Canto Two

The Journey in Eternal Night and the Voice of the Darkness

Awhile on the chill dreadful edge of Night

All stood as if a world were doomed to die

And waited on the eternal silence’ brink.

Heaven leaned towards them like a cloudy brow

Of menace through the dim and voiceless hush.

As thoughts stand mute on a despairing verge

Where the last depths plunge into nothingness

And the last dreams must end, they paused; in their front

Were glooms like shadowy wings, behind them, pale,

The lifeless evening was a dead man’s gaze.

Hungry beyond, the night desired her soul.

But still in its lone niche of templed strength

Motionless, her flame-bright spirit, mute, erect,

Burned like a torch-fire from a windowed room

Pointing against the darkness’ sombre breast.

The Woman first affronted the Abyss

Daring to journey through the eternal Night.

Armoured with light she advanced her foot to plunge

Into the dread and hueless vacancy;

Immortal, unappalled, her spirit faced

The danger of the ruthless eyeless waste.

Against night’s inky ground they stirred, moulding

Mysterious motion on her human tread,

A swimming action and a drifting march

Like figures moving before eyelids closed:

All as in dreams went slipping, gliding on.

The rock-gate’s heavy walls were left behind;

As if through passages of receding time

Present and past into the Timeless lapsed;

Arrested upon dim adventure’s brink,

The future ended drowned in nothingness.

Amid collapsing shapes they wound obscure;

The fading vestibules of a tenebrous world

Received them, where they seemed to move and yet

Be still, nowhere advancing yet to pass,

A dumb procession a dim picture bounds,

Not conscious forms threading a real scene.

A mystery of terror’s boundlessness,

Gathering its hungry strength the huge pitiless void

Surrounded slowly with its soundless depths,

And monstrous, cavernous, a shapeless throat

Devoured her into its shadowy strangling mass,

The fierce spiritual agony of a dream.

A curtain of impenetrable dread,

The darkness hung around her cage of sense

As, when the trees have turned to blotted shades

And the last friendly glimmer fades away,

Around a bullock in the forest tied

By hunters closes in no empty night.

The thought that strives in the world was here unmade;

Its effort it renounced to live and know,

Convinced at last that it had never been;

It perished, all its dream of action done:

This clotted cypher was its dark result.

In the smothering stress of this stupendous Nought

Mind could not think, breath could not breathe, the soul

Could not remember or feel itself; it seemed

A hollow gulf of sterile emptiness,

A zero oblivious of the sum it closed,

An abnegation of the Maker’s joy

Saved by no wide repose, no depth of peace.

On all that claims here to be Truth and God

And conscious self and the revealing Word

And the creative rapture of the Mind

And Love and Knowledge and heart’s delight, there fell

The immense refusal of the eternal No.

As disappears a golden lamp in gloom

Borne into distance from the eyes’ desire,

Into the shadows vanished Savitri.

There was no course, no path, no end or goal:

Visionless she moved amid insensible gulfs,

Or drove through some great black unknowing waste,

Or whirled in a dumb eddy of meeting winds

Assembled by the titan hands of Chance.

There was none with her in the dreadful Vast:

She saw no more the vague tremendous god,

Her eyes had lost their luminous Satyavan.

Yet not for this her spirit failed, but held

More deeply than the bounded senses can

Which grasp externally and find to lose,

Its object loved. So when on earth they lived

She had felt him straying through the glades, the glades

A scene in her, its clefts her being’s vistas

Opening their secrets to his search and joy,

Because to jealous sweetness in her heart

Whatever happy space his cherished feet

Preferred, must be at once her soul embracing

His body, passioning dumbly to his tread.

But now a silent gulf between them came

And to abysmal loneliness she fell,

Even from herself cast out, from love remote.

Long hours, since long it seems when sluggish time

Is measured by the throbs of the soul’s pain,

In an unreal darkness empty and drear

She travelled treading on the corpse of life,

Lost in a blindness of extinguished souls.

Solitary in the anguish of the void

She lived in spite of death, she conquered still;

In vain her puissant being was oppressed:

Her heavy long monotony of pain

Tardily of its fierce self-torture tired.

At first a faint inextinguishable gleam,

Pale but immortal, flickered in the gloom

As if a memory came to spirits dead,

A memory that wished to live again,

Dissolved from mind in Nature’s natal sleep.

It wandered like a lost ray of the moon

Revealing to the night her soul of dread;

Serpentine in the gleam the darkness lolled,

Its black hoods jewelled with the mystic glow;

Its dull sleek folds shrank back and coiled and slid,

As though they felt all light a cruel pain

And suffered from the pale approach of hope.

Night felt assailed her heavy sombre reign;

The splendour of some bright eternity

Threatened with this faint beam of wandering Truth

Her empire of the everlasting Nought.

Implacable in her intolerant strength

And confident that she alone was true,

She strove to stifle the frail dangerous ray;

Aware of an all-negating immensity

She reared her giant head of Nothingness,

Her mouth of darkness swallowing all that is;

She saw in herself the tenebrous Absolute.

But still the light prevailed and still it grew,

And Savitri to her lost self awoke;

Her limbs refused the cold embrace of death,

Her heart-beats triumphed in the grasp of pain;

Her soul persisted claiming for its joy

The soul of the beloved now seen no more.

Before her in the stillness of the world

Once more she heard the treading of a god,

And out of the dumb darkness Satyavan,

Her husband, grew into a luminous shade.

Then a sound pealed through that dead monstrous realm:

Vast like the surge in a tired swimmer’s ears,

Clamouring, a fatal iron-hearted roar,

Death missioned to the night his lethal call.

“This is my silent dark immensity,

This is the home of everlasting Night,

This is the secrecy of Nothingness

Entombing the vanity of life’s desires.

Hast thou beheld thy source, O transient heart,

And known from what the dream thou art was made?

In this stark sincerity of nude emptiness

Hopest thou still always to last and love?”

The Woman answered not. Her spirit refused

The voice of Night that knew and Death that thought.

In her beginningless infinity

Through her soul’s reaches unconfined she gazed;

She saw the undying fountains of her life,

She knew herself eternal without birth.

