76: O soul suffer what thou must

A Spiritual Biography of Savitri

 

…Death once more inflicted on her heart

The majesty of his calm and dreadful voice:

 

“A bright hallucination are thy thoughts.

 

A prisoner haled by a spiritual cord,

Of thy own sensuous will the ardent slave,

Thou sendest eagle-poised to meet the sun

Words winged with the red splendour of thy heart.

 

But knowledge dwells not in the passionate heart;

The heart's words fall back unheard from Wisdom's throne.

 

Vain is thy longing to build heaven on earth.

 

Artificer of Ideal and Idea,

Mind, child of Matter in the womb of Life,

To higher levels persuades his parents' steps;

Inapt, they follow ill the daring guide.

 

But Mind, a glorious traveller in the sky,

Walks lamely on the earth with footsteps slow…

All thy high dreams were made by Matter's mind…

 

All else is only its outcome or its phase:

Thy soul is a brief flower by the gardener Mind

Created in thy matter's terrain plot;

It perishes with the plant on which it grows…

All upon Matter stands as on a rock.

 

Yet this security and guarantor

Pressed for credentials an impostor proves:

A cheat of substance where no substance is…

 

What seemed most real once, is Nihil's show.

 

Its figures are snares that trap and prison the sense;

The beginningless void was its artificer:

Nothing is there but aspects limned by Chance

And seeming shapes of seeming Energy.

 

All by Death's mercy breathe and live awhile,

All think and act by the Inconscient's grace…

 

At last to open thy eyes consent and see

The stuff of which thou and the world are made…

 

For something on its nescient breast was born

Condemned to see and know, to feel and love,

It watched its acts, imagined a soul within;

It groped for truth and dreamed of Self and God.

 

When all unconscious was, then all was well.

 

I, Death, was king and kept my regal state,

Designing my unwilled, unerring plan,

Creating with a calm insentient heart.

 

In my sovereign power of unreality…

Founded on the hollow ground of the Inane

The sure bizarrerie of Nature's scheme.

 

I curbed the vacant ether into Space;

A huge expanding and contracting breath

Harboured the fires of the universe:

I struck out the supreme original spark

And spread its sparse ranked armies through the Inane,

Manufactured the stars from the occult radiances,

Marshalled the platoons of the invisible dance;

I formed earth's beauty out of atom and gas,

And built from chemic plasm the living man.

 

Then Thought came in and spoilt the harmonious world:

Matter began to hope and think and feel,

Tissue and nerve bore joy and agony.

 

The inconscient cosmos strove to learn its task;

An ignorant personal god was born in Mind

And to understand invented reason's law,

The impersonal Vast throbbed back to man's desire,

A trouble rocked the great world's blind still heart

And Nature lost her wide immortal calm.

 

Thus came this warped incomprehensible scene…

This is the world in which thou mov'st, astray

In the tangled pathways of the human mind,

In the issueless circling of thy human life,

Searching for thy soul and thinking God is here.

 

But where is room for soul or place for God

In the brute immensity of a machine?

 

A transient Breath thou takest for thy soul…

Interposed between the upper and nether Void,

Thy consciousness reflects the world around

In the distorting mirror of Ignorance

Or upwards turns to catch imagined stars…

 

Immortality thou claimest for thy spirit,

But immortality for imperfect man,

A god who hurts himself at every step,

Would be a cycle of eternal pain.

 

Wisdom and love thou claimest as thy right;

But knowledge in this world is error's make,

A brilliant procuress of Nescience,

And human love a posturer on earth-stage

Who imitates with verve a faery dance…

 

But not on earth can divine wisdom reign

And not on earth can divine love be found;

Heaven-born, only in heaven can they live;

Or else there too perhaps they are shining dreams…

Even Matter vanishes into Energy's vague

And Energy is a motion of old Nought.

 

How shall the Ideal's unsubstantial hues

Be painted stiff on earth's vermilion blur,

A dream within a dream come doubly true?

 

How shall the will-o'-the-wisp become a star?

 

The Ideal is a malady of thy mind,

A bright delirium of thy speech and thought,

A strange wine of beauty lifting thee to false sight…

 

O soul misled by the splendour of thy thoughts,

O earthly creature with thy dream of heaven,

Obey, resigned and still, the earthly law.

 

Accept the light that falls upon thy days;

Take what thou canst of Life's permitted joy,

Submitting to the ordeal of Fate's scourge

Suffer what thou must of toil and grief and care.

 

There shall approach silencing thy passionate heart

My long calm night of everlasting sleep:

There into the hush from which thou cam'st retire.”

 

 

Savitri, pp. 614-20