Golden Bridge

Savitri: Book 1 Canto 2 Section 2 5:43 to For this she had accepted mortal bredthTo wrestle with the Shadow she had comeAnd must confront the riddle of man’s birthAnd life’s brief struggle in dumb Matter’s night.Whether to bear with Ignorance and deathOr hew the ways of Immortality,To win or lose the godlike game for man,Was her soul’s issue thrown with Destiny’s dice.But not to submit and suffer was she born;To lead, to deliver was her glorious part.Here was no fabric of terrestrial makeFit for a day’s use by busy careless Powers.An image fluttering on the screen of Fate,Half-animated for a passing show,Or a castaway on the ocean of DesireFlung to the eddies in a ruthless sportAnd tossed along the gulfs of Circumstance,A creature born to bend beneath the yoke,A chattel and a plaything of Time’s lords,Or one more pawn who comes destined to be pushedOne slow move forward on a measureless boardIn the chess-play of the earth-soul with Doom,—Such is the human figure drawn by Time.

Savitri: Book 1 Canto 1 Section 2 2:45 to 17:06Apart, living within, all lives she bore;Aloof, she carried in herself the world:Her dread was one with the great cosmic dread,Her strength was founded on the cosmic mights;The universal Mother’s love was hers.Against the evil at life’s afflicted roots,Her own calamity its private sign,Of her pangs she made a mystic poignant sword.A solitary mind, a world-wide heart,To the lone Immortal’s unshared work she rose.At first life grieved not in her burdened breast:On the lap of earth’s original somnolenceInert, released into forgetfulness,Prone it reposed, unconscious on mind’s verge,Obtuse and tranquil like the stone and star.In a deep cleft of silence twixt two realmsShe lay remote from grief, unsawn by care,Nothing recalling of the sorrow here.Then a slow faint remembrance shadowlike moved,And sighing she laid her hand upon her bosomAnd recognised the close and lingering ache,Deep, quiet, old, made natural to its place,But knew not why it was there nor whence it came.The Power that kindles mind was still withdrawn:Heavy, unwilling were life’s servitorsLike workers with no wages of delight;Sullen, the torch of sense refused to burn;The unassisted brain found not its past.Only a vague earth-nature held the frame.But now she stirred, her life shared the cosmic load.At the summons of her body’s voiceless callHer strong far-winging spirit travelled back,Back to the yoke of ignorance and fate,Back to the labour and stress of mortal days,Lighting a pathway through strange symbol dreamsAcross the ebbing of the seas of sleep.

Savitri: Book 1 Canto 1 Section 2 2:45 to 17:06Too unlike the world she came to help and save,Her greatness weighed upon its ignorant breastAnd from its dim chasms welled a dire return,A portion of its sorrow, struggle, fall.To live with grief, to confront death on her road,—The mortal’s lot became the Immortal’s share.Thus trapped in the gin of earthly destinies,Awaiting her ordeal’s hour abode,Outcast from her inborn felicity,Accepting life’s obscure terrestrial robe,Hiding herself even from those she loved,The godhead greater by a human fate.A dark foreknowledge separated herFrom all of whom she was the star and stay;Too great to impart the peril and the pain,In her torn depths she kept the grief to come.As one who watching over men left blindTakes up the load of an unwitting race,Harbouring a foe whom with her heart she must feed,Unknown her act, unknown the doom she faced,Unhelped she must foresee and dread and dare.The long-foreknown and fatal morn was hereBringing a noon that seemed like every noon.For Nature walks upon her mighty wayUnheeding when she breaks a soul, a life;Leaving her slain behind she travels on:Man only marks and God’s all-seeing eyes.Even in this moment of her soul’s despair,In its grim rendezvous with death and fear,No cry broke from her lips, no call for aid;She told the secret of her woe to none:Calm was her face and courage kept her mute.Yet only her outward self suffered and strove;Even her humanity was half divine:Her spirit opened to the Spirit in all,Her nature felt all Nature as its own.

