The Winds of Wonder

Apropos of Two Vast Negations — 7

Savitri Book Ten Canto Four

Death’s Denial

Look on these forms that stay awhile and pass,

These lives that long and strive, then are no more,

These structures that have no abiding truth,

The saviour creeds that cannot save themselves,

But perish in the strangling hands of the years,

Discarded from man’s thought, proved false by Time,

Philosophies that strip all problems bare

But nothing ever have solved since earth began,

And sciences omnipotent in vain

By which men learn of what the suns are made,

Transform all forms to serve their outward needs,

Ride through the sky and sail beneath the sea,

But learn not what they are or why they came;

These polities, architectures of man’s brain,

That, bricked with evil and good, wall in man’s spirit

And, fissured houses, palace at once and jail,

Rot while they reign and crumble before they crash;

These revolutions, demon or drunken god,

Convulsing the wounded body of mankind

Only to paint in new colours an old face;

These wars, carnage triumphant, ruin gone mad,

The work of centuries vanishing in an hour,

The blood of the vanquished and the victor’s crown

Which men to be born must pay for with their pain,

The hero’s face divine on satyr’s limbs,

The demon’s grandeur mixed with the demi-god’s,

The glory and the beasthood and the shame;

Why is it all, the labour and the din,

The transient joys, the timeless sea of tears,

The longing and the hoping and the cry,

The battle and the victory and the fall,

The aimless journey that can never pause,

The waking toil, the incoherent sleep? ||144.14||

Song, shouts and weeping, wisdom and idle words,

The laughter of men, the irony of the gods? ||144.15||

Where leads the march, whither the pilgrimage? ||144.16||

Who keeps the map of the route or planned each stage? ||144.17||

Or else self-moved the world walks its own way? ||144.18||

Or nothing is there but only a Mind that dreams:

The world is a myth that happened to come true,

A legend told to itself by conscious Mind,

Imaged and played on a feigned Matter’s ground

On which it stands in an unsubstantial Vast. ||144.19||

Savitri’s forceful response to the Denial of the Materialist

The world is a spiritual paradox

Invented by a need in the Unseen,

A poor translation to the creature’s sense

Of That which for ever exceeds idea and speech,

A symbol of what can never be symbolised,

A language mispronounced, misspelt, yet true. ||144.40||

Its powers have come from the eternal heights

And plunged into the inconscient dim Abyss

And risen from it to do their marvellous work. ||144.41||

The soul is a figure of the Unmanifest,

The mind labours to think the Unthinkable,

The life to call the Immortal into birth,

The body to enshrine the Illimitable. ||144.42||

The world is not cut off from Truth and God. ||144.43||

In vain thou hast dug the dark unbridgeable gulf,

In vain thou hast built the blind and doorless wall:

Man’s soul crosses through thee to Paradise,

Heaven’s sun forces its way through death and night;

Its light is seen upon our being’s verge. ||144.44||

My mind is a torch lit from the eternal sun,

My life a breath drawn by the immortal Guest,

My mortal body is the Eternal’s house. ||144.45||

Already the torch becomes the undying ray,

Already the life is the Immortal’s force,

The house grows of the householder part and one. ||144.46||

How sayst thou Truth can never light the human mind

And Bliss can never invade the mortal’s heart

Or God descend into the world he made? ||144.47||

If in the meaningless Void creation rose,

If from a bodiless Force Matter was born,

If Life could climb in the unconscious tree,

If green delight break into emerald leaves

And its laughter of beauty blossom in the flower,

If sense could wake in tissue, nerve and cell,

And Thought seize the grey matter of the brain,

And soul peep from its secrecy through the flesh,

How shall the nameless light not leap on men,

And unknown powers emerge from Nature’s sleep? ||144.48||

Even now hints of a luminous Truth like stars

Arise in the mind-mooned splendour of Ignorance;

Even now the deathless Lover’s touch we feel:

If the chamber’s door is even a little ajar,

What then can hinder God from stealing in

Or who forbid his kiss on the sleeping soul? ||144.49||

Already God is near, the Truth is close:

Because the dark atheist body knows him not,

Must the sage deny the Light, the seer his soul? ||144.50||

I am not bound by thought or sense or shape;

I live in the glory of the Infinite,

I am near to the Nameless and Unknowable,

The Ineffable is now my household mate. ||144.51||