Savitri Class in Hindi with Alok Pandey
Savitri Book II: The Book of the Traveller of the Worlds, Canto III: The Glory and the Fall of Life
At her will the inscrutable Supermind leans down
To guide her force that feels but cannot know,
Its breath of power controls her restless seas
And life obeys the governing Idea.
At her will, led by a luminous Immanence
The hazardous experimenting Mind
Pushes its way through obscure possibles
Mid chance formations of an unknowing world.
Our human ignorance moves towards the Truth
That Nescience may become omniscient,
Transmuted instincts shape to divine thoughts,
Thoughts house infallible immortal sight
And Nature climb towards God’s identity.
The Master of the worlds self-made her slave
Is the executor of her fantasies:
She has canalised the seas of omnipotence;
She has limited by her laws the Illimitable.
The Immortal bound himself to do her works;
He labours at the tasks her Ignorance sets,
Hidden in the cape of our mortality.
The worlds, the forms her goddess fancy makes
Have lost their origin on unseen heights:
Even severed, straying from their timeless source,
Even deformed, obscure, accursed and fallen,—
Since even fall has its perverted joy
And nothing she leaves out that serves delight,—
These too can to the peaks revert or here
Cut out the sentence of the spirit’s fall,
Recover their forfeited divinity.
At once caught in an eternal vision’s sweep
He saw her pride and splendour of highborn zones
And her regions crouching in the nether deeps.
Above was a monarchy of unfallen self,
Beneath was the gloomy trance of the abyss,
An opposite pole or dim antipodes.
There were vasts of the glory of life’s absolutes:
All laughed in a safe immortality
And an eternal childhood of the soul
Before darkness came and pain and grief were born
Where all could dare to be themselves and one
And Wisdom played in sinless innocence
With naked Freedom in Truth’s happy sun.
There were worlds of her laughter and dreadful irony,
There were fields of her taste of toil and strife and tears;
Her head lay on the breast of amorous Death,
Sleep imitated awhile extinction’s peace.
The light of God she has parted from his dark
To test the savour of bare opposites.
Here mingling in man’s heart their tones and hues
Have woven his being’s mutable design,
His life a forward-rippling stream in Time,
His nature’s constant fixed mobility,
His soul a moving picture’s changeful film,
His cosmos-chaos of personality.
The grand creatrix with her cryptic touch
Has turned to pathos and power being’s self-dream,
Made a passion-play of its fathomless mystery.
But here were worlds lifted half-way to heaven.
The Veil was there but not the Shadowy Wall;
In forms not too remote from human grasp
Some passion of the inviolate purity
Broke through, a ray of the original Bliss.
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.[pp. 121-123]
