{"id":1011,"date":"2013-07-13T01:31:58","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:31:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=1011"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:31:58","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:31:58","slug":"24-book-10-canto-04-the-dream-twilight-of-the-earthly-real-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\/24-book-10-canto-04-the-dream-twilight-of-the-earthly-real-vol-29-savitri-volume-29","title":{"rendered":"-24_Book 10 Canto 04 The Dream Twilight of the Earthly Real.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\n\n\n
 <\/td>\n\n
\n

Canto Four<\/i><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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

 <\/p>\n

There came a slope that slowly downward sank;<\/p>\n

It slipped towards a stumbling grey descent.<\/p>\n

The dim-heart marvel of the ideal was lost;<\/p>\n

Its crowding wonder of bright delicate dreams<\/p>\n

And vague half-limned sublimities she had left:<\/p>\n

Thought fell towards lower levels; hard and tense<\/p>\n

It passioned<\/span> for some crude
\nreality.<\/p>\n

The twilight floated still but changed its hues<\/p>\n

And heavily swathed a less delightful dream;<\/p>\n

It settled in tired masses on the air;<\/p>\n

Its symbol colours<\/span> tuned with
\nduller reds<\/p>\n

And almost seemed a lurid mist of day.<\/p>\n

A straining taut and dire besieged her heart;<\/p>\n

Heavy her sense grew with a dangerous load,<\/p>\n

And sadder, greater sounds were in her ears,<\/p>\n

And through stern breakings of the lambent glare<\/p>\n

Her vision caught a hurry of driving plains<\/p>\n

And cloudy mountains and wide tawny streams,<\/p>\n

And cities climbed in minarets and towers<\/p>\n

Towards an unavailing changeless sky:<\/p>\n

Long quays and ghauts<\/span> and harbours<\/span> white with sails<\/p>\n

Challenged her sight awhile and then were gone.<\/p>\n

Amidst them travailed toiling multitudes<\/p>\n

In ever shifting perishable groups,<\/p>\n

A foiled cinema of lit shadowy shapes<\/p>\n

Enveloped in the grey mantle of a dream.<\/p>\n

Imagining meanings in life’s heavy drift,<\/p>\n

They trusted in the uncertain environment<\/p>\n

And waited for death to change their spirit’s scene.<\/p>\n

A savage din of labour and a tramp<\/p>\n

Of armoured<\/span> life and the
\nmonotonous hum <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 641<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

Of thoughts and acts that ever were the same,<\/p>\n

As if the dull reiterated drone<\/p>\n

Of a great brute machine, beset her soul,\u2014<\/p>\n

A grey dissatisfied rumour like a ghost<\/p>\n

Of the moaning of a loud unquiet sea.<\/p>\n

A huge inhuman Cyclopean voice,<\/p>\n

A Babel-builder’s song towering to heaven,<\/p>\n

A throb of engines and the clang of tools<\/p>\n

Brought the deep undertone of labour’s<\/span>
\npain.<\/p>\n

As when pale lightnings<\/span> tear a
\ntortured sky,<\/p>\n

High overhead a cloud-rimmed series flared<\/p>\n

Chasing like smoke from a red funnel driven,<\/p>\n

The forced creations of an ignorant Mind:<\/p>\n

Drifting she saw like pictured fragments flee<\/p>\n

Phantoms of human thought and baffled hopes,<\/p>\n

The shapes of Nature and the arts of man,<\/p>\n

Philosophies and disciplines and laws,<\/p>\n

And the dead spirit of old societies,<\/p>\n

Constructions of the Titan and the worm.<\/p>\n

As if lost remnants of forgotten light,<\/p>\n

Before her mind there fled with trailing wings<\/p>\n

Dimmed revelations and delivering words,<\/p>\n

Emptied of their mission and their strength to save,<\/p>\n

The messages of the evangelist gods,<\/p>\n

Voices of prophets, scripts of vanishing creeds.<\/p>\n

Each in its hour eternal claimed went by:<\/p>\n

Ideals, systems, sciences, poems, crafts<\/p>\n

Tireless there perished and again recurred,<\/p>\n

Sought restlessly by
\nsome creative Power.<\/p>\n

But all were dreams crossing an empty vast.<\/p>\n

Ascetic voices called of lonely seers<\/p>\n

On mountain summits or
\non river banks<\/p>\n

Or from the desolate heart of forest glades<\/p>\n

Seeking heaven’s rest or the spirit’s worldless<\/span>
\npeace,<\/p>\n

Or in bodies motionless like statues, fixed<\/p>\n

In tranced<\/span> cessations of their
\nsleepless thought <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 642<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

Sat sleeping souls, and this too was a dream.<\/p>\n

All things the past has made and slain were there,<\/p>\n

Its lost forgotten forms that once had lived,<\/p>\n

And all the present loves as new-revealed<\/p>\n

And all the hopes the future brings had failed<\/p>\n

Already, caught and spent in efforts vain,<\/p>\n

Repeated fruitlessly age after age.<\/p>\n

Unwearied all returned insisting still<\/p>\n

Because of joy in the anguish of pursuit<\/p>\n

And joy to labour and to win and lose<\/p>\n

And joy to create and keep and joy to kill.<\/p>\n

The rolling cycles passed and came again,<\/p>\n

Brought the same toils and the same barren end,<\/p>\n

Forms ever new and ever old, the long<\/p>\n

Appalling revolutions of the world.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Once more arose the great destroying Voice:<\/p>\n

Across the fruitless labour of the worlds<\/p>\n

His huge denial’s all-defeating might<\/p>\n

Pursued the ignorant march of dolorous Time.<\/p>\n

\u201cBehold the figures of this symbol realm,<\/p>\n

Its solid outlines of creative dream<\/p>\n

Inspiring the great concrete tasks of earth.<\/p>\n

In its motion-parable of human life<\/p>\n

Here thou canst trace the outcome Nature gives<\/p>\n

To the sin of being and the error in things<\/p>\n

And the desire that compels to live<\/p>\n

And man’s incurable malady of hope.<\/p>\n

In an immutable order’s hierarchy<\/p>\n

Where Nature changes not, man cannot change:<\/p>\n

Ever he obeys her fixed mutation’s law;<\/p>\n

In a new version of her oft-told tale<\/p>\n

In ever-wheeling cycles turns the race.<\/p>\n

His mind is pent in circling boundaries:<\/p>\n

For mind is man, beyond thought he cannot soar.<\/p>\n

If he could leave his limits he would be safe: <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 643<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

