Classes at Shalwa Woods

But now the destined spot and hour were close;

Unknowing she had neared her nameless goal. ||101.1||

For though a dress of blind and devious chance

Is laid upon the work of all-wise Fate,

Our acts interpret an omniscient Force

That dwells in the compelling stuff of things,

And nothing happens in the cosmic play

But at its time and in its foreseen place. ||101.2||

To a space she came of soft and delicate air

That seemed a sanctuary of youth and joy,

A highland world of free and green delight

Where spring and summer lay together and strove

In indolent and amicable debate,

Inarmed, disputing with laughter who should rule. ||101.3||

There expectation beat wide sudden wings,

As if a soul had looked out from earth’s face

And all that was in her felt a coming change

And forgetting obvious joys and common dreams,

Obedient to Time’s call and the spirit’s fate,

Were lifted to a beauty calm and pure

That lived under the eyes of Eternity. ||101.4||

A crowd of mountainous heads assailed the sky

Pushing towards rival shoulders nearer heaven,

The armoured leaders of an iron line;

Earth prostrate lay beneath their feet of stone. ||101.5||

Below there crouched a dream of emerald woods

And gleaming borders solitary as sleep:

Pale waters ran like glimmering threads of pearl. ||101.6||

A sigh was straying among happy leaves;

Cool-perfumed with slow pleasure-burdened feet

Faint stumbling breezes faltered among flowers. ||101.7||

The white crane stood, a vivid motionless streak,

Peacock and parrot jewelled soil and tree,

The dove’s soft moan enriched the enamoured air

And fire-winged wild-drakes swam in silvery pools. ||101.8||

Earth couched alone with her great lover Heaven,

Uncovered to her consort’s purple eye. ||101.9||

In her luxurious ecstasy of joy

She squandered the love-music of her notes,

Wasted the passionate pattern of her blooms

And festival riot of her scents and hues. ||101.10||

A cry and leap and hurry were around,

The stealthy footfalls of her chasing things,

The shaggy emerald of her centaur mane,

The gold and sapphire of her warmth and blaze. ||101.11||

Magician of her rapt felicities,

Blithe, sensuous-hearted, careless and divine,

Life ran or hid in her delightful rooms;

Behind all brooded Nature’s grandiose calm. ||101.12||

Primeval peace was there and in its bosom

Held undisturbed the strife of bird and beast. ||101.13||

Man, the deep-browed artificer, had not come

To lay his hand on happy inconscient things,

Thought was not there nor the measurer, strong-eyed toil,

Life had not learned its discord with its aim. ||101.14||

The mighty Mother lay outstretched at ease. ||101.15||

All was in line with her first satisfied plan;

Moved by a universal will of joy

The trees bloomed in their green felicity

And the wild children brooded not on pain. ||101.16||

At the end reclined a stern and giant tract

Of tangled depths and solemn questioning hills

And peaks like a bare austerity of the soul,

Armoured, remote and desolately grand

Like the thought-screened infinities that lie

Behind the rapt smile of the Almighty’s dance. ||101.17||

A matted forest-head invaded heaven

As if a blue-throated ascetic peered

From the stone fastness of his mountain cell

Regarding the brief gladness of the days;

His vast extended spirit couched behind. ||101.18||

A mighty murmur of immense retreat

Besieged the ear, a sad and limitless call

As of a soul retiring from the world. ||101.19||

This was the scene which the ambiguous Mother

Had chosen for her brief felicitous hour;

Here in this solitude far from the world

Her part she began in the world’s joy and strife. ||101.20||

Here were disclosed to her the mystic courts,

The lurking doors of beauty and surprise,

The wings that murmur in the golden house,

The temple of sweetness and the fiery aisle. ||101.21||

A stranger on the sorrowful roads of Time,

Immortal under the yoke of death and fate,

A sacrificant of the bliss and pain of the spheres,

Love in the wilderness met Savitri. ||101.22||

Around her were the austere sky-pointing hills,

And the green murmurous broad deep-thoughted woods

Muttered incessantly their muffled spell. ||3.20||

A dense magnificent coloured self-wrapped life

Draped in the leaves’ vivid emerald monotone

And set with chequered sunbeams and blithe flowers

Immured her destiny’s secluded scene. ||3.21||

There had she grown to the stature of her spirit:

