Canto Two

The Growth of the Flame

A land of mountains and wide sun-beat plains

And giant rivers pacing to vast seas,

A field of creation and spiritual hush,

Silence swallowing life’s acts into the deeps,

Of thought’s transcendent climb and heavenward leap,

A brooding world of reverie and trance,

Filled with the mightiest works of God and man,

Where Nature seemed a dream of the Divine

And beauty and grace and grandeur had their home,

Harboured the childhood of the incarnate Flame.

Over her watched millennial influences

And the deep godheads of a grandiose past

Looked on her and saw the future’s godheads come

As if this magnet drew their powers unseen.

Earth’s brooding wisdom spoke to her still breast;

Mounting from mind’s last peaks to mate with gods,

Making earth’s brilliant thoughts a springing-board

To dive into the cosmic vastnesses,

The knowledge of the thinker and the seer

Saw the unseen and thought the unthinkable,

Opened the enormous doors of the unknown,

Rent man’s horizons into infinity.

A shoreless sweep was lent to the mortal’s acts,

And art and beauty sprang from the human depths;

Nature and soul vied in nobility.

Ethics the human keyed to imitate heaven;

The harmony of a rich culture’s tones

Refined the sense and magnified its reach

To hear the unheard and glimpse the invisible

And taught the soul to soar beyond things known,

Inspiring life to greaten and break its bounds,

Aspiring to the Immortals’ unseen world.

Leaving earth’s safety daring wings of Mind

Bore her above the trodden fields of thought

Crossing the mystic seas of the Beyond

To live on eagle heights near to the Sun.

There Wisdom sits on her eternal throne.

All her life’s turns led her to symbol doors

Admitting to secret Powers that were her kin;

Adept of truth, initiate of bliss,

A mystic acolyte trained in Nature’s school,

Aware of the marvel of created things

She laid the secrecies of her heart’s deep muse

Upon the altar of the Wonderful;

Her hours were a ritual in a timeless fane;

Her acts became gestures of sacrifice.

Invested with a rhythm of higher spheres

The word was used as a hieratic means

For the release of the imprisoned spirit

Into communion with its comrade gods.

Or it helped to beat out new expressive forms

Of that which labours in the heart of life,

Some immemorial Soul in men and things,

Seeker of the unknown and the unborn

Carrying a light from the Ineffable

To rend the veil of the last mysteries.

Intense philosophies pointed earth to heaven

Or on foundations broad as cosmic Space

Upraised the earth-mind to superhuman heights.

Overpassing lines that please the outward eyes

But hide the sight of that which lives within

Sculpture and painting concentrated sense

Upon an inner vision’s motionless verge,

Revealed a figure of the invisible,

Unveiled all Nature’s meaning in a form,

Or caught into a body the Divine.

The architecture of the Infinite

Discovered here its inward-musing shapes

Captured into wide breadths of soaring stone:

Music brought down celestial yearnings, song

Held the merged heart absorbed in rapturous depths,

Linking the human with the cosmic cry;

The world-interpreting movements of the dance

Moulded idea and mood to a rhythmic sway

And posture; crafts minute in subtle lines

Eternised a swift moment’s memory

Or showed in a carving’s sweep, a cup’s design

The underlying patterns of the unseen:

Poems in largeness cast like moving worlds

And metres surging with the ocean’s voice

Translated by grandeurs locked in Nature’s heart

But thrown now into a crowded glory of speech

The beauty and sublimity of her forms,

The passion of her moments and her moods

Lifting the human word nearer to the god’s.

Man’s eyes could look into the inner realms;

His scrutiny discovered number’s law

And organised the motions of the stars,

Mapped out the visible fashioning of the world,

Questioned the process of his thoughts or made

A theorised diagram of mind and life.

These things she took in as her nature’s food,

But these alone could fill not her wide Self:

A human seeking limited by its gains,

To her they seemed the great and early steps

Hazardous of a young discovering spirit

Which saw not yet by its own native light;

It tapped the universe with testing knocks

Or stretched to find truth mind’s divining rod;

There was a growing out to numberless sides,

But not the widest seeing of the soul,

Not yet the vast direct immediate touch,

Nor yet the art and wisdom of the Gods.

A boundless knowledge greater than man’s thought,

A happiness too high for heart and sense

Locked in the world and yearning for release

She felt in her; waiting as yet for form,

It asked for objects around which to grow

And natures strong to bear without recoil

The splendour of her native royalty,

Her greatness and her sweetness and her bliss,

Her might to possess and her vast power to love:

Earth made a stepping-stone to conquer heaven,

The soul saw beyond heaven’s limiting boundaries,

Met a great light from the Unknowable

And dreamed of a transcendent action’s sphere.

