BOOK ELEVEN

The Book of Everlasting Day

Canto One

The Eternal Day: The Soul's Choice

and the Supreme Consummation

A MARVELLOUS sun looked down from ecstasy's skies

Magical unfoldings of the Eternal's smile

God's everlasting day surrounded her,

Invading all Nature with the Absolute's joy.

Her soul stood close to the founts of the infinite.

For ever to an everliving sight.

Translating its endless mightiness and joy

In grandeurs ever new-born from the unknown depths,

In passionate heart-beats of an undying love,

Immortal to the rapturous heart and eyes,

From Wonder's dream-vasts cloudless skies slid down

Which suffered without pain the absolute ray

Twilight and mist were exiles from that air,

Firm in the bosom of immensity

From a still beauty of creative joy;

Page – 671

Answered the deep demand of an infinite sense

A march of universal powers in Time,

In cyclic symmetries and metric planes

An endless figuring of the spirit in things

Of all the beauty and the marvel here,

Eternity was the substance and the source;

They offered the suggestion of their depths

Arisen beneath a triple mystic heaven

Homes of the blest released from death and sleep

Arriving from self-lost and seeking worlds

And mighty posture of eternal calm,

Plains lay that seemed the expanse of God's wide sleep,

Lost in blue deeps of immortality.

Air seemed an ocean of felicity

A vast quiescence swallowing up all sound

Even Matter brought a close spiritual touch,

The lowest of these earths was still a heaven

The beauty and brightness of terrestrial scenes.

Page – 672

Eternal mountains ridge on gleaming ridge

Whose lines were graved as on a sapphire plate

Climbed like piled temple stairs and from their heads

The approach of a blue pilgrim multitude

Of the wide travel hymn of timeless seas.

Past branches fragrant with a sigh of flowers

The murmurous rivers of felicity

Mingling their sister eddies of delight,

Down many-glimmered estuaries of dream

On a brink held of senseless ecstasy

Sat sculptured souls dreaming by rivers of sound

Around her lived the children of God's day

A happiness never lost, the immortal's ease,

Around, the deathless nations moved and spoke,

Faces of stark beauty, limbs of the moulded Ray;

And wonderful pastures and on gleaming coasts

Above her rhythming godheads whirled the spheres,

By the huge erring orbits of our stars.

Each movement found a music all its own;

Page – 673

The colours of whose plumage had been caught

Immortal fragrance packed the quivering breeze.

The million children of the undying spring

Nestling for shelter in their emerald sky:

A dancing chaos, an iridescent sea

The crowding petal-glow of marvel's tints

Immortal harmonies filled her listening ear;

On Titan wings of rhythmic grandeur borne

Strains trembling with the secrets of the gods.

A spirit brooded in the leaf and stone;

Along a living verge of silence strayed,

Unfathomed, inexpressible, chantings rose

A climber on the invisible stair of sound,

Aspired that wander upon transient strings,

In a passion of unforeseeing discovery,

A growing treasure in the mystic heart.

Of unexplored attraction and desire,

Hunting as if in some deep secret heart

Page – 674

To find some lost or missed felicity.

Breaking through enchantments of the ravished sense,

Mid spume and laughter tempting with its prow

Adventures without danger beautiful

From rhythmic rocks in ever-foaming seas.

Delivered from our limiting ray of thought,

To embrace the Godhead in whatever guise,

Invaded by beauty's universal revel

And claimed deep union with its outer selves,

Heaven's subtleties of touch unwearying forced

What would be suffering here, was fiery bliss.

Divined by the inner prophet who perceives

Turned to more sweetness than can now be dreamed.

Trembling because she cannot understand,

Were here the first lexicon of an infinite mind

Here rapture was a common incident;

Our human pleasure is a fallen thread,

Sewn on the rich brocade of Godhead's dress.

Page – 675

The heart was a torch lit from infinity,

These were the first domains, the outer courts

The slightest ecstasies of the undying gods.

