“SAVITRI” by Sri Aurobindo (Republished edition of the 1st edition 1950-51, draft approved by Sri Aurobindo before his death) Book Four—The Book of Birth and Quest (Contd. from yesterday September 14, 2013) Canto II THE GROWTH OF THE FLAME These comrade selves to raise to her own wide breadths Her heart desired and fill with her own power That a diviner Force might enter life, A breath of Godhead greaten human time. Although she leaned down to their littleness Covering their lives with her strong passionate hands And knew by sympathy their needs and wants And dived in the shallow wave-depths of their lives And met and shared their heart-beats of grief and joy And bent to heal their sorrow and their pride, Lavishing the might that was hers on her lone peak To lift to it their aspiration’s cry And though she drew their souls into her vast And surrounded with the silence of her deeps And held as the great Mother holds her own, Only her earthly surface bore their charge And mixed its fire with their mortality: Her greater self lived sole, unclaimed, within. Oftener in dumb Nature’s stir and peace A nearness she could feel serenely one; The Force in her drew earth’s subhuman broods; And to her spirit’s large and free delight She joined the ardent-hued magnificent lives Of animal and bird and flower and tree. They answered to her with the simple heart. In man a dim disturbing somewhat lives; It knows but turns away from divine Light Preferring the dark ignorance of the fall. Among the many who came drawn to her Nowhere she found her partner of high tasks, The comrade of her soul, her other self Who was made with her, like God and Nature, one. Some near approached, were touched, caught fire, then failed. Too great was her demand, too pure her force. Thus lightning earth around her like a sun, Yet in her inmost sky an orb aloof, A distance severed her from those most close. Puissant, apart her soul as the gods live.
Posted on: Sun, 15 Sep 2013 07:27:43 +0000