Aware of the universal Self in all

She turned to living hearts and human forms,

Her soul’s reflections, complements, counterparts,

The close outlying portions of her being

Divided from her by walls of body and mind

Yet to her spirit bound by ties divine.

Overcoming invisible hedge and masked defence

And the loneliness that separates soul from soul,

She wished to make all one immense embrace

That she might house in it all living things

Raised into a splendid point of seeing light

Out of division’s dense inconscient cleft,

And make them one with God and world and her.

Only a few responded to her call:

Still fewer felt the screened divinity

And strove to mate its godhead with their own,

Approaching with some kinship to her heights.

Uplifted towards luminous secrecies

Or conscious of some splendour hidden above

They leaped to find her in a moment’s flash,

Glimpsing a light in a celestial vast,

But could not keep the vision and the power

And fell back to life’s dull ordinary tone.

A mind daring heavenly experiment,

Growing towards some largeness they felt near,

Testing the unknown’s bound with eager touch

They still were prisoned by their human grain:

They could not keep up with her tireless step;

Too small and eager for her large-paced will,

Too narrow to look with the unborn Infinite’s gaze

Their nature weary grew of things too great.

For even the close partners of her thoughts

Who could have walked the nearest to her ray,

Worshipped the power and light they felt in her

But could not match the measure of her soul.

A friend and yet too great wholly to know,

She walked in their front towards a greater light,

Their leader and queen over their hearts and souls,

One close to their bosoms, yet divine and far.

Admiring and amazed they saw her stride

Attempting with a godlike rush and leap

Heights for their human stature too remote

Or with a slow great many-sided toil

Pushing towards aims they hardly could conceive;

Yet forced to be the satellites of her sun

They moved unable to forego her light,

Desiring they clutched at her with outstretched hands

Or followed stumbling in the paths she made.

Or longing with their self of life and flesh

They clung to her for heart’s nourishment and support:

The rest they could not see in visible light;

Vaguely they bore her inner mightiness.

Or bound by the senses and the longing heart,

Adoring with a turbid human love,

They could not grasp the mighty spirit she was

Or change by closeness to be even as she.

Some felt her with their souls and thrilled with her,

A greatness felt near yet beyond mind’s grasp;

To see her was a summons to adore,

To be near her drew a high communion’s force.

So men worship a god too great to know,

Too high, too vast to wear a limiting shape;

They feel a Presence and obey a might,

Adore a love whose rapture invades their breasts;

To a divine ardour quickening the heart-beats,

A law they follow greatening heart and life.

Opened to the breath is a new diviner air,

Opened to man is a freer, happier world:

He sees high steps climbing to Self and Light.

Her divine parts the soul’s allegiance called:

It saw, it felt, it knew the deity.

Her will was puissant on their nature’s acts,

Her heart’s inexhaustible sweetness lured their hearts,

A being they loved whose bounds exceeded theirs;

Her measure they could not reach but bore her touch,

Answering with the flower’s answer to the sun

They gave themselves to her and asked no more.

One greater than themselves, too wide for their ken,

Their minds could not understand nor wholly know,

Their lives replied to hers, moved at her words:

They felt a godhead and obeyed a call,

Answered to her lead and did her work in the world;

Their lives, their natures moved compelled by hers

As if the truth of their own larger selves

Put on an aspect of divinity

To exalt them to a pitch beyond their earth’s.

They felt a larger future meet their walk;

She held their hands, she chose for them their paths:

They were moved by her towards great unknown things,

Faith drew them and the joy to feel themselves hers;

They lived in her, they saw the world with her eyes.

Some turned to her against their nature’s bent;

Divided between wonder and revolt,

Drawn by her charm and mastered by her will,

Possessed by her, her striving to possess,

Impatient subjects, their tied longing hearts

Hugging the bonds close of which they most complained,

Murmured at a yoke they would have wept to lose,

The splendid yoke of her beauty and her love:

Others pursued her with life’s blind desires

And claiming all of her as their lonely own,

Hastened to engross her sweetness meant for all.

As earth claims light for its lone separate need

Demanding her for their sole jealous clasp,

They asked from her movements bounded like their own

And to their smallness craved a like response.

Or they repined that she surpassed their grip,

And hoped to bind her close with longing’s cords.

