Explorations in Savitri

In that desolate grandeur, in that beauty bare, In the deaf stillness, mid the unheeded sounds, Heavy was the uncommunicated load Of Godhead in a world that had no needs; For none was there to feel or to receive.

A Power beyond earth's scope has touched the earth; The repose that might have been can be no more; A formless yearning passions in man's heart, A cry is in his blood for happier things:

In this slow ascension he must follow her pace Even from her faint and dim subconscious start: So only can earth's last salvation come.

A wide unquiet mist of seeking Space, A rayless region swallowed in vague swathes, That seemed, unnamed, unbodied and unhoused, A swaddled visionless and formless mind, Asked for a body to translate its soul.

A heavenly process donned this grey disguise, A fallen ignorance in its covert night Laboured to achieve its dumb unseemly work, A camouflage of the Inconscient's need To release the glory of God in Nature's mud.

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.

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: Content to breathe, to feel, to sense, to act,

Absorbed in the present act, the fleeting days, None thought to look beyond the hour's gains, Or dreamed to make this earth a fairer world, Or felt some touch divine surprise his heart.

A glint of light kindled the obscure World-Force; It dowered a driven world with the seeing Idea And armed the act with thought's dynamic point: A small thinking being watched the works of Time.

A thought was there that planned, a will that strove, But for small aims within a narrow scope, Wasting unmeasured toil on transient things. It knew itself a creature of the mud; It asked no larger law, no loftier aim; It had no inward look, no upward gaze.

A FIXED and narrow power with rigid forms, He saw the empire of the little life, An unhappy corner in eternity. It lived upon the margin of the Idea Protected by Ignorance as in a shell.

But now the Light supreme is far away: Our conscious life obeys the Inconscient's laws; To ignorant purposes and blind desires Our hearts are moved by an ambiguous force; Even our mind's conquests wear a battered crown.

"...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"

"...Infant self-feeling grew and birth was born. A godhead woke but lay with dreaming limbs; Her house refused to open its sealed doors."

"... Unknown, unfelt the mighty Witness lives And nothing shows the Glory that is here."

"Inscrutable work the cosmic agencies. Only the fringe of a wide surge we see; Our instruments have not that greater light, Our will tunes not with the eternal Will, Our heart’s sight is too blind and passionate."

"...Ourselves incapable to build our fate Only as actors speak and strut our parts Until the piece is done and we pass off Into a brighter Time and subtler Space."

"As long as the human animal is lord And a dense nether nature screens the soul, As long as intellect’s outward-gazing sight Serves earthy interest and creature joys, An incurable littleness pursues his days."