# SAVITRI: a Legend and a Symbol

Sri Aurobindo

Book One

THE BOOK OF BEGINNINGS


Canto IV

THE SECRET KNOWLEDGE


On a height he stood that looked towards greater heights.

Our early approaches to the Infinite

Are sunrise splendours on a marvellous verge

While lingers yet unseen the glorious sun.

What now we see is a shadow of what must come.

The earth's uplook to a remote Unknown

Is a preface only of the epic climb

Of human soul from its flat earthly state

To the discovery of a greater self

And the far gleam of an eternal Light.

This world is a beginning and a base

Where Life and Mind erect their structured dreams;

An unborn Power must build reality.

A deathbound littleness is not all we are:

Immortal our forgotten vastnesses

Await discovery in our summit selves;

Unmeasured breadths and depths of being are ours.

Akin to the ineffable Secrecy,

Mystic, eternal in unrealised Time,

Neighbours of Heaven are Nature's altitudes.

To these high-peaked dominions sealed to our search,

Too far from surface Nature's postal routes,

Too lofty for our mortal lives to breathe,

Deep in us a forgotten kinship points

And a faint voice of ecstasy and prayer

Calls to those lucent lost immensities.

Even when we fail to look into our souls

Or lie embedded in earthly consciousness,

Still have we parts that grow towards the light,

Yet are there luminous tracts and heavens serene

And Eldorados of splendour and ecstasy

And temples to the godhead none can see.

A shapeless memory lingers in us still

And sometimes, when our sight is turned within,

Earth's ignorant veil is lifted from our eyes;

There is a short miraculous escape.

This narrow fringe of clamped experience

We leave behind meted to us as life,

Our little walks, our insufficient reach.

Our souls can visit in great lonely hours

Still regions of imperishable Light,

All- seeing eagle-peaks of silent Power

And moon- flame oceans of swift fathomless Bliss

And calm immensities of spirit space.

In the unfolding process of the Self

Sometimes the inexpressible Mystery

Elects a human vessel of descent.

A breath comes down from a supernal air,

A Presence is born, a guiding Light awakes,

A stillness falls upon the instruments:

Fixed, motionless like a marble monument,

Stone- calm, the body is a pedestal

Supporting a figure of eternal Peace.

Or a revealing Force sweeps blazing in;

Out of some vast superior continent

Knowledge breaks through trailing its radiant seas,

And Nature trembles with the power, the flame.

A greater Personality sometimes

Possesses us which yet we know is ours:

Or we adore the Master of our souls.

Then the small bodily ego thins and falls;

No more insisting on its separate self,

Losing the punctilio of its separate birth,

It leaves us one with Nature and with God.

In moments when the inner lamps are lit

And the life's cherished guests are left outside,

Our spirit sits alone and speaks to its gulfs.

A wider consciousness opens then its doors;

Invading from spiritual silences

A ray of the timeless Glory stoops awhile

To commune with our seized illumined clay

And leaves its huge white stamp upon our lives.

In the oblivious field of mortal mind,

Revealed to the closed prophet eyes of trance

Or in some deep internal solitude

Witnessed by a strange immaterial sense,

The signals of eternity appear.

The truth mind could not know unveils its face,

We hear what mortal ears have never heard,

We feel what earthly sense has never felt,

We love what common hearts repel and dread;

Our minds hush to a bright Omniscient;

A Voice calls from the chambers of the soul;

We meet the ecstasy of the Godhead's touch

In golden privacies of immortal fire.

These signs are native to a larger self

That lives within us by ourselves unseen;

Only sometimes a holier influence comes,

A tide of mightier surgings bears our lives

And a diviner Presence moves the soul;

Or through the earthly coverings something breaks,

A grace and beauty of spiritual light,

The murmuring tongue of a celestial fire.

Ourself and a high stranger whom we feel,

It is and acts unseen as if it were not;

It follows the line of sempiternal birth,

Yet seems to perish with its mortal frame.

Assured of the Apocalypse to be,

It reckons not the moments and the hours;

Great, patient, calm it sees the centuries pass,

Awaiting the slow miracle of our change

In the sure deliberate process of world-force

And the long march of all-revealing Time.

It is the origin and the master-clue,

A silence overhead, an inner voice,

A living image seated in the heart,

An unwalled wideness and a fathomless point,

The truth of all these cryptic shows in Space,

The Real towards which our strivings move,

The secret grandiose meaning of our lives.

A treasure of honey in the combs of God,

A Splendour burning in a tenebrous cloak,

It is our glory of the flame of God,

Our golden fountain of the world's delight,

An immortality cowled in the cape of death,

The shape of our unborn divinity.

It guards for us our fate in depths within

Where sleeps the eternal seed of transient things.

