Canto 1The Eternal Day: The Soul’s Choice and the Supreme Consummation
Book 11. The Book of Everlasting Day
A MARVELLOUS sun looked down from ecstasy’s skies
On worlds of deathless bliss, perfection’s home,
Magical unfoldings of the Eternal’s smile
Capturing his secret heart-beats of delight.
5God’s everlasting day surrounded her,
Domains appeared of sempiternal light
Invading all Nature with the Absolute’s joy.
Her body quivered with eternity’s touch,
Her soul stood close to the founts of the infinite.
10Infinity’s finite fronts she lived in, new
For ever to an everliving sight.
Eternity multiplied its vast self-look
Translating its endless mightiness and joy
Into delight souls playing with Time could share
15In grandeurs ever new-born from the unknown depths,
In powers that leaped immortal from unknown heights,
In passionate heart-beats of an undying love,
In scenes of a sweetness that can never fade.
Immortal to the rapturous heart and eyes,
20In serene arches of translucent calm
From Wonder’s dream-vasts cloudless skies slid down
An abyss of sapphire; sunlight visited eyes
Which suffered without pain the absolute ray
And saw immortal clarities of form.
25Twilight and mist were exiles from that air,
Night was impossible to such radiant heavens.
Firm in the bosom of immensity
Spiritual breadths were seen, sublimely born
From a still beauty of creative joy;
30Embodied thoughts to sweet dimensions held
To please some carelessness of divine peace,
Answered the deep demand of an infinite sense
And its need of forms to house its bodiless thrill.
A march of universal powers in Time,
35The harmonic order of self’s vastitudes
In cyclic symmetries and metric planes
Harboured a cosmic rapture’s revelry,
An endless figuring of the spirit in things
Planned by the artist who has dreamed the worlds;
40Of all the beauty and the marvel here,
Of all Time’s intricate variety
Eternity was the substance and the source;
Not from a plastic mist of Matter made,
They offered the suggestion of their depths
45And opened the great series of their powers.
Arisen beneath a triple mystic heaven
The seven immortal earths were seen, sublime:
Homes of the blest released from death and sleep
Where grief can never come nor any pang
50Arriving from self-lost and seeking worlds
Alter Heaven-nature’s changeless quietude
And mighty posture of eternal calm,
Its pose of ecstasy immutable.
Plains lay that seemed the expanse of God’s wide sleep,
55Thought’s wings climbed up towards heaven’s vast repose
Lost in blue deeps of immortality.
A changed earth-nature felt the breath of peace.
Air seemed an ocean of felicity
Or the couch of the unknown spiritual rest,
60A vast quiescence swallowing up all sound
Into a voicelessness of utter bliss;
Even Matter brought a close spiritual touch,
All thrilled with the immanence of one divine.
The lowest of these earths was still a heaven
65Translating into the splendour of things divine
The beauty and brightness of terrestrial scenes.
The Soul’s Choice and the Supreme Consummation
Eternal mountains ridge on gleaming ridge
Whose lines were graved as on a sapphire plate
70And etched the borders of heaven’s lustrous noon
Climbed like piled temple stairs and from their heads
Of topless meditation heard below
The approach of a blue pilgrim multitude
And listened to a great arriving voice
75Of the wide travel hymn of timeless seas.
A chanting crowd from mountain bosoms slipped
Past branches fragrant with a sigh of flowers
Hurrying through sweetnesses with revel leaps;
The murmurous rivers of felicity
80Divinely rippled honey-voiced desires,
Mingling their sister eddies of delight,
Then, widening to a pace of calm-lipped muse,
Down many-glimmered estuaries of dream
Went whispering into lakes of liquid peace.
85On a brink held of senseless ecstasy
And guarding an eternal poise of thought
Sat sculptured souls dreaming by rivers of sound
In changeless attitudes of marble bliss.
Around her lived the children of God’s day
90In an unspeakable felicity,
A happiness never lost, the immortal’s ease,
A glad eternity’s blissful multitude.
Around, the deathless nations moved and spoke,
Souls of a luminous celestial joy,
95Faces of stark beauty, limbs of the moulded Ray;
In cities cut like gems of conscious stone
And wonderful pastures and on gleaming coasts
Bright forms were seen, eternity’s luminous tribes.
Above her rhythming godheads whirled the spheres,
100Rapt mobile fixities here blindly sought
By the huge erring orbits of our stars.
Ecstatic voices smote at hearing’s chords,
Each movement found a music all its own;
Songs thrilled of birds upon unfading boughs
105The colours of whose plumage had been caught
From the rainbow of imagination’s wings.
Immortal fragrance packed the quivering breeze.
In groves that seemed moved bosoms and trembling depths
The million children of the undying spring
110Bloomed, pure unnumbered stars of hued delight
Nestling for shelter in their emerald sky:
Faery flower-masses looked with laughing eyes.
A dancing chaos, an iridescent sea
Eternised to Heaven’s ever-wakeful sight
115The crowding petal-glow of marvel’s tints
Which float across the curtained lids of dream.
Immortal harmonies filled her listening ear;
A great spontaneous utterance of the heights
On Titan wings of rhythmic grandeur borne
120Poured from some deep spiritual heart of sound,
Strains trembling with the secrets of the gods.
A spirit wandered happily in the wind,
A spirit brooded in the leaf and stone;
The voices of thought-conscious instruments
125Along a living verge of silence strayed,
And from some deep, a wordless tongue of things
Unfathomed, inexpressible, chantings rose
Translating into a voice the Unknown.
A climber on the invisible stair of sound,
130Music not with these few and striving steps
Aspired that wander upon transient strings,
But changed its ever new uncounted notes
In a passion of unforeseeing discovery,
And kept its old unforgotten ecstasies
135A growing treasure in the mystic heart.
A consciousness that yearned through every cry
Of unexplored attraction and desire,
It found and searched again the unsatisfied deeps
Hunting as if in some deep secret heart
140The Soul’s Choice and the Supreme Consummation
To find some lost or missed felicity.
In those far-lapsing symphonies she could hear,
Breaking through enchantments of the ravished sense,
The lyric voyage of a divine soul
145Mid spume and laughter tempting with its prow
The charm of innocent Circean isles,
Adventures without danger beautiful
In lands where siren Wonder sings its lures
From rhythmic rocks in ever-foaming seas.
150In the harmony of an original sight
Delivered from our limiting ray of thought,
And the reluctance of our blinded hearts
To embrace the Godhead in whatever guise,
She saw all Nature marvellous without fault.
155Invaded by beauty’s universal revel
Her being’s fibre reached out vibrating
And claimed deep union with its outer selves,
And on the heart’s chords made pure to seize all tones
Heaven’s subtleties of touch unwearying forced
160More vivid raptures than earth’s life can bear.
What would be suffering here, was fiery bliss.
All here but passionate hint and mystic shade
Divined by the inner prophet who perceives
The spirit of delight in sensuous things,
165Turned to more sweetness than can now be dreamed.
The mighty signs of which earth fears the stress,
Trembling because she cannot understand,
And must keep obscure in forms strange and sublime,
Were here the first lexicon of an infinite mind
170Translating the language of eternal bliss.
Here rapture was a common incident;
The lovelinesses of whose captured thrill
Our human pleasure is a fallen thread,
Lay, symbol shapes, a careless ornament,
175Sewn on the rich brocade of Godhead’s dress.
Things fashioned were the imaged homes where mind
Arrived to fathom a deep physical joy;
The heart was a torch lit from infinity,
The limbs were trembling densities of soul.
180These were the first domains, the outer courts
Immense but least in range and least in price,
The slightest ecstasies of the undying gods.
Higher her swing of vision swept and knew,
Admitted through large sapphire opening gates
185Into the wideness of a light beyond,
These were but sumptuous decorated doors
To worlds nobler, more felicitously fair.
Endless aspired the climbing of those heavens;
Realm upon realm received her soaring view.
190Then on what seemed one crown of the ascent
Where finite and the infinite are one,
Immune she beheld the strong immortals’ seats
Who live for a celestial joy and rule,
The middle regions of the unfading Ray.
195Great forms of deities sat in deathless tiers,
Eyes of an unborn gaze towards her leaned
Through a transparency of crystal fire.
In the beauty of bodies wrought from rapture’s lines,
Shapes of entrancing sweetness spilling bliss,
200Feet glimmering upon the sunstone courts of mind,
Heaven’s cupbearers bore round the Eternal’s wine.
A tangle of bright bodies, of moved souls
Tracing the close and intertwined delight,
The harmonious tread of lives for ever joined
205In the passionate oneness of a mystic joy
As if sunbeams made living and divine,
The golden-bosomed Apsara goddesses,
In groves flooded from an argent disk of bliss
That floated through a luminous sapphire dream,
210In a cloud of raiment lit with golden limbs
And gleaming footfalls treading faery swards,
Virgin motions of bacchant innocences
The Soul’s Choice and the Supreme Consummation
Who know their riot for a dance of God,
215Whirled linked in moonlit revels of the heart.
Impeccable artists of unerring forms,
Magician builders of sound and rhythmic words,
Wind-haired Gandharvas chanted to the ear
The odes that shape the universal thought,
220The lines that tear the veil from Deity’s face,
The rhythms that bring the sounds of wisdom’s sea.
Immortal figures and illumined brows,
Our great forefathers in those splendours moved;
Termless in power and satisfied of light,
225They enjoyed the sense of all for which we strive.
High seers, moved poets saw the eternal thoughts
That, travellers from on high, arrive to us
Deformed by our search, tricked by costuming mind,
Like gods disfigured by the pangs of birth,
230Seized the great words which now are frail sounds caught
By difficult rapture on a mortal tongue.
The strong who stumble and sin were calm proud gods.
There lightning-filled with glory and with flame,
Melting in waves of sympathy and sight,
235Smitten like a lyre that throbs to others’ bliss,
Drawn by the cords of ecstasies unknown,
Her human nature faint with heaven’s delight,
She beheld the clasp to earth denied and bore
The imperishable eyes of veilless love.
240More climbed above, level to level reached,
Beyond what tongue can utter or mind dream:
Worlds of an infinite reach crowned Nature’s stir.
There was a greater tranquil sweetness there,
A subtler and profounder ether’s field
245And mightier scheme than heavenliest sense can give.
There breath carried a stream of seeing mind,
Form was a tenuous raiment of the soul:
Colour was a visible tone of ecstasy;
Shapes seen half immaterial by the gaze
250And yet voluptuously palpable
Made sensible to touch the indwelling spirit.
The high perfected sense illumined lived
A happy vassal of the inner ray,
Each feeling was the Eternal’s mighty child
255And every thought was a sweet burning god.
Air was a luminous feeling, sound a voice,
Sunlight the soul’s vision and moonlight its dream.
On a wide living base of wordless calm
All was a potent and a lucid joy.
260Into those heights her spirit went floating up
Like an upsoaring bird who mounts unseen
Voicing to the ascent his throbbing heart
Of melody till a pause of closing wings
Comes quivering in his last contented cry
265And he is silent with his soul discharged,
Delivered of his heart’s burden of delight.
Experience mounted on joy’s coloured breast
To inaccessible spheres in spiral flight.
There Time dwelt with eternity as one;
270Immense felicity joined rapt repose.
As one drowned in a sea of splendour and bliss,
Mute in the maze of these surprising worlds,
Turning she saw their living knot and source,
Key to their charm and fount of their delight,
275And knew him for the same who snares our lives
Captured in his terrifying pitiless net,
And makes the universe his prison camp
And makes in his immense and vacant vasts
The labour of the stars a circuit vain
280And death the end of every human road
And grief and pain the wages of man’s toil.
One whom her soul had faced as Death and Night
A sum of all sweetness gathered into his limbs
And blinded her heart to the beauty of the suns.
285The Soul’s Choice and the Supreme Consummation
Transfigured was the formidable shape.