But still opposing her with endless night

Death, the dire god, inflicted on her eyes

The immortal calm of his tremendous gaze:

“Although thou hast survived the unborn void

Which never shall forgive, while Time endures,

The primal violence that fashioned thought,

Forcing the immobile vast to suffer and live,

This sorrowful victory only hast thou won

To live for a little without Satyavan.

What shall the ancient goddess give to thee

Who helps thy heart-beats? Only she prolongs

The nothing dreamed existence and delays

With the labour of living thy eternal sleep.

A fragile miracle of thinking clay,

Armed with illusions walks the child of Time.

To fill the void around he feels and dreads,

The void he came from and to which he goes,

He magnifies his self and names it God.

He calls the heavens to help his suffering hopes.

He sees above him with a longing heart

Bare spaces more unconscious than himself

That have not even his privilege of mind,

And empty of all but their unreal blue,

And peoples them with bright and merciful powers.

For the sea roars around him and earth quakes

Beneath his steps, and fire is at his doors,

And death prowls baying through the woods of life.

Moved by the Presences with which he yearns,

He offers in implacable shrines his soul

And clothes all with the beauty of his dreams.

The gods who watch the earth with sleepless eyes

And guide its giant stumblings through the void,

Have given to man the burden of his mind;

In his unwilling heart they have lit their fires

And sown in it incurable unrest.

His mind is a hunter upon tracks unknown;

Amusing Time with vain discovery,

He deepens with thought the mystery of his fate

And turns to song his laughter and his tears.

His mortality vexing with the immortal’s dreams,

Troubling his transience with the infinite’s breath,

They gave him hungers which no food can fill;

He is the cattle of the shepherd gods.

His body the tether with which he is tied,

They cast for fodder grief and hope and joy:

His pasture ground they have fenced with Ignorance.

Into his fragile undefended breast

They have breathed a courage that is met by death,

They have given a wisdom that is mocked by night,

They have traced a journey that foresees no goal.

Aimless man toils in an uncertain world,

Lulled by inconstant pauses of his pain,

Scourged like a beast by the infinite desire,

Bound to the chariot of the dreadful gods.

But if thou still canst hope and still wouldst love,

Return to thy body’s shell, thy tie to earth,

And with thy heart’s little remnants try to live.

Hope not to win back to thee Satyavan.

Yet since thy strength deserves no trivial crown,

Gifts I can give to soothe thy wounded life.

The pacts which transient beings make with fate,

And the wayside sweetness earth-bound hearts would pluck,

These if thy will accepts make freely thine.

Choose a life’s hopes for thy deceiving prize.”

As ceased the ruthless and tremendous Voice,

Unendingly there rose in Savitri,

Like moonlit ridges on a shuddering flood,

A stir of thoughts out of some silence born

Across the sea of her dumb fathomless heart.

At last she spoke; her voice was heard by Night:

“I bow not to thee, O huge mask of death,

Black lie of night to the cowed soul of man,

Unreal, inescapable end of things,

Thou grim jest played with the immortal spirit.

Conscious of immortality I walk.

A victor spirit conscious of my force,

Not as a suppliant to thy gates I came:

Unslain I have survived the clutch of Night.

My first strong grief moves not my seated mind;

My unwept tears have turned to pearls of strength:

I have transformed my ill-shaped brittle clay

Into the hardness of a statued soul.

Now in the wrestling of the splendid gods

My spirit shall be obstinate and strong

Against the vast refusal of the world.

I stoop not with the subject mob of minds

Who run to glean with eager satisfied hands

And pick from its mire mid many trampling feet

Its scornful small concessions to the weak.

Mine is the labour of the battling gods:

Imposing on the slow reluctant years

The flaming will that reigns beyond the stars,

They lay the law of Mind on Matter’s works

And win the soul’s wish from earth’s inconscient Force.

First I demand whatever Satyavan,

My husband, waking in the forest’s charm

Out of his long pure childhood’s lonely dreams,

Desired and had not for his beautiful life.

Give, if thou must, or, if thou canst, refuse.”

Death bowed his head in scornful cold assent,

The builder of this dreamlike earth for man

Who has mocked with vanity all gifts he gave.

Uplifting his disastrous voice he spoke:

“Indulgent to the dreams my touch shall break,

I yield to his blind father’s longing heart

Kingdom and power and friends and greatness lost

And royal trappings for his peaceful age,

The pallid pomps of man’s declining days,

The silvered decadent glories of life’s fall.

To one who wiser grew by adverse Fate,

Goods I restore the deluded soul prefers

To impersonal nothingness’s bare sublime.

The sensuous solace of the light I give

To eyes which could have found a larger realm,

A deeper vision in their fathomless night.

For that this man desired and asked in vain

While still he lived on earth and cherished hope.

Back from the grandeur of my perilous realms

Go, mortal, to thy small permitted sphere!

Hasten swift-footed, lest to slay thy life

The great laws thou hast violated, moved,

Open at last on thee their marble eyes.”

But Savitri answered the disdainful Shade:

“World-spirit, I was thy equal spirit born.

My will too is a law, my strength a god.

I am immortal in my mortality.

I tremble not before the immobile gaze

Of the unchanging marble hierarchies

That look with the stone eyes of Law and Fate.

My soul can meet them with its living fire.

Out of thy shadow give me back again

Into earth’s flowering spaces Satyavan

In the sweet transiency of human limbs

To do with him my spirit’s burning will.

I will bear with him the ancient Mother’s load,

I will follow with him earth’s path that leads to God.

Else shall the eternal spaces open to me,

While round us strange horizons far recede,

Travelling together the immense unknown.

For I who have trod with him the tracts of Time,

Can meet behind his steps whatever night

Or unimaginable stupendous dawn

Breaks on our spirits in the untrod Beyond.

Wherever thou leadst his soul I shall pursue.”

But to her claim opposed, implacable,

Insisting on the immutable Decree,

Insisting on the immitigable Law

And the insignificance of created things,

Out of the rolling wastes of night there came

Born from the enigma of the unknowable depths

A voice of majesty and appalling scorn.

