Daily Passages from Savitri

There are muffled throbs of laughter’s undertones,
The murmur of an occult happiness,
An exultation in the depths of sleep,
A heart of bliss within a world of pain.

An Infant nursed on Nature’s covert breast,
An Infant playing in the magic woods,
Fluting to rapture by the spirit’s streams,
Awaits the hour when we shall turn to his call.

In this investiture of fleshly life
A soul that is a spark of God survives
And sometimes it breaks through the sordid screen
And kindles a fire that makes us half-divine.

In our body’s cells there sits a hidden Power
That sees the unseen and plans eternity,
Our smallest parts have room for deepest needs;
There too the golden Messengers can come:
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.

Pity is there and fire-winged sacrifice,
And flashes of sympathy and tenderness
Cast heaven-lights from the heart’s secluded shrine.

[Savitri: Book Two Canto 5]

All is not here a blinded Nature’s task:
A Word, a Wisdom watches us from on high,
A Witness sanctioning her will and works,
An Eye unseen in the unseeing vast;
There is an Influence from a Light above,
There are thoughts remote and sealed eternities;
A mystic motive drives the stars and suns.

In this passage from a deaf unknowing Force
To struggling consciousness and transient breath
A mighty Supernature waits on Time.

The world is other than we now think and see,
Our lives a deeper mystery than we have dreamed;
Our minds are starters in the race to God,
Our souls deputed selves of the Supreme.

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.

Even in the theatre of these small lives
Behind the act a secret sweetness breathes,
An urge of miniature divinity.

A mystic passion from the wells of God
Flows through the guarded spaces of the soul;
A force that helps supports the suffering earth,
An unseen nearness and a hidden joy.

[Savitri: Book Two Canto 5]

These unwise prompters of man’s ignorant heart
And tutors of his stumbling speech and will,
Movers of petty wraths and lusts and hates
And changeful thoughts and shallow emotion’s starts,
These slight illusion-makers with their masks,
Painters of the decor of a dull-hued stage
And nimble scene-shifters of the human play,
Ever are busy with this ill-lit scene.

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.

Thus they inflict their little pigmy law
And curb the mounting slow uprise of man,
Then his too scanty walk with death they close.

    This is the ephemeral creature’s daily life.

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.

Ever since consciousness was born on earth,
Life is the same in insect, ape and man,
Its stuff unchanged, its way the common route.

If new designs, if richer details grow
And thought is added and more tangled cares,
If little by little it wears a brighter face,
Still even in man the plot is mean and poor.

A gross content prolongs his fallen state;
His small successes are failures of the soul,
His little pleasures punctuate frequent griefs:
Hardship and toil are the heavy price he pays
For the right to live and his last wages death.

An inertia sunk towards inconscience,
A sleep that imitates death is his repose.

A puny splendour of creative force
Is made his spur to fragile human works
Which yet outlast their brief creator’s breath.

He dreams sometimes of the revels of the gods
And sees the Dionysian gesture pass,—
A leonine greatness that would tear his soul
If through his failing limbs and fainting heart
The sweet and joyful mighty madness swept:
Trivial amusements stimulate and waste
The energy given to him to grow and be.

His little hour is spent in little things…..

Yet was this only a provisional scheme,
A false appearance sketched by limiting sense,
Mind’s insufficient self-discovery,
An early attempt, a first experiment.

This was a toy to amuse the infant earth;
But knowledge ends not in these surface powers
That live upon a ledge in the Ignorance
And dare not look into the dangerous depths
Or to stare upward measuring the Unknown.

There is a deeper seeing from within
And, when we have left these small purlieus of mind,
A greater vision meets us on the heights
In the luminous wideness of the spirit’s gaze.

At last there wakes in us a witness Soul
That looks at truths unseen and scans the Unknown;
Then all assumes a new and marvellous face:
The world quivers with a God-light at its core,
In Time’s deep heart high purposes move and live,
Life’s borders crumble and join infinity.

[Savitri: Book Two Canto 5]

Our conscious movements have sealed origins
But with those shadowy seats no converse hold;
No understanding binds our comrade parts;
Our acts emerge from a crypt our minds ignore.

Our deepest depths are ignorant of themselves;
Even our body is a mystery shop;
As our earth’s roots lurk screened below our earth,
So lie unseen our roots of mind and life.