Admitted through large sapphire opening gates

These were but sumptuous decorated doors

Endless aspired the climbing of those heavens;

Then on what seemed one crown of the ascent

Immune she beheld the strong immortals' seats

The middle regions of the unfading Ray.

Eyes of an unborn gaze towards her leaned

In the beauty of bodies wrought from rapture's lines,

Feet glimmering upon the sunstone courts of mind,

A tangle of bright bodies, of moved souls

The harmonious tread of lives for ever joined

As if sunbeams made living and divine,

In groves flooded from an argent disk of bliss

In a cloud of raiment lit with golden limbs

Virgin motions of bacchant innocences

Page – 676

Who know their riot for a dance of God,

Whirled linked in moonlit revels of the heart.

Magician builders of sound and rhythmic words,

The odes that shape the universal thought,

The rhythms that bring the sounds of wisdom's sea.

Our great forefathers in those splendours moved;

They enjoyed the sense of all for which we strive.

That, travellers from on high, arrive to us

Like gods disfigured by the pangs of birth,

By difficult rapture on a mortal tongue.

There lightning-filled with glory and with flame,

Smitten like a lyre that throbs to others' bliss,

Her human nature faint with heaven's delight,

The imperishable eyes of veilless love.

Beyond what tongue can utter or mind dream:

There was a greater tranquil sweetness there,

And mightier scheme than heavenliest sense can give.

Form was a tenuous raiment of the soul:

Shapes seen half immaterial by the gaze

Page – 677

Made sensible to touch the indwelling spirit.

A happy vassal of the inner ray,

And every thought was a sweet burning god.

Sunlight the soul's vision and moonlight its dream.

All was a potent and a lucid joy.

Like an upsoaring bird who mounts unseen

Of melody till a pause of closing wings

And he is silent with his soul discharged,

Experience mounted on joy's coloured breast

There Time dwelt with eternity as one;

As one drowned in a sea of splendour and bliss,

Turning she saw their living knot and source,

And knew him for the same who snares our lives

And makes the universe his prison camp

The labour of the stars a circuit vain

And grief and pain the wages of man's toil.

A sum of all sweetness gathered into his limbs

Page – 678

Transfigured was the formidable shape.

His darkness and his sad destroying might

The mystery of his high and violent deeds,

Where once the vast embodied Void had stood.

The vague infinity was slain whose gloom

The obscure disastrous figure of a god,

And lighted the ignorant gulf whose hollow deeps

As when before the eye that wakes in sleep

Illumined letterings are seen which kept

A marvellous form responded to her gaze

All Nature's struggle was its easy price,

As if the choric calyx of a flower

A lotus of light-petalled ecstasy

There was no more the torment under the stars,

There was no more the dark pretence of hate,

Hate was the grip of a dreadful amour's strife;

Has here replaced the sweet original god.

The passion to lock itself in and to unite,

Devouring the soul that it had made its own,

Page – 679

Punishing the unwillingness to be one,

Passionate to take but knowing not how to give.

There lightened on her the godhead's lurking laugh.

Were here collected in a single form;

He bore all godheads in his grandiose limbs.

Intolerant and invincible in joy

Into immortal lines of beauty rose.

That wears the mystery of a nameless Name,

In the inexhaustible meaning of a word.

At once the art and artist of his works,

Virat, who lights his camp-fires in the suns

Expressed himself with Matter for his speech:

Events are the crowded history of his life,

Matter is his means and his spiritual sign;

In the current of the blood makes flow the soul.

A Will that without sense or motive acts,

The world creates itself invincibly;

And in its heart stands Virat, King of Kings.

Page – 680

In him shadows his form the Golden Child

Who in the Sun-capped Vast cradles his birth:

Who sees the invisible and hears the sounds

Discoverer of unthought realities

He is the leader on the inner roads;

A magician with the omnipotent wand of thought,

Armed with the golden speech, the diamond eye,

Imagist casting the formless into shape,

He is the carrier of the hidden fire,

He is the invisible hunter of the light,

The conqueror of the kingdoms of the soul.