As when the storm-haired Titan-striding sea

Throws on a swimmer its tremendous laugh

Remembering all the joy its waves have drowned,

So from the darkness of the sovereign night

Against the Woman’s boundless heart arose

The almighty cry of universal Death.

“Hast thou god-wings or feet that tread my stars,

Frail creature with the courage that aspires,

Forgetting thy bounds of thought, thy mortal role?

Their orbs were coiled before thy soul was formed.

I, Death, created them out of my void;

All things I have built in them and I destroy.

I made the worlds my net, each joy a mesh.

A Hunger amorous of its suffering prey,

Life that devours, my image see in things.

Mortal, whose spirit is my wandering breath,

Whose transience was imagined by my smile,

Flee clutching thy poor gains to thy trembling breast

Pierced by my pangs Time shall not soon appease.

Blind slave of my deaf force whom I compel

To sin that I may punish, to desire

That I may scourge thee with despair and grief

And thou come bleeding to me at the last,

Thy nothingness recognised, my greatness known,

Turn nor attempt forbidden happy fields

Meant for the souls that can obey my law,

Lest in their sombre shrines thy tread awake

From their uneasy iron-hearted sleep

The Furies who avenge fulfilled desire.

Dread lest in skies where passion hoped to live,

The Unknown’s lightnings start and, terrified,

Lone, sobbing, hunted by the hounds of heaven,

A wounded and forsaken soul thou flee

Through the long torture of the centuries,

Nor many lives exhaust the tireless Wrath

Hell cannot slake nor Heaven’s mercy assuage.

I will take from thee the black eternal grip:

Clasping in thy heart thy fate’s exiguous dole

Depart in peace, if peace for man is just.”

But Savitri answered meeting scorn with scorn,

The mortal woman to the dreadful Lord:

“Who is this God imagined by thy night,

Contemptuously creating worlds disdained,

Who made for vanity the brilliant stars?

Not he who has reared his temple in my thoughts

And made his sacred floor my human heart.

My God is will and triumphs in his paths,

My God is love and sweetly suffers all.

To him I have offered hope for sacrifice

And gave my longings as a sacrament.

Who shall prohibit or hedge in his course,

The wonderful, the charioteer, the swift?

A traveller of the million roads of life,

His steps familiar with the lights of heaven

Tread without pain the sword-paved courts of hell;

There he descends to edge eternal joy.

Love’s golden wings have power to fan thy void:

The eyes of love gaze starlike through death’s night,

The feet of love tread naked hardest worlds.

He labours in the depths, exults on the heights;

He shall remake thy universe, O Death.”

She spoke and for a while no voice replied,

While still they travelled through the trackless night

And still that gleam was like a pallid eye

Troubling the darkness with its doubtful gaze.

Then once more came a deep and perilous pause

In that unreal journey through blind Nought;

Once more a Thought, a Word in the void arose

And Death made answer to the human soul:

“What is thy hope? to what dost thou aspire?

This is thy body’s sweetest lure of bliss,

Assailed by pain, a frail precarious form,

To please for a few years thy faltering sense

With honey of physical longings and the heart’s fire

And, a vain oneness seeking, to embrace

The brilliant idol of a fugitive hour.

And thou, what art thou, soul, thou glorious dream

Of brief emotions made and glittering thoughts,

A thin dance of fireflies speeding through the night,

A sparkling ferment in life’s sunlit mire?

Wilt thou claim immortality, O heart,

Crying against the eternal witnesses

That thou and he are endless powers and last?

Death only lasts and the inconscient Void.

I only am eternal and endure.

I am the shapeless formidable Vast,

I am the emptiness that men call Space,

I am a timeless Nothingness carrying all,

I am the Illimitable, the mute Alone.

I, Death, am He; there is no other God.

All from my depths are born, they live by death;

All to my depths return and are no more.

I have made a world by my inconscient Force.

My Force is Nature that creates and slays

The hearts that hope, the limbs that long to live.

I have made man her instrument and slave,

His body I made my banquet, his life my food.

Man has no other help but only Death;

He comes to me at his end for rest and peace.

I, Death, am the one refuge of thy soul.

The Gods to whom man prays can help not man;

They are my imaginations and my moods

Reflected in him by illusion’s power.

That which thou seest as thy immortal self

Is a shadowy icon of my infinite,

Is Death in thee dreaming of eternity.

I am the Immobile in which all things move,

I am the nude Inane in which they cease:

I have no body and no tongue to speak,

I commune not with human eye and ear;

Only thy thought gave a figure to my void.

Because, O aspirant to divinity,

Thou calledst me to wrestle with thy soul,

I have assumed a face, a form, a voice.

But if there were a Being witnessing all,

How should he help thy passionate desire?

Aloof he watches sole and absolute,

Indifferent to thy cry in nameless calm.

His being is pure, unwounded, motionless, one.

One endless watches the inconscient scene

Where all things perish, as the foam the stars.

The One lives for ever. There no Satyavan

Changing was born and there no Savitri

Claims from brief life her bribe of joy. There love

Came never with his fretful eyes of tears,

Nor Time is there nor the vain vasts of Space.

It wears no living face, it has no name,

No gaze, no heart that throbs; it asks no second

To aid its being or to share its joys.

It is delight immortally alone.

If thou desirest immortality,

Be then alone sufficient to thy soul:

Live in thyself; forget the man thou lov’st.

My last grand death shall rescue thee from life;

Then shalt thou rise into thy unmoved source.”

But Savitri replied to the dread Voice:

“O Death, who reasonest, I reason not,

Reason that scans and breaks, but cannot build

Or builds in vain because she doubts her work.

I am, I love, I see, I act, I will.”

Death answered her, one deep surrounding cry:

“Know also. Knowing, thou shalt cease to love

And cease to will, delivered from thy heart.

So shalt thou rest for ever and be still,

Consenting to the impermanence of things.”

But Savitri replied for man to Death:

“When I have loved for ever, I shall know.

Love in me knows the truth all changings mask.

I know that knowledge is a vast embrace:

I know that every being is myself,

In every heart is hidden the myriad One.

