{"id":1019,"date":"2013-07-13T01:32:03","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:32:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=1019"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:32:03","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:32:03","slug":"22-book-10-canto-02-the-gospel-of-death-and-vanity-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\/22-book-10-canto-02-the-gospel-of-death-and-vanity-of-the-ideal-vol-29-savitri-volume-29","title":{"rendered":"-22_Book 10 Canto 02 The Gospel of Death and Vanity of the Ideal.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\n\n
 <\/td>\n\n
\n

Canto Two<\/i> <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\nThe Gospel of
\nDeath and Vanity of the Ideal<\/font><\/span> <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Then pealed the calm inexorable voice:<\/p>\n

Abolishing hope, cancelling life’s golden truths,<\/p>\n

Fatal its accents smote the trembling air.<\/p>\n

That lovely world swam thin and frail, most like<\/p>\n

Some pearly evanescent farewell gleam<\/p>\n

On the faint verge of dusk in moonless eves.<\/p>\n

\u201cPrisoner of Nature, many-visioned spirit,<\/p>\n

Thought’s creature in the ideal’s realm enjoying<\/p>\n

Thy unsubstantial immortality<\/p>\n

The subtle marvellous mind of man has feigned,<\/p>\n

This is the world from which thy yearnings came.<\/p>\n

When it would build eternity from the dust,<\/p>\n

Man’s thought paints images illusion rounds;<\/p>\n

Prophesying glories it shall never see,<\/p>\n

It labours delicately among its dreams.<\/p>\n

Behold this fleeing of light-tasselled shapes,<\/p>\n

Aerial raiment of unbodied gods;<\/p>\n

A rapture of things that never can be born,<\/p>\n

Hope chants to hope a bright immortal choir;<\/p>\n

Cloud satisfies cloud, phantom to longing phantom<\/p>\n

Leans sweetly, sweetly is clasped or sweetly chased.<\/p>\n

This is the stuff from which the ideal is formed:<\/p>\n

Its builder is thought, its base the heart’s desire,<\/p>\n

But nothing real answers to their call.<\/p>\n

The ideal dwells not in heaven, nor on the earth,<\/p>\n

A bright delirium of man’s ardour of hope<\/p>\n

Drunk with the wine of its own
\nphantasy.<\/p>\n

It is a brilliant shadow’s dreamy trail.<\/p>\n

Thy vision’s error builds the azure skies,<\/p>\n

Thy vision’s error drew the rainbow’s arch; <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 607<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

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

Thy mortal longing made for thee a soul.<\/p>\n

This angel in thy body thou callst love,<\/p>\n

Who shapes his wings from thy emotion’s hues,<\/p>\n

In a ferment of thy body has been born<\/p>\n

And with the body that housed it it must die.<\/p>\n

It is a passion of thy yearning cells,<\/p>\n

It is flesh that calls to flesh to serve its lust;<\/p>\n

It is thy mind that seeks an answering mind<\/p>\n

And dreams awhile that it has found its mate;<\/p>\n

It is thy life that asks a human prop<\/p>\n

To uphold its weakness lonely in the world<\/p>\n

Or feeds its hunger on another’s life.<\/p>\n

A beast of prey that pauses in its prowl,<\/p>\n

It crouches under a bush in splendid flower<\/p>\n

To seize a heart and body for its food:<\/p>\n

This beast thou dreamst immortal and a god.<\/p>\n

O human mind, vainly thou torturest<\/p>\n

An hour’s delight to stretch through infinity’s<\/p>\n

Long void and fill its formless, passionless gulfs,<\/p>\n

Persuading the insensible Abyss<\/p>\n

To lend eternity to perishing things,<\/p>\n

And trickst the fragile movements of thy heart<\/p>\n

With thy spirit’s feint of immortality.<\/p>\n

All here emerges born from Nothingness;<\/p>\n

Encircled it lasts by the emptiness of Space,<\/p>\n

Awhile upheld by an unknowing Force,<\/p>\n

Then crumbles back into its parent Nought:<\/p>\n

Only the mute Alone can ever be.<\/p>\n

In the Alone there is no room for love.<\/p>\n

In vain to clothe love’s perishable mud<\/p>\n

Thou hast woven on the Immortal’s borrowed loom<\/p>\n

The ideal’s gorgeous and unfading robe.<\/p>\n

The ideal never yet was real made.<\/p>\n

Imprisoned in form that glory cannot live;<\/p>\n

Into a body shut it breathes no more.<\/p>\n

Intangible, remote, for ever pure, <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 608<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