A mass of superconscience closed in light,

All from his stillness came as grows a tree;

All light is but a flash from his closed eyes:

The omniscient Ray is shut behind his lids:

His wordless silence brings the immortal word.

He sleeps in man and god and beast and stone:

Because he is there the world forgets to die.

He the circumference of Nature's run.

Page – 681

Awake, he is the Eternal and Supreme.

Its omniscient and omnipotent repose,

All powers were woven in countless concords here.

Love and delight were the head of the sweet form.

Recaptured, the proud blissful members held

And fugitive from life's outstripped desire.

Whatever happiness comes in dream and trance,

The joy the cup of Nature cannot hold,

Were waiting in the honey of his laugh.

The ideas that find no voice on living lips,

Had come to birth in him and taken fire:

Revealed its meaning in his fathomless look.

His smile that played with the wonder of the mind

Glimmered with the radiance of the morning star

His gaze was the regard of eternity;

Was a wise home of gladness and divulged

A sun of wisdom in a miracled grove.

All contrary seekings their close kinship knew,

Page – 682

Rich-hearted, wonderful to each other met

In the mutual marvelling of their myriad notes

Who had found their common and mysterious home.

There springs a harmony of lyric bliss

Such was the life in that embodied Light.

He seemed the passion of a sorrowless earth,

Two looked upon each other, Soul saw Soul.

Then like an anthem from the heart's lucent cave

A voice soared up whose magic sound could turn

Of rapture and her cry to spirit song.

How hast thou seen beyond the topaz walls

Summoned the genii of their wakeful sleep,

The carved thought-shrouded doors to swing apart,

And taught the entries of a heavenlier state

In thee the secret sight man's blindness missed

And death, my tunnel which I drive through life

I am the hushed search of the jealous gods

Seized in the thousand meeting ways of heaven.

Drawing through the deep roads of the infinite night

Page – 683

I am the inviolable Ecstasy;

The eyes that live in night shall see my form.

That flow beneath a grey tormented sky,

Pace near but parted in the life of man;

Heaven in its rapture dreams of perfect earth,

The two longing to join, yet walk apart,

They are kept from their oneness by enchanted fears;

They gaze across the silent gulfs of sleep.

Like bride and bridegroom magically divorced

While thinly flickering hesitates uncrossed

The shadowy eidolon of a sword.

Then never more can space or time divide

Her great translucent curtain, Time shall be

Attend that moment of celestial fate.

Which only now the scouts of vision glimpse

Have found the narrow bridges of the gods.

Making division your delightful means

By attraction in the throbbing air between.

Page – 684

Yet if thou wouldst abandon the vexed world,

Tread down the isthmus, overleap the flood,

Renounce the tie that joins thee to earth-kind,

Arise, vindicate thy spirit's conquered right:

Under the cold gaze of the indifferent stars

Ascend, O soul, into thy blissful home.

Or in domains the wise Immortals tread

Spiritual lit by an unsetting sun,

And share not in the toil of Nature's powers:

Cast off the ambiguous myth of earth's desire,

On Savitri listening in her tranquil heart

A joy exceeding earth's and heaven's poured down,

A rapture from some waiting Infinite.

Its confident felicity's messenger

Rippled along two wakened lotus-pools.

And the world's pleasure and pain and Day and Night,

Testing his strength with the close touch of hell,

Even as I have shunned thy eternal Night.

Page – 685

Thy spaces need him not to help their joy;

To fling delight down like a net of gold.

Earth is the heroic spirit's battlefield,

Thy servitudes on earth are greater, King,

The heavens were once to me my natural home,

Paced sun-gold pastures and moon-silver swards

And lingered under branches dropping myrrh;

Touched by the ethereal raiment of the winds,

Lived in the rhyme of bright unlabouring thoughts,

Danced in spontaneous measures of the soul

O fragrant are the lanes thy children walk

Amid the wonder-flowers of Paradise:

There where the gods and demons battle in night

Taught by the sweetness and the pain of life

Against the edge of some divinest hope,

In me the spirit of immortal love

Too far thy heavens for me from suffering men.