I know the calm Transcendent bears the world,

The veiled Inhabitant, the silent Lord:

I feel his secret act, his intimate fire;

I hear the murmur of the cosmic Voice.

I know my coming was a wave from God.

For all his suns were conscient in my birth,

And one who loves in us came veiled by death.

Then was man born among the monstrous stars

Dowered with a mind and heart to conquer thee.”

In the eternity of his ruthless will

Sure of his empire and his armoured might,

Like one disdaining violent helpless words

From victim lips Death answered not again.

He stood in silence and in darkness wrapped,

A figure motionless, a shadow vague,

Girt with the terrors of his secret sword.

Half-seen in clouds appeared a sombre face;

Night’s dusk tiara was his matted hair,

The ashes of the pyre his forehead’s sign.

Once more a wanderer in the unending Night,

Blindly forbidden by dead vacant eyes,

She travelled through the dumb unhoping vasts.

Around her rolled the shuddering waste of gloom,

Its swallowing emptiness and joyless death

Resentful of her thought and life and love.

Through the long fading night by her compelled,

Gliding half-seen on their unearthly path,

Phantasmal in the dimness moved the three.

End of Canto Two
End of Book Nine

Canto One

The Dream Twilight of the Ideal

All still was darkness dread and desolate;

There was no change nor any hope of change.

In this black dream which was a house of Void,

A walk to Nowhere in a land of Nought,

Ever they drifted without aim or goal;

Gloom led to worse gloom, depth to an emptier depth,

In some positive Non-being’s purposeless Vast

Through formless wastes dumb and unknowable.

An ineffectual beam of suffering light

Through the despairing darkness dogged their steps

Like the remembrance of a glory lost;

Even while it grew, it seemed unreal there,

Yet haunted Nihil’s chill stupendous realm,

Unquenchable, perpetual, lonely, null,

A pallid ghost of some dead eternity.

It was as if she must pay now her debt,

Her vain presumption to exist and think,

To some brilliant Maya that conceived her soul.

This most she must absolve with endless pangs,

Her deep original sin, the will to be

And the sin last, greatest, the spiritual pride,

That, made of dust, equalled itself with heaven,

Its scorn of the worm writhing in the mud,

Condemned ephemeral, born from Nature’s dream,

Refusal of the transient creature’s role,

The claim to be a living fire of God,

The will to be immortal and divine.

In that tremendous darkness heavy and bare

She atoned for all since the first act whence sprang

The error of the consciousness of Time,

The rending of the Inconscient’s seal of sleep,

The primal and unpardoned revolt that broke

The peace and silence of the Nothingness

Which was before a seeming universe

Appeared in a vanity of imagined Space

And life arose engendering grief and pain:

A great Negation was the Real’s face

Prohibiting the vain process of Time:

And when there is no world, no creature more,

When Time’s intrusion has been blotted out,

It shall last, unbodied, saved from thought, at peace.

Accursed in what had been her godhead source,

Condemned to live for ever empty of bliss,

Her immortality her chastisement,

Her spirit, guilty of being, wandered doomed,

Moving for ever through eternal Night.

But Maya is a veil of the Absolute;

A Truth occult has made this mighty world:

The Eternal’s wisdom and self-knowledge act

In ignorant Mind and in the body’s steps.

The Inconscient is the Superconscient’s sleep.

An unintelligible Intelligence

Invents creation’s paradox profound;

Spiritual thought is crammed in Matter’s forms,

Unseen it throws out a dumb energy

And works a miracle by a machine.

All here is a mystery of contraries:

Darkness a magic of self-hidden Light,

Suffering some secret rapture’s tragic mask

And death an instrument of perpetual life.

Although Death walks beside us on Life’s road,

A dim bystander at the body’s start

And a last judgment on man’s futile works,

Other is the riddle of its ambiguous face:

Death is a stair, a door, a stumbling stride

The soul must take to cross from birth to birth,

A grey defeat pregnant with victory,

A whip to lash us towards our deathless state.

The inconscient world is the spirit’s self-made room,

Eternal Night shadow of eternal Day.

Night is not our beginning nor our end;

She is the dark Mother in whose womb we have hid

Safe from too swift a waking to world-pain.

We came to her from a supernal Light,

By Light we live and to the Light we go.

Here in this seat of Darkness mute and lone,

In the heart of everlasting Nothingness

Light conquered now even by that feeble beam:

Its faint infiltration drilled the blind deaf mass;

Almost it changed into a glimmering sight

That housed the phantom of an aureate Sun

Whose orb pupilled the eye of Nothingness.

A golden fire came in and burned Night’s heart;

Her dusky mindlessness began to dream;

The Inconscient conscious grew, Night felt and thought.

Assailed in the sovereign emptiness of its reign

The intolerant Darkness paled and drew apart

Till only a few black remnants stained that Ray.

But on a failing edge of dumb lost space

Still a great dragon body sullenly loomed;

Adversary of the slow struggling Dawn

Defending its ground of tortured mystery,

It trailed its coils through the dead martyred air

And curving fled down a grey slope of Time.

There is a morning twilight of the gods;

Miraculous from sleep their forms arise

And God’s long nights are justified by dawn.

There breaks a passion and splendour of new birth

And hue-winged visions stray across the lids,

Heaven’s chanting heralds waken dim-eyed Space.

The dreaming deities look beyond the seen

And fashion in their thoughts the ideal worlds

Sprung from a limitless moment of desire

That once had lodged in some abysmal heart.

Passed was the heaviness of the eyeless dark

And all the sorrow of the night was dead:

Surprised by a blind joy with groping hands

Like one who wakes to find his dreams were true,

Into a happy misty twilit world

Where all ran after light and joy and love

She slipped; there far-off raptures drew more close

And deep anticipations of delight,

For ever eager to be grasped and held,

Were never grasped, yet breathed strange ecstasy.

A pearl-winged indistinctness fleeting swam,

An air that dared not suffer too much light.

