74: My God is will and love

A Spiritual Biography of Savitri

 

 

Uplifting his disastrous voice [Death] spoke…

“Back from the grandeur of my perilous realms

Go, mortal, to thy small permitted sphere!

Hasten swift-footed, lest to slay thy life

The great laws thou hast violated, moved,

Open at last on thee their marble eyes.”

 

But Savitri answered the disdainful Shade:

“World-spirit, I was thy equal spirit born.

 

My will too is a law, my strength a god.

 

I am immortal in my mortality.

 

I tremble not before the immobile gaze

Of the unchanging marble hierarchies

That look with the stone eyes of Law and Fate.

 

My soul can meet them with its living fire.

 

Out of thy shadow give me back again

Into earth's flowering spaces Satyavan

In the sweet transiency of human limbs

To do with him my spirit's burning will.

 

I will bear with him the ancient Mother's load,

I will follow with him earth's path that leads to God.

 

Else shall the eternal spaces open to me

While round us strange horizons far recede,

Travelling together the immense unknown…

Wherever thou leadst his soul I shall pursue.” …

 

Against the Woman's boundless heart arose

The almighty cry of universal Death:

“Hast thou god-wings or feet that tread my stars,

Frail creature with the courage that aspires,

Forgetting thy bounds of thought, thy mortal role?

 

Their orbs were coiled before thy soul was formed.

 

I, Death, created them out of my void;

All things I have built in them and I destroy.

 

I made the worlds my net, each joy a mesh…

 

Blind slave of my deaf force whom I compel

To sin that I may punish, to desire

That I may scourge thee with despair and grief

And thou come bleeding to me at the last,

Thy nothingness recognised, my greatness known,

Turn nor attempt forbidden happy fields

Meant for the souls that can obey my law,

Lest in their sombre shrines thy tread awake

From their uneasy iron-hearted sleep

The Furies who avenge fulfilled desire.

 

Dread lest in skies where passion hoped to live,

The Unknown's lightnings start and terrified,

Lone, sobbing, hunted by the hounds of heaven,

A wounded and forsaken soul, thou flee

Through the long torture of the centuries,

Nor many lives exhaust the tireless Wrath

Hell cannot slake nor heaven's mercy assuage.

 

I will take from thee the black eternal grip:

Clasping in thy heart thy fate's exiguous doles

Depart in peace, if peace for man is just.”

 

But Savitri answered meeting scorn with scorn,

The mortal woman to the dreadful Lord:

 

“Who is this God imagined by thy night,

Contemptuously creating worlds disdained,

Who made for vanity the brilliant stars?...

 

My God is Will and triumphs in his paths,

My God is Love and sweetly suffers all…

 

A traveller of the million roads of life,

His steps familiar with the lights of heaven

Tread without pain the sword-paved courts of hell;

There he descends to edge eternal joy.

 

Love's golden wings have power to fan thy void:

The eyes of love gaze starlike through death's night,

The feet of love tread naked hardest worlds.

He labours in the depths, exults on the heights;

He shall remake thy universe, O Death.”…

 

And Death made answer to the human soul:

“What is thy hope? to what dost thou aspire?

 

This is thy body's sweetest lure of bliss,

Assailed by pain a frail precarious form,

To please for a few years thy faltering sense…

 

And thou, what art thou, soul, thou glorious dream

Of brief emotions made and glittering thoughts,

A thin dance of fireflies speeding through the night,

A sparkling ferment in life's sunlit mire?

 

Wilt thou claim immortality, O heart,

Crying against the eternal witnesses

That thou and he are endless powers and last?

Death only lasts and the inconscient Void.

 

I only am eternal and endure…

I, Death, am He; there is no other God.

 

All from my depths are born, they live by death;

All to my depths return and are no more…

I, Death, am the one refuge of thy soul.

 

The gods to whom man prays can help not man;

They are my imaginations and my moods

Reflected in him by illusion's power.

 

That which thou seest as thy immortal self

Is a shadowy icon of my infinite,

Is Death in thee dreaming of eternity…

 

Because, O aspirant to divinity,

Thou calledst me to wrestle with thy soul,

I have assumed a face, a form, a voice.

 

But if there were a being witnessing all,

How should he help thy passionate desire?...

One endless watches the inconscient scene

Where all things perish, as the foam the stars.

 

The One lives for ever.

There no Satyavan

Changing was born and there no Savitri

Claims from brief life her bribe of joy.

There love

Came never with his fretful eyes of tears,

Nor Time is there nor the vain vasts of Space…

It is delight immortally alone.

 

If thou desirest immortality,

Be then alone sufficient to thy soul:

Live in thyself; forget the man thou lov'st.

 

My last grand death shall rescue thee from life;

Then shalt thou rise into thy unnamed source.”

 

But Savitri replied to the dread Voice:

 

“O Death, who reasonest, I reason not,

Reason that scans and breaks, but cannot build

Or builds in vain because she doubts her work.

 

I am, I love, I see, I act, I will.”

 

Death answered her, one deep surrounding cry:

 

“Know also. Knowing, thou shalt cease to love

And cease to will, delivered from thy heart,

So shalt thou rest for ever and be still,

Consenting to the impermanence of things.”

 

But Savitri replied for man to Death:

“When I have loved for ever, I shall know.

 

Love in me knows the truth all changings mask.

I know that knowledge is a vast embrace:

I know that every being is myself,

In every heart is hidden the myriad One.

 

I know the calm Transcendent bears the world,

The veiled Inhabitant, the silent Lord:

I feel his secret act, his intimate fire;

I hear the murmur of the cosmic Voice.

 

I know my coming was a wave from God.

 

For all his suns were conscient in my birth,

And one who loves in us came veiled by death.

Then man was born among the monstrous stars

Dowered with a mind and heart to conquer thee.”

 

In the eternity of his ruthless will

Sure of his empire and his armoured might,

Like one disdaining violent helpless words

From victim lips Death answered not again…

 

Half-seen in clouds appeared a sombre face;

Night's dusk tiara was his matted hair,

The ashes of the pyre his forehead's sign.

 

Once more a Wanderer in the unending Night,

Blindly forbidden by dead vacant eyes,

She travelled through the dumb unhoping vasts.

 

Around her rolled the shuddering waste of gloom…

Through the long fading night by her compelled,

Gliding half-seen on their unearthly path,

Phantasmal in the dimness moved the three.

 

Savitri, pp. 589-95