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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 had 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-recurring memories in front,

The stars at night were her past’s brilliant friends,

The winds murmured to her of ancient things

And she met nameless comrades loved by her once.

All was a part of old forgotten selves:

Vaguely or with a flash of sudden hints

Her acts recalled a line of bygone power,

Even her motion’s purpose was not new:

Traveller to a prefigured high event,

She seemed to her remembering witness soul

To trace again a journey often made.

A guidance turned the dumb revolving wheels

And in the eager body of their speed

The dim-masked hooded godheads rode who move

Assigned to man immutably from his birth,

Receivers of the inner and outer law,

At once the agents of his spirit’s will

And witnesses and executors of his fate.

Inexorably faithful to their task,

They hold his nature’s sequence in their guard

Carrying the unbroken thread old lives have spun.

Attendants on his destiny’s measured walk

Leading to joys he has won and pains he has called,

Even in his casual steps they intervene.

Nothing we think or do is void or vain;

Each is an energy loosed and holds its course.

The shadowy keepers of our deathless past

Have made our fate the child of our own acts,

And from the furrows laboured by our will

We reap the fruit of our forgotten deeds.

But since unseen the tree that bore this fruit

And we live in a present born from an unknown past,

They seem but parts of a mechanic Force

To a mechanic mind tied by earth’s laws;

Yet are they instruments of a Will supreme,

Watched by a still all-seeing Eye above.

A prescient architect of Fate and Chance

Who builds our lives on a foreseen design

The meaning knows and consequence of each step

And watches the inferior stumbling powers.

Upon her silent heights she was aware

Of a calm Presence throned above her brows

Who saw the goal and chose each fateful curve;

It used the body for its pedestal;

The eyes that wandered were its searchlight fires,

The hands that held the reins its living tools;

All was the working of an ancient plan,

A way proposed by an unerring Guide.

Across wide noons and glowing afternoons,

She met with Nature and with human forms

And listened to the voices of the world;

Driven from within she followed her long road,

Mute in the luminous cavern of her heart,

Like a bright cloud through the resplendent day.

At first her path ran far through peopled tracts:

Admitted to the lion eye of States

And theatres of the loud act of man,

Her carven chariot with its fretted wheels

Threaded through clamorous marts and sentinel towers

Past figured gates and high dream-sculptured fronts

And gardens hung in the sapphire of the skies,

Pillared assembly halls with armoured guards,

Small fanes where one calm Image watched man’s life

And temples hewn as if by exiled gods

To imitate their lost eternity.

Often from gilded dusk to argent dawn,

Where jewel-lamps flickered on frescoed walls

And the stone lattice stared at moonlit boughs,

Half-conscious of the tardy listening night

Dimly she glided between banks of sleep

At rest in the slumbering palaces of kings.

Hamlet and village saw the fate-wain pass,

Homes of a life bent to the soil it ploughs

For sustenance of its short and passing days

That, transient, keep their old repeated course,

Unchanging in the circle of a sky

Which alters not above our mortal toil.

Away from this thinking creature’s burdened hours

To free and griefless spaces now she turned

Not yet perturbed by human joys and fears.

Here was the childhood of primaeval earth,

Here timeless musings large and glad and still,

Men had forborne as yet to fill with cares,

Imperial acres of the eternal sower

And wind-stirred grass-lands winking in the sun:

Or mid green musing of woods and rough-browed hills,

In the grove’s murmurous bee-air humming wild

Or past the long lapsing voice of silver floods

Like a swift hope journeying among its dreams

Hastened the chariot of the golden bride.

Out of the world’s immense unhuman past

Tract-memories and ageless remnants came,

Domains of light enfeoffed to antique calm

Listened to the unaccustomed sound of hooves

And large immune entangled silences

Absorbed her into emerald secrecy

And slow hushed wizard nets of fiery bloom

Environed with their coloured snare her wheels.

The strong importunate feet of Time fell soft

Along these lonely ways, his titan pace

Forgotten and his stark and ruinous rounds.

The inner ear that listens to solitude,

Leaning self-rapt unboundedly could hear

The rhythm of the intenser wordless Thought

That gathers in the silence behind life,

And the low sweet inarticulate voice of earth

In the great passion of her sun-kissed trance

Ascended with its yearning undertone.

