Canto Four

The Dream Twilight of the Earthly Real

THERE came a slope that slowly downward sank;

It slipped towards a stumbling grey descent.

Its crowding wonder of bright delicate dreams

Thought fell towards lower levels; hard and tense

The twilight floated still but changed its hues

It settled in tired masses on the air;

And almost seemed a lurid mist of day.

Heavy her sense grew with a dangerous load,

And through stern breakings of the lambent glare

And cloudy mountains and wide tawny streams,

Towards an unavailing changeless sky:

Challenged her sight awhile and then were gone.

In ever shifting perishable groups,

Enveloped in the grey mantle of a dream.

They trusted in the uncertain environment

A savage din of labour and a tramp

Page – 641

As if the dull reiterated drone

A grey dissatisfied rumour like a ghost

A huge inhuman cyclopean voice,

A throb of engines and the clang of tools

As when pale lightnings tear a tortured sky,

Chasing like smoke from a red funnel driven,

Drifting she saw like pictured fragments flee

The shapes of Nature and the arts of man,

And the dead spirit of old societies,

As if lost remnants of forgotten light,

Dimmed revelations and delivering words,

The messages of the evangelist gods,

Each in its hour eternal claimed went by:

Tireless there perished and again recurred,

But all were dreams crossing an empty vast.

On mountain summits or by river banks

Seeking heaven's rest or the spirit's worldless peace,

In tranced cessations of their sleepless thought

Page – 642

All things the past has made and slain were there,

And all the present loves as new-revealed

Already, caught and spent in efforts vain,

Unwearied all returned insisting still

And joy to labour and to win and lose

The rolling cycles passed and came again,

Forms ever new and ever old, the long

Once more arose the great destroying Voice:

His huge denial's all-defeating might

"Behold the figures of this symbol realm,

Inspiring the great concrete tasks of earth.

Here thou canst trace the outcome Nature gives

And the desire that compels to live

In an immutable order's hierarchy

Ever he obeys her fixed mutation's law;

In ever-wheeling cycles turns the race.

For mind is man, beyond thought he cannot soar.

Page – 643

Even winged, he sinks back to his native soil.

And beats soul-wings against the walls of life.

Peopling with brilliant Gods the formless Void;

And in its happy nothingness asks release,

The Word in silence ends, in Nought the name.

He calls the Godhead incommunicable

Or casts his spirit into its void embrace.

He imparts to the Immobile his own will,

And to the Ineffable lends a thousand names.

How shalt thou bring the Everlasting here?

Vainly thou seekst in Matter's world an aim;

All walk by Nature bound for ever the same.

These lives that long and strive, then are no more,

The saviour creeds that cannot save themselves,

Discarded from man's thought, proved false by Time,

But nothing ever have solved since earth began,

By which men learn of what the suns are made,

Ride through the sky and sail beneath the sea,

Page – 644

But learn not what they are or why they came;

That, bricked with evil and good, wall in man's spirit

Rot while they reign and crumble before they crash;

Convulsing the wounded body of mankind

These wars, carnage triumphant, ruin gone mad,

The blood of the vanquished and the victor's crown

The hero's face divine on satyr's limbs,

The glory and the beasthood and the shame;

The transient joys, the timeless sea of tears,

The battle and the victory and the fall,

The waking toil, the incoherent sleep,

The laughter of men, the irony of the gods?

Who keeps the map of the route or planned each stage?

Or nothing is there but only a Mind that dreams:

A legend told to itself by conscious Mind,

On which it stands in an unsubstantial Vast.

Mind only is and what it thinks is seen.

If Mind is all, renounce the hope of Truth.

Page – 645

Only his shadow it grasps nor hears his laugh

Mind is a tissue woven of light and shade

Or Mind is Nature's marriage of convenance

This struggling pair no court can separate.

And error and truth are its obverse and reverse:

And of this kind is all its currency.

Or make of Matter's world the home of God;

God is not there but only the name of God.

It is no one and it is possessed by none.

