The Mother Reads Selections from Savitri by Sri Aurobindo
Book 7. The Book of Yoga
Canto 1. The Joy of the Union; the Ordeal of the Foreknowledge of Death and the Heart’s Grief and Pain
Once more she sat behind loud hastening hooves;
A speed of armoured squadrons and a voice
Far-heard of chariots bore her from her home.
A couchant earth wakened in its dumb muse
Looked up at her from a vast indolence:
[p. 465]
* * *
Arrived in that rough-hewn homestead they gave,
Questioning no more the strangeness of her fate,
Their pride and loved one to the great blind king,
A regal pillar of fallen mightiness
And the stately care-worn woman once a queen
Who now hoped nothing for herself from life,
But all things only hoped for her one child,
. . .
They parted from her with pain-fraught burdened hearts
. . .
Helpless against the choice of Savitri’s heart
They left her to her rapture and her doom
[p. 467]
* * *
A worshipped empress all once vied to serve,
She made herself the diligent serf of all,
Nor spared the labour of broom and jar and well,
Or close gentle tending or to heap the fire
Of altar and kitchen, no slight task allowed
To others that her woman’s strength might do.
[p. 470]
* * *
But Satyavan sometimes half understood,
. . .
The unplumbed abyss of her deep passionate want.
. . .
Yet ever they grew into each other more
Until it seemed no power could rend apart,
Since even the body’s walls could not divide.
For when he wandered in the forest, oft
Her conscious spirit walked with him and knew
His actions as if in herself he moved;
He, less aware, thrilled with her from afar.
[pp. 472; 473]End of Book 7 Canto 1
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