Savitri Book 2 Canto 5 - The Godheads of the Little Life
He plunged his gaze into the siege of mist ||43.4|| As when a search-light stabs the Night’s blind breast And dwellings and trees and figures of men appear As if revealed to an eye in Nothingness, All lurking things were torn out of their veils And held up in his vision’s sun-white blaze. ||43.5||
Astonished by the unaccustomed glow, As if immanent in the shadows started up Imps with wry limbs and carved beast visages, Sprite prompters goblin-wizened or faery-small, And genii fairer but unsouled and poor And fallen beings, their heavenly portion lost, And errant divinities trapped in Time’s dust. ||43.9||
An ocean of electric Energy Formlessly formed its strange wave-particles Constructing by their dance this solid scheme, Its mightiness in the atom shut to rest; ||44.10|| Thus has been made this real impossible world, An obvious miracle or convincing show. ||44.11||
At first she raised no voice, no motion dared: Charged with world-power, instinct with living force, Only she clung with her roots to the safe earth, Thrilled dumbly to the shocks of ray and breeze And put out tendril fingers of desire; ||44.28||
Then man was moulded from the original brute. ||44.33|| A thinking mind had come to lift life’s moods, A keen-edged tool of Nature mixed and vague, An intelligence half-witness, half-machine. ||44.34||
A fragile human love that could not last, Ego’s moth-wings to lift the seraph soul, Appeared, a surface glamour of brief date Extinguished by a scanty breath of Time;... Hopes that soon fade to drab realities And passions that crumble to ashes while they blaze Kindled the common earth with their brief flame. ||44.40||
A spirit that perished not with the body and breath Was there like a shadow of the Unmanifest And stood behind the little personal form But claimed not yet this earthly embodiment. ||44.42||
A thinking puppet is the mind of life: Its choice is the work of elemental strengths That know not their own birth and end and cause ||45.17|| Into the actions mortals think their own They bring the incoherences of Fate, Or make a doom of Time’s slipshod caprice And toss the lives of men from hand to hand In an inconsequent and devious game. ||45.22||
In a narrow plot he has pitched his tent of life Beneath the wide gaze of the starry Vast. ||46.22||
Our seekings are short-lived experiments Made by a wordless and inscrutable Power Testing its issues from inconscient Night To meet its luminous self of Truth and Bliss. ||47.7|| Amid the figures of the Ignorance, In the symbol pictures drawn by word and thought, It seeks the truth to which all figures point; It looks for the source of Light with vision’s lamp; ||47.8||
It works to find the doer of all works, The unfelt Self within who is the guide, The unknown Self above who is the goal. ||47.8||
Across the cosmic field through narrow lanes Asking a scanty dole from Fortune’s hands And garbed in beggar’s robes there walks the One. ||47.12||
A door is cut in the mud wall of self; Across the lowly threshold with bowed heads Angels of ecstasy and self-giving pass, And lodged in an inner sanctuary of dream The makers of the image of deity live. ||47.18||
This little being of Time, this shadow-soul, This living dwarf figure-head of darkened spirit Out of its traffic of petty dreams shall rise. ||47.26|| Like a clay troll kneaded into a god New-made in the image of the eternal Guest, It shall be caught to the breast of a white Force ||47.27||
But first the spirit’s ascent we must achieve Out of the chasm from which our nature rose. ||47.29|| Then kindling the gold tongue of sacrifice, Calling the powers of a bright hemisphere, We shall shed discredit of our mortal state, Make the abysm a road for Heaven’s descent, Acquaint our depths with the supernal Ray And cleave the darkness with the mystic Fire. ||47.31||
He through the astral chaos shore a way Mid the grey faces of its demon gods, ||48.1|| The watching opacity multiplied as he moved Its hostile mass of dead and staring eyes; The darkness glimmered like a dying torch. ||48.4|| Around him an extinguished phantom glare Peopled with shadowy and misleading shapes The vague Inconscient’s dark and measureless cave. ||48.5|| His only sunlight was his spirit’s flame. ||48.6||
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