His darkness and his sad destroying might
Abolishing for ever and disclosing
The mystery of his high and violent deeds,
290A secret splendour rose revealed to sight
Where once the vast embodied Void had stood.
Night the dim mask had grown a wonderful face.
The vague infinity was slain whose gloom
Had outlined from the terrible unknown
295The obscure disastrous figure of a god,
Fled was the error that arms the hands of grief,
And lighted the ignorant gulf whose hollow deeps
Had given to nothingness a dreadful voice.
As when before the eye that wakes in sleep
300Is opened the sombre binding of a book,
Illumined letterings are seen which kept
A golden blaze of thought inscribed within,
A marvellous form responded to her gaze
Whose sweetness justified life’s blindest pain;
305All Nature’s struggle was its easy price,
The universe and its agony seemed worth while.
As if the choric calyx of a flower
Aerial, visible on music’s waves,
A lotus of light-petalled ecstasy
310Took shape out of the tremulous heart of things.
There was no more the torment under the stars,
The evil sheltered behind Nature’s mask;
There was no more the dark pretence of hate,
The cruel rictus on Love’s altered face.
315Hate was the grip of a dreadful amour’s strife;
A ruthless love intent only to possess
Has here replaced the sweet original god.
Forgetting the Will-to-love that gave it birth,
The passion to lock itself in and to unite,
320It would swallow all into one lonely self,
Devouring the soul that it had made its own,
By suffering and annihilation’s pain
Punishing the unwillingness to be one,
Angry with the refusals of the world,
325Passionate to take but knowing not how to give.
Death’s sombre cowl was cast from Nature’s brow;
There lightened on her the godhead’s lurking laugh.
All grace and glory and all divinity
Were here collected in a single form;
330All worshipped eyes looked through his from one face;
He bore all godheads in his grandiose limbs.
An oceanic spirit dwelt within;
Intolerant and invincible in joy
A flood of freedom and transcendent bliss
335Into immortal lines of beauty rose.
In him the fourfold Being bore its crown
That wears the mystery of a nameless Name,
The universe writing its tremendous sense
In the inexhaustible meaning of a word.
340In him the architect of the visible world,
At once the art and artist of his works,
Spirit and seer and thinker of things seen,
Virat, who lights his camp-fires in the suns
And the star-entangled ether is his hold,
345Expressed himself with Matter for his speech:
Objects are his letters, forces are his words,
Events are the crowded history of his life,
And sea and land are the pages for his tale.
Matter is his means and his spiritual sign;
350He hangs the thought upon a lash’s lift,
In the current of the blood makes flow the soul.
His is the dumb will of atom and of clod;
A Will that without sense or motive acts,
An Intelligence needing not to think or plan,
355The world creates itself invincibly;
For its body is the body of the Lord
And in its heart stands Virat, King of Kings.
The Soul’s Choice and the Supreme Consummation
In him shadows his form the Golden Child
360Who in the Sun-capped Vast cradles his birth:
Hiranyagarbha, author of thoughts and dreams,
Who sees the invisible and hears the sounds
That never visited a mortal ear,
Discoverer of unthought realities
365Truer to Truth than all we have ever known,
He is the leader on the inner roads;
A seer, he has entered the forbidden realms;
A magician with the omnipotent wand of thought,
He builds the secret uncreated worlds.
370Armed with the golden speech, the diamond eye,
His is the vision and the prophecy:
Imagist casting the formless into shape,
Traveller and hewer of the unseen paths,
He is the carrier of the hidden fire,
375He is the voice of the Ineffable,
He is the invisible hunter of the light,
The Angel of mysterious ecstasies,
The conqueror of the kingdoms of the soul.
A third spirit stood behind, their hidden cause,
380A mass of superconscience closed in light,
Creator of things in his all-knowing sleep.
All from his stillness came as grows a tree;
He is our seed and core, our head and base.
All light is but a flash from his closed eyes:
385An all-wise Truth is mystic in his heart,
The omniscient Ray is shut behind his lids:
He is the Wisdom that comes not by thought,
His wordless silence brings the immortal word.
He sleeps in the atom and the burning star,
390He sleeps in man and god and beast and stone:
Because he is there the Inconscient does its work,
Because he is there the world forgets to die.
He is the centre of the circle of God,
He the circumference of Nature’s run.
395His slumber is an Almightiness in things,
Awake, he is the Eternal and Supreme.
Above was the brooding bliss of the Infinite,
Its omniscient and omnipotent repose,
Its immobile silence absolute and alone.
400All powers were woven in countless concords here.
The bliss that made the world in his body lived,
Love and delight were the head of the sweet form.
In the alluring meshes of their snare
Recaptured, the proud blissful members held
405All joys outrunners of the panting heart
And fugitive from life’s outstripped desire.
Whatever vision has escaped the eye,
Whatever happiness comes in dream and trance,
The nectar spilled by love with trembling hands,
410The joy the cup of Nature cannot hold,
Had crowded to the beauty of his face,
Were waiting in the honey of his laugh.
Things hidden by the silence of the hours,
The ideas that find no voice on living lips,
415The soul’s pregnant meeting with infinity
Had come to birth in him and taken fire:
The secret whisper of the flower and star
Revealed its meaning in his fathomless look.
His lips curved eloquent like a rose of dawn;
420His smile that played with the wonder of the mind
And stayed in the heart when it had left his mouth
Glimmered with the radiance of the morning star
Gemming the wide discovery of heaven.
His gaze was the regard of eternity;
425The spirit of its sweet and calm intent
Was a wise home of gladness and divulged
The light of the ages in the mirth of the hours,
A sun of wisdom in a miracled grove.
In the orchestral largeness of his mind
430All contrary seekings their close kinship knew,
The Soul’s Choice and the Supreme Consummation
Rich-hearted, wonderful to each other met
In the mutual marvelling of their myriad notes
And dwelt like brothers of one family
435Who had found their common and mysterious home.
As from the harp of some ecstatic god
There springs a harmony of lyric bliss
Striving to leave no heavenly joy unsung,
Such was the life in that embodied Light.
440He seemed the wideness of a boundless sky,
He seemed the passion of a sorrowless earth,
He seemed the burning of a world-wide sun.
Two looked upon each other, Soul saw Soul.
Then like an anthem from the heart’s lucent cave
445A voice soared up whose magic sound could turn
The poignant weeping of the earth to sobs
Of rapture and her cry to spirit song.
“O human image of the deathless word,
How hast thou seen beyond the topaz walls
450The gleaming sisters of the divine gate,
Summoned the genii of their wakeful sleep,
And under revelation’s arches forced
The carved thought-shrouded doors to swing apart,
Unlocked the avenues of spiritual sight
455And taught the entries of a heavenlier state
To thy rapt soul that bore the golden key?
In thee the secret sight man’s blindness missed
Has opened its view past Time, my chariot-course,
And death, my tunnel which I drive through life
460To reach my unseen distances of bliss.
I am the hushed search of the jealous gods
Pursuing my wisdom’s vast mysterious work
Seized in the thousand meeting ways of heaven.
I am the beauty of the unveiled ray
465Drawing through the deep roads of the infinite night
The unconquerable pilgrim soul of earth
Beneath the flaring torches of the stars.
I am the inviolable Ecstasy;
They who have looked on me, shall grieve no more.
470The eyes that live in night shall see my form.
On the pale shores of foaming steely straits
That flow beneath a grey tormented sky,
Two powers from one original ecstasy born
Pace near but parted in the life of man;
475One leans to earth, the other yearns to the skies:
Heaven in its rapture dreams of perfect earth,
Earth in its sorrow dreams of perfect heaven.
The two longing to join, yet walk apart,
Idly divided by their vain conceits;
480They are kept from their oneness by enchanted fears;
Sundered mysteriously by miles of thought,
They gaze across the silent gulfs of sleep.
Or side by side reclined upon my vasts
Like bride and bridegroom magically divorced
485They wake to yearn, but never can they clasp
While thinly flickering hesitates uncrossed
Between the lovers on their nuptial couch
The shadowy eidolon of a sword.
But when the phantom flame-edge fails undone,
490Then never more can space or time divide
The lover from the loved; Space shall draw back
Her great translucent curtain, Time shall be
The quivering of the spirit’s endless bliss.
Attend that moment of celestial fate.
495Meanwhile you two shall serve the dual law
Which only now the scouts of vision glimpse
Who pressing through the forest of their thoughts
Have found the narrow bridges of the gods.
Wait patient of the brittle bars of form
500Making division your delightful means
Of happy oneness rapturously enhanced
By attraction in the throbbing air between.
The Soul’s Choice and the Supreme Consummation
Yet if thou wouldst abandon the vexed world,
505Careless of the dark moan of things below,
Tread down the isthmus, overleap the flood,
Cancel thy contract with the labouring Force;
Renounce the tie that joins thee to earth-kind,
Cast off thy sympathy with mortal hearts.
510Arise, vindicate thy spirit’s conquered right:
Relinquishing thy charge of transient breath,
Under the cold gaze of the indifferent stars
Leaving thy borrowed body on the sod,
Ascend, O soul, into thy blissful home.
515Here in the playground of the eternal Child
Or in domains the wise Immortals tread
Roam with thy comrade splendour under skies
Spiritual lit by an unsetting sun,
As godheads live who care not for the world
520And share not in the toil of Nature’s powers:
Absorbed in their self-ecstasy they dwell.
Cast off the ambiguous myth of earth’s desire,
O immortal, to felicity arise.”
On Savitri listening in her tranquil heart
525To the harmony of the ensnaring voice
A joy exceeding earth’s and heaven’s poured down,
The bliss of an unknown eternity,
A rapture from some waiting Infinite.
A smile came rippling out in her wide eyes,
530Its confident felicity’s messenger
As if the first beam of the morning sun
Rippled along two wakened lotus-pools.
“O besetter of man’s soul with life and death
And the world’s pleasure and pain and Day and Night,
535Tempting his heart with the far lure of heaven,
Testing his strength with the close touch of hell,
I climb not to thy everlasting Day,
Even as I have shunned thy eternal Night.
To me who turn not from thy terrestrial Way,
540Give back the other self my nature asks.
Thy spaces need him not to help their joy;
Earth needs his beautiful spirit made by thee
To fling delight down like a net of gold.
Earth is the chosen place of mightiest souls;
545Earth is the heroic spirit’s battlefield,
The forge where the Archmason shapes his works.
Thy servitudes on earth are greater, King,
Than all the glorious liberties of heaven.
The heavens were once to me my natural home,
550I too have wandered in star-jewelled groves,
Paced sun-gold pastures and moon-silver swards
And heard the harping laughter of their streams
And lingered under branches dropping myrrh;
I too have revelled in the fields of light
555Touched by the ethereal raiment of the winds,
Thy wonder-rounds of music I have trod,
Lived in the rhyme of bright unlabouring thoughts,
I have beat swift harmonies of rapture vast,
Danced in spontaneous measures of the soul
560The great and easy dances of the gods.
O fragrant are the lanes thy children walk
And lovely is the memory of their feet
Amid the wonder-flowers of Paradise:
A heavier tread is mine, a mightier touch.
565There where the gods and demons battle in night
Or wrestle on the borders of the Sun,
Taught by the sweetness and the pain of life
To bear the uneven strenuous beat that throbs
Against the edge of some divinest hope,
570To dare the impossible with these pangs of search,
In me the spirit of immortal love
Stretches its arms out to embrace mankind.
Too far thy heavens for me from suffering men.
Imperfect is the joy not shared by all.
575O to spread forth, O to encircle and seize
The Soul’s Choice and the Supreme Consummation
More hearts till love in us has filled thy world!
O life, the life beneath the wheeling stars!
For victory in the tournament with death,
580For bending of the fierce and difficult bow,
For flashing of the splendid sword of God!
O thou who soundst the trumpet in the lists,
Part not the handle from the untried steel,
Take not the warrior with his blow unstruck.
585Are there not still a million fights to wage?
O king-smith, clang on still thy toil begun,
Weld us to one in thy strong smithy of life.