The genius of titanic silences

Steeping her soul in its wide loneliness

Had shown to her her self’s bare reality

And mated her with her environment. ||3.22||

Its solitude greatened her human hours

With a background of the eternal and unique. ||3.23||

A force of spare direct necessity

Reduced the heavy framework of man’s days

And his overburdening mass of outward needs

To a first thin strip of simple animal wants,

And the mighty wideness of the primitive earth

And the brooding multitude of patient trees

And the musing sapphire leisure of the sky

And the solemn weight of the slowly passing months

Had left in her deep room for thought and God. ||3.24||

Back

There was her drama’s radiant prologue lived. ||3.25||

A spot for the eternal’s tread on earth

Set in the cloistral yearning of the woods

And watched by the aspiration of the peaks

Appeared through an aureate opening in Time

Where stillness listening felt the unspoken word

And the hours forgot to pass towards grief and change. ||3.26||

Back

Close is my father’s creepered hermitage

Screened by the tall ranks of these silent kings,

Sung to by voices of the hue-robed choirs

Whose chants repeat transcribed in music’s notes

The passionate coloured lettering of the boughs

And fill the hours with their melodious cry. ||103.14||

Amid the welcome-hum of many bees

Invade our honied kingdom of the woods;

There let me lead thee into an opulent life. ||103.15||

Bare, simple is the sylvan hermit-life;

Yet is it clad with the jewelry of earth. ||103.16||

Back

Wild winds run—visitors midst the swaying tops,

Through the calm days heaven’s sentinels of peace

Couched on a purple robe of sky above

Look down on a rich secrecy and hush

And the chambered nuptial waters chant within. ||103.17||

Enormous, whispering, many-formed around

High forest gods have taken in their arms

The human hour, a guest of their centuried pomps. ||103.18||

Apparelled are the morns in gold and green,

Sunlight and shadow tapestry the walls

To make a resting chamber fit for thee. ||103.19||

Back

All she remembered on this day of Fate,

The road that hazarded not the solemn depths

But turned away to flee to human homes,

The wilderness with its mighty monotone,

The morning like a lustrous seer above,

The passion of the summits lost in heaven,

The titan murmur of the endless woods. ||102.1||

As if a wicket gate to joy were there

Ringed in with voiceless hint and magic sign,

Upon the margin of an unknown world

Reclined the curve of a sun-held recess;

Groves with strange flowers like eyes of gazing nymphs

Back

Peered from their secrecy into open space,

Boughs whispering to a constancy of light

Sheltered a dim and screened felicity,

And slowly a supine inconstant breeze

Ran like a fleeting sigh of happiness

Over slumberous grasses pranked with green and gold. ||102.2||

Hidden in the forest’s bosom of loneliness

Amid the leaves the inmate voices called,

Sweet like desires enamoured and unseen,

Cry answering to low insistent cry. ||102.3||

Back

Behind slept emerald dumb remotenesses,

Haunt of a Nature passionate, veiled, denied

To all but her own vision lost and wild. ||102.4||

Earth in this beautiful refuge free from cares

Murmured to the soul a song of strength and peace. ||102.5||

Only one sign was there of a human tread:

A single path, shot thin and arrowlike

Into this bosom of vast and secret life,

Pierced its enormous dream of solitude. ||102.6||

Back

Great Nature came to her recovered child;

I reigned in a kingdom of a nobler kind

Than men can build upon dull Matter’s soil;

