Canto One

The Joy of Union; the Ordeal of the Foreknowledge of Death and the Heart’s Grief and Pain

Fate followed her foreseen immutable road.

Man’s hopes and longings build the journeying wheels

That bear the body of his destiny

And lead his blind will towards an unknown goal.

His fate within him shapes his acts and rules;

Its face and form already are born in him,

Its parentage is in his secret soul:

Here Matter seems to mould the body’s life

And the soul follows where its nature drives.

Nature and Fate compel his free-will’s choice.

But greater spirits this balance can reverse

And make the soul the artist of its fate.

This is the mystic truth our ignorance hides:

Doom is a passage for our inborn force,

Our ordeal is the hidden spirit’s choice,

Ananke is our being’s own decree.

All was fulfilled the heart of Savitri

Flower-sweet and adamant, passionate and calm,

Had chosen and on her strength’s unbending road

Forced to its issue the long cosmic curve.

Once more she sat behind loud hastening hooves;

A speed of armoured squadrons and a voice

Far-heard of chariots bore her from her home.

A couchant earth wakened in its dumb muse

Looked up at her from a vast indolence:

Hills wallowing in a bright haze, large lands

That lolled at ease beneath the summer heavens,

Region on region spacious in the sun,

Cities like chrysolites in the wide blaze

And yellow rivers pacing lion-maned

Led to the Shalwa marches’ emerald line,

A happy front to iron vastnesses

And austere peaks and titan solitudes.

Once more was near the fair and fated place,

The borders gleaming with the groves’ delight

Where first she met the face of Satyavan

And he saw like one waking into a dream

Some timeless beauty and reality,

The moon-gold sweetness of heaven’s earth-born child.

The past receded and the future neared:

Far now behind lay Madra’s spacious halls,

The white carved pillars, the cool dim alcoves,

The tinged mosaic of the crystal floors,

The towered pavilions, the wind-rippled pools

And gardens humming with the murmur of bees,

Forgotten soon or a pale memory

The fountain’s plash in the white stone-bound pool,

The thoughtful noontide’s brooding solemn trance,

The colonnade’s dream grey in the quiet eve,

The slow moonrise gliding in front of Night.

Left far behind were now the faces known,

The happy silken babble on laughter’s lips

And the close-clinging clasp of intimate hands

And adoration’s light in cherished eyes

Offered to the one sovereign of their life.

Nature’s primaeval loneliness was here:

Here only was the voice of bird and beast, –

The ascetic’s exile in the dim-souled huge

Inhuman forest far from cheerful sound

Of man’s blithe converse and his crowded days.

In a broad eve with one red eye of cloud,

Through a narrow opening, a green flowered cleft,

Out of the stare of sky and soil they came

Into a mighty home of emerald dusk.

There onward led by a faint brooding path

Which toiled through the shadow of enormous trunks

And under arches misers of sunshine,

They saw low thatched roofs of a hermitage

Huddled beneath a patch of azure hue

In a sunlit clearing that seemed the outbreak

Of a glad smile in the forest’s monstrous heart,

A rude refuge of the thought and will of man

Watched by the crowding giants of the wood.

Arrived in that rough-hewn homestead they gave,

Questioning no more the strangeness of her fate,

Their pride and loved one to the great blind king,

A regal pillar of fallen mightiness

And the stately care-worn woman once a queen

Who now hoped nothing for herself from life,

But all things only hoped for her one child,

Calling on that single head from partial Fate

All joy of earth, all heaven’s beatitude.

Adoring wisdom and beauty like a young god’s,

She saw him loved by heaven as by herself,

She rejoiced in his brightness and believed in his fate

And knew not of the evil drawing near.

Lingering some days upon the forest verge

Like men who lengthen out departure’s pain,

Unwilling to separate sorrowful clinging hands,

Unwilling to see for the last time a face,

Heavy with the sorrow of a coming day

And wondering at the carelessness of Fate

Who breaks with idle hands her supreme works,

They parted from her with pain-fraught burdened hearts

As forced by inescapable fate we part

From one whom we shall never see again;

Driven by the singularity of her fate,

Helpless against the choice of Savitri’s heart

They left her to her rapture and her doom

In the tremendous forest’s savage charge.

All put behind her that was once her life,

All welcomed that henceforth was his and hers,

She abode with Satyavan in the wild woods:

Priceless she deemed her joy so close to death;

Apart with love she lived for love alone.

As if self-poised above the march of days,

Her immobile spirit watched the haste of Time,

A statue of passion and invincible force,

An absolutism of sweet imperious will,

A tranquillity and a violence of the gods

Indomitable and immutable.

At first to her beneath the sapphire heavens

The sylvan solitude was a gorgeous dream,

An altar of the summer’s splendour and fire,

A sky-topped flower-hung palace of the gods

And all its scenes a smile on rapture’s lips

And all its voices bards of happiness.

There was a chanting in the casual wind,

There was a glory in the least sunbeam;

Night was a chrysoprase on velvet cloth,

A nestling darkness or a moonlit deep;

Day was a purple pageant and a hymn,

A wave of the laughter of light from morn to eve.

His absence was a dream of memory,

His presence was the empire of a god.

A fusing of the joys of earth and heaven,

A tremulous blaze of nuptial rapture passed,

A rushing of two spirits to be one,

A burning of two bodies in one flame.

Opened were gates of unforgettable bliss:

Two lives were locked within an earthly heaven

And fate and grief fled from that fiery hour.

But soon now failed the summer’s ardent breath

And throngs of blue-black clouds crept through the sky

And rain fled sobbing over the dripping leaves

And storm became the forest’s titan voice.

Then listening to the thunder’s fatal crash

And the fugitive pattering footsteps of the showers

And the long unsatisfied panting of the wind

And sorrow muttering in the sound-vexed night,

The grief of all the world came near to her.

Night’s darkness seemed her future’s ominous face.

The shadow of her lover’s doom arose

And fear laid hands upon her mortal heart.

The moments swift and ruthless raced; alarmed

Her thoughts, her mind remembered Narad’s date.

A trembling moved accountant of her riches,

She reckoned the insufficient days between:

A dire expectancy knocked at her breast;

Dreadful to her were the footsteps of the hours:

Grief came, a passionate stranger to her gate:

Banished when in his arms, out of her sleep

It rose at morn to look into her face.

Vainly she fled into abysms of bliss

From her pursuing foresight of the end.

The more she plunged into love that anguish grew;

Her deepest grief from sweetest gulfs arose.