Cast off thy life and mind, then art thou Self,

If God there is he cares not for the world;

He has doomed all hearts to sorrow and desire,

He answers not the ignorant voice of prayer.

Unmoved, untouched by aught that he has made,

The animal's agony and the fate of man:

His solitary joy needs not thy love.

If thou desirest Truth, then still thy mind

Immortal bliss lives not in human air:

Page – 646

Keep fragrant in this narrow fragile vase,

In hearts which earthly sorrow can assail

Dream not to change the world that God has planned,

If heavens there are whose gates are shut to grief,

Or in the imperishable hemisphere

And Spirit is the deathless ground of things,

If thou art Spirit and Nature is thy robe,

Immutable in its undying truth,

Turn then to God, for him leave all behind;

Annul thyself in his immobile peace.

For thou must die to thyself to reach God's height:

But Savitri answered to the sophist God:

Make Knowledge a catch of the snare of Ignorance

Offer, O King, thy boons to tired spirits

Let those who were tied to body and to mind,

Crying for a refuge from the play of God.

But how shall I seek rest in endless peace

Her vision turned to read the enigmaed world,

Page – 647

And the flaming silence of her heart of love?

Invented by a need in the Unseen,

Of That which for ever exceeds idea and speech,

A language mispronounced, misspelt, yet true.

And plunged into the inconscient dim Abyss

The soul is a figure of the Unmanifest,

The life to call the Immortal into birth,

The world is not cut off from Truth and God.

In vain thou hast built the blind and doorless wall:

Heaven's sun forces its way through death and night;

My mind is a torch lit from the eternal sun,

My mortal body is the Eternal's house.

Already the life is the Immortal's force,

How sayst thou Truth can never light the human mind

Or God descend into the world he made?

If from a bodiless Force Matter was born,

Its green delight break into emerald leaves

If sense could wake in tissue, nerve and cell

Page – 648

And soul peep from its secrecy through the flesh,

And unknown powers emerge from Nature's sleep?

Arise in the mind-mooned splendour of Ignorance;

If the chamber's door is even a little ajar,

Or who forbid his kiss on the sleeping soul?

Because the dark atheist body knows him not,

I am not bound by thought or sense or shape;

I am near to the Nameless and Unknowable,

But standing on Eternity's luminous brink

I have met Spirit with spirit, Self with self,

I have pursued him in his earthly form.

A heart that has grown one with every heart:

My spirit's liberty I ask for all."

Then rang again a deeper cry of Death.

As if beneath its weight of sterile law

Disdainful, weary and compassionate,

But seemed like life's in her unnumbered paths

Because of birth and change, her mortal powers

Page – 649

Whose course for ever speeds and is the same.

Assured of the game's vanity lost or won,

Which knowledge seems to increase and growth to enlarge,

Old, weary and discouraged on its work.

Some great thing has been done, some light, some power

It has emerged from night; it sees its dawns

This change was in the godhead's far-flung voice;

Our transient effort at eternity,

On grandiose hints of an impossible day.

"Because thou knowst the wisdom that transcends

Arise delivered by the seeing gods.

Thou mightst have been like them omniscient, calm.

It is the storm bird of an anarch Power

The indecipherable scroll of Fate,

Hasteners to action, violators of God

And they who formed like thee, for both art thou,

With too large natures overleaping time.

Their giant wills compel the troubled years.

Page – 650

Rise ceaselessly towards their unreached sky,

Dreamless in heaven's immutable domain.

Lifting half-way to heaven the climbing soul

To watch the revolutions of the stars:

They see the ages pass and are the same.

Of far-off things; patient, unmoved they keep

Lest man's frail days into the unknown should sink

Into the abyss of his stupendous seas.

All moves, is in peril, anguished, torn, upheaved.

If strength from heaven surprised the imperfect earth

The deities have screened their dreadful power:

Be still and tardy in the slow wise world.

To whom thou criedst at dawn in the dim woods.

Touch not the seated lines, the ancient laws,

But Savitri replied to the huge god:

Is it not the dull-visioned tread inert

Soulless and stone-eyed with mechanic dreams?

