Opening Remarks
Death tries to take away every support of hope from the human consciousness and his speech is directed towards this end.
Inexorable voice
Then pealed the calm inexorable voice:
Abolishing hope, cancelling life’s golden truths,
Fatal its accents smote the trembling air.
Death spoke in a continuous monotone with fatal accents that smote the trembling air abolishing hope, negating all that is glad and beautiful.
Farewell gleam
That lovely world swam thin and frail, most like
Some pearly evanescent farewell gleam
On the faint verge of dusk in moonless eves.
As Death spoke, that lovely twilight world of the heavenly ideal swam further away, becoming thin and frails if some fast fading gleam was bidding farewell on the faith verge of dusk in a moonless evening.
Unsubstantial immortality
“Prisoner of Nature, many-visioned spirit,
Thought’s creature in the ideal’s realm enjoying
Thy unsubstantial immortality
The subtle marvellous mind of man has feigned,
This is the world from which thy yearnings came.
Death addresses Savitri as a prisoner of Nature, many-visioned spirit, Thought’s creature enjoying in the ideal’s realm her apparent immortality that has no base. According to death immortality is a myth feigned by the subtle marvellous mind of man drawing its yearnings from the ideal world.
Images illusion rounds
When it would build eternity from the dust,
Man’s thought paints images illusion rounds;
Prophesying glories it shall never see,
It labours delicately among its dreams.
Man’s thoughts, according to Death, imagines eternity in a grain of dust painting illusions rounds, prophesying glories that are mere fancies it will never see. It labours meticulously among its delicate dreams that will be shattered when he wakes up since they are mere illusions.
Phantom longings
Behold this fleeing of light-tasselled shapes,
Aerial raiment of unbodied gods;
A rapture of things that never can be born,
Hope chants to hope a bright immortal choir;
Cloud satisfies cloud, phantom to longing phantom
Leans sweetly, sweetly is clasped or sweetly chased.
Death bids Savitri to behold the fleeting realm of lightly woven shapes like aerial raiment of gods without a distinct form. The rapture of unborn things that never can be is what is given to man. Hope chants to hope a bright immortal choir. Cloud satisfies cloud, phantom longs for another phantom leaning sweetly towards shadows, illusions and ghost images, clasped and chased sweetly.
Nothing real
This is the stuff from which the ideal is formed:
Its builder is thought, its base the heart’s desire,
But nothing real answers to their call.
Death retorts mockingly that the ideal is formed of this illusory stuff built by thought and the heart’s desire but nothing real answers to the call of mind and heart.
Unreachable ideal
The ideal dwells not in heaven, nor on the earth,
A bright delirium of man’s ardour of hope
Drunk with the wine of its own fantasy.
Death dismisses all ideals as a fiction of the human mind that is found neither in heaven nor upon earth. It is simply a bright delirium of man’s ardour of hope drunk with the ecstatic and giddy wine of its own fantasy.
Brilliant shadow
It is a brilliant shadow’s dreamy trail.
Thy vision’s error builds the azure skies,
Thy vision’s error drew the rainbow’s arch;
Thy mortal longing made for thee a soul.
Death considers the soul as a product of our mortal longings, the ideal as a brilliant shadow’s dreamy trail just as our vision’s error draws the rainbow arch.
Closing Remarks
Thus Death tries to falsifies all the beautiful things and ideals that man has dreamed and attempts to build with great labour and struggle and pain.