Remembrance was a poignant pang, she felt

Each day a golden leaf torn cruelly out

From her too slender book of love and joy.

Thus swaying in strong gusts of happiness

And swimming in foreboding’s sombre waves

And feeding sorrow and terror with her heart, –

For now they sat among her bosom’s guests

Or in her inner chamber paced apart, –

Her eyes stared blind into the future’s night.

Out of her separate self she looked and saw,

Moving amid the unconscious faces loved,

In mind a stranger though in heart so near,

The ignorant smiling world go happily by

Upon its way towards an unknown doom

And wondered at the careless lives of men.

As if in different worlds they walked, though close,

They confident of the returning sun,

They wrapped in little hourly hopes and tasks, –

She in her dreadful knowledge was alone.

The rich and happy secrecy that once

Enshrined her as if in a silver bower

Apart in a bright nest of thoughts and dreams

Made room for tragic hours of solitude

And lonely grief that none could share or know,

A body seeing the end too soon of joy

And the fragile happiness of its mortal love.

Her quiet visage still and sweet and calm,

Her graceful daily acts were now a mask;

In vain she looked upon her depths to find

A ground of stillness and the spirit’s peace.

Still veiled from her was the silent Being within

Who sees life’s drama pass with unmoved eyes,

Supports the sorrow of the mind and heart

And bears in human breasts the world and fate.

A glimpse or flashes came, the Presence was hid.

Only her violent heart and passionate will

Were pushed in front to meet the immutable doom;

Defenceless, nude, bound to her human lot

They had no means to act, no way to save.

These she controlled, nothing was shown outside:

She was still to them the child they knew and loved;

The sorrowing woman they saw not within.

No change was in her beautiful motions seen:

A worshipped empress all once vied to serve,

She made herself the diligent serf of all,

Nor spared the labour of broom and jar and well,

Or close gentle tending or to heap the fire

Of altar and kitchen, no slight task allowed

To others that her woman’s strength might do.

In all her acts a strange divinity shone:

Into a simplest movement she could bring

A oneness with earth’s glowing robe of light,

A lifting up of common acts by love.

All-love was hers and its one heavenly cord

Bound all to all with her as golden tie.

But when her grief to the surface pressed too close,

These things, once gracious adjuncts of her joy,

Seemed meaningless to her, a gleaming shell,

Or were a round mechanical and void,

Her body’s actions shared not by her will.

Always behind this strange divided life

Her spirit like a sea of living fire

Possessed her lover and to his body clung,

One locked embrace to guard its threatened mate.

At night she woke through the slow silent hours

Brooding on the treasure of his bosom and face,

Hung o’er the sleep-bound beauty of his brow

Or laid her burning cheek upon his feet.

Waking at morn her lips endlessly clung to his,

Unwilling ever to separate again

Or lose that honeyed drain of lingering joy,

Unwilling to loose his body from her breast,

The warm inadequate signs that love must use.

Intolerant of the poverty of Time

Her passion catching at the fugitive hours

Willed the expense of centuries in one day

Of prodigal love and the surf of ecstasy;

Or else she strove even in mortal time

To build a little room for timelessness

By the deep union of two human lives,

Her soul secluded shut into his soul.

After all was given she demanded still;

Even by his strong embrace unsatisfied,

She longed to cry, “O tender Satyavan,

O lover of my soul, give more, give more

Of love while yet thou canst, to her thou lov’st.

Imprint thyself for every nerve to keep

That thrills to thee the message of my heart.

For soon we part and who shall know how long

Before the great wheel in its monstrous round

Restore us to each other and our love?”

Too well she loved to speak a fateful word

And lay her burden on his happy head;

She pressed the outsurging grief back into her breast

To dwell within silent, unhelped, alone.

But Satyavan sometimes half understood,

Or felt at least with the uncertain answer

Of our thought-blinded hearts the unuttered need,

The unplumbed abyss of her deep passionate want.

All of his speeding days that he could spare

From labour in the forest hewing wood

And hunting food in the wild sylvan glades

And service to his father’s sightless life

He gave to her and helped to increase the hours

By the nearness of his presence and his clasp,

And lavish softness of heart-seeking words

And the close beating felt of heart on heart.

All was too little for her bottomless need.

If in his presence she forgot awhile,

Grief filled his absence with its aching touch;

She saw the desert of her coming days

Imaged in every solitary hour.

Although with a vain imaginary bliss

Of fiery union through death’s door of escape

She dreamed of her body robed in funeral flame,

She knew she must not clutch that happiness

To die with him and follow, seizing his robe

Across our other countries, travellers glad

Into the sweet or terrible Beyond.

For those sad parents still would need her here

To help the empty remnant of their day.

Often it seemed to her the ages’ pain

Had pressed their quintessence into her single woe,

Concentrating in her a tortured world.

Thus in the silent chamber of her soul

Cloistering her love to live with secret grief

She dwelt like a dumb priest with hidden gods

Unappeased by the wordless offering of her days,

Lifting to them her sorrow like frankincense,

Her life the altar, herself the sacrifice.

Yet ever they grew into each other more

Until it seemed no power could rend apart,

Since even the body’s walls could not divide.

For when he wandered in the forest, oft

Her conscious spirit walked with him and knew

His actions as if in herself he moved;

He, less aware, thrilled with her from afar.

Always the stature of her passion grew;

Grief, fear became the food of mighty love.

Increased by its torment it filled the whole world;

It was all her life, became her whole earth and heaven.

Although life-born, an infant of the hours,

Immortal it walked unslayable as the gods:

Her spirit stretched measureless in strength divine,

An anvil for the blows of Fate and Time:

Or tired of sorrow’s passionate luxury,

Grief’s self became calm, dull-eyed, resolute,

Awaiting some issue of its fiery struggle,

Some deed in which it might for ever cease,

Victorious over itself and death and tears.

The year now paused upon the brink of change.

No more the storms sailed with stupendous wings

And thunder strode in wrath across the world,

But still was heard a muttering in the sky

And rain dripped wearily through the mournful air

And grey slow-drifting clouds shut in the earth.

So her grief’s heavy sky shut in her heart.

A still self hid behind but gave no light:

No voice came down from the forgotten heights;

Only in the privacy of its brooding pain

Her human heart spoke to the body’s fate.

End of Canto One

Canto Two

The Parable of the Search for the Soul

As in the vigilance of the sleepless night

Through the slow heavy-footed silent hours,

Repressing in her bosom its load of grief,

She sat staring at the dumb tread of Time

And the approach of ever-nearing Fate,

A summons from her being’s summit came,

A sound, a call that broke the seals of Night.

