LITMIR.BIZ

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of sleep.

      Or side by side reclined upon my vasts

      Like bride and bridegroom magically divorced

      They wake to yearn, but never can they clasp

      While thinly flickering hesitates uncrossed

      Between the lovers on their nuptial couch

      The shadowy eidolon of a sword.

      But when the phantom flame-edge fails undone,

      Then never more can space or time divide

      The lover from the loved; Space shall draw back

      Her great translucent curtain, Time shall be

      The quivering of the spirit’s endless bliss.

      Attend that moment of celestial fate.

      Meanwhile you two shall serve the dual law

      Which only now the scouts of vision glimpse

      Who pressing through the forest of their thoughts

      Have found the narrow bridges of the gods.

      Wait patient of the brittle bars of form

      Making division your delightful means

      Of happy oneness rapturously enhanced

      By attraction in the throbbing air between.

      Yet if thou wouldst abandon the vexed world,

      Careless of the dark moan of things below,

      Tread down the isthmus, overleap the flood,

      Cancel thy contract with the labouring Force;

      Renounce the tie that joins thee to earth-kind,

      Cast off thy sympathy with mortal hearts.

      Arise, vindicate thy spirit’s conquered right:

      Relinquishing thy charge of transient breath,

      Under the cold gaze of the indifferent stars

      Leaving thy borrowed body on the sod,

      Ascend, O soul, into thy blissful home.

      Here in the playground of the eternal Child

      Or in domains the wise Immortals tread

      Roam with thy comrade splendour under skies

      Spiritual lit by an unsetting sun,

      As godheads live who care not for the world

      And share not in the toil of Nature’s powers:

      Absorbed in their self-ecstasy they dwell.

      Cast off the ambiguous myth of earth’s desire,

      O immortal, to felicity arise.”

      On Savitri listening in her tranquil heart

      To the harmony of the ensnaring voice

      A joy exceeding earth’s and heaven’s poured down,

      The bliss of an unknown eternity,

      A rapture from some waiting Infinite.

      A smile came rippling out in her wide eyes,

      Its confident felicity’s messenger

      As if the first beam of the morning sun

      Rippled along two wakened lotus-pools.

      “O besetter of man’s soul with life and death

      And the world’s pleasure and pain and Day and Night,

      Tempting his heart with the far lure of heaven,

      Testing his strength with the close touch of hell,

      I climb not to thy everlasting Day,

      Even as I have shunned thy eternal Night.

      To me who turn not from thy terrestrial Way,

      Give back the other self my nature asks.

      Thy spaces need him not to help their joy;

      Earth needs his beautiful spirit made by thee

      To fling delight down like a net of gold.

      Earth is the chosen place of mightiest souls;

      Earth is the heroic spirit’s battlefield,

      The forge where the Archmason shapes his works.

      Thy servitudes on earth are greater, King,

      Than all the glorious liberties of heaven.

      The heavens were once to me my natural home,

      I too have wandered in star-jewelled groves,

      Paced sun-gold pastures and moon-silver swards

      And heard the harping laughter of their streams

      And lingered under branches dropping myrrh;

      I too have revelled in the fields of light

      Touched by the ethereal raiment of the winds,

      Thy wonder-rounds of music I have trod,

      Lived in the rhyme of bright unlabouring thoughts,

      I have beat swift harmonies of rapture vast,

      Danced in spontaneous measures of the soul

      The great and easy dances of the gods.

      O fragrant are the lanes thy children walk

      And lovely is the memory of their feet

      Amid the wonder-flowers of Paradise:

      A heavier tread is mine, a mightier touch.

      There where the gods and demons battle in night

      Or wrestle on the borders of the Sun,

      Taught by the sweetness and the pain of life

      To bear the uneven strenuous beat that throbs

      Against the edge of some divinest hope,

      To dare the impossible with these pangs of search,

      In me the spirit of immortal love

      Stretches its arms out to embrace mankind.

      Too far thy heavens for me from suffering men.

      Imperfect is the joy not shared by all.

      O to spread forth, O to encircle and seize

      More hearts till love in us has filled thy world!

      O life, the life beneath the wheeling stars!

      For victory in the tournament with death,

      For bending of the fierce and difficult bow,

      For flashing of the splendid sword of God!

      O thou who soundst the trumpet in the lists,

      Part not the handle from the untried steel,

      Take not the warrior with his blow unstruck.

      Are there not still a million fights to wage?

      O king-smith, clang on still thy toil begun,

      Weld us to one in thy strong smithy of life.

      Thy fine-curved jewelled hilt call Savitri,

      Thy blade’s exultant smile name Satyavan.

      Fashion to beauty, point us through the world.

      Break not the lyre before the song is found;

      Are there not still unnumbered chants to weave?

      O subtle-souled musician of the years,

      Play out what thou hast fluted on my stops;

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