He sees but cannot mount to his greater heavens;<\/p>\n

Even winged, he sinks back to his native soil.<\/p>\n

He is a captive in his net of mind<\/p>\n

And beats soul-wings against the walls of life.<\/p>\n

In vain his heart lifts up its yearning prayer,<\/p>\n

Peopling with brilliant Gods the formless Void;<\/p>\n

Then disappointed to the Void he turns<\/p>\n

And in its happy nothingness asks release,<\/p>\n

The calm Nirvana of his dream of self:<\/p>\n

The Word in silence ends, in Nought<\/span>
\nthe name.<\/p>\n

Apart amid the mortal multitudes,<\/p>\n

He calls the Godhead incommunicable<\/p>\n

To be the lover of his lonely soul<\/p>\n

Or casts his spirit
\ninto its void embrace,<\/p>\n

Or he finds his copy in the impartial All;<\/p>\n

He imparts to the Immobile his own will,<\/p>\n

Attributes to the Eternal wrath and love<\/p>\n

And to the Ineffable lends a thousand names.<\/p>\n

Hope not to call God
\ndown into his life:<\/p>\n

How shalt thou bring the Everlasting here?<\/p>\n

There is no house for him in hurrying Time.<\/p>\n

Vainly thou seek’st<\/span> in Matter’s
\nworld an aim;<\/p>\n

No aim is there, only a will to be.<\/p>\n

All walk by Nature bound for ever the same.<\/p>\n

Look on these forms that stay awhile and pass,<\/p>\n

These lives that long and strive, then are no more,<\/p>\n

These structures that have no abiding truth,<\/p>\n

The saviour<\/span> creeds that cannot
\nsave themselves,<\/p>\n

But perish in the strangling hands of the years,<\/p>\n

Discarded from man’s thought, proved false by Time,<\/p>\n

Philosophies that strip all problems bare<\/p>\n

But nothing ever have solved since earth began,<\/p>\n

And sciences omnipotent in vain<\/p>\n

By which men learn of what the suns are made,<\/p>\n

Transform all forms to serve their outward needs,<\/p>\n

Ride through the sky and sail beneath the sea, <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 644<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

But learn not what they are or why they came;<\/p>\n

These polities, architectures of man’s brain,<\/p>\n

That, bricked with evil and good, wall in man’s spirit<\/p>\n

And, fissured houses, palace at once and jail,<\/p>\n

Rot while they reign and crumble before they crash;<\/p>\n

These revolutions, demon or drunken god,<\/p>\n

Convulsing the wounded body of mankind<\/p>\n

Only to paint in new colours<\/span> an
\nold face;<\/p>\n

These wars, carnage triumphant, ruin gone mad,<\/p>\n

The work of centuries vanishing in an hour,<\/p>\n

The blood of the vanquished and the victor’s crown<\/p>\n

Which men to be born must pay for with their pain,<\/p>\n

The hero’s face divine on satyr’s limbs,<\/p>\n

The demon’s grandeur mixed with the demi-god’s,<\/p>\n

The glory and the beasthood<\/span> and
\nthe shame;<\/p>\n

Why is it all, the labour and the din,<\/p>\n

The transient joys, the timeless sea of tears,<\/p>\n

The longing and the hoping and the cry,<\/p>\n

The battle and the victory and the fall,<\/p>\n

The aimless journey that can never pause,<\/p>\n

The waking toil, the
\nincoherent sleep?<\/p>\n

Song, shouts and weeping, wisdom and idle words,<\/p>\n

The laughter of men, the irony of the gods?<\/p>\n

Where leads the march, whither the pilgrimage?<\/p>\n

Who keeps the map of the route or planned each stage?<\/p>\n

Or else self-moved the world walks its own way,<\/p>\n

Or nothing is there but only a Mind that dreams:<\/p>\n

The world is a myth that happened to come true,<\/p>\n

A legend told to itself by conscious Mind,<\/p>\n

Imaged and played on a feigned Matter’s ground<\/p>\n

On which it stands in an unsubstantial Vast.<\/p>\n

Mind is the author, spectator, actor, stage:<\/p>\n

Mind only is and what it thinks is seen.<\/p>\n

If Mind is all, renounce the hope of bliss;<\/p>\n

If Mind is all, renounce the hope of Truth.<\/p>\n

For Mind can never touch the body of Truth <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 645<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

And Mind can never see the soul of God;<\/p>\n

Only his shadow it grasps nor hears his laugh<\/p>\n

As it turns from him to the vain seeming of things.<\/p>\n

Mind is a tissue woven of light and shade<\/p>\n

Where right and wrong have sewn their mingled parts;<\/p>\n

Or Mind is Nature’s marriage of covenance<\/span><\/p>\n

Between truth and falsehood, between joy and pain:<\/p>\n

This struggling pair no court can separate.<\/p>\n

Each thought is a gold coin with bright alloy<\/p>\n

And error and truth are its obverse and reverse:<\/p>\n

This is the imperial mintage of the brain<\/p>\n

And of this kind is all its currency.<\/p>\n

Think not to plant on earth the living Truth<\/p>\n

Or make of Matter’s world the home of God;<\/p>\n

Truth comes not there but only the thought of Truth,<\/p>\n

God is not there but only the name of God.<\/p>\n

If Self there is, it is bodiless and unborn;<\/p>\n

It is no one and it
\nis possessed by none,<\/p>\n

On what shalt thou then build thy happy world?<\/p>\n

Cast off thy life and mind, then art thou Self,<\/p>\n

An all-seeing
\nOmnipresence stark, alone,<\/p>\n

If God there is he cares not for the world;<\/p>\n

All things he sees with calm indifferent gaze,<\/p>\n

He has doomed all hearts to sorrow and desire,<\/p>\n

He has bound all life with his implacable laws;<\/p>\n

He answers not the ignorant voice of prayer.<\/p>\n

Eternal while the ages toil beneath,<\/p>\n

Unmoved, untouched by aught that he has made,<\/p>\n

He sees as minute details mid the stars<\/p>\n

The animal’s agony and the fate of man:<\/p>\n

Immeasurably wise, he exceeds thy thought;<\/p>\n

His solitary joy needs not thy love.<\/p>\n

His truth in human thinking cannot dwell:<\/p>\n

If thou desirest<\/span> Truth, then still
\nthy mind<\/p>\n

For ever, slain by the dumb unseen Light.<\/p>\n

Immortal bliss lives not in human air: <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 646<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

How shall the mighty Mother her calm delight<\/p>\n

Keep fragrant in this
\nnarrow fragile vase<\/p>\n

Or lodge her sweet unbroken ecstasy<\/p>\n

In hearts which earthly sorrow can assail<\/p>\n

And bodies careless Death can slay at will?<\/p>\n

Dream not to change the world that God has planned,<\/p>\n

Strive not to alter his eternal law.<\/p>\n

If heavens there are whose gates are shut to grief,<\/p>\n

There seek the joy thou couldst not find on earth;<\/p>\n

Or in the imperishable hemisphere<\/p>\n

Where Light is native and Delight is king<\/p>\n

And Spirit is the deathless ground of
\nThings,<\/p>\n

Choose thy high station, child of Eternity.<\/p>\n

If thou art Spirit and Nature is thy robe,<\/p>\n

Cast off thy garb and be thy naked self<\/p>\n

Immutable in its undying truth,<\/p>\n

Alone for ever in the mute Alone.<\/p>\n

Turn then to God, for him leave all behind;<\/p>\n

Forgetting Love, forgetting Satyavan,<\/p>\n

Annul thyself in his immobile peace.<\/p>\n

O soul, drown in his still beatitude.<\/p>\n

For thou must die to thyself to reach God’s height:<\/p>\n

I, Death, am the gate of immortality.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Savitri answered to the sophist God:<\/p>\n

