Daily Passages from Savitri

Ourself and a high stranger whom we feel,
It is and acts unseen as if it were not;
It follows the line of sempiternal birth,
Yet seems to perish with its mortal frame.

Assured of the Apocalypse to be,
It reckons not the moments and the hours;
Great, patient, calm it sees the centuries pass,
Awaiting the slow miracle of our change
In the sure deliberate process of world-force
And the long march of all-revealing Time.
It is the origin and the master-clue,
A silence overhead, an inner voice,
A living image seated in the heart,
An unwalled wideness and a fathomless point,
The truth of all these cryptic shows in Space,
The Real towards which our strivings move,
The secret grandiose meaning of our lives.

A treasure of honey in the combs of God,
A Splendour burning in a tenebrous cloak,
It is our glory of the flame of God,
Our golden fountain of the world’s delight,
An immortality cowled in the cape of death,
The shape of our unborn divinity.

It guards for us our fate in depths within
Where sleeps the eternal seed of transient things.

Always we bear in us a magic key
Concealed in life’s hermetic envelope.

A burning Witness in the sanctuary
Regards through Time and the blind walls of Form;
A timeless Light is in his hidden eyes;
He sees the secret things no words can speak
And knows the goal of the unconscious world
And the heart of the mystery of the journeying years.

Savitri: Book One Canto 4

In the unfolding process of the Self
Sometimes the inexpressible Mystery
Elects a human vessel of descent.

A breath comes down from a supernal air,
A Presence is born, a guiding Light awakes,
A stillness falls upon the instruments:
Fixed, motionless like a marble monument,
Stone-calm, the body is a pedestal
Supporting a figure of eternal Peace.

Or a revealing Force sweeps blazing in;
Out of some vast superior continent
Knowledge breaks through trailing its radiant seas,
And Nature trembles with the power, the flame.

A greater Personality sometimes
Possesses us which yet we know is ours:
Or we adore the Master of our souls.

Then the small bodily ego thins and falls;
No more insisting on its separate self,
Losing the punctilio of its separate birth,
It leaves us one with Nature and with God.

In moments when the inner lamps are lit
And the life’s cherished guests are left outside,
Our spirit sits alone and speaks to its gulfs.
A wider consciousness opens then its doors;
Invading from spiritual silences
A ray of the timeless Glory stoops awhile
To commune with our seized illumined clay
And leaves its huge white stamp upon our lives.

Savitri: Book One Canto 4

A deathbound littleness is not all we are:
Immortal our forgotten vastnesses
Await discovery in our summit selves;
Unmeasured breadths and depths of being are ours.

Akin to the ineffable Secrecy,
Mystic, eternal in unrealised Time,
Neighbours of Heaven are Nature’s altitudes.

To these high-peaked dominions sealed to our search,
Too far from surface Nature’s postal routes,
Too lofty for our mortal lives to breathe,
Deep in us a forgotten kinship points
And a faint voice of ecstasy and prayer
Calls to those lucent lost immensities.

Even when we fail to look into our souls
Or lie embedded in earthly consciousness,
Still have we parts that grow towards the light,
Yet are there luminous tracts and heavens serene
And Eldorados of splendour and ecstasy
And temples to the godhead none can see.

A shapeless memory lingers in us still
And sometimes, when our sight is turned within,
Earth’s ignorant veil is lifted from our eyes;
There is a short miraculous escape.

This narrow fringe of clamped experience
We leave behind meted to us as life,
Our little walks, our insufficient reach.

Our souls can visit in great lonely hours
Still regions of imperishable Light,
All-seeing eagle-peaks of silent Power
And moon-flame oceans of swift fathomless Bliss
And calm immensities of spirit space.

Savitri: Book One Canto 4

Only awhile at first these heavenlier states,
These large wide-poised upliftings could endure.

The high and luminous tension breaks too soon,
The body’s stone stillness and the life’s hushed trance,
The breathless might and calm of silent mind;
Or slowly they fail as sets a golden day.

The restless nether members tire of peace;
A nostalgia of old little works and joys,
A need to call back small familiar selves,
To tread the accustomed and inferior way,
The need to rest in a natural pose of fall,
As a child who learns to walk can walk not long,
Replace the titan will for ever to climb,
On the heart’s altar dim the sacred fire.