Always we bear in us a magic key

Concealed in life's hermetic envelope.

A burning Witness in the sanctuary

Regards through Time and the blind walls of Form;

A timeless Light is in his hidden eyes;

He sees the secret things no words can speak

And knows the goal of the unconscious world

And the heart of the mystery of the journeying years.


But all is screened, subliminal, mystical;

It needs the intuitive heart, the inward turn,

It needs the power of a spiritual gaze.

Else to our waking mind's small moment look

A goalless voyage seems our dubious course

Some Chance has settled or hazarded some Will,

Or a Necessity without aim or cause

Unwillingly compelled to emerge and be.

In this dense field where nothing is plain or sure,

Our very being seems to us questionable,

Our life a vague experiment, the soul

A flickering light in a strange ignorant world,

The earth a brute mechanic accident,

A net of death in which by chance we live.

All we have learned appears a doubtful guess,

The achievement done a passage or a phase

Whose farther end is hidden from our sight,

A chance happening or a fortuitous fate.

Out of the unknown we move to the unknown.

Ever surround our brief existence here

Grey shadows of unanswered questionings;

The dark Inconscient's signless mysteries

Stand up unsolved behind Fate's starting-line.

An aspiration in the Night's profound,

Seed of a perishing body and half-lit mind,

Uplifts its lonely tongue of conscious fire

Towards an undying Light for ever lost;

Only it hears, sole echo of its call,

The dim reply in man's unknowing heart

And meets, not understanding why it came

Or for what reason is the suffering here,

God's sanction to the paradox of life

And the riddle of the Immortal's birth in Time.

Along a path of aeons serpentine

In the coiled blackness of her nescient course

The Earth-Goddess toils across the sands of Time.

A Being is in her whom she hopes to know,

A Word speaks to her heart she cannot hear,

A Fate compels whose form she cannot see.

In her unconscious orbit through the Void

Out of her mindless depths she strives to rise,

A perilous life her gain, a struggling joy;

A Thought that can conceive but hardly knows

Arises slowly in her and creates

The idea, the speech that labels more than it lights;

A trembling gladness that is less than bliss

Invades from all this beauty that must die.

Alarmed by the sorrow dragging at her feet

And conscious of the high things not yet won,

Ever she nurses in her sleepless breast

An inward urge that takes from her rest and peace.

Ignorant and weary and invincible,

She seeks through the soul's war and quivering pain

The pure perfection her marred nature needs,

A breath of Godhead on her stone and mire.

A faith she craves that can survive defeat,

The sweetness of a love that knows not death,

The radiance of a truth for ever sure.

A light grows in her, she assumes a voice,

Her state she learns to read and the act she has done,

But the one needed truth eludes her grasp,

Herself and all of which she is the sign.

An inarticulate whisper drives her steps

Of which she feels the force but not the sense;

A few rare intimations come as guides,

Immense divining flashes cleave her brain,

And sometimes in her hours of dream and muse

The truth that she has missed looks out on her

As if far off and yet within her soul.

A change comes near that flees from her surmise

And, ever postponed, compels attempt and hope,

Yet seems too great for mortal hope to dare.

A vision meets her of supernal Powers

That draw her as if mighty kinsmen lost

Approaching with estranged great luminous gaze.

Then is she moved to all that she is not

And stretches arms to what was never hers.

Outstretching arms to the unconscious Void,

Passionate she prays to invisible forms of Gods

Soliciting from dumb Fate and toiling Time

What most she needs, what most exceeds her scope,

A Mind unvisited by illusion's gleams,

A Will expressive of soul's deity,

A Strength not forced to stumble by its speed,

A Joy that drags not sorrow as its shade.

For these she yearns and feels them destined hers:

Heaven's privilege she claims as her own right.

Just is her claim the all-witnessing Gods approve,

Clear in a greater light than reason owns:

Our intuitions are its title-deeds;

Our souls accept what our blind thoughts refuse.

Earth's winged chimaeras are Truth's steeds in Heaven,

The impossible God's sign of things to be.

But few can look beyond the present state

Or overleap this matted hedge of sense.

All that transpires on earth and all beyond

Are parts of an illimitable plan

The One keeps in his heart and knows alone.

Our outward happenings have their seed within,

And even this random Fate that imitates Chance,

This mass of unintelligible results,

Are the dumb graph of truths that work unseen:

The laws of the Unknown create the known.

The events that shape the appearance of our lives

Are a cipher of subliminal quiverings

Which rarely we surprise or vaguely feel,

Are an outcome of suppressed realities

That hardly rise into material day:

They are born from the spirit's sun of hidden powers

Digging a tunnel through emergency.

But who shall pierce into the cryptic gulf

And learn what deep necessity of the soul

Determined casual deed and consequence?