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

A sovereign of its own brilliant void,<\/p>\n

Unwillingly it descends to earthly air<\/p>\n

To inhabit a white temple in man’s heart:<\/p>\n

In his heart it shines rejected by his life.<\/p>\n

Immutable, bodiless, beautiful, grand and dumb,<\/p>\n

Immobile on its shining throne it sits;<\/p>\n

Dumb it receives his offering and his prayer.<\/p>\n

It has no voice to answer to his call,<\/p>\n

No feet that move, no hands to take his gifts:<\/p>\n

Aerial statue of the nude Idea,<\/p>\n

Virgin conception of a bodiless god,<\/p>\n

Its light stirs man the thinker to create<\/p>\n

An earthly semblance of diviner things.<\/p>\n

Its hued reflection falls upon man’s acts;<\/p>\n

His institutions are its cenotaphs,<\/p>\n

He signs his dead conventions with its name;<\/p>\n

His virtues don the Ideal’s skiey robe<\/p>\n

And a nimbus of the outline of its face:<\/p>\n

He hides their littleness with the divine Name.<\/p>\n

Yet insufficient is the bright pretence<\/p>\n

To screen their indigent and earthy make:<\/p>\n

Earth only is there and not some heavenly source.<\/p>\n

If heavens there are they are veiled in their own light,<\/p>\n

If a Truth eternal somewhere reigns unknown,<\/p>\n

It burns in a tremendous void of God;<\/p>\n

For truth shines far from the falsehoods of the world;<\/p>\n

How can the heavens come down to unhappy earth<\/p>\n

Or the eternal lodge in drifting time?<\/p>\n

How shall the Ideal tread earth’s dolorous soil<\/p>\n

Where life is only a labour and a hope,<\/p>\n

A child of Matter and by Matter fed,<\/p>\n

A fire flaming low in Nature’s grate,<\/p>\n

A journey’s toilsome trudge with death for goal?<\/p>\n

The Avatars have lived and died in vain,<\/p>\n

Vain was the sage’s thought, the prophet’s voice;<\/p>\n

In vain is seen the shining upward Way. <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 609<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

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

Earth lies unchanged beneath the circling sun;<\/p>\n

She loves her fall and no omnipotence<\/p>\n

Her mortal imperfections can erase,<\/p>\n

Force on man’s crooked ignorance Heaven’s straight line<\/p>\n

Or colonise a world of death with gods.<\/p>\n

O traveller in the chariot of the Sun,<\/p>\n

High priestess in the holy fancy’s shrine<\/p>\n

Who with a magic ritual in earth’s house<\/p>\n

Worshippest ideal and eternal love,<\/p>\n

What is this love thy thought has deified,<\/p>\n

This sacred legend and immortal myth?<\/p>\n

It is a conscious yearning of thy flesh,<\/p>\n

It is a glorious burning of thy nerves,<\/p>\n

A rose of dream-splendour petalling thy mind,<\/p>\n

A great red rapture and torture of thy heart.<\/p>\n

A sudden transfiguration of thy days,<\/p>\n

It passes and the world is as before.<\/p>\n

A ravishing edge of sweetness and of pain,<\/p>\n

A thrill in its yearning makes it seem divine,<\/p>\n

A golden bridge across the roar of the years,<\/p>\n

A cord tying thee to eternity.<\/p>\n

And yet how brief and frail! how soon is spent<\/p>\n

This treasure wasted by the gods on man,<\/p>\n

This happy closeness as of soul to soul,<\/p>\n

This honey of the body’s companionship,<\/p>\n

This heightened joy, this ecstasy in the veins,<\/p>\n

This strange illumination of the sense!<\/p>\n

If Satyavan had lived, love would have died;<\/p>\n

But Satyavan is dead and love shall live<\/p>\n

A little while in thy sad breast, until<\/p>\n

His face and body fade on memory’s wall<\/p>\n

Where other bodies, other faces come.<\/p>\n

When love breaks suddenly into the life<\/p>\n

At first man steps into a world of the sun;<\/p>\n

In his passion he feels his heavenly element:<\/p>\n

But only a fine sunlit patch of earth <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 610<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

