The Mother Reads Savitri (video clips)

She puts forth a small portion of herself, A being no bigger than the thumb of man Into a hidden region of the heart To face the pang and to forget the bliss, To share the suffering and endure earth’s wounds

Unutterably effaced, no one and null, A vanishing vestige like a violet trace, A faint record merely of a self now past, She was a point in the unknowable.

All Nature reproduced her in its lines, Its movements were large copies of her own. She was the single self of all these selves, She was in them and they were all in her.

He cried out in a clinging last despair, “Savitri, Savitri, O Savitri, Lean down, my soul, and kiss me while I die.”

Still like a statue on its pedestal, Lone in the silence and to vastness bared, Against midnight’s dumb abysses piled in front A columned shaft of fire and light she rose.

My God is Will and triumphs in his paths, My God is Love and sweetly suffers all.

Night is not our beginning nor our end; She is the dark Mother in whose womb we have hid Safe from too swift a waking to world-pain.

Then pealed the calm inexorable voice: . . . This is the world from which thy yearnings came.

Death walked in front of her and Satyavan, In the dark front of death, a failing star. Above was the unseen balance of his fate.