Thy fine-curved jewelled hilt call Savitri,
Thy blade’s exultant smile name Satyavan.
590Fashion to beauty, point us through the world.
Break not the lyre before the song is found;
Are there not still unnumbered chants to weave?
O subtle-souled musician of the years,
Play out what thou hast fluted on my stops;
595Arise from the strain their first wild plaint divined
And that discover which is yet unsung.
I know that I can lift man’s soul to God,
I know that he can bring the Immortal down.
Our will labours permitted by thy will
600And without thee an empty roar of storm,
A senseless whirlwind is the Titan’s force
And without thee a snare the strength of gods.
Let not the inconscient gulf swallow man’s race
That through earth’s ignorance struggles towards thy Light.
605O Thunderer with the lightnings of the soul,
Give not to darkness and to death thy sun,
Achieve thy wisdom’s hidden firm decree
And the mandate of thy secret world-wide love.”
Her words failed lost in thought’s immensities
610Which seized them at the limits of their cry
And hid their meaning in the distances
That stir to more than ever speech has won
From the Unthinkable, end of all our thought,
And the Ineffable from whom all words come.
615Then with a smile august as noonday heavens
The godhead of the vision wonderful:
“How shall earth-nature and man’s nature rise
To the celestial levels, yet earth abide?
Heaven and earth towards each other gaze
620Across a gulf that few can cross, none touch,
Arriving through a vague ethereal mist
Out of which all things form that move in space,
The shore that all can see but never reach.
Heaven’s light visits sometimes the mind of earth;
625Its thoughts burn in her sky like lonely stars;
In her heart there move celestial seekings soft
And beautiful like fluttering wings of birds,
Visions of joy that she can never win
Traverse the fading mirror of her dreams.
630Faint seeds of light and bliss bear sorrowful flowers,
Faint harmonies caught from a half-heard song
Fall swooning mid the wandering voices’ jar,
Foam from the tossing luminous seas where dwells
The beautiful and far delight of gods,
635Raptures unknown, a miracled happiness
Thrill her and pass half-shaped to mind and sense.
Above her little finite steps she feels,
Careless of knot or pause, worlds which weave out
A strange perfection beyond law and rule,
640A universe of self-found felicity,
An inexpressible rhythm of timeless beats,
The many-movemented heart-beats of the One,
Magic of the boundless harmonies of self,
Order of the freedom of the infinite,
645The wonder-plastics of the Absolute.
There is the All-Truth and there the timeless bliss.
But hers are fragments of a star-lost gleam,
The Soul’s Choice and the Supreme Consummation
Hers are but careless visits of the gods.
650They are a Light that fails, a Word soon hushed
And nothing they mean can stay for long on earth.
There are high glimpses, not the lasting sight.
A few can climb to an unperishing sun,
Or live on the edges of the mystic moon
655And channel to earth-mind the wizard ray.
The heroes and the demigods are few
To whom the close immortal voices speak
And to their acts the heavenly clan are near.
Few are the silences in which Truth is heard,
660Unveiling the timeless utterance in her deeps;
Few are the splendid moments of the seers.
Heaven’s call is rare, rarer the heart that heeds;
The doors of light are sealed to common mind
And earth’s needs nail to earth the human mass,
665Only in an uplifting hour of stress
Men answer to the touch of greater things:
Or, raised by some strong hand to breathe heaven-air,
They slide back to the mud from which they climbed;
In the mud of which they are made, whose law they know
670They joy in safe return to a friendly base,
And, though something in them weeps for glory lost
And greatness murdered, they accept their fall.
To be the common man they think the best,
To live as others live is their delight.
675For most are built on Nature’s early plan
And owe small debt to a superior plane;
The human average is their level pitch,
A thinking animal’s material range.
In the long ever-mounting hierarchy,
680In the stark economy of cosmic life
Each creature to its appointed task and place
Is bound by his nature’s form, his spirit’s force.
If this were easily disturbed, it would break
The settled balance of created things;
685The perpetual order of the universe
Would tremble, and a gap yawn in woven Fate.
If men were not and all were brilliant gods,
The mediating stair would then be lost
By which the spirit awake in Matter winds
690Accepting the circuits of the middle Way,
By heavy toil and slow aeonic steps
Reaching the bright miraculous fringe of God,
Into the glory of the Oversoul.
My will, my call is there in men and things;
695But the Inconscient lies at the world’s grey back
And draws to its breast of Night and Death and Sleep.
Imprisoned in its dark and dumb abyss
A little consciousness it lets escape
But jealous of the growing light holds back
700Close to the obscure edges of its cave
As if a fond ignorant mother kept her child
Tied to her apron strings of Nescience.
The Inconscient could not read without man’s mind
The mystery of the world its sleep has made:
705Man is its key to unlock a conscious door.
But still it holds him dangled in its grasp:
It draws its giant circle round his thoughts,
It shuts his heart to the supernal Light.
A high and dazzling limit shines above,
710A black and blinding border rules below:
His mind is closed between two firmaments.
He seeks through words and images the Truth,
And, poring on surfaces and brute outsides
Or dipping cautious feet in shallow seas,
715Even his Knowledge is an Ignorance.
He is barred out from his own inner depths;
He cannot look on the face of the Unknown.
How shall he see with the Omniscient’s eyes,
How shall he will with the Omnipotent’s force?
720O too compassionate and eager Dawn,
The Soul’s Choice and the Supreme Consummation
Leave to the circling aeons’ tardy pace
And to the working of the inconscient Will,
Leave to its imperfect light the earthly race:
725All shall be done by the long act of Time.
Although the race is bound by its own kind,
The soul in man is greater than his fate:
Above the wash and surge of Time and Space,
Disengaging from the cosmic commonalty
730By which all life is kin in grief and joy,
Delivered from the universal Law
The sunlike single and transcendent spirit
Can blaze its way through the mind’s barrier wall
And burn alone in the eternal sky,
735Inhabitant of a wide and endless calm.
O flame, withdraw into thy luminous self.
Or else return to thy original might
On a seer-summit above thought and world;
Partner of my unhoured eternity,
740Be one with the infinity of my power:
For thou art the World-Mother and the Bride.
Out of the fruitless yearning of earth’s life,
Out of her feeble unconvincing dream,
Recovering wings that cross infinity
745Pass back into the Power from which thou cam’st.
To that thou canst uplift thy formless flight,
Thy heart can rise from its unsatisfied beats
And feel the immortal and spiritual joy
Of a soul that never lost felicity.
750Lift up the fallen heart of love which flutters
Cast down desire’s abyss into the gulfs.
For ever rescued out of Nature’s shapes
Discover what the aimless cycles want,
There intertwined with all thy life has meant,
755Here vainly sought in a terrestrial form.
Break into eternity thy mortal mould;
Melt, lightning, into thy invisible flame!
Clasp, Ocean, deep into thyself thy wave,
Happy for ever in the embosoming surge.
760Grow one with the still passion of the depths.
Then shalt thou know the Lover and the Loved,
Leaving the limits dividing him and thee.
Receive him into boundless Savitri,
Lose thyself into infinite Satyavan.
765O miracle, where thou beganst, there cease!”
But Savitri answered to the radiant God:
“In vain thou temptst with solitary bliss
Two spirits saved out of a suffering world;
My soul and his indissolubly linked
770In the one task for which our lives were born,
To raise the world to God in deathless Light,
To bring God down to the world on earth we came,
To change the earthly life to life divine.
I keep my will to save the world and man;
775Even the charm of thy alluring voice,
O blissful Godhead, cannot seize and snare.
I sacrifice not earth to happier worlds.
Because there dwelt the Eternal’s vast Idea
And his dynamic will in men and things,
780So only could the enormous scene begin.
Whence came this profitless wilderness of stars,
This mighty barren wheeling of the suns?
Who made the soul of futile life in Time,
Planted a purpose and a hope in the heart,
785Set Nature to a huge and meaningless task
Or planned her million-aeoned effort’s waste?
What force condemned to birth and death and tears
These conscious creatures crawling on the globe?
If earth can look up to the light of heaven
790And hear an answer to her lonely cry,
Not vain their meeting, nor heaven’s touch a snare.
If thou and I are true, the world is true;
Although thou hide thyself behind thy works,
The Soul’s Choice and the Supreme Consummation
795To be is not a senseless paradox;
Since God has made earth, earth must make in her God;
What hides within her breast she must reveal.
I claim thee for the world that thou hast made.
If man lives bound by his humanity,
800If he is tied for ever to his pain,
Let a greater being then arise from man,
The superhuman with the Eternal mate
And the Immortal shine through earthly forms.
Else were creation vain and this great world
805A nothing that in Time’s moments seems to be.
But I have seen through the insentient mask;
I have felt a secret spirit stir in things
Carrying the body of the growing God:
It looks through veiling forms at veilless truth;
810It pushes back the curtain of the gods;
It climbs towards its own eternity.”
But the god answered to the woman’s heart:
“O living power of the incarnate Word,
All that the Spirit has dreamed thou canst create:
815Thou art the force by which I made the worlds,
Thou art my vision and my will and voice.
But knowledge too is thine, the world-plan thou knowest
And the tardy process of the pace of Time.
In the impetuous drive of thy heart of flame,
820In thy passion to deliver man and earth,
Indignant at the impediments of Time
And the slow evolution’s sluggard steps,
Lead not the spirit in an ignorant world
To dare too soon the adventure of the Light,
825Pushing the bound and slumbering god in man
Awakened mid the ineffable silences
Into endless vistas of the unknown and unseen,
Across the last confines of the limiting Mind
And the Superconscient’s perilous border line
830Into the danger of the Infinite.
But if thou wilt not wait for Time and God,
Do then thy work and force thy will on Fate.
As I have taken from thee my load of night
And taken from thee my twilight’s doubts and dreams,
835So now I take my light of utter Day.
These are my symbol kingdoms but not here
Can the great choice be made that fixes fate
Or uttered the sanction of the Voice supreme.
Arise upon a ladder of greater worlds
840To the infinity where no world can be.
But not in the wide air where a greater Life
Uplifts its mystery and its miracle,
And not on the luminous peaks of summit Mind,
Or in the hold where subtle Matter’s spirit
845Hides in its light of shimmering secrecies,
Can there be heard the Eternal’s firm command
That joins the head of destiny to its base.
These only are the mediating links;
Not theirs is the originating sight
850Nor the fulfilling act or last support
That bears perpetually the cosmic pile.
Two are the Powers that hold the ends of Time;
Spirit foresees, Matter unfolds its thought,
The dumb executor of God’s decrees,
855Omitting no iota and no dot,
Agent unquestioning, inconscient, stark,
Evolving inevitably a charged content,
Intention of his force in Time and Space,
In animate beings and inanimate things;
860Immutably it fulfils its ordered task,
It cancels not a tittle of things done;
Unswerving from the oracular command
It alters not the steps of the Unseen.
If thou must indeed deliver man and earth
865On the spiritual heights look down on life,
Discover the truth of God and man and world;
The Soul’s Choice and the Supreme Consummation
Then do thy task knowing and seeing all.
Ascend, O soul, into thy timeless self;
870Choose destiny’s curve and stamp thy will on Time.”
He ended and upon the falling sound
A power went forth that shook the founded spheres
And loosed the stakes that hold the tents of form.
Absolved from vision’s grip and the folds of thought,
875Rapt from her sense like disappearing scenes
In the stupendous theatre of Space
The heaven-worlds vanished in spiritual light.
A movement was abroad, a cry, a word,
Beginningless in its vast discovery,
880Momentless in its unthinkable return:
Choired in calm seas she heard the eternal Thought
Rhythming itself abroad unutterably
In spaceless orbits and on timeless roads.
In an ineffable world she lived fulfilled.
