Only a little the God-light can stay:

 

The conditions in our world are such that the light of God cannot sty unadulterated, undeflected for more than a little while. It is obliged to withdraw. But the little that it stays, makes all the difference to our life.

 

Spiritual beauty illumining human sight

Lines with its passion and mystery Matter's mask

And squanders eternity on a beat of Time.

 

Beauty is of many kinds: physical beauty of form, vital beauty of life, aesthetic beauty. Here the poet speaks of spiritual beauty. Matter is a mask that has an outside and an inside. This mask of matter is lined inside with spiritual beauty. The mystery element in matter which our reasoning cannot explain and the intensity of movement that articulated dead inert matter with life and activity are due to this spiritual element. This supernatural beauty squanders, throws out, eternity on a beat of time. A single beat of time, a moment, a second, contains in itself the whole eternity. To us it looks like a passing moment, but it is a throb of eternity in a moment of time.

 

As when a soul draws near the sill of birth,

Adjoining mortal time to Timelessness,

A spark of deity lost in Matter's crypt

Its lustre vanishes in the inconscient planes,

That transitory glow of magic fire

So now dissolved in bright accustomed air.

 

There is a threshold standing between this world and the other world, eternity on one side and this domain of time on the other. When a soul crosses this sill to take birth in this world, the divine spark that is is lost in the crypt, the vault of Matter; it loses its awareness. The lustre of that spark vanishes in these Inconscient planes. Similarly the momentary glow of the fiery ray of Dawn dissolves in the earth’s accustomed air which is getting brighter. That means with the spread of common daylight, the beauty and glow of dawn recede.

 

The message ceased and waned the messenger.

 

The thrilling message of the advent of light, the birth of Consciousness is no more articulate. It fades away.

 

The single Call, the uncompanioned Power,

Drew back into some far-off secret world

The hue and marvel of the supernal beam.

 

The divine call to light and life, the lone Power oc consciousness that had come down, draws back its colourful and wondrous spiritual beam of light from this hackneyed atmosphere into its own secret home far away.

 

She looked no more on our mortality.

 

The Goddess, the Deity, looks no more on our world of mortality. Mortality is a state of being bound by death. The earth-life is death-bound. That is why it is called mortal.

 

The excess of beauty natural to God-kind

Could not uphold its claim on time-born eyes;

Too mystic-real for space-tenancy

Her body of glory was expunged from heaven.

 

There is an attenuated beauty that is natural to earth-life. Very different is the luxuriant beauty which is natural to God-kind and cannot be held by mortal eyes. It is too dazzling for the human, time-born sight to behold. The Mother used to say that the supramental sun looks black to human sight. It is so bright, so dazzling that it is beyond the range of our physical sight. Thus the body of glory of the Goddess Dawn gets ‘expunged’, expelled, cleared from heaven—from the sky. It was too mystic, but at the same time real. Mystic is visionary, not substantial, and yet it is real—too unusual to be a tenant of this earth-space.

 

The rarity and wonder lived no more.

 

What is left is:

 

There was the common light of earthly day.

 

In that common light,

 

Affranchised from the respite of fatigue

Once more the rumour of the speed of Life

Pursued the cycles of her blinded quest.

 

Till this outbreak of light and the Dawn, the movement of life had a spell of rest. The journey of life had been suspended. But now that respite is over. ‘Affranchised’, freed from that respite of fatigue, the report of the speed of life gathers momentum; it goes on its usual blind way. Life is in quest of something but it pursues it blindly in cycles after cycles. Now once more that quest is resumed.

 

All sprang to their unvarying daily acts;

The thousand peoples of the soil and tree

Obeyed the unforeseeing instant's urge,

And, leader here with his uncertain mind,

Alone who stares at the future's covered face,

Man lifted up the burden of his fate.

 

Now everyone resumes the unchanging routine mechanically. The countless creatures of land and air, animals, birds, start once again following blindly the impulse of the moment,—the moment that is hardly aware of the next step. And man, too, who is the leader of all creatures on this evolving earth despite his unsure mental direction, who alone among all the living beings on earth looks up and gazes at the veiled face of the future, lifts up the burden of his destiny which has been temporarily laid down during the ‘respite of fatigue’. Man is unique in as much as he is not content to live in the present like other creatures; he dares to look ahead and peer into the future which is in the womb of to time. Though he lives mostly in the present, there is something in man which looks beyond. The face, the eyes of all the animals are turned earthward. Man is the only one whose eyes are turned upward. That is why Sri Aurobindo speaks elsewhere of man ‘who looks at his companion stars’.