Savitri: Book 1 Canto 1 Section 2 2:45 to 17:06Too unlike the world she came to help and save,Her greatness weighed upon its ignorant breastAnd from its dim chasms welled a dire return,A portion of its sorrow, struggle, fall.To live with grief, to confront death on her road,—The mortal’s lot became the Immortal’s share.Thus trapped in the gin of earthly destinies,Awaiting her ordeal’s hour abode,Outcast from her inborn felicity,Accepting life’s obscure terrestrial robe,Hiding herself even from those she loved,The godhead greater by a human fate.A dark foreknowledge separated herFrom all of whom she was the star and stay;Too great to impart the peril and the pain,In her torn depths she kept the grief to come.As one who watching over men left blindTakes up the load of an unwitting race,Harbouring a foe whom with her heart she must feed,Unknown her act, unknown the doom she faced,Unhelped she must foresee and dread and dare.The long-foreknown and fatal morn was hereBringing a noon that seemed like every noon.For Nature walks upon her mighty wayUnheeding when she breaks a soul, a life;Leaving her slain behind she travels on:Man only marks and God’s all-seeing eyes.Even in this moment of her soul’s despair,In its grim rendezvous with death and fear,No cry broke from her lips, no call for aid;She told the secret of her woe to none:Calm was her face and courage kept her mute.Yet only her outward self suffered and strove;Even her humanity was half divine:Her spirit opened to the Spirit in all,Her nature felt all Nature as its own.

Book 1 Canto 1 Section 2 2:45 to 17:06She had brought with her into the human form,The calm delight that weds one soul to all,The key to the flaming doors of ecstasy.Earth’s grain that needs the sap of pleasure and tearsRejected the undying rapture’s boon:Offered to the daughter of infinityHer passion-flower of love and doom she gave.In vain now seemed the splendid sacrifice.A prodigal of her rich divinity,Her self and all she was she had lent to men,Hoping her greater being to implantAnd in their body’s lives acclimatiseThat heaven might native grow on mortal soil.Hard is it to persuade earth-nature’s change;Mortality bears ill the eternal’s touch:It fears the pure divine intoleranceOf that assault of ether and of fire;It murmurs at its sorrowless happiness,Almost with hate repels the light it brings;It trembles at its naked power of TruthAnd the might and sweetness of its absolute Voice.Inflicting on the heights the abysm’s law,It sullies with its mire heaven’s messengers:Its thorns of fallen nature are the defenceIt turns against the saviour hands of Grace;It meets the sons of God with death and pain.A glory of lightnings traversing the earth-scene,Their sun-thoughts fading, darkened by ignorant minds,Their work betrayed, their good to evil turned,The cross their payment for the crown they gave,Only they leave behind a splendid Name.A fire has come and touched men’s hearts and gone;A few have caught flame and risen to greater life.

Savitri BOOK VI: The Book of Fate 443-44-45CANTO II: The Way of Fate and the Problem of PainSection 2Where Ignorance is, there suffering too must come;Thy grief is a cry of darkness to the Light;Pain was the first-born of the InconscienceWhich was thy body’s dumb original base;Already slept there pain’s subconscient shape:A shadow in a shadowy tenebrous womb,Till life shall move, it waits to wake and be.In one caul with joy came forth the dreadful Power.In life’s breast it was born hiding its twin;But pain came first, then only joy could be.Pain ploughed the first hard ground of the world-drowse. By pain a spirit started from the clod,By pain Life stirred in the subliminal deep.Interned, submerged, hidden in Matter’s tranceAwoke to itself the dreamer, sleeping Mind;It made a visible realm out of its dreams,It drew its shapes from the subconscient depths,Then turned to look upon the world it had made.By pain and joy, the bright and tenebrous twins,The inanimate world perceived its sentient soul,Else had the Inconscient never suffered change.Pain is the hammer of the Gods to breakA dead resistance in the mortal’s heart,His slow inertia as of living stone.If the heart were not forced to want and weep,His soul would have lain down content, at ease,And never thought to exceed the human startAnd never learned to climb towards the Sun.This earth is full of labour, packed with pain;Throes of an endless birth coerce her still; The centuries end, the ages vainly passAnd yet the Godhead in her is not born.The ancient Mother faces all with joy,Calls for the ardent pang, the grandiose thrill; For with pain and labour all creation comes.