Our springs are kept close hid beneath, within;
Our souls are moved by powers behind the wall.

In the subterranean reaches of the spirit
A puissance acts and recks not what it means;
Using unthinking monitors and scribes,
It is the cause of what we think and feel.

The troglodytes of the subconscious Mind,
Ill-trained slow stammering interpreters
Only of their small task’s routine aware
And busy with the record in our cells,
Concealed in the subliminal secrecies
Mid an obscure occult machinery,
Capture the mystic Morse whose measured lilt
Transmits the messages of the cosmic Force.

A whisper falls into life’s inner ear
And echoes from the dun subconscient caves,
Speech leaps, thought quivers, the heart vibrates, the will
Answers and tissue and nerve obey the call.

Our lives translate these subtle intimacies;
All is the commerce of a secret Power….

This is the ephemeral creature’s daily life.

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.

[Savitri: Book 2 Canto 5]

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,
Life had for them no aim save Nature’s joy
And the stimulus and delight of outer things;
Identified with the spirit’s outward shell,
They worked for the body’s wants, they craved no more.

The veiled spectator watching from their depths
Fixed not his inward eye upon himself
Nor turned to find the author of the plot,
He saw the drama only and the stage.

There was no brooding stress of deeper sense,
The burden of reflection was not borne:
Mind looked on Nature with unknowing eyes,
Adored her boons and feared her monstrous strokes.

It pondered not on the magic of her laws,
It thirsted not for the secret wells of Truth,
But made a register of crowding facts
And strung sensations on a vivid thread:
It hunted and it fled and sniffed the winds,
Or slothed inert in sunshine and soft air:
It sought the engrossing contacts of the world,
But only to feed the surface sense with bliss.

These felt life’s quiver in the outward touch,
They could not feel behind the touch the soul.

To guard their form of self from Nature’s harm,
To enjoy and to survive was all their care.

[Savitri: Book Two Canto 4]

Heaven’s joys might have been earth’s if earth were pure.

There could have reached our divinised sense and heart
Some natural felicity’s bright extreme,
Some thrill of Supernature’s absolutes:
All strengths could laugh and sport on earth’s hard roads
And never feel her cruel edge of pain,
All love could play and nowhere Nature’s shame.

But she has stabled her dreams in Matter’s courts
And still her doors are barred to things supreme….

Only to be was a supreme delight,
Life was a happy laughter of the soul
And Joy was king with Love for minister.

The spirit’s luminousness was bodied there.

Life’s contraries were lovers or natural friends
And her extremes keen edges of harmony:
Indulgence with a tender purity came
And nursed the god on her maternal breast:
There none was weak, so falsehood could not live;
Ignorance was a thin shade protecting light,
Imagination the free-will of Truth,
Pleasure a candidate for heaven’s fire;
The intellect was Beauty’s worshipper,
Strength was the slave of calm spiritual law,
Power laid its head upon the breasts of Bliss….

All was a game of meeting kinglinesses.

For worship lifts the worshipper’s bowed strength
Close to the god’s pride and bliss his soul adores:
The ruler there is one with all he rules;
To him who serves with a free equal heart
Obedience is his princely training’s school,
His nobility’s coronet and privilege,
His faith is a high nature’s idiom,
His service a spiritual sovereignty.

[Savitri: Book 2 Canto 3]

A touch of God’s rapture in creation’s acts,
A lost remembrance of felicity
Lurks still in the dumb roots of death and birth,
The world’s senseless beauty mirrors God’s delight.

That rapture’s smile is secret everywhere;
It flows in the wind’s breath, in the tree’s sap,
Its hued magnificence blooms in leaves and flowers.

When life broke through its half-drowse in the plant
That feels and suffers but cannot move or cry,
In beast and in winged bird and thinking man
It made of the heart’s rhythm its music’s beat;
It forced the unconscious tissues to awake
And ask for happiness and earn the pang
And thrill with pleasure and laughter of brief delight,
And quiver with pain and crave for ecstasy.

Imperative, voiceless, ill-understood,
Too far from light, too close to being’s core,
Born strangely in Time from the eternal Bliss,
It presses on heart’s core and vibrant nerve;
Its sharp self-seeking tears our consciousness;
Our pain and pleasure have that sting for cause:
Instinct with it, but blind to its true joy
The soul’s desire leaps out towards passing things.

