An unshaped consciousness desired light
And a blank prescience yearned towards distant change.
As if a childlike finger laid on a cheek
Reminded of the endless need in things
The heedless Mother of the universe,
An infant longing clutched the sombre Vast.
Insensibly somewhere a breach began:
A long lone line of hesitating hue
Like a vague smile tempting a desert heart
Troubled the far rim of life’s obscure sleep.
Arrived from the other side of boundlessness
An eye of deity peered through the dumb deeps;
A scout in a reconnaissance from the sun,
It seemed amid a heavy cosmic rest,
The torpor of a sick and weary world,
Source: Savitri (Canto One, The Symbol Dawn)
To seek for a spirit sole and desolate
Too fallen to recollect forgotten bliss.
Intervening in a mindless universe,
Its message crept through the reluctant hush
Calling the adventure of consciousness and joy
And, conquering Nature’s disillusioned breast,
Compelled renewed consent to see and feel.
A thought was sown in the unsounded Void,
A sense was born within the darkness’ depths,
A memory quivered in the heart of Time
As if a soul long dead were moved to live:
But the oblivion that succeeds the fall,
Had blotted the crowded tablets of the past,
And all that was destroyed must be rebuilt
And old experience laboured out once more.
All can be done if the god-touch is there
This portion of the work seems like a verdict with its closing, “All can be done if the god-touch is there.” There is assurance, hope, and preordained tenacity for a new beginning, for the Divine—the Mother of the Universe—is present.
As for overall details in these verses, the dawn of a new beginning is captured in the desire of “an unshaped consciousness” for light, the reminder to the Mother about a need “to be fulfilled,” and the awakening of old memories of the supposedly erased past (with the end of the previous cycle)—these stirrings as remarkable and powerful as the movement for life in a supposedly dead soul. There seems to be an onerous task, for the “crowded tablets of the past”—the vestiges of a previous cycle—were effaced. Imagine a kind hand reaching out to the site of a collapsed sand house. For the Divine, it may indeed be just a sand house—Her touch is enough for rebuilding to occur.