(S 1) | ||
A QUIVERING trepidant uncertain world | ||
Born from that dolorous meeting and eclipse
|
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Appeared in the emptiness where her feet had trod,
|
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A quick obscurity, a seeking stir. | ||
(S 2) | ||
5 |
There was a writhing of half-conscious force
|
|
Hardly awakened from the Inconscient’s sleep,
|
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Tied to an instinct-driven Ignorance, | ||
To find itself and find its hold on things. | ||
(S 3) | ||
Inheritor of poverty and loss, | ||
10 |
Assailed by memories that fled when seized,
|
|
Haunted by a forgotten uplifting hope, | ||
It strove with a blindness as of groping hands
|
||
To fill the aching and disastrous gap | ||
Between earth-pain and the bliss from which Life fell.
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(S 4) | ||
15 |
A world that ever seeks for something missed,
|
|
Hunts for the joy that earth has failed to keep.
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(S 5) | ||
Too near to our gates its unappeased unrest
|
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For peace to live on the inert solid globe: | ||
It has joined its hunger to the hunger of earth,
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20 | It has given the law of craving to our lives, | |
It has made our spirit’s need a fathomless gulf.
|
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(S 6) | ||
An Influence entered mortal night and day, | ||
A shadow overcast the time-born race; | ||
In the troubled stream where leaps a blind heart-pulse
|
||
25 |
And the nerve-beat of feeling wakes in sense
|
|
Dividing Matter’s sleep from conscious Mind,
|
||
There strayed a call that knew not why it came.
|
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(S 7) | ||
A Power beyond earth’s scope has touched the earth;
|
||
The repose that might have been can be no more;
|
||
30 |
A formless yearning passions in man’s heart,
|
|
A cry is in his blood for happier things: | ||
Else could he roam on a free sunlit soil | ||
With the childlike pain-forgetting mind of beasts
|
||
Or live happy, unmoved, like flowers and trees.
|
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(S 8) | ||
35 |
The Might that came upon the earth to bless,
|
|
Has stayed on earth to suffer and aspire. | ||
(S 9) | ||
The infant laugh that rang through time is hushed:
|
||
Man’s natural joy of life is overcast | ||
And sorrow is his nurse of destiny. | ||
(S 10) | ||
40 | The animal’s thoughtless joy is left behind, | |
Care and reflection burden his daily walk; | ||
He has risen to greatness and to discontent,
|
||
He is awake to the Invisible. | ||
(S 11) | ||
Insatiate seeker, he has all to learn: | ||
45 | He has exhausted now life’s surface acts, | |
His being’s hidden realms remain to explore.
|
||
(S 12) | ||
He becomes a mind, he becomes a spirit and self;
|
||
In his fragile tenement he grows Nature’s lord.
|
||
(S 13) | ||
In him Matter wakes from its long obscure trance,
|
||
50 |
In him earth feels the Godhead drawing near.
|
|
(S 14) | ||
An eyeless Power that sees no more its aim,
|
||
A restless hungry energy of Will, | ||
Life cast her seed in the body’s indolent mould;
|
||
It woke from happy torpor a blind Force | ||
55 | Compelling it to sense and seek and feel. | |
(S 15) | ||
In the enormous labour of the Void | ||
Perturbing with her dreams the vast routine | ||
And dead roll of a slumbering universe | ||
The mighty prisoner struggled for release. | ||
(S 16) | ||
60 | Alive with her yearning woke the inert cell, | |
In the heart she kindled a fire of passion and need,
|
||
Amid the deep calm of inanimate things | ||
Arose her great voice of toil and prayer and strife.
|
||
(S 17) | ||
A groping consciousness in a voiceless world,
|
||
65 |
A guideless sense was given her for her road;
|
|
Thought was withheld and nothing now she knew,
|
||
But all the unknown was hers to feel and clasp.
|
||
(S 18) | ||
Obeying the push of unborn things towards birth
|
||
Out of her seal of insentient life she broke: | ||
70 |
In her substance of unthinking mute soul-strength
|
|
That cannot utter what its depths divine, | ||
Awoke a blind necessity to know. | ||
(S 19) | ||
The chain that bound her she made her instrument;
|
||
Instinct was hers, the chrysalis of Truth, | ||
75 |
And effort and growth and striving nescience.
|
|
(S 20) | ||
Inflicting on the body desire and hope, | ||
Imposing on inconscience consciousness, | ||
She brought into Matter’s dull tenacity | ||
Her anguished claim to her lost sovereign right,
|
||
80 |
Her tireless search, her vexed uneasy heart,
|
|
Her wandering unsure steps, her cry for change.
|
||
(S 21) | ||
Adorer of a joy without a name, | ||
In her obscure cathedral of delight | ||
To dim dwarf gods she offers secret rites. | ||
(S 22) | ||
85 | But vain unending is the sacrifice, | |
The priest an ignorant mage who only makes
|
||
Futile mutations in the altar’s plan | ||
And casts blind hopes into a powerless flame.
|
||
(S 23) | ||
A burden of transient gains weighs down her steps
|
||
90 |
And hardly under that load can she advance;
|
|
But the hours cry to her, she travels on | ||
Passing from thought to thought, from want to want;
|
||
Her greatest progress is a deepened need. | ||
(S 24) | ||
Matter dissatisfies, she turns to Mind; | ||
95 |
She conquers earth, her field, then claims the heavens.
|
|
(S 25) | ||
Insensible, breaking the work she has done | ||
The stumbling ages over her labour pass, | ||
But still no great transforming light came down
|
||
And no revealing rapture touched her fall. | ||
(S 26) | ||
100 | Only a glimmer sometimes splits mind’s sky | |
Justifying the ambiguous providence | ||
That makes of night a path to unknown dawns
|
||
Or a dark clue to some diviner state. | ||
(S 27) | ||
In Nescience began her mighty task, | ||
105 |
In Ignorance she pursues the unfinished work,
|
|
For knowledge gropes, but meets not Wisdom’s face.
|
||
(S 28) | ||
A foundling of the Gods she wanders here | ❊ | |
Like a child-soul left near the gates of Hell | ||
110 |
Fumbling through fog in search of Paradise.
|
Book 2, Canto 4 – The Kingdoms of the Little Life, Section 1Savitri Bhavan2018-09-21T05:53:38+00:00