An old pull of subconscious cords renews;
It draws the unwilling spirit from the heights,
Or a dull gravitation drags us down
To the blind driven inertia of our base.

This too the supreme Diplomat can use,
He makes our fall a means for greater rise.

For into ignorant Nature’s gusty field,
Into the half-ordered chaos of mortal life
The formless Power, the Self of eternal light
Follow in the shadow of the spirit’s descent;
The twin duality for ever one
Chooses its home mid the tumults of the sense.

He comes unseen into our darker parts
And, curtained by the darkness, does his work,
A subtle and all-knowing guest and guide,
Till they too feel the need and will to change.

All here must learn to obey a higher law,
Our body’s cells must hold the Immortal’s flame.

Else would the spirit reach alone its source
Leaving a half-saved world to its dubious fate.

Nature would ever labour unredeemed;
Our earth would ever spin unhelped in Space,
And this immense creation’s purpose fail
Till at last the frustrate universe sank undone.

Savitri: Book One Canto 3

The voice that only by speech can move the mind
Became a silent knowledge in the soul;
The strength that only in action feels its truth
Was lodged now in a mute omnipotent peace.

A leisure in the labour of the worlds,
A pause in the joy and anguish of the search
Restored the stress of Nature to God’s calm.

A vast unanimity ended life’s debate.

The war of thoughts that fathers the universe,
The clash of forces struggling to prevail
In the tremendous shock that lights a star
As in the building of a grain of dust,
The grooves that turn their dumb ellipse in space
Ploughed by the seeking of the world’s desire,
The long regurgitations of Time’s flood,
The torment edging the dire force of lust
That wakes kinetic in earth’s dullard slime
And carves a personality out of mud,
The sorrow by which Nature’s hunger is fed,
The oestrus which creates with fire of pain,
The fate that punishes virtue with defeat,
The tragedy that destroys long happiness,
The weeping of Love, the quarrel of the Gods,
Ceased in a truth which lives in its own light.

His soul stood free, a witness and a king.

Savitri: Book One Canto 3

A long dim preparation is man’s life,
A circle of toil and hope and war and peace
Tracked out by Life on Matter’s obscure ground.

In his climb to a peak no feet have ever trod,
He seeks through a penumbra shot with flame
A veiled reality half-known, ever missed,
A search for something or someone never found,
Cult of an ideal never made real here,
An endless spiral of ascent and fall
Until at last is reached the giant point
Through which his Glory shines for whom we were made
And we break into the infinity of God.

Across our nature’s border line we escape
Into Supernature’s arc of living light.

Savitri: Book One Canto 3

This bodily appearance is not all;
The form deceives, the person is a mask;
Hid deep in man celestial powers can dwell.

His fragile ship conveys through the sea of years
An incognito of the Imperishable.

A spirit that is a flame of God abides,
A fiery portion of the Wonderful,
Artist of his own beauty and delight,
Immortal in our mortal poverty.

This sculptor of the forms of the Infinite,
This screened unrecognised Inhabitant,
Initiate of his own veiled mysteries,
Hides in a small dumb seed his cosmic thought.

In the mute strength of the occult Idea
Determining predestined shape and act,
Passenger from life to life, from scale to scale,
Changing his imaged self from form to form,
He regards the icon growing by his gaze
And in the worm foresees the coming god.

At last the traveller in the paths of Time
Arrives on the frontiers of eternity.

In the transient symbol of humanity draped,
He feels his substance of undying self
And loses his kinship to mortality.

Savitri: Book One Canto 3

In her own self she found her high recourse;
She matched with the iron law her sovereign right:
Her single will opposed the cosmic rule.

To stay the wheels of Doom this greatness rose.

At the Unseen’s knock upon her hidden gates
Her strength made greater by the lightning’s touch
Awoke from slumber in her heart’s recess.

It bore the stroke of That which kills and saves.

Across the awful march no eye can see,
Barring its dreadful route no will can change,
She faced the engines of the universe;
A heart stood in the way of the driving wheels:
Its giant workings paused in front of a mind,
Its stark conventions met the flame of a soul.

A magic leverage suddenly is caught
That moves the veiled Ineffable’s timeless will:
A prayer, a master act, a king idea
Can link man’s strength to a transcendent Force.

Then miracle is made the common rule,
One mighty deed can change the course of things;
A lonely thought becomes omnipotent.

Savitri: Book One, Canto 2