84: I am the inviolable Ecstasy

A Spiritual Biography of Savitri

 

 

“O human image of the deathless word,

How hast thou seen beyond the topaz walls

The gleaming sisters of the divine gate,

Summoned the genii of their wakeful sleep,

And under revelation’s arches forced

The carved thought-shrouded doors to swing apart,

Unlocked the avenues of spiritual sight

And taught the entries of a heavenlier state

To thy rapt soul that bore the golden key?

 

In thee the secret sight man's blindness missed

Has opened its view past Time, my chariot course,

And death, my tunnel which I drive through life

To reach my unseen distances of bliss.

 

I am the hushed search of the jealous gods

Pursuing my wisdom’s vast mysterious word

Seized in the thousand meeting ways of heaven.

 

I am the beauty of the unveiled Ray…

I am the inviolable Ecstasy;

They who have looked on me, shall grieve no more…

 

Two powers from one original ecstasy born

Pace near, but parted in the life of man;

One leans to earth, the other yearns to the skies:

Heaven in its rapture dreams of perfect earth,

Earth in its sorrow dreams of perfect heaven…

 

But when the phantom flame-edge fails undone,

Then never more can space or time divide

The lover from the loved; Space shall draw back

Her great translucent curtain, Time shall be

The quivering of the spirit's endless bliss.

 

Attend that moment of celestial fate.

 

Meanwhile you two shall serve the dual law

Which only now the scouts of vision glimpse

Who pressing through the forest of their thoughts

Have found the narrow bridges of the gods…

 

Yet if thou wouldst abandon the vexed world,

Careless of the dark moan of things below,

Tread down the isthmus, overleap the flood,

Cancel thy contract with the labouring Force,

Renounce the tie that joins thee to earth-kind,

Cast off thy sympathy with mortal hearts.

 

Arise, vindicate thy spirit's conquered right:

Relinquishing thy charge of transient breath,

Under the cold gaze of the indifferent stars

Leaving thy borrowed body on the sod,

Ascend, O soul, into thy blissful home…

Cast off the ambiguous myth of earth's desire,

O immortal, to felicity arise.”

 

On Savitri listening in her tranquil heart

To the harmony of the ensnaring voice

A joy exceeding earth's and heaven's poured down,

The bliss of an unknown eternity,

A rapture from some waiting Infinite.

 

A smile came rippling out in her wide eyes,

Its confident felicity's messenger

As if the first beam of the morning sun

Rippled along two wakened lotus-pools:

 

“O besetter of man's soul with life and death

And the world's pleasure and pain and Day and Night,

Tempting his heart with the far lure of heaven,

Testing his strength with the close touch of hell,

I climb not to thy everlasting Day,

Even as I have shunned thy eternal Night.

 

To me who turn not from thy terrestrial Way,

Give back the other self my nature asks,

Thy spaces need him not to help their joy;

Earth needs his beautiful spirit made by thee

To fling delight down like a net of gold.

 

Earth is the chosen place of mightiest souls;

Earth is the heroic spirit's battlefield,

The forge where the Arch-mason shapes his works.

 

Thy servitudes on earth are greater, king,

Than all the glorious liberties of heaven.

 

The heavens were once to me my natural home,

I too have wandered in star-jewelled groves…

I too have revelled in the fields of light…

Lived in the rhyme of bright unlabouring thoughts,

I have beat swift harmonies of rapture vast,

Danced in spontaneous measures of the soul

The great and easy dances of the gods…

 

There where the gods and demons battle in night

Or wrestle on the borders of the Sun…

In me the spirit of immortal love

Stretches its arms out to embrace mankind…

 

O life, the life beneath the wheeling stars

For victory in the tournament with death,

For bending of the fierce and difficult bow,

For flashing of the splendid sword of God!

O thou who soundest the trumpet in the lists,

Part not the handle from the untried steel,

Take not the warrior with his blow unstruck…

 

O King-smith, clang on still thy toil begun,

Weld us to one in thy strong smithy of life.

Thy fine-curved jewelled hilt call Savitri,

Thy blade's exultant smile name Satyavan.

 

Fashion to beauty, point us through the world.

 

Break not the lyre before the song is found;

Are there not still unnumbered chants to weave?

 

O subtle-souled musician of the years,

Play out what thou hast fluted on my stops;

Arise from the strain their first wild plaint divined

And that discover which is yet unsung.

 

I know that I can lift man's soul to God,

I know that he can bring the Immortal down.

 

Our will labours permitted by thy will

And without thee an empty roar of storm,

A senseless whirlwind is the Titan's force

And without thee a snare the strength of gods.

 

Let not the inconscient gulf swallow man's race

That through earth's ignorance struggles towards thy Light.

 

O thunderer with the lightnings of the soul,

Give not to darkness and to death thy sun,

Achieve thy wisdom's hidden firm decree

And the mandate of thy secret world-wide love.”

 

Her words failed lost in thought's immensities

Which seized them at the limits of their cry

And hid their meaning in the distances

That stir to more than ever speech has won

From the Unthinkable, end of all our thought,

And the Ineffable from whom all words come.

 

 

Savitri, pp. 683-88