Savitri

 III

      'THE SUPREME CONSUMMATION"

      The Supreme's blissful word comes at last:

My will is thine, what thou hast chosen I choose.

All thou hast asked I give to earth and men.⁸⁶

Thesis and antithesis have been clashing through the symbol worlds °f night, twilight and day, and even in the highest realms of the Supreme; the possibility of any true ideals being quarried out of the crude hard rocks of the Inconscience has been questioned, and the possibility of earthly realisations being permanent has been doubted; the advisability of leaving the earth and mankind to their fate and achieving a personal salvation either through the enjoyment of the bliss of heaven or through total extinction in nirvana has also been persuasively and almost peremptorily canvassed. Savitri has stood her ground without flinching in the least. Now the supreme tells her that hers is the right choice, nay his own choice in her! This is the synthesis towards which the dialectic has been moving all along. The tests have led to right self-knowledge, to the awakening of the requisite will, to the organisation of the right means to achieve the right purpose. The word comes again:

      Because thou hast chosen to share earth's struggle and fate

      And leaned in pity over earth-bound men

      And turned aside to help and yearned to save,

      I bind by thy heart's passion thy heart to mine

      And lay my splendid yoke upon thy soul...

      O Sun-Word, thou shalt raise the earth-soul to Light

      And bring down God into the lives of men;...⁸⁷

      Descend to life with him thy heart desires.

      0 Satyavan, O luminous Savitri,

      1 sent you forth of old beneath the stars,

      A dual power of God in an ignorant world,

      In a hedged creation shut from limitless self,

      Bringing down God to the insentient globe,

      Lifting earth-beings to immortality.⁸⁸

It is a speech of about 500 lines, and many of the ideas already elaborated in earlier cantos are here gathered up into a comprehensive and significant whole. The intention from the very beginning had been that Savitri and Sayavan should be God's dual power—Savitri the force and Satyavan the soul—operating on earth to divinise it; between them they are to give the right turn to human life and point

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to "the souls of men the routes to God". When favourable conditions have been created by the dual power,

      The superman shall wake in mortal man

      And manifest the hidden demigod

      Or grow into the God-Light and God-Force

      Revealing the secret deity in the cave.⁸⁹

All shall then change, a magic order will displace the "mechanic universe", and "the superman shall reign as king of life/Make earth almost the mate and peer of heaven."⁹⁰ As a "high crown of all", there will result "the end of Death, the death of Ignorance". Matter's world will itself be transformed, for "Matter shall reveal the Spirit's face". Nature too will be transfigured, "a divine force shall flow through tissue and cell" and every feeling will become a "celestial thrill":

      Thus shall the earth open to divinity

      And common natures feel the wide uplift,

      Illumine common acts with the Spirit's ray

      And meet the deity in common things.

      Nature shall live to manifest secret God,

      The Spirit shall take up the human play,

      This earthly life become the life divine.⁹¹

The subtle music ceases at the conclusion of the great ambrosial revelation, and presently, "through unseen worlds and bottomless spaces forced", Savitri's soul sinks down to the earth, drawing with her, "like a flower hidden in the heart of spring", dear Satyavan's soul as well. As they career towards the earth,

      Invisible heavens in a thronging flight

      Soared past.. .Then all the blind

      And near attraction of the earth compelled

      Fearful rapidities of downward bliss.⁹²

Their return is earth's moment of destiny; "a crimson seed of God's felicity" is lodged on earth:

      A power leaned down, a happiness found its home.

      Over wide earth brooded the infinite bliss.⁹³

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