Savitri BOOK VI: The Book of Fate 443-44-45CANTO II: The Way of Fate and the Problem of PainSection 2Then after a silence Narad made reply:Tuning his lips to earthly sound he spoke,And something now of the deep sense of fate Weighted the fragile hints of mortal speech.His forehead shone with vision solemnised, Turned to a tablet of supernal thoughtsAs if characters of an unwritten tongueHad left in its breadth the inscriptions of the gods. Bare in that light Time toiled, his unseen works Detected; the broad-flung far-seeing schemes Unfinished which his aeoned flight unrollsWere mapped already in that world-wide look. “Was then the sun a dream because there is night? Hidden in the mortal’s heart the Eternal lives:He lives secret in the chamber of thy soul,A Light shines there nor pain nor grief can cross. A darkness stands between thyself and him,Thou canst not hear or feel the marvellous Guest, Thou canst not see the beatific sun.O queen, thy thought is a light of the Ignorance, Its brilliant curtain hides from thee God’s face.It illumes a world born from the InconscienceBut hides the Immortal’s meaning in the world.Thy mind’s light hides from thee the Eternal’s thought, Thy heart’s hopes hide from thee the Eternal’s will, Earth’s joys shut from thee the Immortal’s bliss.Thence rose the need of a dark intruding god,The world’s dread teacher, the creator, pain.

Savitri - CANTO III: The Yoga of the Soul’s Release 25-26-27A Seer was born, a shining Guest of Time.For him mind’s limiting firmament ceased above. In the griffin forefront of the Night and DayA gap was rent in the all-concealing vault;The conscious ends of being went rolling back: The landmarks of the little person fell,The island ego joined its continent.Overpassed was this world of rigid limiting forms: Life’s barriers opened into the Unknown. Abolished were conception’s covenantsAnd, striking off subjection’s rigorous clause, Annulled the soul’s treaty with Nature’s nescience. All the grey inhibitions were torn offAnd broken the intellect’s hard and lustrous lid; Truth unpartitioned found immense sky-room; An empyrean vision saw and knew;The bounded mind became a boundless light,The finite self mated with infinity.His march now soared into an eagle’s flight.Out of apprenticeship to IgnoranceWisdom upraised him to her master craftAnd made him an archmason of the soul,A builder of the Immortal’s secret house,An aspirant to supernal Timelessness:Freedom and empire called to him from on high; Above mind’s twilight and life’s star-led night There gleamed the dawn of a spiritual day.

Savitri - Book 1, CANTO III: (Section 1 later)At last the traveller in the paths of TimeArrives on the frontiers of eternity.In the transient symbol of humanity draped,He feels his substance of undying selfAnd loses his kinship to mortality.A beam of the Eternal smites his heart,His thought stretches into infinitude;All in him turns to spirit vastnesses.His soul breaks out to join the Oversoul, His life is oceaned by that superlife.He has drunk from the breasts of the Mother of the worlds; A topless Supernature fills his frame:She adopts his spirit’s everlasting groundAs the security of her changing worldAnd shapes the figure of her unborn mights.Immortally she conceives herself in him,In the creature the unveiled Creatrix works:Her face is seen through his face, her eyes through his eyes; Her being is his through a vast identity.Then is revealed in man the overt Divine.A static Oneness and dynamic Power Descend in him, the integral Godhead’s seals; His soul and body take that splendid stamp. A long dim preparation is man’s life,A circle of toil and hope and war and peaceTracked out by Life on Matter’s obscure ground.In his climb to a peak no feet have ever trod,He seeks through a penumbra shot with flameA veiled reality half-known, ever missed,A search for something or someone never found,Cult of an ideal never made real here,An endless spiral of ascent and fallUntil at last is reached the giant pointThrough which his Glory shines for whom we were made And we break into the infinity of God.Across our nature’s border line we escapeInto Supernature’s arc of living light.