O to spread forth, O to encircle and seize

Page – 686

More hearts till love in us has filled thy world!

O life, the life beneath the wheeling stars!

For bending of the fierce and difficult bow,

O thou who soundst the trumpet in the lists,

Take not the warrior with his blow unstruck.

O king-smith, clang on still thy toil begun,

Thy fine-curved jewelled hilt call Savitri,

Fashion to beauty, point us through the world.

Are there not still unnumbered chants to weave?

Play out what thou hast fluted on my stops;

And that discover which is yet unsung.

I know that he can bring the Immortal down.

And without thee an empty roar of storm,

And without thee a snare the strength of gods.

That through earth's ignorance struggles towards thy Light.

Give not to darkness and to death thy sun,

And the mandate of thy secret world-wide love."

Which seized them at the limits of their cry

That stir to more than ever speech has won

Page – 687

And the Ineffable from whom all words come.

Then with a smile august as noonday heavens

The godhead of the vision wonderful:

To the celestial levels, yet earth abide?

Across a gulf that few can cross, none touch,

Out of which all things form that move in space,

Heaven's light visits sometimes the mind of earth;

In her heart there move celestial seekings soft

Visions of joy that she can never win

Faint seeds of light and bliss bear sorrowful flowers,

Fall swooning mid the wandering voices' jar,

The beautiful and far delight of gods,

Thrill her and pass half-shaped to mind and sense.

Careless of knot or pause, worlds which weave out

A universe of self-found felicity,

The many-movemented heart-beats of the One,

Order of the freedom of the infinite,

There is the All-Truth and there the timeless bliss.

Page – 688

Hers are but careless visits of the gods.

They are a Light that fails, a Word soon hushed

There are high glimpses, not the lasting sight.

Or live on the edges of the mystic moon

The heroes and the demigods are few

And to their acts the heavenly clan are near.

Unveiling the timeless utterance in her deeps;

Heaven's call is rare, rarer the heart that heeds;

And earth's needs nail to earth the human mass,

Men answer to the touch of greater things:

They slide back to the mud from which they climbed;

They joy in safe return to a friendly base,

And greatness murdered, they accept their fall.

To live as others live is their delight.

And owe small debt to a superior plane;

A thinking animal's material range.

In the stark economy of cosmic life

Is bound by his nature's form, his spirit's force.

The settled balance of created things;

Page – 689

Would tremble, and a gap yawn in woven Fate.

The mediating stair would then be lost

Accepting the circuits of the middle Way,

Reaching the bright miraculous fringe of God,

My will, my call is there in men and things;

And draws to its breast of Night and Death and Sleep.

A little consciousness it lets escape

Close to the obscure edges of its cave

Tied to her apron strings of Nescience.

The mystery of the world its sleep has made:

But still it holds him dangled in its grasp:

It shuts his heart to the supernal Light.

A black and blinding border rules below:

He seeks through words and images the Truth,

Or dipping cautious feet in shallow seas,

He is barred out from his own inner depths;

How shall he see with the Omniscient's eyes,

O too compassionate and eager Dawn,

Page – 690

Leave to the circling aeons' tardy pace

And to the working of the inconscient Will,

All shall be done by the long act of Time.

The soul in man is greater than his fate:

Disengaging from the cosmic commonalty

Delivered from the universal Law

Can blaze its way through the mind's barrier wall

Inhabitant of a wide and endless calm.

Or else return to thy original might

Partner of my unhoured eternity,

For thou art the World-Mother and the Bride.

Out of her feeble unconvincing dream,

Pass back into the Power from which thou cam'st.

Thy heart can rise from its unsatisfied beats

Of a soul that never lost felicity.

Cast down desire's abyss into the gulfs.

Discover what the aimless cycles want,

Here vainly sought in a terrestrial form.

