{"id":1009,"date":"2013-07-13T01:31:57","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:31:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=1009"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:31:57","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:31:57","slug":"21-book-10-canto-01-the-dream-twilight-of-the-ideal-vol-29-savitri-volume-29","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/01-works-of-sri-aurobindo\/01-sabcl\/29-savitri-volume-29\/21-book-10-canto-01-the-dream-twilight-of-the-ideal-vol-29-savitri-volume-29","title":{"rendered":"-21_Book 10 Canto 01 The Dream Twilight of the Ideal.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

\n\t\t\t\t\tBook Ten<\/font><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\nThe Book of the Double Twilight<\/b><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n\n\n
 <\/td>\n\n
\n

Canto One<\/i> <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\nThe Dream
\nTwilight of the Ideal<\/font><\/span> <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

All still was darkness dread and desolate;<\/p>\n

There was no change nor any hope of change.<\/p>\n

In this black dream which was a house of Void,<\/p>\n

A walk to Nowhere in a land of Nought,<\/p>\n

Ever they drifted without aim or goal;<\/p>\n

Gloom led to worse gloom, death to an emptier death,<\/p>\n

In some positive Non-Being’s purposeless Vast<\/p>\n

Through formless wastes dumb and unknowable.<\/p>\n

An ineffectual beam of suffering light<\/p>\n

Through the despairing darkness dogged their steps<\/p>\n

Like the remembrance of a glory lost;<\/p>\n

Even while it grew, it seemed unreal there,<\/p>\n

Yet haunted Nihil’s chill stupendous realm,<\/p>\n

Unquenchable, perpetual, lonely, null,<\/p>\n

A pallid ghost of some dead eternity.<\/p>\n

It was as if she must pay now her debt,<\/p>\n

Her vain presumption to exist and think,<\/p>\n

To some brilliant Maya that conceived her soul.<\/p>\n

This most she must absolve with endless pangs,<\/p>\n

Her deep original sin, the will to be<\/p>\n

And the sin last, greatest, the spiritual pride,<\/p>\n

That, made of dust, equalled itself with heaven,<\/p>\n

Its scorn of the worm writhing in the mud,<\/p>\n

Condemned, ephemeral, born from Nature’s dream,<\/p>\n

Refusal of the transient creature’s role,<\/p>\n

The claim to be a living fire of God,<\/p>\n

The will to be immortal and divine.<\/p>\n

In that tremendous darkness heavy and bare<\/p>\n

She atoned for all since the first act whence sprang<\/p>\n

The error of the consciousness of Time,<\/p>\n

The rending of the Inconscient’s seal of sleep, <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 599<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n<\/div>\n