885An energy of the triune Infinite,
In a measureless Reality she dwelt,
A rapture and a being and a force,
A linked and myriad-motioned plenitude,
A virgin unity, a luminous spouse,
890Housing a multitudinous embrace
To marry all in God’s immense delight,
Bearing the eternity of every spirit,
Bearing the burden of universal love,
A wonderful mother of unnumbered souls.
895All things she knew, all things imagined or willed:
Her ear was opened to ideal sound,
Shape the convention bound no more her sight,
A thousand doors of oneness was her heart.
A crypt and sanctuary of brooding light
900Appeared, the last recess of things beyond.
Then in its rounds the enormous fiat paused,
Silence gave back to the Unknowable
All it had given. Still was her listening thought.
The form of things had ceased within her soul.
905Invisible that perfect godhead now.
Around her some tremendous spirit lived,
Mysterious flame around a melting pearl,
And in the phantom of abolished Space
There was a voice unheard by ears that cried:
910“Choose, spirit, thy supreme choice not given again;
For now from my highest being looks at thee
The nameless formless peace where all things rest.
In a happy vast sublime cessation know, —
An immense extinction in eternity,
915A point that disappears in the infinite, —
Felicity of the extinguished flame,
Last sinking of a wave in a boundless sea,
End of the trouble of thy wandering thoughts,
Close of the journeying of thy pilgrim soul.
920Accept, O music, weariness of thy notes,
O stream, wide breaking of thy channel banks.”
The moments fell into eternity.
But someone yearned within a bosom unknown
And silently the woman’s heart replied:
925“Thy peace, O Lord, a boon within to keep
Amid the roar and ruin of wild Time
For the magnificent soul of man on earth.
Thy calm, O Lord, that bears thy hands of joy.”
Limitless like ocean round a lonely isle
930A second time the eternal cry arose:
“Wide open are the ineffable gates in front.
My spirit leans down to break the knot of earth,
Amorous of oneness without thought or sign
To cast down wall and fence, to strip heaven bare,
935See with the large eye of infinity,
Unweave the stars and into silence pass.”
In an immense and world-destroying pause
She heard a million creatures cry to her.
Through the tremendous stillness of her thoughts
940The Soul’s Choice and the Supreme Consummation
Immeasurably the woman’s nature spoke:
“Thy oneness, Lord, in many approaching hearts,
My sweet infinity of thy numberless souls.”
Mightily retreating like a sea in ebb
945A third time swelled the great admonishing call:
“I spread abroad the refuge of my wings.
Out of its incommunicable deeps
My power looks forth of mightiest splendour, stilled
Into its majesty of sleep, withdrawn
950Above the dreadful whirlings of the world.”
A sob of things was answer to the voice,
And passionately the woman’s heart replied:
“Thy energy, Lord, to seize on woman and man,
To take all things and creatures in their grief
955And gather them into a mother’s arms.”
Solemn and distant like a seraph’s lyre
A last great time the warning sound was heard:
“I open the wide eye of solitude
To uncover the voiceless rapture of my bliss,
960Where in a pure and exquisite hush it lies
Motionless in its slumber of ecstasy,
Resting from the sweet madness of the dance
Out of whose beat the throb of hearts was born.”
Breaking the Silence with appeal and cry
965A hymn of adoration tireless climbed,
A music beat of winged uniting souls,
Then all the woman yearningly replied:
“Thy embrace which rends the living knot of pain,
Thy joy, O Lord, in which all creatures breathe,
970Thy magic flowing waters of deep love,
Thy sweetness give to me for earth and men.”
Then after silence a still blissful cry
Began, such as arose from the Infinite
When the first whisperings of a strange delight
975Imagined in its deep the joy to seek,
The passion to discover and to touch,
The enamoured laugh which rhymed the chanting worlds:
“O beautiful body of the incarnate Word,
Thy thoughts are mine, I have spoken with thy voice.
980My will is thine, what thou hast chosen I choose:
All thou hast asked I give to earth and men.
All shall be written out in destiny’s book
By my trustee of thought and plan and act,
The executor of my will, eternal Time.
985But since thou hast refused my maimless Calm
And turned from my termless peace in which is expunged
The visage of Space and the shape of Time is lost,
And from happy extinction of thy separate self
In my uncompanioned lone eternity, —
990For not for thee the nameless worldless Nought,
Annihilation of thy living soul
And the end of thought and hope and life and love
In the blank measureless Unknowable, —
I lay my hands upon thy soul of flame,
995I lay my hands upon thy heart of love,
I yoke thee to my power of work in Time.
Because thou hast obeyed my timeless will,
Because thou hast chosen to share earth’s struggle and fate
And leaned in pity over earth-bound men
1000And turned aside to help and yearned to save,
I bind by thy heart’s passion thy heart to mine
And lay my splendid yoke upon thy soul.
Now will I do in thee my marvellous works.
I will fasten thy nature with my cords of strength,
1005Subdue to my delight thy spirit’s limbs
And make thee a vivid knot of all my bliss
And build in thee my proud and crystal home.
Thy days shall be my shafts of power and light,
Thy nights my starry mysteries of joy
1010And all my clouds lie tangled in thy hair
And all my springtides marry in thy mouth.
The Soul’s Choice and the Supreme Consummation
O Sun-Word, thou shalt raise the earth-soul to Light
And bring down God into the lives of men;
1015Earth shall be my work-chamber and my house,
My garden of life to plant a seed divine.
When all thy work in human time is done
The mind of earth shall be a home of light,
The life of earth a tree growing towards heaven,
1020The body of earth a tabernacle of God.
Awakened from the mortal’s ignorance
Men shall be lit with the Eternal’s ray
And the glory of my sun-lift in their thoughts
And feel in their hearts the sweetness of my love
1025And in their acts my Power’s miraculous drive.
My will shall be the meaning of their days;
Living for me, by me, in me they shall live.
In the heart of my creation’s mystery
I will enact the drama of thy soul,
1030Inscribe the long romance of Thee and Me.
I will pursue thee across the centuries;
Thou shalt be hunted through the world by love,
Naked of ignorance’ protecting veil
And without covert from my radiant gods.
1035No shape shall screen thee from my divine desire,
Nowhere shalt thou escape my living eyes.
In the nudity of thy discovered self,
In a bare identity with all that is,
Disrobed of thy covering of humanity,
1040Divested of the dense veil of human thought,
Made one with every mind and body and heart,
Made one with all Nature and with Self and God,
Summing in thy single soul my mystic world
I will possess in thee my universe,
1045The universe find all I am in thee.
Thou shalt bear all things that all things may change,
Thou shalt fill all with my splendour and my bliss,
Thou shalt meet all with thy transmuting soul.
Assailed by my infinitudes above,
1050And quivering in immensities below,
Pursued by me through my mind’s wall-less vast,
Oceanic with the surges of my life,
A swimmer lost between two leaping seas
By my outer pains and inner sweetnesses
1055Finding my joy in my opposite mysteries
Thou shalt respond to me from every nerve.
A vision shall compel thy coursing breath,
Thy heart shall drive thee on the wheel of works,
Thy mind shall urge thee through the flames of thought,
1060To meet me in the abyss and on the heights,
To feel me in the tempest and the calm,
And love me in the noble and the vile,
In beautiful things and terrible desire.
The pains of hell shall be to thee my kiss,
1065The flowers of heaven persuade thee with my touch.
My fiercest masks shall my attractions bring.
Music shall find thee in the voice of swords,
Beauty pursue thee through the core of flame.
Thou shalt know me in the rolling of the spheres
1070And cross me in the atoms of the whirl.
The wheeling forces of my universe
Shall cry to thee the summons of my name.
Delight shall drop down from my nectarous moon,
My fragrance seize thee in the jasmine’s snare,
1075My eye shall look upon thee from the sun.
Mirror of Nature’s secret spirit made,
Thou shalt reflect my hidden heart of joy,
Thou shalt drink down my sweetness unalloyed
In my pure lotus-cup of starry brim.
1080My dreadful hands laid on thy bosom shall force
Thy being bathed in fiercest longing’s streams.
Thou shalt discover the one and quivering note,
And cry, the harp of all my melodies,
And roll, my foaming wave in seas of love.
1085The Soul’s Choice and the Supreme Consummation
Even my disasters’ clutch shall be to thee
The ordeal of my rapture’s contrary shape:
In pain’s self shall smile on thee my secret face:
Thou shalt bear my ruthless beauty unabridged
1090Amid the world’s intolerable wrongs,
Trampled by the violent misdeeds of Time
Cry out to the ecstasy of my rapture’s touch.
All beings shall be to thy life my emissaries;
Drawn to me on the bosom of thy friend,
1095Compelled to meet me in thy enemy’s eyes,
My creatures shall demand me from thy heart.
Thou shalt not shrink from any brother soul.
Thou shalt be attracted helplessly to all.
Men seeing thee shall feel my hands of joy,
1100In sorrow’s pangs feel steps of the world’s delight,
Their life experience its tumultuous shock
In the mutual craving of two opposites.
Hearts touched by thy love shall answer to my call,
Discover the ancient music of the spheres
1105In the revealing accents of thy voice
And nearer draw to me because thou art:
Enamoured of thy spirit’s loveliness
They shall embrace my body in thy soul,
Hear in thy life the beauty of my laugh,
1110Know the thrilled bliss with which I made the worlds.
All that thou hast, shall be for others’ bliss,
All that thou art, shall to my hands belong.
I will pour delight from thee as from a jar,
I will whirl thee as my chariot through the ways,
1115I will use thee as my sword and as my lyre,
I will play on thee my minstrelsies of thought.
And when thou art vibrant with all ecstasy,
And when thou liv’st one spirit with all things,
Then will I spare thee not my living fires,
1120But make thee a channel for my timeless force.
My hidden presence led thee unknowing on
From thy beginning in earth’s voiceless bosom
Through life and pain and time and will and death,
Through outer shocks and inner silences
1125Along the mystic roads of Space and Time
To the experience which all Nature hides.
Who hunts and seizes me, my captive grows:
This shalt thou henceforth learn from thy heart-beats.
For ever love, O beautiful slave of God!
1130O lasso of my rapture’s widening noose,
Become my cord of universal love.
The spirit ensnared by thee force to delight
Of creation’s oneness sweet and fathomless,
Compelled to embrace my myriad unities
1135And all my endless forms and divine souls.
O Mind, grow full of the eternal peace;
O Word, cry out the immortal litany:
Built is the golden tower, the flame-child born.
“Descend to life with him thy heart desires.
1140O Satyavan, O luminous Savitri,
I sent you forth of old beneath the stars,
A dual power of God in an ignorant world,
In a hedged creation shut from limitless self,
Bringing down God to the insentient globe,
1145Lifting earth-beings to immortality.
In the world of my knowledge and my ignorance
Where God is unseen and only is heard a Name
And knowledge is trapped in the boundaries of mind
And life is hauled in the drag-net of desire
1150And Matter hides the soul from its own sight,
You are my Force at work to uplift earth’s fate,
My self that moves up the immense incline
Between the extremes of the spirit’s night and day.
He is my soul that climbs from nescient Night
1155Through life and mind and supernature’s Vast
To the supernal light of Timelessness
And my eternity hid in moving Time
The Soul’s Choice and the Supreme Consummation
And my boundlessness cut by the curve of Space.
1160It climbs to the greatness it has left behind
And to the beauty and joy from which it fell,
To the closeness and sweetness of all things divine,
To light without bounds and life illimitable,
Taste of the depths of the Ineffable’s bliss,
1165Touch of the immortal and the infinite.
He is my soul that gropes out of the beast
To reach humanity’s heights of lucent thought
And the vicinity of Truth’s sublime.
He is the godhead growing in human lives
1170And in the body of earth-being’s forms:
He is the soul of man climbing to God
In Nature’s surge out of earth’s ignorance.
O Savitri, thou art my spirit’s Power,
The revealing voice of my immortal Word,
1175The face of Truth upon the roads of Time
Pointing to the souls of men the routes to God.