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

The marvellous aspect
\ntook of heaven’s outburst.<\/p>\n

The snake is there and the worm in the heart of the rose.<\/p>\n

A word, a moment’s act can slay the god;<\/p>\n

Precarious is his immortality,<\/p>\n

He has a thousand
\nways to suffer and die;<\/p>\n

Love cannot live by heavenly food alone,<\/p>\n

Only on sap of earth can it survive.<\/p>\n

For thy passion was a
\nsensual want refined;<\/p>\n

A hunger of the body and the heart;<\/p>\n

Thy want can tire and
\ncease or turn elsewhere<\/p>\n

Or love may meet a dire and pitiless end<\/p>\n

By bitter treason, or wrath with cruel wounds<\/p>\n

Separate, or thy unsatisfied will to others<\/p>\n

Depart when first love’s joy lies stripped and slain:<\/p>\n

A dull indifference replaces fire<\/p>\n

Or an endearing habit imitates love:<\/p>\n

An outward and uneasy union lasts<\/p>\n

Or the routine of a
\nlife’s compromise.<\/p>\n

Where once the seed of oneness had been cast<\/p>\n

Into a semblance of spiritual ground<\/p>\n

By a divine adventure of heavenly powers<\/p>\n

Two strive, constant associates without joy,<\/p>\n

Two egos straining in a single leash,<\/p>\n

Two minds divided by their jarring thoughts,<\/p>\n

Two spirits disjoined, for ever separate.<\/p>\n

Thus is the ideal falsified in man’s world;<\/p>\n

Trivial or sombre, disillusion comes,<\/p>\n

Life’s harsh reality stares at the soul:<\/p>\n

Heaven’s hour adjourned flees into bodiless Time.<\/p>\n

Death saves thee from this and saves Satyavan:<\/p>\n

He now is safe, delivered from himself;<\/p>\n

He travels to silence and felicity.<\/p>\n

Call him not back to the treacheries of earth<\/p>\n

And the poor petty life of animal Man.<\/p>\n

In my vast tranquil spaces let him sleep<\/p>\n

In harmony with the mighty hush of death <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 611<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

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

Where love lies slumbering on the breast of peace.<\/p>\n

And thou, go back alone to thy frail world:<\/p>\n

Chastise thy heart with knowledge, unhood
\nto see,<\/p>\n

Thy nature raised into clear living heights,<\/p>\n

The heaven-bird’s view from unimagined peaks.<\/p>\n

For when thou givest thy spirit to a dream<\/p>\n

Soon hard necessity will smite thee awake:<\/p>\n

Purest delight began and it must end.<\/p>\n

Thou too shalt know, thy heart no anchor swinging,<\/p>\n

Thy cradled soul moored in eternal seas.<\/p>\n

Vain are the cycles of thy brilliant mind.<\/p>\n

Renounce, forgetting joy and hope and tears,<\/p>\n

Thy passionate nature in the bosom profound<\/p>\n

Of a happy Nothingness and wordless Calm,<\/p>\n

Delivered into my mysterious rest.<\/p>\n

One with my fathomless Nihil all forget.<\/p>\n

Forget thy fruitless spirit’s waste of force,<\/p>\n

Forget the weary circle of thy birth,<\/p>\n

Forget the joy and the struggle and the pain,<\/p>\n

The vague spiritual quest which first began<\/p>\n

When worlds broke forth like clusters of fire-flowers,<\/p>\n

And great burning thoughts voyaged through the sky of mind<\/p>\n

And Time and its aeons crawled across the vasts<\/p>\n

And souls emerged into mortality.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Savitri replied to the dark Power:<\/p>\n