\u201cOnce more wilt thou call Light to blind Truth’s eyes,<\/p>\n

Make knowledge a catch of the snare of Ignorance<\/p>\n

And the Word a dart to slay my living
\nSoul?<\/p>\n

Offer, O king, thy boons to tired spirits<\/p>\n

And hearts that could not bear the wounds of Time,<\/p>\n

Let those who were tied to body and to mind,<\/p>\n

Tear off those bonds and flee into white calm<\/p>\n

Crying for a refuge
\nfrom the play of God,<\/p>\n

Surely thy boons are great since thou art He!<\/p>\n

But how shall I seek rest in endless peace<\/p>\n

Who house the mighty Mother’s violent force,<\/p>\n

Her vision turned to read the enigmaed<\/span>
\nworld, <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 647<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

Her will tempered in the blaze of Wisdom’s sun<\/p>\n

And the flaming silence of her heart of love?<\/p>\n

The world is a spiritual paradox<\/p>\n

Invented by a need in the Unseen,<\/p>\n

A poor translation to the creature’s sense<\/p>\n

Of That which for ever exceeds idea and speech,<\/p>\n

A symbol of what can never be symbolised,<\/p>\n

A language mispronounced, misspelt<\/span>,
\nyet true.<\/p>\n

Its powers have come from the eternal heights<\/p>\n

And plunged into the inconscient dim Abyss<\/p>\n

And risen from it to do their marvellous<\/span>
\nwork.<\/p>\n

The soul is a figure of the Unmanifest<\/span>,<\/p>\n

The mind labours<\/span> to think the
\nUnthinkable,<\/p>\n

The life to call the Immortal into birth,<\/p>\n

The body to enshrine the Illimitable.<\/p>\n

The world is not cut off from Truth and God.<\/p>\n

In vain thou hast dug the dark unbridgeable gulf,<\/p>\n

In vain thou hast built the blind and doorless<\/span>
\nwall:<\/p>\n

Man’s soul crosses through thee to Paradise,<\/p>\n

Heaven’s sun forces its way through death and night;<\/p>\n

Its light is seen upon our being’s verge.<\/p>\n

My mind is a torch lit from the eternal sun,<\/p>\n

My life a breath drawn by the immortal Guest,<\/p>\n

My mortal body is the Eternal’s<\/span>
\nhouse.<\/p>\n

Already the torch becomes the undying ray,<\/p>\n

Already the life is the Immortal’s force,<\/p>\n

The house grows of the householder part and one.<\/p>\n

How sayst<\/span> thou Truth can never
\nlight the human mind<\/p>\n

And Bliss can never invade the mortal’s heart<\/p>\n

Or God descend into the world he made?<\/p>\n

If in the meaningless Void creation rose,<\/p>\n

If from a bodiless Force Matter was born,<\/p>\n

If Life could climb in the unconscious tree,<\/p>\n

If green delight break into emerald leaves<\/p>\n

And its laughter of beauty blossom in the flower,<\/p>\n

If sense could wake in tissue, nerve and cell, <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 648<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

And Thought seize the grey matter of the brain,<\/p>\n

And soul peep from its secrecy through the flesh,<\/p>\n

How shall the nameless
\nlight not leap on men,<\/p>\n

And unknown powers emerge from Nature’s sleep?<\/p>\n

Even now hints of a luminous Truth like stars<\/p>\n

Arise in the mind-mooned splendour<\/span>
\nof Ignorance;<\/p>\n

Even now the deathless Lover’s touch we feel:<\/p>\n

If the chamber’s door is even a little ajar,<\/p>\n

What then can hinder God from stealing in<\/p>\n

Or who forbid his kiss on the sleeping soul?<\/p>\n

Already God is near, the Truth is close:<\/p>\n

Because the dark atheist body knows him not,<\/p>\n

Must the sage deny the Light, the seer his soul?<\/p>\n

I am not bound by thought or sense or shape;<\/p>\n

I live in the glory of the Infinite,<\/p>\n

I am near to the Nameless and Unknowable,<\/p>\n

The Ineffable is now my household mate.<\/p>\n

But standing on Eternity’s luminous brink<\/p>\n

I have discovered that the world was He;<\/p>\n

I have met Spirit with spirit, Self with self,<\/p>\n

But I have loved too the body of my God.<\/p>\n

I have pursued him in his earthly form.<\/p>\n

A lonely freedom cannot satisfy<\/p>\n

A heart that has grown one with every heart:<\/p>\n

I am a deputy of the aspiring world,<\/p>\n

My spirit’s liberty I ask for all.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Then rang again a deeper cry of Death.<\/p>\n

As if beneath its weight of sterile law<\/p>\n

Oppressed by its own obstinate meaningless will,<\/p>\n

Disdainful, weary and compassionate,<\/p>\n

It kept no more its old intolerant sound,<\/p>\n

But seemed like life’s in her unnumbered paths,<\/p>\n

Toiling for ever and achieving nought<\/span><\/p>\n

Because of birth and change, her mortal powers<\/p>\n

By which she lasts, around the term posts fixed <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 649<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

Turning of a wide circling aimless race<\/p>\n

Whose course for ever speeds and is the same.<\/p>\n

In its long play with Fate and Chance and Time<\/p>\n

Assured of the game’s vanity lost or won,<\/p>\n

Crushed by its load of ignorance and doubt<\/p>\n

Which knowledge seems to increase and growth to enlarge,<\/p>\n

The earth-mind sinks and it despairs and looks<\/p>\n

Old, weary and discouraged on its work.<\/p>\n

Yet was all nothing then or vainly achieved?<\/p>\n

Some great thing has been done, some light, some power<\/p>\n

Delivered from the huge Inconscient’s<\/span>
\ngrasp:<\/p>\n

It has emerged from night; it sees its dawns<\/p>\n

Circling for ever though no dawn can stay.<\/p>\n

This change was in the godhead’s far-flung voice;<\/p>\n

His form of dread was altered and admitted<\/p>\n

Our transient effort at eternity,<\/p>\n

Yet flung vast doubts of what might else have been<\/p>\n

On grandiose hints of an impossible day.<\/p>\n

The great voice surging cried to Savitri:<\/p>\n

\u201cBecause thou knowst<\/span> the wisdom
\nthat transcends<\/p>\n

Both veil of forms and the contempt of forms,<\/p>\n

Arise delivered by the seeing gods.<\/p>\n

If free thou hadst<\/span> kept thy mind
\nfrom life’s fierce stress,<\/p>\n

Thou mightst<\/span> have been like them
\nomniscient, calm.<\/p>\n

But the violent and passionate heart forbids.<\/p>\n

It is the storm bird of an anarch<\/span>
\nPower<\/p>\n

That would upheave<\/span> the world and
\ntear from it<\/p>\n

The indecipherable scroll of Fate,<\/p>\n

Death’s rule and Law and the unknowable Will.<\/p>\n

Hasteners to action, violators of God<\/p>\n

Are these great spirits who have too much love,<\/p>\n

And they who formed like thee, for both art thou,<\/p>\n

Have come into the narrow bounds of life<\/p>\n

With too large natures overleaping time.<\/p>\n

Worshippers of force who know not her recoil,<\/p>\n

Their giant wills compel the troubled years. <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 650<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