While the dim light from the veiled Spirit’s peak
Falls upon Matter’s stark inconscient sleep
As if a pale moonbeam on a dense glade,
1180And Mind in a half-light moves amid half-truths
And the human heart knows only human love
And life is a stumbling and imperfect force
And the body counts out its precarious days,
You shall be born into man’s dubious hours
1185In forms that hide the soul’s divinity
And show through veils of the earth’s doubting air
My glory breaking as through clouds a sun,
Or burning like a rare and inward fire,
And with my nameless influence fill men’s lives.
1190Yet shall they look up as to peaks of God
And feel God like a circumambient air
And rest on God as on a motionless base.
Yet shall there glow on mind like a horned moon
The Spirit’s crescent splendour in pale skies
1195And light man’s life upon his Godward road.
But more there is concealed in God’s Beyond
That shall one day reveal its hidden face.
Now mind is all and its uncertain ray,
Mind is the leader of the body and life,
1200Mind the thought-driven chariot of the soul
Carrying the luminous wanderer in the night
To vistas of a far uncertain dawn,
To the end of the Spirit’s fathomless desire,
To its dream of absolute truth and utter bliss.
1205There are greater destinies mind cannot surmise
Fixed on the summit of the evolving Path
The Traveller now treads in the Ignorance,
Unaware of his next step, not knowing his goal.
Mind is not all his tireless climb can reach,
1210There is a fire on the apex of the worlds,
There is a house of the Eternal’s light,
There is an infinite truth, an absolute power.
The Spirit’s mightiness shall cast off its mask;
Its greatness shall be felt shaping the world’s course:
1215It shall be seen in its own veilless beams,
A star rising from the Inconscient’s night,
A sun climbing to Supernature’s peak.
Abandoning the dubious middle Way,
A few shall glimpse the miraculous Origin
1220And some shall feel in you the secret Force
And they shall turn to meet a nameless tread,
Adventurers into a mightier Day.
Ascending out of the limiting breadths of mind,
They shall discover the world’s huge design
1225And step into the Truth, the Right, the Vast.
You shall reveal to them the hidden eternities,
The breath of infinitudes not yet revealed,
Some rapture of the bliss that made the world,
Some rush of the force of God’s omnipotence,
1230Some beam of the omniscient Mystery.
The Soul’s Choice and the Supreme Consummation
But when the hour of the Divine draws near
The Mighty Mother shall take birth in Time
And God be born into the human clay
1235In forms made ready by your human lives.
Then shall the Truth supreme be given to men:
There is a being beyond the being of mind,
An Immeasurable cast into many forms,
A miracle of the multitudinous One,
1240There is a consciousness mind cannot touch,
Its speech cannot utter nor its thought reveal.
It has no home on earth, no centre in man,
Yet is the source of all things thought and done,
The fount of the creation and its works,
1245It is the origin of all truth here,
The sun-orb of mind’s fragmentary rays,
Infinity’s heaven that spills the rain of God,
The Immense that calls to man to expand the Spirit,
The wide Aim that justifies his narrow attempts,
1250A channel for the little he tastes of bliss.
Some shall be made the glory’s receptacles
And vehicles of the Eternal’s luminous power.
These are the high forerunners, the heads of Time,
The great deliverers of earth-bound mind,
1255The high transfigurers of human clay,
The first-born of a new supernal race.
The incarnate dual Power shall open God’s door,
Eternal supermind touch earthly Time.
The superman shall wake in mortal man
1260And manifest the hidden demigod
Or grow into the God-Light and God-Force
Revealing the secret deity in the cave.
Then shall the earth be touched by the Supreme,
His bright unveiled Transcendence shall illumine
1265The mind and heart and force the life and act
To interpret his inexpressible mystery
In a heavenly alphabet of Divinity’s signs.
His living cosmic spirit shall enring,
Annulling the decree of death and pain,
1270Erasing the formulas of the Ignorance,
With the deep meaning of beauty and life’s hid sense,
The being ready for immortality,
His regard crossing infinity’s mystic waves
Bring back to Nature her early joy to live,
1275The metred heart-beats of a lost delight,
The cry of a forgotten ecstasy,
The dance of the first world-creating Bliss.
The Immanent shall be the witness God
Watching on his many-petalled lotus-throne
1280His actionless being and his silent might
Ruling earth-nature by eternity’s law,
A thinker waking the Inconscient’s world,
An immobile centre of many infinitudes
In his thousand-pillared temple by Time’s sea.
1285Then shall the embodied being live as one
Who is a thought, a will of the Divine,
A mask or robe of his divinity,
An instrument and partner of his Force,
A point or line drawn in the infinite,
1290A manifest of the Imperishable.
The supermind shall be his nature’s fount,
The Eternal’s truth shall mould his thoughts and acts,
The Eternal’s truth shall be his light and guide.
All then shall change, a magic order come
1295Overtopping this mechanical universe.
A mightier race shall inhabit the mortal’s world.
On Nature’s luminous tops, on the Spirit’s ground,
The superman shall reign as king of life,
Make earth almost the mate and peer of heaven,
1300And lead towards God and truth man’s ignorant heart
And lift towards godhead his mortality.
A power released from circumscribing bounds,
Its height pushed up beyond death’s hungry reach,
The Soul’s Choice and the Supreme Consummation
1305Life’s tops shall flame with the Immortal’s thoughts,
Light shall invade the darkness of its base.
Then in the process of evolving Time
All shall be drawn into a single plan,
A divine harmony shall be earth’s law,
1310Beauty and joy remould her way to live:
Even the body shall remember God,
Nature shall draw back from mortality
And Spirit’s fires shall guide the earth’s blind force;
Knowledge shall bring into the aspirant Thought
1315A high proximity to Truth and God.
The supermind shall claim the world for Light
And thrill with love of God the enamoured heart
And place Light’s crown on Nature’s lifted head
And found Light’s reign on her unshaking base.
1320A greater truth than earth’s shall roof-in earth
And shed its sunlight on the roads of mind;
A power infallible shall lead the thought,
A seeing Puissance govern life and act,
In earthly hearts kindle the Immortal’s fire.
1325A soul shall wake in the Inconscient’s house;
The mind shall be God-vision’s tabernacle,
The body intuition’s instrument,
And life a channel for God’s visible power.
All earth shall be the Spirit’s manifest home,
1330Hidden no more by the body and the life,
Hidden no more by the mind’s ignorance;
An unerring Hand shall shape event and act.
The Spirit’s eyes shall look through Nature’s eyes,
The Spirit’s force shall occupy Nature’s force.
1335This world shall be God’s visible garden-house,
The earth shall be a field and camp of God,
Man shall forget consent to mortality
And his embodied frail impermanence.
This universe shall unseal its occult sense,
1340Creation’s process change its antique front,
An ignorant evolution’s hierarchy
Release the Wisdom chained below its base.
The Spirit shall be the master of his world
Lurking no more in form’s obscurity
1345And Nature shall reverse her action’s rule,
The outward world disclose the Truth it veils;
All things shall manifest the covert God,
All shall reveal the Spirit’s light and might
And move to its destiny of felicity.
1350Even should a hostile force cling to its reign
And claim its right’s perpetual sovereignty
And man refuse his high spiritual fate,
Yet shall the secret Truth in things prevail.
For in the march of all-fulfilling Time
1355The hour must come of the Transcendent’s will:
All turns and winds towards his predestined ends
In Nature’s fixed inevitable course
Decreed since the beginning of the worlds
In the deep essence of created things:
1360Even there shall come as a high crown of all
The end of Death, the death of Ignorance.
But first high Truth must set her feet on earth
And man aspire to the Eternal’s light
And all his members feel the Spirit’s touch
1365And all his life obey an inner Force.
This too shall be; for a new life shall come,
A body of the Superconscient’s truth,
A native field of Supernature’s mights:
It shall make earth’s nescient ground Truth’s colony,
1370Make even the Ignorance a transparent robe
Through which shall shine the brilliant limbs of Truth
And Truth shall be a sun on Nature’s head
And Truth shall be the guide of Nature’s steps
And Truth shall gaze out of her nether deeps.
1375When superman is born as Nature’s king
His presence shall transfigure Matter’s world:
The Soul’s Choice and the Supreme Consummation
He shall light up Truth’s fire in Nature’s night,
He shall lay upon the earth Truth’s greater law;
1380Man too shall turn towards the Spirit’s call.
Awake to his hidden possibility,
Awake to all that slept within his heart
And all that Nature meant when earth was formed
And the Spirit made this ignorant world his home,
1385He shall aspire to Truth and God and Bliss.
Interpreter of a diviner law
And instrument of a supreme design,
The higher kind shall lean to lift up man.
Man shall desire to climb to his own heights.
1390The truth above shall wake a nether truth,
Even the dumb earth become a sentient force.
The Spirit’s tops and Nature’s base shall draw
Near to the secret of their separate truth
And know each other as one deity.
1395The Spirit shall look out through Matter’s gaze
And Matter shall reveal the Spirit’s face.
Then man and superman shall be at one
And all the earth become a single life.
Even the multitude shall hear the Voice
1400And turn to commune with the Spirit within
And strive to obey the high spiritual law:
This earth shall stir with impulses sublime,
Humanity awake to deepest self,
Nature the hidden godhead recognise.
1405Even the many shall some answer make
And bear the splendour of the Divine’s rush
And his impetuous knock at unseen doors.
A heavenlier passion shall upheave men’s lives,
Their mind shall share in the ineffable gleam,
1410Their heart shall feel the ecstasy and the fire.
Earth’s bodies shall be conscious of a soul;
Mortality’s bondslaves shall unloose their bonds,
Mere men into spiritual beings grow
And see awake the dumb divinity.
1415Intuitive beams shall touch the nature’s peaks,
A revelation stir the nature’s depths;
The Truth shall be the leader of their lives,
Truth shall dictate their thought and speech and act,
They shall feel themselves lifted nearer to the sky,
1420As if a little lower than the gods.
For knowledge shall pour down in radiant streams
And even darkened mind quiver with new life
And kindle and burn with the Ideal’s fire
And turn to escape from mortal ignorance.
1425The frontiers of the Ignorance shall recede,
More and more souls shall enter into light,
Minds lit, inspired, the occult summoner hear
And lives blaze with a sudden inner flame
And hearts grow enamoured of divine delight
1430And human wills tune to the divine will,
These separate selves the Spirit’s oneness feel,
These senses of heavenly sense grow capable,
The flesh and nerves of a strange ethereal joy
And mortal bodies of immortality.
1435A divine force shall flow through tissue and cell
And take the charge of breath and speech and act
And all the thoughts shall be a glow of suns
And every feeling a celestial thrill.
Often a lustrous inner dawn shall come
1440Lighting the chambers of the slumbering mind;
A sudden bliss shall run through every limb
And Nature with a mightier Presence fill.
Thus shall the earth open to divinity
And common natures feel the wide uplift,
1445Illumine common acts with the Spirit’s ray
And meet the deity in common things.
Nature shall live to manifest secret God,
The Spirit shall take up the human play,
This earthly life become the life divine.”
1450The Soul’s Choice and the Supreme Consummation
The measure of that subtle music ceased.
Down with a hurried swimming floating lapse
Through unseen worlds and bottomless spaces forced
Sank like a star the soul of Savitri.
1455Amidst a laughter of unearthly lyres
She heard around her nameless voices cry
Triumphing, an innumerable sound.
A choir of rushing winds to meet her came.
She bore the burden of infinity
1460And felt the stir of all ethereal space.
Pursuing her in her fall, implacably sweet,
A face was over her which seemed a youth’s,
Symbol of all the beauty eyes see not,
Crowned as with peacock plumes of gorgeous hue
1465Framing a sapphire, whose heart-disturbing smile
Insatiably attracted to delight,
Voluptuous to the embraces of her soul.
Changed in its shape, yet rapturously the same,
It grew a woman’s dark and beautiful
1470Like a mooned night with drifting star-gemmed clouds,
A shadowy glory and a stormy depth,
Turbulent in will and terrible in love.
