Canto Seven   The Discovery of the Cosmic Spirit and the Cosmic Consciousness   IN THE little hermitage in the forest's heart, In the sunlight and the moonlight and the dark The daily human life went plodding on Even as before with its small unchanging works And its spare outward body of routine And happy quiet of ascetic peace. The old beauty smiled of the terrestrial scene; She too was her old gracious self to men. The Ancient Mother clutched her child to her breast Pressing her close in her environing arms, As if earth ever the same could for ever keep The living spirit and body in her clasp, As if death were

  Canto Eight   The World of Falsehood, the Mother of Evil and the Sons of Darkness   THEN could he see the hidden heart of Night: The labour of its stark unconsciousness Revealed the endless terrible Inane. A spiritless blank Infinity was there; A Nature that denied the eternal Truth In the vain braggart freedom of its thought Hoped to abolish God and reign alone. There was no sovereign Guest, no witness Light; Unhelped it would create its own bleak world. Its large blind eyes looked out on demon acts, Its deaf ears heard the untruth its dumb lips spoke; Its huge misguided fancy took vast shapes, Its min

  Canto Fifteen   The Kingdoms of the Greater Knowledge   AFTER a measureless moment of the soul Again returning to these surface fields Out of the timeless depths where he had sunk, He heard once more the slow tread of the hours. All once perceived and lived was far away; Himself was to himself his only scene. Above the Witness and his universe He stood in a realm of boundless silences Awaiting the Voice that spoke and built the worlds. A light was round him wide and absolute, A diamond purity of eternal sight; A consciousness lay still, devoid of forms, Free, wordless, uncoerced by sign or rule, For ever cont

Canto Three   The Debate of Love and Death   A SAD destroying cadence the voice sank; It seemed to lead the advancing march of Life Into some still original Inane. But Savitri answered to almighty Death: "O dark-browed sophist of the universe Who veilst the Real with its own Idea, Hiding with brute objects Nature's living face, Masking eternity with thy dance of death, Thou hast woven the ignorant mind into a screen And made of Thought error's purveyor and scribe, And a false witness of mind's servant sense. An aesthete of the sorrow of the world, Champion of a harsh and sad philosophy Thou hast used words to shutter out the

    BOOK EIGHT   The Book of Death   Canto Three ¹   Death in the Forest   NOW it was here in this great golden dawn. By her still sleeping husband lain she gazed Into her past as one about to die Looks back upon the sunlit fields of life Where he too ran and sported with the rest, Lifting his head above the huge dark stream Into whose depths he must for ever plunge. All she had been and done she lived again. The whole year in a swift and eddying race Of memories swept through her and fled away Into the irrecoverable past. Then silently she rose and, service done, Bowed down to the great g

  BOOK SIX   The Book of Fate   Canto One   The Word of Fate   IN SILENT bounds bordering the mortal's plane Crossing a wide expanse of brilliant peace Narad the heavenly sage from Paradise Came chanting through the large and lustrous air. Attracted by the golden summer-earth That lay beneath him like a glowing bowl Tilted upon a table of the Gods, Turning as if moved round by an unseen hand To catch the warmth and blaze of a small sun, He passed from the immortals' happy paths To a world of toil and quest and grief and hope, To these rooms of the see-saw game of death with lif

  PART TWO BOOKS IV ­ VIII   BOOK FOUR   The Book of Birth and Quest     Canto One   The Birth and Childhood of the Flame   A MAENAD of the cycles of desire Around a Light she must not dare to touch, Hastening towards a far-off unknown goal Earth followed the endless journey of the Sun. A mind but half-awake in the swing of the void On the bosom of Inconscience dreamed out life And bore this finite world of thought and deed Across the immobile trance of the Infinite. A vast immutable silence with her ran: Prisoner of speed upon a jewelled wheel, She co

  Canto Two   Satyavan   ALL SHE remembered on this day of Fate, The road that hazarded not the solemn depths But turned away to flee to human homes, The wilderness with its mighty monotone, The morning like a lustrous seer above, The passion of the summits lost in heaven, The titan murmur of the endless woods. As if a wicket gate to joy were there Ringed in with voiceless hint and magic sign, Upon the margin of an unknown world Reclined the curve of a sun-held recess; Groves with strange flowers like eyes of gazing nymphs Peered from their secrecy into open space, Boughs whispering to a constancy of light Sheltered

  Canto Seven   The Descent into Night   A MIND absolved from life, made calm to know, A heart divorced from the blindness and the pang, The seal of tears, the bond of ignorance, He turned to find that wide world-failure's cause. Away he looked from Nature's visible face And sent his gaze into the viewless Vast, The formidable unknown Infinity, Asleep behind the endless coil of things, That carries the universe in its timeless breadths And the ripples of its being are our lives. The worlds are built by its unconscious Breath And Matter and Mind are its figures or its powers, Our waking thoughts the output of its dreams

  Canto Two   The Parable of the Search for the Soul   AS IN the vigilance of the sleepless night Through the slow heavy-footed silent hours, Repressing in her bosom its load of grief, She sat staring at the dumb tread of Time And the approach of ever-nearing Fate, A summons from her being's summit came, A sound, a call that broke the seals of Night. Above her brows where will and knowledge meet A mighty Voice invaded mortal space. It seemed to come from inaccessible heights And yet was intimate with all the world And knew the meaning of the steps of Time And saw eternal destiny's changeless scene Filling the far prospe