Daily Passages from Savitri

In a sublimer and more daring soar
To the wide summit of the triple stairs
Bare steps climbed up like flaming rocks of gold
Burning their way to a pure absolute sky.

August and few the sovereign Kings of Thought
Have made of Space the ir wide all-seeing gaze
Surveying the enormous work of Time:
A breadth of all-containing Consciousness
Supported Being in a still embrace.

Intercessors with a luminous Unseen,
They capt in the long passage to the world
The imperatives of the creator Self
Obeyed by unknowing earth, by conscious heaven;
Their thoughts are partners in its vast control.

A great all-ruling Consciousness is the re
And Mind unwitting serves a higher Power;
It is a channel, not the source of all.

The cosmos is no accident in Time;
There is a meaning in each play of Chance,
There is a freedom in each face of Fate.

A Wisdom knows and guides the mysteried world;
A Truth-gaze shapes its beings and events;
A Word self-born upon creation’s heights,
Voice of the Eternal in the temporal spheres,
Prophet of the seeings of the Absolute,
Sows the Idea’s significance in Form
And from that seed the growths of Time arise.

[Savitri: Book Two Canto 11]

The mighty Mother’s whims and lightning moods
Arisen from her all-wise unruled delight
In the freedom of her sweet and passionate breast,
Robbed of their wonder were chained to a cause and aim;
An idol of bronze replaced her mystic shape
That captures the movements of the cosmic vasts,
In the sketch precise of an ideal face
Forgotten was her eyelashes’ dream-print
Carrying on their curve infinity’s dreams,
Lost the alluring marvel of her eyes;
The surging wave-throbs of her vast sea-heart
They bound to a theorem of ordered beats:
Her deep designs which from herself she had veiled
Bowed self-revealed in the ir confessional.

For the birth and death of the worlds they fixed a date,
The diameter of infinity was drawn,
Measured the distant arc of the unseen heights
And visualised the plumbless viewless depths,
Till all seemed known that in all time could be.

All was coerced by number, name and form;
Nothing was left untold, incalculable.

Yet was their wisdom circled with a nought:
Truths they could find and hold but not the one Truth:
The Highest was to them unknowable.

By knowing too much they missed the whole to be known:
The fathomless heart of the world was left unguessed
And the Transcendent kept its secrecy.

[Savitri: Book Two Canto 11]

A wisdom read their mind to themselves unknown,
Their anarchy rammed into a formula
And from their giant randomness of Force,
Following the habit of their million paths,
Distinguishing each faintest line and stroke
Of a concealed unalterable design,
Out of the chaos of the Invisible’s moods
Derived the calculus of Destiny.

In its bright pride of universal lore
Mind’s knowledge overtopped the Omniscient’s power:
The Eternal’s winging eagle puissances
Surprised in their untracked empyrean
Stooped from their gyres to obey the beck of Thought:
Each mysteried God forced to revealing form,
Assigned his settled moves in Nature’s game,
Zigzagged at the gesture of a chess-player Will
Across the chequerboard of cosmic Fate.

[Savitri: Book Two Canto 11]

Acolytes they wait upon the timeless Power,
The cycle of her works investigate;
Passing her fence of wordless privacy
Their mind could penetrate her occult mind
And draw the diagram of her secret thoughts;
They read the codes and ciphers she had sealed,
Copies they made of all her guarded plans,
For every turn of her mysterious course
Assigned a reason and unchanging rule.

The unseen grew visible to student eyes,
Explained was the immense Inconscient’s scheme,
Audacious lines were traced upon the Void;
The Infinite was reduced to square and cube.

Arranging symbol and significance,
Tracing the curve of a transcendent Power,
They framed the cabbala of the cosmic Law,
The balancing line discovered of Life’s technique
And structured her magic and her mystery.

[Savitri: Book Two Canto 11]

Above stood ranked a subtle archangel race
With larger lids and looks that searched the unseen.