Melt, lightning, into thy invisible flame!

Page – 691

Happy for ever in the embosoming surge.

Then shalt thou know the Lover and the Loved,

Receive him into boundless Savitri,

O miracle, where thou beganst, there cease!"

But Savitri answered to the radiant God:

"In vain thou temptst with solitary bliss

My soul and his indissolubly linked

To raise the world to God in deathless Light,

To change the earthly life to life divine.

Even the charm of thy alluring voice,

I sacrifice not earth to happier worlds.

And his dynamic will in men and things,

Whence came this profitless wilderness of stars,

Who made the soul of futile life in Time,

Set Nature to a huge and meaningless task

What force condemned to birth and death and tears

If earth can look up to the light of heaven

Not vain their meeting, nor heaven's touch a snare.

Although thou hide thyself behind thy works,

Page – 692

To be is not a senseless paradox;

Since God has made earth, earth must make in her God;

I claim thee for the world that thou hast made.

If he is tied for ever to his pain,

The superhuman with the Eternal mate

Else were creation vain and this great world

But I have seen through the insentient mask;

Carrying the body of the growing God:

It pushes back the curtain of the gods;

But the god answered to the woman's heart:

All that the Spirit has dreamed thou canst create:

Thou art my vision and my will and voice.

And the tardy process of the pace of Time.

In thy passion to deliver man and earth,

And the slow evolution's sluggard steps,

To dare too soon the adventure of the Light,

Awakened mid the ineffable silences

Across the last confines of the limiting Mind

Into the danger of the Infinite.

Page – 693

But if thou wilt not wait for Time and God,

Do then thy work and force thy will on Fate.

And taken from thee my twilight's doubts and dreams,

These are my symbol kingdoms but not here

Or uttered the sanction of the Voice supreme.

To the infinity where no world can be.

Uplifts its mystery and its miracle,

Or in the hold where subtle Matter's spirit

Can there be heard the Eternal's firm command

These only are the mediating links;

Nor the fulfilling act or last support

Two are the Powers that hold the ends of Time;

The dumb executor of God's decrees,

Agent unquestioning, inconscient, stark,

Intention of his force in Time and Space,

Immutably it fulfils its ordered task,

Unswerving from the oracular command

If thou must indeed deliver man and earth

Discover the truth of God and man and world;

Page – 694

Then do thy task knowing and seeing all.

Choose destiny's curve and stamp thy will on Time."

A power went forth that shook the founded spheres

Absolved from vision's grip and the folds of thought,

In the stupendous theatre of Space

A movement was abroad, a cry, a word,

Momentless in its unthinkable return:

Rhythming itself abroad unutterably

In an ineffable world she lived fulfilled.

In a measureless Reality she dwelt,

A linked and myriad-motioned plenitude,

Housing a multitudinous embrace

Bearing the eternity of every spirit,

A wonderful mother of unnumbered souls.

Her ear was opened to ideal sound,

A thousand doors of oneness was her heart.

Appeared, the last recess of things beyond.

Silence gave back to the Unknowable

Page – 695

Invisible that perfect godhead now.

Mysterious flame around a melting pearl,

There was a voice unheard by ears that cried:

For now from my highest being looks at thee

In a happy vast sublime cessation know, —

A point that disappears in the infinite, —

Last sinking of a wave in a boundless sea,

Close of the journeying of thy pilgrim soul.

O stream, wide breaking of thy channel banks."

But someone yearned within a bosom unknown

"Thy peace, O Lord, a boon within to keep

For the magnificent soul of man on earth.

Limitless like ocean round a lonely isle

"Wide open are the ineffable gates in front.

Amorous of oneness without thought or sign

See with the large eye of infinity,

In an immense and world-destroying pause

Through the tremendous stillness of her thoughts

Page – 696

Immeasurably the woman's nature spoke:

"Thy oneness, Lord, in many approaching hearts,

Mightily retreating like a sea in ebb

"I spread abroad the refuge of my wings.