\u201cA dangerous music now thou findst, O Death,<\/p>\n

Melting thy speech into harmonious pain,<\/p>\n

And flut’st alluringly to tired hopes<\/p>\n

Thy falsehoods mingled with sad strains of truth.<\/p>\n

But I forbid thy voice to slay my soul.<\/p>\n

My love is not a hunger of the heart,<\/p>\n

My love is not a craving of the flesh;<\/p>\n

It came to me from God, to God returns.<\/p>\n

Even in all that life and man have marred,<\/p>\n

A whisper of divinity still is heard,<\/p>\n

A breath is felt from the eternal spheres. <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 612<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

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

Allowed by Heaven and wonderful to man<\/p>\n

A sweet fire-rhythm of passion chants to love.<\/p>\n

There is a hope in its wild infinite cry;<\/p>\n

It rings with callings from forgotten heights,<\/p>\n

And when its strains are hushed to high-winged souls<\/p>\n

In their empyrean, its burning breath<\/p>\n

Survives beyond, the rapturous core of suns<\/p>\n

That flame for ever pure in skies unseen,<\/p>\n

A voice of the eternal Ecstasy.<\/p>\n

One day I shall behold my great sweet world<\/p>\n

Put off the dire disguises of the gods,<\/p>\n

Unveil from terror and disrobe from sin.<\/p>\n

Appeased we shall draw near our
\nMother’s face,<\/p>\n

We shall cast our candid souls upon her lap;<\/p>\n

Then shall we clasp the ecstasy we chase,<\/p>\n

Then shall we shudder with the long-sought god,<\/p>\n

Then shall we find Heaven’s unexpected strain.<\/p>\n

Not only is there hope for godheads pure;<\/p>\n

The violent and darkened deities<\/p>\n

Leaped down from the one breast in rage to find<\/p>\n

What the white gods had missed: they too are safe;<\/p>\n

A Mother’s eyes are on them and her arms<\/p>\n

Stretched out in love desire her rebel sons.<\/p>\n

One who came, love and lover and beloved<\/p>\n

Eternal, built himself a wondrous field<\/p>\n

And wove the measures of a marvellous dance.<\/p>\n

There in its circles and its magic turns<\/p>\n

Attracted he arrives, repelled he flees.<\/p>\n

In the wild devious promptings of his mind<\/p>\n

He tastes the honey of tears and puts off joy<\/p>\n

Repenting, and has laughter and has wrath,<\/p>\n

And both are a broken music of the soul<\/p>\n

Which seeks out, reconciled, its heavenly rhyme.<\/p>\n

Ever he comes to us across the years<\/p>\n

Bearing a sweet new face that is the old.<\/p>\n

His bliss laughs to us or it calls concealed <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 613<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