Absorbed in a routine of daily acts,

Our eyes are fixed on an external scene;

We hear the crash of the wheels of Circumstance

And wonder at the hidden cause of things.

Yet a foreseeing Knowledge might be ours,

If we could take our spirit's stand within,

If we could hear the muffled daemon voice.

Too seldom is the shadow of what must come

Cast in an instant on the secret sense

Which feels the shock of the invisible,

And seldom in the few who answer give

The mighty process of the cosmic Will

Communicates its image to our sight,

Identifying the world's mind with ours.

Our range is fixed within the crowded arc

Of what we observe and touch and thought can guess

And rarely dawns the light of the Unknown

Waking in us the prophet and the seer.

The outward and the immediate are our field,

The dead past is our background and support;

Mind keeps the soul prisoner, we are slaves to our acts;

We cannot free our gaze to reach wisdom's sun.

Inheritor of the brief animal mind,

Man, still a child in Nature's mighty hands,

In the succession of the moments lives;

To a changing present is his narrow right;

His memory stares back at a phantom past,

The future flees before him as he moves;

He sees imagined garments, not a face.

Armed with a limited precarious strength,

He saves his fruits of work from adverse chance.

A struggling ignorance is his wisdom's mate:

He waits to see the consequence of his acts,

He waits to weigh the certitude of his thoughts,

He knows not what he shall achieve or when;

He knows not whether at last he shall survive,

Or end like the mastodon and the sloth

And perish from the earth where he was king.

He is ignorant of the meaning of his life,

He is ignorant of his high and splendid fate.

Only the Immortals on their deathless heights

Dwelling beyond the walls of Time and Space,

Masters of living, free from the bonds of Thought,

Who are overseers of Fate and Chance and Will

And experts of the theorem of world-need,

Can see the Idea, the Might that change Time's course,

Come maned with light from undiscovered worlds,

Hear, while the world toils on with its deep blind heart,

The galloping hooves of the unforeseen event,

Bearing the superhuman Rider, near

And, impassive to earth's din and startled cry,

Return to the silence of the hills of God;

As lightning leaps, as thunder sweeps, they pass

And leave their mark on the trampled breast of Life.

Above the world the world-creators stand,

In the phenomenon see its mystic source.

These heed not the deceiving outward play,

They turn not to the moment's busy tramp,

But listen with the still patience of the Unborn

For the slow footsteps of far Destiny

Approaching through huge distances of Time,

Unmarked by the eye that sees effect and cause,

Unheard mid the clamour of the human plane.

Attentive to an unseen Truth they seize

A sound as of invisible augur wings,

Voices of an unplumbed significance,

Mutterings that brood in the core of Matter's sleep.

In the heart's profound audition they can catch

The murmurs lost by Life's uncaring ear,

A prophet-speech in Thought's omniscient trance.

Above the illusion of the hopes that pass,

Behind the appearance and the overt act,

Behind this clock-work Chance and vague surmise,

Amid the wrestle of force, the trampling feet,

Across the cries of anguish and of joy,

Across the triumph, fighting and despair,

They watch the Bliss for which earth's heart has cried

On the long road which cannot see its end

Winding undetected through the sceptic days

And to meet it guide the unheedful moving world.

Thus will the masked Transcendent mount his throne.

When darkness deepens strangling the earth's breast

And man's corporeal mind is the only lamp,

As a thief's in the night shall be the covert tread

Of one who steps unseen into his house.

A Voice ill-heard shall speak, the soul obey,

A Power into mind's inner chamber steal,

A charm and sweetness open life's closed doors

And beauty conquer the resisting world,

The Truth-Light capture Nature by surprise,

A stealth of God compel the heart to bliss

And earth grow unexpectedly divine.

In Matter shall be lit the spirit's glow,

In body and body kindled the sacred birth;

Night shall awake to the anthem of the stars,

The days become a happy pilgrim march,

Our will a force of the Eternal's power,

And thought the rays of a spiritual sun.

A few shall see what none yet understands;

God shall grow up while the wise men talk and sleep;

For man shall not know the coming till its hour

And belief shall be not till the work is done.


A Consciousness that knows not its own truth,

A vagrant hunter of misleading dawns,

Between the being's dark and luminous ends

Moves here in a half-light that seems the whole:

An interregnum in Reality

Cuts off the integral Thought, the total Power;

It circles or stands in a vague interspace,

Doubtful of its beginning and its close,

Or runs upon a road that has no end;

Far from the original Dusk, the final Flame

In some huge void Inconscience it lives,

Like a thought persisting in a wide emptiness.

As if an unintelligible phrase

Suggested a million renderings to the Mind,

It lends a purport to a random world.

