Golden Bridge Sri Aurobindo Ashram Delhi Branch

Savitri: Book 3 Canto 4 Section 1



Illumining breath to think and plasm to feel,

He labours with his slow and sceptic brain

Helped by the reason’s vacillating fires,

To make his thought and will a magic door

For knowledge to enter the darkness of the world

And love to rule a realm of strife and hate.

A mind impotent to reconcile heaven and earth

And tied to Matter with a thousand bonds,

He lifts himself to be a conscious god.

Even when a glory of wisdom crowns his brow,

When mind and spirit shed a grandiose ray

To exalt this product of the sperm and gene,

This alchemist’s miracle from plasm and gas,

And he who shared the animal’s run and crawl

Lifts his thought-stature to the Immortal’s heights,

His life still keeps the human middle way;

His body he resigns to death and pain,

Abandoning Matter, his too heavy charge.

A thaumaturge sceptic of miracles,

A spirit left sterile of its occult power

By an unbelieving brain and credulous heart,

He leaves the world to end where it began:

His work unfinished he claims a heavenly prize.

Thus has he missed creation’s absolute.

Half-way he stops his star of destiny:

A vast and vain long-tried experiment,

An ill-served high conception doubtfully done,

The world’s life falters on not seeing its goal,—

A zigzag towards unknown dangerous ground

Ever repeating its habitual walk,

Ever retreating after marches long



And hardiest victories without sure result,

Drawn endlessly an inconclusive game.

Savitri: Book 3 Canto 4 Section 1



His day is a moment in perpetual Time;

He is the prey of the minutes and the hours.

Assailed on earth and unassured of heaven,

Descended here unhappy and sublime,

A link between the demigod and the beast,

He knows not his own greatness nor his aim;

He has forgotten why he has come and whence.

His spirit and his members are at war;

His heights break off too low to reach the skies,

His mass is buried in the animal mire.

A strange antinomy is his nature’s rule.

A riddle of opposites is made his field:

Freedom he asks but needs to live in bonds,

He has need of darkness to perceive some light

And need of grief to feel a little bliss;

He has need of death to find a greater life.

All sides he sees and turns to every call;

He has no certain light by which to walk;

His life is a blind-man’s-buff, a hide-and-seek;

He seeks himself and from himself he runs;

Meeting himself, he thinks it other than he.

Always he builds, but finds no constant ground,

Always he journeys, but nowhere arrives;

He would guide the world, himself he cannot guide;

He would save his soul, his life he cannot save.

The light his soul had brought his mind has lost;

All he has learned is soon again in doubt;

A sun to him seems the shadow of his thoughts,

Then all is shadow again and nothing true:

Unknowing what he does or whither he tends

He fabricates signs of the Real in Ignorance.

He has hitched his mortal error to Truth’s star.

Wisdom attracts him with her luminous masks,

But never has he seen the face behind:

A giant Ignorance surrounds his lore.

Assigned to meet the cosmic mystery

In the dumb figure of a material world,

His passport of entry false and his personage,

He is compelled to be what he is not;

He obeys the Inconscience he had come to rule

And sinks in Matter to fulfil his soul.

Awakened from her lower driven forms

The Earth-Mother gave her forces to his hands

And painfully he guards the heavy trust;

His mind is a lost torch-bearer on her roads.

Savitri: Book 3 Canto 4 Section 1



THEN suddenly there rose a sacred stir.

Amid the lifeless silence of the Void

In a solitude and an immensity

A sound came quivering like a loved footfall

Heard in the listening spaces of the soul;

A touch perturbed his fibres with delight.

An Influence had approached the mortal range,

A boundless Heart was near his longing heart,

A mystic Form enveloped his earthly shape.

All at her contact broke from silence’ seal;

Spirit and body thrilled identified,

Linked in the grasp of an unspoken joy;

Mind, members, life were merged in ecstasy.

Intoxicated as with nectarous rain

His nature’s passioning stretches flowed to her,

Flashing with lightnings, mad with luminous wine.

All was a limitless sea that heaved to the moon.

A divinising stream possessed his veins,

His body’s cells awoke to spirit sense,

Each nerve became a burning thread of joy:

Tissue and flesh partook beatitude.

Alight, the dun unplumbed subconscient caves

Thrilled with the prescience of her longed-for tread

And filled with flickering crests and praying tongues.

Even lost in slumber, mute, inanimate

His very body answered to her power.

The One he worshipped was within him now:

Flame-pure, ethereal-tressed, a mighty Face

Appeared and lips moved by immortal words;

Lids, Wisdom’s leaves, drooped over rapture’s orbs.

A marble monument of ponderings, shone

A forehead, sight’s crypt, and large like ocean’s gaze

Towards Heaven, two tranquil eyes of boundless thought

Looked into man’s and saw the god to come.