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

Like a far-heard unseen entrancing flute<\/p>\n

From moonlit branches in the throbbing woods,<\/p>\n

Tempting our angry search and passionate pain.<\/p>\n

Disguised the Lover seeks and draws our souls.<\/p>\n

He named himself for me, grew Satyavan.<\/p>\n

For we are man and woman from the first,<\/p>\n

The twin souls born from one undying fire.<\/p>\n

Did he not dawn on me in other stars?<\/p>\n

How has he through the thickets of the world<\/p>\n

Pursued me like a lion in the night<\/p>\n

And come upon me suddenly in the ways<\/p>\n

And seized me with his glorious golden leap!<\/p>\n

Unsatisfied he yearned for me through time,<\/p>\n

Sometimes with wrath and sometimes with sweet peace,<\/p>\n

Desiring me since first the world began.<\/p>\n

He rose like a wild wave out of the floods<\/p>\n

And dragged me helpless into seas of bliss.<\/p>\n

Out of my curtained
\npast his arms arrived;<\/p>\n

They have touched me like the soft persuading wind,<\/p>\n

They have plucked me like a glad and trembling flower,<\/p>\n

And clasped me happily burned in ruthless flame.<\/p>\n

I too have found him charmed in lovely forms<\/p>\n

And run delighted to his distant voice<\/p>\n

And pressed to him past many dreadful bars.<\/p>\n

If there is a yet happier greater god,<\/p>\n

Let him first wear the face of Satyavan<\/p>\n

And let his soul be one with him I love;<\/p>\n

So let him seek me that I may desire.<\/p>\n

For only one heart beats within my breast<\/p>\n

And one god sits there throned. Advance, O Death,<\/p>\n

Beyond the phantom beauty of this world;<\/p>\n

For of its citizens I am not one.<\/p>\n

I cherish God the Fire, not God the Dream.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Death once more inflicted on her heart<\/p>\n

The majesty of his calm and dreadful voice:<\/p>\n

\u201cA bright hallucination are thy thoughts. <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 614<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

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

A prisoner haled by a spiritual cord,<\/p>\n

Of thy own sensuous will the ardent slave,<\/p>\n

Thou sendest eagle-poised to meet the sun<\/p>\n

Words winged with the red splendour of thy heart.<\/p>\n

But knowledge dwells not in the passionate heart;<\/p>\n

The heart’s words fall back unheard from Wisdom’s throne.<\/p>\n

Vain is thy longing to build heaven on earth.<\/p>\n

Artificer of Ideal and Idea,<\/p>\n

Mind, child of Matter in the womb of Life,<\/p>\n

To higher levels
\npersuades his parents’ steps;<\/p>\n

Inapt, they follow ill the daring guide.<\/p>\n

But Mind, a glorious traveller in the sky,<\/p>\n

Walks lamely on the earth with footsteps slow;<\/p>\n

Hardly he can mould the life’s rebellious stuff,<\/p>\n

Hardly can he hold the galloping hooves of sense:<\/p>\n

His thoughts look straight into the very heavens;<\/p>\n

They draw their gold from a celestial mine,<\/p>\n

His acts work painfully a common ore.<\/p>\n

All thy high dreams were made by Matter’s mind<\/p>\n

To solace its dull work in Matter’s jail,<\/p>\n

Its only house where it alone seems true.<\/p>\n

A solid image of reality<\/p>\n

Carved out being to
\nprop the works of Time;<\/p>\n

Matter on the firm earth sits strong and sure.<\/p>\n

It is the first-born of created things,<\/p>\n

It stands the last when mind and life are slain,<\/p>\n

And if it ended all would cease to be.<\/p>\n

All else is only its outcome or its phase:<\/p>\n

Thy soul is a brief flower by the gardener Mind<\/p>\n

Created on thy Matter’s terrain plot;<\/p>\n

It perishes with the plant on which it grows,<\/p>\n

For from earth’s sap it draws its heavenly hue:<\/p>\n

Thy thoughts are gleams that pass on Matter’s verge,<\/p>\n

Thy life a lapsing wave on Matter’s sea.<\/p>\n

A careful steward of Truth’s limited means,<\/p>\n

Treasuring her founded facts from the squandering Power, <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 615<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