Above her brows where will and knowledge meet

A mighty Voice invaded mortal space.

It seemed to come from inaccessible heights

And yet was intimate with all the world

And knew the meaning of the steps of Time

And saw eternal destiny’s changeless scene

Filling the far prospect of the cosmic gaze.

As the Voice touched, her body became a stark

And rigid golden statue of motionless trance,

A stone of God lit by an amethyst soul.

Around her body’s stillness all grew still:

Her heart listened to its slow measured beats,

Her mind renouncing thought heard and was mute:

“Why camest thou to this dumb deathbound earth,

This ignorant life beneath indifferent skies

Tied like a sacrifice on the altar of Time,

O spirit, O immortal energy,

If ‘twas to nurse grief in a helpless heart

Or with hard tearless eyes await thy doom?

Arise, O soul, and vanquish Time and Death.”

But Savitri’s heart replied in the dim night:

“My strength is taken from me and given to Death.

Why should I lift my hands to the shut heavens

Or struggle with mute inevitable Fate

Or hope in vain to uplift an ignorant race

Who hug their lot and mock the saviour Light

And see in Mind wisdom’s sole tabernacle,

In its harsh peak and its inconscient base

A rock of safety and an anchor of sleep?

Is there a God whom any cry can move?

He sits in peace and leaves the mortal’s strength

Impotent against his calm omnipotent Law

And Inconscience and the almighty hands of Death.

What need have I, what need has Satyavan

To avoid the black-meshed net, the dismal door,

Or call a mightier Light into life’s closed room,

A greater Law into man’s little world?

Why should I strive with earth’s unyielding laws

Or stave off death’s inevitable hour?

This surely is best to practise with my fate

And follow close behind my lover’s steps

And pass through night from twilight to the sun

Across the tenebrous river that divides

The adjoining parishes of earth and heaven.

Then could we lie inarmed breast upon breast,

Untroubled by thought, untroubled by our hearts,

Forgetting man and life and time and its hours,

Forgetting eternity’s call, forgetting God.”

The Voice replied: “Is this enough, O spirit?

And what shall thy soul say when it wakes and knows

The work was left undone for which it came?

Or is this all for thy being born on earth

Charged with a mandate from eternity,

A listener to the voices of the years,

A follower of the footprints of the gods,

To pass and leave unchanged the old dusty laws?

Shall there be no new tables, no new Word,

No greater light come down upon the earth

Delivering her from her unconsciousness,

Man’s spirit from unalterable Fate?

Cam’st thou not down to open the doors of Fate,

The iron doors that seemed for ever closed,

And lead man to Truth’s wide and golden road

That runs through finite things to eternity?

Is this then the report that I must make,

My head bowed with shame before the Eternal’s seat, –

His power he kindled in thy body has failed,

His labourer returns, her task undone?”

Then Savitri’s heart fell mute, it spoke no word.

But holding back her troubled rebel heart,

Abrupt, erect and strong, calm like a hill,

Surmounting the seas of mortal ignorance,

Its peak immutable above mind’s air,

A Power within her answered the still Voice:

“I am thy portion here charged with thy work,

As thou myself seated for ever above,

Speak to my depths, O great and deathless Voice,

Command, for I am here to do thy will.”

The Voice replied: “Remember why thou cam’st:

Find out thy soul, recover thy hid self,

In silence seek God’s meaning in thy depths,

Then mortal nature change to the divine.

Open God’s door, enter into his trance.

Cast Thought from thee, that nimble ape of Light:

In his tremendous hush stilling thy brain

His vast Truth wake within and know and see.

Cast from thee sense that veils thy spirit’s sight:

In the enormous emptiness of thy mind

Thou shalt see the Eternal’s body in the world,

Know him in every voice heard by thy soul,

In the world’s contacts meet his single touch;

All things shall fold thee into his embrace.

Conquer thy heart’s throbs, let thy heart beat in God:

Thy nature shall be the engine of his works,

Thy voice shall house the mightiness of his Word:

Then shalt thou harbour my force and conquer Death.”

Then Savitri by her doomed husband sat,

Still rigid in her golden motionless pose,

A statue of the fire of the inner sun.

In the black night the wrath of storm swept by,

The thunder crashed above her, the rain hissed,

Its million footsteps pattered on the roof.

Impassive mid the movement and the cry,

Witness of the thoughts of mind, the moods of life,

She looked into herself and sought for her soul.

A dream disclosed to her the cosmic past,

The crypt-seed and the mystic origins,

The shadowy beginnings of world-fate:

A lamp of symbol lighting hidden truth

Imaged to her the world’s significance.

In the indeterminate formlessness of Self

Creation took its first mysterious steps,

It made the body’s shape a house of soul

And Matter learned to think and person grew;

She saw Space peopled with the seeds of life

And saw the human creature born in Time.

At first appeared a dim half-neutral tide

Of being emerging out of infinite Nought:

A consciousness looked at the inconscient Vast

And pleasure and pain stirred in the insensible Void.

All was the deed of a blind World-Energy:

Unconscious of her own exploits she worked,

Shaping a universe out of the Inane.

In fragmentary beings she grew aware:

A chaos of little sensibilities

Gathered round a small ego’s pin-point head;

In it a sentient creature found its poise,

It moved and lived a breathing, thinking whole.

On a dim ocean of subconscient life

A formless surface consciousness awoke:

A stream of thoughts and feelings came and went,

A foam of memories hardened and became

A bright crust of habitual sense and thought,

A seat of living personality

And recurrent habits mimicked permanence.

Mind nascent laboured out a mutable form,

It built a mobile house on shifting sands,

A floating isle upon a bottomless sea.

A conscious being was by this labour made;

It looked around it on its difficult field

In the green wonderful and perilous earth;

It hoped in a brief body to survive,

Relying on Matter’s false eternity.

It felt a godhead in its fragile house;

It saw blue heavens, dreamed immortality.

A conscious soul in the Inconscient’s world,

Hidden behind our thoughts and hopes and dreams,

An indifferent Master signing Nature’s acts

Leaves the vicegerent mind a seeming king.

In his floating house upon the sea of Time

The regent sits at work and never rests:

He is a puppet of the dance of Time;

He is driven by the hours, the moment’s call

Compels him with the thronging of life’s need

And the babel of the voices of the world.

This mind no silence knows nor dreamless sleep,

In the incessant circling of its steps

Thoughts tread for ever through the listening brain;

It toils like a machine and cannot stop.

Into the body’s many-storeyed rooms

Endless crowd down the dream-god’s messages.