All Nature’s longing drive none can resist,
Comes surging through the blood and quickened sense;
An ecstasy of the infinite is her cause.

It turns in us to finite loves and lusts,
The will to conquer and have, to seize and keep,
To enlarge life’s room and scope and pleasure’s range,
To battle and overcome and make one’s own,
The hope to mix one’s joy with others’ joy,
A yearning to possess and be possessed,
To enjoy and be enjoyed, to feel, to live.

Here was its early brief attempt to be,
Its rapid end of momentary delight
Whose stamp of failure haunts all ignorant life.

[Savitri: Book Two Canto 4]

All is a miracle of symmetric charm,
A fantasy of perfect line and rule.

There all feel satisfied in themselves and whole,
A rich completeness is by limit made,
Marvel in an utter littleness abounds,
An intricate rapture riots in a small space:
Each rhythm is kin to its environment,
Each line is perfect and inevitable,
Each object faultlessly built for charm and use.

All is enamoured of its own delight.

Intact it lives of its perfection sure
In a heaven-pleased self-glad immunity;
Content to be, it has need of nothing more.

Here was not futile effort’s broken heart:
Exempt from the ordeal and the test,
Empty of opposition and of pain,
It was a world that could not fear nor grieve.

It had no grace of error or defeat,
It had no room for fault, no power to fail.

Out of some packed self-bliss it drew at once
Its form-discoveries of the mute Idea
And the miracle of its rhythmic thoughts and acts,
Its clear technique of firm and rounded lives,
Its gracious people of inanimate shapes
And glory of breathing bodies like our own.

Amazed, his senses ravished with delight,
He moved in a divine, yet kindred world
Admiring marvellous forms so near to ours
Yet perfect like the playthings of a god,
Deathless in the aspect of mortality.

In their narrow and exclusive absolutes
The finite’s ranked supremacies throned abide;
It dreams not ever of what might have been;
Only in boundaries can this absolute live.

In a supremeness bound to its own plan
Where all was finished and no widths were left,
No space for shadows of the immeasurable,
No room for the incalculable’s surprise,
A captive of its own beauty and ecstasy,
In a magic circle wrought the enchanted Might….

A perfect picture in a perfect frame,
This faery artistry could not keep his will:
Only a moment’s fine release it gave;
A careless hour was spent in a slight bliss.

Our spirit tires of being’s surfaces,
Transcended is the splendour of the form;
It turns to hidden powers and deeper states.

So now he looked beyond for greater light.

His soul’s peak-climb abandoning in its rear
This brilliant courtyard of the House of Days,
He left that fine material Paradise.

His destiny lay beyond in larger Space.

[Savitri: Book 2 Canto 2]

Even in the littleness of our mortal state,
Even in this prison-house of outer form,
A brilliant passage for the infallible Flame
Is driven through gross walls of nerve and brain,
A Splendour presses or a Power breaks through,
Earth’s great dull barrier is removed awhile,
The inconscient seal is lifted from our eyes
And we grow vessels of creative might.

The enthusiasm of a divine surprise
Pervades our life, a mystic stir is felt,
A joyful anguish trembles in our limbs;
A dream of beauty dances through the heart,
A thought from the eternal Mind draws near,
Intimations cast from the Invisible
Awaking from Infinity’s sleep come down,
Symbols of That which never yet was made.

But soon the inert flesh responds no more,
Then sinks the sacred orgy of delight,
The blaze of passion and the tide of power
Are taken from us and, though a glowing form
Abides astonishing earth, imagined supreme,
Too little of what was meant has left a trace….

Although beginnings only and first attempts,
These glimmerings point to the secret of our birth
And the hidden miracle of our destiny.

What we are there and here on earth shall be
Is imaged in a contact and a call.

As yet earth’s imperfection is our sphere,
Our nature’s glass shows not our real self;
That greatness still abides held back within.

Earth’s doubting future hides our heritage:
The Light now distant shall grow native here,
The Strength that visits us our comrade power;
The Ineffable shall find a secret voice,
The Imperishable burn through Matter’s screen
Making this mortal body godhead’s robe.

The Spirit’s greatness is our timeless source
And it shall be our crown in endless Time.

[Savitri: Book Two Canto 2]