The primal and unpardoned revolt that broke<\/p>\n

The peace and silence of the Nothingness<\/p>\n

Which was before a seeming universe<\/p>\n

Appeared in a vanity of imagined
\nspace<\/p>\n

And life arose engendering grief and pain:<\/p>\n

A great Negation was the Real’s face<\/p>\n

Prohibiting the vain process of Time:<\/p>\n

And when there is no world, no creature more,<\/p>\n

When Time’s intrusion has been blotted out,<\/p>\n

It shall last, unbodied, saved from thought, at peace.<\/p>\n

Accursed in what had been her godhead source,<\/p>\n

Condemned to live for ever empty of bliss,<\/p>\n

Her immortality her chastisement,<\/p>\n

Her spirit, guilty of being, wandered doomed,<\/p>\n

Moving for ever through eternal Night.<\/p>\n

But Maya is a veil of the Absolute;<\/p>\n

A Truth occult has made this mighty world:<\/p>\n

The Eternal’s wisdom and self-knowledge act<\/p>\n

In ignorant Mind and in the body’s steps.<\/p>\n

The Inconscient is the Superconscient’s sleep.<\/p>\n

An unintelligible Intelligence<\/p>\n

Invents creation’s paradox profound;<\/p>\n

Spiritual thought is crammed in Matter’s forms,<\/p>\n

Unseen it throws out a dumb energy<\/p>\n

And works a miracle by a machine.<\/p>\n

All here is a mystery of contraries:<\/p>\n

Darkness a magic of self-hidden
\nlight,<\/p>\n

Suffering some secret rapture’s tragic mask<\/p>\n

And death an instrument of perpetual life.<\/p>\n

Although Death walks beside us on Life’s road,<\/p>\n

A dim bystander at the body’s start<\/p>\n

And a last judgment on man’s futile works,<\/p>\n

Other is the riddle of its ambiguous face:<\/p>\n

Death is a stair, a door, a stumbling stride<\/p>\n

The soul must take to cross from birth to birth,<\/p>\n

A grey defeat pregnant with victory, <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 600<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n<\/div>\n

A whip to lash us towards our deathless state.<\/p>\n

The inconscient world is the spirit’s self-made room,<\/p>\n

Eternal Night shadow of eternal Day.<\/p>\n

Night is not our beginning nor our end;<\/p>\n

She is the dark Mother in whose womb we have hid<\/p>\n

Safe from too swift a waking to world-pain.<\/p>\n

We came to her from a supernal Light,<\/p>\n

By Light we live and to the Light we go.<\/p>\n

Here in this seat of Darkness mute and lone,<\/p>\n

In the heart of everlasting Nothingness<\/p>\n

Light conquered now even by that feeble beam:<\/p>\n

Its faint infiltration drilled the blind deaf mass;<\/p>\n

Almost it changed into a glimmering sight<\/p>\n

That housed the phantom of an aureate Sun<\/p>\n

Whose orb pupilled the eye of Nothingness.<\/p>\n

A golden fire came in and burnt Night’s heart;<\/p>\n

Her dusky mindlessness began to dream;<\/p>\n

The Inconscient conscious grew, Night felt and thought.<\/p>\n

Assailed in the sovereign emptiness of its reign<\/p>\n

The intolerant Darkness paled and drew apart<\/p>\n

Till only a few black remnants stained that Ray.<\/p>\n

But on a failing edge of dumb lost space<\/p>\n

Still a great dragon body sullenly loomed;<\/p>\n

Adversary of the slow struggling Dawn<\/p>\n

Defending its ground of tortured mystery,<\/p>\n

It trailed its coils through the dead martyred air<\/p>\n

And curving fled down a grey slope of Time.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

There is a morning twilight of the gods;<\/p>\n

Miraculous from sleep their forms arise<\/p>\n

And God’s long nights are justified by dawn.<\/p>\n

There breaks a passion and splendour of new birth<\/p>\n

And hue-winged visions stray across the lids,<\/p>\n

The dreaming deities look beyond the seen<\/p>\n

And fashion in their thoughts the ideal worlds<\/p>\n

Sprung from a limitless moment of desire <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 601<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n<\/div>\n