My power looks forth of mightiest splendour, stilled

Above the dreadful whirlings of the world."

And passionately the woman's heart replied:

To take all things and creatures in their grief

Solemn and distant like a seraph's lyre

"I open the wide eye of solitude

Where in a pure and exquisite hush it lies

Resting from the sweet madness of the dance

Breaking the Silence with appeal and cry

A music beat of winged uniting souls,

"Thy embrace which rends the living knot of pain,

Thy magic flowing waters of deep love,

Then after silence a still blissful cry

When the first whisperings of a strange delight

Page – 697

The enamoured laugh which rhymed the chanting worlds:

Thy thoughts are mine, I have spoken with thy voice.

All thou hast asked I give to earth and men.

By my trustee of thought and plan and act,

But since thou hast refused my maimless Calm

The visage of Space and the shape of Time is lost,

In my uncompanioned lone eternity, —

Annihilation of thy living soul

In the blank measureless Unknowable, —

I lay my hands upon thy heart of love,

Because thou hast obeyed my timeless will,

And leaned in pity over earth-bound men

I bind by thy heart's passion thy heart to mine

Now will I do in thee my marvellous works.

Subdue to my delight thy spirit's limbs

And build in thee my proud and crystal home.

Thy nights my starry mysteries of joy

And all my springtides marry in thy mouth.

Page – 698

O Sun-Word, thou shalt raise the earth-soul to Light

And bring down God into the lives of men;

My garden of life to plant a seed divine.

The mind of earth shall be a home of light,

The body of earth a tabernacle of God.

Men shall be lit with the Eternal's ray

And feel in their hearts the sweetness of my love

My will shall be the meaning of their days;

In the heart of my creation's mystery

Inscribe the long romance of Thee and Me.

Thou shalt be hunted through the world by love,

And without covert from my radiant gods.

Nowhere shalt thou escape my living eyes.

In a bare identity with all that is,

Divested of the dense veil of human thought,

Made one with all Nature and with Self and God,

I will possess in thee my universe,

Thou shalt bear all things that all things may change,

Thou shalt meet all with thy transmuting soul.

Page – 699

And quivering in immensities below,

Oceanic with the surges of my life,

By my outer pains and inner sweetnesses

Thou shalt respond to me from every nerve.

Thy heart shall drive thee on the wheel of works,

To meet me in the abyss and on the heights,

And love me in the noble and the vile,

The pains of hell shall be to thee my kiss,

My fiercest masks shall my attractions bring.

Beauty pursue thee through the core of flame.

And cross me in the atoms of the whirl.

Shall cry to thee the summons of my name.

My fragrance seize thee in the jasmine's snare,

Mirror of Nature's secret spirit made,

Thou shalt drink down my sweetness unalloyed

My dreadful hands laid on thy bosom shall force

Thou shalt discover the one and quivering note,

And roll, my foaming wave in seas of love.

Page – 700

Even my disasters' clutch shall be to thee

The ordeal of my rapture's contrary shape:

Thou shalt bear my ruthless beauty unabridged

Trampled by the violent misdeeds of Time

All beings shall be to thy life my emissaries;

Compelled to meet me in thy enemy's eyes,

Thou shalt not shrink from any brother soul.

Men seeing thee shall feel my hands of joy,

Their life experience its tumultuous shock

Hearts touched by thy love shall answer to my call,

In the revealing accents of thy voice

Enamoured of thy spirit's loveliness

Hear in thy life the beauty of my laugh,

All that thou hast, shall be for others' bliss,

I will pour delight from thee as from a jar,

I will use thee as my sword and as my lyre,

And when thou art vibrant with all ecstasy,

Then will I spare thee not my living fires,

My hidden presence led thee unknowing on

Page – 701

Through life and pain and time and will and death,

Along the mystic roads of Space and Time

Who hunts and seizes me, my captive grows:

For ever love, O beautiful slave of God!

Become my cord of universal love.

Of creation's oneness sweet and fathomless,

And all my endless forms and divine souls.

