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.