THE WORLD SOUL
Savitri canto fourteen

 

A covert answer to his seeking came.
In a far-shimmering background of Mind-Space
A glowing mouth was seen, a luminous shaft;
A recluse-gate it seemed, musing on joy,
A veiled retreat and escape to mystery.
Away from the unsatisfied surface world
It fled into the bosom of the unknown,
A well, a tunnel of the depts of God.
It plunged as if the mystic groove of hope
Throught many layers of formless voiceless self
To reach the last profound of the world's hearth,
And from that hearth there surged a wordless call
Pleading with some still impenetrable Mind,
Voicing some passionate unseen desire.
As if a beckoning finger of secrecy
Outstreched into a crystal mood of air,
Pointing at him from some near hidden depth,
As if a message from the world's deep soul,
An intimation of a lurking joy
That flowed out from a cup of brooding bliss,
There shimmered stealing out into the Mind
A mute and quivering ecstasy of light,
A passion and delicacy of roseate fire.
As one drawn to his lost spiritual home
Feels now the closeness of a waiting love,
Into a passage dim and tremulous
That clasped him in from day and night's pursuit,
He travelled led by a mysterious sound.
A murmur, multitudinous and lone,
All sounds it was turn, yet still the same.
A hidden call to unforseen delight
In the summoning voice of one long known and loved,
But nameless to the unremembering mind,
It led to rapture back the truant hearth.
The immortal cry ravished the captive ear,
Then, lowering its imperious mystery,
It sank to a whisper circling round the soul.
It seemed the yeaning of a lonely flute
That roamed along the shores of memory
And filled the eyes with tears and longing joy.
A cricket's rash and fiery single note,
It marked with shrill melody night's moonless hush
And beat upon a nerve of mystic sleep
Its hight insistent magical reveille.
Ajingling silver laught of anklet bells
Traveled the roads of a solitary heart;
Its dance solaced an eternal loneliness:
An old forgotten sweetness sobbing came.
Or from a far harmonious distance heard
The tinkling pace of a long caravan
It seemed at times, or a vast forst's hymn,
The solemn reminder of a temple gong,
A bee-croon honey-drunk in summer isles
Ardent with extasy in a slumberous noon,
Or the far anthem of a pilgrim sea.
An incence floated in the quiveing air,
A mystic happiness trmbled in the breast
As if the invisible Beloved had come
Assuming the sudden loveliness of a face
and close glad hands could size his fugitive feet
And the world change with the beauty of a smile.
Into a woderful bodiless realm he came,
The home of a passion without name or voice
A depth he felt answering to every height,
A nook was found that could embrace all worlds,
A point that was the conscious knot of space,
An hour eternal in the heart of Time.
The silent soul of all the world was there:
A Being lived, a Presence and a Power,
A Single person who eas himself and all
And cherished Nature's sweet and dangerous throbs
Transfigured into beats divine and pure.
To be continued.....
It bore within itself a seed, a flame,
A seed from which the Eternal is new-born,
Aflame that cancels death in mortal things.
All grew to all kindred and self and near,
The intimacy of God was everywhere,
No veil vas felt, no brute barrier inert,
Distance could not divide, Time could not change.
A fire of passion burned in spirit-depts,
A constant touch of sweetness linked all hearts,
The trob of one adoration's single bliss
In a rapt ether of undying love.
An inner happiness abode in all,
A sense of universal harmonies,
A mesureless secure eternity
Of truth and beauty and good and joy made one.
There was the welling core of finite life;
A formless spirit became the soul of form.