A conjecture leaning upon doubtful proofs,

A message misunderstood, a thought confused

Missing its aim is all that it can speak

Or a fragment of the universal word.

It leaves two giant letters void of sense

While without sanction turns the middle sign

Carrying an enigmatic universe,

As if a present without future or past

Repeating the same revolution's whirl

Turned on its axis in its own Inane.

Thus is the meaning of creation veiled;

For without context reads the cosmic page:

Its signs stare at us like an unknown script,

As if appeared screened by a foreign tongue

Or code of splendour signs without a key

A portion of a parable sublime.

It wears to the perishable creature's eyes

The grandeur of a useless miracle;

Wasting itself that it may last awhile,

A river that can never find its sea,

It runs through life and death on an edge of Time;

A fire in the Night is its mighty action's blaze.

This is our deepest need to join once more

What now is parted, opposite and twain,

Remote in sovereign spheres that never meet

Or fronting like far poles of Night and Day.

We must fill the immense lacuna we have made,

Re- wed the closed finite's lonely consonant

With the open vowels of Infinity,

A hyphen must connect Matter and Mind,

The narrow isthmus of the ascending soul:

We must renew the secret bond in things,

Our hearts recall the lost divine Idea,

Reconstitute the perfect word, unite

The Alpha and the Omega in one sound;

Then shall the Spirit and Nature be at one.

Two are the ends of the mysterious plan.

In the wide signless ether of the Self,

In the unchanging Silence white and nude,

Aloof, resplendent like gold dazzling suns

Veiled by the ray no mortal eye can bear,

The Spirit's bare and absolute potencies

Burn in the solitude of the thoughts of God.

A rapture and a radiance and a hush,

Delivered from the approach of wounded hearts,

Denied to the Idea that looks at grief,

Remote from the Force that cries out in its pain,

In his inalienable bliss they live.

Immaculate in self-knowledge and self-power,

Calm they repose on the eternal Will.

Only his law they count and him obey;

They have no goal to reach, no aim to serve.

Implacable in their timeless purity,

All barter or bribe of worship they refuse;

Unmoved by cry of revolt and ignorant prayer

They reckon not our virtue and our sin;

They bend not to the voices that implore,

They hold no traffic with error and its reign;

They are guardians of the silence of the Truth,

They are keepers of the immutable decree.

A deep surrender is their source of might,

A still identity their way to know,

Motionless is their action like a sleep.

At peace, regarding the trouble beneath the stars,

Deathless, watching the works of Death and Chance,

Immobile, seeing the millenniums pass,

Untouched while the long map of Fate unrolls,

They look on our struggle with impartial eyes,

And yet without them cosmos could not be.

Impervious to desire and doom and hope,

Their station of inviolable might

Moveless upholds the world's enormous task,

Its ignorance is by their knowledge lit,

Its yearning lasts by their indifference.

As the height draws the low ever to climb,

As the breadths draw the small to adventure vast,

Their aloofness drives man to surpass himself.

Our passion heaves to wed the Eternal's calm,

Our dwarf-search mind to meet the Omniscient's light,

Our helpless hearts to enshrine the Omnipotent's force.

Acquiescing in the wisdom that made hell

And the harsh utility of death and tears,

Acquiescing in the gradual steps of Time,

Careless they seem of the grief that stings the world's heart,

Careless of the pain that rends its body and life;

Above joy and sorrow is that grandeur's walk:

They have no portion in the good that dies,

Mute, pure, they share not in the evil done;

Else might their strength be marred and could not save.

Alive to the truth that dwells in God's extremes,

Awake to a motion of all-seeing Force,

The slow outcome of the long ambiguous years

And the unexpected good from woeful deeds,

The immortal sees not as we vainly see.

He looks on hidden aspects and screened powers,

He knows the law and natural line of things.

Undriven by a brief life's will to act,

Unharassed by the spur of pity and fear,

He makes no haste to untie the cosmic knot

Or the world's torn jarring heart to reconcile.

In Time he waits for the Eternal's hour.

Yet a spiritual secret aid is there;

While a tardy Evolution's coils wind on

And Nature hews her way through adamant

A divine intervention thrones above.

Alive in a dead rotating universe

We whirl not here upon a casual globe

Abandoned to a task beyond our force;

Even through the tangled anarchy called Fate

And through the bitterness of death and fall

An outstretched Hand is felt upon our lives.

It is near us in unnumbered bodies and births;

In its unslackening grasp it keeps for us safe

The one inevitable supreme result

No will can take away and no doom change,

The crown of conscious Immortality,

The godhead promised to our struggling souls

When first man's heart dared death and suffered life.

