71: At first in a blind stress of woods she moved

A Spiritual Biography of Savitri

 

At first in a blind stress of woods she moved

With strange inhuman paces on the soil,

Journeying as if upon an unseen road.

 

Around her on the green and imaged earth

The flickering screen of forests ringed her steps.

 

Its thick luxurious obstacle of boughs

Besieged her body pressing dimly through

In a rich realm of whispers palpable,

And all the murmurous beauty of the leaves

Rippled around her like an emerald robe.

 

But more and more this grew an alien sound,

And her old intimate body seemed to her

A burden which her being remotely bore.

 

Herself lived far in some uplifted scene

Where to the trance-chained vision of pursuit,

Sole presences in a high spaceless dream,

The luminous spirit glided stilly on

And the great shadow travelled vague behind.

 

Still with an amorous crowd of seeking hands

Softly entreated by their old desires

Her senses felt earth's close and gentle air…

 

But now as if the body's sensuous hold

Curbing the godhead of her infinite walk

Had freed those spirits to their grander road

Across some boundary's intangible bar,

The silent god grew mighty and remote

In other spaces and the soul she loved

Lost its consenting nearness to her life.

 

Into a deep and unfamiliar air

Enormous, windless, without stir or sound

They seemed to enlarge away, drawn by some wide

Pale distance, from the warm control of earth

And her grown far. Now, now they would escape.

 

Then flaming from her body's nest, alarmed,

Her violent spirit soared at Satyavan.

 

Out mid the plunge of heaven-surrounded rocks

So in a terror and a wrath divine

From her eyrie streams against the ascending death,

Indignant at its crouching point of steel,

A fierce she-eagle threatened in her brood,

Borne on a rush of puissance and a cry,

Outwinging like a mass of golden fire.

 

So on a spirit's flaming outrush borne

She crossed the borders of dividing sense;

Like pale discarded sheaths dropped dully down

Her mortal members fell back from her soul.

 

A moment of a secret body's sleep,

Her trance knew not of sun or earth or world;

Thought, time and death were absent from her grasp:

She knew not self, forgotten was Savitri.

 

All was the violent ocean of a will

Where lived captive to an immense caress,

Possessed in a supreme identity,

Her aim, joy, origin, Satyavan alone.

 

Her sovereign prisoned in her being's core,

He beat there like a rhythmic heart,—herself

But different still, one loved, enveloped, clasped,

A treasure saved from the collapse of space.

 

Around him nameless, infinite she surged,

Her spirit fulfilled in his spirit, rich with all Time,

As if Love's deathless moment had been found,

A pearl within eternity's white shell.

 

Then out of the engulfing sea of trance

Her mind rose drenched to light streaming with hues

Of vision and, awake once more to Time,

Returned to shape the lineaments of things

And live in borders of the seen and known.

 

Onward the three still moved in her soul-scene.

 

As if pacing through fragments of a dream,

She seemed to travel on, a visioned shape…

In voiceless regions they were travellers

Alone in a new world where souls were not,

But only living moods. A strange, hushed, weird

Country was round them, strange far skies above…

Weird were the grasses, weird the treeless plains,

Weird ran the road which like fear hastening

Towards that of which it has most terror, passed

Phantasmal between pillared conscious rocks

Sombre and high, gates brooding, whose stone thoughts

Lost their huge sense beyond in giant night…

 

Then to that chill sere heavy line arrived

Where his feet touched the shadowy marches' brink,

Turning arrested luminous Satyavan

Looked back with his wonderful eyes at Savitri.

 

But Death pealed forth his vast abysmal cry:

“O mortal, turn back to thy transient kind;

Aspire not to accompany Death to his home,

As if thy breath could live where Time must die…

 

Let not the dreadful goddess move thy soul

To enlarge thy vehement trespass into worlds

Where it shall perish like a helpless thought…

 

O sleeper dreaming of divinity,

Wake trembling mid the indifferent silences

In which thy few weak chords of being die.

 

Impermanent creatures, sorrowful foam of Time,

Your transient loves bind not the eternal gods.”…

 

The Woman answered not. Her high nude soul,

Stripped of the girdle of mortality,

Against fixed destiny and the grooves of law

Stood up in its sheer will a primal force.

 

Still like a statue on its pedestal,

Lone in the silence and to vastness bared,

Against midnight's dumb abysses piled in front

A columned shaft of fire and light she rose.

 

Savitri, pp. 577-81