Savitri - Book 1, CANTO III: Section 1 earlyHis days were a long growth to the Supreme.A skyward being nourishing its rootsOn sustenance from occult spiritual fountsClimbed through white rays to meet an unseen Sun.His soul lived as eternity’s delegate,His mind was like a fire assailing heaven,His will a hunter in the trails of light.An ocean impulse lifted every breath;Each action left the footprints of a god,Each moment was a beat of puissant wings.The little plot of our mortalityTouched by this tenant from the heights becameA playground of the living Infinite.This bodily appearance is not all;The form deceives, the person is a mask;Hid deep in man celestial powers can dwell.His fragile ship conveys through the sea of years An incognito of the Imperishable.A spirit that is a flame of God abides,A fiery portion of the Wonderful,Artist of his own beauty and delight,Immortal in our mortal poverty.This sculptor of the forms of the Infinite,This screened unrecognised Inhabitant,Initiate of his own veiled mysteries,Hides in a small dumb seed his cosmic thought.In the mute strength of the occult IdeaDetermining predestined shape and act,Passenger from life to life, from scale to scale, Changing his imaged self from form to form,He regards the icon growing by his gazeAnd in the worm foresees the coming god.

Savitri: Book 2 Canto 14 Section 1The silent Soul of all the world was there:A Being lived, a Presence and a Power,A single Person who was himself and allAnd cherished Nature’s sweet and dangerous throbsTransfigured into beats divine and pure.One who could love without return for love,Meeting and turning to the best the worst,It healed the bitter cruelties of earth,Transforming all experience to delight;Intervening in the sorrowful paths of birthIt rocked the cradle of the cosmic ChildAnd stilled all weeping with its hand of joy;It led things evil towards their secret good,It turned racked falsehood into happy truth;Its power was to reveal divinity.Infinite, coeval with the mind of God,It bore within itself a seed, a flame,A seed from which the Eternal is new-born,A flame that cancels death in mortal things.All grew to all kindred and self and near;The intimacy of God was everywhere,No veil was felt, no brute barrier inert,Distance could not divide, Time could not change.A fire of passion burned in spirit-depths,A constant touch of sweetness linked all hearts,The throb of one adoration’s single blissIn a rapt ether of undying love.An inner happiness abode in all,A sense of universal harmonies,A measureless secure eternityOf truth and beauty and good and joy made one.Here was the welling core of finite life;A formless spirit became the soul of form.

Savitri: Book 3 Canto 4 Section 1O Son of Strength who climbst creation’s peaks,No soul is thy companion in the light;Alone thou standest at the eternal doors.What thou hast won is thine, but ask no more.O Spirit aspiring in an ignorant frame,O Voice arisen from the Inconscient’s world,How shalt thou speak for men whose hearts are dumb,Make purblind earth the soul’s seer-vision’s homeOr lighten the burden of the senseless globe?I am the Mystery beyond reach of mind,I am the goal of the travail of the suns;My fire and sweetness are the cause of life.But too immense my danger and my joy.Awake not the immeasurable descent,Speak not my secret name to hostile Time;Man is too weak to bear the Infinite’s weight.Truth born too soon might break the imperfect earth.Leave the all-seeing Power to hew its way:In thy single vast achievement reign apartHelping the world with thy great lonely days.I ask thee not to merge thy heart of flameIn the Immobile’s wide uncaring bliss,Turned from the fruitless motion of the years,Deserting the fierce labour of the worlds,Aloof from beings, lost in the Alone.How shall thy mighty spirit brook reposeWhile Death is still unconquered on the earthAnd Time a field of suffering and pain?Thy soul was born to share the laden Force;Obey thy nature and fulfil thy fate:Accept the difficulty and godlike toil,For the slow-paced omniscient purpose live.

Savitri: Book 3 Canto 4 Section 3 (very beginning)“O strong forerunner, I have heard thy cry.One shall descend and break the iron Law,Change Nature’s doom by the lone spirit’s power.A limitless Mind that can contain the world,A sweet and violent heart of ardent calmsMoved by the passions of the gods shall come.All mights and greatnesses shall join in her;Beauty shall walk celestial on the earth,Delight shall sleep in the cloud-net of her hair,And in her body as on his homing treeImmortal Love shall beat his glorious wings.A music of griefless things shall weave her charm;The harps of the Perfect shall attune her voice,The streams of Heaven shall murmur in her laugh,Her lips shall be the honeycombs of God,Her limbs his golden jars of ecstasy,Her breasts the rapture-flowers of Paradise.She shall bear Wisdom in her voiceless bosom,Strength shall be with her like a conqueror’s swordAnd from her eyes the Eternal’s bliss shall gaze.A seed shall be sown in Death’s tremendous hour,A branch of heaven transplant to human soil;Nature shall overleap her mortal step;Fate shall be changed by an unchanging will.”