That once had lodged in some abysmal heart.<\/p>\n

Passed was the heaviness of the eyeless dark<\/p>\n

And all the sorrow of the night was dead:<\/p>\n

Surprised by a blind joy with groping hands<\/p>\n

Like one who wakes to find his dreams were true,<\/p>\n

Into a happy misty twilit world<\/p>\n

Where all ran after light and joy and love<\/p>\n

She slipped; there far-off raptures drew more close<\/p>\n

And deep
\nanticipations of delight<\/p>\n

For ever eager to be grasped and held,<\/p>\n

Were never grasped, yet breathed strange ecstasy.<\/p>\n

A pearl-winged indistinctness fleeting swam,<\/p>\n

An air that dared not suffer too much light.<\/p>\n

Vague fields were there, vague pastures gleaned, vague
\ntrees,<\/p>\n

Vague scenes dim-hearted in a drifting haze;<\/p>\n

Vague cattle white roamed glimmering through the mist;<\/p>\n

Vague spirits wandered with a bodiless cry,<\/p>\n

Vague melodies touched the soul and fled pursued<\/p>\n

Into harmonious distances unseized;<\/p>\n

Forms subtly elusive and half-luminous powers<\/p>\n

Wishing no goal for their unearthly course<\/p>\n

Strayed happily
\nthrough vague ideal lands<\/p>\n

Or floated without footing or their walk<\/p>\n

Left steps of reverie on sweet memory’s ground;<\/p>\n

Or they paced to the mighty measure of their thoughts<\/p>\n

Led by a low far chanting of the gods.<\/p>\n

A ripple of gleaming wings crossed the far sky;<\/p>\n

Birds like pale-bosomed imaginations flew<\/p>\n

With low disturbing voices of desire,<\/p>\n

And half-heard lowings drew the listening ear,<\/p>\n

As if the Sun-god’s brilliant kine were there<\/p>\n

Hidden in mist and passing towards the sun.<\/p>\n

These fugitive beings, these elusive shapes<\/p>\n

Were all that claimed the eye and met the soul,<\/p>\n

The natural inhabitants of that world.<\/p>\n

But nothing there was fixed or stayed for long; <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 602<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n<\/div>\n

No mortal feet could rest upon that soil,<\/p>\n

No breath of life lingered embodied there.<\/p>\n

In that fine chaos joy fled dancing past<\/p>\n

And beauty evaded settled line and form<\/p>\n

And hid its sense in mysteries of hue;<\/p>\n

Yet gladness ever repeated the same notes<\/p>\n

And gave the sense of an enduring world;<\/p>\n

There was a strange consistency of shapes,<\/p>\n

And the same thoughts were constant passers-by<\/p>\n

And all renewed unendingly its charm<\/p>\n

Alluring ever the expectant heart<\/p>\n

Like music that one always waits to hear,<\/p>\n

Like the recurrence of a haunting rhyme.<\/p>\n

One touched incessantly things never seized,<\/p>\n

A skirt of worlds invisibly divine.<\/p>\n

As if a trail of disappearing stars<\/p>\n

There showered upon the floating atmosphere<\/p>\n

Colours and lights and evanescent gleams<\/p>\n

That called to follow into magic heaven,<\/p>\n

And in each cry that fainted on the ear<\/p>\n

There was the voice of an unrealised bliss.<\/p>\n

An adoration reigned in the yearning heart,<\/p>\n

A spirit of purity, an elusive presence<\/p>\n

Of faery beauty and ungrasped delight<\/p>\n

Whose momentary and escaping thrill,<\/p>\n

However unsubstantial to our flesh,<\/p>\n

And brief even in imperishableness,<\/p>\n

Much sweeter seemed than any rapture known<\/p>\n

Earth or all-conquering heaven can ever give.<\/p>\n

Heaven ever young and earth too firm and old<\/p>\n

Delay the heart by immobility:<\/p>\n

Their raptures of creation last too long,<\/p>\n

Their bold formations are too absolute;<\/p>\n

Carved by an anguish of divine endeavour<\/p>\n

They stand up sculptured on the eternal hills,<\/p>\n

Or quarried from the living rocks of God <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 603<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n<\/div>\n