All is a hundred-toned murmur and babble and stir,

There is a tireless running to and fro,

A haste of movement and a ceaseless cry.

The hurried servant senses answer apace

To every knock upon the outer doors,

Bring in time’s visitors, report each call,

Admit the thousand queries and the calls

And the messages of communicating minds

And the heavy business of unnumbered lives

And all the thousandfold commerce of the world.

Even in the tracts of sleep is scant repose;

He mocks life’s steps in strange subconscient dreams,

He strays in a subtle realm of symbol scenes,

His night with thin-air visions and dim forms

He packs or peoples with slight drifting shapes

And only a moment spends in silent Self.

Adventuring into infinite mind-space

He unfolds his wings of thought in inner air,

Or travelling in imagination’s car

Crosses the globe, journeys beneath the stars,

To subtle worlds takes his ethereal course,

Visits the Gods on Life’s miraculous peaks,

Communicates with Heaven, tampers with Hell.

This is the little surface of man’s life.

He is this and he is all the universe;

He scales the Unseen, his depths dare the Abyss;

A whole mysterious world is locked within.

Unknown to himself he lives a hidden king

Behind rich tapestries in great secret rooms;

An epicure of the spirit’s unseen joys,

He lives on the sweet honey of solitude:

A nameless god in an unapproachable fane,

In the secret adytum of his inmost soul

He guards the being’s covered mysteries

Beneath the threshold, behind shadowy gates

Or shut in vast cellars of inconscient sleep.

The immaculate Divine All-Wonderful

Casts into the argent purity of his soul

His splendour and his greatness and the light

Of self-creation in Time’s infinity

As into a sublimely mirroring glass.

Man in the world’s life works out the dreams of God.

But all is there, even God’s opposites;

He is a little front of Nature’s works,

A thinking outline of a cryptic Force.

All she reveals in him that is in her,

Her glories walk in him and her darknesses.

Man’s house of life holds not the gods alone:

There are occult Shadows, there are tenebrous Powers,

Inhabitants of life’s ominous nether rooms,

A shadowy world’s stupendous denizens.

A careless guardian of his nature’s powers,

Man harbours dangerous forces in his house.

The Titan and the Fury and the Djinn

Lie bound in the subconscient’s cavern pit

And the Beast grovels in his antre den:

Dire mutterings rise and murmur in their drowse.

Insurgent sometimes raises its huge head

A monstrous mystery lurking in life’s deeps,

The mystery of dark and fallen worlds,

The dread visages of the adversary Kings.

The dreadful powers held down within his depths

Become his masters or his ministers;

Enormous they invade his bodily house,

Can act in his acts, infest his thought and life.

Inferno surges into the human air

And touches all with a perverting breath.

Grey forces like a thin miasma creep,

Stealing through chinks in his closed mansion’s doors,

Discolouring the walls of upper mind

In which he lives his fair and specious life,

And leave behind a stench of sin and death:

Not only rise in him perverse drifts of thought

And formidable formless influences,

But there come presences and awful shapes:

Tremendous forms and faces mount dim steps

And stare at times into his living-rooms,

Or called up for a moment’s passionate work

Lay a dire custom’s claim upon his heart:

Aroused from sleep, they can be bound no more.

Afflicting the daylight and alarming night,

Invading at will his outer tenement,

The stark gloom’s grisly dire inhabitants

Mounting into God’s light all light perturb.

All they have touched or seen they make their own,

In Nature’s basement lodge, mind’s passages fill,

Disrupt thought’s links and musing sequences,

Break through the soul’s stillness with a noise and cry

Or they call the inhabitants of the abyss,

Invite the instincts to forbidden joys,

A laughter wake of dread demoniac mirth

And with nether riot and revel shake life’s floor.

Impotent to quell his terrible prisoners,

Appalled the householder helpless sits above,

Taken from him his house is his no more.

He is bound and forced, a victim of the play,

Or, allured, joys in the mad and mighty din.

His nature’s dangerous forces have arisen

And hold at will a rebel’s holiday.

Aroused from the darkness where they crouched in the depths,

Prisoned from the sight, they can be held no more;

His nature’s impulses are now his lords.

Once quelled or wearing specious names and vests

Infernal elements, demon powers are there.

Man’s lower nature hides these awful guests.

Their vast contagion grips sometimes man’s world.

An awful insurgence overpowers man’s soul.

In house and house the huge uprising grows:

Hell’s companies are loosed to do their work,

Into the earth-ways they break out from all doors,

Invade with blood-lust and the will to slay

And fill with horror and carnage God’s fair world.

Death and his hunters stalk a victim earth;

The terrible Angel smites at every door:

An awful laughter mocks at the world’s pain

And massacre and torture grin at Heaven:

All is the prey of the destroying force;

Creation rocks and tremble top and base.

This evil Nature housed in human hearts,

A foreign inhabitant, a dangerous guest:

The soul that harbours it it can dislodge,

Expel the householder, possess the house.

An opposite potency contradicting God,

A momentary Evil’s almightiness

Has straddled the straight path of Nature’s acts.

It imitates the Godhead it denies,

Puts on his figure and assumes his face.

A Manichean creator and destroyer,

This can abolish man, annul his world.

But there is a guardian power, there are Hands that save,

Calm eyes divine regard the human scene.

All the world’s possibilities in man

Are waiting as the tree waits in its seed:

His past lives in him; it drives his future’s pace;

His present’s acts fashion his coming fate.

The unborn gods hide in his house of Life.

The daemons of the unknown overshadow his mind

Casting their dreams into live moulds of thought,

The moulds in which his mind builds out its world.

His mind creates around him its universe.

All that has been renews in him its birth;

All that can be is figured in his soul.

Issuing in deeds it scores on the roads of the world,

Obscure to the interpreting reason’s guess,

Lines of the secret purpose of the gods.

In strange directions runs the intricate plan;

Held back from human foresight is their end

And the far intention of some ordering Will

Or the order of life’s arbitrary Chance

Finds out its settled poise and fated hour.

Our surface watched in vain by reason’s gaze,

Invaded by the impromptus of the unseen,

Helpless records the accidents of Time,

The involuntary turns and leaps of life.

Only a little of us foresees its steps,

Only a little has will and purposed pace.

A vast subliminal is man’s measureless part.

The dim subconscient is his cavern base.

Abolished vainly in the walks of Time

Our past lives still in our unconscious selves

And by the weight of its hidden influences

Is shaped our future’s self-discovery.

Thus all is an inevitable chain

And yet a series seems of accidents.