Eyes in which Nature’s blind ecstatic life
Sprang from some spirit’s passionate content,
1475Missioned her to the whirling dance of earth.
Amidst the headlong rapture of her fall
Held like a bird in a child’s satisfied hands,
In an enamoured grasp her spirit strove
Admitting no release till Time should end,
1480And, as the fruit of the mysterious joy,
She kept within her strong embosoming soul
Like a flower hidden in the heart of spring
The soul of Satyavan drawn down by her
Inextricably in that mighty lapse.
1485Invisible heavens in a thronging flight
Soared past her as she fell. Then all the blind
And near attraction of the earth compelled
Fearful rapidities of downward bliss.
Lost in the giddy proneness of that speed,
1490Whirled, sinking, overcome she disappeared,
Like a leaf spinning from the tree of heaven,
In broad unconsciousness as in a pool;
A hospitable softness drew her in
Into a wonder of miraculous depths,
1495Above her closed a darkness of great wings
And she was buried in a mother’s breast.
Then from a timeless plane that watches Time,
A Spirit gazed out upon destiny,
In its endless moment saw the ages pass.
1500All still was in a silence of the gods.
The prophet moment covered limitless Space
And cast into the heart of hurrying Time
A diamond light of the Eternal’s peace,
A crimson seed of God’s felicity;
1505A glance from the gaze fell of undying Love.
A wonderful face looked out with deathless eyes;
A hand was seen drawing the golden bars
That guard the imperishable secrecies.
A key turned in a mystic lock of Time.
1510But where the silence of the gods had passed,
A greater harmony from the stillness born
Surprised with joy and sweetness yearning hearts,
An ecstasy and a laughter and a cry.
A power leaned down, a happiness found its home.
1515Over wide earth brooded the infinite bliss.
END OF BOOK ELEVEN
BOOK TWELVE
Epilogue
Epilogue
1520The Return to Earth
OUT OF abysmal trance her spirit woke.
Lain on the earth-mother’s calm inconscient breast
She saw the green-clad branches lean above
Guarding her sleep with their enchanted life,
1525And overhead a blue-winged ecstasy
Fluttered from bough to bough with high-pitched call.
Into the magic secrecy of the woods
Peering through an emerald lattice-window of leaves,
In indolent skies reclined, the thinning day
1530Turned to its slow fall into evening’s peace.
She pressed the living body of Satyavan:
On her body’s wordless joy to be and breathe
She bore the blissful burden of his head
Between her breasts’ warm labour of delight,
1535The waking gladness of her members felt
The weight of heaven in his limbs, a touch
Summing the whole felicity of things,
And all her life was conscious of his life
And all her being rejoiced enfolding his.
1540The immense remoteness of her trance had passed;
Human she was once more, earth’s Savitri,
Yet felt in her illimitable change.
A power dwelt in her soul too great for earth,
A bliss lived in her heart too large for heaven;
1545Light too intense for thought and love too boundless
For earth’s emotions lit her skies of mind
And spread through her deep and happy seas of soul.
All that is sacred in the world drew near
To her divine passivity of mood.
1550A marvellous voice of silence breathed its thoughts.
All things in Time and Space she had taken for hers;
In her they moved, by her they lived and were,
The whole wide world clung to her for delight,
Created for her rapt embrace of love.
1555Now in her spaceless self released from bounds
Unnumbered years seemed moments long drawn out,
The brilliant time-flakes of eternity.
Outwingings of a bird from its bright home,
Her earthly morns were radiant flights of joy.
1560Boundless she was, a form of infinity.
Absorbed no longer by the moment’s beat
Her spirit the unending future felt
And lived with all the unbeginning past.
Her life was a dawn’s victorious opening,
1565The past and unborn days had joined their dreams,
Old vanished eves and far arriving noons
Hinted to her a vision of prescient hours.
Supine in musing bliss she lay awhile
Given to the wonder of a waking trance;
1570Half-risen then she sent her gaze around,
As if to recover old sweet trivial threads,
Old happy thoughts, small treasured memories,
And weave them into one immortal day.
Ever she held on the paradise of her breast
1575Her lover charmed into a fathomless sleep,
Lain like an infant spirit unaware
Lulled on the verge of two consenting worlds.
But soon she leaned down over her loved to call
His mind back to her with her travelling touch
1580On his closed eyelids; settled was her still look
Of strong delight, not yearning now, but large
With limitless joy or sovereign last content,
Pure, passionate with the passion of the gods.
Desire stirred not its wings; for all was made
1585An overarching of celestial rays
Like the absorbed control of sky on plain,
Heaven’s leaning down to embrace from all sides earth,
The Return to Earth
A quiet rapture, a vast security.
1590Then sighing to her touch the soft-winged sleep
Rose hovering from his flowerlike lids and flew
Murmurous away. Awake, he found her eyes
Waiting for his, and felt her hands, and saw
The earth his home given back to him once more
1595And her made his again, his passion’s all.
With his arms’ encircling hold around her locked,
A living knot to make possession close,
He murmured with hesitating lips her name,
And vaguely recollecting wonder cried,
1600“Whence hast thou brought me captive back, love-chained,
To thee and sunlight’s walls, O golden beam
And casket of all sweetness, Savitri,
Godhead and woman, moonlight of my soul?
For surely I have travelled in strange worlds
1605By thee companioned, a pursuing spirit,
Together we have disdained the gates of night.
I have turned away from the celestials’ joy
And heaven’s insufficient without thee.
Where now has passed that formidable Shape
1610Which rose against us, the Spirit of the Void,
Claiming the world for Death and Nothingness,
Denying God and soul? Or was all a dream
Or a vision seen in a spiritual sleep,
A symbol of the oppositions of Time
1615Or a mind-lit beacon of significance
In some stress of darkness lighting on the Way
Or guiding a swimmer through the straits of Death,
Or finding with the succour of its ray
In a gully mid the crowded streets of Chance
1620The soul that into the world-adventure came,
A scout and voyager from Eternity?”
But she replied, “Our parting was the dream;
We are together, we live, O Satyavan.
Look round thee and behold, glad and unchanged
1625Our home, this forest with its thousand cries
And the whisper of the wind among the leaves
And, through rifts in emerald scene, the evening sky,
God’s canopy of blue sheltering our lives,
And the birds crying for heart’s happiness,
1630Winged poets of our solitary reign,
Our friends on earth where we are king and queen.
Only our souls have left Death’s night behind,
Changed by a mighty dream’s reality,
Illumined by the light of symbol worlds
1635And the stupendous summit self of things,
And stood at Godhead’s gates limitless, free.”
Then filled with the glory of their happiness
They rose and with safe clinging fingers locked
Hung on each other in a silent look.
1640But he with a new wonder in his heart
And a new flame of worship in his eyes:
“What high change is in thee, O Savitri? Bright
Ever thou wast, a goddess still and pure,
Yet dearer to me by thy sweet human parts
1645Earth gave thee making thee yet more divine.
My adoration mastered, my desire
Bent down to make its subject, my daring clasped,
Claiming by body and soul my life’s estate,
Rapture’s possession, love’s sweet property,
1650A statue of silence in my templed spirit,
A yearning godhead and a golden bride.
But now thou seemst almost too high and great
For mortal worship; Time lies below thy feet
And the whole world seems only a part of thee,
1655Thy presence the hushed heaven I inhabit,
And thou lookst on me in the gaze of the stars,
Yet art the earthly keeper of my soul,
My life a whisper of thy dreaming thoughts,
My morns a gleaming of thy spirit’s wings,
1660And day and night are of thy beauty part.
The Return to Earth
Hast thou not taken my heart to treasure it
In the secure environment of thy breast?
Awakened from the silence and the sleep,
1665I have consented for thy sake to be.
By thee I have greatened my mortal arc of life,
But now far heavens, unmapped infinitudes
Thou hast brought me, thy illimitable gift!
If to fill these thou lift thy sacred flight,
1670My human earth will still demand thy bliss.
Make still my life through thee a song of joy
And all my silence wide and deep with thee.”
A heavenly queen consenting to his will,
She clasped his feet, by her enshrining hair
1675Enveloped in a velvet cloak of love,
And answered softly like a murmuring lute:
“All now is changed, yet all is still the same.
Lo, we have looked upon the face of God,
Our life has opened with divinity.
1680We have borne identity with the Supreme
And known his meaning in our mortal lives.
Our love has grown greater by that mighty touch
And learned its heavenly significance,
Yet nothing is lost of mortal love’s delight.
1685Heaven’s touch fulfils but cancels not our earth:
Our bodies need each other in the same last;
Still in our breasts repeat heavenly secret rhythm
Our human heart-beats passionately close.
Still am I she who came to thee mid the murmur
1690Of sunlit leaves upon this forest verge;
I am the Madran, I am Savitri.
All that I was before, I am to thee still,
Close comrade of thy thoughts and hopes and toils,
All happy contraries I would join for thee.
1695All sweet relations marry in our life;
I am thy kingdom even as thou art mine,
The sovereign and the slave of thy desire,
Thy prone possessor, sister of thy soul
And mother of thy wants; thou art my world,
1700The earth I need, the heaven my thoughts desire,
The world I inhabit and the god I adore.
Thy body is my body’s counterpart
Whose every limb my answering limb desires,
Whose heart is key to all my heart-beats, — this
1705I am and thou to me, O Satyavan.
Our wedded walk through life begins anew,
No gladness lost, no depth of mortal joy.
Let us go through this new world that is the same,
For it is given back, but it is known,
1710A playing-ground and dwelling-house of God
Who hides himself in bird and beast and man
Sweetly to find himself again by love,
By oneness. His presence leads the rhythms of life
That seek for mutual joy in spite of pain.
1715We have each other found, O Satyavan,
In the great light of the discovered soul.
Let us go back, for eve is in the skies.
Now grief is dead and serene bliss remains
The heart of all our days for evermore.
1720Lo, all these beings in this wonderful world!
Let us give joy to all, for joy is ours.
For not for ourselves alone our spirits came
Out of the veil of the Unmanifest,
Out of the deep immense Unknowable
1725Upon the ignorant breast of dubious earth,
Into the ways of labouring, seeking men,
Two fires that burn towards that parent Sun,
Two rays that travel to the original Light.
To lead man’s soul towards truth and God we are born,
1730To draw the chequered scheme of mortal life
Into some semblance of the Immortal’s plan,
To shape it closer to an image of God,
A little nearer to the Idea divine.”
The Return to Earth
1735She closed her arms about his breast and head
As if to keep him on her bosom worn
For ever through the journeying of the years.
So for a while they stood entwined, their kiss
And passion-tranced embrace a meeting-point
1740In their commingling spirits one for ever,
Two-souled, two-bodied for the joys of Time.
Then hand in hand they left that solemn place
Full now of mute unusual memories,
To the green distance of their sylvan home
1745Returning slowly through the forest’s heart.
Round them the afternoon to evening changed;
Light slipped down to the brightly sleeping verge,
And the birds came back winging to their nests,
And day and night leaned to each other’s arms.
1750Now the dusk shadowy trees stood close around
Like dreaming spirits and, delaying night,
The grey-eyed pensive evening heard their steps,
And from all points the cries and movements came
Of the four-footed wanderers of the night
1755Approaching. Then a human rumour rose
Long alien to their solitary days,
Invading the charmed wilderness of leaves
Once sacred to secluded loneliness
With violent breaking of its virgin sleep.
1760Through the screened dusk it deepened still and there neared
Floating of many voices and the sound
Of many feet, till on their sight broke in
As if a coloured wave upon the eye
The brilliant strenuous crowded days of man.
1765Topped by a flaring multitude of lights
A great resplendent company arrived.
Life in its ordered tumult wavering came
Bringing its stream of unknown faces, thronged
With gold-fringed headdresses, gold-broidered robes,
1770Glittering of ornaments, fluttering of hems,
Hundreds of hands parted the forest-boughs,
Hundreds of eyes searched the entangled glades.