Vague fields were there, vague pastures gleamed, vague trees,

Vague scenes dim-hearted in a drifting haze;

Vague cattle white roamed glimmering through the mist;

Vague spirits wandered with a bodiless cry,

Vague melodies touched the soul and fled pursued

Into harmonious distances unseized;

Forms subtly elusive and half-luminous powers

Wishing no goal for their unearthly course

Strayed happily through vague ideal lands,

Or floated without footing or their walk

Left steps of reverie on sweet memory’s ground;

Or they paced to the mighty measure of their thoughts

Led by a low far chanting of the gods.

A ripple of gleaming wings crossed the far sky;

Birds like pale-bosomed imaginations flew

With low disturbing voices of desire,

And half-heard lowings drew the listening ear,

As if the Sun-god’s brilliant kine were there

Hidden in mist and passing towards the sun.

These fugitive beings, these elusive shapes

Were all that claimed the eye and met the soul,

The natural inhabitants of that world.

But nothing there was fixed or stayed for long;

No mortal feet could rest upon that soil,

No breath of life lingered embodied there.

In that fine chaos joy fled dancing past

And beauty evaded settled line and form

And hid its sense in mysteries of hue;

Yet gladness ever repeated the same notes

And gave the sense of an enduring world;

There was a strange consistency of shapes,

And the same thoughts were constant passers-by

And all renewed unendingly its charm

Alluring ever the expectant heart

Like music that one always waits to hear,

Like the recurrence of a haunting rhyme.

One touched incessantly things never seized,

A skirt of worlds invisibly divine.

As if a trail of disappearing stars

There showered upon the floating atmosphere

Colours and lights and evanescent gleams

That called to follow into a magic heaven,

And in each cry that fainted on the ear

There was the voice of an unrealised bliss.

An adoration reigned in the yearning heart,

A spirit of purity, an elusive presence

Of faery beauty and ungrasped delight

Whose momentary and escaping thrill,

However unsubstantial to our flesh,

And brief even in imperishableness,

Much sweeter seemed than any rapture known

Earth or all-conquering heaven can ever give.

Heaven ever young and earth too firm and old

Delay the heart by immobility:

Their raptures of creation last too long,

Their bold formations are too absolute;

Carved by an anguish of divine endeavour

They stand up sculptured on the eternal hills,

Or quarried from the living rocks of God

Win immortality by perfect form.

They are too intimate with eternal things:

Vessels of infinite significances,

They are too clear, too great, too meaningful;

No mist or shadow soothes the vanquished sight,

No soft penumbra of incertitude.

These only touched a golden hem of bliss,

The gleaming shoulder of some godlike hope,

The flying feet of exquisite desires.

On a slow trembling brink between night and day

They shone like visitants from the morning star,

Satisfied beginnings of perfection, first

Tremulous imaginings of a heavenly world:

They mingle in a passion of pursuit,

Thrilled with a spray of joy too slight to tire.

All in this world was shadowed forth, not limned,

Like faces leaping on a fan of fire

Or shapes of wonder in a tinted blur,

Like fugitive landscapes painting silver mists.

Here vision fled back from the sight alarmed,

And sound sought refuge from the ear’s surprise,

And all experience was a hasty joy.

The joys here snatched were half-forbidden things,

Timorous soul-bridals delicately veiled

As when a goddess’ bosom dimly moves

To first desire and her white soul transfigured,

A glimmering Eden crossed by faery gleams,

Trembles to expectation’s fiery wand,

But nothing is familiar yet with bliss.

All things in this fair realm were heavenly strange

In a fleeting gladness of untired delight,

In an insistency of magic change.

Past vanishing hedges, hurrying hints of fields,

Mid swift escaping lanes that fled her feet

Journeying she wished no end: as one through clouds

Travels upon a mountain ridge and hears

Arising to him out of hidden depths

Sound of invisible streams, she walked besieged

By the illusion of a mystic space,

A charm of bodiless touches felt and heard

A sweetness as of voices high and dim

Calling like travellers upon seeking winds

Melodiously with an alluring cry.

As if a music old yet ever new,

Moving suggestions on her heart-strings dwelt,

Thoughts that no habitation found, yet clung

With passionate repetition to her mind,

Desires that hurt not, happy only to live

Always the same and always unfulfilled

Sang in the breast like a celestial lyre.

Thus all could last yet nothing ever be.

In this beauty as of mind made visible,

Dressed in its rays of wonder Satyavan

Before her seemed the centre of its charm,

Head of her loveliness of longing dreams

And captain of the fancies of her soul.

Even the dreadful majesty of Death’s face

And its sombre sadness could not darken nor slay

The intangible lustre of those fleeting skies.

The sombre Shadow sullen, implacable

Made beauty and laughter more imperative;

Enhanced by his grey, joy grew more bright and dear;

His dark contrast edging ideal sight

Deepened unuttered meanings to the heart;

Pain grew a trembling undertone of bliss

And transience immortality’s floating hem,

A moment’s robe in which she looked more fair,

Its antithesis sharpening her divinity.

A comrade of the Ray and Mist and Flame,

By a moon-bright face a brilliant moment drawn,

Almost she seemed a thought mid floating thoughts,

Seen hardly by a visionary mind

Amid the white inward musings of the soul.

Half-vanquished by the dream-happiness around,

Awhile she moved on an enchantment’s soil,

But still remained possessor of her soul.

Above, her spirit in its mighty trance

Saw all, but lived for its transcendent task,

Immutable like a fixed eternal star.

End of Canto One

Canto Two

The Gospel of Death and Vanity of the Ideal

Then pealed the calm inexorable voice:

Abolishing hope, cancelling life’s golden truths,

Fatal its accents smote the trembling air.

That lovely world swam thin and frail, most like

Some pearly evanescent farewell gleam

On the faint verge of dusk in moonless eves.

“Prisoner of Nature, many-visioned spirit,

Thought’s creature in the ideal’s realm enjoying

Thy unsubstantial immortality

The subtle marvellous mind of man has feigned,

This is the world from which thy yearnings came.

When it would build eternity from the dust,

Man’s thought paints images illusion rounds;

Prophesying glories it shall never see,

It labours delicately among its dreams.

