Opening Remarks
Death tries to show how love lives only for a while and then dies buried in the human heart helpless against the law of earthly life.
The first outbreak of love
When love breaks suddenly into the life
At first man steps into a world of the sun;
In his passion he feels his heavenly element:
But only a fine sunlit patch of earth
The marvellous aspect took of heaven’s outburst;
The snake is there and the worm in the heart of the rose.
Death begins to show the normal course of earthly love. In the beginning all seems rosy and sunlit and beautiful when love enters the human life. In the rush and passion of love one feels in as if one is nearer to heaven. One wakes up to one’s heavenlier parts. But it is only like a bright sunlit patch of earth that for a moment imitates heaven. But the snake and the worm are waiting there in the heart of this beauty waiting to leap and spoil the flower of love.
A thousand ways to suffer and die
A word, a moment’s act can slay the god;
Precarious is his immortality,
He has a thousand ways to suffer and die.
Love suffers in a thousand ways and dies. A word, a momentary act can slay the god of love such is its precarious immortality.
Sap of earth
Love cannot live by heavenly food alone,
Only on sap of earth can it survive.
Love upon earth cannot live by heavenly joys alone. It needs to touch of earth and its grain of sweet-bitter joy and tears.
Sensual want
For thy passion was a sensual want refined,
A hunger of the body and the heart;
Thy want can tire and cease or turn elsewhere.
Death labels the love of Savitri as merely a refined passion and a sensual want. He claims that it is only a hunger of the body and the heart can soon tire and cease or turn elsewhere.
Dire and pitiless end
Or love may meet a dire and pitiless end
By bitter treason, or wrath with cruel wounds
Separate, or thy unsatisfied will to others
Depart when first love’s joy lies stripped and slain:
A dull indifference replaces fire
Or an endearing habit imitates love:
An outward and uneasy union lasts
Or the routine of a life’s compromise:
Where once the seed of oneness had been cast
Into a semblance of spiritual ground
By a divine adventure of heavenly powers
Two strive, constant associates without joy,
Two egos straining in a single leash,
Two minds divided by their jarring thoughts,
Two spirits disjoined, for ever separate.
Or even a worse bitter end may come to the story of love through treason and cruelty and anger filled with hate separating the two. Or it may depart to others its joy replaced by a dull indifference. Or it may simply remain as an endearing habit imitating the first rush. Then only an outward uneasy union lasts through a routine of habit and compromise due to various social and other reasons. The seed of love once cast into a semblance of spiritual soil and a divine effort by heavenly powers loses its joys. The two who were in love then strive for superiority as two egos clashing with each other. Their thoughts begin to jar, their spirits disjoin and drift apart separating forever.
Closing Remarks
This is the tragedy that love meets upon earth.
