68: There came on her a change

A Spiritual Biography of Savitri

 

So was she left alone in the huge wood,

Surrounded by a dim unthinking world,

Her husband's corpse on her forsaken breast.

 

In her vast silent spirit motionless

She measured not her loss with helpless thoughts,

Nor rent with tears the marble seals of pain:

She rose not yet to face the dreadful god.

 

Over the body she loved her soul leaned out

In a great stillness without stir or voice,

As if her mind had died with Satyavan.

 

But still the human heart in her beat on.

 

Aware still of his being near to hers,

Closely she clasped to her the mute lifeless form

As though to guard the oneness they had been

And keep the spirit still within the frame.

 

Then suddenly there came on her the change

Which in tremendous moments of our lives

Can overtake sometimes the human soul

And hold it up towards its luminous source…

The voice of life is turned to infinite sounds,

The moments on great wings of lightning come

And godlike thought surprise the mind of earth.

 

Into the soul’s splendour and intensity

A crescent of miraculous birth is tossed,

Whose horn of mystery floats in a bright void…

 

A new sight comes, new voices in us form

A body of the music of the gods.

 

Immortal yearnings without name leap down,

Large quiverings of godhead seeking run

And weave upon a puissant field of calm

A high and lonely ecstasy of will.

 

This in a moment's depths was born in her.

 

Now to the limitless gaze disclosed that sees

Things barred from human thinking's earthly lids,

The Spirit who had hidden in Nature soared

Out of his luminous nest within the worlds.

 

Like a vast fire it climbed the skies of night.

 

Thus were the cords of self-oblivion torn.

 

Like one who looks up to far heights she saw,

Ancient and strong as on a windless summit

Above her where she had worked in her lone mind

Labouring apart in a sole tower of self,

The source of all which she had seemed or wrought,

A power projected into cosmic space,

A slow embodiment of the aeonic will,

A starry fragment of the eternal Truth,

The passionate instrument of an unmoved Power.

 

A Presence was there that filled the listening world,

A central All assumed her boundless life.

 

A sovereignty, a silence and a swiftness,

One brooded over abysses who was she.

 

As in a choric robe of unheard sounds

A force descended trailing endless lights;

Linking Time's seconds to Infinity,

Illimitably it girt the earth and her:

It sank into her soul and she was changed.

 

Then like a thought fulfilled by some great word

That mightiness assumed a symbol form;

Her being's spaces quivered with its touch,

It covered her as with immortal wings;

On its lips the curve of the unuttered Truth,

A halo of Wisdom's lightnings for its crown,

It entered the mystic lotus in her head,

A thousand-petalled home of power and light.

 

Immortal leader of her mortality,

Doer of her works and fountain of her words,

Invulnerable by Time, omnipotent,

It stood above her calm, immobile, mute.

 

 

Savitri, pp. 571-73