Afar from the brute noise of clamorous needs

The quieted all-seeking mind could feel,

At rest from its blind outwardness of will,

The unwearied clasp of her mute patient love

And know for a soul the mother of our forms.

This spirit stumbling in the fields of sense,

This creature bruised in the mortar of the days

Could find in her broad spaces of release.

Not yet was a world all occupied by care.

The bosom of our mother kept for us still

Her austere regions and her musing depths,

Her impersonal reaches lonely and inspired

And the mightinesses of her rapture haunts.

Muse-lipped she nursed her symbol mysteries

And guarded for her pure-eyed sacraments

The valley clefts between her breasts of joy,

Her mountain altars for the fires of dawn

And nuptial beaches where the ocean couched

And the huge chanting of her prophet woods.

Fields had she of her solitary mirth,

Plains hushed and happy in the embrace of light,

Alone with the cry of birds and hue of flowers,

And wildernesses of wonder lit by her moons

And grey seer-evenings kindling with the stars

And dim movement in the night’s infinitude.

August, exulting in her Maker’s eye,

She felt her nearness to him in earth’s breast,

Conversed still with a Light behind the veil,

Still communed with Eternity beyond.

A few and fit inhabitants she called

To share the glad communion of her peace;

The breadth, the summit were their natural home.

The strong king-sages from their labour done,

Freed from the warrior tension of their task,

Came to her serene sessions in these wilds;

The strife was over, the respite lay in front.

Happy they lived with birds and beasts and flowers

And sunlight and the rustle of the leaves,

And heard the wild winds wandering in the night,

Mused with the stars in their mute constant ranks,

And lodged in the mornings as in azure tents,

And with the glory of the noons were one.

Some deeper plunged; from life’s external clasp

Beckoned into a fiery privacy

In the soul’s unprofaned star-white recess

They sojourned with an everliving Bliss;

A Voice profound in the ecstasy and the hush

They heard, beheld an all-revealing Light.

All time-made difference they overcame;

The world was fibred with their own heart-strings;

Close drawn to the heart that beats in every breast,

They reached the one self in all through boundless love.

Attuned to Silence and to the world-rhyme,

They loosened the knot of the imprisoning mind;

Achieved was the wide untroubled witness gaze,

Unsealed was Nature’s great spiritual eye;

To the height of heights rose now their daily climb:

Truth leaned to them from her supernal realm;

Above them blazed eternity’s mystic suns.

Nameless the austere ascetics without home

Abandoning speech and motion and desire

Aloof from creatures sat absorbed, alone,

Immaculate in tranquil heights of self

On concentration’s luminous voiceless peaks,

World-naked hermits with their matted hair

Immobile as the passionless great hills

Around them grouped like thoughts of some vast mood

Awaiting the Infinite’s behest to end.

The seers attuned to the universal Will,

Content in Him who smiles behind earth’s forms,

Abode ungrieved by the insistent days.

About them like green trees girdling a hill

Young grave disciples fashioned by their touch,

Trained to the simple act and conscious word,

Greatened within and grew to meet their heights.

Far-wandering seekers on the Eternal’s path

Brought to these quiet founts their spirit’s thirst

And spent the treasure of a silent hour

Bathed in the purity of the mild gaze

That, uninsistent, ruled them from its peace,

And by its influence found the ways of calm.

The Infants of the monarchy of the worlds,

The heroic leaders of a coming time,

King-children nurtured in that spacious air

Like lions gambolling in sky and sun

Received half-consciously their godlike stamp:

Formed in the type of the high thoughts they sang

They learned the wide magnificence of mood

That makes us comrades of the cosmic urge,

No longer chained to their small separate selves,

Plastic and firm beneath the eternal hand,

Met Nature with a bold and friendly clasp

And served in her the Power that shapes her works.

One-souled to all and free from narrowing bonds,

Large like a continent of warm sunshine

In wide equality’s impartial joy,

These sages breathed for God’s delight in things.

Assisting the slow entries of the gods,

Sowing in young minds immortal thoughts they lived,

Taught the great Truth to which man’s race must rise

Or opened the gates of freedom to a few.

