A WHILE, withdrawn in secret fields of thought,

That lived again and saw its end approach:

Dying, it lived imperishably in her,

And the blue mountains of her soaring youth

Or a vast ignorant mind's colossal work.

But wisdom comes, and vision grows within;

Then Nature's instrument crowns himself her king;

He feels his witnessing self and conscious power;

His soul steps back and sees the Light supreme.

This truth broke in in a triumph of fire;

A victory was won for God in man,

The deity revealed its hidden face.

The great World-Mother now in her arose:

A living choice reversed fate's cold dead turn,

And burst the bounds of consciousness and Time.

On man sometimes when he draws near to God:

An hour comes when fail all Nature's means;

Forced out from the protecting Ignorance

He at length must cast from him his surface soul

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And be the ungarbed entity within:

That hour had fallen now on Savitri.

A point she had reached where life must be in vain

Or, in her unborn element awake,

Her will must cancel her body's destiny.

For only the unborn spirit's timeless power

Can lift the yoke imposed by birth in time.

Only the Self that builds this figure of self

Can rase the fixed interminable line

That joins these changing names, these numberless lives,

These new oblivious personalities

And keeps still lurking in our conscious acts

The trail of old forgotten thoughts and deeds,

Disown the legacy of our buried selves,

The burdensome heirship to our vanished forms

Accepted blindly by the body and soul.

An episode in an unremembered tale,

Its beginning lost, its motive and plot concealed,

A once living story has prepared and made

Our present fate, child of past energies.

The fixity of the cosmic sequences

Fastened with hidden inevitable links

She must disrupt, dislodge by her soul's force

Her past, a block on the immortal's road,

Make a rased ground and shape anew her fate.

A colloquy of the original Gods

Meeting upon the borders of the unknown,

Her soul's debate with embodied Nothingness

Must be wrestled out on a dangerous dim background:

Her being must confront its formless Cause,

Altered must be Nature's harsh economy;

Acquittance she must win from her past's bond,

An old account of suffering exhaust,

Strike out from Time the soul's long compound debt

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And the heavy servitudes of the Karmic Gods,

The slow revenge of unforgiving Law

And the deep need of universal pain

And hard sacrifice and tragic consequence.

Out of a timeless barrier she must break,

Penetrate with her thinking depths the Void's monstrous hush,

Look into the lonely eyes of immortal Death

And with her nude spirit measure the Infinite's night.

The great and dolorous moment now was close.

A mailed battalion marching to its doom,

The last long days went by with heavy tramp,

Long but too soon to pass, too near the end.

Alone amid the many faces loved,

Aware among unknowing happy hearts,

Her armoured spirit kept watch upon the hours

Listening for a foreseen tremendous step

In the closed beauty of the inhuman wilds.

A combatant in silent dreadful lists,

The world unknowing, for the world she stood:

No helper had she save the Strength within,

There was no witness of terrestrial eyes;

The Gods above and Nature's soul below

Were the spectators of that mighty strife.

Around her were the austere sky-pointing hills,

And the green murmurous broad deep-thoughted woods

Muttered incessantly their muffled spell.

A dense magnificent coloured self-wrapped life

Draped in the leaves' vivid emerald monotone

And set with chequered sunbeams and blithe flowers

Immured her destiny's secluded scene.

There had she grown to the stature of her spirit:

The genius of titanic silences

And his overburdening mass of outward needs

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To a first thin strip of simple animal wants,

And the mighty wideness of the primitive earth

And the brooding multitude of patient trees

And the musing sapphire leisure of the sky

And the solemn weight of the slowly passing months

Had left in her deep room for thought and God.

There was her drama's radiant prologue lived.

A spot for the eternal's tread on earth

Set in the cloistral yearning of the woods

And watched by the aspiration of the peaks

Appeared through an aureate opening in Time

Where stillness listening felt the unspoken word

And the hours forgot to pass towards grief and change.

Here with the suddenness divine advents have,

Repeating the marvel of the first descent,

Changing to rapture the dull earthly round,

Love came to her hiding the shadow. Death.

Well might he find in her his perfect shrine.

Since first the earth-being's heavenward growth began,

Through all the long ordeal of the race,

Never a rarer creature bore his shaft,

That burning test of the godhead in our parts,

A lightning from the heights on our abyss.

All in her pointed to a nobler kind.

