Savitri Talks - The Book of Love - Talk 2 (Part 1)

1. Classes at Shalwa Woods

2. But now the destined spot and hour were close;
Unknowing she had neared her nameless goal. ||101.1||
For though a dress of blind and devious chance
Is laid upon the work of all-wise Fate,
Our acts interpret an omniscient Force
That dwells in the compelling stuff of things,
And nothing happens in the cosmic play
But at its time and in its foreseen place. ||101.2||

3. To a space she came of soft and delicate air
That seemed a sanctuary of youth and joy,
A highland world of free and green delight
Where spring and summer lay together and strove
In indolent and amicable debate,
Inarmed, disputing with laughter who should rule. ||101.3||

4. There expectation beat wide sudden wings,
As if a soul had looked out from earth’s face
And all that was in her felt a coming change
And forgetting obvious joys and common dreams,
Obedient to Time’s call and the spirit’s fate,
Were lifted to a beauty calm and pure
That lived under the eyes of Eternity. ||101.4||
A crowd of mountainous heads assailed the sky
Pushing towards rival shoulders nearer heaven,
The armoured leaders of an iron line;
Earth prostrate lay beneath their feet of stone. ||101.5||

5. Below there crouched a dream of emerald woods
And gleaming borders solitary as sleep:
Pale waters ran like glimmering threads of pearl. ||101.6||
A sigh was straying among happy leaves;
Cool-perfumed with slow pleasure-burdened feet
Faint stumbling breezes faltered among flowers. ||101.7||
The white crane stood, a vivid motionless streak,
Peacock and parrot jewelled soil and tree,
The dove’s soft moan enriched the enamoured air
And fire-winged wild-drakes swam in silvery pools. ||101.8||

6. Earth couched alone with her great lover Heaven,
Uncovered to her consort’s purple eye. ||101.9||
In her luxurious ecstasy of joy
She squandered the love-music of her notes,
Wasted the passionate pattern of her blooms
And festival riot of her scents and hues. ||101.10||
A cry and leap and hurry were around,
The stealthy footfalls of her chasing things,
The shaggy emerald of her centaur mane,
The gold and sapphire of her warmth and blaze. ||101.11||

7. Magician of her rapt felicities,
Blithe, sensuous-hearted, careless and divine,
Life ran or hid in her delightful rooms;
Behind all brooded Nature’s grandiose calm. ||101.12||
Primeval peace was there and in its bosom
Held undisturbed the strife of bird and beast. ||101.13||
Man, the deep-browed artificer, had not come
To lay his hand on happy inconscient things,
Thought was not there nor the measurer, strong-eyed toil,
Life had not learned its discord with its aim. ||101.14||

8. The mighty Mother lay outstretched at ease. ||101.15||
All was in line with her first satisfied plan;
Moved by a universal will of joy
The trees bloomed in their green felicity
And the wild children brooded not on pain. ||101.16||
At the end reclined a stern and giant tract
Of tangled depths and solemn questioning hills
And peaks like a bare austerity of the soul,
Armoured, remote and desolately grand
Like the thought-screened infinities that lie
Behind the rapt smile of the Almighty’s dance. ||101.17||

9. A matted forest-head invaded heaven
As if a blue-throated ascetic peered
From the stone fastness of his mountain cell
Regarding the brief gladness of the days;
His vast extended spirit couched behind. ||101.18||
A mighty murmur of immense retreat
Besieged the ear, a sad and limitless call
As of a soul retiring from the world. ||101.19||
This was the scene which the ambiguous Mother
Had chosen for her brief felicitous hour;
Here in this solitude far from the world
Her part she began in the world’s joy and strife. ||101.20||

10. Here were disclosed to her the mystic courts,
The lurking doors of beauty and surprise,
The wings that murmur in the golden house,
The temple of sweetness and the fiery aisle. ||101.21||
A stranger on the sorrowful roads of Time,
Immortal under the yoke of death and fate,
A sacrificant of the bliss and pain of the spheres,
Love in the wilderness met Savitri. ||101.22||