Ever to the new and the unknown press on

Page – 651

What were earth's ages if the grey restraint

Bursting their obscure seed, while man's slow life

By divine words and human gods revealed?

The dull fixity that binds inanimate things.

Content to live beneath the immutable yoke;

I trample on thy law with living feet;

If I am mighty let my force be unveiled

Or else let my frustrated soul sink down

I claim from Time my will's eternity,

"Why should the noble and immortal will

Freedom forgotten and the Eternal's path?

To struggle with the bonds of death and time

And battle and bear agony of wounds

In her small treasure-chest of passing things?

Only to win poor shreds of earthly life

Keeping from early rapture of the heavens

Are thy arms sweeter than the courts of God?"

The strong hand hewed for me which planned our paths.

Page – 652

And I am driven by the reins of God.

Or filled infinity with his passionate breath?

And sow in me his bright and proud desires,

Carving his human image richly shaped

Far Heaven can wait our coming in its calm.

Earth was his difficult matter, earth the glory

There are the ominous masks, the terrible powers;

Is not the spirit immortal and absolved

Why came it down into the mortal's Space?

And wrote a hidden decree on Nature's tops.

Large in life's limits, strong in Matter's knots,

To make fine wisdom from coarse, scattered strands

The wager wonderful, the game divine.

Unless stripped bare and cannot kiss the bonds

Choosing his tyranny, crushed in his embrace?

She accepts the limiting circle of his arms,

And laughs in his rich constraints, most bound, most free.

Page – 653

Immutable, Death's denial met her cry:

"However mighty, whatever thy secret name

Thy heart's ephemeral passion cannot break

With which the great Gods fence their camp in Space.

Even if thou art the Mother of the worlds

The cosmic Law is greater than thy will.

The Law abides and never can it change,

A forerunner of a greater Truth to come,

Vaunting a Force behind on which it leans,

Thou claimst the first fruits of Truth's victory.

Amid the specious images of sense,

And the dark ambiguities of a world

For where is Truth and when was her footfall heard

And which is her voice amid the thousand cries

Or is Truth aught but a high starry name

Sanctions and consecrates his nature's choice,

The cherished idea elect among the elect,

Who high-voiced crowd the playgrounds of the mind

All things hang here between God's yes and no,

Page – 654

Two Powers real but to each other untrue,

That towards two opposite horizons gaze,

The swift and the lame foot, wing strong, wing broken

A great surreal dragon in the skies.

Entangled in Matter's mortal littleness.

Its thoughts into an eternal cipher run,

Thus man at once is animal and god,

Unable to free the Godhead's form within,

The aspiring animal, the frustrate god

But man tied to the kind earth's labour strives to exceed

Objects are seemings and none knows their truth,

Truth has no home in earth's irrational breast:

But reason is poised above a dim abyss

Eternal truth lives not with mortal men.

Show me the body of the living Truth

That I too may obey and worship her.

But here are only facts and steel-bound Law.

And even thy sweetness cannot lure him back.

Page – 655

No joy of the heart can last surviving death,

But Life alone can solace the mute Void

Leave then thy dead, O Savitri, and live."

And as she spoke, mortality disappeared;

Light came, a dream of heaven, into her face.

But only his own black shadow on his path

And drags with him its clinging inconscient Force.

Of his Ignorance thou art the impenitent sign,

On his immortality the sinister bar.

The Many are the innumerable One,

He is the Impersonal, inscrutable, sole,

The Silence bears the Eternal's great dumb seal,

He is the Immobile's deep and deathless hush,

Yet stands the creator Self, the almighty Lord

And the desire that goads half-conscious man

These wide divine extremes, these inverse powers

Existence balanced twixt two mighty arms

Darkness below, a fathomless Light above,

Page – 656

Stand face to face, opposite, inseparable,

Two poles whose currents wake the immense World-Force.

Above the world brooding with equal wings,

Transcending both, he enters the Absolute.

His ways bewilder mortal ignorance;

Amazed, credits not God's audacity

And see and act as might one Infinite.

