Savitri: Book 6 Canto 2 Section 6

Fate is Truth working out in Ignorance.

O King, thy fate is a transaction done

At every hour between Nature and thy soul

With God for its foreseeing arbiter.

Fate is a balance drawn in Destiny’s book.

Man can accept his fate, he can refuse.

Even if the One maintains the unseen decree

He writes thy refusal in thy credit page:

For doom is not a close, a mystic seal.

Arisen from the tragic crash of life,

Arisen from the body’s torture and death,

The spirit rises mightier by defeat;

Its godlike wings grow wider with each fall.

Its splendid failures sum to victory.

O man, the events that meet thee on thy road,

Though they smite thy body and soul with joy and grief,

Are not thy fate,—they touch thee awhile and pass;

Even death can cut not short thy spirit’s walk:

Thy goal, the road thou choosest are thy fate.

On the altar throwing thy thoughts, thy heart, thy works,

Thy fate is a long sacrifice to the gods

Till they have opened to thee thy secret self

And made thee one with the indwelling God.

O soul, intruder in Nature’s ignorance,

Armed traveller to the unseen supernal heights,

Thy spirit’s fate is a battle and ceaseless march

Against invisible opponent Powers,

A passage from Matter into timeless self.

Adventurer through blind unforeseeing Time,

A forced advance through a long line of lives,

It pushes its spearhead through the centuries.

Across the dust and mire of the earthly plain,

On many guarded lines and dangerous fronts,

In dire assaults, in wounded slow retreats,

Holding the ideal’s ringed and battered fort

Or fighting against odds in lonely posts,

Or camped in night around the bivouac’s fires

Awaiting the tardy trumpets of the dawn,

In hunger and in plenty and in pain,

Through peril and through triumph and through fall,

Through life’s green lanes and over her desert sands,

Up the bald moor, along the sunlit ridge,

In serried columns with a straggling rear

Led by its nomad vanguard’s signal fires,

Marches the army of the waylost god.

Then late the joy ineffable is felt,

Then he remembers his forgotten self;

He has refound the skies from which he fell.

At length his front’s indomitable line

Forces the last passes of the Ignorance:

Advancing beyond Nature’s last known bounds,

Reconnoitring the formidable unknown,

Beyond the landmarks of things visible,

It mounts through a miraculous upper air

Till climbing the mute summit of the world

He stands upon the splendour-peaks of God.