The wise are tranquil; silent the great hills<\/p>\n

Rise ceaselessly towards their unreached<\/span>
\nsky,<\/p>\n

Seated on their unchanging base, their heads<\/p>\n

Dreamless in heaven’s immutable domain.<\/p>\n

On their aspiring tops, sublime and still,<\/p>\n

Lifting half-way to heaven the climbing soul<\/p>\n

The mighty mediators stand content<\/p>\n

To watch the
\nrevolutions of the stars.<\/p>\n

Motionlessly moving with the might of earth,<\/p>\n

They see the ages pass and are the same.<\/p>\n

The wise think with the cycles, they hear the tread<\/p>\n

Of far-off things; patient, unmoved they keep<\/p>\n

Their dangerous wisdom in their depths restrained,<\/p>\n

Lest man’s frail days into the unknown should sink<\/p>\n

Dragged like a ship by bound leviathan<\/p>\n

Into the abyss of his stupendous seas.<\/p>\n

Lo, how all shakes when the gods tread too near!<\/p>\n

All moves, is in peril, anguished, torn, upheaved<\/span>.<\/p>\n

The hurrying aeons<\/span> would stumble
\non too swift<\/p>\n

If strength from heaven surprised the imperfect earth<\/p>\n

And veilless<\/span> knowledge smote these
\nunfit souls.<\/p>\n

The deities have screened their dreadful power:<\/p>\n

God hides his thought and, even, he seems to err.<\/p>\n

Be still and tardy in the slow wise world.<\/p>\n

Mighty art thou with the dread goddess filled,<\/p>\n

To whom thou criedst<\/span> at dawn in
\nthe dim woods.<\/p>\n

Use not thy strength like the wild Titan souls!<\/p>\n

Touch not the seated lines, the ancient laws,<\/p>\n

Respect the calm of great established things.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Savitri replied to the huge god:<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat is the calm thou vauntst<\/span>, O
\nLaw, O Death?<\/p>\n

Is it not the dull-visioned<\/span> tread
\ninert<\/p>\n

Of monstrous energies chained in a stark round<\/p>\n

Soulless and stone-eyed with mechanic dreams?<\/p>\n

Vain the soul’s hope if changeless Law is all:<\/p>\n

Ever to the new and the unknown press on <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 651<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

The speeding aeons<\/span> justifying God.<\/p>\n

What were earth’s ages if the grey restraint<\/p>\n

Were never broken and glories sprang not forth<\/p>\n

Bursting their obscure seed, while man’s slow life<\/p>\n

Leaped hurried into sudden splendid paths<\/p>\n

By divine words and human gods revealed?<\/p>\n

Impose not upon sentient minds and hearts<\/p>\n

The dull fixity that binds inanimate things.<\/p>\n

Well is the unconscious rule for the animal breeds<\/p>\n

Content to live beneath the immutable yoke;<\/p>\n

Man turns to a nobler walk, a master path.<\/p>\n

I trample on thy law with living feet;<\/p>\n

For to arise in freedom I was born.<\/p>\n

If I am mighty let my force be unveiled<\/p>\n

Equal companion of the dateless powers,<\/p>\n

Or else let my frustrated soul sink down<\/p>\n

Unworthy of Godhead in the original sleep.<\/p>\n

I claim from Time my will’s eternity,<\/p>\n

God from his moments.\u201d Death replied to her,<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy should the noble and immortal will<\/p>\n

Stoop to the petty works of transient earth,<\/p>\n

Freedom forgotten and the Eternal’s<\/span>
\npath?<\/p>\n

Or is this the high use of strength and thought,<\/p>\n

To struggle with the bonds of death and time<\/p>\n

And spend the labour that might earn the gods<\/p>\n

And battle and bear agony of wounds<\/p>\n

To grasp the trivial joys that earth can guard<\/p>\n

In her small treasure-chest of passing things?<\/p>\n

Child, hast thou trodden the gods beneath thy feet<\/p>\n

Only to win poor shreds of earthly life<\/p>\n

For him thou lov’st<\/span> cancelling<\/span> the grand release,<\/p>\n

Keeping from early rapture of the heavens<\/p>\n

His soul the lenient deities have called?<\/p>\n

Are thy arms sweeter than the courts of God?\u201d<\/p>\n

She answered, \u201cStraight I trample on the road<\/p>\n

The strong hand hewed for me which planned our paths. <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 652<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

I run where his sweet dreadful voice commands<\/p>\n

And I am driven by the reins of God.<\/p>\n

Why drew he wide his scheme of mighty worlds<\/p>\n

Or filled infinity with his passionate breath?<\/p>\n

Or wherefore did he build my mortal form<\/p>\n

And sow in me his bright and proud desires,<\/p>\n

If not to achieve, to flower in me, to love,<\/p>\n

Carving his human image richly shaped<\/p>\n

In thoughts and largenesses<\/span> and
\ngolden powers?<\/p>\n

Far Heaven can wait our coming in its calm.<\/p>\n

Easy the heavens were to build for God.<\/p>\n

Earth was his difficult matter, earth the glory<\/p>\n

Gave of the problem and the race and strife.<\/p>\n

There are the ominous masks, the terrible powers;<\/p>\n

There it is greatness to create the gods.<\/p>\n

Is not the spirit immortal and absolved<\/p>\n

Always, delivered from the grasp of Time?<\/p>\n

Why came it down into the mortal’s Space?<\/p>\n

A charge he gave to his high spirit in man<\/p>\n

And wrote a hidden decree on Nature’s tops.<\/p>\n

Freedom is this with ever seated soul,<\/p>\n

Large in life’s limits, strong in Matter’s knots,<\/p>\n

Building great stuff of action from the worlds<\/p>\n

To make fine wisdom from coarse scattered strands<\/p>\n

And love and beauty out of war and night,<\/p>\n

The wager wonderful, the game divine.<\/p>\n

What liberty has the soul which feels not free<\/p>\n

Unless stripped bare and cannot kiss the bonds<\/p>\n

The Lover winds around his playmate’s limbs,<\/p>\n

Choosing his tyranny, crushed in his embrace?<\/p>\n

To seize him better with her boundless heart<\/p>\n

She accepts the limiting circle of his arms,<\/p>\n

Bows full of bliss beneath his mastering hands<\/p>\n

And laughs in his rich constraints, most bound, most free.<\/p>\n

This is my answer to thy lures, O Death.\u201d <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 653<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

Immutable, Death’s denial met her cry:<\/p>\n

\u201cHowever mighty, whatever thy secret name<\/p>\n

Uttered in hidden conclave of the gods,<\/p>\n

Thy heart’s ephemeral passion cannot break<\/p>\n

The iron rampart of accomplished things<\/p>\n

With which the great Gods fence their camp in Space.<\/p>\n

Whoever thou art behind thy human mask,<\/p>\n

Even if thou art the Mother of the worlds<\/p>\n

And pegg’st<\/span> thy claim upon the
\nrealms of Chance,<\/p>\n

The cosmic Law is greater than thy will.<\/p>\n

Even God himself obeys the Laws he made:<\/p>\n

The Law abides and never can it change,<\/p>\n

The Person is a bubble on Time’s sea.<\/p>\n

A forerunner of a greater Truth to come,<\/p>\n

Thy soul creator of its freer Law,<\/p>\n

Vaunting a Force behind on which it leans,<\/p>\n

A Light above which none but thou hast seen,<\/p>\n

Thou claimst<\/span> the first fruits of
\nTruth’s victory.<\/p>\n

But what is Truth and who can find her form<\/p>\n

Amid the specious images of sense,<\/p>\n

Amid the crowding guesses of the mind<\/p>\n

And the dark ambiguities of a world<\/p>\n

Peopled with the incertitudes<\/span> of
\nThought?<\/p>\n

For where is Truth and when was her footfall heard<\/p>\n

Amid the endless clamour of Time’s mart<\/p>\n

And which is her voice amid the thousand cries<\/p>\n

That cross the listening brain and cheat the soul?<\/p>\n

Or is Truth aught but a high starry name,<\/p>\n

Or a vague and splendid word by which man’s thought<\/p>\n

Sanctions and consecrates his nature’s choice,<\/p>\n

The heart’s wish donning knowledge as its robe,<\/p>\n

The cherished idea elect among the elect,<\/p>\n

Thought’s favourite<\/span> mid the
\nchildren of half-light<\/p>\n

Who high-voiced crowd the playgrounds of the mind<\/p>\n

Or people its dormitories in infant sleep?<\/p>\n

All things hang here between God’s yes and no, <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 654<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

