(S 1)
A CALM slow sun looked down from tranquil heavens.
(S 2)
A routed sullen rearguard of retreat,
The last rains had fled murmuring across the woods
Or failed, a sibilant whisper mid the leaves,
5 And the great blue enchantment of the sky
Recovered the deep rapture of its smile.
(S 3)
Its mellow splendour unstressed by storm-licked heats
Found room for a luxury of warm mild days,
The night’s gold treasure of autumnal moons
10 Came floating shipped through ripples of faery air.
(S 4)
And Savitri’s life was glad, fulfilled like earth’s;
She had found herself, she knew her being’s aim.
(S 5)
Although her kingdom of marvellous change within EoS
Remained unspoken in her secret breast,
15 All that lived round her felt its magic’s charm:
The trees’ rustling voices told it to the winds,
Flowers spoke in ardent hues an unknown joy,
The birds’ carolling became a canticle,
The beasts forgot their strife and lived at ease.
(S 6)
20 Absorbed in wide communion with the Unseen
The mild ascetics of the wood received
A sudden greatening of their lonely muse.
(S 7)
This bright perfection of her inner state
Poured overflowing into her outward scene,
25 Made beautiful dull common natural things
And action wonderful and time divine.
(S 8)
Even the smallest meanest work became
A sweet or glad and glorious sacrament,
An offering to the self of the great world
30 Or a service to the One in each and all.
(S 9)
A light invaded all from her being’s light;
Her heart-beats’ dance communicated bliss:
Happiness grew happier, shared with her, by her touch
And grief some solace found when she drew near.
(S 10)
35 Above the cherished head of Satyavan EoS
She saw not now Fate’s dark and lethal orb;
A golden circle round a mystic sun
Disclosed to her new-born predicting sight
The cyclic rondure of a sovereign life.
(S 11)
40 In her visions and deep-etched veridical dreams,
In brief shiftings of the future’s heavy screen,
He lay not by a dolorous decree
A victim in the dismal antre of death
Or borne to blissful regions far from her
45 Forgetting the sweetness of earth’s warm delight,
Forgetting the passionate oneness of love’s clasp,
Absolved in the self-rapt immortal’s bliss.
(S 12)
Always he was with her, a living soul
That met her eyes with close enamoured eyes,
50 A living body near to her body’s joy.
(S 13)
But now no longer in these great wild woods EoS
In kinship with the days of bird and beast
And levelled to the bareness of earth’s brown breast,
But mid the thinking high-built lives of men
55 In tapestried chambers and on crystal floors,
In armoured town or gardened pleasure-walks,
Even in distance closer than her thoughts,
Body to body near, soul near to soul,
Moving as if by a common breath and will
60 They were tied in the single circling of their days
Together by love’s unseen atmosphere,
Inseparable like the earth and sky.
(S 14)
Thus for a while she trod the Golden Path;
This was the sun before abysmal Night.
(S 15)
65 Once as she sat in deep felicitous muse, EoS
Still quivering from her lover’s strong embrace,
And made her joy a bridge twixt earth and heaven,
An abyss yawned suddenly beneath her heart.
(S 16)
A vast and nameless fear dragged at her nerves
70 As drags a wild beast its half-slaughtered prey;
It seemed to have no den from which it sprang:
It was not hers, but hid its unseen cause.
(S 17)
Then rushing came its vast and fearful Fount.
(S 18)
A formless Dread with shapeless endless wings
75 Filling the universe with its dangerous breath,
A denser darkness than the Night could bear,
Enveloped the heavens and possessed the earth.
(S 19)
A rolling surge of silent death, it came
Curving round the far edge of the quaking globe;
80 Effacing heaven with its enormous stride
It willed to expunge the choked and anguished air
And end the fable of the joy of life.
(S 20)
It seemed her very being to forbid,
Abolishing all by which her nature lived,
85 And laboured to blot out her body and soul,
A clutch of some half-seen Invisible,
An ocean of terror and of sovereign might,
A person and a black infinity.
(S 21)
It seemed to cry to her without thought or word EoS
90 The message of its dark eternity
And the awful meaning of its silences:
Out of some sullen monstrous vast arisen,
Out of an abysmal deep of grief and fear
Imagined by some blind regardless self,
95 A consciousness of being without its joy,
Empty of thought, incapable of bliss,
That felt life blank and nowhere found a soul,
A voice to the dumb anguish of the heart
Conveyed a stark sense of unspoken words;
100 In her own depths she heard the unuttered thought
That made unreal the world and all life meant.
(S 22)
“Who art thou who claimst thy crown of separate birth,
The illusion of thy soul’s reality
And personal godhead on an ignorant globe
105 In the animal body of imperfect man?
(S 23)
Hope not to be happy in a world of pain EoS
And dream not, listening to the unspoken Word
And dazzled by the inexpressible Ray,
Transcending the mute Superconscient’s realm,
110 To give a body to the Unknowable,
Or for a sanction to thy heart’s delight
To burden with bliss the silent still Supreme
Profaning its bare and formless sanctity,
Or call into thy chamber the Divine
115 And sit with God tasting a human joy.
(S 24)
I have created all, all I devour; EoS
I am Death and the dark terrible Mother of life,
I am Kali black and naked in the world,
I am Maya and the universe is my cheat.
