Daily Passages from Savitri

But our dwarf will and cold pragmatic sense
Admit not the celestial visitants:
Awaiting us on the Ideal’s peaks
Or guarded in our secret self unseen
Yet flashed sometimes across the awakened soul,
Hide from our lives their greatness, beauty, power.

Our present feels sometimes their regal touch,
Our future strives towards their luminous thrones:
Out of spiritual secrecy they gaze,
Immortal footfalls in mind’s corridors sound:
Our souls can climb into the shining planes,
The breadths from which they came can be our home.

His privilege regained of shadowless sight
The Thinker entered the immortals’ air
And drank again his pure and mighty source.

Immutable in rhythmic calm and joy
He saw, sovereignly free in limitless light,
The unfallen planes, the thought-created worlds
Where Knowledge is the leader of the act
And Matter is of thinking substance made,
Feeling, a heaven-bird poised on dreaming wings,
Answers Truth’s call as to a parent’s voice,
Form luminous leaps from the all-shaping beam
And Will is a conscious chariot of the Gods,
And Life, a splendour stream of musing Force,
Carries the voices of the mystic Suns.
A happiness it brings of whispered truth;
The re runs in its flow honeying the bosom of Space
A laughter from the immortal heart of Bliss,
And the unfathomed Joy of timelessness,
The sound of Wisdom’s murmur in the Unknown
And the breath of an unseen Infinity.

In gleaming clarities of amethyst air
The chainless and omnipotent Spirit of Mind
Brooded on the blue lotus of the Idea.

A gold supernal sun of timeless Truth
Poured down the mystery of the eternal Ray
Through a silence quivering with the word of Light
On an endless ocean of discovery.

Far- off he saw the joining hemispheres.

On meditation’s mounting edge of trance
Great stairs of thought climbed up to unborn heights
Where Time’s last ridges touch eternity’s skies
And Nature speaks to the spirit’s absolute.

[Savitri: Book Two Canto 11]

But now our rights are barred, our passports void;
We live self-exiled from our heavenlier home.

An errant ray from the immortal Mind
Accepted the earth’s blindness and became
Our human thought, servant of Ignorance.

An exile, labourer on this unsure globe
Captured and driven in Life’s nescient grasp,
Hampered by obscure cell and treacherous nerve,
It dreams of happier states and nobler powers,
The natural privilege of unfallen gods,
Recalling still its old lost sovereignty.

Amidst earth’s mist and fog and mud and stone
It still remembers its exalted sphere
And the high city of its splendid birth.

[Savitri: Book Two Canto 11]

Far are those realms from our labour and yearning and call,
Perfection’s reign and hallowed sanctuary
Closed to the uncertain thoughts of human mind,
Remote from the turbid tread of mortal life.

But since our secret selves are next of kin,
A breath of unattained divinity
Visits the imperfect earth on which we toil;
Across a gleaming ether’s golden laugh
A light falls on our vexed unsatisfied lives,
A thought comes down from the ideal worlds
And moves us to new-model even here
Some image of their greatness and appeal
And wonder beyond the ken of mortal hope.

Amid the heavy sameness of the days
And contradicted by the human law,
A faith in things that are not and must be
Lives comrade of this world’s delight and pain,
The child of the secret soul’s forbidden desire
Born of its amour with eternity.

Our spirits break free from their environment;
The future brings its face of miracle near,
Its godhead looks at us with present eyes;
Acts deemed impossible grow natural;
We feel the hero’s immortality;
The courage and the strength death cannot touch
Awake in limbs that are mortal, hearts that fail;
We move by the rapid impulse of a will
That scorns the tardy trudge of mortal time.

These promptings come not from an alien sphere:
Ourselves are citizens of that mother State,
Adventurers, we have colonised Matter’s night.

[Savitri: Book Two Canto 11]

In its vast ambit of ideal Space
Where beauty and mightiness walk hand in hand,
The Spirit’s truths take form as living Gods
And each can build a world in its own right.

In an air which doubt and error cannot mark
With the stigmata of their deformity,
In communion with the musing privacy
Of a truth that sees in an unerring light
Where the sight falters not nor wanders thought,
Exempt from our world’s exorbitant tax of tears,
Dreaming its luminous creations gaze
On the Ideas that people eternity.

In a sun-blaze of joy and absolute power
Above the Masters of the Ideal throne
In sessions of secure felicity,
In regions of illumined certitude.

[Savitri: Book Two Canto 11]

Arriving into his ken a wonder space
Of great and marvellous meetings called his steps,
Where Thought leaned on a Vision beyond thought
And shaped a world from the Unthinkable.