One who has shaped this world is ever its lord:

Our errors are his steps upon the way;

He works through the fierce vicissitudes of our lives,

He works through the hard breath of battle and toil,

He works through our sins and sorrows and our tears,

His knowledge overrules our nescience;

Whatever the appearance we must bear,

Whatever our strong ills and present fate,

When nothing we can see but drift and bale,

A mighty Guidance leads us still through all.

After we have served this great divided world

God's bliss and oneness are our inborn right.

A date is fixed in the calendar of the Unknown,

An anniversary of the Birth sublime:

Our soul shall justify its chequered walk,

All will come near that now is naught or far.

These calm and distant Mights shall act at last.

Immovably ready for their destined task,

The ever- wise compassionate Brilliances

Await the sound of the Incarnate's voice

To leap and bridge the chasms of Ignorance

And heal the hollow yearning gulfs of Life

And fill the abyss that is the universe.

Here meanwhile at the Spirit's opposite pole

In the mystery of the deeps that God has built

For his abode below the Thinker's sight,

In this compromise of a stark absolute Truth

With the Light that dwells near the dark end of things,

In this tragi-comedy of divine disguise,

This long far seeking for joy ever near,

In the grandiose dream of which the world is made,

In this gold dome on a black dragon base,

The conscious Force that acts in Nature's breast,

A dark- robed labourer in the cosmic scheme

Carrying clay images of unborn gods,

Executrix of the inevitable Idea

Hampered, enveloped by the hoops of Fate,

Patient trustee of slow eternal Time,

Absolves from hour to hour her secret charge.

All she foresees in masked imperative depths;

The dumb intention of the unconscious gulfs

Answers to a will that sees upon the heights,

And the evolving Word's first syllable

Ponderous, brute-sensed, contains its luminous close,

Privy to a summit victory's vast descent

And the portent of the soul's immense uprise.


All here where each thing seems its lonely self

Are figures of the sole transcendent One:

Only by him they are, his breath is their life;

An unseen Presence moulds the oblivious clay.

A playmate in the mighty Mother's game,

One came upon the dubious whirling globe

To hide from her pursuit in force and form.

A secret spirit in the Inconscient's sleep,

A shapeless Energy, a voiceless Word,

He was here before the elements could emerge,

Before there was light of mind or life could breathe.

Accomplice of her cosmic huge pretence,

His semblances he turns to real shapes

And makes the symbol equal with the truth:

He gives to his timeless thoughts a form in Time.

He is the substance, he the self of things;

She has forged from him her works of skill and might:

She wraps him in the magic of her moods

And makes of his myriad truths her countless dreams.

The Master of being has come down to her,

An immortal child born in the fugitive years.

In objects wrought, in the persons she conceives,

Dreaming she chases her idea of him,

And catches here a look and there a gest:

Ever he repeats in them his ceaseless births.

He is the Maker and the world he made,

He is the vision and he is the Seer;

He is himself the actor and the act,

He is himself the knower and the known,

He is himself the dreamer and the dream.

There are Two who are One and play in many worlds;

In Knowledge and Ignorance they have spoken and met

And light and darkness are their eyes' interchange;

Our pleasure and pain are their wrestle and embrace,

Our deeds, our hopes are intimate to their tale;

They are married secretly in our thought and life.

The universe is an endless masquerade:

For nothing here is utterly what it seems;

It is a dream-fact vision of a truth

Which but for the dream would not be wholly true,

A phenomenon stands out significant

Against dim backgrounds of eternity;

We accept its face and pass by all it means;

A part is seen, we take it for the whole.

Thus have they made their play with us for roles:

Author and actor with himself as scene,

He moves there as the Soul, as Nature she.

Here on the earth where we must fill our parts,

We know not how shall run the drama's course;

Our uttered sentences veil in their thought.

Her mighty plan she holds back from our sight:

She has concealed her glory and her bliss

And disguised the Love and Wisdom in her heart;

Of all the marvel and beauty that are hers,

Only a darkened little we can feel.

He too wears a diminished godhead here;

He has forsaken his omnipotence,

His calm he has foregone and infinity.

He knows her only, he has forgotten himself;

To her he abandons all to make her great.

He hopes in her to find himself anew,

Incarnate, wedding his infinity's peace

To her creative passion's ecstasy.

Although possessor of the earth and heavens,

He leaves to her the cosmic management

And watches all, the Witness of her scene.

A supernumerary on her stage,

He speaks no words or hides behind the wings.

He takes birth in her world, waits on her will,

Divines her enigmatic gesture's sense,

The fluctuating chance turns of her mood,

Works out her meanings she seems not to know

And serves her secret purpose in long Time.

As one too great for him he worships her;

He adores her as his regent of desire,

He yields to her as the mover of his will,

He burns the incense of his nights and days

Offering his life, a splendour of sacrifice.