Two Powers real but to each other untrue,<\/p>\n

Two consort stars in the mooned night of mind<\/p>\n

That towards two opposite horizons gaze,<\/p>\n

The white head and black tail of the mystic drake,<\/p>\n

The swift and the lame foot, wing strong, wing broken<\/p>\n

Sustaining the body of the uncertain world,<\/p>\n

A great surreal dragon in the skies.<\/p>\n

Too dangerously thy high proud truth must live<\/p>\n

Entangled in Matter’s mortal littleness.<\/p>\n

All in this world is true, yet all is false:<\/p>\n

Its thoughts into an eternal cipher run,<\/p>\n

Its deeds swell to Time’s rounded zero sum.<\/p>\n

Thus man at once is animal and god,<\/p>\n

A disparate enigma of God’s make<\/p>\n

Unable to free the Godhead’s form within,<\/p>\n

A being less than himself, yet something more,<\/p>\n

The aspiring animal, the frustrate god;<\/p>\n

Yet neither beast nor deity but man,<\/p>\n

But man tied to the kind earth’s labour strives to exceed,<\/p>\n

Climbing the stairs of God to higher
\nThings.<\/p>\n

Objects are seemings<\/span> and none
\nknows their truth,<\/p>\n

Ideas are guesses of an ignorant god.<\/p>\n

Truth has no home in earth’s irrational breast:<\/p>\n

Yet without reason life is a tangle of dreams,<\/p>\n

But reason is poised above a dim abyss<\/p>\n

And stands at last upon a plank of doubt.<\/p>\n

Eternal truth lives not with mortal men.<\/p>\n

Or if she dwells within thy mortal heart,<\/p>\n

Show me the body of the living Truth<\/p>\n

Or draw for me the outline of her face<\/p>\n

That I too may obey and worship her.<\/p>\n

Then will I give thee back thy Satyavan.<\/p>\n

But here are only facts and steel-bound Law.<\/p>\n

This truth I know that Satyavan is dead<\/p>\n

And even thy sweetness cannot lure him back.<\/p>\n

No magic Truth can bring the dead to life, <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 655<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

No power of earth
\ncancel the thing once done.<\/p>\n

No joy of the heart can last surviving death,<\/p>\n

No bliss persuade the past to live again.<\/p>\n

But Life alone can solace the mute Void<\/p>\n

And fill with thought the emptiness of Time.<\/p>\n

Leave then thy dead, O Savitri, and live.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Woman answered to the mighty Shade,<\/p>\n

And as she spoke, mortality disappeared;<\/p>\n

Her Goddess self grew visible in her eyes,<\/p>\n

Light came a dream of heaven into her face.<\/p>\n

\u201cO Death, thou too art God and yet not He,<\/p>\n

But only his own black shadow on his path<\/p>\n

As leaving the Night he takes the upward Way<\/p>\n

And drags with him its clinging inconscient Force.<\/p>\n

Of God unconscious thou art the dark head,<\/p>\n

Of his Ignorance thou art the impenitent sign,<\/p>\n

Of its vast tenebrous womb the natural child,<\/p>\n

On his immortality the sinister bar.<\/p>\n

All contraries are aspects of God’s face.<\/p>\n

The Many are the innumerable One,<\/p>\n

The One carries the multitude in his breast;<\/p>\n

He is the Impersonal, inscrutable, sole,<\/p>\n

He is the one infinite Person seeing his world;<\/p>\n

The Silence bears the Eternal’s<\/span>
\ngreat dumb seal,<\/p>\n

His light inspires the eternal Word;<\/p>\n

He is the Immobile’s<\/span> deep and
\ndeathless hush,<\/p>\n

Its white and signless<\/span> blank
\nnegating calm,<\/p>\n

Yet stands the creator Self, the almighty Lord<\/p>\n

And watches his will done by the forms of
\ngods<\/p>\n

And the desire that goads half-conscious man<\/p>\n

And the reluctant and unseeing Night.<\/p>\n

These wide divine extremes, these inverse powers<\/p>\n

Are the right and left side of the body of God;<\/p>\n

Existence balanced twixt two mighty arms<\/p>\n

Confronts the mind with unsolved abysms of Thought.<\/p>\n

Darkness below, a fathomless Light above, <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 656<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

In Light are joined, but sundered by severing Mind<\/p>\n

Stand face to face, opposite, inseparable,<\/p>\n

Two contraries needed for his great World-task,<\/p>\n

Two poles whose currents wake the immense World-Force.<\/p>\n

In the stupendous secrecy of his Self,<\/p>\n

Above the world brooding with equal wings,<\/p>\n

He is both in one beginningless<\/span>,
\nwithout end:<\/p>\n

Transcending both, he enters the Absolute.<\/p>\n

His being is a mystery beyond mind,<\/p>\n

His ways bewilder mortal ignorance;<\/p>\n

The finite in its little sections parked,<\/p>\n

Amazed, credits not God’s audacity<\/p>\n

Who dares to be the unimagined All<\/p>\n

And see and act as might one Infinite.<\/p>\n

Against human reason
\nthis is his offence;<\/p>\n

Being known to be for ever unknowable,<\/p>\n

To be all and yet transcend the mystic whole,<\/p>\n

Absolute, to lodge in a relative world of Time,<\/p>\n

Eternal and all-knowing, to suffer birth,<\/p>\n

Omnipotent, to sport with Chance and Fate,<\/p>\n

Spirit, yet to be Matter and the Void,<\/p>\n

Illimitable, beyond form or name,<\/p>\n

To dwell within a body, one and supreme<\/p>\n

To be animal and human and divine:<\/p>\n

A still deep sea, he
\nlaughs in rolling waves:<\/p>\n

Universal, he is all,\u2014transcendent, none.<\/p>\n

To man’s righteousness this is his cosmic crime,<\/p>\n

Almighty beyond good and evil to dwell<\/p>\n

Leaving the good to their fate in a wicked world<\/p>\n

And evil to reign in this enormous scene.<\/p>\n

An aimless labour with but scanty sense,<\/p>\n

All opposition seems
\nand strife and chance<\/p>\n

To eyes that see a part and miss the whole;<\/p>\n

The surface men scan, the depths refuse their search:<\/p>\n

A hybrid mystery challenges the view,<\/p>\n

Or a discouraging sordid miracle. <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 657<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