Savitri: Book 4 Canto 3 Section 1“O Force-compelled, Fate-driven earth-born race,O petty adventurers in an infinite worldAnd prisoners of a dwarf humanity,How long will you tread the circling tracks of mindAround your little self and petty things?But not for a changeless littleness were you meant,Not for vain repetition were you built;Out of the Immortal’s substance you were made;Your actions can be swift revealing steps,Your life a changeful mould for growing gods.A Seer, a strong Creator, is within,The immaculate Grandeur broods upon your days,Almighty powers are shut in Nature’s cells.A greater destiny waits you in your front:This transient earthly being if he willsCan fit his acts to a transcendent scheme.He who now stares at the world with ignorant eyesHardly from the Inconscient’s night aroused,That look at images and not at Truth,Can fill those orbs with an immortal’s sight.Yet shall the godhead grow within your hearts,You shall awake into the spirit’s airAnd feel the breaking walls of mortal mindAnd hear the message which left life’s heart dumbAnd look through Nature with sun-gazing lidsAnd blow your conch-shells at the Eternal’s gate.Authors of earth’s high change, to you it is givenTo cross the dangerous spaces of the soulAnd touch the mighty Mother stark awakeAnd meet the Omnipotent in this house of fleshAnd make of life the million-bodied One.The earth you tread is a border screened from heavenThe life you lead conceals the light you are.

Book 1, Canto II, p. 14-15-16All in her pointed to a nobler kind.Near to earth’s wideness, intimate with heaven, Exalted and swift her young large-visioned spirit Voyaging through worlds of splendour and of calm Overflew the ways of Thought to unborn things. Ardent was her self-poised unstumbling will;Her mind, a sea of white sincerity,Passionate in flow, had not one turbid wave.As in a mystic and dynamic danceA priestess of immaculate ecstasiesInspired and ruled from Truth’s revealing vaultMoves in some prophet cavern of the gods,A heart of silence in the hands of joyInhabited with rich creative beatsA body like a parable of dawnThat seemed a niche for veiled divinityOr golden temple-door to things beyond.Immortal rhythms swayed in her time-born steps;Her look, her smile awoke celestial senseEven in earth-stuff, and their intense delightPoured a supernal beauty on men’s lives.A wide self-giving was her native act;A magnanimity as of sea or skyEnveloped with its greatness all that cameAnd gave a sense as of a greatened world:Her kindly care was a sweet temperate sun,Her high passion a blue heaven’s equipoise.As might a soul fly like a hunted bird,Escaping with tired wings from a world of storms, And a quiet reach like a remembered breast,In a haven of safety and splendid soft reposeOne could drink life back in streams of honey-fire, Recover the lost habit of happiness,Feel her bright nature’s glorious ambience,And preen joy in her warmth and colour’s rule.A deep of compassion, a hushed sanctuary,Her inward help unbarred a gate in heaven;Love in her was wider than the universe,The whole world could take refuge in her single heart. The great unsatisfied godhead here could dwell: Vacant of the dwarf self’s imprisoned air,Her mood could harbour his sublimer breathSpiritual that can make all things divine. For even her gulfs were secrecies of light. At once she was the stillness and the word, A continent of self-diffusing peace,An ocean of untrembling virgin fire;The strength, the silence of the gods were hers. In her he found a vastness like his own,His high warm subtle ether he refoundAnd moved in her as in his natural home.In her he met his own eternity.

Savitri: Book 1, Canto 2 Section 1 An absolute supernatural darkness falls On man sometimes when he draws near to God: An hour arrives when fail all Nature’s means; Forced out from the protecting Ignorance And flung back on his naked primal need, He at length must cast from him his surface soul And be the ungarbed entity within: That hour had fallen now on Savitri. A point she had reached where life must be in vain Or, in her unborn element awake, Her will must cancel her body’s destiny. For only the unborn spirit’s timeless power Can lift the yoke imposed by birth in Time. Only the Self that builds this figure of self Can rase the fixed interminable line That joins these changing names, these numberless lives, These new oblivious personalities And keeps still lurking in our conscious acts The trail of old forgotten thoughts and deeds, Disown the legacy of our buried selves, The burdensome heirship to our vanished forms Accepted blindly by the body and soul. An episode in an unremembered tale, Its beginning lost, its motive and plot concealed, A once living story has prepared and made Our present fate, child of past energies. The fixity of the cosmic sequences Fastened with hidden inevitable links She must disrupt, dislodge by her soul’s force Her past, a block on the Immortal’s road, Make a rased ground and shape anew her fate.