A rapt solicitor for her love and grace,

His bliss in her to him is his whole world:

He grows through her in all his being's powers;

He reads by her God's hidden aim in things.

Or, a courtier in her countless retinue,

Content to be with her and feel her near

He makes the most of the little that she gives

And all she does drapes with his own delight.

A glance can make his whole day wonderful,

A word from her lips with happiness wings the hours.

He leans on her for all he does and is:

He builds on her largesses his proud fortunate days

And trails his peacock-plumaged joy of life

And suns in the glory of her passing smile.

In a thousand ways he serves her royal needs;

He makes the hours pivot around her will,

Makes all reflect her whims; all is their play:

This whole wide world is only he and she.


This is the knot that ties together the stars:

The Two who are one are the secret of all power,

The Two who are one are the might and right in things.

His soul, silent, supports the world and her,

His acts are her commandment's registers.

Happy, inert, he lies beneath her feet:

His breast he offers for her cosmic dance

Of which our lives are the quivering theatre,

And none could bear but for his strength within,

Yet none would leave because of his delight.

His works, his thoughts have been devised by her,

His being is a mirror vast of hers:

Active, inspired by her he speaks and moves;

His deeds obey her heart's unspoken demands:

Passive, he bears the impacts of the world

As if her touches shaping his soul and life:

His journey through the days is her sun-march;

He runs upon her roads; hers is his course.

A witness and student of her joy and dole,

A partner in her evil and her good,

He has consented to her passionate ways,

He is driven by her sweet and dreadful force.

His sanctioning name initials all her works;

His silence is his signature to her deeds;

In the execution of her drama's scheme,

In her fancies of the moment and its mood,

In the march of this obvious ordinary world

Where all is deep and strange to the eyes that see

And Nature's common forms are marvel-wefts,

She through his witness sight and motion of might

Unrolls the material of her cosmic Act,

Her happenings that exalt and smite the soul,

Her force that moves, her powers that save and slay,

Her Word that in the silence speaks to our hearts,

Her silence that transcends the summit Word,

Her heights and depths to which our spirit moves,

Her events that weave the texture of our lives

And all by which we find or lose ourselves,

Things sweet and bitter, magnificent and mean,

Things terrible and beautiful and divine.

Her empire in the cosmos she has built,

He is governed by her subtle and mighty laws.

His consciousness is a babe upon her knees,

His being a field of her vast experiment,

Her endless space is the playground of his thoughts;

She binds to knowledge of the shapes of Time

And the creative error of limiting mind

And chance that wears the rigid face of fate

And her sport of death and pain and Nescience,

His changed and struggling immortality.

His soul is a subtle atom in a mass,

His substance a material for her works.

His spirit survives amid the death of things,

He climbs to eternity through being's gaps,

He is carried by her from Night to deathless Light.

This grand surrender is his free-will's gift,

His pure transcendent force submits to hers.

In the mystery of her cosmic ignorance,

In the insoluble riddle of her play,

A creature made of perishable stuff,

In the pattern she has set for him he moves,

He thinks with her thoughts, with her trouble his bosom heaves;

He seems the thing that she would have him seem,

He is whatever her artist will can make.

Although she drives him on her fancy's roads,

At play with him as with her child or slave,

To freedom and the Eternal's mastery

And immortality's stand above the world,

She moves her seeming puppet of an hour.

Even in his mortal session in body's house,

An aimless traveller between birth and death,

Ephemeral dreaming of immortality,

To reign she spurs him. He takes up her powers;

He has harnessed her to the yoke of her own law.

His face of human thought puts on a crown.

Held in her leash, bound to her veiled caprice,

He studies her ways if so he may prevail

Even for an hour and she work out his will;

He makes of her his moment passion's serf:

To obey she feigns, she follows her creature's lead:

For him she was made, lives only for his use.

But conquering her, then is he most her slave;

He is her dependent, all his means are hers;

Nothing without her he can, she rules him still.

At last he wakes to a memory of Self:

He sees within the face of deity,

The Godhead breaks out through the human mould:

Her highest heights she unmasks and is his mate.

Till then he is a plaything in her game;

Her seeming regent, yet her fancy's toy,

A living robot moved by her energy's springs,

He acts as in the movements of a dream,

An automaton stepping in the grooves of Fate,

He stumbles on driven by her whip of Force:

His thought labours, a bullock in Time's fields;

His will he thinks his own, is shaped in her forge.

Obedient to World-Nature's dumb control,

Driven by his own formidable Power,

His chosen partner in a titan game,

Her will he has made the master of his fate,

Her whim the dispenser of his pleasure and pain;

He has sold himself into her regal power

For any blow or boon that she may choose:

Even in what is suffering to our sense,

He feels the sweetness of her mastering touch,

In all experience meets her blissful hands;

On his heart he bears the happiness of her tread

And the surprise of her arrival's joy

In each event and every moment's chance.

