He Met with His Bare Spirit

A force demoniac lurking in man’s depths
That heaves suppressed by the heart’s human law,
Awed by the calm and sovereign eyes of Thought,
Can in a fire and earthquake of the soul
Arise and, calling to its native night,
Overthrow the reason, occupy the life
And stamp its hoof on Nature’s shaking ground:
This was for them their being’s flaming core.

A mighty energy, a monster god,
Hard to the strong, implacable to the weak,
It stared at the harsh unpitying world it made
With the stony eyelids of its fixed idea.

Its heart was drunk with a dire hunger’s wine,
In others’ suffering felt a thrilled delight
And of death and ruin the grandiose music heard.

To have power, to be master, was sole virtue and good:
It claimed the whole world for Evil’s living room,
Its party’s grim totalitarian reign
The cruel destiny of breathing things.

All on one plan was shaped and standardised
Under a dark dictatorship’s breathless weight.

In street and house, in councils and in courts
Beings he met who looked like living men
And climbed in speech upon high wings of thought
But harboured all that is subhuman, vile
And lower than the lowest reptile’s crawl….

In that wide cynic den of thinking beasts
One looked in vain for a trace of pity or love;
There was no touch of sweetness anywhere,
But only Force and its acolytes, greed and hate:
There was no help for suffering, none to save,
None dared resist or speak a noble word….

Darkness proclaimed her slogans to the world.

A servile blinkered silence hushed the mind
Or only it repeated lessons taught,
While mitred, holding the good shepherd’s staff,
Falsehood enthroned on awed and prostrate hearts
The cults and creeds that organise living death
And slay the soul on the altar of a lie.

All were deceived or served their own deceit;
Truth in that stifling atmosphere could not live.

There wretchedness believed in its own joy
And fear and weakness hugged their abject depths;
All that is low and sordid-thoughted, base,
All that is drab and poor and miserable,
Breathed in a lax content its natural air
And felt no yearning of divine release:
Arrogant, gibing at more luminous states
The people of the gulfs despised the sun…..

But he endured, stilled the vain terror, bore
The smothering coils of agony and affright;
Then peace returned and the soul’s sovereign gaze.

To the blank horror a calm Light replied:
Immutable, undying and unborn,
Mighty and mute the Godhead in him woke
And faced the pain and danger of the world.

He mastered the tides of Nature with a look:
He met with his bare spirit naked Hell.

[Savitri: Book Two Canto 7]