Savitri: Book VII, Canto II The parable of the search for the Soul (p.475-76-77) The Voice replied: “Is this enough, O spirit? And what shall thy soul say when it wakes and knows The work was left undone for which it came? Or is this all for thy being born on earth Charged with a mandate from eternity, A listener to the voices of the years, A follower of the footprints of the gods, To pass and leave unchanged the old dusty laws? Shall there be no new tables, no new Word, No greater light come down upon the earth Delivering her from her unconsciousness, Man’s spirit from unalterable Fate? Cam’st thou not down to open the doors of Fate, The iron doors that seemed for ever closed, And lead man to Truth’s wide and golden road That runs through finite things to eternity? Is this then the report that I must make, My head bowed with shame before the Eternal’s seat, — His power he kindled in thy body has failed, His labourer returns, her task undone?” Then Savitri’s heart fell mute, it spoke no word. But holding back her troubled rebel heart, Abrupt, erect and strong, calm like a hill, Surmounting the seas of mortal ignorance, Its peak immutable above mind’s air, A Power within her answered the still Voice: “I am thy portion here charged with thy work, As thou myself seated for ever above, Speak to my depths, O great and deathless Voice, Command, for I am here to do thy will.” The Voice replied: “Remember why thou cam’st: Find out thy soul, recover thy hid self, In silence seek God’s meaning in thy depths, Then mortal nature change to the divine. Open God’s door, enter into his trance. Cast Thought from thee, that nimble ape of Light: In his tremendous hush stilling thy brain His vast Truth wake within and know and see. Cast from thee sense that veils thy spirit’s sight: In the enormous emptiness of thy mind Thou shalt see the Eternal’s body in the world, Know him in every voice heard by thy soul, In the world’s contacts meet his single touch; All things shall fold thee into his embrace. Conquer thy heart’s throbs, let thy heart beat in God: Thy nature shall be the engine of his works, Thy voice shall house the mightiness of his Word: Then shalt thou harbour my force and conquer Death.” Then Savitri by her doomed husband sat, Still rigid in her golden motionless pose, A statue of the fire of the inner sun. In the black night the wrath of storm swept by, The thunder crashed above her, the rain hissed, Its million footsteps pattered on the roof. Impassive mid the movement and the cry, Witness of the thoughts of mind, the moods of life, She looked into herself and sought for her soul.

Savitri: Book VII, Canto II The parable of the search for the Soul (p.474-75) As the Voice touched, her body became a stark And rigid golden statue of motionless trance, A stone of God lit by an amethyst soul. Around her body’s stillness all grew still: Her heart listened to its slow measured beats, Her mind renouncing thought heard and was mute: “Why camest thou to this dumb deathbound earth, This ignorant life beneath indifferent skies Tied like a sacrifice on the altar of Time, O spirit, O immortal energy, If ’twas to nurse grief in a helpless heart Or with hard tearless eyes await thy doom? Arise, O soul, and vanquish Time and Death.” But Savitri’s heart replied in the dim night: “My strength is taken from me and given to Death. Why should I lift my hands to the shut heavens Or struggle with mute inevitable Fate Or hope in vain to uplift an ignorant race Who hug their lot and mock the saviour Light And see in Mind wisdom’s sole tabernacle, In its harsh peak and its inconscient base A rock of safety and an anchor of sleep? Is there a God whom any cry can move? He sits in peace and leaves the mortal’s strength Impotent against his calm omnipotent Law And Inconscience and the almighty hands of Death. What need have I, what need has Satyavan To avoid the black-meshed net, the dismal door, Or call a mightier Light into life’s closed room, A greater Law into man’s little world? Why should I strive with earth’s unyielding laws Or stave off death’s inevitable hour? This surely is best to pactise with my fate And follow close behind my lover’s steps And pass through night from twilight to the sun Across the tenebrous river that divides The adjoining parishes of earth and heaven. Then could we lie inarmed breast upon breast, Untroubled by thought, untroubled by our hearts, Forgetting man and life and time and its hours, Forgetting eternity’s call, forgetting God.”