(S 25)
120 I lay waste human happiness with my breath
And slay the will to live, the joy to be
That all may pass back into nothingness
And only abide the eternal and absolute.
(S 26)
For only the blank Eternal can be true. EoS
(S 27)
125 All else is shadow and flash in Mind’s bright glass,
Mind, hollow mirror in which Ignorance sees
A splendid figure of its own false self
And dreams it sees a glorious solid world.
(S 28)
O soul, inventor of man’s thoughts and hopes,
130 Thyself the invention of the moments’ stream,
Illusion’s centre or subtle apex point,
At last know thyself, from vain existence cease.”
(S 29)
A shadow of the negating Absolute,
The intolerant Darkness travelled surging past
135 And ebbed in her the formidable Voice.
(S 30)
It left behind her inner world laid waste:
A barren silence weighed upon her heart,
Her kingdom of delight was there no more;
Only her soul remained, its emptied stage,
140 Awaiting the unknown eternal Will.
(S 31)
Then from the heights a greater Voice came down, EoS
The Word that touches the heart and finds the soul,
The voice of Light after the voice of Night:
The cry of the Abyss drew Heaven’s reply,
145 A might of storm chased by the might of the Sun.
(S 32)
“O soul, bare not thy kingdom to the foe; EoS
Consent to hide thy royalty of bliss
Lest Time and Fate find out its avenues
And beat with thunderous knock upon thy gates.
(S 33)
150 Hide whilst thou canst thy treasure of separate self EoS
Behind the luminous rampart of thy depths
Till of a vaster empire it grows part.
(S 34)
But not for self alone the Self is won: EoS
Content abide not with one conquered realm;
155 Adventure all to make the whole world thine,
To break into greater kingdoms turn thy force.
(S 35)
Fear not to be nothing that thou mayst be all; EoS
Assent to the emptiness of the Supreme
That all in thee may reach its absolute.
(S 36)
160 Accept to be small and human on the earth,
Interrupting thy new-born divinity,
That man may find his utter self in God.
(S 37)
If for thy own sake only thou hast come, EoS
An immortal spirit into the mortal’s world,
165 To found thy luminous kingdom in God’s dark,
In the Inconscient’s realm one shining star,
One door in the Ignorance opened upon light,
Why hadst thou any need to come at all?
(S 38)
Thou hast come down into a struggling world
170 To aid a blind and suffering mortal race,
To open to Light the eyes that could not see, EoS
To bring down bliss into the heart of grief,
To make thy life a bridge twixt earth and heaven;
If thou wouldst save the toiling universe,
175 The vast universal suffering feel as thine:
Thou must bear the sorrow that thou claimst to heal;
The day-bringer must walk in darkest night.
(S 39)
He who would save the world must share its pain. EoS
(S 40)
If he knows not grief, how shall he find grief’s cure?
(S 41)
180 If far he walks above mortality’s head,
How shall the mortal reach that too high path?
(S 42)
If one of theirs they see scale heaven’s peaks, EoS
Men then can hope to learn that titan climb.
(S 43)
God must be born on earth and be as man
185 That man being human may grow even as God.
(S 44)
He who would save the world must be one with the world,
All suffering things contain in his heart’s space
And bear the grief and joy of all that lives.
(S 45)
His soul must be wider than the universe EoS
190 And feel eternity as its very stuff,
Rejecting the moment’s personality
Know itself older than the birth of Time,
Creation an incident in its consciousness,
Arcturus and Belphego grains of fire
195 Circling in a corner of its boundless self,
The world’s destruction a small transient storm
In the calm infinity it has become.
(S 46)
If thou wouldst a little loosen the vast chain, EoS
Draw back from the world that the Idea has made,
200 Thy mind’s selection from the Infinite,
Thy senses’ gloss on the Infinitesimal’s dance,Infinitesimal’s dance
Then shalt thou know how the great bondage came.
(S 47)
Banish all thought from thee and be God’s void.
(S 48)
Then shalt thou uncover the Unknowable
205 And the Superconscient conscious grow on thy tops;
Infinity’s vision through thy gaze shall pierce;
Thou shalt look into the eyes of the Unknown,
Find the hid Truth in things seen null and false,
Behind things known discover Mystery’s rear.
(S 49)
210 Thou shalt be one with God’s bare reality EoS
And the miraculous world he has become
And the diviner miracle still to be
When Nature who is now unconscious God
Translucent grows to the Eternal’s light,
215 Her seeing his sight, her walk his steps of power
And life is filled with a spiritual joy
And Matter is the Spirit’s willing bride.
(S 50)
Consent to be nothing and none, dissolve Time’s work, EoS
Cast off thy mind, step back from form and name.
(S 51)
220 Annul thyself that only God may be.”