Behold this fleeing of light-tasselled shapes,

Aerial raiment of unbodied gods;

A rapture of things that never can be born,

Hope chants to hope a bright immortal choir;

Cloud satisfies cloud, phantom to longing phantom

Leans sweetly, sweetly is clasped or sweetly chased.

This is the stuff from which the ideal is formed:

Its builder is thought, its base the heart’s desire,

But nothing real answers to their call.

The ideal dwells not in heaven, nor on the earth,

A bright delirium of man’s ardour of hope

Drunk with the wine of its own fantasy.

It is a brilliant shadow’s dreamy trail.

Thy vision’s error builds the azure skies,

Thy vision’s error drew the rainbow’s arch;

Thy mortal longing made for thee a soul.

This angel in thy body thou callst love,

Who shapes his wings from thy emotion’s hues,

In a ferment of thy body has been born

And with the body that housed it it must die.

It is a passion of thy yearning cells,

It is flesh that calls to flesh to serve its lust;

It is thy mind that seeks an answering mind

And dreams awhile that it has found its mate;

It is thy life that asks a human prop

To uphold its weakness lonely in the world

Or feeds its hunger on another’s life.

A beast of prey that pauses in its prowl,

It crouches under a bush in splendid flower

To seize a heart and body for its food:

This beast thou dreamst immortal and a god.

O human mind, vainly thou torturest

An hour’s delight to stretch through infinity’s

Long void and fill its formless, passionless gulfs,

Persuading the insensible Abyss

To lend eternity to perishing things,

And trickst the fragile movements of thy heart

With thy spirit’s feint of immortality.

All here emerges born from Nothingness;

Encircled it lasts by the emptiness of Space,

Awhile upheld by an unknowing Force,

Then crumbles back into its parent Nought:

Only the mute Alone can for ever be.

In the Alone there is no room for love.

In vain to clothe love’s perishable mud

Thou hast woven on the Immortals’ borrowed loom

The ideal’s gorgeous and unfading robe.

The ideal never yet was real made.

Imprisoned in form that glory cannot live;

Into a body shut it breathes no more.

Intangible, remote, for ever pure,

A sovereign of its own brilliant void,

Unwillingly it descends to earthly air

To inhabit a white temple in man’s heart:

In his heart it shines rejected by his life.

Immutable, bodiless, beautiful, grand and dumb,

Immobile on its shining throne it sits;

Dumb it receives his offering and his prayer.

It has no voice to answer to his call,

No feet that move, no hands to take his gifts:

Aerial statue of the nude Idea,

Virgin conception of a bodiless god,

Its light stirs man the thinker to create

An earthly semblance of diviner things.

Its hued reflection falls upon man’s acts;

His institutions are its cenotaphs,

He signs his dead conventions with its name;

His virtues don the Ideal’s skiey robe

And a nimbus of the outline of its face:

He hides their littleness with the divine Name.

Yet insufficient is the bright pretence

To screen their indigent and earthy make:

Earth only is there and not some heavenly source.

If heavens there are they are veiled in their own light,

If a Truth eternal somewhere reigns unknown,

It burns in a tremendous void of God;

For truth shines far from the falsehoods of the world;

How can the heavens come down to unhappy earth

Or the eternal lodge in drifting time?

How shall the Ideal tread earth’s dolorous soil

Where life is only a labour and a hope,

A child of Matter and by Matter fed,

A fire flaming low in Nature’s grate,

A wave that breaks upon a shore in Time,

A journey’s toilsome trudge with death for goal?

The Avatars have lived and died in vain,

Vain was the sage’s thought, the prophet’s voice;

In vain is seen the shining upward Way.

Earth lies unchanged beneath the circling sun;

She loves her fall and no omnipotence

Her mortal imperfections can erase,

Force on man’s crooked ignorance Heaven’s straight line

Or colonise a world of death with gods.

O traveller in the chariot of the Sun,

High priestess in thy holy fancy’s shrine

Who with a magic ritual in earth’s house

Worshippest ideal and eternal love,

What is this love thy thought has deified,

This sacred legend and immortal myth?

It is a conscious yearning of thy flesh,

It is a glorious burning of thy nerves,

A rose of dream-splendour petalling thy mind,

A great red rapture and torture of thy heart.

A sudden transfiguration of thy days,

It passes and the world is as before.

A ravishing edge of sweetness and of pain,

A thrill in its yearning makes it seem divine,

A golden bridge across the roar of the years,

A cord tying thee to eternity.

And yet how brief and frail! how soon is spent

This treasure wasted by the gods on man,

This happy closeness as of soul to soul,

This honey of the body’s companionship,

This heightened joy, this ecstasy in the veins,

This strange illumination of the sense!

If Satyavan had lived, love would have died;

But Satyavan is dead and love shall live

A little while in thy sad breast, until

His face and body fade on memory’s wall

Where other bodies, other faces come.

When love breaks suddenly into the life

At first man steps into a world of the sun;

In his passion he feels his heavenly element:

But only a fine sunlit patch of earth

The marvellous aspect took of heaven’s outburst;

The snake is there and the worm in the heart of the rose.

A word, a moment’s act can slay the god;

Precarious is his immortality,

He has a thousand ways to suffer and die.

Love cannot live by heavenly food alone,

Only on sap of earth can it survive.

For thy passion was a sensual want refined,

A hunger of the body and the heart;

Thy want can tire and cease or turn elsewhere.

Or love may meet a dire and pitiless end

By bitter treason, or wrath with cruel wounds

Separate, or thy unsatisfied will to others

Depart when first love’s joy lies stripped and slain:

A dull indifference replaces fire

Or an endearing habit imitates love:

An outward and uneasy union lasts

Or the routine of a life’s compromise:

Where once the seed of oneness had been cast

Into a semblance of spiritual ground

By a divine adventure of heavenly powers

Two strive, constant associates without joy,

Two egos straining in a single leash,

Two minds divided by their jarring thoughts,

Two spirits disjoined, for ever separate.

Thus is the ideal falsified in man’s world;

Trivial or sombre, disillusion comes,

Life’s harsh reality stares at the soul:

Heaven’s hour adjourned flees into bodiless Time.

Death saves thee from this and saves Satyavan:

He now is safe, delivered from himself;

He travels to silence and felicity.