Being known to be for ever unknowable,

Absolute, to lodge in a relative world of Time,

Omnipotent, to sport with Chance and Fate,

Illimitable, beyond form or name,

To be animal and human and divine:

Universal, he is all, — transcendent, none.

Almighty beyond good and evil to dwell

And evil to reign in this enormous scene.

An aimless labour with but scanty sense,

The surface men scan, the depths refuse their search:

Or a discouraging sordid miracle.

Page – 657

In the casual error of the world's ignorance

There is a purpose in each stumble and fall;

Preparing some forward step, some deep result.

These million discords dot the harmonious theme

A Truth supreme has forced the world to be;

A shroud of Death, a shroud of Ignorance.

Flame-signs of its uncomprehended Thought

It made of Knowledge a veiled and struggling light,

Of Bliss the beauty of an insentient world.

Involved it sleeps in Matter's helpless trance,

Dreaming it throws out mind and heart and soul

A broken whole it works through scattered points;

Its shadowy reflex our ignorance.

It fashions a being out of brain and nerve,

A pack of feelings obscure, a dot of sense

Then, crushed or its force spent, leaves the dead form,

An insignificant unconsidered guest.

It gives to the body its strength and magnificence;

Page – 658

It lends significance to earth's meaningless life.

He wallows in mud, yet heavenward soars in thought;

Satisfies his little longings like the beast;

Out of this tangle of intellect and sense,

At last he wakes into spiritual mind;

He glimpses eternity, touches the infinite,

He feels the universe as his larger self,

To join the heights and depths of being in light,

But these are touches and high moments lived;

Reflections of the sun in waters still.

And break through borders of blinding light above,

Receive a vaster being's messages

On summit Mind are radiant altitudes

Outskirts and dependencies of the house of Truth,

There man can visit but there he cannot live.

Its smallest parts are here philosophies

Each figuring an omniscient scheme of things.

There are vasts of vision and eternal suns,

Page – 659

Flame-hills assaulting heaven with their peaks,

A burning head of vision leads the mind,

The heart glows, an illuminate and seer,

A highest flight climbs to a deepest view:

Intuition's lightnings range in a bright pack

Its fiery edge of seeing absolute

Rummages the sky-recesses of the brain,

Its spear-point ictus of discovery

Strips bare the secret soul of all that is.

The Word, a mighty and inspiring Voice,

And tears away the veil from God and life.

The cosmic empire of the Overmind,

Too vast for the experience of man's soul:

The Powers that build the cosmos station take

Each god from there builds his own nature's world;

Each marshalling his company of rays.

All Time is one body, Space a single look:

And there the boundaries of immortal Mind:

Page – 660

Closes in on the labour of the Gods

In her glorious kingdom of eternal light

Omnipotent, omniscient and alone,

In its corridor she hears the tread that comes

Till the Unknown is known and seen by men.

Above the silence of the wordless Thought,

Nameless, investitured with the name divine,

The Mighty Mother sits in lucent calm

Attending the day when he shall speak to Fate.

There is the sun for which all darkness waits,

The world's contradictions climb to her and are one:

The Light of which the world's ignorance is the shade

The Love our hearts call down to heal all strife,

Thence comes the glory sometimes seen on earth,

The Beauty and the dream on Nature's face.

Calls to it the perfection born in Time,

The image of God overtaking finite shapes.

In the realms of the immortal Supermind

Page – 661

Her riddle deemed by reason impossible

Unenigmaed lives, unmasked her face and there

There in a body made of spirit stuff,

Action translates the movements of the soul,

And life is a continual worship's rite,

A cosmic vision, a spiritual sense

And seen through a quivering ecstasy of light

In the truth of a moment, in the moment's soul

A Spirit who is no one and innumerable,

Multiplies his myriad personality,

And sits in each immortal and unique.

A background of the movement and the scene,

And change on the Immutable's deathless poise.

The Ineffable puts on a robe of speech

Moving with beauty, inspiring with their gleam,

Recorded in the memory of the world.