I met the frankness of the primal earth,

I enjoyed the intimacy of infant God. ||103.28||

In the great tapestried chambers of her state

Free in her boundless palace I have dwelt

Indulged by the warm mother of us all,

Reared with my natural brothers in her house

I lay in the wide bare embrace of heaven,

The sunlight’s radiant blessing clasped my brow,

The moonbeam’s silver ecstasy at night

Kissed my dim lids to sleep. Earth’s morns were mine;

Lured by faint murmurings with the green-robed hours

I wandered lost in woods, prone to the voice

Of winds and waters, partner of the sun’s joy,

A listener to the universal speech:

My spirit satisfied within me knew

Godlike our birthright, luxuried our life

Whose close belongings are the earth and skies. ||103.29||

High beauty’s visitants my inmates were. ||103.34||

The neighing pride of rapid life that roams

Wind-maned through our pastures, on my seeing mood

Cast shapes of swiftness; trooping spotted deer

Against the vesper sky became a song

Of evening to the silence of the soul. ||103.35||

I caught for some eternal eye the sudden

Kingfisher flashing to a darkling pool;

A slow swan silvering the azure lake,

A shape of magic whiteness, sailed through dream;

Leaves trembling with the passion of the wind

And wandering wings nearing from infinity

Lived on the tablets of my inner sight;

Mountains and trees stood there like thoughts from God. ||103.36||

Pranked butterflies, the conscious flowers of air,

The brilliant long bills in their vivid dress,

The peacock scattering on the breeze his moons

Painted my memory like a frescoed wall. ||103.37||

I carved my vision out of wood and stone;

I caught the echoes of a word supreme

And metred the rhythm beats of infinity

And listened through music for the eternal Voice. ||103.38||

I felt a covert touch, I heard a call,

But could not clasp the body of my God

Or hold between my hands the World-Mother’s feet. ||103.39||

There hast thou paused, and marvelling borne eyes

Unknown, or heard a voice that forced thy life

To strain its rapture through thy listening soul? ||106.26||

Or, if my thought could trust this shimmering gaze,

It would say: thou hast not drunk from an earthly cup,

But stepping through azure curtains of the morn

Thou wast surrounded on a magic verge

In brighter countries than man’s eyes can bear. ||106.27||

Assailed by trooping voices of delight

And seized mid a sunlit glamour of the boughs

In faery woods, led down the gleaming slopes

Of Gundhamadan where the Apsaras roam,

Thy limbs have shared the sports which none has seen,

And in god-haunts thy human footsteps strayed,

Thy mortal bosom quivered with god-speech

And thy soul answered to a Word unknown. ||106.28||

What feet of gods, what ravishing flutes of heaven

Have thrilled high melodies round, from near and far

Approaching through the soft and revelling air,

Which still surprised thou hearest? They have fed

Thy silence on some red strange-ecstasied fruit

And thou hast trod the dim moon-peaks of bliss. ||106.29||

With strange inhuman paces on the soil,

Journeying as if upon an unseen road. ||136.1||

Around her on the green and imaged earth

The flickering screen of forests ringed her steps. ||136.2||

Its thick luxurious obstacle of boughs

Besieged her body pressing dimly through

In a rich realm of whispers palpable,

And all the murmurous beauty of the leaves

Rippled around her like an emerald robe. ||136.3||

Now the dusk shadowy trees stood close around

Like dreaming spirits and delaying night,

The grey-eyed pensive evening heard their steps,

And from all points the cries and movements came

Of the four-footed wanderers of the night

Approaching. Then a human rumour rose

Long alien to their solitary days,

Invading the charmed wilderness of leaves,

Once sacred to secluded loneliness,

With violent breaking of its virgin sleep. ||158.1||

Through the screened dusk it deepened still and there neared

Floating of many voices and the sound

Of many feet till on their sight broke in,

As if a coloured wave upon the eye,

The brilliant strenuous crowded life of man. ||158.2||

A cry and leap and hurry were around,

The stealthy footfalls of her chasing things,

The shaggy emerald of her centaur mane,

The gold and sapphire of her warmth and blaze. ||101.11||