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.