O Word, cry out the immortal litany:

"Descend to life with him thy heart desires.

I sent you forth of old beneath the stars,

In a hedged creation shut from limitless self,

Lifting earth-beings to immortality.

Where God is unseen and only is heard a Name

And life is hauled in the drag-net of desire

You are my Force at work to uplift earth's fate,

Between the extremes of the spirit's night and day.

Through life and mind and supernature's Vast

And my eternity hid in moving Time

Page – 702

And my boundlessness cut by the curve of Space.

It climbs to the greatness it has left behind

To the closeness and sweetness of all things divine,

Taste of the depths of the Ineffable's bliss,

He is my soul that gropes out of the beast

And the vicinity of Truth's sublime.

And in the body of earth-being's forms:

In Nature's surge out of earth's ignorance.

The revealing voice of my immortal Word,

Pointing to the souls of men the routes to God.

Falls upon Matter's stark inconscient sleep

And Mind in a half-light moves amid half-truths

And life is a stumbling and imperfect force

You shall be born into man's dubious hours

And show through veils of the earth's doubting air

Or burning like a rare and inward fire,

Yet shall they look up as to peaks of God

And rest on God as on a motionless base.

The Spirit's crescent splendour in pale skies

Page – 703

But more there is concealed in God's Beyond

Now mind is all and its uncertain ray,

Mind the thought-driven chariot of the soul

To vistas of a far uncertain dawn,

To its dream of absolute truth and utter bliss.

Fixed on the summit of the evolving Path

Unaware of his next step, not knowing his goal.

There is a fire on the apex of the worlds,

There is an infinite truth, an absolute power.

Its greatness shall be felt shaping the world's course:

A star rising from the Inconscient's night,

Abandoning the dubious middle Way,

And some shall feel in you the secret Force

Adventurers into a mightier Day.

They shall discover the world's huge design

You shall reveal to them the hidden eternities,

Some rapture of the bliss that made the world,

Some beam of the omniscient Mystery.

Page – 704

But when the hour of the Divine draws near

And God be born into the human clay

Then shall the Truth supreme be given to men:

An Immeasurable cast into many forms,

There is a consciousness mind cannot touch,

It has no home on earth, no centre in man,

The fount of the creation and its works,

The sun-orb of mind's fragmentary rays,

The Immense that calls to man to expand the Spirit,

A channel for the little he tastes of bliss.

And vehicles of the Eternal's luminous power.

The great deliverers of earth-bound mind,

The first-born of a new supernal race.

Eternal supermind touch earthly Time.

And manifest the hidden demigod

Revealing the secret deity in the cave.

His bright unveiled Transcendence shall illumine

To interpret his inexpressible mystery

Page – 705

Annulling the decree of death and pain,

With the deep meaning of beauty and life's hid sense,

His regard crossing infinity's mystic waves

The metred heart-beats of a lost delight,

The dance of the first world-creating Bliss.

Watching on his many-petalled lotus-throne

Ruling earth-nature by eternity's law,

An immobile centre of many infinitudes

Then shall the embodied being live as one

A mask or robe of his divinity,

A point or line drawn in the infinite,

The supermind shall be his nature's fount,

The Eternal's truth shall be his light and guide.

Overtopping this mechanical universe.

On Nature's luminous tops, on the Spirit's ground,

Make earth almost the mate and peer of heaven,

And lift towards godhead his mortality.

Its height pushed up beyond death's hungry reach,

Page – 706

Life's tops shall flame with the Immortal's thoughts,

Light shall invade the darkness of its base.

All shall be drawn into a single plan,

Beauty and joy remould her way to live:

Nature shall draw back from mortality

Knowledge shall bring into the aspirant Thought

The supermind shall claim the world for Light

And place Light's crown on Nature's lifted head

A greater truth than earth's shall roof-in earth

A power infallible shall lead the thought,

In earthly hearts kindle the Immortal's fire.

The mind shall be God-vision's tabernacle,

And life a channel for God's visible power.