The unremembering hours repeat the old acts,

Our dead past round our future’s ankles clings

And drags back the new nature’s glorious stride,

Or from its buried corpse old ghosts arise,

Old thoughts, old longings, dead passions live again,

Recur in sleep or move the waking man

To words that force the barrier of the lips,

To deeds that suddenly start and o’erleap

His head of reason and his guardian will.

An old self lurks in the new self we are;

Hardly we escape from what we once had been:

In the dim gleam of habit’s passages,

In the subconscient’s darkling corridors

All things are carried by the porter nerves

And nothing checked by subterranean mind,

Unstudied by the guardians of the doors

And passed by a blind instinctive memory,

The old gang dismissed, old cancelled passports serve.

Nothing is wholly dead that once had lived;

In dim tunnels of the world’s being and in ours

The old rejected nature still survives;

The corpses of its slain thoughts raise their heads

And visit mind’s nocturnal walks in sleep,

Its stifled impulses breathe and move and rise;

All keeps a phantom immortality.

Irresistible are Nature’s sequences:

The seeds of sins renounced sprout from hid soil;

The evil cast from our hearts once more we face;

Our dead selves come to slay our living soul.

A portion of us lives in present Time,

A secret mass in dim inconscience gropes;

Out of the inconscient and subliminal

Arisen, we live in mind’s uncertain light

And strive to know and master a dubious world

Whose purpose and meaning are hidden from our sight.

Above us dwells a superconscient God

Hidden in the mystery of his own light:

Around us is a vast of ignorance

Lit by the uncertain ray of human mind,

Below us sleeps the Inconscient dark and mute.

But this is only Matter’s first self-view,

A scale and series in the Ignorance.

This is not all we are or all our world.

Our greater self of knowledge waits for us,

A supreme light in the truth-conscious Vast:

It sees from summits beyond thinking mind,

It moves in a splendid air transcending life.

It shall descend and make earth’s life divine.

Truth made the world, not a blind Nature-Force.

For here are not our large diviner heights;

Our summits in the superconscient’s blaze

Are glorious with the very face of God:

There is our aspect of eternity,

There is the figure of the god we are,

His young unaging look on deathless things,

His joy in our escape from death and Time,

His immortality and light and bliss.

Our larger being sits behind cryptic walls:

There are greatnesses hidden in our unseen parts

That wait their hour to step into life’s front:

We feel an aid from deep indwelling Gods;

One speaks within, Light comes to us from above.

Our soul from its mysterious chamber acts;

Its influence pressing on our heart and mind

Pushes them to exceed their mortal selves.

It seeks for Good and Beauty and for God;

We see beyond self’s walls our limitless self,

We gaze through our world’s glass at half-seen vasts,

We hunt for the Truth behind apparent things.

Our inner Mind dwells in a larger light,

Its brightness looks at us through hidden doors;

Our members luminous grow and Wisdom’s face

Appears in the doorway of the mystic ward:

When she enters into our house of outward sense,

Then we look up and see, above, her sun.

A mighty life-self with its inner powers

Supports the dwarfish modicum we call life;

It can graft upon our crawl two puissant wings.

Our body’s subtle self is throned within

In its viewless palace of veridical dreams

That are bright shadows of the thoughts of God.

In the prone obscure beginnings of the race

The human grew in the bowed apelike man.

He stood erect, a godlike form and force,

And a soul’s thoughts looked out from earth-born eyes;

Man stood erect, he wore the thinker’s brow:

He looked at heaven and saw his comrade stars;

A vision came of beauty and greater birth

Slowly emerging from the heart’s chapel of light

And moved in a white lucent air of dreams.

He saw his being’s unrealised vastnesses,

He aspired and housed the nascent demigod.

Out of the dim recesses of the self

The occult seeker into the open came:

He heard the far and touched the intangible,

He gazed into the future and the unseen;

He used the powers earth-instruments cannot use,

A pastime made of the impossible;

He caught up fragments of the Omniscient’s thought,

He scattered formulas of omnipotence.

Thus man in his little house made of earth’s dust

Grew towards an unseen heaven of thought and dream

Looking into the vast vistas of his mind

On a small globe dotting infinity.

At last climbing a long and narrow stair

He stood alone on the high roof of things

And saw the light of a spiritual sun.

Aspiring he transcends his earthly self;

He stands in the largeness of his soul new-born,

Redeemed from encirclement by mortal things

And moves in a pure free spiritual realm

As in the rare breath of a stratosphere;

A last end of far lines of divinity,

He mounts by a frail thread to his high source;

He reaches his fount of immortality,

He calls the Godhead into his mortal life.

All this the spirit concealed had done in her:

A portion of the mighty Mother came

Into her as into its own human part:

Amid the cosmic workings of the Gods

It marked her the centre of a wide-drawn scheme,

Dreamed in the passion of her far-seeing spirit

To mould humanity into God’s own shape

And lead this great blind struggling world to light

Or a new world discover or create.

Earth must transform herself and equal Heaven

Or Heaven descend into earth’s mortal state.

But for such vast spiritual change to be,

Out of the mystic cavern in man’s heart

The heavenly Psyche must put off her veil

And step into common nature’s crowded rooms

And stand uncovered in that nature’s front

And rule its thoughts and fill the body and life.

Obedient to a high command she sat:

Time, life and death were passing incidents

Obstructing with their transient view her sight,

Her sight that must break through and liberate the god

Imprisoned in the visionless mortal man.

The inferior nature born into ignorance

Still took too large a place, it veiled her self

And must be pushed aside to find her soul.

End of Canto Two

Canto Three

The Entry into the Inner Countries

At first out of the busy hum of mind

As if from a loud thronged market into a cave

By an inward moment’s magic she had come.

A stark hushed emptiness became her self:

Her mind unvisited by the voice of thought

Stared at a void deep’s dumb infinity.

Her heights receded, her depths behind her closed;

All fled away from her and left her blank.

But when she came back to her self of thought,

Once more she was a human thing on earth,

A lump of Matter, a house of closed sight,

A mind compelled to think out ignorance,

A life-force pressed into a camp of works

And the material world her limiting field.

Amazed like one unknowing she sought her way

Out of the tangle of man’s ignorant past

That took the surface person for the soul.

Then a Voice spoke that dwelt on secret heights:

“For man thou seekst, not for thyself alone.

Only if God assumes the human mind

And puts on mortal ignorance for his cloak

And makes himself the Dwarf with triple stride,

Can he help man to grow into the God.

