The Mother Reads Selections from Savitri by Sri Aurobindo
Book 2. The Book Of The Traveller Of The Worlds
Canto 5. The Godheads Of The Little Life
He plunged his gaze into the siege of mist
. . .
As when a search-light stabs the Night’s blind breast
And dwellings and trees and figures of men appear
As if revealed to an eye in Nothingness,
All lurking things were torn out of their veils
And held up in his vision’s sun-white blaze.
[p. 151]
* * *
Astonished by the unaccustomed glow,
As if immanent in the shadows started up
Imps with wry limbs and carved beast visages,
Sprite-prompters goblin-wizened or faery-small,
And genii fairer but unsouled and poor
And fallen beings, their heavenly portion lost,
And errant divinities trapped in Time’s dust.
[p. 152]
* * *
An ocean of electric Energy
Formlessly formed its strange wave-particles
Constructing by their dance this solid scheme,
Its mightiness in the atom shut to rest;
. . .
Thus has been made this real impossible world,
An obvious miracle or convincing show.
[p. 155]
* * *
At first she raised no voice, no motion dared:
Charged with world-power, instinct with living force,
Only she clung with her roots to the safe earth,
Thrilled dumbly to the shocks of ray and breeze
And put out tendril fingers of desire;
[p. 157]
* * *
Then man was moulded from the original brute.
A thinking mind had come to lift life’s moods,
A keen-edged tool of a Nature mixed and vague,
An intelligence half-witness, half-machine.
[p. 158]
* * *
A fragile human love that could not last,
Ego’s moth-wings to lift the seraph soul,
Appeared, a surface glamour of brief date
Extinguished by a scanty breath of Time;
. . .
Hopes that soon fade to drab realities
And passions that crumble to ashes while they blaze
Kindled the common earth with their brief flame.
[p. 159]
* * *
A spirit that perished not with the body and breath
Was there like a shadow of the Unmanifest
And stood behind the little personal form
But claimed not yet this earthly embodiment.
[p. 159]
* * *
A thinking puppet is the mind of life:
Its choice is the work of elemental strengths
That know not their own birth and end and cause
. . .
Into the actions mortals think their own
They bring the incoherencies of Fate,
Or make a doom of Time’s slipshod caprice
And toss the lives of men from hand to hand
In an inconsequent and devious game.
[p. 162]
* * *
In a narrow plot he has pitched his tent of life
Beneath the wide gaze of the starry Vast.
[p. 166]
* * *
Our seekings are short-lived experiments
Made by a wordless and inscrutable Power
Testing its issues from inconscient Night
To meet its luminous self of Truth and Bliss.
. . .
Amid the figures of the Ignorance,
In the symbol pictures drawn by word and thought,
It seeks the truth to which all figures point;
It looks for the source of Light with vision’s lamp;
[p. 168]
* * *
It works to find the doer of all works,
The unfelt Self within who is the guide,
The unknown Self above who is the goal.
[p. 168]
* * *
Across the cosmic field through narrow lanes
Asking a scanty dole from Fortune’s hands
And garbed in beggar’s robes there walks the One.
[p. 169]
* * *
A door is cut in the mud wall of self;
Across the lowly threshold with bowed heads
Angels of ecstasy and self-giving pass,
And lodged in an inner sanctuary of dream
The makers of the image of deity live.
[p. 170]
* * *
This little being of Time, this shadow-soul,
This living dwarf figure-head of darkened spirit
Out of its traffic of petty dreams shall rise.
. . .
Like a clay troll kneaded into a god,
New-made in the image of the eternal Guest,
It shall be caught to the breast of a white Force
[p. 171]
* * *
But first the spirit’s ascent we must achieve
Out of the chasm from which our nature rose.
. . .
Then kindling the gold tongue of sacrifice,
Calling the powers of a bright hemisphere,
We shall shed the discredit of our mortal state,
Make the abysm a road for Heaven’s descent,
Acquaint our depths with the supernal Ray
And cleave the darkness with the mystic Fire.
[p. 171-172]
* * *
He through the astral chaos shore a way
Mid the grey faces of its demon gods,
. . .
The watching opacity multiplied as he moved
Its hostile mass of dead and staring eyes;
The darkness glimmered like a dying torch.
Around him an extinguished phantom glare
Peopled with shadowy and misleading shapes
The vague Inconscient’s dark and measureless cave.
His only sunlight was his spirit’s flame.
[p. 172]End of Book 2 Canto 5
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