Savitri Study Class 23-10 “The Mask of Death”, pp. 628-629

Savitri Study Class with Alok Pandey, Book 10 Canto 3.

The mask of Death has covered the Eternal. All seems to have turned into its very opposite. And yet something of this Glory shines through the mask and waits for its hour.

Thy mask has covered the Eternal’s face,
The Bliss that made the world has fallen asleep.
Abandoned in the Vast she slumbered on:
An evil transmutation overtook
Her members till she knew herself no more.

Only through her creative slumber flit
Frail memories of the joy and beauty meant
Under the sky’s blue laugh mid green-scarfed trees
And happy squanderings of scents and hues,
In the field of the golden promenade of the sun
And the vigil of the dream-light of the stars,
Amid high meditating heads of hills,
On the bosom of voluptuous rain-kissed earth
And by the sapphire tumblings of the sea.

But now the primal innocence is lost
And Death and Ignorance govern the mortal world
And Nature’s visage wears a greyer hue.
Earth still has kept her early charm and grace,
The grandeur and the beauty still are hers,
But veiled is the divine Inhabitant.

The souls of men have wandered from the Light
And the great Mother turns away her face.
The eyes of the creatrix Bliss are closed
And sorrow’s touch has found her in her dreams.
As she turns and tosses on her bed of Void,
Because she cannot wake and find herself
And cannot build again her perfect shape,
Oblivious of her nature and her state,
Forgetting her instinct of felicity,
Forgetting to create a world of joy,
She weeps and makes her creatures’ eyes to weep;
Testing with sorrow’s edge her children’s breasts,
She spends on life’s vain waste of hope and toil
The poignant luxury of grief and tears.

In the nightmare change of her half-conscious dream,
Tortured herself and torturing by her touch,
She comes to our hearts and bodies and our lives
Wearing a hard and cruel mask of pain.

Our nature twisted by the abortive birth
Returns wry answers to life’s questioning shocks,
An acrid relish finds in the world’s pangs,
Drinks the sharp wine of grief’s perversity.

A curse is laid on the pure joy of life:
Delight, God’s sweetest sign and Beauty’s twin,
Dreaded by aspiring saint and austere sage,
Is shunned, a dangerous and ambiguous cheat,
A specious trick of an infernal Power
It tempts the soul to its self-hurt and fall.

A puritan God made pleasure a poisonous fruit,
Or red drug in the market-place of Death,
And sin the child of Nature’s ecstasy.

Yet every creature hunts for happiness,
Buys with harsh pangs or tears by violence
From the dull breast of the inanimate globe
Some fragment or some broken shard of bliss.

Even joy itself becomes a poisonous draught;
Its hunger is made a dreadful hook of Fate.

All means are held good to catch a single beam,
Eternity sacrificed for a moment’s bliss:
Yet for joy and not for sorrow earth was made
And not as a dream in endless suffering Time.

Although God made the world for his delight,
An ignorant Power took charge and seemed his Will
And Death’s deep falsity has mastered Life.

All grew a play of Chance simulating Fate.

[Breaks are added to emphasize separate movements]