Savitri BOOK VI: The Book of Fate 443-44-45

CANTO II: The Way of Fate and the Problem of Pain

Section 2

Then 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 thoughts

As if characters of an unwritten tongue

Had 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 unrolls

Were 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 Inconscience

But 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.