Awake she endured the moments’ serried march

And looked on this green smiling dangerous world,

And heard the ignorant cry of living things.

Amid the trivial sounds, the unchanging scene

Her soul arose confronting Time and Fate.

(Savitri, p. 10)

The anguish of the entire world was locked in her breast, and she spoke of it to none—because none would understand her, none had power to help her in that dire moment when everything was locked in the fate of this vast creation.

 

Too well she loved to speak a fateful word

And lay her burden on his happy head;

She pressed the outsurging grief back into her breast

To dwell within silent, unhelped, alone.

 

But Satyavan sometimes half understood,

Or felt at least with the uncertain answer

Of our thought-blinded hearts the unuttered need,

The unplumbed abyss of her deep passionate want.

 

 

Thus in the silent chamber of her soul

Cloistering her love to live with secret grief

She dwelt like a dumb priest with hidden gods

Unappeased by the wordless offering of her days,

Lifting to them her sorrow like frankincense,

Her life the altar, herself the sacrifice.

 

Yet ever they grew into each other more

Until it seemed no power could rend apart,

Since even the body's walls could not divide.

 

For when he wandered in the forest, oft

Her conscious spirit walked with him and knew

His actions as if in herself he moved;

He, less aware, thrilled with her from afar.

Always the stature of her passion grew;

Grief, fear became the food of mighty love.

 

Increased by its torment it filled the whole world;

It was all her life, became her whole earth and heaven.

Although life-born, an infant of the hours,

Immortal it walked unslayable as the gods:

Her spirit stretched measureless in strength divine,

An anvil for the blows of Fate and Time:

Or tired of sorrow's passionate luxury,

Grief's self became calm, dull-eyed, resolute,

Awaiting some issue of its fiery struggle,

Some deed in which it might for ever cease,

Victorious over itself and death and tears.

The year now paused upon the brink of change.

 

No more the storms sailed with stupendous wings

And thunder strode in wrath across the world,

But still was heard a muttering in the sky

And rain dripped wearily through the mournful air

And grey slow-drifting clouds shut in the earth.

 

So her grief's heavy sky shut in her heart.

 

A still self hid behind but gave no light:

No voice came down from the forgotten heights;

Only in the privacy of its brooding pain

Her human heart spoke to the body's fate.

(pp. 472-73)

 

The poet has presented this plight of Savitri on the day of her reckoning right at the beginning of the epic. But what we have at the beginning is not a flashback of what is to come in the course of events. This is the plight of Savitri in her human state. What we have at the beginning is the account of things happening in the Transcendent, in the World of Truth; it is here things are poised for action in the terrestrial play:

 

A guardian of the unconsoled abyss

Inheriting the long agony of the globe,

A stone-still figure of high and godlike Pain

Stared into space with fixed regardless eye

That saw grief's timeless depths but not life's goal.

Afflicted by his harsh divinity,

Bound to his throne, he waited unappeased

The daily oblation of her unwept tears.

(p. 10)

 

The Mother was asked: “Why did you come like us? Why did you not come as you truly are?” She answered: “Because if I did not come like you, I could never be close to you and I would not be able to tell you: ‘Become what I am.’ ”