A Spiritual Biography of Savitri

23: Her School Days

 

A land of mountains and wide sun-beat plains

And giant rivers pacing to vast seas,

A field of creation and spiritual hush,

Silence swallowing life’s acts into the deeps,

Of thought’s transcendent climb and heavenward leap,

A brooding world of reverie and trance,

Filled with the mightiest works of God and man,

Where Nature seemed a dream of the Divine

And beauty and grace and grandeur had their home,

Harboured the childhood of the incarnate Flame.

 

Over her watched millennial influences

And the deep godheads of a grandiose past

Looked on her and saw the future’s godheads come

As if this magnet drew their powers unseen.

 

Earth’s brooding wisdom spoke to her still breast;

Mounting from mind’s last peaks to mate with gods,

Making earth’s brilliant thoughts a springing-board

To dive into the cosmic vastnesses,

The knowledge of the thinker and the seer

Saw the unseen and thought the unthinkable,

Opened the enormous doors of the unknown,

Rent Man’s horizons into infinity.

 

A shoreless sweep was lent to the mortal’s acts,

And art and beauty sprang from the human depths;

Nature and soul vied in nobility.

 

Ethics the human keyed to imitate heaven;

The harmony of a rich culture’s tones

Refined the sense and magnified its reach

To hear the unheard and glimpse the invisible

And taught the soul to soar beyond things known,

Inspiring life to greaten and break its bounds,

Aspiring to the Immortal’s unseen world.

 

Leaving earth’s safety daring wings of Mind

Bore her above the trodden fields of thought

Crossing the mystic seas of the Beyond

To live on eagle heights near to the Sun.

There Wisdom sits on her eternal throne.

 

All her life’s turns led her to symbol doors

Admitting to secret Powers that were her kin;

Adept of truth, initiate of bliss,

A mystic acolyte trained in Nature’s school,

Aware of the marvel of created things

She laid the secrecies of her heart’s deep muse

Upon the altar of the Wonderful;

Her hours were ritual in a timeless fane;

Her acts became gestures of sacrifice.

Invested with a rhythm of higher spheres

The word was used as a hieratic means

For the release of the imprisoned spirit

Into communion with its comrade gods.

 

Or it helped to beat out new expressive forms

Of that which labours in the heart of life,

Some immemorial Soul in men and things,

Seeker of the Unknown and the Unborn

Carrying a light from the Ineffable

To rend the veil of the last mysteries.

 

Intense philosophies pointed earth to heaven

Or on foundations broad as cosmic Space

Upraised the earth-mind to superhuman heights.

 

Overpassing lines that please the outward eyes

But hide the sight of that which lives within

Sculpture and painting concentrated sense

Upon an inner vision’s motionless verge,

Revealed a figure of the invisible,

Unveiled all Nature’s meaning in a form,

Or caught into a body the Divine.

 

The architecture of the Infinite

Discovered here its inward-musing shapes

Captured into wide breadths of soaring stone:

Music brought down celestial yearnings, song

Held the merged heart absorbed in rapturous depths,

Linking the human with the cosmic cry;

The world-interpreting movements of the dance

Moulded idea and mood to a rhythmic sway

And posture; crafts minute in subtle lines

Eternised a swift moment’s memory

Or showed in a carving’s sweep, a cup’s design

The underlying patterns of the unseen:

Poems in largeness cast like moving worlds

And metres surging with the ocean’s voice

Translated by grandeurs locked in Nature’s heart

But thrown now into a crowded glory of speech

The beauty and sublimity of her forms,

The passion of her moments and her moods

Lifting the human word near to the god’s.

 

Man’s eyes could look into the inner realms;

His scrutiny discovered number’s law

And organised the motions of the stars,

Mapped out the visible fashioning of the world,

Questioned the process of his thoughts or made

A theorised diagram of mind and life.

These things she took in as her nature’s food,

But these alone could fill not her wide Self:

A human seeking limited by its gains,

To her they seemed the great and early steps

Hazardous of a young discovering spirit

Which saw not yet by its own native light;

It tapped the universe with testing knocks

Or stretched to find Truth-mind’s divining rod;

A growing out there was to numberless sides,

But not the widest seeing of the soul,

Not yet the vast direct immediate touch,

Nor yet the art and wisdom of the Gods.

 

Savitri, pp. 359-61