The Mother Reads Selections from Savitri by Sri Aurobindo
Book 4. The Book of Birth and Quest
Canto 4. The Quest
The world-ways opened before Savitri.
. . .
A guidance turned the dumb revolving wheels
And in the eager body of their speed
The dim-masked hooded godheads rode who move
Assigned to man immutably from his birth,
Receivers of the inner and outer law,
At once the agents of his spirit’s will
And witnesses and executors of his fate.
[p. 377]
* * *
Often from gilded dusk to argent dawn
Where jewel-lamps flickered on frescoed walls
And the stone lattice stared at moonlit boughs,
Half-conscious of the tardy listening night
Dimly she glided between banks of sleep
At rest in the slumbering palaces of kings.
[p. 379]
* * *
Hamlet and village saw the fate-van pass,
Homes of a life bent to the soil it ploughs
For sustenance of its short and passing days
That, transient, keep their old repeated course
Unchanging in the circle of a sky
Which alters not above our mortal toil.
[p. 379]
* * *
Away from this thinking creature’s burdened hours
To free and griefless spaces now she turned
. . .
Here was the childhood of primeval earth,
. . .
Imperial acres of the eternal sower
And wind-stirred grass-lands winking in the sun:
Or mid green musing of woods and rough-browed hills,
In the grove’s murmurous bee-air humming wild
Or past the long lapsing voice of silver floods
Like a swift hope journeying among its dreams
Hastened the chariot of the golden bride.
[p. 379]
* * *The bosom of our mother kept for us still
Her austere regions and her musing depths,
Her impersonal reaches lonely and inspired
And the mightinesses of her rapture haunts.
. . .
August, exulting in her Maker’s eye,
She felt her nearness to him in earth’s breast,
Conversed still with a Light behind the veil,
Still communed with Eternity beyond.
[pp. 380-381]
* * *
The seers attuned to the universal Will,
Content in Him who smiles behind earth’s forms
Abode ungrieved by the insistent days.
About them like green trees girdling a hill
Young grave disciples fashioned by their touch,
Trained to the simple act and conscious word,
Greatened within and grew to meet their heights.
[p. 382]
* * *
As floats a sunbeam through a shady place,
The golden virgin in her carven car
Came gliding among meditation’s seats.
. . .
Awake in candid dawn or darkness mooned,
To the still touch inclined the daughter of Flame
Drank in hushed splendour between tranquil lids
And felt the kinship of eternal calm.
[p. 384]
* * *
But morn broke in reminding her of her quest
And from low rustic couch or mat she rose
And went impelled on her unfinished way
And followed the fateful orbit of her life
[pp. 384-385]
* * *
Still unaccomplished was the fateful quest;
Still she found not the one predestined face
For which she sought amid the sons of men.
[p. 385]End of Book 4 Canto 4
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