Savitri First Edition

by Sri Aurobindo

Power worked, but none knew whence it came.

His walk through Time outstripped the human stride. Lonely his days and splendid like the sun’s.

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 w...

A new order substitutes for the divine.

Wherever the Gods act, they intervene.

One step more in Necessity’s long march. A term was set for every eager Power

He knew things by their soul and not their shape:

And all creation is an act of light.

Thus was a seed cast into endless Time.

All he had done was to prepare a field; His small beginnings asked for a mighty end: For all that he had been must now new-shape In him her joy to embody, to enshrine Her beauty and greatness in his house of life.

This Light comes not by struggle or by thought; In the mind’s silence the Transcendent acts And the hushed heart hears the unuttered Word. A

vast surrender was his only strength.

All seemed to have perished that was undivine: Yet some minutest dissident might escape And still a centre lurk of the blind force.

He felt the joy of others as his joy,

He bore the grief of others as his grief; His universal sympathy upbore, Immense like ocean, the creation’s load As earth upbears all beings’ sacrifice, Thrilled with the hidden Transcendent’s joy and peace.

There was no cleavage between soul and soul, There was no barrier between world and God.

Bliss, a Light, a Power, a flame-white Love Caught all into a sole immense embrace;

He felt the footsteps of a million wills Moving in unison to a single goal.

A sound came quivering like a loved footfall Heard in the listening spaces of the soul;

A touch perturbed his fibres with delight.

He has pitched a tent of life in desert Space.

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.

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.

He seeks himself and from himself he runs; Meeting himself, he thinks it other than he.

He obeys the Inconscience he has come to rule And sinks in Matter to fulfil his soul.

Cease not from knowledge, let thy toil be vast, No more in earthly limits pen thy force; Equal thy work with long unending Time’s.

All things shall change in God’s transfiguring hour.”

I know that thy creation cannot fail.

For even through the mists of mortal thought Infallible are thy mysterious steps, And, though Necessity dons the garb of Chance, Hidden in the blind shifts of Fate she keeps The slow calm logic of Infinity’s pace And the inviolate sequence of its will.

This strange irrational product of the mire, This compromise between the beast and God, Is not the crown of thy miraculous world.

One moment fill with thy eternity, Let thy infinity in one body live, All-Knowledge wrap one mind in seas of light, All-Love throb single in one human heart.

And with one gesture change all future time.

Translating heaven into a human shape Its brightness linked our transience to the Unknown.

They felt a larger future meet their walk;

Whoever is too great must lonely live, Adored he walks in mighty solitude; Vain is his labour to create his kins, His only comrade is the Strength within.

A casual passing phrase can change our life.

One force shall be your mover and your guide, One light shall be around you and within; Hand in strong hand confront Heaven’s question, life: Challenge the ordeal of the immense disguise.

A mystery wakes in our inconscient stuff, A bliss is born that can remake our life.

moment passed that was eternity’s ray, An hour began, the matrix of new Time.

Mountains and trees stood there like thoughts from God.

Descend, O Happiness, with thy moon-gold feet, Enrich earth’s floors upon whose sleep we lie.

Came into a new self and a new world.

If but this joy of life could last, nor pain Throw its bronze note into her rhythmed days!