As man disguised the cosmic Greatness works

And finds the mystic inaccessible gate

And opens the Immortal’s golden door.

Man, human, follows in God’s human steps.

Accepting his darkness thou must bring to him light,

Accepting his sorrow thou must bring to him bliss.

In Matter’s body find thy heaven-born soul.”

Then Savitri surged out of her body’s wall

And stood a little span outside herself

And looked into her subtle being’s depths

And in its heart as in a lotus-bud

Divined her secret and mysterious soul.

At the dim portal of the inner life

That bars out from our depths the body’s mind

And all that lives but by the body’s breath,

She knocked and pressed against the ebony gate.

The living portal groaned with sullen hinge:

Heavily reluctant it complained inert

Against the tyranny of the spirit’s touch.

A formidable voice cried from within:

“Back, creature of earth, lest tortured and torn thou die.”

A dreadful murmur rose like a dim sea;

The Serpent of the threshold hissing rose,

A fatal guardian hood with monstrous coils,

The hounds of darkness growled with jaws agape,

And trolls and gnomes and goblins scowled and stared

And wild beast roarings thrilled the blood with fear

And menace muttered in a dangerous tongue.

Unshaken her will pressed on the rigid bars:

The gate swung wide with a protesting jar,

The opponent Powers withdrew their dreadful guard;

Her being entered into the inner worlds.

In a narrow passage, the subconscient’s gate,

She breathed with difficulty and pain and strove

To find the inner self concealed in sense.

Into a dense of subtle Matter packed,

A cavity filled with a blind mass of power,

An opposition of misleading gleams,

A heavy barrier of unseeing sight,

She forced her way through body to the soul.

Across a perilous border line she passed

Where Life dips into the subconscient dusk

Or struggles from Matter into chaos of mind,

Aswarm with elemental entities

And fluttering shapes of vague half-bodied thought

And crude beginnings of incontinent force.

At first a difficult narrowness was there,

A press of uncertain powers and drifting wills;

For all was there but nothing in its place.

At times an opening came, a door was forced;

She crossed through spaces of a secret self

And trod in passages of inner Time.

At last she broke into a form of things,

A start of finiteness, a world of sense:

But all was still confused, nothing self-found.

Soul was not there but only cries of life.

A thronged and clamorous air environed her.

A horde of sounds defied significance,

A dissonant clash of cries and contrary calls;

A mob of visions broke across the sight,

A jostled sequence lacking sense and suite,

Feelings pushed through a packed and burdened heart,

Each forced its separate inconsequent way

But cared for nothing but its ego’s drive.

A rally without key of common will,

Thought stared at thought and pulled at the taut brain

As if to pluck the reason from its seat

And cast its corpse into life’s wayside drain;

So might forgotten lie in Nature’s mud

Abandoned the slain sentinel of the soul.

So could life’s power shake from it mind’s rule,

Nature renounce the spirit’s government

And the bare elemental energies

Make of the sense a glory of boundless joy,

A splendour of ecstatic anarchy,

A revel mighty and mad of utter bliss.

This was the sense’s instinct void of soul

Or when the soul sleeps hidden void of power,

But now the vital godhead wakes within

And lifts the life with the Supernal’s touch.

But how shall come the glory and the flame

If mind is cast away into the abyss?

For body without mind has not the light,

The rapture of spirit sense, the joy of life;

All then becomes subconscient, tenebrous,

Inconscience puts its seal on Nature’s page

Or else a mad disorder whirls the brain

Posting along a ravaged nature’s roads,

A chaos of disordered impulses

In which no light can come, no joy, no peace.

This state now threatened, this she pushed from her.

As if in a long endless tossing street

One driven mid a trampling hurrying crowd

Hour after hour she trod without release

Holding by her will the senseless meute at bay;

Out of the dreadful press she dragged her will

And fixed her thought upon the saviour Name;

Then all grew still and empty; she was free.

A large deliverance came, a vast calm space.

Awhile she moved through a blank tranquillity

Of naked Light from an invisible sun,

A void that was a bodiless happiness,

A blissful vacuum of nameless peace.

But now a mightier danger’s front drew near:

The press of bodily mind, the Inconscient’s brood

Of aimless thought and will had fallen from her.

Approaching loomed a giant head of Life

Ungoverned by mind or soul, subconscient, vast.

It tossed all power into a single drive,

It made its power a might of dangerous seas.

Into the stillness of her silent self,

Into the whiteness of its muse of Space

A spate, a torrent of the speed of Life

Broke like a wind-lashed driven mob of waves

Racing on a pale floor of summer sand;

It drowned its banks, a mountain of climbing waves.

Enormous was its vast and passionate voice.

It cried to her listening spirit as it ran,

Demanding God’s submission to chainless Force.

A deaf force calling to a status dumb,

A thousand voices in a muted Vast,

It claimed the heart’s support for its clutch at joy,

For its need to act the witness Soul’s consent,

For its lust of power her neutral being’s seal.

Into the wideness of her watching self

It brought a grandiose gust of the Breath of Life;

Its torrent carried the world’s hopes and fears,

All life’s, all Nature’s dissatisfied hungry cry,

And the longing all eternity cannot fill.

It called to the mountain secrecies of the soul

And the miracle of the never-dying fire,

It spoke to some first inexpressible ecstasy

Hidden in the creative beat of Life;

Out of the nether unseen deeps it tore

Its lure and magic of disordered bliss,

Into earth-light poured its maze of tangled charm

And heady draught of Nature’s primitive joy

And the fire and mystery of forbidden delight

Drunk from the world-libido’s bottomless well,

And the honey-sweet poison-wine of lust and death,

But dreamed a vintage of glory of life’s gods,

And felt as celestial rapture’s golden sting.

The cycles of the infinity of desire

And the mystique that made an unrealised world

Wider than the known and closer than the unknown

In which hunt for ever the hounds of mind and life,

Tempted a deep dissatisfied urge within

To long for the unfulfilled and ever far

And make this life upon a limiting earth

A climb towards summits vanishing in the void,

A search for the glory of the impossible.

It dreamed of that which never has been known,

It grasped at that which never has been won,

It chased into an Elysian memory

The charms that flee from the heart’s soon lost delight;

It dared the force that slays, the joys that hurt,

The imaged shape of unaccomplished things

And the summons to a Circean transmuting dance

And passion’s tenancy of the courts of love

And the wild Beast’s ramp and romp with Beauty and Life.