A light of liberating knowledge shone
Across the gulfs of silence in their eyes;
They lived in the mind and knew truth from within;
A sight withdrawn in the concentrated heart
Could pierce behind the screen of Time’s results
And the rigid cast and shape of visible things.

All that escaped conception’s narrow noose
Vision descried and gripped; their seeing thoughts
Filled in the blanks left by the seeking sense.

High architects of possibility
And engineers of the impossible,
Mathematicians of the infinitudes
And theoricians of unknowable truths,
They formulate enigma’s postulates
And join the unknown to the apparent worlds.

[Savitri: Book Two Canto 11]

The All-containing was contained in form,
Oneness was carved into units measurable,
The limitless built into a cosmic sum:
Unending Space was beaten into a curve,
Indivisible Time into small minutes cut,
The infinitesimal massed to keep secure
The mystery of the Formless cast into form.

Invincibly their craft devised for use
The magic of sequent number and sign’s spell,
Design’s miraculous potency was caught
Laden with beauty and significance
And by the determining mandate of their gaze
Figure and quality equating joined
In an inextricable identity.

On each event they stamped its curves of law
And its trust and charge of burdened circumstance;
A free and divine incident no more
At each moment willed or adventure of the soul,
It lengthened a fate-bound mysterious chain,
A line foreseen of an immutable plan,
One step more in Necessity’s long march.

A term was set for every eager Power
Restraining its will to monopolise the world,
A groove of bronze prescribed for force and act
And shown to each moment its appointed place
Forewilled inalterably in the spiral
Huge Time-loop fugitive from eternity.

[Savitri: Book Two Canto 11]

In front of the ascending epiphany
World-Time’s enjoyers, favourites of World-Bliss,
The Masters of things actual, lords of the hours,
Playmates of youthful Nature and child God,
Creators of Matter by hid stress of Mind
Whose subtle thoughts support unconscious Life
And guide the fantasy of brute events,
Stood there, a race of young keen-visioned gods,
King-children born on Wisdom’s early plane,
Taught in her school world-making’s mystic play.

Archmasons of the eternal Thaumaturge,
Moulders and measurers of fragmented Space,
They have made their plan of the concealed and known
A dwelling-house for the invisible king.

Obeying the Eternal’s deep command
They have built in the material front of things
This wide world-kindergarten of young souls
Where the infant spirit learns through mind and sense
To read the letters of the cosmic script
And study the body of the cosmic self
And search for the secret meaning of the whole.

To all that Spirit conceives they give a mould;
Persuading Nature into visible moods
They lend a finite shape to infinite things.

[Savitri: Book Two Canto 11]

Although abrupt for common strengths to tread,
Its upward slope looks down on our earth-poise:
On a slant not too precipitously steep
One could turn back travelling deep descending lines
To commune with the mortal’s universe.

The mighty wardens of the ascending stair
Who intercede with the all-creating Word,
There waited for the pilgrim heaven-bound soul;
Holding the thousand keys of the Beyond
They proffered their knowledge to the climbing mind
And filled the life with Thought’s immensities.

The prophet hierophants of the occult Law,
The flame-bright hierarchs of the divine Truth,
Interpreters between man’s mind and God’s,
They bring the immortal fire to mortal men.

[Savitri: Book Two Canto 11]

A triple realm of ordered thought came first,
A small beginning of immense ascent:
Above were bright e the real skies of mind,
A packed and endless soar as if sky pressed sky
Buttressed against the Void on bastioned light;
The highest strove to neighbour eternity,
The largest widened into the infinite.

But though immortal, mighty and divine,
The first realms were close and kin to human mind;
Their deities shape our greater thinking’s roads,
A fragment of the ir puissance can be ours:
The se breadths were not too broad for our souls to range,
These heights were not too high for human hope.

A triple flight led to this triple world.

[Savitri: Book Two Canto 11]