Daily Passages from Savitri

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]

But our dwarf will and cold pragmatic sense
Admit not the celestial visitants:
Awaiting us on the Ideal’s peaks
Or guarded in our secret self unseen
Yet flashed sometimes across the awakened soul,
Hide from our lives their greatness, beauty, power.

Our present feels sometimes their regal touch,
Our future strives towards their luminous thrones:
Out of spiritual secrecy they gaze,
Immortal footfalls in mind’s corridors sound:
Our souls can climb into the shining planes,
The breadths from which they came can be our home.

His privilege regained of shadowless sight
The Thinker entered the immortals’ air
And drank again his pure and mighty source.

Immutable in rhythmic calm and joy
He saw, sovereignly free in limitless light,
The unfallen planes, the thought-created worlds
Where Knowledge is the leader of the act
And Matter is of thinking substance made,
Feeling, a heaven-bird poised on dreaming wings,
Answers Truth’s call as to a parent’s voice,
Form luminous leaps from the all-shaping beam
And Will is a conscious chariot of the Gods,
And Life, a splendour stream of musing Force,
Carries the voices of the mystic Suns.
A happiness it brings of whispered truth;
The re runs in its flow honeying the bosom of Space
A laughter from the immortal heart of Bliss,
And the unfathomed Joy of timelessness,
The sound of Wisdom’s murmur in the Unknown
And the breath of an unseen Infinity.

In gleaming clarities of amethyst air
The chainless and omnipotent Spirit of Mind
Brooded on the blue lotus of the Idea.

A gold supernal sun of timeless Truth
Poured down the mystery of the eternal Ray
Through a silence quivering with the word of Light
On an endless ocean of discovery.

Far- off he saw the joining hemispheres.

On meditation’s mounting edge of trance
Great stairs of thought climbed up to unborn heights
Where Time’s last ridges touch eternity’s skies
And Nature speaks to the spirit’s absolute.

[Savitri: Book Two Canto 11]

But now our rights are barred, our passports void;
We live self-exiled from our heavenlier home.

An errant ray from the immortal Mind
Accepted the earth’s blindness and became
Our human thought, servant of Ignorance.

An exile, labourer on this unsure globe
Captured and driven in Life’s nescient grasp,
Hampered by obscure cell and treacherous nerve,
It dreams of happier states and nobler powers,
The natural privilege of unfallen gods,
Recalling still its old lost sovereignty.

Amidst earth’s mist and fog and mud and stone
It still remembers its exalted sphere
And the high city of its splendid birth.

[Savitri: Book Two Canto 11]

Far are those realms from our labour and yearning and call,
Perfection’s reign and hallowed sanctuary
Closed to the uncertain thoughts of human mind,
Remote from the turbid tread of mortal life.

But since our secret selves are next of kin,
A breath of unattained divinity
Visits the imperfect earth on which we toil;
Across a gleaming ether’s golden laugh
A light falls on our vexed unsatisfied lives,
A thought comes down from the ideal worlds
And moves us to new-model even here
Some image of their greatness and appeal
And wonder beyond the ken of mortal hope.

Amid the heavy sameness of the days
And contradicted by the human law,
A faith in things that are not and must be
Lives comrade of this world’s delight and pain,
The child of the secret soul’s forbidden desire
Born of its amour with eternity.

Our spirits break free from their environment;
The future brings its face of miracle near,
Its godhead looks at us with present eyes;
Acts deemed impossible grow natural;
We feel the hero’s immortality;
The courage and the strength death cannot touch
Awake in limbs that are mortal, hearts that fail;
We move by the rapid impulse of a will
That scorns the tardy trudge of mortal time.

These promptings come not from an alien sphere:
Ourselves are citizens of that mother State,
Adventurers, we have colonised Matter’s night.

[Savitri: Book Two Canto 11]

In its vast ambit of ideal Space
Where beauty and mightiness walk hand in hand,
The Spirit’s truths take form as living Gods
And each can build a world in its own right.

In an air which doubt and error cannot mark
With the stigmata of their deformity,
In communion with the musing privacy
Of a truth that sees in an unerring light
Where the sight falters not nor wanders thought,
Exempt from our world’s exorbitant tax of tears,
Dreaming its luminous creations gaze
On the Ideas that people eternity.

In a sun-blaze of joy and absolute power
Above the Masters of the Ideal throne
In sessions of secure felicity,
In regions of illumined certitude.

[Savitri: Book Two Canto 11]

Arriving into his ken a wonder space
Of great and marvellous meetings called his steps,
Where Thought leaned on a Vision beyond thought
And shaped a world from the Unthinkable.

On peaks imagination cannot tread,
In the horizons of a tireless sight,
Under a blue veil of eternity
The splendours of ideal Mind were seen
Outstretched across the boundaries of things known.

Origin of the little that we are,
Instinct with the endless more that we must be,
A prop of all that human strength enacts,
Creator of hopes by earth unrealised,
It spreads beyond the expanding universe;
It wings beyond the boundaries of Dream,
It overtops the ceiling of life’s soar.

Awake in a luminous sphere unbound by Thought,
Exposed to omniscient immensities,
It casts on our world its great crowned influences,
Its speed that outstrips the ambling of the hours,
Its force that strides invincibly through Time,
Its mights that bridge the gulf twixt man and God,
Its lights that combat Ignorance and Death.

[Savitri: Book Two Canto 11]