On peaks imagination cannot tread,
In the horizons of a tireless sight,
Under a blue veil of eternity
The splendours of ideal Mind were seen
Outstretched across the boundaries of things known.

Origin of the little that we are,
Instinct with the endless more that we must be,
A prop of all that human strength enacts,
Creator of hopes by earth unrealised,
It spreads beyond the expanding universe;
It wings beyond the boundaries of Dream,
It overtops the ceiling of life’s soar.

Awake in a luminous sphere unbound by Thought,
Exposed to omniscient immensities,
It casts on our world its great crowned influences,
Its speed that outstrips the ambling of the hours,
Its force that strides invincibly through Time,
Its mights that bridge the gulf twixt man and God,
Its lights that combat Ignorance and Death.

[Savitri: Book Two Canto 11]

But thought nor word can seize eternal Truth:
The whole world lives in a lonely ray of her sun.

In our thinking’s close and narrow lamp-lit house
The vanity of our shut mortal mind
Dreams that the chains of thought have made her ours;
But only we play with our own brilliant bonds;
Tying her down, it is ourselves we tie.

In our hypnosis by one luminous point
We see not what small figure of her we hold;
We feel not her inspiring boundlessness,
We share not her immortal liberty.

Thus is it even with the seer and sage;
For still the human limits the divine:
Out of our thoughts we must leap up to sight,
Breathe her divine illimitable air,
Her simple vast supremacy confess,
Dare to surrender to her absolute.

Then the Unmanifest reflects his form
In the still mind as in a living glass;
The timeless Ray descends into our hearts
And we are rapt into eternity.

For Truth is wider, greater than her forms.

A thousand icons they have made of her
And find her in the idols they adore;
But she remains herself and infinite.

[Savitri: Book Two Canto 11]

There ceased the limits of the labouring Power.

But being and creation cease not there.

For Thought transcends the circles of mortal mind,
It is greater than its earthly instrument:
The godhead crammed into mind’s narrow space
Escapes on every side into some vast
That is a passage to infinity.

It moves eternal in the spirit’s field,
A runner towards the far spiritual light,
A child and servant of the spirit’s force.

But mind too falls back from a nameless peak.

His being stretched beyond the sight of Thought.

For the spirit is eternal and unmade
And not by thinking was its greatness born,
And not by thinking can its knowledge come.

It knows itself and in itself it lives,
It moves where no thought is nor any form.

Its feet are steadied upon finite things,
Its wings can dare to cross the Infinite.

[Savitri: Book Two Canto 11]

Alone a process of events was there
And Nature’s plastic and protean change
And, strong by death to slay or to create,
The riven invisible atom’s omnipotent force.

One chance remained that here might be a power
To liberate man from the old inadequate means
And leave him sovereign of the earthly scene.

For Reason then might grasp the original Force
To drive her car upon the roads of Time.

All then might serve the need of the thinking race,
An absolute State found order’s absolute,
To a standardised perfection cut all things,
In society build a just exact machine.

Then science and reason careless of the soul
Could iron out a tranquil uniform world,
Aeonic seekings glut with outward truths
And a single-patterned thinking force on mind,
Inflicting Matter’s logic on Spirit’s dreams
A reasonable animal make of man
And a symmetrical fabric of his life.

This would be Nature’s peak on an obscure globe,
The grand result of the long ages’ toil,
Earth’s evolution crowned, her mission done.
So might it be if the spirit fell asleep;
Man then might rest content and live in peace,
Master of Nature who once her bondslave worked,
The world’s disorder hardening into Law,—
If Life’s dire heart arose not in revolt,
If God within could find no greater plan.

But many-visaged is the cosmic Soul;
A touch can alter the fixed front of Fate.

A sudden turn can come, a road appear.

A greater Mind may see a greater Truth,
Or we may find when all the rest has failed
Hid in ourselves the key of perfect change.

[Savitri: Book Two Canto 10]

An inconclusive play is Reason’s toil.

Each strong idea can use her as its tool;
Accepting every brief she pleads her case.

Open to every thought, she cannot know.

The eternal Advocate seated as judge
Armours in logic’s invulnerable mail
A thousand combatants for Truth’s veiled throne
And sets on a high horse-back of argument
To tilt for ever with a wordy lance
In a mock tournament where none can win.

Assaying thought’s values with her rigid tests
Balanced she sits on wide and empty air,
Aloof and pure in her impartial poise.

Absolute her judgments seem but none is sure;
Time cancels all her verdicts in appeal.

Although like sunbeams to our glow-worm mind
Her knowledge feigns to fall from a clear heaven,
Its rays are a lantern’s lustres in the Night;
She throws a glittering robe on Ignorance.

[Savitri: Book Two Canto 10]