Creation as a Divine Play, pp. 623-625 (SH 308)

Savitri Class in Hindi with Alok Pandey
Book Ten: The Book of the Double Twilight, Canto Three: The Debate of Love and Death

Savitri is revealing to us what we do not see since Death’s darkness blinds our eyes. Yet when the eyes open, we see that was this not the obvious truth hidden for so long! She reveals to us that creation is not an unfortunate accident but a play of the Divine.

All here bears witness to his secret might,
In all we feel his presence and his power.

A blaze of his sovereign glory is the sun,
A glory is the gold and glimmering moon,
A glory is his dream of purple sky.
A march of his greatness are the wheeling stars.
His laughter of beauty breaks out in green trees,
His moments of beauty triumph in a flower;
The blue sea’s chant, the rivulet’s wandering voice
Are murmurs falling from the Eternal’s harp.

This world is God fulfilled in outwardness.

His ways challenge our reason and our sense;
By blind brute movements of an ignorant Force,
By means we slight as small, obscure or base,
A greatness founded upon little things,
He has built a world in the unknowing Void.
His forms he has massed from infinitesimal dust;
His marvels are built from insignificant things.

If mind is crippled, life untaught and crude,
If brutal masks are there and evil acts,
They are incidents of his vast and varied plot,
His great and dangerous drama’s needed steps;
He makes with these and all his passion-play,
A play and yet no play but the deep scheme
Of a transcendent Wisdom finding ways
To meet her Lord in the shadow and the Night:
Above her is the vigil of the stars;
Watched by a solitary Infinitude
She embodies in dumb Matter the Divine,
In symbol minds and lives the Absolute.

A miracle-monger her mechanical craft;
Matter’s machine worked out the laws of thought,
Life’s engines served the labour of a soul:
The Mighty Mother her creation wrought,
A huge caprice self-bound by iron laws,
And shut God into an enigmatic world:
She lulled the Omniscient into nescient sleep,
Omnipotence on Inertia’s back she drove,
Trod perfectly with divine unconscious steps
The enormous circle of her wonder-works.

Immortality assured itself by death;
The Eternal’s face was seen through drifts of Time.

His knowledge he disguised as Ignorance,
His Good he sowed in Evil’s monstrous bed,
Made error a door by which Truth could enter in,
His plant of bliss watered with Sorrow’s tears.

[Savitri: 623 – 625]

(line breaks added to emphasize separate movements)