It brought its cry and surge of opposite powers,

Its moments of the touch of luminous planes,

Its flame-ascensions and sky-pitched vast attempts,

Its fiery towers of dream built on the winds,

Its sinkings towards the darkness and the abyss,

Its honey of tenderness, its sharp wine of hate,

Its changes of sun and cloud, of laughter and tears,

Its bottomless danger-pits and swallowing gulfs,

Its fear and joy and ecstasy and despair,

Its occult wizardries, its simple lines

And great communions and uplifting moves,

Its faith in heaven, its intercourse with hell.

These powers were not blunt with the dead weight of earth,

They gave ambrosia’s taste and poison’s sting.

There was an ardour in the gaze of Life

That saw heaven blue in the grey air of Night:

The impulses godward soared on passion’s wings.

Mind’s quick-paced thoughts floated from their high necks,

A glowing splendour as of an irised mane,

A parure of pure intuition’s light;

Its flame-foot gallop they could imitate:

Mind’s voices mimicked inspiration’s stress,

Its ictus of infallibility,

Its speed and lightning heaven-leap of the Gods.

A trenchant blade that shore the nets of doubt,

Its sword of discernment seemed almost divine.

Yet all that knowledge was a borrowed sun’s;

The forms that came were not heaven’s native births:

An inner voice could speak the unreal’s Word;

Its puissance dangerous and absolute

Could mingle poison with the wine of God.

On these high shining backs falsehood could ride;

Truth lay with delight in error’s passionate arms

Gliding downstream in a blithe gilded barge:

She edged her ray with a magnificent lie.

Here in Life’s nether realms all contraries meet;

Truth stares and does her works with bandaged eyes

And Ignorance is Wisdom’s patron here:

Those galloping hooves in their enthusiast speed

Could bear to a dangerous intermediate zone

Where Death walks wearing a robe of deathless Life.

Or they enter the valley of the wandering Gleam

Whence, captives or victims of the specious Ray,

Souls trapped in that region never can escape.

Agents, not masters, they serve Life’s desires

Toiling for ever in the snare of Time.

Their bodies born out of some Nihil’s womb

Ensnare the spirit in the moment’s dreams,

Then perish vomiting the immortal soul

Out of Matter’s belly into the sink of Nought.

Yet some uncaught, unslain, can warily pass

Carrying Truth’s image in the sheltered heart,

Pluck Knowledge out of error’s screening grip,

Break paths through the blind walls of little self,

Then travel on to reach a greater life.

All this streamed past her and seemed to her vision’s sight

As if around a high and voiceless isle

A clamour of waters from far unknown hills

Swallowed its narrow banks in crowding waves

And made a hungry world of white wild foam:

Hastening, a dragon with a million feet,

Its foam and cry a drunken giant’s din,

Tossing a mane of Darkness into God’s sky,

It ebbed receding into a distant roar.

Then smiled again a large and tranquil air:

Blue heaven, green earth, partners of Beauty’s reign,

Lived as of old, companions in happiness;

And in the world’s heart laughed the joy of life.

All now was still, the soil shone dry and pure.

Through it all she moved not, plunged not in the vain waves.

Out of the vastness of the silent self

Life’s clamour fled; her spirit was mute and free.

Then journeying forward through the self’s wide hush

She came into a brilliant ordered Space.

There Life dwelt parked in an armed tranquillity;

A chain was on her strong insurgent heart.

Tamed to the modesty of a measured pace,

She kept no more her vehement stride and rush;

She had lost the careless majesty of her muse

And the ample grandeur of her regal force;

Curbed were her mighty pomps, her splendid waste,

Sobered the revels of her bacchant play,

Cut down were her squanderings in desire’s bazaar,

Coerced her despot will, her fancy’s dance,

A cold stolidity bound the riot of sense.

A royalty without freedom was her lot;

The sovereign throned obeyed her ministers:

Her servants mind and sense governed her house:

Her spirit’s bounds they cast in rigid lines

And guarding with a phalanx of armoured rules

The reason’s balanced reign, kept order and peace.

Her will lived closed in adamant walls of law,

Coerced was her force by chains that feigned to adorn,

Imagination was prisoned in a fort,

Her wanton and licentious favourite;

Reality’s poise and reason’s symmetry

Were set in its place sentinelled by marshalled facts,

They gave to the soul for throne a bench of Law,

For kingdom a small world of rule and line:

The ages’ wisdom, shrivelled to scholiast lines,

Shrank patterned into a copy-book device.

The Spirit’s almighty freedom was not here:

A schoolman mind had captured life’s large space,

But chose to live in bare and paltry rooms

Parked off from the too vast dangerous universe,

Fearing to lose its soul in the infinite.

Even the Idea’s ample sweep was cut

Into a system, chained to fixed pillars of thought

Or rivetted to Matter’s solid ground:

Or else the soul was lost in its own heights:

Obeying the Ideal’s high-browed law

Thought based a throne on unsubstantial air

Disdaining earth’s flat triviality:

It barred reality out to live in its dreams.

Or all stepped into a systemed universe:

Life’s empire was a managed continent,

Its thoughts an army ranked and disciplined;

Uniformed they kept the logic of their fixed place

At the bidding of the trained centurion mind.

Or each stepped into its station like a star

Or marched through fixed and constellated heavens

Or kept its feudal rank among its peers

In the sky’s unchanging cosmic hierarchy.

Or like a high-bred maiden with chaste eyes

Forbidden to walk unveiled the public ways,

She must in close secluded chambers move,

Her feeling in cloisters live or gardened paths.

Life was consigned to a safe level path,

It dared not tempt the great and difficult heights

Or climb to be neighbour to a lonely star

Or skirt the danger of the precipice

Or tempt the foam-curled breakers’ perilous laugh,

Adventure’s lyrist, danger’s amateur,

Or into her chamber call some flaming god,

Or leave the world’s bounds and where no limits are

Meet with the heart’s passion the Adorable

Or set the world ablaze with the inner Fire.

A chastened epithet in the prose of life,

She must fill with colour just her sanctioned space,

Not break out of the cabin of the idea

Nor trespass into rhythms too high or vast.

Even when it soared into ideal air,

Thought’s flight lost not itself in heaven’s blue:

It drew upon the skies a patterned flower

Of disciplined beauty and harmonic light.

A temperate vigilant spirit governed life:

Its acts were tools of the considering thought,

Too cold to take fire and set the world ablaze,

Or the careful reason’s diplomatic moves

Testing the means to a prefigured end,

Or at the highest pitch some calm Will’s plan

Or a strategy of some High Command within

To conquer the secret treasures of the gods

Or win for a masked king some glorious world,

Not a reflex of the spontaneous self,

An index of the being and its moods,

A winging of conscious spirit, a sacrament

Of life’s communion with the still Supreme

Or its pure movement on the Eternal’s road.

