(S 1)
Allured to her lashes by his passionate words
Her fathomless soul looked out at him from her eyes;
325 Passing her lips in liquid sounds it spoke.
(S 2)
This word alone she uttered and said all:
“O Satyavan, I have heard thee and I know;
I know that thou and only thou art he.”
(S 3)
Then down she came from her high carven car
330 Descending with a soft and faltering haste;
Her many-hued raiment glistening in the light
Hovered a moment over the wind-stirred grass,
Mixed with a glimmer of her body’s ray
Like lovely plumage of a settling bird.
(S 4)
335 Her gleaming feet upon the green-gold sward
Scattered a memory of wandering beams
And lightly pressed the unspoken desire of earth
Cherished in her too brief passing by the soil.
(S 5)
Then flitting like pale-brilliant moths her hands
340 Took from the sylvan verge’s sunlit arms
A load of their jewel-faces’ clustering swarms,
Companions of the spring-time and the breeze.
(S 6)
A candid garland set with simple forms
Her rapid fingers taught a flower song,
345 The stanzaed movement of a marriage hymn.
(S 7)
Profound in perfume and immersed in hue
They mixed their yearning’s coloured signs and made
The bloom of their purity and passion one.
(S 8)
A sacrament of joy in treasuring palms
350 She brought, flower-symbol of her offered life,
Then with raised hands that trembled a little now
At the very closeness that her soul desired,
This bond of sweetness, their bright union’s sign,
She laid on the bosom coveted by her love.
(S 9)
355 As if inclined before some gracious god
Who has out of his mist of greatness shone
To fill with beauty his adorer’s hours,
She bowed and touched his feet with worshipping hands;
She made her life his world for him to tread
360 And made her body the room of his delight,
Her beating heart a remembrancer of bliss.
(S 10)
He bent to her and took into his own
Their married yearning joined like folded hopes;
As if a whole rich world suddenly possessed,
365 Wedded to all he had been, became himself,
An inexhaustible joy made his alone,
He gathered all Savitri into his clasp.
(S 11)
Around her his embrace became the sign
Of a locked closeness through slow intimate years,
370 A first sweet summary of delight to come,
One brevity intense of all long life.
(S 12)
In a wide moment of two souls that meet
She felt her being flow into him as in waves
A river pours into a mighty sea.
(S 13)
375 As when a soul is merging into God
To live in Him for ever and know His joy,
Her consciousness grew aware of him alone
And all her separate self was lost in his.
(S 14)
As a starry heaven encircles happy earth,
380 He shut her into himself in a circle of bliss
And shut the world into himself and her.
(S 15)
A boundless isolation made them one;
He was aware of her enveloping him
And let her penetrate his very soul
385 As is a world by the world’s spirit filled,
As the mortal wakes into Eternity,
As the finite opens to the Infinite.
(S 16)
Thus were they in each other lost awhile,
Then drawing back from their long ecstasy’s trance
390 Came into a new self and a new world.
(S 17)
Each now was a part of the other’s unity,
The world was but their twin self-finding’s scene
Or their own wedded being’s vaster frame.
(S 18)
On the high glowing cupola of the day
395 Fate tied a knot with morning’s halo threads
While by the ministry of an auspice-hour
Heart-bound before the sun, their marriage fire,
The wedding of the eternal Lord and Spouse
Took place again on earth in human forms:
400 In a new act of the drama of the world
The united Two began a greater age.
(S 19)
In the silence and murmur of that emerald world
And the mutter of the priest-wind’s sacred verse,
Amid the choral whispering of the leaves
405 Love’s twain had joined together and grew one.
(S 20)
The natural miracle was wrought once more:
In the immutable ideal world
One human moment was eternal made.