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

It tethers mind to the tent-posts of sense,<\/p>\n

To a leaden grey routine clamps Life’s caprice<\/p>\n

And ties all creatures with the cords of Law.<\/p>\n

A vessel of transmuting alchemies,<\/p>\n

A glue that sticks together mind and life,<\/p>\n

If Matter fails, all crumbling cracks and falls.<\/p>\n

All upon Matter stands as on a rock.<\/p>\n

Yet this security and guarantor<\/p>\n

Pressed for credentials an impostor proves:<\/p>\n

A cheat of substance where no substance is,<\/p>\n

An appearance and a symbol and a nought,<\/p>\n

Its forms have no original right to birth:<\/p>\n

Its aspect of a fixed stability<\/p>\n

Is the cover of a captive motion’s swirl,<\/p>\n

An order of the steps of Energy’s dance<\/p>\n

Whose footmarks leave for ever the same signs,<\/p>\n

A concrete face of unsubstantial Time,<\/p>\n

A trickle dotting the emptiness of Space:<\/p>\n

A stable-seeming movement without change,<\/p>\n

Yet change arrives and the last change is death.<\/p>\n

What seemed most real once, is Nihil’s show.<\/p>\n

Its figures are snares that trap and prison the sense;<\/p>\n

The beginningless void was its artificer:<\/p>\n

Nothing is there but aspects limned by Chance<\/p>\n

And seeming shapes of seeming Energy.<\/p>\n

All by Death’s mercy breathe and live awhile,<\/p>\n

All think and act by the Inconscient’s grace.<\/p>\n

Addict of the roseate luxury of thy thoughts,<\/p>\n

Turn not thy gaze within thyself to look<\/p>\n

At visions in the gleaming crystal, Mind,<\/p>\n

Close not thy lids to dream the forms of Gods.<\/p>\n

At last to open thy eyes consent and see<\/p>\n

The stuff of which thou and the world are made.<\/p>\n

Inconscient in the
\nstill inconscient Void<\/p>\n

Inexplicably a moving world sprang forth:<\/p>\n

Awhile secure, happily insensible, <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 616<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

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

It could not rest content with its own truth.<\/p>\n

For something on its nescient breast was born<\/p>\n

Condemned to see and know, to feel and love,<\/p>\n

It watched its acts, imagined a soul within;<\/p>\n

It groped for truth and dreamed of Self and God.<\/p>\n

When all unconscious was, then all was well.<\/p>\n

I, Death, was king and kept my regal state,<\/p>\n

Designing my unwilled, unerring plan,<\/p>\n

Creating with a calm insentient heart.<\/p>\n

In my sovereign power of unreality<\/p>\n

Obliging nothingness to take a form,<\/p>\n

Infallibly my blind unthinking force<\/p>\n

Making by chance a fixity like fate’s,<\/p>\n

By whim the formulas of Necessity,<\/p>\n

Founded on the hollow ground of the Inane<\/p>\n

The sure bizarrerie of Nature’s scheme.<\/p>\n

I curbed the vacant ether into Space;<\/p>\n

A huge expanding and contracting
\nbreath<\/p>\n

Harboured the fires of the universe:<\/p>\n

I struck out the supreme original spark<\/p>\n

And spread its sparse ranked armies through the Inane,<\/p>\n

Manufactured the stars from the occult radiances,<\/p>\n

Marshalled the platoons of the invisible dance;<\/p>\n

I formed earth’s beauty out of atom and gas,<\/p>\n

And built from chemic plasm the living man.<\/p>\n

Then Thought came in
\nand spoilt the harmonious world:<\/p>\n

Matter began to hope and think and feel,<\/p>\n

Tissue and nerve bore joy and agony.<\/p>\n

The inconscient cosmos strove to learn its task;<\/p>\n

An ignorant personal
\ngod was born in Mind<\/p>\n

And to understand invented reason’s law,<\/p>\n

The impersonal Vast throbbed back to man’s desire,<\/p>\n

A trouble rocked the great world’s blind still heart<\/p>\n

And Nature lost her wide immortal calm.<\/p>\n

Thus came this warped incomprehensible scene<\/p>\n

Of souls emmeshed in life’s delight and pain <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 617<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

