Savitri

         IV

'The Vision and the Boon'

      The stage now is his own heart, the auditorium the "listening spaces of the soul". Aswapati looks inward, he thrills at the sacred stir and approach; mind, members, life, are "merged in ecstasy" and partake beatitude. "Flame-pure, ethereal-tressed a mighty Face" appears, the lips quiver, the words come. Aswapati is the elect, the transfigured, but he is asked to leave the Inconscient alone:

How shalt thou speak for men whose hearts are dumb,

Make purblind earth the soul's seer-vision's home

Or lighten the burden of the senseless globe?...

Awake not the immeasurable descent,

Speak not my secret name to hostile Time;

Man is too weak to bear the Infinite's weight.¹⁵⁰

Death must be unconquered still on earth, and the dramas played in the theatre of Time must still diet on suffering and pain. It is man's merit that he is awake, that he has memory and desire, that he cannot help aspiring "to change the cosmic dream". But the law of Chance and Death cannot be altered; man is condemned yet to be no more than "a link between the demigod and the beast"; he must veer between the pulls of darkness and light, and play endlessly this inconclusive game. But the wheels of the evolutionary advance, though they grind slowly or by fits and starts, grind also with a complete inevitability, and man is the base on which the citadels of the seeming impossible are to be reared in the future. Aswapati is to hope and persevere, not force the pace:

Traveller upon the bare eternal heights,

Tread still the difficult and dateless path

Joining the cycles with its austere curve

Measured for man by the initiate Gods...

Ask not the imperfect fruit, the partial prize.

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      Only one boon, to greaten thy spirit, demand;

      Only one joy, to raise thy kind, desire...

      All things shall change in God's transfiguring hour.¹⁵¹

Having seen what he has seen, having glimpsed the great crests of future Possibility, must Aswapati still return to this bank empty-handed, hugging only the phantom of Hope and donning only the armour of Patience? A cry is wrung from Aswapati:

      How shall I rest content with mortal days

      And the dull measure of terrestrial things,

      I who have seen behind the cosmic mask

      The glory and the beauty of thy face? ¹⁵²

What use were waiting, when "all we have done is ever still to do", when humanity is apparently doomed to follow the circuit of folly and failure? How long this compromise between the beast and God? As the beast has been exceeded by man, shall not man in turn be superseded by a greater than man, the Superman?

      This high divine successor surely shall come

      Behind man's inefficient mortal pace,

      Behind his vain labour, sweat and blood and tears:...

      Inheritor of the toil of human time,

      He shall take on him the burden of the gods;...¹⁵³

 "He shall"—but when, oh when! The earth has waited long, and man has waited long; the Mother can remain indifferent no longer, and leave things to the slow process of change. The sterile plant of hope must put forth an immediate bud of promise so that the rich fruit may not be long withheld. Aswapati will not miss this golden moment and miss the promise of a hastened Dawn. Aswapati's winged words fly up to the Presence with their load of anguished memory and hope, of urgent prayer and entreaty:

      O Wisdom-Splendour, Mother of the universe,

      Creatrix, the Eternal's artist Bride,

      Linger not long...

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      Let thy infinity in one body live,

      All-Knowledge wrap one mind in seas of light,

      All-Love throb single in one human heart...

      Pack with the eternal might one human hour

      And with one gesture change all future time.¹³⁴

Aswapati has articulated his and the world's paramount desire and has sought the boon of an imminent divine advent. Let the Mother herself come down as a human being to lead the struggle against the Darkness and establish the reign of Light, Love and Immortality. Let it be no purblind groping after far horizons which, as one approaches them faster and faster, only fly further and further; let it rather be a purposeful forging ahead, a bold storming of the fortress of Nescience, under the leadership of a choice superior spirit. The Divine Mother now gives her wide consenting voice to expectant Aswapati:

      O strong forerunner, I have heard thy cry.

      One shall descend and break the iron Law,

      Change Nature's doom by the lone spirit's power...

      Beauty shall walk celestial on the earth,

      Delight shall sleep in the cloud-net of her hair

      And in her body as on his homing tree

      Immortal Love shall beat his glorious wings...

      She shall bear Wisdom in her voiceless bosom,

      Strength shall be with her like a conqueror's sword

      And from her eyes the Eternal's bliss shall gaze.

      A seed shall be sown in Death's tremendous hour,

      A branch of heaven transplant to human soil;

      Nature shall overleap her mortal step;

      Fate shall be changed by an unchanging will.¹⁵⁵

 The words cease, and the splendour fades away; only the echoes of the promise fill the chambers of the soul and make new cadences that are untranslatable. Eternity recedes, and Time's slow tread is heard. Aswapati, having gained his heart's immaculate desire, returns to the

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familiar ways of the world. But it is to be no vain repetition of the old routine; he is sustained now by the vision splendid and the Promise nectarean. It is the lord of a spiritual empire who has imposed his mastery on the occult realms of the World Stair that now returns to where he started from and resumes,

 ...his mighty rounds

In the scant field of the ambiguous globe.¹⁵⁶

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