Savitri Study Class with Alok Pandey, Book 10 Canto 4.
Death confronts Savitri with the hard immutable law as the only Truth. He wonders, half-mockingly, if there is any other truth than the hard facts of earthly life. Even if there is something greater called God, the laws of matter still hold. It is as if the two, – Matter and Spirit looked away from each other in different directions.
Immutable, Death’s denial met her cry:
“However mighty, whatever thy secret name
Uttered in hidden conclaves of the gods,
Thy heart’s ephemeral passion cannot break
The iron rampart of accomplished things
With which the great Gods fence their camp in Space.Whoever thou art behind thy human mask,
Even if thou art the Mother of the worlds
And pegst thy claim upon the realms of Chance,
The cosmic Law is greater than thy will.
Even God himself obeys the Laws he made:
The Law abides and never can it change,
The Person is a bubble on Time’s sea.A forerunner of a greater Truth to come,
Thy soul creator of its freer Law,
Vaunting a Force behind on which it leans,
A Light above which none but thou hast seen,
Thou claimst the first fruits of Truth’s victory.But what is Truth and who can find her form
Amid the specious images of sense,
Amid the crowding guesses of the mind
And the dark ambiguities of a world
Peopled with the incertitudes of Thought?For where is Truth and when was her footfall heard
Amid the endless clamour of Time’s mart
And which is her voice amid the thousand cries
That cross the listening brain and cheat the soul?Or is Truth aught but a high starry name
Or a vague and splendid word by which man’s thought
Sanctions and consecrates his nature’s choice,
The heart’s wish donning knowledge as its robe,
The cherished idea elect among the elect,
Thought’s favourite mid the children of half-light
Who high-voiced crowd the playgrounds of the mind
Or people its dormitories in infant sleep?All things hang here between God’s yes and no,
Two Powers real but to each other untrue,
Two consort stars in the mooned night of mind
That towards two opposite horizons gaze,
The white head and black tail of the mystic drake,
The swift and the lame foot, wing strong, wing broken
Sustaining the body of the uncertain world,
A great surreal dragon in the skies.Too dangerously thy high proud truth must live
Entangled in Matter’s mortal littleness.All in this world is true, yet all is false:
Its thoughts into an eternal cipher run,
Its deeds swell to Time’s rounded zero sum.Thus man at once is animal and god,
A disparate enigma of God’s make
Unable to free the Godhead’s form within,
A being less than himself, yet something more,
The aspiring animal, the frustrate god
Yet neither beast nor deity but man,
But man tied to the kind earth’s labour strives to exceed
Climbing the stairs of God to higher things.Objects are seemings and none knows their truth,
Ideas are guesses of an ignorant god.Truth has no home in earth’s irrational breast:
Yet without reason life is a tangle of dreams,
But reason is poised above a dim abyss
And stands at last upon a plank of doubt.Eternal truth lives not with mortal men.
Or if she dwells within thy mortal heart,
Show me the body of the living Truth
Or draw for me the outline of her face
That I too may obey and worship her.
Then will I give thee back thy Satyavan.But here are only facts and steel-bound Law.
This truth I know that Satyavan is dead
And even thy sweetness cannot lure him back.
No magic Truth can bring the dead to life,
No power of earth cancel the thing once done,
No joy of the heart can last surviving death,
No bliss persuade the past to live again.But Life alone can solace the mute Void
And fill with thought the emptiness of Time.
Leave then thy dead, O Savitri, and live.”[Breaks are added to emphasize separate movements]