Hidden no more by the body and the life,

An unerring Hand shall shape event and act.

The Spirit's force shall occupy Nature's force.

The earth shall be a field and camp of God,

And his embodied frail impermanence.

Creation's process change its antique front,

Page – 707

Release the Wisdom chained below its base.

Lurking no more in form's obscurity

The outward world disclose the Truth it veils;

All shall reveal the Spirit's light and might

Even should a hostile force cling to its reign

And man refuse his high spiritual fate,

For in the march of all-fulfilling Time

All turns and winds towards his predestined ends

Decreed since the beginning of the worlds

Even there shall come as a high crown of all

But first high Truth must set her feet on earth

And all his members feel the Spirit's touch

This too shall be; for a new life shall come,

A native field of Supernature's mights:

Make even the Ignorance a transparent robe

And Truth shall be a sun on Nature's head

And Truth shall gaze out of her nether deeps.

His presence shall transfigure Matter's world:

Page – 708

He shall light up Truth's fire in Nature's night,

He shall lay upon the earth Truth's greater law;

Awake to his hidden possibility,

And all that Nature meant when earth was formed

He shall aspire to Truth and God and Bliss.

And instrument of a supreme design,

Man shall desire to climb to his own heights.

Even the dumb earth become a sentient force.

Near to the secret of their separate truth

The Spirit shall look out through Matter's gaze

Then man and superman shall be at one

Even the multitude shall hear the Voice

And strive to obey the high spiritual law:

Humanity awake to deepest self,

Even the many shall some answer make

And his impetuous knock at unseen doors.

Their mind shall share in the ineffable gleam,

Earth's bodies shall be conscious of a soul;

Mere men into spiritual beings grow

Page – 709

Intuitive beams shall touch the nature's peaks,

The Truth shall be the leader of their lives,

They shall feel themselves lifted nearer to the sky,

For knowledge shall pour down in radiant streams

And kindle and burn with the Ideal's fire

The frontiers of the Ignorance shall recede,

Minds lit, inspired, the occult summoner hear

And hearts grow enamoured of divine delight

These separate selves the Spirit's oneness feel,

The flesh and nerves of a strange ethereal joy

A divine force shall flow through tissue and cell

And all the thoughts shall be a glow of suns

Often a lustrous inner dawn shall come

A sudden bliss shall run through every limb

Thus shall the earth open to divinity

Illumine common acts with the Spirit's ray

Nature shall live to manifest secret God,

This earthly life become the life divine."

Page – 710

The measure of that subtle music ceased.

Down with a hurried swimming floating lapse

Sank like a star the soul of Savitri.

She heard around her nameless voices cry

A choir of rushing winds to meet her came.

And felt the stir of all ethereal space.

A face was over her which seemed a youth's,

Crowned as with peacock plumes of gorgeous hue

Insatiably attracted to delight,

Changed in its shape, yet rapturously the same,

Like a mooned night with drifting star-gemmed clouds,

Turbulent in will and terrible in love.

Sprang from some spirit's passionate content,

Amidst the headlong rapture of her fall

In an enamoured grasp her spirit strove

And, as the fruit of the mysterious joy,

Like a flower hidden in the heart of spring

Inextricably in that mighty lapse.

Soared past her as she fell. Then all the blind

Page – 711

Fearful rapidities of downward bliss.

Whirled, sinking, overcome she disappeared,

In broad unconsciousness as in a pool;

Into a wonder of miraculous depths,

And she was buried in a mother's breast.

Then from a timeless plane that watches Time,

A Spirit gazed out upon destiny,

All still was in a silence of the gods.

And cast into the heart of hurrying Time

A crimson seed of God's felicity;

A wonderful face looked out with deathless eyes;

That guard the imperishable secrecies.

But where the silence of the gods had passed,

Surprised with joy and sweetness yearning hearts,

A power leaned down, a happiness found its home.

END OF CANTO ONE

END OF BOOK ELEVEN

Page – 712