Calm white-clad priests their grave-eyed sweetness brought,
Strong warriors in their glorious armour shone,
1775The proud-hooved steeds came trampling through the wood.
In front King Dyumatsena walked, no more
Blind, faltering-limbed, but his far-questing eyes
Restored to all their confidence in light
Took seeingly this imaged outer world;
1780Firmly he trod with monarch step the soil.
By him that queen and mother’s anxious face
Came changed from its habitual burdened look
Which in its drooping strength of tired toil
Had borne the fallen life of those she loved.
1785Her patient paleness wore a pensive glow
Like evening’s subdued gaze of gathered light
Departing, which foresees sunrise her child.
Sinking in quiet splendours of her sky,
She lives awhile to muse upon that hope,
1790The brilliance of her rich receding gleam
A thoughtful prophecy of lyric dawn.
Her eyes were first to find her children’s forms.
But at the vision of the beautiful twain
The air awoke perturbed with scaling cries,
1795And the swift parents hurrying to their child, —
Their cause of life now who had given him breath, —
Possessed him with their arms. Then tenderly
Cried Dyumatsena chiding Satyavan:
“The fortunate gods have looked on me today,
1800A kingdom seeking came and heaven’s rays.
But where wast thou? Thou hast tormented gladness
With fear’s dull shadow, O my child, my life.
What danger kept thee for the darkening woods?
Or how could pleasure in her ways forget
1805That useless orbs without thee are my eyes
The Return to Earth
Which only for thy sake rejoice at light?
Not like thyself was this done, Savitri,
Who ledst not back thy husband to our arms,
1810Knowing with him beside me only is taste
In food and for his touch evening and morn
I live content with my remaining days.”
But Satyavan replied with smiling lips,
“Lay all on her; she is the cause of all.
1815With her enchantments she has twined me round.
Behold, at noon leaving this house of clay
I wandered in far-off eternities,
Yet still, a captive in her golden hands,
I tread your little hillock called green earth
1820And in the moments of your transient sun
Live glad among the busy works of men.”
Then all eyes turned their wondering looks where stood,
A deepening redder gold upon her cheeks,
With lowered lids the noble lovely child,
1825And one consenting thought moved every breast.
“What gleaming marvel of the earth or skies
Stands silently by human Satyavan
To mark a brilliance in the dusk of eve?
If this is she of whom the world has heard,
1830Wonder no more at any happy change.
Each easy miracle of felicity
Of her transmuting heart the alchemy is.”
Then one spoke there who seemed a priest and sage:
“O woman soul, what light, what power revealed,
1835Working the rapid marvels of this day,
Opens for us by thee a happier age?”
Her lashes fluttering upwards gathered in
To a vision which had scanned immortal things,
Rejoicing, human forms for their delight.
1840They claimed for their deep childlike motherhood
The life of all these souls to be her life,
Then falling veiled the light. Low she replied,
“Awakened to the meaning of my heart
That to feel love and oneness is to live
1845And this the magic of our golden change,
Is all the truth I know or seek, O sage.”
Wondering at her and her too luminous words
Westward they turned in the fast-gathering night.
From the entangling verges freed they came
1850Into a dimness of the sleeping earth
And travelled through her faint and slumbering plains.
Murmur and movement and the tread of men
Broke the night’s solitude; the neigh of steeds
Rose from that indistinct and voiceful sea
1855Of life and all along its marchings swelled
The rhyme of hooves, the chariot’s homeward voice.
Drawn by white manes upon a high-roofed car
In flare of the unsteady torches went
With linked hands Satyavan and Savitri,
1860Hearing a marriage march and nuptial hymn,
Where waited them the many-voiced human world.
Numberless the stars swam on their shadowy field
Describing in the gloom the ways of light.
Then while they skirted yet the southward verge,
1865Lost in the halo of her musing brows
Night, splendid with the moon dreaming in heaven
In silver peace, possessed her luminous reign.
She brooded through her stillness on a thought
Deep-guarded by her mystic folds of light,
1870And in her bosom nursed a greater dawn.
THE END
Note on the Text
Note on the Text
SAVITRI began as a narrative poem of moderate length based
1875on a legend told in the Mahabharata. Sri Aurobindo considered
the story to be originally “one of the many symbolic myths
of the Vedic cycle”. Bringing out its symbolism and charging
it progressively with his own spiritual vision, he turned Savitri
into the epic it is today.
1880By the time it was published, some passages had gone
through dozens of drafts. Sri Aurobindo explained how he
wrote the poem: “I used Savitri as a means of ascension. I began
with it on a certain mental level, each time I could reach a higher
level I rewrote from that level. . . . In fact Savitri has not been
1885regarded by me as a poem to be written and finished, but as a
field of experimentation to see how far poetry could be written
from one’s own yogic consciousness and how that could be
made creative.”
The following outline of the composition and publication
1890of Savitri draws upon all existing manuscripts and other textual
materials, supplemented by the author’s letters on the poem. In
brief, Savitri took shape through three major phases.
(1) Before 1920, Sri Aurobindo made a number of drafts of
a narrative poem retelling in an original way the tale of Savitri
1895and Satyavan. Its last version had a plan of eight books in two
parts; the books were not divided into cantos. (2) In the 1930s,
he set about converting this narrative poem into an epic. For a
long time he concentrated on the description of Aswapati’s Yoga
prior to the birth of Savitri, creating by 1945 a new Part One
1900with three books and many cantos. (3) In the last phase, besides
revising Part One for publication, he reworked and enlarged
most of the books written in the first period. He added a book
on the Yoga of Savitri, making twelve books and forty-nine
cantos in all and completing Parts Two and Three.
1905The Composition of Savitri
Sri Aurobindo read the Savitri-episode of the Mahabharata in
Sanskrit while he was in Baroda. He expressed appreciation of
its style in his “Notes on the Mahabharata”, written around
1901. But a report that he worked on an English poem on the
1910subject at this time is not supported by his own statements or
any documents that survive. If there was a Baroda Savitri, which
is doubtful, it was among the writings of which Sri Aurobindo
wrote in 1933, “Most of all that has disappeared into the un-
known in the whirlpools and turmoil of my political career.”
1915Even assuming that such a poem was written in Baroda, for
all practical purposes Savitri as we know it was commenced in
Pondicherry.
The opening of the first known version is dated “August
8th 9th / 1916”. Further dates occur later on in the draft. From
1920the death of Satyavan to the end of Savitri’s debate with Death,
the manuscript is marked every few pages with dates from a
three-day period, 17-19 October. After this, the consecutive nar-
ration breaks off and the notebook contains only disconnected
passages. Some of these are sketches for the conclusion of the
1925poem. Most of them go back over what was already written.
They represent the beginning of the long process of rewriting
which was to continue until 1950.
This earliest surviving manuscript of Savitri shows every
sign of being the first draft. It is one of the few versions that Sri
1930Aurobindo dated. But even if precise dates cannot be assigned
to them, the manuscripts of the poem can almost always be
placed in a definite order after a careful comparison. This is
because changes made when one draft was revised were usually
incorporated in the next draft, which would then be further
1935altered and most often expanded.
Initially the poem was short enough not to require division
into books or cantos. Its sections were separated only by blank
lines. But soon Sri Aurobindo was dividing it into “Book I”,
ending with the death of Satyavan, and “Book II”, recounting
1940Savitri’s debate with and victory over Death. Next he adopted
Note on the Text
a scheme of six cantos and an epilogue. The canto titles were:
Love, Fate, Death, Night, Twilight and Day.
After making a few drafts in cantos, he started substituting
1945the word “book” for “canto”. There were now six books with
the same names as the former cantos. Meanwhile the larger di-
vision had reappeared as two parts, “Earth” and “Beyond”. At
first each part comprised three books, not counting the epilogue.
But before long, the rapidly growing first book was broken up
1950into two. The second book kept the name “Love”; the first was
renamed “Quest”.
A manuscript beginning with “Book I / Quest” has the title
“Sˆavithrˆı: A Tale and a Vision”. (In early versions, “Sˆavithrˆı”
was the usual spelling of the heroine’s name.) Sri Aurobindo
1955referred to this stage in the poem’s history in a letter of 1936:
“Savitri was originally written many years ago before the
Mother came [i.e., before the Mother’s final arrival in 1920], as a
narrative poem in two parts, Part I Earth and Part II Beyond . . .
each of four books — or rather Part II consisted of three books
1960and an epilogue.”
This was the plan of Savitri at the end of the first phase
of its composition. But the last manuscript actually completed
was in six cantos and an epilogue. After “books” replaced the
“cantos” and the number of books increased, some books were
1965worked over several times. Others were hardly touched. There
is a partial draft of “Book III / Death”, for example; there is
none from the stage when “Death” would have been the fourth
book. After 1945 when Sri Aurobindo incorporated material
from the early poem into what was by then a full-fledged epic,
1970he sometimes went back to a manuscript of the six “cantos” as
his starting-point.
Savitri was apparently put aside during most of the 1920s, a
period when Sri Aurobindo did little writing. The first evidence
of its resumption is found in a letter of 1931. Here he speaks of a
1975radical change in the conception and scope of the poem. Already
the subtitle, “A Legend and a Symbol”, is present in his mind:
“There is a previous draft, the result of the many retouchings of
which somebody told you; but in that form it would not have
been a ‘magnum opus’ at all. Besides, it would have been a legend
1980and not a symbol. I therefore started recasting the whole thing;
only the best passages and lines of the old draft will remain,
altered so as to fit into the new frame.”
Throughout the thirties and early forties, it was primarily
Book One that was affected by this recasting. At first this book
1985was still called “Quest”. It extended as far as Savitri’s arrival at
“The Destined Meeting-Place” (the eventual title of Book Five,
Canto One). But in the early thirties, the brief description of the
Yoga of King Aswapati near the beginning swelled to hundreds
of lines. What was to become the second and longest book of
1990the epic, “The Book of the Traveller of the Worlds”, began to
take shape.
In a letter of 1936, Sri Aurobindo mentioned a new first
book, the “Book of Birth”, carved out of the overgrown
“Quest”. Another letter of the same year reveals the internal
1995structure of this book. It was “divided into sections and the
larger sections into subsections”. Up to this point, the books
had been divided only into passages separated by spaces, as
many cantos are now. As these sections increased in length, they
were recognised as formal units and began to be named and
2000numbered. Section marks (§) were usually put before and after
the numbers.
The Book of Birth, whose last section related the birth and
childhood of Savitri, was still disproportionately long and was
constantly growing. Early in 1937, Sri Aurobindo expressed
2005his intention of rearranging the opening books into a Book of
Beginnings and a Book of Birth and Quest.
Progress on the poem was intermittent in the thirties due
to Sri Aurobindo’s heavy load of correspondence. From the end
of 1938 to mid-1940, work on Savitri was suspended. But on 6
2010September 1942, a 110-page draft of the Book of Beginnings was
completed. The fourth of its eight sections, “The Ascent through
the Worlds”, accounted for more than half the total length and
had twelve subsections. In the next version, this section became
Book Two with the title it now has. The last four sections were
2015grouped into Book Three, “The Book of the Divine Mother”.
Note on the Text
The second phase in the composition of Savitri reached its
culmination when the first three books were written out in two
columns on large sheets. Many passages, including the whole of
2020the first and third books and much of the second, went through
two or more drafts in this form. The last complete manuscript
is dated “May 7. 1944” at the end.
It was while revising this manuscript that Sri Aurobindo
reintroduced the word “canto” which he had not used since an
2025early stage, applying it to the former “sections” of the books.
At this point the third section of Book One, “The Yoga of the
King”, was turned into Cantos 3-5 with their present titles. The
three opening books were for the first time identified as “Part
One”.
2030The two-column manuscript is the last continuous version
of Part One in Sri Aurobindo’s hand. But he went on reworking
Book One and passages throughout Book Two. For this purpose
he began using small note-pads whose sheets, containing new or
rewritten matter, could be torn out and pinned to the principal
2035manuscript at the appropriate places.
