CANTO TWO   THE GOSPEL OF DEATH AND VANITY OF THE IDEAL     THEN pealed the calm inexorable voice: Abolishing hope, cancelling life's golden truths, Fatal its accents smote the trembling air. That lovely world swam thin and frail, most like Some pearly evanescent farewell gleam On the faint verge of dusk in moonless eves. "Prisoner of Nature, many-visioned spirit, Thought's creature in the ideal's realm enjoying Thy unsubstantial immortality The subtle marvellous mind of man has feigned, This is the world from which thy yearnings came. When it would build eternity from the dust, Man's thought paints images illusion rounds;

CANTO FOUR   THE DREAM TWILIGHT OF THE EARTHLY REAL     THERE came a slope that slowly downward sank; It slipped towards a stumbling grey descent. The dim-heart marvel of the ideal was lost, Its crowding wonder of bright delicate dreams And vague half-limned sublimities she had left: Thought fell towards lower levels, hard and tense It passioned for some crude reality. The twilight floated still but changed its hues And heavily swathed a less delightful dream; It settled in tired masses on the air; Its symbol colours tuned with duller reds And almost seemed a lurid mist of day. A straining taut and dire be

PART THREE   (Books IX-XII)   BOOK NINE   The Book of Eternal Night   CANTO ONE   TOWARDS THE BLACK VOID     SO was she left alone in the huge wood, Surrounded by a dim unthinking world, Her husband's corpse on her forsaken breast. She measured not her loss with helpless thoughts, Nor rent with tears the marble seals of pain: She rose not yet to face the dreadful god. Over the body she loved her soul leaned out In a great stillness without stir or voice, As if her mind had died with Satyavan. But still the human heart in her beat on. Aware still of his being near to hers, Closely she clas

CANTO FOUR   THE QUEST     THE world-ways opened before Savitri. At first a strangeness of new brilliant scenes Peopled her mind and kept her body's gaze. But as she moved across the changing earth A deeper consciousness welled up in her: A citizen of many scenes and climes, Each soil and country it has made its home; It took all clans and peoples for her own, Till the whole destiny of mankind was hers. These unfamiliar spaces on her way Were known and neighbours to a sense within; Landscapes recurred like lost forgotten fields, Cities and rivers and plains her vision claimed Like s

CANTO SIX   NIRVANA AND THE DISCOVERY OF THE ALL-NEGATING ABSOLUTE     A CALM slow sun looked down from tranquil heavens. A routed sullen rearguard of retreat, The last rains had fled murmuring across the woods Or failed, a sibilant whisper mid the leaves, And the great blue enchantment of the sky Recovered the deep rapture of its smile. Its mellow splendour unstressed by storm-licked heats Found room for a luxury of warm mild days, The night's gold treasure of autumnal moons Came floating shipped through ripples of fairy air. And Savitri's life was glad, fulfilled like earth's;

BOOK SEVEN   The Book of Yoga   CANTO ONE   THE JOY OF UNION; THE ORDEAL OF THE FOREKNOWLEDGE OF DEATH AND THE HEART'S GRIEF     FATE followed her foreseen immutable road. Man's hopes and longings build the journeying wheels That bear the body of his destiny And lead his blind will towards an unknown goal. His fate within him shapes his acts and rules; Its face and form already are born in him, Its parentage is in his secret soul; Here Matter seems to mould the body's life And the soul follows where its nature drives: Nature and Fate compel his free-will's choice. But greater spirits this ba

CANTO THREE   SATYAVAN AND SAVITRI     OUT of the voiceless mystery of the past In a present ignorant of forgotten bonds These spirits met upon the roads of Time. Yet in the heart their secret conscious selves At once aware grew of each other warned By the first call of a delightful voice And a first vision of the destined face. As when being cries to being from its depths Behind the screen of the external sense And strives to find the heart-disclosing word, The passionate speech revealing the soul's need, But the mind's ignorance veils the inner sight, Only a little breaks through our earth-made bounds, So now they met i

BOOK EIGHT   The Book of Death   CANTO THREE*   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 goddess simply carved

PART ONE SRI AUROBINDO ON HIMSELF NOTES AND LETTERS ON HIS LIFE SECTION ONE LIFE BEFORE PONDICHERRY This section, relating to the earlier part of Sri Aurobindo's life prior to his arrival at Pondicherry in 1910, is compiled from notes given by him during 1943-46 while reading the manuscripts of his three biographers submitted to him for correction or verification and approval. The notes were intended either to elucidate their statements by supplying the relevant facts or to correct and modify them wherever necessary. In most cases brief references to the points in the original uncorrected manuscripts or to incomplete or erroneous statements in them are given