Or finding her touch desired too strong to bear

They blamed her for a tyranny they loved,

Shrank into themselves as from too bright a sun,

Yet hankered for the splendour they refused.

Angrily enamoured of her sweet passionate ray

The weakness of their earth could hardly bear,

They longed but cried out at the touch desired

Inapt to meet divinity so close,

Intolerant of a Force they could not house.

Some drawn unwillingly by her divine sway

Endured it like a sweet but alien spell;

Unable to mount to levels too sublime,

They yearned to draw her down to their own earth.

Or forced to centre round her their passionate lives,

They hoped to bind to their heart’s human needs

Her glory and grace that had enslaved their souls.

But mid this world, these hearts that answered her call,

None could stand up her equal and her mate.

In vain she stooped to equal them with her heights,

Too pure that air was for small souls to breathe.

These comrade selves to raise to her own wide breadths

Her heart desired and fill with her own power

That a diviner Force might enter life,

A breath of Godhead greaten human time.

Although she leaned down to their littleness

Covering their lives with her strong passionate hands

And knew by sympathy their needs and wants

And dived in the shallow wave-depths of their lives

And met and shared their heart-beats of grief and joy

And bent to heal their sorrow and their pride,

Lavishing the might that was hers on her lone peak

To lift to it their aspiration’s cry,

And though she drew their souls into her vast

And surrounded with the silence of her deeps

And held as the great Mother holds her own,

Only her earthly surface bore their charge

And mixed its fire with their mortality:

Her greater self lived sole, unclaimed, within.

Oftener in dumb Nature’s stir and peace

A nearness she could feel serenely one;

The Force in her drew earth’s subhuman broods;

And to her spirit’s large and free delight

She joined the ardent-hued magnificent lives

Of animal and bird and flower and tree.

They answered to her with the simple heart.

In man a dim disturbing somewhat lives;

It knows but turns away from divine Light

Preferring the dark ignorance of the fall.

Among the many who came drawn to her

Nowhere she found her partner of high tasks,

The comrade of her soul, her other self

Who was made with her, like God and Nature, one.

Some near approached, were touched, caught fire, then failed,

Too great was her demand, too pure her force.

Thus lighting earth around her like a sun,

Yet in her inmost sky an orb aloof,

A distance severed her from those most close.

Puissant, apart her soul as the gods live.

As yet unlinked with the broad human scene,

In a small circle of young eager hearts,

Her being’s early school and closed domain,

Apprentice in the business of earth-life,

She schooled her heavenly strain to bear its touch,

Content in her little garden of the gods

As blooms a flower in an unvisited place.

Earth nursed, unconscious still, the inhabiting flame,

Yet something deeply stirred and dimly knew;

There was a movement and a passionate call,

A rainbow dream, a hope of golden change;

Some secret wing of expectation beat,

A growing sense of something new and rare

And beautiful stole across the heart of Time.

Then a faint whisper of her touched the soil,

Breathed like a hidden need the soul divines;

The eye of the great world discovered her

And wonder lifted up its bardic voice.

A key to a Light still kept in being’s cave,

The sun-word of an ancient mystery’s sense,

Her name ran murmuring on the lips of men

Exalted and sweet like an inspired verse

Struck from the epic lyre of rumour’s winds

Or sung like a chanted thought by the poet Fame.

But like a sacred symbol’s was that cult.

Admired, unsought, intangible to the grasp

Her beauty and flaming strength were seen afar

Like lightning playing with the fallen day,

A glory unapproachably divine.

No equal heart came close to join her heart,

No transient earthly love assailed her calm,

No hero passion had the strength to seize;

No eyes demanded her replying eyes.

A Power within her awed the imperfect flesh;

The self-protecting genius in our clay

Divined the goddess in the woman’s shape

And drew back from a touch beyond its kind

The earth-nature bound in sense-life’s narrow make.

The hearts of men are amorous of clay-kin

And bear not spirits lone and high who bring

Fire-intimations from the deathless planes

Too vast for souls not born to mate with heaven.

Whoever is too great must lonely live.

Adored he walks in mighty solitude;

Vain is his labour to create his kind,

His only comrade is the Strength within.

Thus was it for a while with Savitri.

All worshipped marvellingly, none dared to claim.

Her mind sat high pouring its golden beams,

Her heart was a crowded temple of delight.

A single lamp lit in perfection’s house,

A bright pure image in a priestless shrine,

Midst those encircling lives her spirit dwelt,

Apart in herself until her hour of fate.

End of Canto Two