Or else for the body of some high Idea

A house was built with too close-fitting bricks;

Action and thought cemented made a wall

Of small ideals limiting the soul.

Even meditation mused on a narrow seat;

And worship turned to an exclusive God,

To the Universal in a chapel prayed

Whose doors were shut against the universe;

Or kneeled to the bodiless Impersonal

A mind shut to the cry and fire of love:

A rational religion dried the heart.

It planned a smooth life’s acts with ethics’ rule

Or offered a cold and flameless sacrifice.

The sacred Book lay on its sanctified desk

Wrapped in interpretation’s silken strings:

A credo sealed up its spiritual sense.

Here was a quiet country of fixed mind,

Here life no more was all nor passion’s voice;

The cry of sense had sunk into a hush.

Soul was not there nor spirit but mind alone;

Mind claimed to be the spirit and the soul.

The spirit saw itself as form of mind,

Lost itself in the glory of the thought,

A light that made invisible the sun.

Into a firm and settled space she came

Where all was still and all things kept their place.

Each found what it had sought and knew its aim.

All had a final last stability.

There one stood forth who bore authority

On an important brow and held a rod;

Command was incarnate in his gesture and tone;

Tradition’s petrified wisdom carved his speech,

His sentences savoured the oracle.

“Traveller or pilgrim of the inner world,

Fortunate art thou to reach our brilliant air

Flaming with thought’s supreme finality.

O aspirant to the perfect way of life,

Here find it; rest from search and live at peace.

Ours is the home of cosmic certainty.

Here is the truth, God’s harmony is here.

Register thy name in the book of the elite,

Admitted by the sanction of the few,

Adopt thy station of knowledge, thy post in mind,

Thy ticket of order draw in Life’s bureau

And praise thy fate that made thee one of ours.

All here, docketed and tied, the mind can know,

All schemed by law that God permits to life.

This is the end and there is no beyond.

Here is the safety of the ultimate wall,

Here is the clarity of the sword of Light,

Here is the victory of a single Truth,

Here burns the diamond of flawless bliss.

A favourite of Heaven and Nature live.”

But to the too satisfied and confident sage

Savitri replied casting into his world

Sight’s deep release, the heart’s questioning inner voice:

For here the heart spoke not, only clear daylight

Of intellect reigned here, limiting, cold, precise.

“Happy are they who in this chaos of things,

This coming and going of the feet of Time,

Can find the single Truth, the eternal Law:

Untouched they live by hope and doubt and fear.

Happy are men anchored on fixed belief

In this uncertain and ambiguous world,

Or who have planted in the heart’s rich soil

One small grain of spiritual certitude.

Happiest who stand on faith as on a rock.

But I must pass leaving the ended search,

Truth’s rounded outcome firm, immutable

And this harmonic building of world-fact,

This ordered knowledge of apparent things.

Here I can stay not, for I seek my soul.”

None answered in that bright contented world,

Or only turned on their accustomed way

Astonished to hear questioning in that air

Or thoughts that could still turn to the Beyond.

But some murmured, passers-by from kindred spheres:

Each by his credo judged the thought she spoke.

“Who then is this who knows not that the soul

Is a least gland or a secretion’s fault

Disquieting the sane government of the mind,

Disordering the function of the brain,

Or a yearning lodged in Nature’s mortal house

Or dream whispered in man’s cave of hollow thought

Who would prolong his brief unhappy term

Or cling to living in a sea of death?”

But others, “Nay, it is her spirit she seeks.

A splendid shadow of the name of God,

A formless lustre from the Ideal’s realm,

The Spirit is the Holy Ghost of Mind;

But none has touched its limbs or seen its face.

Each soul is the great Father’s crucified Son,

Mind is that soul’s one parent, its conscious cause,

The ground on which trembles a brief passing light,

Mind, sole creator of the apparent world.

All that is here is part of our own self;

Our minds have made the world in which we live.”

Another with mystic and unsatisfied eyes

Who loved his slain belief and mourned its death,

“Is there one left who seeks for a Beyond?

Can still the path be found, opened the gate?”

So she fared on across her silent self.

To a road she came thronged with an ardent crowd

Who sped brilliant, fire-footed, sunlight-eyed,

Pressing to reach the world’s mysterious wall,

And pass through masked doorways into outer mind

Where the Light comes not nor the mystic voice,

Messengers from our subliminal greatnesses,

Guests from the cavern of the secret soul.

Into dim spiritual somnolence they break

Or shed wide wonder on our waking self,

Ideas that haunt us with their radiant tread,

Dreams that are hints of unborn Reality,

Strange goddesses with deep-pooled magical eyes,

Strong wind-haired gods carrying the harps of hope,

Great moon-hued visions gliding through gold air,

Aspiration’s sun-dream head and star-carved limbs,

Emotions making common hearts sublime.

And Savitri mingling in that glorious crowd,

Yearning to the spiritual light they bore,

Longed once to hasten like them to save God’s world;

But she reined back the high passion in her heart;

She knew that first she must discover her soul.

Only who save themselves can others save.

In contrary sense she faced life’s riddling truth:

They carrying the light to suffering men

Hurried with eager feet to the outer world;

Her eyes were turned towards the eternal source.

Outstretching her hands to stay the throng she cried:

“O happy company of luminous gods,

Reveal, who know, the road that I must tread, –

For surely that bright quarter is your home, –

To find the birthplace of the occult Fire

And the deep mansion of my secret soul.”

One answered pointing to a silence dim

On a remote extremity of sleep

In some far background of the inner world.

“O Savitri, from thy hidden soul we come.

We are the messengers, the occult gods

Who help men’s drab and heavy ignorant lives

To wake to beauty and the wonder of things

Touching them with glory and divinity;

In evil we light the deathless flame of good

And hold the torch of knowledge on ignorant roads;

We are thy will and all men’s will towards Light.

O human copy and disguise of God

Who seekst the deity thou keepest hid

And livest by the Truth thou hast not known,

Follow the world’s winding highway to its source.

There in the silence few have ever reached,

Thou shalt see the Fire burning on the bare stone

And the deep cavern of thy secret soul.”

Then Savitri following the great winding road

Came where it dwindled into a narrow path

Trod only by rare wounded pilgrim feet.

A few bright forms emerged from unknown depths

And looked at her with calm immortal eyes.

There was no sound to break the brooding hush;

One felt the silent nearness of the soul.

End of Canto Three