Fits faultlessly the hour and circumstance,

But shaped into vessels for the spirit's use,

Page – 662

All there is a supreme epiphany:

The All-Beautiful is a miracle in each shape;

A pure celestial joy is the use of sense.

A portion of the million-thoughted All,

The many's sweetness, the joy of difference

"But who can show to thee Truth's glorious face?

To thought she is an unthinkable rapture of light,

O Death, if thou couldst touch the Truth supreme

If our souls could see and love and clasp God's Truth,

Our being in God's image be remade

Then Death the last time answered Savitri:

Severed by Knowledge and the climbing vasts,

Between her and the dream-world she has made?

And persuade to tread the harsh globe with wounded feet

Wasting her splendour on pale earthly air?

O soul who flutterest to escape my net?

Thy voice carries the sound of infinity,

The light of things beyond shines in thy eyes.

Page – 663

Hast thou God's force to build heaven's values here?

If Knowledge brings not power to change the world,

A blind Force, not Truth has made this ignorant world,

By Power, not Light, the great Gods rule the world;

O human claimant to immortality,

Then will I give back to thee Satyavan.

Show me her face that I may worship her;

An imperishable Force touching brute things

Then can thy dead return to thee and live.

And feel near her the secret body of God

And Savitri looked on Death and answered not.

The world's darkness had consented to Heaven-light

A mighty transformation came on her.

The Immortal's lustre that had lit her face

Overflowing made the air a luminous sea.

The Incarnation thrust aside its veil.

Yet stood and seemed the Eternal's very house,

Page – 664

And all wide space was but its outer robe.

Descending into earth's humility,

Her eyes were two stars that watched the universe.

The Presence chambered in lotus secrecy,

Where the mind's Lord in his control-room sits;

He opens that third mysterious eye in man,

When Light with a golden ecstasy fills his brain

And eternal Will seizes the mortal's will.

And in her speech throbbed the immortal Word,

Moving in harmony with the cosmic Thought.

Where hides his light from the pursuing gods,

And woke in it the Force that alters Fate.

Lodged in the little life-nature's narrow home,

And made desire a pure celestial flame,

And smote the thousand-hooded serpent Force

Joined Matter's dumbness to the Spirit's hush

Thus changed she waited for the Word to speak.

And Darkness saw God's living Reality.

Page – 665

When it speaks to the silence in the heart of sleep.

Thou grandiose Darkness of the Infinite.

Hunger that gnawest at the universe

And eatst the whole world with thy jaws of fire,

Inconscience, carrier of the seeds of thought,

And slowly emerges in its hollow breast

Thou art my shadow and my instrument.

And thy sharp sword of terror and grief and pain

On the brevity of his half-conscious days.

The whip to his yearning for eternal bliss,

Live, Death, awhile, be still my instrument.

Of silence and the brooding peace of Night

And the calm inflexible pity in thy gaze.

And leave the path of my incarnate Force.

Release the soul of the world called Satyavan

That he may stand master of life and fate,

The mate of Wisdom and the spouse of Light,

She spoke; Death unconvinced resisted still,

Page – 666

Although he saw refusing still to see.

His spirit bowed; his will obeyed the law

The Two opposed each other face to face.

Around it her light grew, an ocean's siege.

Assailing in front, oppressing from above,

The tyranny of her divine desire.

Weighed on his unbowed head and stubborn breast;

Light was a luminous torture in his heart,

His darkness muttered perishing in her blaze.

And left no room for his enormous will

And could no more re-enter but left him void.

He called to Hell but sullenly it retired:

From which he was born, his vast sustaining self;

As if by himself to swallow up himself:

His body was eaten by light, his spirit devoured.

And left crumbling the shape that he had worn,

And force to be mortal the immortal spirit.

And refuge took in the retreating Night.

Page – 667

The dire universal Shadow disappeared

As if deprived of its original cause,

And Satyavan and Savitri were alone.

A mute invisible and translucent wall.

All waited on the unknown inscrutable Will.

END OF CANTO FOUR

END OF BOOK TEN

Page – 668