Near to earth's wideness, intimate with heaven,

Exalted and swift her young large-visioned spirit

Voyaging through worlds of splendour and of calm

Overflew the ways of Thought to unborn things.

Ardent was her self-poised unstumbling will;

Her mind, a sea of white sincerity,

Passionate in flow, had not one turbid wave.

As in a mystic and dynamic dance

A priestess of immaculate ecstasies

Inspired and ruled from Truth's revealing vault

Moves in some prophet cavern of the gods,

A heart of silence in the hands of joy

Inhabited with rich creative beats

A body like a parable of dawn

That seemed a niche for veiled divinity

Or golden temple door to things beyond.

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Immortal rhythms swayed in her time-born steps;

Her look, her smile awoke celestial sense

A wide self-giving was her native act;

A magnanimity as of sea or sky

And gave a sense as of a greatened world:

Her kindly care was a sweet temperate sun,

In a haven of safety and splendid soft repose

Her inward help unbarred a gate in heaven;

Love in her was wider than the universe,

The great unsatisfied godhead here could dwell:

Vacant of the dwarf self's imprisoned air

An ocean of untrembling virgin fire:

The strength, the silence of the gods were hers.

     Till then no mournful line had barred this ray.

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Where life is not exposed to sorrowful change,

Earth's breath had failed to stain that brilliant glass:

Unsmeared with the dust of our mortal atmosphere

It still reflected heaven's spiritual joy.

Her playmate in the sempiternal spheres

In her attracting advent's luminous wake,

Drifting with burning wings above her days:

Heaven's tranquil shield guarded the missioned child.

A glowing orbit was her early term,

Years like gold raiment of the gods that pass,

Her youth sat throned in calm felicity.

But joy cannot endure until the end:

There is a darkness in terrestrial things

On her too closed the inescapable Hand:

The armed Immortal bore the snare of Time.

For this she had accepted mortal breath;

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To wrestle with the Shadow she had come

win or lose the godlike game for man,

Was her soul's issue thrown with Destiny's dice.

But not to submit and suffer was she born,

To lead, to deliver was her glorious part.

Here was no fabric of terrestrial make

Fit for a day's use by busy careless Powers.

An image fluttering on the screen of fate

Half-animated for a passing show,

Or a castaway on the ocean of Desire

Or one more pawn who comes destined to be pushed

One slow move forward on a measureless board

And earth sink down with the weight of the Infinite.

A gaol is this immense material world.

Restrain the Titan in us and the God

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Pain with its lash, joy with its silver bribe

A seal on the too large wide-open heart;

Death stays the journeying discoverer. Life.

A work she had to do, a word to speak;

Writing the unfinished story of her soul

In thoughts and actions graved in Nature's book,

She accepted not to close the luminous page,

Cancel her commerce with eternity,

Or set a signature of weak assent

To the brute balance of the world's exchange.

A force in her that toiled since earth was made,

Accomplishing in life the great world-plan,

Pursuing after death immortal aims,

Repugned to admit frustration's barren role,   

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Forfeit the meaning of her birth in Time,

Obey the government of the casual fact

Or yield her high destiny up to passing Chance.

In her own self she found her high recourse,

She matched with the iron law her sovereign right:

Her single will opposed the cosmic rule.

She faced the engines of the universe;

A heart stood in the way of the driving wheels:

Its giant workings paused in front of a mind,

That moves the veiled Ineffable's timeless will:

A prayer, a master act, a king idea

Can link man's strength to a transcendent Force.

Then miracle is made the common rule,

One mighty deed can change the course of things,

A lonely thought becomes omnipotent.

All now seems Nature's massed machinery;

An endless servitude to material rule

He too is a machine amid machines;

A piston brain pumps out the shapes of thought,

A beating heart cuts out emotion's modes;

An insentient energy fabricates a soul.

Or the figure of the world reveals the signs

Of a tied Chance repeating her old steps

In circles around Matter's binding-posts.

A random series of inept events

To which reason lends illusive sense, is here,

Or the empiric Life's instinctive search,

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Or a vast ignorant mind's colossal work.

But wisdom comes, and vision grows within;

Then Nature's instrument crowns himself her king;

He feels his witnessing self and conscious power;

His soul steps back and sees the Light supreme.

This truth broke in in a triumph of fire;

A victory was won for God in man,

The deity revealed its hidden face.

The great World-Mother now in her arose:

A living choice reversed fate's cold dead turn,

And burst the bounds of consciousness and Time.

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