Win immortality by perfect form.<\/p>\n

They are too intimate with eternal things:<\/p>\n

Vessels of infinite significances,<\/p>\n

They are too clear, too great, too meaningful;<\/p>\n

No mist or shadow soothes the vanquished sight,<\/p>\n

No soft penumbra of incertitude.<\/p>\n

These only touch a golden hem of bliss,<\/p>\n

The gleaming shoulder of some godlike hope,<\/p>\n

The flying feet of exquisite desires.<\/p>\n

On a slow trembling brink between night and day<\/p>\n

They shine like visitants from the morning star,<\/p>\n

Satisfied beginnings of perfection, first<\/p>\n

Tremulous imaginings of a heavenly world:<\/p>\n

They mingle in a passion of pursuit,<\/p>\n

Thrilled with a spray of joy too slight to tire.<\/p>\n

All in this world was shadowed forth, not limned,<\/p>\n

Like faces leaping on a fan of fire<\/p>\n

Or shapes of wonder in a tinted blur,<\/p>\n

Like fugitive landscapes painting silver mists.<\/p>\n

Here vision fled back from the sight alarmed,<\/p>\n

And sound sought refuge from the ear’s surprise,<\/p>\n

And all experience was a hasty joy.<\/p>\n

The joys here snatched were half-forbidden things,<\/p>\n

Timorous soul-bridals delicately veiled<\/p>\n

As when a goddess’ bosom dimly moves<\/p>\n

To first desire and her white soul transfigured,<\/p>\n

A glimmering Eden crossed by fairy gleams,<\/p>\n

Trembles to expectation’s fiery wand,<\/p>\n

But nothing is familiar yet with bliss.<\/p>\n

All things in this fair realm were heavenly strange<\/p>\n

In a fleeting gladness of untired delight,<\/p>\n

In an insistency of magic change.<\/p>\n

Past vanishing hedges, hurrying hints of fields,<\/p>\n

Mid swift escaping lanes that fled her feet<\/p>\n

Journeying she wished no end: as one through clouds<\/p>\n

Travels upon a mountain ridge and hears <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 604<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n<\/div>\n

Arising to him out of hidden depths<\/p>\n

Sound of invisible streams, she walked besieged<\/p>\n

By the illusion of a mystic space,<\/p>\n

A charm of bodiless touches felt and heard<\/p>\n

A sweetness as of voices high and dim<\/p>\n

Calling like travellers upon seeking winds<\/p>\n

Melodiously with an alluring cry.<\/p>\n

As if a music old yet ever new,<\/p>\n

Moving suggestions on her heart-strings dwelt,<\/p>\n

Thoughts that no habitation found, yet clung<\/p>\n

With passionate repetition to her mind,<\/p>\n

Desires that hurt not, happy only to live<\/p>\n

Always the same and always unfulfilled<\/p>\n

Sang in the breast like a celestial lyre.<\/p>\n

Thus all could last, yet nothing ever be.<\/p>\n

In this beauty as of mind made visible,<\/p>\n

Dressed in its rays of wonder Satyavan<\/p>\n

Before her seemed the centre of its charm,<\/p>\n

Head of her loveliness of longing dreams<\/p>\n

And captain of the fancies of her soul.<\/p>\n

Even the dreadful majesty of Death’s face<\/p>\n

And its sombre sadness could not darken nor slay<\/p>\n

The intangible lustre of those fleeting skies.<\/p>\n

The sombre Shadow sullen, implacable<\/p>\n

Made beauty and laughter more imperative;<\/p>\n

Enhanced by his grey, joy grew more bright and dear;<\/p>\n

His dark contrast edging ideal sight<\/p>\n

Deepened unuttered meanings to the heart;<\/p>\n

Pain grew a trembling undertone of bliss<\/p>\n

And transience immortality’s floating hem,<\/p>\n

A moment’s robe in which she looked more fair,<\/p>\n

Its antithesis sharpening her divinity.<\/p>\n

A comrade of the Ray and Mist and Flame,<\/p>\n

By a moon-bright face a brilliant moment drawn,<\/p>\n

Almost she seemed a thought mid floating thoughts,<\/p>\n

Seen hardly by a visionary mind <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 605<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n<\/div>\n

Amid the white inward musings of the soul.<\/p>\n

Half-vanquished by the dream-happiness around,<\/p>\n

Awhile she moved on an enchantment’s soil,<\/p>\n

But still remained possessor of her soul.<\/p>\n

Above, her spirit in its mighty trance<\/p>\n

Saw all, but lived for its transcendent task,<\/p>\n

Immutable like a fixed eternal star.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

End of Canto One <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 606<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/td>\n

 <\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Book Ten   The Book of the Double Twilight     Canto One    The Dream Twilight of the Ideal    All still was darkness…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1009","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-29-savitri-volume-29","wpcat-22-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1009","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1009"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1009\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1009"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1009"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1009"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}