Savitri Study Class with Dr Alok Pandey, Book 7 Canto 3
Released from the prison house of Matter, Savitri enters into the dangerous and delightful, fitful and fanciful world of life. She has come out of individual ignorance but has entered into the cosmic ignorance, a much vaster and mixed territory where truth and error walk hand in hand.
Enormous was its vast and passionate voice.
It cried to her listening spirit as it ran,
Demanding God’s submission to chainless Force.
A deaf force calling to a status dumb,
A thousand voices in a muted Vast,
It claimed the heart’s support for its clutch at joy,
For its need to act the witness Soul’s consent,
For its lust of power her neutral being’s seal.
Into the wideness of her watching self
It brought a grandiose gust of the Breath of Life;
Its torrent carried the world’s hopes and fears,
All life’s, all Nature’s dissatisfied hungry cry,
And the longing all eternity cannot fill.
It called to the mountain secrecies of the soul
And the miracle of the never-dying fire,
It spoke to some first inexpressible ecstasy
Hidden in the creative beat of Life;
Out of the nether unseen deeps it tore
Its lure and magic of disordered bliss,
Into earth-light poured its maze of tangled charm
And heady draught of Nature’s primitive joy
And the fire and mystery of forbidden delight
Drunk from the world-libido’s bottomless well,
And the honey-sweet poison-wine of lust and death,
But dreamed a vintage of glory of life’s gods,
And felt as celestial rapture’s golden sting.
The cycles of the infinity of desire
And the mystique that made an unrealised world
Wider than the known and closer than the unknown
In which hunt for ever the hounds of mind and life,
Tempted a deep dissatisfied urge within
To long for the unfulfilled and ever far
And make this life upon a limiting earth
A climb towards summits vanishing in the void,
A search for the glory of the impossible.
It dreamed of that which never has been known,
It grasped at that which never has been won,
It chased into an Elysian memory
The charms that flee from the heart’s soon lost delight;
It dared the force that slays, the joys that hurt,
The imaged shape of unaccomplished things
And the summons to a Circean transmuting dance
And passion’s tenancy of the courts of love
And the wild Beast’s ramp and romp with Beauty and Life.
It brought its cry and surge of opposite powers,
Its moments of the touch of luminous planes,
Its flame-ascensions and sky-pitched vast attempts,
Its fiery towers of dream built on the winds,
Its sinkings towards the darkness and the abyss,
Its honey of tenderness, its sharp wine of hate,
Its changes of sun and cloud, of laughter and tears,
Its bottomless danger-pits and swallowing gulfs,
Its fear and joy and ecstasy and despair,
Its occult wizardries, its simple lines
And great communions and uplifting moves,
Its faith in heaven, its intercourse with hell.
Savitri: 492 – 493