All she can do is marvellous in his sight:

He revels in her, a swimmer in her sea,

A tireless amateur of her world-delight,

He rejoices in her every thought and act

And gives consent to all that she can wish;

Whatever she desires he wills to be:

The Spirit, the innumerable One,

He has left behind his lone eternity,

He is an endless birth in endless Time,

Her finite's multitude in an infinite Space.


The master of existence lurks in us

And plays at hide-and-seek with his own Force;

In Nature's instrument loiters secret God.

The Immanent lives in man as in his house;

He has made the universe his pastime's field,

A vast gymnasium of his works of might.

All- knowing he accepts our darkened state,

Divine, wears shapes of animal or man;

Eternal, he assents to Fate and Time,

Immortal, dallies with mortality.

The All- Conscious ventured into Ignorance,

The All- Blissful bore to be insensible.

Incarnate in a world of strife and pain,

He puts on joy and sorrow like a robe

And drinks experience like a strengthening wine.

He whose transcendence rules the pregnant Vasts,

Prescient now dwells in our subliminal depths,

A luminous individual Power, alone.

The Absolute, the Perfect, the Alone

Has called out of the Silence his mute Force

Where she lay in the featureless and formless hush

Guarding from Time by her immobile sleep

The ineffable puissance of his solitude.

The Absolute, the Perfect, the Alone

Has entered with his silence into space:

He has fashioned these countless persons of one self;

He has built a million figures of his power;

He lives in all, who lived in his Vast alone;

Space is himself and Time is only he.

The Absolute, the Perfect, the Immune,

One who is in us as our secret self,

Our mask of imperfection has assumed,

He has made this tenement of flesh his own,

His image in the human measure cast

That to his divine measure we might rise;

Then in a figure of divinity

The Maker shall recast us and impose

A plan of godhead on the mortal's mould

Lifting our finite minds to his infinite,

Touching the moment with eternity.

This transfiguration is earth's due to heaven:

A mutual debt binds man to the Supreme:

His nature we must put on as he put ours;

We are sons of God and must be even as he:

His human portion, we must grow divine.

Our life is a paradox with God for key.


But meanwhile all is a shadow cast by a dream

And to the musing and immobile spirit

Life and himself don the aspect of a myth,

The burden of a long unmeaning tale.

For the key is hid and by the Inconscient kept;

The secret God beneath the threshold dwells.

In a body obscuring the immortal Spirit

A nameless Resident vesting unseen powers

With Matter's shapes and motives beyond thought

And the hazard of an unguessed consequence,

An omnipotent indiscernible Influence,

He sits, unfelt by the form in which he lives

And veils his knowledge by the groping mind.

A wanderer in a world his thoughts have made,

He turns in a chiaroscuro of error and truth

To find a wisdom that on high is his.

As one forgetting he searches for himself;

As if he had lost an inner light he seeks:

As a sojourner lingering amid alien scenes

He journeys to a home he knows no more.

His own self's truth he seeks who is the Truth;

He is the Player who became the play,

He is the Thinker who became the thought;

He is the many who was the silent One.

In the symbol figures of the cosmic Force

And in her living and inanimate signs

And in her complex tracery of events

He explores the ceaseless miracle of himself,

Till the thousandfold enigma has been solved

In the single light of an all-witnessing Soul.

This was his compact with his mighty mate,

For love of her and joined to her for ever

To follow the course of Time's eternity,

Amid magic dramas of her sudden moods

And the surprises of her masked Idea

And the vicissitudes of her vast caprice.

Two seem his goals, yet ever are they one

And gaze at each other over bourneless Time;

Spirit and Matter are their end and source.

A seeker of hidden meanings in life's forms,

Of the great Mother's wide uncharted will

And the rude enigma of her terrestrial ways

He is the explorer and the mariner

On a secret inner ocean without bourne:

He is the adventurer and cosmologist

Of a magic earth's obscure geography.

In her material order's fixed design

Where all seems sure and, even when changed, the same,

Even though the end is left for ever unknown

And ever unstable is life's shifting flow,

His paths are found for him by silent fate;

As stations in the ages' weltering flood

Firm lands appear that tempt and stay awhile,

Then new horizons lure the mind's advance.

There comes no close to the finite's boundlessness,

There is no last certitude in which thought can pause

And no terminus to the soul's experience.

A limit, a farness never wholly reached,

An unattained perfection calls to him

From distant boundaries in the Unseen:

A long beginning only has been made.


This is the sailor on the flow of Time,

This is World-Matter's slow discoverer,

Who, launched into this small corporeal birth,

Has learned his craft in tiny bays of self,

But dares at last unplumbed infinitudes,

A voyager upon eternity's seas.