11. Around her were the austere sky-pointing hills,
And the green murmurous broad deep-thoughted woods
Muttered incessantly their muffled spell. ||3.20||
A dense magnificent coloured self-wrapped life
Draped in the leaves’ vivid emerald monotone
And set with chequered sunbeams and blithe flowers
Immured her destiny’s secluded scene. ||3.21||
There had she grown to the stature of her spirit:
The genius of titanic silences
Steeping her soul in its wide loneliness
Had shown to her her self’s bare reality
And mated her with her environment. ||3.22||

12. Its solitude greatened her human hours
With a background of the eternal and unique. ||3.23||
A force of spare direct necessity
Reduced the heavy framework of man’s days
And his overburdening mass of outward needs
To a first thin strip of simple animal wants,
And the mighty wideness of the primitive earth
And the brooding multitude of patient trees
And the musing sapphire leisure of the sky
And the solemn weight of the slowly passing months
Had left in her deep room for thought and God. ||3.24||

13. Back
There was her drama’s radiant prologue lived. ||3.25||
A spot for the eternal’s tread on earth
Set in the cloistral yearning of the woods
And watched by the aspiration of the peaks
Appeared through an aureate opening in Time
Where stillness listening felt the unspoken word
And the hours forgot to pass towards grief and change. ||3.26||

14. Back
Close is my father’s creepered hermitage
Screened by the tall ranks of these silent kings,
Sung to by voices of the hue-robed choirs
Whose chants repeat transcribed in music’s notes
The passionate coloured lettering of the boughs
And fill the hours with their melodious cry. ||103.14||
Amid the welcome-hum of many bees
Invade our honied kingdom of the woods;
There let me lead thee into an opulent life. ||103.15||
Bare, simple is the sylvan hermit-life;
Yet is it clad with the jewelry of earth. ||103.16||

15. Back
Wild winds run—visitors midst the swaying tops,
Through the calm days heaven’s sentinels of peace
Couched on a purple robe of sky above
Look down on a rich secrecy and hush
And the chambered nuptial waters chant within. ||103.17||
Enormous, whispering, many-formed around
High forest gods have taken in their arms
The human hour, a guest of their centuried pomps. ||103.18||
Apparelled are the morns in gold and green,
Sunlight and shadow tapestry the walls
To make a resting chamber fit for thee. ||103.19||

16. Back
All she remembered on this day of Fate,
The road that hazarded not the solemn depths
But turned away to flee to human homes,
The wilderness with its mighty monotone,
The morning like a lustrous seer above,
The passion of the summits lost in heaven,
The titan murmur of the endless woods. ||102.1||
As if a wicket gate to joy were there
Ringed in with voiceless hint and magic sign,
Upon the margin of an unknown world
Reclined the curve of a sun-held recess;
Groves with strange flowers like eyes of gazing nymphs

17. Back
Peered from their secrecy into open space,
Boughs whispering to a constancy of light
Sheltered a dim and screened felicity,
And slowly a supine inconstant breeze
Ran like a fleeting sigh of happiness
Over slumberous grasses pranked with green and gold. ||102.2||
Hidden in the forest’s bosom of loneliness
Amid the leaves the inmate voices called,
Sweet like desires enamoured and unseen,
Cry answering to low insistent cry. ||102.3||

18. Back
Behind slept emerald dumb remotenesses,
Haunt of a Nature passionate, veiled, denied
To all but her own vision lost and wild. ||102.4||
Earth in this beautiful refuge free from cares
Murmured to the soul a song of strength and peace. ||102.5||
Only one sign was there of a human tread:
A single path, shot thin and arrowlike
Into this bosom of vast and secret life,
Pierced its enormous dream of solitude. ||102.6||

19. Back
Great Nature came to her recovered child;
I reigned in a kingdom of a nobler kind
Than men can build upon dull Matter’s soil;
I met the frankness of the primal earth,
I enjoyed the intimacy of infant God. ||103.28||
In the great tapestried chambers of her state
Free in her boundless palace I have dwelt
Indulged by the warm mother of us all,
Reared with my natural brothers in her house
I lay in the wide bare embrace of heaven,
The sunlight’s radiant blessing clasped my brow,

