The Mother Reads Selections from Savitri by Sri Aurobindo
Book 2. The Book Of The Traveller Of The Worlds
Canto 4. The Kingdoms Of The Little Life
Adorer of a joy without a name,
In her obscure cathedral of delight
To dim dwarf gods she offers secret rites.
But vain unending is the sacrifice,
The priest an ignorant mage who only makes
Futile mutations in the altar’s plan
And casts blind hopes into a powerless flame.
[p. 134]
* * *
Ascending slowly with unconscious steps,
A foundling of the gods she wanders here
Like a child-soul left near the gates of Hell
Fumbling through fog in search of Paradise.
[p. 135]
* * *
As shines a solitary witness star
That burns apart, Light’s lonely sentinel,
In the drift and teeming of a mindless Night,
A single thinker in an aimless world
Awaiting some tremendous dawn of God,
He saw the purpose in the works of Time.
[p. 137]
* * *
The phantom of a dark and evil start
Ghostlike pursues all that we dream and do.
. . .
This was the first cry of the awaking world.
It clings around us still and clamps the god.
[p. 140]
* * *
In the enigma of the darkened Vasts,
In the passion and self-loss of the Infinite
When all was plunged in the negating Void,
Non-Being’s night could never have been saved
If Being had not plunged into the dark
Carrying with it its triple mystic cross.
[p. 140-141]
* * *
A blindfold search and wrestle and fumbling clasp
Of a half-seen Nature and a hidden Soul,
A game of hide and seek in twilit rooms,
A play of love and hate and fear and hope
Continues in the nursery of mind
Its hard and heavy romp of self-born twins.
[p. 141]
* * *
Huge armoured strengths shook the frail quaking ground,
Great puissant creatures with a dwarfish brain,
And pigmy tribes imposed their small life-drift.
[p. 142]
* * *
Beings were there who wore a human form;
Absorbed they lived in the passion of the scene,
But knew not who they were or why they lived:
. . .
Ardent from the sack of happy peaceful homes
And gorged with slaughter, plunder, rape and fire,
They made of human selves their helpless prey,
A drove of captives led to lifelong woe,
[p. 143, 144]
* * *
At first he saw a dim obscure mind-power
Moving concealed by Matter and dumb life.
. . .
In the deep midst of an unconscious world
Its huddled waves and foam of consciousness ran
Pressing and eddying through a narrow strait,
Carrying experience in its crowded pace.
[p. 147]
* * *
A little light in a great darkness born,
Life knew not where it went nor whence it came.
Around all floated still the nescient haze.
[p. 150]End of Book 2 Canto 4
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