolour of Ignorance,

In spite of death and evil circumstance

There is a joy in all that meets the sense,

A joy in evil and a joy in good,

Indifferent to the threat of Karmic law,

Its sap runs through the plant and flowers of Pain:

It tears its food from sorrow and ecstasy,

It wallows with the reptile and the worm

It shares the faeries' dance, dines with the gnome:

The sun of Beauty and the sun of Power

Page – 630

It grows towards the Titan and the God.

Through the symbol of her pleasure and her pain,

Of the flame-stabs and the torment-craft of Hell

In the small paltry pleasures of man's life,

A taste in tears and torture of broken hearts,

In life's nectar of sweetness and its bitter wine.

Sounds all experience for things new and strange.

A tongue of glory from a brighter sphere:

It leaps at the splendour of some perfect word,

Wanders in his errors, dares the abyss's brink,

Angel and demon brides his chamber share,

To the enjoyer of the cosmic scene

His magnanimity and meanness hues

The Artist's skill he admires who planned it all.

Beyond the earth, but meant for delivered earth,

Truth superhuman calls to thinking man.

In every shrine it cries for the clasp of God.

Then is achieved the longed-for miracle.

Page – 631

Opens on the stars, she stirs her mighty limbs;

And Space fills with a white beatitude.

Abandoning speech and the name-determined realms,

Through naked thought-free heavens of absolute sight,

Remembering the future that must be

Immutable above the world it made.

Like a great heaven-bird on a motionless sea

On the still deep of the Eternal's peace.

Nature's allotted task when beauty-drenched

Out of the Void this grand creation rose, —

And charged with its power Matter's unknowing force,

In Death's realm repatriate immortality.

All our earth starts from mud and ends in sky,

Then a sweet madness in the rapturous heart,

Becomes a wide spiritual yearning's space.

The heart that loved man thrills to the love of God,

Then is our being rescued from separateness;

A Lover leaning from his cloister's door

Page – 632

Then shall the business fail of Night and Death:

And all is known and all is clasped by Love

"O Death, I have triumphed over thee within;

A mighty calmness seated deep within

It takes the world's grief and transmutes to strength,

My love eternal sits throned on God's calm;

And find its secret sense ineffable;

Yet keep its sovereignty of earthly bliss.

Nor for my happy body's bliss alone

But for his work and mine, our sacred charge.

To dwell under death's shadow they have come

His love to fill the hollow in men's hearts,

For I, the woman, am the force of God,

My will is greater than thy law, O Death;

Our love is the heavenly seal of the Supreme.

Love must not cease to live upon the earth;

Love is the far Transcendent's angel here;

But to the woman Death the god replied,

Page – 633

Discouraging the labour of the stars:

Thus wilt thou hire the glorious charlatan, Mind,

A fine raiment for thy body's nude desires

Daub not the web of life with magic hues:

Reflecting Matter and mortality,

A made-up self in a constructed world.

For how in the soiled heart of man could dwell

Or who can see a face and form divine

O human face, put off mind-painted masks:

Accept thy futile birth, thy narrow life.

Bare in the bareness, hard with truth's hardness live."

"Yes, I am human. Yet shall man by me,

Trample thee down to reach the immortal heights,

Yes, my humanity is a mask of God:

Turning the great wheel of his cosmic work.

I am the thinking instrument of his power,

I am his conquering and unslayable will.

In me are the Nameless and the secret Name."

Page – 634

Death from the incredulous Darkness sent its cry:

Persuade first Nature's fixed immutable laws

How canst thou force to wed two eternal foes?

They cancel the glory of their pure extremes:

How shall thy will make one the true and false?

If all are the Spirit, Matter is a lie,

The Real with the unreal cannot mate.

He who would live in the Spirit, must give up life;

The voyagers of the million routes of mind

Sages exploring the world-ocean's vasts,

Two only are the doors of man's escape,

Death of his soul his last felicity.

But Savitri replied to mighty Death:

My heart is stronger than thy bonds, O Death.

It feels the high Transcendent's sunlike hands,

In the dim Night it lies alone with God.

And never falter from its luminous track,

It can drink up the sea of All-Delight

Page – 635

He said, "Art thou indeed so strong, O heart,

Bright pleasure from my wayside flowering boughs,

Meet the world's dangerous touch and never fall?

But Savitri answered, "Surely I shall find

Close-bosomed pleasures, only mine since his,

And if I linger, Time is ours and God's,

All is a single plan; each wayside act

Death the contemptuous Nihil answered her:

By choosing earthly joy! For self demand

Then will I give thee all thy soul desires,

Only the one dearest wish that outweighs all,

My will once wrought remains unchanged through Time,

But Savitri replied to the vague Power:

Look in my heart and, knowing what I am,

Nothing I claim but Satyavan alone."

As one disdainful still who yields a point

"I give to thee, saved from death and poignant fate

Desired in his heart for Savitri.

Page – 636

Daughters of thy own shape in heart and mind,

Of union with thy husband dear and true.

Felicity of thy surrounded eves.

The opposite sweetness in thy days shall meet

And loving empire over all thy loved,

Return, O child, to thy forsaken earth."

Earth cannot flower if lonely I return."

As chides a lion his escaping prey:

Who thinkst that one man dead all joy must cease?

For grief dies soon in the tired human heart;

A transient painting on a holiday's floor

Or if a voyager on the eternal trail,

Like waves to a swimmer upon infinite seas."

"Give me back Satyavan, my only lord.

The deep eternal truth in transient things."

Soon shalt thou find appeased that other men

And when thou hast half forgotten, one of these

Some human answering heart against thy breast;

Page – 637

Then Satyavan shall glide into the past,

By new love and thy children's tender hands,

Such is the life earth's travail has conceived,

But Savitri replied to mighty Death:

Thou mockst the mind and body's faltering search

And the immortal spirit shall make its own.

The image of the god its love adored;

Are we not they who bore vast solitude

Why dost thou vainly strive with me, O Death,

To whom the secrets of the gods are plain?

The great stars burn with my unceasing fire

Life only was my blind attempt to love:

All shall be seized, transcended; there shall kiss

The eternal bridegroom and eternal bride.

On our life's prow that breaks the waves of Time

She spoke; the boundless members of the god

Shuddered in silence as obscurely stir

Then lifted up as by a sudden wind

Page – 638

The twilight trembled like a bursting veil.

Thus with armed speech the great opponents strove.

Around those spirits in the glittering mist

As if to reach some far ideal Morn.

Mingling bright-pinioned with its lights and veils

Into the glow of a mysterious world,

Like echoes swam fainting into far sound.

An unenduring tissue sewn by mind

Intent upon her silent will she walked

A floating veil of visions in her front,

But now her spirit's flame of conscient force

Called back her thoughts from speech to sit within

For only there could dwell the soul's firm truth:

It flamed unquenched upon the central hearth

The homestead's sentinel and witness fire

All still compelled went gliding on unchanged,

The mortal led, the god and spirit obeyed

And they in front were followers of her will.

Vaguely companioned by the glimmering mists.

Page – 639

Escaping from the clearness of her soul.

Borne like a coloured and embosomed fire,

On through the enchanted dimness moved her soul.

In the dark front of Death, a failing star.

END OF CANTO THREE

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