Imparting to our struggling world the Light

They breathed like spirits from Time’s dull yoke released,

Comrades and vessels of the cosmic Force,

Using a natural mastery like the sun’s:

Their speech, their silence was a help to earth.

A magic happiness flowed from their touch;

Oneness was sovereign in that sylvan peace,

The wild beast joined in friendship with its prey;

Persuading the hatred and the strife to cease

The love that flows from the one Mother’s breast

Healed with their hearts the hard and wounded world.

Others escaped from the confines of thought

To where Mind motionless sleeps waiting Light’s birth,

And came back quivering with a nameless Force,

Drunk with a wine of lightning in their cells;

Intuitive knowledge leaping into speech,

Seized, vibrant, kindling with the inspired word,

Hearing the subtle voice that clothes the heavens,

Carrying the splendour that has lit the suns,

They sang Infinity’s names and deathless powers

In metres that reflect the moving worlds,

Sight’s sound-waves breaking from the soul’s great deeps.

Some lost to the person and his strip of thought

In a motionless ocean of impersonal Power,

Sat mighty, visioned with the Infinite’s light,

Or, comrades of the everlasting Will,

Surveyed the plan of past and future Time.

Some winged like birds out of the cosmic sea

And vanished into a bright and featureless Vast:

Some silent watched the universal dance,

Or helped the world by world-indifference.

Some watched no more merged in a lonely Self,

Absorbed in the trance from which no soul returns,

All the occult world-lines for ever closed,

The chains of birth and person cast away:

Some uncompanioned reached the Ineffable.

As floats a sunbeam through a shady place,

The golden virgin in her carven car

Came gliding among meditation’s seats.

Often in twilight mid returning troops

Of cattle thickening with their dust the shades

When the loud day had slipped below the verge,

Arriving in a peaceful hermit grove

She rested drawing round her like a cloak

Its spirit of patient muse and potent prayer.

Or near to a lion river’s tawny mane

And trees that worshipped on a praying shore,

A domed and templed air’s serene repose

Beckoned to her hurrying wheels to stay their speed.

In the solemnity of a space that seemed

A mind remembering ancient silences,

Where to the heart great bygone voices called

And the large liberty of brooding seers

Had left the long impress of their soul’s scene,

Awake in candid dawn or darkness mooned,

To the still touch inclined the daughter of Flame

Drank in hushed splendour between tranquil lids

And felt the kinship of eternal calm.

But morn broke in reminding her of her quest

And from low rustic couch or mat she rose

And went impelled on her unfinished way

And followed the fateful orbit of her life

Like a desire that questions silent gods

Then passes starlike to some bright Beyond.

Thence to great solitary tracts she came,

Where man was a passer-by towards human scenes

Or sole in Nature’s vastness strove to live

And called for help to ensouled invisible Powers,

Overwhelmed by the immensity of his world

And unaware of his own infinity.

The earth multiplied to her a changing brow

And called her with a far and nameless voice.

The mountains in their anchorite solitude,

The forests with their multitudinous chant

Disclosed to her the masked divinity’s doors.

On dreaming plains, an indolent expanse,

The death-bed of a pale enchanted eve

Under the glamour of a sunken sky,

Impassive she lay as at an age’s end,

Or crossed an eager pack of huddled hills

Lifting their heads to hunt a lairlike sky,

Or travelled in a strange and empty land

Where desolate summits camped in a weird heaven,

Mute sentinels beneath a drifting moon,

Or wandered in some lone tremendous wood

Ringing for ever with the crickets’ cry

Or followed a long glistening serpent road

Through fields and pastures lapped in moveless light

Or reached the wild beauty of a desert space

Where never plough was driven nor herd had grazed

And slumbered upon stripped and thirsty sands

Amid the savage wild-beast night’s appeal.

Still unaccomplished was the fateful quest;

Still she found not the one predestined face

For which she sought amid the sons of men.

A grandiose silence wrapped the regal day:

The months had fed the passion of the sun

And now his burning breath assailed the soil.

The tiger heats prowled through the fainting earth;

All was licked up as by a lolling tongue.

The spring winds failed; the sky was set like bronze.

End of Canto Four

End of Book Four