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

And Matter’s sleep and Mind’s mortality,<\/p>\n

Of beings in Nature’s prison waiting death<\/p>\n

And consciousness left in seeking ignorance.<\/p>\n

This is the world in which thou mov’st, astray<\/p>\n

In the tangled pathways of the human mind,<\/p>\n

In the issueless circling of thy human life,<\/p>\n

Searching for thy soul and thinking God is here.<\/p>\n

But where is room for soul or place for God<\/p>\n

In the brute immensity of a machine?<\/p>\n

A transient Breath thou takest for thy soul,<\/p>\n

Born from a gas, a plasm, a sperm, a gene,<\/p>\n

A magnified image of man’s mind for God,<\/p>\n

A shadow of thyself thrown upon Space.<\/p>\n

Interposed between the upper and nether Void,<\/p>\n

Thy consciousness reflects the world around<\/p>\n

In the distorting mirror of Ignorance<\/p>\n

Or upwards turns to catch imagined stars.<\/p>\n

Or if a half Truth is playing with the earth<\/p>\n

Throwing its light on a dark shadowy ground,<\/p>\n

It touches only and leaves a luminous smudge.<\/p>\n

Immortality thou claimest for thy spirit,<\/p>\n

But immortality for imperfect man,<\/p>\n

A god who hurts himself at every step,<\/p>\n

Would be a cycle of eternal pain.<\/p>\n

Wisdom and love thou claimest as thy right;<\/p>\n

But knowledge in this world is error’s make,<\/p>\n

A brilliant procuress of Nescience,<\/p>\n

And human love a posturer on earth-stage<\/p>\n

Who imitates with verve a faery dance.<\/p>\n

An extract pressed from hard experience,<\/p>\n

Man’s knowledge casked in the barrels of Memory<\/p>\n

Has the harsh savour of a mortal draught:<\/p>\n

A sweet secretion from the erotic glands<\/p>\n

Flattering and torturing the burning nerves,<\/p>\n

Love is a honey and poison in the breast<\/p>\n

Drunk by it as the nectar of the gods. <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 618<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

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

Earth’s human wisdom is no great-browed power,<\/p>\n

And love no gleaming
\nangel from the skies.<\/p>\n

If they aspire beyond earth’s dullard air,<\/p>\n

Arriving sunwards
\nwith frail waxen wings<\/p>\n

How high could reach that forced unnatural flight?<\/p>\n

But not on earth can divine wisdom reign<\/p>\n

And not on earth can divine love be found;<\/p>\n

Heaven-born, only in
\nheaven can they live,<\/p>\n

Or else there too perhaps they are shining dreams.<\/p>\n

Nay, is not all thou art and doest a dream?<\/p>\n

Thy mind and life are tricks of Matter’s force.<\/p>\n

If thy mind seems to thee a radiant sun,<\/p>\n

If thy life runs a swift and glorious
\ndream,<\/p>\n

This is the illusion of thy mortal heart<\/p>\n

Dazzled by a ray of happiness or light.<\/p>\n

Impotent to live by their own right divine,<\/p>\n

Convinced of their brilliant unreality,<\/p>\n

When their supporting ground is cut away,<\/p>\n

These children of Matter into Matter die.<\/p>\n

Even Matter vanishes into Energy’s vague<\/p>\n

And Energy is a motion of old Nought.<\/p>\n

How shall the Ideal’s unsubstantial hues<\/p>\n

Be painted stiff on earth’s vermilion blur,<\/p>\n

A dream within a dream come doubly true?<\/p>\n

How shall the will-o’-the-wisp become a star?<\/p>\n

The Ideal is a malady of thy mind,<\/p>\n

A bright delirium of thy speech and thought,<\/p>\n

A strange wine of beauty lifting thee to false sight.<\/p>\n

A noble fiction of thy yearnings made,<\/p>\n

Thy human imperfection it must share:<\/p>\n

Its forms in Nature disappoint the heart,<\/p>\n

And never shall it find its heavenly shape<\/p>\n

And never can it be fulfilled in Time.<\/p>\n

O soul misled by the splendour of thy thoughts,<\/p>\n

O earthly creature with thy dream of heaven,<\/p>\n

Obey, resigned and still, the earthly law. <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 619<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

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

Accept the light that falls upon thy days;<\/p>\n

Take what thou canst
\nof Life’s permitted joy,<\/p>\n

Submitting to the ordeal of
\nFate’s scourge<\/p>\n

Suffer what thou must of toil and grief and care.<\/p>\n

There shall approach silencing thy passionate heart<\/p>\n

My long calm night of everlasting sleep:<\/p>\n

There into the hush from which thou cam’st retire.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

End of Canto Two <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 620<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/td>\n

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

  Canto Two    The Gospel of Death and Vanity of the Ideal    Then pealed the calm inexorable voice: Abolishing hope, cancelling life’s golden…<\/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-1019","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\/1019","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=1019"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1019\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1019"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1019"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1019"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}