Savitri: Book 6 Canto 2 Section 6 Fate is Truth working out in Ignorance. O King, thy fate is a transaction done At every hour between Nature and thy soul With God for its foreseeing arbiter. Fate is a balance drawn in Destiny’s book. Man can accept his fate, he can refuse. Even if the One maintains the unseen decree He writes thy refusal in thy credit page: For doom is not a close, a mystic seal. Arisen from the tragic crash of life, Arisen from the body’s torture and death, The spirit rises mightier by defeat; Its godlike wings grow wider with each fall. Its splendid failures sum to victory. O man, the events that meet thee on thy road, Though they smite thy body and soul with joy and grief, Are not thy fate,—they touch thee awhile and pass; Even death can cut not short thy spirit’s walk: Thy goal, the road thou choosest are thy fate. On the altar throwing thy thoughts, thy heart, thy works, Thy fate is a long sacrifice to the gods Till they have opened to thee thy secret self And made thee one with the indwelling God. O soul, intruder in Nature’s ignorance, Armed traveller to the unseen supernal heights, Thy spirit’s fate is a battle and ceaseless march Against invisible opponent Powers, A passage from Matter into timeless self. Adventurer through blind unforeseeing Time, A forced advance through a long line of lives, It pushes its spearhead through the centuries. Across the dust and mire of the earthly plain, On many guarded lines and dangerous fronts, In dire assaults, in wounded slow retreats, Holding the ideal’s ringed and battered fort Or fighting against odds in lonely posts, Or camped in night around the bivouac’s fires Awaiting the tardy trumpets of the dawn, In hunger and in plenty and in pain, Through peril and through triumph and through fall, Through life’s green lanes and over her desert sands, Up the bald moor, along the sunlit ridge, In serried columns with a straggling rear Led by its nomad vanguard’s signal fires, Marches the army of the waylost god. Then late the joy ineffable is felt, Then he remembers his forgotten self; He has refound the skies from which he fell. At length his front’s indomitable line Forces the last passes of the Ignorance: Advancing beyond Nature’s last known bounds, Reconnoitring the formidable unknown, Beyond the landmarks of things visible, It mounts through a miraculous upper air Till climbing the mute summit of the world He stands upon the splendour-peaks of God.

Savitri: Book 5 Canto 3 Section 1 31:03 to 36:32 Once were my days like days of other men: To think and act was all, to enjoy and breathe; This was the width and height of mortal hope: Yet there came glimpses of a deeper self That lives behind Life and makes her act its scene. A truth was felt that screened its shape from mind, A Greatness working towards a hidden end, And vaguely through the forms of earth there looked Something that life is not and yet must be. I groped for the Mystery with the lantern, Thought. Its glimmerings lighted with the abstract word A half-visible ground and travelling yard by yard It mapped a system of the Self and God. I could not live the truth it spoke and thought. I turned to seize its form in visible things, Hoping to fix its rule by mortal mind, Imposed a narrow structure of world-law Upon the freedom of the Infinite, A hard firm skeleton of outward Truth, A mental scheme of a mechanic Power. This light showed more the darknesses unsearched; It made the original Secrecy more occult; It could not analyse its cosmic Veil Or glimpse the Wonder-worker’s hidden hand And trace the pattern of his magic plans. I plunged into an inner seeing Mind And knew the secret laws and sorceries That make of Matter mind’s bewildered slave: The mystery was not solved but deepened more. I strove to find its hints through Beauty and Art, But Form cannot unveil the indwelling Power; Only it throws its symbols at our hearts. It evoked a mood of self, invoked a sign Of all the brooding glory hidden in sense: I lived in the ray but faced not to the sun. I looked upon the world and missed the Self, And when I found the Self, I lost the world, My other selves I lost and the body of God, The link of the finite with the Infinite, The bridge between the appearance and the Truth, The mystic aim for which the world was made, The human sense of Immortality.