Call him not back to the treacheries of earth

And the poor petty life of animal Man.

In my vast tranquil spaces let him sleep

In harmony with the mighty hush of death

Where love lies slumbering on the breast of peace.

And thou, go back alone to thy frail world:

Chastise thy heart with knowledge, unhood to see,

Thy nature raised into clear living heights,

The heaven-bird’s view from unimagined peaks.

For when thou givest thy spirit to a dream

Soon hard necessity will smite thee awake:

Purest delight began and it must end.

Thou too shalt know, thy heart no anchor swinging,

Thy cradled soul moored in eternal seas.

Vain are the cycles of thy brilliant mind.

Renounce, forgetting joy and hope and tears,

Thy passionate nature in the bosom profound

Of a happy Nothingness and worldless Calm,

Delivered into my mysterious rest.

One with my fathomless Nihil all forget.

Forget thy fruitless spirit’s waste of force,

Forget the weary circle of thy birth,

Forget the joy and the struggle and the pain,

The vague spiritual quest which first began

When worlds broke forth like clusters of fire-flowers,

And great burning thoughts voyaged through the sky of mind

And Time and its aeons crawled across the vasts

And souls emerged into mortality.”

But Savitri replied to the dark Power:

“A dangerous music now thou findst, O Death,

Melting thy speech into harmonious pain,

And flut’st alluringly to tired hopes

Thy falsehoods mingled with sad strains of truth.

But I forbid thy voice to slay my soul.

My love is not a hunger of the heart,

My love is not a craving of the flesh;

It came to me from God, to God returns.

Even in all that life and man have marred,

A whisper of divinity still is heard,

A breath is felt from the eternal spheres.

Allowed by Heaven and wonderful to man

A sweet fire-rhythm of passion chants to love.

There is a hope in its wild infinite cry;

It rings with callings from forgotten heights,

And when its strains are hushed to high-winged souls

In their empyrean, its burning breath

Survives beyond, the rapturous core of suns

That flame for ever pure in skies unseen,

A voice of the eternal Ecstasy.

One day I shall behold my great sweet world

Put off the dire disguises of the gods,

Unveil from terror and disrobe from sin.

Appeased we shall draw near our mother’s face,

We shall cast our candid souls upon her lap;

Then shall we clasp the ecstasy we chase,

Then shall we shudder with the long-sought god,

Then shall we find Heaven’s unexpected strain.

Not only is there hope for godheads pure;

The violent and darkened deities

Leaped down from the one breast in rage to find

What the white gods had missed: they too are safe;

A mother’s eyes are on them and her arms

Stretched out in love desire her rebel sons.

One who came love and lover and beloved

Eternal, built himself a wondrous field

And wove the measures of a marvellous dance.

There in its circles and its magic turns

Attracted he arrives, repelled he flees.

In the wild devious promptings of his mind

He tastes the honey of tears and puts off joy

Repenting, and has laughter and has wrath,

And both are a broken music of the soul

Which seeks out reconciled its heavenly rhyme.

Ever he comes to us across the years

Bearing a new sweet face that is the old.

His bliss laughs to us or it calls concealed

Like a far-heard unseen entrancing flute

From moonlit branches in the throbbing woods,

Tempting our angry search and passionate pain.

Disguised the Lover seeks and draws our souls.

He named himself for me, grew Satyavan.

For we were man and woman from the first,

The twin souls born from one undying fire.

Did he not dawn on me in other stars?

How has he through the thickets of the world

Pursued me like a lion in the night

And come upon me suddenly in the ways

And seized me with his glorious golden leap!

Unsatisfied he yearned for me through time,

Sometimes with wrath and sometimes with sweet peace

Desiring me since first the world began.

He rose like a wild wave out of the floods

And dragged me helpless into seas of bliss.

Out of my curtained past his arms arrive;

They have touched me like the soft persuading wind,

They have plucked me like a glad and trembling flower,

And clasped me happily burned in ruthless flame.

I too have found him charmed in lovely forms

And run delighted to his distant voice

And pressed to him past many dreadful bars.

If there is a yet happier greater god,

Let him first wear the face of Satyavan

And let his soul be one with him I love;

So let him seek me that I may desire.

For only one heart beats within my breast

And one god sits there throned. Advance, O Death,

Beyond the phantom beauty of this world;

For of its citizens I am not one.

I cherish God the Fire, not God the Dream.”

But Death once more inflicted on her heart

The majesty of his calm and dreadful voice:

“A bright hallucination are thy thoughts.

A prisoner haled by a spiritual cord,

Of thy own sensuous will the ardent slave,

Thou sendest eagle-poised to meet the sun

Words winged with the red splendour of thy heart.

But knowledge dwells not in the passionate heart;

The heart’s words fall back unheard from Wisdom’s throne.

Vain is thy longing to build heaven on earth.

Artificer of Ideal and Idea,

Mind, child of Matter in the womb of Life,

To higher levels persuades his parents’ steps:

Inapt, they follow ill the daring guide.

But Mind, a glorious traveller in the sky,

Walks lamely on the earth with footsteps slow;

Hardly he can mould the life’s rebellious stuff,

Hardly can he hold the galloping hooves of sense:

His thoughts look straight into the very heavens;

They draw their gold from a celestial mine,

His acts work painfully a common ore.

All thy high dreams were made by Matter’s mind

To solace its dull work in Matter’s jail,

Its only house where it alone seems true.

A solid image of reality

Carved out of being to prop the works of Time,

Matter on the firm earth sits strong and sure.

It is the first-born of created things,

It stands the last when mind and life are slain,

And if it ended all would cease to be.

All else is only its outcome or its phase:

Thy soul is a brief flower by the gardener Mind

Created in thy matter’s terrain plot;

It perishes with the plant on which it grows,

For from earth’s sap it draws its heavenly hue:

Thy thoughts are gleams that pass on Matter’s verge,

Thy life a lapsing wave on Matter’s sea.

A careful steward of Truth’s limited means,

Treasuring her founded facts from the squandering Power,

It tethers mind to the tent-posts of sense,

To a leaden grey routine clamps Life’s caprice

And ties all creatures with the cords of Law.