Yet in the exact Inconscient’s<\/span>
\nstark conceit,<\/p>\n

In the casual error of the world’s ignorance<\/p>\n

A plan, a hidden Intelligence is glimpsed.<\/p>\n

There is a purpose in each stumble and fall;<\/p>\n

Nature’s most careless lolling is a pose<\/p>\n

Preparing some forward step, some deep result.<\/p>\n

Ingenious notes plugged into a motived<\/span>
\nscore,<\/p>\n

These million discords dot the harmonious theme<\/p>\n

Of the evolution’s huge orchestral dance.<\/p>\n

A Truth supreme has forced the world to be;<\/p>\n

It has wrapped itself in Matter as in a shroud,<\/p>\n

A shroud of Death, a shroud of Ignorance.<\/p>\n

It compelled the suns to burn through silent Space,<\/p>\n

Flame-signs of its uncomprehended<\/span>
\nThought<\/p>\n

In a wide brooding ether’s formless muse:<\/p>\n

It made of Knowledge a veiled and struggling light,<\/p>\n

Of Being a substance nescient, dense and dumb,<\/p>\n

Of Bliss the beauty of an insentient world.<\/p>\n

In finite things the conscious Infinite dwells:<\/p>\n

Involved it sleeps in Matter’s helpless trance,<\/p>\n

It rules the world from its sleeping senseless Void;<\/p>\n

Dreaming it throws out mind and heart and soul<\/p>\n

To labour crippled, bound, on the hard earth;<\/p>\n

A broken whole it works through scattered points;<\/p>\n

Its gleaming shards are Wisdom’s diamond thoughts,<\/p>\n

Its shadowy reflex our ignorance.<\/p>\n

It starts from the mute mass in countless jets,<\/p>\n

It fashions a being out of brain and nerve,<\/p>\n

A sentient creature from its pleasures and pangs.<\/p>\n

A pack of feelings obscure, a dot of sense<\/p>\n

Survives awhile answering the shocks of life,<\/p>\n

Then crushed or, its
\nforce spent, leaves the dead form,<\/p>\n

Leaves the huge universe in which it lived<\/p>\n

An insignificant unconsidered guest.<\/p>\n

But the soul grows concealed within its house;<\/p>\n

It gives to the body its strength and magnificence; <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 658<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

It follows aims in an ignorant aimless world,<\/p>\n

It lends significance to earth’s meaningless life.<\/p>\n

A demi-god animal,
\ncame thinking man.<\/p>\n

He wallows in mud, yet heavenward soars in thought;<\/p>\n

He plays and ponders, laughs and weeps and dreams,<\/p>\n

Satisfies his little longings like the beast;<\/p>\n

He pores upon life’s book with student eyes.<\/p>\n

Out of this tangle of intellect and sense,<\/p>\n

Out of the narrow scope of finite thought<\/p>\n

At last he wakes into spiritual mind;<\/p>\n

A high liberty begins and luminous room:<\/p>\n

He glimpses eternity, touches the infinite,<\/p>\n

He meets the gods in great and sudden hours,<\/p>\n

He feels the universe as his larger self,<\/p>\n

Makes Space and Time his opportunity<\/p>\n

To join the heights and depths of being in light,<\/p>\n

In the heart’s cave speaks secretly with God.<\/p>\n

But these are touches and high moments lived;<\/p>\n

Fragments of Truth supreme have lit his soul,<\/p>\n

Reflections of the sun in waters still.<\/p>\n

A few have dared the last supreme ascent<\/p>\n

And break through borders of blinding light above,<\/p>\n

And feel a breath around of mightier air,<\/p>\n

Receive a vaster being’s messages<\/p>\n

And bathe in its immense intuitive Ray.<\/p>\n

On summit Mind are radiant altitudes<\/p>\n

Exposed to the lustre of Infinity,<\/p>\n

Outskirts and dependencies of the house of Truth,<\/p>\n

Upraised estates of Mind and measureless.<\/p>\n

There man can visit but there he cannot live.<\/p>\n

A cosmic Thought spreads out its vastitudes<\/span>;<\/p>\n

Its smallest parts are here philosophies<\/p>\n

Challenging with their detailed immensity,<\/p>\n

Each figuring an omniscient scheme of things.<\/p>\n

But higher still can climb the ascending light;<\/p>\n

There are vasts<\/span> of vision and
\neternal suns, <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 659<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

Oceans of an immortal luminousness,<\/p>\n

Flame-hills assaulting heaven with their peaks,<\/p>\n

There dwelling all becomes a blaze of sight;<\/p>\n

A burning head of vision leads the mind,<\/p>\n

Thought trails behind it its long comet tail;<\/p>\n

The heart glows, an illuminate and seer,<\/p>\n

And sense is kindled into identity.<\/p>\n

A highest flight climbs to a deepest view:<\/p>\n

In a wide opening of its native sky<\/p>\n

Intuition’s lightnings<\/span> range in a
\nbright pack<\/p>\n

Hunting all hidden truths out of their lairs,<\/p>\n

Its fiery edge of seeing absolute<\/p>\n

Cleaves into locked unknown retreats of self,<\/p>\n

Rummages the sky-recesses of the brain,<\/p>\n

Lights up the occult chambers of the heart;<\/p>\n

Its spear-point ictus of discovery<\/p>\n

Pressed on the cover of name, the screen of form,<\/p>\n

Strips bare the secret soul of all that is.<\/p>\n

Thought there has revelation’s sun-bright eyes;<\/p>\n

The Word, a mighty and inspiring Voice,<\/p>\n

Enters Truth’s inmost cabin of privacy<\/p>\n

And tears away the veil from God and life.<\/p>\n

Then stretches the boundless finite’s last expanse,<\/p>\n

The cosmic empire of the Overmind<\/span>,<\/p>\n

Time’s buffer state bordering Eternity,<\/p>\n

Too vast for the experience of man’s soul:<\/p>\n

All here gathers beneath one golden sky:<\/p>\n

The Powers that build the cosmos station take<\/p>\n

In its house of infinite possibility;<\/p>\n

Each god from there builds his own nature’s world;<\/p>\n

Ideas are phalanxed<\/span> like a group
\nof sums,<\/p>\n

Thought crowds in masses seized by one regard;<\/p>\n

All Time is one body,
\nSpace a single book:<\/p>\n

There is the Godhead’s universal gaze<\/p>\n

And there the boundaries of immortal Mind:<\/p>\n

The line that parts and joins the hemispheres <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 660<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

Closes in on the labour of the Gods<\/p>\n

FencingEeternity from the toil of Time.<\/p>\n

In her glorious kingdom of eternal light<\/p>\n

All-ruler, ruled by none, the Truth supreme,<\/p>\n

Omnipotent, omniscient and alone,<\/p>\n

In a golden country keeps her measureless house;<\/p>\n

In its corridor she hears the tread that comes<\/p>\n

Out of the Unmanifest<\/span> never to
\nreturn<\/p>\n

Till the Unknown is known and seen by men.<\/p>\n

Above the stretch and blaze of cosmic Sight,<\/p>\n

Above the silence of the wordless Thought,<\/p>\n

Formless creator of immortal forms,<\/p>\n

Nameless, investitured<\/span> with the
\nname divine,<\/p>\n

Transcending Time’s hours, transcending Timelessness,<\/p>\n

The Mighty Mother sits in lucent calm<\/p>\n

And holds the eternal Child upon her knees,<\/p>\n

Attending the day when he shall speak to Fate.<\/p>\n

There is the image of our future’s hope;<\/p>\n

There is the sun for which all darkness waits,<\/p>\n

There is the imperishable harmony;<\/p>\n

The world’s contradictions climb to her and are one:<\/p>\n

There is the Truth of which the world’s truths are shreds,<\/p>\n

The Light of which the world’s ignorance is the shade<\/p>\n

Till Truth draws back the shade that it has cast,<\/p>\n

The Love our hearts call down to heal all strife,<\/p>\n

The Bliss for which the world’s derelict sorrows yearn:<\/p>\n

Thence comes the glory sometimes seen on earth,<\/p>\n

The visits of Godhead to the human soul,<\/p>\n

The Beauty and the dream on Nature’s face.<\/p>\n

There the perfection born from
\nEternity<\/p>\n

Calls to it the perfection born in Time,<\/p>\n

The truth of God surprising human life,<\/p>\n

The image of God overtaking finite shapes.<\/p>\n

There in a world of everlasting Light,<\/p>\n

In the realms of the immortal Supermind<\/p>\n

Truth who hides here her head in mystery, <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 661<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