By the mid-1940s, Sri Aurobindo’s eyesight was failing and
his handwriting was becoming less and less legible. He needed
the help of a scribe in order to put Books 1-3 into a finished form,
take up the long-neglected later books, and prepare Savitri for
2040publication. This third phase of its composition saw periods of
rapid and decisive progress. But it was to be interrupted the
month before Sri Aurobindo’s passing, a little short of definitive
completion.
Much had still to be done with the first part. Sri Aurobindo
2045asked the scribe to read the last version to him. After dictating
changes, insertions and transpositions, he had his assistant copy
it into a large ledger. This copy was meticulously revised before
being given to another disciple for typing. The typescript in
its turn was read out to Sri Aurobindo and similarly revised.
2050Heavily revised pages were often retyped. The same process was
sometimes repeated, especially in the later cantos of Book Two,
where three typed copies exist.
Savitri now began to appear in print, though not yet in its
final form. The first and third books were brought out canto by
2055canto from August 1946 to February 1948 in journals connected
with the Sri Aurobindo Ashram. They were also published in
fascicles identical to the journal instalments. The second book
was issued in 1947 and 1948 in two large fascicles.
Differences between the typescripts and the printed texts
2060show that proofs of the latter must have been revised in detail
by Sri Aurobindo. Afterwards a copy of each fascicle was read to
him. Even at this advanced stage, he made extensive alterations
and added new lines and passages.
Meanwhile he had turned his attention to the later books.
2065The plan of Parts Two and Three resembled that of the pre-1920
poem, whose books had been divided into “Earth” (Quest, Love,
Fate, Death) and “Beyond” (Night, Twilight, Day, Epilogue). By
1945, however, most of these books had remained untouched for
twenty-five years. Everything written under what Sri Aurobindo
2070termed in 1934 “the old insufficient inspiration” would have to
be thoroughly recast. Moreover, a new book had been conceived:
The Book of Yoga. Destined to become one of the longest in the
epic, six of its seven cantos were still to be drafted.
The material in the Book of Birth and Quest had for a long
2075time been included in Book One. As a result it had gone through
several drafts in the 1930s, while other books lay dormant. The
last book to be set aside, it was also the first to be taken up
again. One manuscript of it precedes the 1942 draft of the Book
of Beginnings. The final version was evidently written within a
2080year or so of this. Since much work had already been done on it,
this book needed less modification than others. Yet especially in
the first two cantos, Sri Aurobindo dictated substantial changes
and additions when he revised the manuscript and typescript.
The Book of Love shared to some extent in the good fortune
2085of the previous book during the thirties and early forties. But
the last version in Sri Aurobindo’s hand, in the notebook which
starts with his final manuscript of Book Four, breaks off in the
middle of the second canto. The continuation is in the scribe’s
hand. It was copied there probably two or three years later when
2090the systematic revision of the later books had been undertaken.
Note on the Text
The remainder of this notebook contains the scribe’s copy
of Books Six, Nine and Ten, reworked from the corresponding
books in the old poem, expanded, divided into cantos and re-
2095named “The Book of Fate”, “The Book of Eternal Night” and
“The Book of the Double Twilight”. Once Sri Aurobindo had
done enough with Books Four and Five for the time being, it
appears that he took up these three books one after the other.
After Book Six, he skipped to Book Nine, postponing extensive
2100work on Books Seven and Eight. However, he may have revised
slightly the versions of the original third book or canto, “Death”,
on which Book Seven, Canto One and the present Book of Death
are based.
Drafts of “Fate”, “Night” and “Twilight” had been written
2105on one side of loose sheets of paper, like other cantos or books
in several early versions of Savitri. This facilitated the complex
process of revision which was now set in motion. When the
space between lines and in the margins was filled up, the backs
of the pages were available. In extreme cases, whole cantos were
2110written on the reverse sides of the pages with little relation to
what was on the front.
Sri Aurobindo drafted many passages in small note-pads of
the type used for Part One. Lines for Books Five and Nine and
large portions of Books Six and Ten were written in this way.
2115Canto Two of Book Six was almost entirely new. The passages
drafted for it were transferred by the scribe to another note-pad,
with changes dictated by Sri Aurobindo at the time.
The metamorphosis which the Book of Fate underwent in-
cluded the introduction of the Queen: some of Aswapati’s later
2120speeches in the old version were now given to her, and her long
speech at the beginning of Canto Two was composed. Sri Au-
robindo worked on this book in 1946 and brought it close to
its final form. But he was to return to it at the end and add
significantly to the second canto.
2125An early manuscript of “Night” was substantially revised
and turned into the two cantos of Book Nine. But in this instance
Sri Aurobindo seems to have found the pre-1920 version more
adequate than usual. He left it intact to a greater extent than in
the case of other books on which he bestowed his full attention
2130in the 1940s. Only the Book of Death and the Epilogue stayed
closer to their original shape, but he always intended to come
back to these.
On the other hand, old drafts of “Twilight” formed merely
a starting-point for the four cantos of Book Ten. The speeches
2135of Savitri and Death were refashioned, rearranged in their order,
and new ones inserted. As he proceeded from one canto to the
next, Sri Aurobindo added longer and longer passages that were
quite new. The first section of Canto One, the long speech of
Death which ends Canto Two, all but the last few pages of
2140Canto Three, and most of Canto Four — especially its second
half, where Savitri finally triumphs over Death — owe little or
nothing to any early version.
In a letter of 22 April 1947, Sri Aurobindo summarised the
status of the various books of the second and third parts. Books
2145Four, Five, Six, Nine and Ten had by then “been completed, in
a general way, with a sufficient finality of the whole form but
subject to final changes in detail”. The other four books were
far from even a provisional completion.
A “drastic recasting of the last two books” was felt to be
2150needed and “only a part of the eleventh” had been subjected to
that process. But a yet larger task lay ahead, the splitting up of
the original Book of Death and the writing of the new cantos
that would go into the Book of Yoga. In his letter of April 1947
Sri Aurobindo did not say what he planned to do next. But there
2155are reasons to believe that, rather than going on directly from
Book Ten to Book Eleven, he now retraced his steps to Book
Seven.
The description of Savitri’s Yoga, complementing that of
Aswapati’s Yoga in Part One, was drafted in a thick notebook
2160whose first hundred pages are filled with drafts for Book Ten,
Canto Four. By March 1947, even before finishing the tenth
book, Sri Aurobindo had begun to use this notebook for pre-
liminary work on Book Seven. The scribe was not asked to
copy the semi-legible handwriting of the draft. Instead, Sri Au-
2165robindo dictated to him the lines he had jotted down, often in a
Note on the Text
somewhat different form. The dictated version was extensively
revised before a typed copy was made.
The Book of Yoga had four cantos at first. But the second,
2170“The Parable of the Finding of the Soul”, grew to an inordinate
length. When the typescript was revised, it was broken up into
Cantos 2-5, from “The Parable of the Search for the Soul” to
“The Finding of the Soul”. Revision of the typed copy was so
elaborate in places (as elsewhere, especially in Book Six, Canto
2175Two and in Book Eleven) that sometimes there was not enough
room on the page. The scribe would then write on separate slips
of paper, attaching as many as ten of these to a single page of
the typescript.
Canto One of Book Seven has a different background. Early
2180in the evolution of Savitri, the third canto of the poem (later, the
third book) was called “Death”. It described the year leading
up to Satyavan’s death as well as the fatal day itself. The latest
version, with the heading “Book III”, is incomplete and stops
before the last day. Sri Aurobindo used this manuscript as far
2185as it goes when he put Book Seven, Canto One into its present
form.
The second half of an earlier “Canto III” had to be used as
the manuscript for Book Eight. It was revised slightly near the
beginning and a substantial passage was dictated at the end. Sri
2190Aurobindo apparently intended to return to the Book of Death,
but this was not to be.
On 20 July 1948 he was compelled to admit, “even Savitri
has very much slowed down and I am only making the last
revisions of the First Part already completed; the other two parts
2195are just now in cold storage.” When the later parts were taken
up again, the most important task remaining was evidently to
bring the almost untouched eleventh book up to the level of
what preceded it. The old “Book VII / Day” on which it would
be based was among the best-developed portions of the early
2200poem. But after thirty years, Sri Aurobindo had more to say at
the climax of Savitri.
There was also the Epilogue; but the contemplated revi-
sion of this must have seemed less essential to the total design.
Although a few pages of an early version were significantly
2205retouched at some stage, the concluding two sections of the
Epilogue stayed almost exactly as they were. Thus the closing
pages of the epic, like most of Book Eight, remained as a sample
of the style in which Savitri was originally written.
Near the end of his life, Sri Aurobindo’s eyesight was so
2210poor that he no longer wrote at all. He made no more drafts for
Savitri and the work proceeded entirely by dictation. Virtually
the whole revision of “The Book of Everlasting Day” was done
in this purely oral manner and may be inferred to belong to this
late period. There exist only a few pages of drafts for it in Sri
2215Aurobindo’s hand, found in note-pads he used around 1946. He
was probably referring to these when he wrote in 1947 that he
had already recast “part of the eleventh” book.
Book Eleven culminates in the longest continuous dictated
passage in Savitri. The passage was written by the scribe in a sep-
2220arate note-pad and seems to have no antecedent in any previous
draft. This is the section which begins on p. 702 with “Descend
to life . . . ”, and ends at the bottom of p. 710 with “This earthly
life become the life divine.” Regarding Sri Aurobindo’s dictation
in Book Eleven, the scribe reports that “line after line began to
2225flow from his lips like a smooth and gentle stream and it was on
the next day that a revision was done to get the link for further
continuation.”
By this time, cantos of Parts Two and Three were coming out
in journal instalments and fascicles like those of Part One. Most
2230of the cantos of Books Four, Five, Six and Nine were published
in this way in 1949-50. Unlike the fascicles of the first part, they
were not revised afterwards by Sri Aurobindo.
But in 1948, an extract from Book Six, Canto Two had
already been printed in the Sri Aurobindo Mandir Annual. An
2235offprint of this was read to Sri Aurobindo and the changes he
dictated were incorporated in a retyped copy. The painstaking
revision of this second typescript was reportedly the last work
he did on Savitri. A short paragraph before the concluding de-
scription of Narad’s departure was the final passage to receive
2240detailed attention in November 1950, less than a month before
Note on the Text
Sri Aurobindo’s passing. The thirteen-line paragraph was ex-
panded to the seventy-two lines beginning “Queen, strive no
more to change the secret will. . . . ”
2245Editions of Savitri
Sri Aurobindo revised the proofs of the first edition of Part
One, making numerous final changes and adding more than a
hundred new lines. In 1950, Part One of Savitri appeared in
book form. Parts Two and Three could not be similarly revised.
2250They came out in 1951 in a second volume, thus completing the
first edition.
The second edition was issued in 1954 in one volume under
the imprint of the Sri Aurobindo International University Centre.
Some obvious errors in the text of the first edition were emended
2255at this time. A few of these were evidently due to the mishearing
of Sri Aurobindo’s dictation.
In 1968, the first edition of Part One was reprinted with
some new textual corrections. The third complete edition (1970)
contained further emendations. Comprising Volumes 28 and
226029 of the Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library, it was also
brought out as a single volume in a reduced format. This was
reprinted a number of times between 1973 and 1990. Several
typographical and other errors were rectified in the 1976 im-
pression.
2265The fourth, critically revised edition appeared in 1993 and
is reproduced here. This edition was the outcome of a systematic
comparison of the printed text of Savitri with the manuscripts.
Each line was traced through all stages of copying, typing and
printing in which errors could have occurred. Readings found to
2270have come about through inaccurate transcription or misprint-
ing were corrected. Accidentally omitted lines were restored to
the text. This has resulted in a very slight increase in the length
of the poem to its present 23,837 lines.