20. The moonbeam’s silver ecstasy at night
Kissed my dim lids to sleep. Earth’s morns were mine;
Lured by faint murmurings with the green-robed hours
I wandered lost in woods, prone to the voice
Of winds and waters, partner of the sun’s joy,
A listener to the universal speech:
My spirit satisfied within me knew
Godlike our birthright, luxuried our life
Whose close belongings are the earth and skies. ||103.29||

21. High beauty’s visitants my inmates were. ||103.34||
The neighing pride of rapid life that roams
Wind-maned through our pastures, on my seeing mood
Cast shapes of swiftness; trooping spotted deer
Against the vesper sky became a song
Of evening to the silence of the soul. ||103.35||

22. I caught for some eternal eye the sudden
Kingfisher flashing to a darkling pool;
A slow swan silvering the azure lake,
A shape of magic whiteness, sailed through dream;
Leaves trembling with the passion of the wind
And wandering wings nearing from infinity
Lived on the tablets of my inner sight;
Mountains and trees stood there like thoughts from God. ||103.36||

23. Pranked butterflies, the conscious flowers of air,
The brilliant long bills in their vivid dress,
The peacock scattering on the breeze his moons
Painted my memory like a frescoed wall. ||103.37||
I carved my vision out of wood and stone;
I caught the echoes of a word supreme
And metred the rhythm beats of infinity
And listened through music for the eternal Voice. ||103.38||
I felt a covert touch, I heard a call,
But could not clasp the body of my God
Or hold between my hands the World-Mother’s feet. ||103.39||

24. There hast thou paused, and marvelling borne eyes
Unknown, or heard a voice that forced thy life
To strain its rapture through thy listening soul? ||106.26||
Or, if my thought could trust this shimmering gaze,
It would say: thou hast not drunk from an earthly cup,
But stepping through azure curtains of the morn
Thou wast surrounded on a magic verge
In brighter countries than man’s eyes can bear. ||106.27||

25. Assailed by trooping voices of delight
And seized mid a sunlit glamour of the boughs
In faery woods, led down the gleaming slopes
Of Gundhamadan where the Apsaras roam,
Thy limbs have shared the sports which none has seen,
And in god-haunts thy human footsteps strayed,
Thy mortal bosom quivered with god-speech
And thy soul answered to a Word unknown. ||106.28||

26. What feet of gods, what ravishing flutes of heaven
Have thrilled high melodies round, from near and far
Approaching through the soft and revelling air,
Which still surprised thou hearest? They have fed
Thy silence on some red strange-ecstasied fruit
And thou hast trod the dim moon-peaks of bliss. ||106.29||

27. With strange inhuman paces on the soil,
Journeying as if upon an unseen road. ||136.1||
Around her on the green and imaged earth
The flickering screen of forests ringed her steps. ||136.2||
Its thick luxurious obstacle of boughs
Besieged her body pressing dimly through
In a rich realm of whispers palpable,
And all the murmurous beauty of the leaves
Rippled around her like an emerald robe. ||136.3||

28. Now the dusk shadowy trees stood close around
Like dreaming spirits and delaying night,
The grey-eyed pensive evening heard their steps,
And from all points the cries and movements came
Of the four-footed wanderers of the night
Approaching. Then a human rumour rose
Long alien to their solitary days,
Invading the charmed wilderness of leaves,
Once sacred to secluded loneliness,
With violent breaking of its virgin sleep. ||158.1||

29. Through the screened dusk it deepened still and there neared
Floating of many voices and the sound
Of many feet till on their sight broke in,
As if a coloured wave upon the eye,
The brilliant strenuous crowded life of man. ||158.2||

30. A cry and leap and hurry were around,
The stealthy footfalls of her chasing things,
The shaggy emerald of her centaur mane,
The gold and sapphire of her warmth and blaze. ||101.11||