In his world-adventure's crude initial start

Behold him ignorant of his godhead's force,

Timid initiate of its vast design.

An expert captain of a fragile craft,

A trafficker in small impermanent wares,

At first he hugs the shore and shuns the breadths,

Dares not to affront the far-off perilous main.

He in a petty coastal traffic plies,

His pay doled out from port to neighbour port,

Content with his safe round's unchanging course,

He hazards not the new and the unseen.

But now he hears the sound of larger seas.

A widening world calls him to distant scenes

And journeyings in a larger vision's arc

And peoples unknown and still unvisited shores.

On a commissioned keel his merchant hull

Serves the world's commerce in the riches of Time

Severing the foam of a great land-locked sea

To reach unknown harbour lights in distant climes

And open markets for life's opulent arts,

Rich bales, carved statuettes, hued canvases,

And jewelled toys brought for an infant's play

And perishable products of hard toil

And transient splendours won and lost by the days.

Or passing through a gate of pillar-rocks,

Venturing not yet to cross oceans unnamed

And journey into a dream of distances

He travels close to unfamiliar coasts

And finds new haven in storm-troubled isles,

Or, guided by a sure compass in his thought,

He plunges through a bright haze that hides the stars,

Steering on the trade-routes of Ignorance.

His prow pushes towards undiscovered shores,

He chances on unimagined continents:

A seeker of the islands of the Blest,

He leaves the last lands, crosses the ultimate seas,

He turns to eternal things his symbol quest;

Life changes for him its time-constructed scenes,

Its images veiling infinity.

Earth's borders recede and the terrestrial air

Hangs round him no longer its translucent veil.

He has crossed the limit of mortal thought and hope,

He has reached the world's end and stares beyond;

The eyes of mortal body plunge their gaze

Into Eyes that look upon eternity.

A greater world Time's traveller must explore.

At last he hears a chanting on the heights

And the far speaks and the unknown grows near:

He crosses the boundaries of the unseen

And passes over the edge of mortal sight

To a new vision of himself and things.

He is a spirit in an unfinished world

That knows him not and cannot know itself:

The surface symbol of his goalless quest

Takes deeper meanings to his inner view;

His is a search of darkness for the light,

Of mortal life for immortality.

In the vessel of an earthly embodiment

Over the narrow rails of limiting sense

He looks out on the magic waves of Time

Where mind like a moon illumines the world's dark.

There is limned ever retreating from the eyes,

As if in a tenuous misty dream-light drawn,

The outline of a dim mysterious shore.

A sailor on the Inconscient's fathomless sea,

He voyages through a starry world of thought

On Matter's deck to a spiritual sun.

Across the noise and multitudinous cry,

Across the rapt unknowable silences,

Through a strange mid-world under supernal skies,

Beyond earth's longitudes and latitudes,

His goal is fixed outside all present maps.

But none learns whither through the unknown he sails

Or what secret mission the great Mother gave.

In the hidden strength of her omnipotent Will,

Driven by her breath across life's tossing deep,

Through the thunder's roar and through the windless hush,

Through fog and mist where nothing more is seen,

He carries her sealed orders in his breast.

Late will he know, opening the mystic script,

Whether to a blank port in the Unseen

He goes or, armed with her fiat, to discover

A new mind and body in the city of God

And enshrine the Immortal in his glory's house

And make the finite one with Infinity.

Across the salt waste of the endless years

Her ocean winds impel his errant boat,

The cosmic waters plashing as he goes,

A rumour around him and danger and a call.

Always he follows in her force's wake.

He sails through life and death and other life,

He travels on through waking and through sleep.

A power is on him from her occult force

That ties him to his own creation's fate,

And never can the mighty Traveller rest

And never can the mystic voyage cease

Till the nescient dusk is lifted from man's soul

And the morns of God have overtaken his night.

As long as Nature lasts, he too is there,

For this is sure that he and she are one;

Even when he sleeps, he keeps her on his breast:

Whoever leaves her, he will not depart

To repose without her in the Unknowable.

There is a truth to know, a work to do;

Her play is real; a Mystery he fulfils:

There is a plan in the Mother's deep world-whim,

A purpose in her vast and random game.

This ever she meant since the first dawn of life,

This constant will she covered with her sport,

To evoke a Person in the impersonal Void,

With the Truth-Light strike earth's massive roots of trance,

Wake a dumb self in the inconscient depths

And raise a lost Power from its python sleep

That the eyes of the Timeless might look out from Time

And the world manifest the unveiled Divine.

For this he left his white infinity

And laid on the spirit the burden of the flesh,

That Godhead's seed might flower in mindless Space.


End of Canto Four