विकट घड़ी | सावित्री pp. 11-12 | सावित्री यज्ञ SY 014

[The Times of Challenge]. We take up the following passage from Savitri, Book Two Canto Two: 'Awhile, withdrawn in secret fields of thought, Her mind moved in a many-imaged past That lived again and saw its end approach: Dying, it lived imperishably in her; Transient and vanishing from transient eyes, Invisible, a fateful ghost of self, It bore the future on its phantom breast. Along the fleeting event's far-backward trail Regressed the stream of the insistent hours, And on the bank of the mysterious flood Peopled with well-loved forms now seen no more And the subtle images of things that were, Her witness spirit stood reviewing Time. All that she once had hoped and dreamed and been, Flew past her eagle-winged through memory's skies. As in a many-hued flaming inner dawn, Her life's broad highways and its sweet bypaths Lay mapped to her sun-clear recording view, From the bright country of her childhood's days And the blue mountains of her soaring youth And the paradise groves and peacock wings of Love To joy clutched under the silent shadow of doom In a last turn where heaven raced with hell. Twelve passionate months led in a day of fate. An absolute supernatural darkness falls On man sometimes when he draws near to God: An hour arrives when fail all Nature's means; Forced out from the protecting Ignorance And flung back on his naked primal need, He at length must cast from him his surface soul And be the ungarbed entity within: That hour had fallen now on Savitri.'