Canto Two

      The Issue

      Awhile, withdrawn in secret fields of thought,

      Her mind moved in a many-imaged past

      That lived again and saw its end approach:

      Dying, it lived imperishably in her;

      Transient and vanishing from transient eyes,

      Invisible, a fateful ghost of self,

      It bore the future on its phantom breast.

      Along the fleeting event’s far-backward trail

      Regressed the stream of the insistent hours,

      And on the bank of the mysterious flood

      Peopled with well-loved forms now seen no more

      And the subtle images of things that were,

      Her witness spirit stood reviewing Time.

      All that she once had hoped and dreamed and been,

      Flew past her eagle-winged through memory’s skies.

      As in a many-hued flaming inner dawn,

      Her life’s broad highways and its sweet bypaths

      Lay mapped to her sun-clear recording view,

      From the bright country of her childhood’s days

      And the blue mountains of her soaring youth

      And the paradise groves and peacock wings of Love

      To joy clutched under the silent shadow of doom

      In a last turn where heaven raced with hell.

      Twelve passionate months led in a day of fate.

      An absolute supernatural darkness falls

      On man sometimes when he draws near to God:

      An hour arrives when fail all Nature’s means;

      Forced out from the protecting Ignorance

      And flung back on his naked primal need,

      He at length must cast from him his surface soul

      And be the ungarbed entity within:

      That hour had fallen now on Savitri.

      A point she had reached where life must be in vain

      Or, in her unborn element awake,

      Her will must cancel her body’s destiny.

      For only the unborn spirit’s timeless power

      Can lift the yoke imposed by birth in Time.

      Only the Self that builds this figure of self

      Can rase the fixed interminable line

      That joins these changing names, these numberless lives,

      These new oblivious personalities

      And keeps still lurking in our conscious acts

      The trail of old forgotten thoughts and deeds,

      Disown the legacy of our buried selves,

      The burdensome heirship to our vanished forms

      Accepted blindly by the body and soul.

      An episode in an unremembered tale,

      Its beginning lost, its motive and plot concealed,

      A once living story has prepared and made

      Our present fate, child of past energies.

      The fixity of the cosmic sequences

      Fastened with hidden inevitable links

      She must disrupt, dislodge by her soul’s force

      Her past, a block on the Immortal’s road,

      Make a rased ground and shape anew her fate.

      A colloquy of the original Gods

      Meeting upon the borders of the unknown,

      Her soul’s debate with embodied Nothingness

      Must be wrestled out on a dangerous dim background:

      Her being must confront its formless Cause,

      Against the universe weigh its single self.

      On the bare peak where Self is alone with Nought

      And life has no sense and love no place to stand,

      She must plead her case upon extinction’s verge,

      In the world’s death-cave uphold life’s helpless claim

      And vindicate her right to be and love.

      Altered must be Nature’s harsh economy;

      Acquittance she must win from her past’s bond,

      An old account of suffering exhaust,

      Strike out from Time the soul’s long compound debt

      And the heavy servitudes of the Karmic Gods,

      The slow revenge of unforgiving Law

      And the deep need of universal pain

      And hard sacrifice and tragic consequence.

      Out of a timeless barrier she must break,

      Penetrate with her thinking depths the Void’s monstrous hush,

      Look into the lonely eyes of immortal Death

      And with her nude spirit measure the Infinite’s night.

      The great and dolorous moment now was close.

      A mailed battalion marching to its doom,

      The last long days went by with heavy tramp,

      Long but too soon to pass, too near the end.

      Alone amid the many faces loved,

      Aware among unknowing happy hearts,

      Her armoured spirit kept watch upon the hours

      Listening for a foreseen tremendous step

      In the closed beauty of the inhuman wilds.

      A combatant in silent dreadful lists,

      The world unknowing, for the world she stood:

      No helper had she save the Strength within;

      There was no witness of terrestrial eyes;

      The Gods above and Nature sole below

      Were the spectators of that mighty strife.

      Around her were the austere sky-pointing hills,

      And the green murmurous broad deep-thoughted woods

      Muttered incessantly their muffled spell.

      A dense magnificent coloured self-wrapped life

      Draped in the