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, Fre

  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 slow-recu

  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.

  CANTO FOUR   THE KINGDOMS OF THE LITTLE LIFE   A QUIVERING trepidant uncertain world Born from that dolorous meeting and eclipse Appeared in the emptiness where her feet had trod, A quick obscurity, a seeking stir. There was a writhing of half-conscious force Hardly awakened from inconscient sleep And tied to an instinct-driven Ignorance, To find itself and find its hold on things. Inheritor of poverty and loss, Assailed by memories that fled when seized, Haunted by a forgotten uplifting hope, It strove with a blindness as of groping hands To fill the aching and disastrous ga

  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 misgui

-51_ sri aurobindo's letters on savitri.htm SRI AUROBINDO'S LETTERS ON "SAVITRI" NOTE   These letters are published at the end of Savitri for their rare value as a great poet's informal self-commentary. Apropos that value, a few facts of deep personal interest may be mentioned about the coming of this poem to its close.     Some months before his passing, Sri Aurobindo, as if in foreknowledge of the event, said: "I want to finish Savitri soon." The words took by utter surprise the disciple, his scribe, who had been used to the grandly patient way in which so far it had been composed and frequently retouched and amplified. Even when, in the past, composition had been ex

  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

  CANTO SEVEN*   ***     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 not there nor end nor change.

  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 ete

  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 immortal's happy paths To a world of toil and quest and grief and hope, To these rooms of a see-saw game of death and life. Across an i