A glowing orbit was her early term,

Years like gold raiment of the gods that pass;

Her youth sat throned in calm felicity.

 

But joy cannot endure until the end: 

There is a darkness in terrestrial things

That will not suffer long too glad a note.

 

On her too closed the inescapable Hand:

The armed Immortal bore the snare of Time.

Savitri’s moment of truth is the moment of truth of this creation. It is going to decide its entire fate. Yet suffering and desire associated with it are a part of a larger Ecstasy, untouched by death yet working under the fruitful spell of death. Savitri must accept them, Savitri must endure them. The lonely forest, green and smiling and dangerous, where the Antagonist is to arrive at the appointed moment foreseen and foretold by the heavenly Seer is the battleground for the occult confrontation. The eternal Hand is there, and it is under its sanction the performance of the world- and death-winning Sacrifice by Savitri is going to assure victory to her.

 

All the fierce question of man's hours relived.

 

The sacrifice of suffering and desire

Earth offers to the immortal Ecstasy

Began again beneath the eternal Hand.

 

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.

 

Immobile in herself, she gathered force.

 

This was the day when Satyavan must die.

 

(Savitri, p. 10)

Here is the inescapable Hand of the Being of Time, Kala-Purusha, and Savitri cannot but come under its formidable hold; she cannot but be clenched by it. How else can she conquer what she has come to conquer? She must know sorrow and suffering first that, knowing them, she can remove them. The Immortal accepts the travail and the burden, the demeaning ignominy of the mortal, shares the mortal’s lot in order to change it. To Savitri this has been offered by the Master of Evolution himself, even as she has stepped into this difficult and painful evolution.

 

There is a darkness in terrestrial things

That will not suffer long too glad a note.

 

On her too closed the inescapable Hand:

The armed Immortal bore the snare of Time.

 

One dealt with her who meets the burdened great.

 

Assigner of the ordeal and the path

Who chooses in this holocaust of the soul

Death, fall and sorrow as the spirit's goads,

The dubious godhead with his torch of pain

Lit up the chasm of the unfinished world

And called her to fill with her vast self the abyss.

 

August and pitiless in his calm outlook,

Heightening the Eternal's dreadful strategy,

He measured the difficulty with the might

And dug more deep the gulf that all must cross.

 

(Savitri, p. 17)

We live in a consciousness which knows not its own truth. We are cut off from Reality and the meaning of creation is veiled from our sight.

 

Yet a spiritual secret aid is there;

While a tardy Evolution's coils wind on

And Nature hews her way through adamant

A divine intervention thrones above.

 

Alive in a dead rotating universe

We whirl not here upon a casual globe

Abandoned to a task beyond our force;

Even through the tangled anarchy called Fate

And through the bitterness of death and fall

An outstretched Hand is felt upon our lives.

 

It is near us in unnumbered bodies and births;

In its unslackening grasp it keeps for us safe

The one inevitable supreme result

No will can take away and no doom change,

The crown of conscious Immortality,

The godhead promised to our struggling souls

When first man's heart dared death and suffered life.

 

(Savitri, pp. 58-59)

The godheads of little life have taken possession of things here as if there is some odd or puzzling divine law operating in a strange way, a law which made it necessary for its own secret purpose. The little deities hide themselves from Heaven’s eye and from behind the scene play havoc in the lives of we small creatures. Into a creative chaos all is cast and everything seems to be governed by Chaos. Through this maze and through this uncertainty our lives wind till all have found divine harmony.

 

But now the Light supreme is far away:

Our conscious life obeys the inconscience' laws;

To ignorant purposes and blind desires

Our hearts are moved by an ambiguous force;

Even our mind's conquests wear a battered crown.

 

A slowly changing order binds our will.

 

This is our doom until our souls are free.

 

A mighty Hand then rolls mind's firmaments back,

Infinity takes up the finite's acts

And Nature steps into the eternal Light.

Then only ends this dream of nether life.

 

(Savitri, p. 154)

Aswapati has entered into the House of the Spirit. There he feels the joy of others as his joy and the grief of others as his grief. There is the universal identity as is the Spirit’s with everything. What he experiences is, one Consciousness that made the countless worlds. He stood beyond this creation fulfilled on the world’s highest line, stood with the expectation of a mighty Descent changing everything here.

 

Life in his members lay down vast and mute;

Naked, unwalled, unterrified it bore

The immense regard of Immortality.

 

The last movement died and all at once grew still.

 

A weight that was the unseen Transcendent's hand

Laid on his limbs the Spirit's measureless seal,

Infinity swallowed him into shoreless trance.

 

(Savitri, p. 320)

Savitri has grown into full maidenhood and her Yogi-Father advises her to find a suitable mate for herself,—because none had approached her to claim her hand. He shall be the lyrist of her soul setting the chords of life into intense vibration, who shall make her give utterance to what is mute in her at present. In the process the two shall grow kindred harps one in the beats of difference and delight. They shall discover new notes of the eternal theme.

 

One force shall be your mover and your guide,

One light shall be around you and within;

Hand in strong hand confront Heaven's question, life:

Challenge the ordeal of the immense disguise.

 

Ascend from Nature to divinity's heights;

Face the high gods, crowned with felicity,

Then meet a greater god, thy self beyond Time.

 

(Savitri, pp. 374-75)

Satyavan and Savitri were sent forth of old to this ignorant world, that God might come down and enter into it. If Savitri is the Force of the Supreme, she who has come here to uplift earth’s fate, Satyavan is his soul climbing from ancient Night to supernal light of Timelessness. Savitri shall take human births and make forms ready, forms fit for the Consciousness-Force to dwell in. Eternal Supermind shall descend upon earth and in the mortal man there shall be born the superman. An unerring Hand shall shape event and act. Such is the wonderful boon Savitri receives from the Supreme.

 

All earth shall be the Spirit's manifest home,

Hidden no more by the body and the life,

Hidden no more by the mind's ignorance;

An unerring Hand shall shape event and act.

 

The Spirit's eyes shall look through Nature's eyes,

The Spirit's force shall occupy Nature's force.

 

This world shall be God's visible garden-house,

The earth shall be a field and camp of God,

Man shall forget consent to mortality

And his embodied frail impermanence.

 

This universe shall unseal its occult sense,

Creation's process change its antique front,

An ignorant evolution's hierarchy

Release the Wisdom chained below its base.

 

The Spirit shall be the master of his world.

 

(Savitri, pp. 707-08)