Savitri : Book 3 Canto 2



A Heart was felt in the spaces wide and bare,

A burning Love from white spiritual founts

Annulled the sorrow of the ignorant depths;

Suffering was lost in her immortal smile.

A Life from beyond grew conqueror here of death;

To err no more was natural to mind;

Wrong could not come where all was light and love.

The Formless and the Formed were joined in her:

Immensity was exceeded by a look,

A Face revealed the crowded Infinite.

Incarnating inexpressibly in her limbs

The boundless joy the blind world-forces seek,

Her body of beauty mooned the seas of bliss.

At the head she stands of birth and toil and fate,

In their slow round the cycles turn to her call;

Alone her hands can change Time’s dragon base.

Hers is the mystery the Night conceals;

The spirit’s alchemist energy is hers;

She is the golden bridge, the wonderful fire.

The luminous heart of the Unknown is she,

A power of silence in the depths of God;

She is the Force, the inevitable Word,

The magnet of our difficult ascent,

The Sun from which we kindle all our suns,

The Light that leans from the unrealised Vasts,

The joy that beckons from the impossible,

The Might of all that never yet came down.

All Nature dumbly calls to her alone

To heal with her feet the aching throb of life

And break the seals on the dim soul of man

And kindle her fire in the closed heart of things.

All here shall be one day her sweetness’ home,

All contraries prepare her harmony;

Towards her our knowledge climbs, our passion gropes;

In her miraculous rapture we shall dwell,

Her clasp shall turn to ecstasy our pain.

Our self shall be one self with all through her.

In her confirmed because transformed in her,

Our life shall find in its fulfilled response

Above, the boundless hushed beatitudes,

Below, the wonder of the embrace divine.

Savitri: Book 3 Canto 1 Section 1



ALL IS too little that the world can give:

Its power and knowledge are the gifts of Time

And cannot fill the spirit’s sacred thirst.

Although of One these forms of greatness are

And by its breath of grace our lives abide,

Although more near to us than nearness’ self,

It is some utter truth of what we are;

Hidden by its own works, it seemed far-off,

Impenetrable, occult, voiceless, obscure.

The Presence was lost by which all things have charm,

The Glory lacked of which they are dim signs.

The world lived on made empty of its Cause,

Like love when the beloved’s face is gone.

The labour to know seemed a vain strife of Mind;

All knowledge ended in the Unknowable:

The effort to rule seemed a vain pride of Will;

A trivial achievement scorned by Time,

All power retired into the Omnipotent.

A cave of darkness guards the eternal Light.

A silence settled on his striving heart;

Absolved from the voices of the world’s desire,

He turned to the Ineffable’s timeless call.

A Being intimate and unnameable,

A wide compelling ecstasy and peace

Felt in himself and all and yet ungrasped,

Approached and faded from his soul’s pursuit

As if for ever luring him beyond.

Near, it retreated; far, it called him still.

Nothing could satisfy but its delight:

Its absence left the greatest actions dull,

Its presence made the smallest seem divine.

Savitri: Book 2 Canto 10 Section 1



This was the first means of our slow ascent

From the half-conscience of the animal soul

Living in a crowded press of shape-events

In a realm it cannot understand nor change;

Only it sees and acts in a given scene

And feels and joys and sorrows for a while.

The ideas that drive the obscure embodied spirit

Along the roads of suffering and desire

In a world that struggles to discover Truth,

Found here their power to be and Nature-force.

Here are devised the forms of an ignorant life

That sees the empiric fact as settled law,

Labours for the hour and not for eternity

And trades its gains to meet the moment’s call:

The slow process of a material mind

Which serves the body it should rule and use

And needs to lean upon an erring sense,

Was born in that luminous obscurity.

Advancing tardily from a limping start,

Crutching hypothesis on argument,

Throning its theories as certitudes,

It reasons from the half-known to the unknown,

Ever constructing its frail house of thought,

Ever undoing the web that it has spun.

A twilight sage whose shadow seems to him self,

Moving from minute to brief minute lives;

A king dependent on his satellites

Signs the decrees of ignorant ministers,

A judge in half-possession of his proofs,

A voice clamant of uncertainty’s postulates,

An architect of knowledge, not its source.

This powerful bondslave of his instruments

Thinks his low station Nature’s highest top,

Oblivious of his share in all things made

And haughtily humble in his own conceit

Believes himself a spawn of Matter’s mud

And takes his own creations for his cause.

To eternal light and knowledge meant to rise,

Up from man’s bare beginning is our climb;

Out of earth’s heavy smallness we must break,

We must search our nature with spiritual fire:

An insect crawl preludes our glorious flight;

Our human state cradles the future god,

Our mortal frailty an immortal force.