CANTO FOUR   THE TRIPLE SOUL-FORCES   HERE from a low and prone and listless ground The passion of the first ascent began; A moon-bright face in a sombre cloud of hair, A Woman sat in a pale lustrous robe. A rugged and ragged soil was her bare seat, Beneath her feet a sharp and wounding stone. A divine pity on the peaks of the world, A spirit touched by the grief of all that lives, She looked out far and saw from inner mind This questionable world of outward things, Of false appearances and plausible shapes, This dubious cosmos stretched in the ignorant Void, The pangs of earth, the toil and

  CANTO TWO   THE GROWTH OF THE FLAME   A LAND of mountains and wide sun-beat plains And giant rivers pacing to vast seas, A field of creation and spiritual hush, Silence swallowing life's acts into the deeps, Of thought's transcendent climb and heavenward leap, A brooding world of reverie and trance, Filled with the mightiest works of God and man, Where Nature seemed a dream of the Divine And beauty and grace and grandeur had their home, Harboured the childhood of the incarnate Flame. Over her watched millennial influences And the deep godheads of a grandiose past Looked on her and saw

  CANTO SIX   THE KINGDOMS AND GODHEADS OF THE GREATER LIFE   AS one who between dim receding walls Towards the far gleam of a tunnel's mouth, Hoping for light, walks now with freer pace And feels approach a breath of wider air, So he escaped from that grey anarchy. Into an ineffectual world he came, A purposeless region of arrested birth Where being from non-being fled and dared To live but had no strength long to abide. Above there gleamed a pondering brow of sky Tormented, crossed by wings of doubtful haze Adventuring with a voice of roaming winds And crying

  CANTO FOURTEEN   THE WORLD-SOUL   A COVERT answer to his seeking came. In a far-shimmering background of Mind-Space A glowing mouth was seen, a luminous shaft, A recluse-gate it seemed, musing on joy, A veiled retreat and escape to mystery. Away from the unsatisfied surface world It fled into the bosom of the unknown, A well, a tunnel of the depths of God. It plunged as if a mystic groove of hope Through many layers of formless voiceless self To reach the last profound of the world's heart, And from that heart there surged a wordless call Pleading with some still unpenetrable Mind, Voicing so

  CANTO FIVE   THE FINDING OF THE SOUL   ONWARD she passed seeking the soul's mystic cave. At first she stepped into a night of God. The light was quenched that helps the labouring world, The power that struggles and stumbles in our life; This inefficient mind gave up its thoughts, The striving heart its unavailing hopes. All Knowledge failed and the Idea's forms, And Wisdom screened in awe her lowly head Feeling a Truth too great for thought or speech, Formless, ineffable, for ever the same. An innocent and holy Ignorance Adored like one who worships formless God The unseen light

  BOOK TWO The Book of the Traveller of the Worlds CANTO ONE   THE WORLD-STAIR   ALONE he moved watched by the infinity Around him and the Unknowable above. All could be seen that shuns the mortal eye, All could be known the mind has never grasped; All could be done no mortal will can dare. A limitless movement filled a limitless peace. In a profound existence beyond earth's, Parent or kin to our ideas and dreams Where Space is a vast experiment of the soul, In a deep oneness of all things that are, The universe of the Unknown arose. A self-creation without end or pause

  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-wi

  BOOK FIVE The Book of Love CANTO ONE   THE DESTINED MEETING-PLACE   BUT now the destined spot and hour were close; Unknowing she had neared her nameless goal. For though a dress of blind and devious chance Is laid upon the work of all-wise Fate, Our acts interpret an omniscient Force That dwells in the compelling stuff of things, And nothing happens in the cosmic play But at its time and in its foreseen place.') To a space she came of soft and delicate air That seemed a sanctuary of youth and joy, A highland world of free and green delight Where spring and summer lay together and strove In indolent and amicable d

  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; She had found

  CANTO THREE   THE ENTRY INTO THE INNER COUNTRIES   AT first out of the busy hum of mind As if from a loud thronged market into a cave By an inward moment's magic she had come, A stark hushed emptiness became her self: Her mind unvisited by the voice of thought Stared at a void deep's dumb infinity. Her heights receded, her depths behind her closed; All fled away from her and left her blank. But when she came back to her self of thought, Once more she was a human thing on earth, A lump of Matter, a house of closed sight, A mind compelled to think out ignorance, A li