Latest / Sri Aurobindo Studies / Savitri: a Legend and a Symbol by Sri Aurobindo, Book I The Book of Beginnings, Canto 4 The Secret Knowledge pp. 49-52

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Savitri: a Legend and a Symbol by Sri Aurobindo, Book I The Book of Beginnings, Canto 4 The Secret Knowledge pp. 49-52 · Sri Aurobindo Studies

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  But all is screened, subliminal, mystical.
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  It needs the intuitive heart, the inward turn.
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  It needs the power of a spiritual gaze.
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  Else to our waking mind, small moment look, a goalless voyage
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  seems our dubious coarse. Some chance has settled or
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  hazarded, some will or a necessity without aim or cause,
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  unwillingly compelled to emerge and be in this dense field where
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  nothing is plain or sure. Our very being seems to us
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  questionable, our life a vague experiment, the soul a
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  flickering light in a strange ignorant world.
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  The Earth. A brute mechanic accident, a net
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  of death in which by chance we live.
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  All we have learned appears a doubtful guess.
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  The achievement done. A passage or a phase whose
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  farther end is hidden from our sight.
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  A chance happening or a fortuitous fate.
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  Out of the unknown, we move to the unknown.
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  Ever surround our brief existence here, Gray shadows of
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  unanswered questionings, the dark in conscience, sineless
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  mysteries stand up unsolved behind fate's starting line.
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  An aspiration in the night's profound seed of a perishing
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  body and half lit mind uplift its lonely tongue of conscious
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  fire towards an undying light, forever lost only adheres sole
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  echo of its call, the dim reply in man's unknowing heart and
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  meats, not understanding why it came or for what reason is the
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  suffering. Here God sanctioned to the
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  paradox of life and the Riddle of the Immortal's birth in time.
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  Along a path of eon Serpentine. In the coiled blackness of her
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  nessient course, the earth goddess toils across the sands
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  of time. A being is in her whom she hopes
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  to know. A word speaks to her heart.
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  She cannot hear. A fate compels whose forms she
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  cannot see. In her unconscious orbit through
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  the void, out of her mindless depths, she strives to rise a
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  perilous life. Her gain, a struggling joy, a
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  thought that can conceive but hardly knows, arises slowly in
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  her and creates the idea. The speech that labels more than
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  it lights a trembling gladness that is less than bliss, invades
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  from all this beauty that must die.
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  Alarmed by the sorrow dragging at her feet, and conscious of
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  the high things not yet won ever, she nurses in her
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  sleepless breast an inward urge that takes from her rest and
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  peace. Ignorant and weary and
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  invincible, she seeks through the soul's war and quivering
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  pain, the pure perfection her marred nature needs.
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  A breath of Godhead on her stone and mire, a faith she craves
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  that can survive defeat. The sweetness of a love that
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  knows not death. The radiance of a truth forever
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  surer. A light grows in her, she
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  assumes a voice, her state she learns to read and the ACT she
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  has done, but the one needed truth eludes her grasp, herself,
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  and all of which she is the sign.
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  An inarticulate whisper drives her steps, of which she feels
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  the force but not the sense. A few rare intimations come as
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  guides. Immense divining flashes cleave
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  her brain, and sometimes in her hours of dream and muse the
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  truth that she has missed looks out on her as if far off.
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  And yet within her soul a change comes near that flees from her
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  surmise, and ever postponed compels attempt and hope it
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  seems too great for mortal hope to dare.
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  A vision meets her of supernal powers that draw her as if
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  mighty kinsmen lost, approaching with a strange great luminous
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  gaze. Then as she moved to all that
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  she has not, and stretches arms to what was never hers,
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  outstretching arms to the unconscious void.
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  Passionate, she prays to invisible forms of gods,
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  soliciting from dumb fate and toiling time what most she
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  needs. What most exceeds her scope.
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  A mind unvisited by illusion's gleams, a will expressive of
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  soul's deity, a strength not forced to stumble by its speed,
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  a joy that drags, not sorrow as its shade.
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  For these she yearns and feels them destined hers.
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  Heaven's privilege, she claims as her own right.
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  Just is her claim. The all witnessing gods approve,
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  clear in a greater light than reason owns our intuitions are
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  its title deeds. Our souls accept what our blind
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  thoughts refuse. The Earth's wing.
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  Chimeras are truth's deeds in heaven, the impossible God's
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  sign of things to be.