A vessel of transmuting alchemies,

A glue that sticks together mind and life,

If Matter fails, all crumbling cracks and falls.

All upon Matter stands as on a rock.

Yet this security and guarantor

Pressed for credentials an impostor proves:

A cheat of substance where no substance is,

An appearance and a symbol and a nought,

Its forms have no original right to birth:

Its aspect of a fixed stability

Is the cover of a captive motion’s swirl,

An order of the steps of Energy’s dance

Whose footmarks leave for ever the same signs,

A concrete face of unsubstantial Time,

A trickle dotting the emptiness of Space:

A stable-seeming movement without change,

Yet change arrives and the last change is death.

What seemed most real once, is Nihil’s show.

Its figures are snares that trap and prison the sense;

The beginningless Void was its artificer:

Nothing is there but aspects limned by Chance

And seeming shapes of seeming Energy.

All by Death’s mercy breathe and live awhile,

All think and act by the Inconscient’s grace.

Addict of the roseate luxury of thy thoughts,

Turn not thy gaze within thyself to look

At visions in the gleaming crystal, Mind,

Close not thy lids to dream the forms of Gods.

At last to open thy eyes consent and see

The stuff of which thou and the world are made.

Inconscient in the dumb inconscient Void

Inexplicably a moving world sprang forth:

Awhile secure, happily insensible,

It could not rest content with its own truth.

For something on its nescient breast was born

Condemned to see and know, to feel and love,

It watched its acts, imagined a soul within;

It groped for truth and dreamed of Self and God.

When all unconscious was, then all was well.

I, Death, was king and kept my regal state,

Designing my unwilled, unerring plan,

Creating with a calm insentient heart.

In my sovereign power of unreality

Obliging nothingness to take a form,

Infallibly my blind unthinking force

Making by chance a fixity like fate’s,

By whim the formulas of Necessity,

Founded on the hollow ground of the Inane

The sure bizarrerie of Nature’s scheme.

I curved the vacant ether into Space;

A huge expanding and contracting Breath

Harboured the fires of the universe:

I struck out the supreme original spark

And spread its sparse ranked armies through the Inane,

Manufactured the stars from the occult radiances,

Marshalled the platoons of the invisible dance;

I formed earth’s beauty out of atom and gas,

And built from chemic plasm the living man.

Then Thought came in and spoiled the harmonious world:

Matter began to hope and think and feel,

Tissue and nerve bore joy and agony.

The inconscient cosmos strove to learn its task;

An ignorant personal God was born in Mind

And to understand invented reason’s law,

The impersonal Vast throbbed back to man’s desire,

A trouble rocked the great world’s blind still heart

And Nature lost her wide immortal calm.

Thus came this warped incomprehensible scene

Of souls emmeshed in life’s delight and pain

And Matter’s sleep and Mind’s mortality,

Of beings in Nature’s prison waiting death

And consciousness left in seeking ignorance

And evolution’s slow arrested plan.

This is the world in which thou mov’st, astray

In the tangled pathways of the human mind,

In the issueless circling of thy human life,

Searching for thy soul and thinking God is here.

But where is room for soul or place for God

In the brute immensity of a machine?

A transient Breath thou takest for thy soul,

Born from a gas, a plasm, a sperm, a gene,

A magnified image of man’s mind for God,

A shadow of thyself thrown upon Space.

Interposed between the upper and nether Void,

Thy consciousness reflects the world around

In the distorting mirror of Ignorance

Or upwards turns to catch imagined stars.

Or if a half-Truth is playing with the earth

Throwing its light on a dark shadowy ground,

It touches only and leaves a luminous smudge.

Immortality thou claimest for thy spirit,

But immortality for imperfect man,

A god who hurts himself at every step,

Would be a cycle of eternal pain.

Wisdom and love thou claimest as thy right;

But knowledge in this world is error’s mate,

A brilliant procuress of Nescience,

And human love a posturer on earth-stage

Who imitates with verve a faery dance.

An extract pressed from hard experience,

Man’s knowledge casked in the barrels of Memory

Has the harsh savour of a mortal draught:

A sweet secretion from the erotic glands

Flattering and torturing the burning nerves,

Love is a honey and poison in the breast

Drunk by it as the nectar of the gods.

Earth’s human wisdom is no great-browed power,

And love no gleaming angel from the skies;

If they aspire beyond earth’s dullard air,

Arriving sunwards with frail waxen wings,

How high could reach that forced unnatural flight?

But not on earth can divine wisdom reign

And not on earth can divine love be found;

Heaven-born, only in heaven can they live;

Or else there too perhaps they are shining dreams.

Nay, is not all thou art and doest a dream?

Thy mind and life are tricks of Matter’s force.

If thy mind seems to thee a radiant sun,

If thy life runs a swift and glorious stream,

This is the illusion of thy mortal heart

Dazzled by a ray of happiness or light.

Impotent to live by their own right divine,

Convinced of their brilliant unreality,

When their supporting ground is cut away,

These children of Matter into Matter die.

Even Matter vanishes into Energy’s vague

And Energy is a motion of old Nought.

How shall the Ideal’s unsubstantial hues

Be painted stiff on earth’s vermilion blur,

A dream within a dream come doubly true?

How shall the will-o’-the-wisp become a star?

The Ideal is a malady of thy mind,

A bright delirium of thy speech and thought,

A strange wine of beauty lifting thee to false sight.

A noble fiction of thy yearnings made,

Thy human imperfection it must share:

Its forms in Nature disappoint the heart,

And never shall it find its heavenly shape

And never can it be fulfilled in Time.

O soul misled by the splendour of thy thoughts,

O earthly creature with thy dream of heaven,

Obey, resigned and still, the earthly law.

Accept the brief light that falls upon thy days;

Take what thou canst of Life’s permitted joy;

Submitting to the ordeal of fate’s scourge

Suffer what thou must of toil and grief and care.

There shall approach silencing thy passionate heart

My long calm night of everlasting sleep:

There into the hush from which thou cam’st retire.”

End of Canto Two