Her riddle deemed by reason impossible<\/p>\n

In the stark structure of material form,<\/p>\n

Unenigmaed<\/span> lives, unmasked her face
\nand there<\/p>\n

Is Nature and the common law of things.<\/p>\n

There in a body made of spirit stuff,<\/p>\n

The hearth-stone of the everlasting<\/span>
\nFire,<\/p>\n

Action translates the movements of the soul,<\/p>\n

Thought steps infallible and absolute<\/p>\n

And life is a continual worship’s rite,<\/p>\n

A sacrifice of rapture to the One.<\/p>\n

A cosmic vision, a spiritual sense<\/p>\n

Feels all the Infinite lodged in finite form<\/p>\n

And seen through a quivering ecstasy of light<\/p>\n

Discovers the bright face of the Bodiless,<\/p>\n

In the truth of a moment, in the moment’s soul<\/p>\n

Can sip the honey-wine of Eternity.<\/p>\n

A Spirit who is no one and innumerable,<\/p>\n

The one mystic infinite Person of his world<\/p>\n

Multiplies his myriad personality,<\/p>\n

On all his bodies seals his divinity’s stamp<\/p>\n

And sits in each immortal and unique.<\/p>\n

The Immobile stands behind each daily act,<\/p>\n

A background of the movement and the scene,<\/p>\n

Upholding creation on its might and calm<\/p>\n

And change on the Immutable’s<\/span>
\ndeathless poise.<\/p>\n

The Timeless looks out from the travelling<\/span>
\nhours;<\/p>\n

The Ineffable puts on a robe of speech<\/p>\n

Where all its words are woven like magic threads<\/p>\n

Moving with beauty, inspiring with their gleam,<\/p>\n

And every thought takes up its destined place<\/p>\n

Recorded in the memory of the world.<\/p>\n

The Truth supreme, vast and impersonal<\/p>\n

Fits faultlessly the hour and circumstance,<\/p>\n

Its substance a pure gold ever the same<\/p>\n

But shaped into vessels for the spirit’s use,<\/p>\n

Its gold becomes the wine jar and the vase. <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 662<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

All there is a supreme epiphany:<\/p>\n

The All-Wonderful makes a marvel of each event,<\/p>\n

The All-Beautiful is a miracle in each shape;<\/p>\n

The All-Blissful smites with rapture the heart’s throbs,<\/p>\n

A pure celestial joy is the use of sense.<\/p>\n

Each being there is a member of the Self,<\/p>\n

A portion of the million-thoughted<\/span>
\nAll,<\/p>\n

A claimant to the timeless Unity,<\/p>\n

The many’s<\/span> sweetness, the joy of difference<\/p>\n

Edged with the intimacy of the One.<\/p>\n

But who can show to thee Truth’s glorious face?<\/p>\n

Our human words can only shadow her.<\/p>\n

To thought she is an unthinkable rapture of light,<\/p>\n

To speech a marvel inexpressible.<\/p>\n

O Death, if thou couldst touch the Truth supreme<\/p>\n

Thou wouldst grow suddenly wise and cease to be.<\/p>\n

If our souls could see and love and clasp God’s Truth,<\/p>\n

Its infinite radiance would seize our hearts,<\/p>\n

Our being in God’s image be remade<\/p>\n

And earthly life become the life divine.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then Death the last time answered Savitri:<\/p>\n

\u201cIf Truth supreme transcends her shadow here<\/p>\n

Severed by Knowledge and the climbing vasts<\/span>,<\/p>\n

What bridge can cross the gulf that she has left<\/p>\n

Between her and the dream-world she has made?<\/p>\n

Or who could hope to bring her down to men<\/p>\n

And persuade to tread the harsh globe with wounded feet,<\/p>\n

Leaving her unapproachable glory and bliss,<\/p>\n

Wasting her splendour<\/span> on pale
\nearthly air?<\/p>\n

Is thine<\/span> that strength, O beauty
\nof mortal limbs,<\/p>\n

O soul who flutterest<\/span> to escape my
\nnet?<\/p>\n

Who then art thou hiding in human guise?<\/p>\n

Thy voice carries the sound of infinity,<\/p>\n

Knowledge is with thee, Truth speaks through thy words;<\/p>\n

The light of things beyond shines in thy eyes.<\/p>\n

But where is thy strength to conquer Time and Death? <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 663<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

Hast thou God’s force to build heaven’s values here?<\/p>\n

For truth and knowledge are an idle gleam,<\/p>\n

If Knowledge brings not power to change the world,<\/p>\n

If Might comes not to give to Truth her right.<\/p>\n

A blind Force, not Truth has made this ignorant world,<\/p>\n

A blind Force, not Truth orders the lives of men:<\/p>\n

By Power, not Light, the great Gods rule the world;<\/p>\n

Power is the arm of God, the seal of Fate.<\/p>\n

O human claimant to immortality,<\/p>\n

Reveal thy power, lay bare thy spirit’s force,<\/p>\n

Then will I give back to thee Satyavan.<\/p>\n

Or if the Mighty Mother is with thee,<\/p>\n

Show me her face that I may worship her;<\/p>\n

Let deathless eyes look into the eyes of Death,<\/p>\n

An imperishable Force touching brute things<\/p>\n

Transform earth’s death into immortal life.<\/p>\n

Then can thy dead
\nreturn to thee and live,<\/p>\n

The prostrate earth perhaps shall lift her gaze<\/p>\n

And feel near her the secret body of God<\/p>\n

And love and joy overtake fleeing Time.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

And Savitri looked on Death and answered not.<\/p>\n

Almost it seemed as if in his symbol shape<\/p>\n

The world’s darkness had consented to Heaven-light<\/p>\n

And God needed no more the Inconscient’s<\/span>
\nscreen.<\/p>\n

A mighty transformation came on her.<\/p>\n

A halo of the indwelling Deity,<\/p>\n

The Immortal’s lustre that had lit her face<\/p>\n

And tented its radiance in her body’s house,<\/p>\n

Overflowing made the air a luminous sea.<\/p>\n

In a flaming moment of apocalypse<\/p>\n

The Incarnation thrust aside its veil.<\/p>\n

A little figure in infinity<\/p>\n

Yet stood and seemed the Eternal’s<\/span>
\nvery house,<\/p>\n

As if the world’s centre was her very soul<\/p>\n

And all wide space was but its outer robe. <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 664<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

