BOOK TWELVE

Epilogue

Epilogue

The Return to Earth

OUT OF abysmal trance her spirit woke.

She saw the green-clad branches lean above

And overhead a blue-winged ecstasy

Into the magic secrecy of the woods

In indolent skies reclined, the thinning day

She pressed the living body of Satyavan:

She bore the blissful burden of his head

The waking gladness of her members felt

Summing the whole felicity of things,

And all her being rejoiced enfolding his.

Human she was once more, earth's Savitri,

A power dwelt in her soul too great for earth,

Light too intense for thought and love too boundless

And spread through her deep and happy seas of soul.

To her divine passivity of mood.

All things in Time and Space she had taken for hers;

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The whole wide world clung to her for delight,

Now in her spaceless self released from bounds

The brilliant time-flakes of eternity.

Her earthly morns were radiant flights of joy.

Absorbed no longer by the moment's beat

And lived with all the unbeginning past.

The past and unborn days had joined their dreams,

Hinted to her a vision of prescient hours.

Given to the wonder of a waking trance;

As if to recover old sweet trivial threads,

And weave them into one immortal day.

Her lover charmed into a fathomless sleep,

Lulled on the verge of two consenting worlds.

His mind back to her with her travelling touch

Of strong delight, not yearning now, but large

Pure, passionate with the passion of the gods.

An overarching of celestial rays

Heaven's leaning down to embrace from all sides earth,

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Then sighing to her touch the soft-winged sleep

Murmurous away. Awake, he found her eyes

The earth his home given back to him once more

With his arms' encircling hold around her locked,

He murmured with hesitating lips her name,

"Whence hast thou brought me captive back, love-chained,

And casket of all sweetness, Savitri,

For surely I have travelled in strange worlds

Together we have disdained the gates of night.

And heaven's insufficient without thee.

Which rose against us, the Spirit of the Void,

Denying God and soul? Or was all a dream

A symbol of the oppositions of Time

In some stress of darkness lighting on the Way

Or finding with the succour of its ray

The soul that into the world-adventure came,

But she replied, "Our parting was the dream;

Look round thee and behold, glad and unchanged

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And the whisper of the wind among the leaves

God's canopy of blue sheltering our lives,

Winged poets of our solitary reign,

Only our souls have left Death's night behind,

Illumined by the light of symbol worlds

And stood at Godhead's gates limitless, free."

Then filled with the glory of their happiness

They rose and with safe clinging fingers locked

But he with a new wonder in his heart

"What high change is in thee, O Savitri? Bright

Yet dearer to me by thy sweet human parts

My adoration mastered, my desire

Claiming by body and soul my life's estate,

A statue of silence in my templed spirit,

But now thou seemst almost too high and great

And the whole world seems only a part of thee,

And thou lookst on me in the gaze of the stars,

My life a whisper of thy dreaming thoughts,

And day and night are of thy beauty part.

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In the secure environment of thy breast?

I have consented for thy sake to be.

But now far heavens, unmapped infinitudes

If to fill these thou lift thy sacred flight,

Make still my life through thee a song of joy

A heavenly queen consenting to his will,

Enveloped in a velvet cloak of love,

"All now is changed, yet all is still the same.

Our life has opened with divinity.

And known his meaning in our mortal lives.

And learned its heavenly significance,

Heaven's touch fulfils but cancels not our earth:

Still in our breasts repeat heavenly secret rhythm

Still am I she who came to thee mid the murmur

I am the Madran, I am Savitri.

Close comrade of thy thoughts and hopes and toils,

All sweet relations marry in our life;

The sovereign and the slave of thy desire,

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And mother of thy wants; thou art my world,

The world I inhabit and the god I adore.

Whose every limb my answering limb desires,

I am and thou to me, O Satyavan.

No gladness lost, no depth of mortal joy.

For it is given back, but it is known,

Who hides himself in bird and beast and man

By oneness. His presence leads the rhythms of life

We have each other found, O Satyavan,

Let us go back, for eve is in the skies.

The heart of all our days for evermore.

Let us give joy to all, for joy is ours.

Out of the veil of the Unmanifest,

Upon the ignorant breast of dubious earth,

Two fires that burn towards that parent Sun,

To lead man's soul towards truth and God we are born,

Into some semblance of the Immortal's plan,

A little nearer to the Idea divine."

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As if to keep him on her bosom worn

So for a while they stood entwined, their kiss

In their commingling spirits one for ever,

Then hand in hand they left that solemn place

To the green distance of their sylvan home

Round them the afternoon to evening changed;

And the birds came back winging to their nests,

Now the dusk shadowy trees stood close around

The grey-eyed pensive evening heard their steps,

Of the four-footed wanderers of the night

Long alien to their solitary days,

Once sacred to secluded loneliness

Through the screened dusk it deepened still and there neared

Of many feet, till on their sight broke in

The brilliant strenuous crowded days of man.

A great resplendent company arrived.

Bringing its stream of unknown faces, thronged

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Hundreds of hands parted the forest-boughs,

Calm white-clad priests their grave-eyed sweetness brought,

The proud-hooved steeds came trampling through the wood.

Blind, faltering-limbed, but his far-questing eyes

Took seeingly this imaged outer world;

By him that queen and mother's anxious face

Which in its drooping strength of tired toil

Her patient paleness wore a pensive glow

Departing, which foresees sunrise her child.

She lives awhile to muse upon that hope,

A thoughtful prophecy of lyric dawn.

But at the vision of the beautiful twain

And the swift parents hurrying to their child, —

Possessed him with their arms. Then tenderly

"The fortunate gods have looked on me today,

But where wast thou? Thou hast tormented gladness

What danger kept thee for the darkening woods?

That useless orbs without thee are my eyes

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Not like thyself was this done, Savitri,

Knowing with him beside me only is taste

I live content with my remaining days."

"Lay all on her; she is the cause of all.

Behold, at noon leaving this house of clay

Yet still, a captive in her golden hands,

And in the moments of your transient sun

Then all eyes turned their wondering looks where stood,

With lowered lids the noble lovely child,

"What gleaming marvel of the earth or skies

To mark a brilliance in the dusk of eve?

Wonder no more at any happy change.

Of her transmuting heart the alchemy is."

"O woman soul, what light, what power revealed,

Opens for us by thee a happier age?"

To a vision which had scanned immortal things,

They claimed for their deep childlike motherhood

Then falling veiled the light. Low she replied,

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That to feel love and oneness is to live

Is all the truth I know or seek, O sage."

Westward they turned in the fast-gathering night.

From the entangling verges freed they came

Into a dimness of the sleeping earth

Murmur and movement and the tread of men

Rose from that indistinct and voiceful sea

The rhyme of hooves, the chariot's homeward voice.

In flare of the unsteady torches went

Hearing a marriage march and nuptial hymn,

Numberless the stars swam on their shadowy field

Then while they skirted yet the southward verge,

Night, splendid with the moon dreaming in heaven

She brooded through her stillness on a thought

And in her bosom nursed a greater dawn.

THE END

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