The Winds of Wonder

Apropos of Two Vast Negations — 15

Two Powers: One leans to earth, the other yearns to the skies

Transfigured Death advises Savitri to forget the myth of earth’s desire and go back to immortal felicity from which she had come. Savitri of course dismisses the idea.

O human image of the deathless word,

How hast thou seen beyond the topaz walls

The gleaming sisters of the divine gate,

Summoned the genii of their wakeful sleep,

And under revelation’s arches forced

The carved thought-shrouded doors to swing apart,

Unlocked the avenues of spiritual sight

And taught[6] the entries of a heavenlier state

To thy rapt soul that bore the golden key? ||150.1||

In thee the secret sight man’s blindness missed

Has opened its view past Time, my chariot course,

And death, my tunnel which I drive through life

To reach my unseen distances of bliss. ||150.2||

I am the hushed search of the jealous gods

Pursuing my wisdom’s vast mysterious work

Seized in the thousand meeting ways of heaven. ||150.3||

I am the beauty of the unveiled Ray

Drawing through the deep roads of the infinite night

The unconquerable pilgrim soul of earth

Beneath the flaring torches of the stars. ||150.4||

I am the inviolable Ecstasy;

They who have looked on me, shall grieve no more. ||150.5||

The eyes that live in night shall see my form. ||150.6||

On the pale shores of conscious foaming straits

That flow beneath a grey tormented sky

Two powers from one original ecstasy born

Pace near, but parted in the life of man;

One leans to earth, the other yearns to the skies:

Heaven in its rapture dreams of perfect earth,

Earth in its sorrow dreams of perfect heaven. ||150.7||

The two longing to join, yet walk apart,

Idly divided by their vain conceits;

They are kept from their oneness by enchanted fears;

Sundered mysteriously by miles of thought,

They gaze across the silent gulfs of sleep. ||150.8||

Or side by side reclined upon my vasts

Like bride and bridegroom magically divorced

They wake to yearn, but never can they clasp

While thinly flickering hesitates uncrossed

Between the lovers on their nuptial couch

The shadowy eidolon of a sword. ||150.9||

But when the phantom flame-edge fails undone,

Then never more can space or time divide

The lover from the loved; space shall draw back

Her great translucent curtain. Time shall be

The quivering of the spirit’s endless bliss. ||150.10||

Attend that moment of celestial fate. ||150.11||

Meanwhile you two shall serve the dual law

Which only now the scouts of vision glimpse

Who pressing through the forest of their thoughts

Have found the narrow bridges of the gods. ||150.12||

Wait patient of the brittle bars of form

Making division your delightful means

Of happy oneness rapturously enhanced

By attraction in the throbbing air between. ||150.13||

Yet if thou wouldst abandon the vexed world

Careless of the dark moan of things below,

Tread down the isthmus, overleap the flood,

Cancel thy contract with the labouring Force,

Renounce the tie that joins thee to earth-kind,

Cast off thy sympathy with mortal hearts. ||150.14||

Arise, vindicate thy spirit’s conquered right:

Relinquishing thy charge of transient breath,

Under the cold gaze of the indifferent stars

Leaving thy borrowed body on the sod,

Ascend, O soul, into thy blissful home. ||150.15||

Here in the playground of the eternal Child

Or in domains the wise Immortals tread

Roam with thy comrade splendour under skies

Spiritual lit by an unsetting sun,

As godheads live who care not for the world

And share not in the toil of Nature’s powers:

Absorbed in their self-ecstasy they dwell. ||150.16||

Cast off the ambiguous myth of earth’s desire,

O immortal to felicity arise. ||150.17||

The featured image is a painting by Huta