A curve of the calm hauteur of far heaven<\/p>\n

Descending into earth’s humility,<\/p>\n

Her forehead’s span vaulted the Omniscient’s<\/span>
\ngaze,<\/p>\n

Her eyes were two stars that watched the universe.<\/p>\n

The Power that from her being’s summit reigned,<\/p>\n

The Presence chambered in lotus secrecy,<\/p>\n

Came down and held the centre in her brow<\/p>\n

Where the mind’s Lord in his control-room sits;<\/p>\n

There throned on concentration’s native seat<\/p>\n

He opens that third mysterious eye in man,<\/p>\n

The Unseen’s<\/span> eye that looks at the
\nunseen,<\/p>\n

When Light with a golden ecstasy fills his brain<\/p>\n

And the Eternal’s<\/span> wisdom drives
\nhis choice<\/p>\n

And eternal Will seizes the mortal’s will.<\/p>\n

It stirred in the lotus of her throat of song,<\/p>\n

And in her speech throbbed the immortal Word,<\/p>\n

Her life sounded with the steps of the
\nWorld-Soul<\/p>\n

Moving in harmony with the cosmic Thought.<\/p>\n

As glides God’s sun into the mystic cave<\/p>\n

Where hides his light from the pursuing gods,<\/p>\n

It glided into the lotus of her heart<\/p>\n

And woke in it the Force that alters Fate.<\/p>\n

It poured into a
\nnavel’s lotus depth,<\/p>\n

Lodged in the little life-nature’s narrow home,<\/p>\n

On the body’s longings grew heaven-rapture’s flower<\/p>\n

And made desire a pure celestial flame,<\/p>\n

Broke into the cave where coiled World-Energy sleeps<\/p>\n

And smote the thousand-hooded serpent Force<\/p>\n

That blazing towered and clasped the World-Self above,<\/p>\n

Joined Matter’s dumbness to the Spirit’s hush<\/p>\n

And filled earth’s acts with the Spirit’s silent power.<\/p>\n

Thus changed she waited for the Word to speak.<\/p>\n

Eternity looked into the eyes of Death,<\/p>\n

And Darkness saw God’s living Reality.<\/p>\n

Then a Voice was heard that seemed the stillness’ self<\/p>\n

Or the low calm utterance of infinity <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 665<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

When it speaks to the silence in the heart of sleep.<\/p>\n

\u201cI hail thee almighty and victorious Death,<\/p>\n

Thou grandiose Darkness of the Infinite.<\/p>\n

O Void that makest<\/span> room for all to
\nbe,<\/p>\n

Hunger that gnawest<\/span> at the
\nuniverse<\/p>\n

Consuming the cold remnants of the suns<\/p>\n

And eat’st<\/span> the whole world with thy
\njaws of fire,<\/p>\n

Waster of the energy that has made the stars,<\/p>\n

Inconscience, carrier of the seeds of thought,<\/p>\n

Nescience in which All-Knowledge sleeps entombed<\/p>\n

And slowly emerges in its hollow breast<\/p>\n

Wearing the mind’s mask of bright Ignorance.<\/p>\n

Thou art my shadow and my instrument.<\/p>\n

I have given thee thy awful shape of dread<\/p>\n

And thy sharp sword of terror and grief and pain<\/p>\n

To force the soul of man to struggle for light<\/p>\n

On the brevity of his half-conscious days.<\/p>\n

Thou art his spur to greatness in his works,<\/p>\n

The whip to his yearning for eternal bliss,<\/p>\n

His poignant need of immortality.<\/p>\n

Live, Death, awhile, be still my instrument.<\/p>\n

One day man too shall know thy fathomless heart<\/p>\n

Of silence and the brooding peace of Night<\/p>\n

And grave obedience to eternal Law<\/p>\n

And the calm inflexible pity in thy gaze.<\/p>\n

But now, O timeless Mightiness, stand aside<\/p>\n

And leave the path of my incarnate Force.<\/p>\n

Relieve the radiant
\ngod from thy black mask;<\/p>\n

Release the soul of the world called Satyavan<\/p>\n

Freed from thy clutch of pain and ignorance<\/p>\n

That he may stand master of life and fate,<\/p>\n

Man’s representative in the house of God,<\/p>\n

The mate of Wisdom and the spouse of Light,<\/p>\n

The eternal bridegroom of the eternal bride.\u201d<\/p>\n

She spoke; Death unconvinced resisted still,
\nAlthough he knew refusing still to know, \n <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 666<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

Although he saw refusing still to see.<\/p>\n

Unshakable he stood claiming his right.<\/p>\n

His spirit bowed; his will obeyed the law<\/p>\n

Of its own nature binding even on Gods.<\/p>\n

The two opposed each other face to face.<\/p>\n

His being like a huge fort of darkness towered;<\/p>\n

Around it her life grew, an ocean’s siege.<\/p>\n

Awhile the Shade survived defying heaven:<\/p>\n

Assailing in front, oppressing from above,<\/p>\n

A concrete mass of conscious power, he bore<\/p>\n

The tyranny of her divine desire.<\/p>\n

A pressure of intolerable force<\/p>\n

Weighed on his unbowed head and stubborn breast;<\/p>\n

Light like a burning tongue licked up his thoughts,<\/p>\n

Light was a luminous torture in his heart,<\/p>\n

Light coursed, a splendid agony, through his nerves;<\/p>\n

His darkness muttered perishing in her blaze.<\/p>\n

Her mastering Word commanded every limb<\/p>\n

And left no room for his enormous will<\/p>\n

That seemed pushed out into some helpless space<\/p>\n

And could no more re-enter but left him void.<\/p>\n

He called to Night but she fell shuddering back,<\/p>\n

He called to Hell but sullenly it retired:<\/p>\n

He turned to the Inconscient for support,<\/p>\n

From which he was
\nborn, his vast sustaining self:<\/p>\n

It drew him back towards boundless vacancy<\/p>\n

As if by himself to swallow up himself:<\/p>\n

He called to his strength, but it refused his call.<\/p>\n

His body was eaten by light, his spirit devoured.<\/p>\n

At last he knew defeat inevitable<\/p>\n

And left crumbling the shape that he had worn,<\/p>\n

Abandoning hope to make man’s soul his prey<\/p>\n

And force to be mortal the immortal spirit.<\/p>\n

Afar he fled shunning her dreaded touch<\/p>\n

And refuge took in the retreating Night.<\/p>\n

In the dream twilight of that symbol world <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 667<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

The dire universal Shadow disappeared<\/p>\n

Vanishing into the Void from which it came.<\/p>\n

As if deprived of its original cause,<\/p>\n

The twilight realm passed fading from their souls,<\/p>\n

And Satyavan and Savitri were alone.<\/p>\n

But neither stirred: between those figures rose<\/p>\n

A mute invisible and translucent wall.<\/p>\n

In the long blank moment’s pause nothing could move:<\/p>\n

All waited on the unknown inscrutable Will.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

End of Canto Four<\/p>\n

End of Book Ten <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 668<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/td>\n

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

  Canto Four   The Dream Twilight of the Earthly Real    There came a slope that slowly downward sank; It slipped towards a stumbling…<\/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-1011","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\/1011","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=1011"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1011\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1011"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1011"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1011"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}