On Savitri
THEME/S
SAVITRI: SOME GLIMPSES AND
REFLECTIONS1
On August 15, 1954, the eighty-second birthday of Sri Aurobindo, a most splendid offering to the Master was the one-volume edition brought out by the Ashram of his greatest poetic achievement - Savitri, a Legend and a Symbol - over which he had worked for, we may say, almost his lifetime. It is on record that Virgil devoted approximately ten years to his Aeneid, Dante sixteen intermittently and six wholly to his Divina Commedia, Milton at least eight to Paradise Lost and Goethe spread the writing of his Faust, with long intervals, over nearly fifty years of crowded life. Sri Aurobindo's occupation with his masterpiece is comparable in time-span to Goethe's - and his too was a life variously crowded, at the beginning with political events, afterwards with mystical realisations and inner discoveries and partly with the writing of a dozen books philosophical or literary on a large scale. But it was not merely lack of spare time or even a desire to put the maximum of available life-experience into the poem, that made it cover fifty years or so. Unlike any of the other epic poets Sri Aurobindo
1 Part of this essay is taken up into 'The Poet of Integralism', first published in The Integral Philosophy of Sri Aurobindo, A Commemorative Symposium, edited by Haridas Chaudhuri and Frederic Spiegelberg (George Allen & Unwin Ltd., London, 1960) and afterwards included with some enlargement in the author's The Vision and Work of Sri Aurobindo (Mother India, Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, 1968). [Originally published in Mother India, August 1954, p. 36].
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made recast after recast, not merely addition on addition - and it was rarely because the early versions wanted in pure poetic merit that he did this: his aim was primarily to lift the work to the highest and most comprehensive expression possible of spiritual realities within the scheme set up by him of character, incident and plot.
This aim and the artistic method employed for achieving it were to be explained in a long Introduction which he intended to write to the complete Savitri. Mostly, Savitri was meant to create in massive proportions the kind of poetry that, in his published literary criticisms, he used to designate as hailing from "Overhead" planes - the ranges of consciousness broadly envisaged by ancient Indian scriptures as lying hidden above the human and possessing an inherent light of knowledge and a natural experience of the infinite. He distinguished in general a progression of four levels as having found rare voice in the world's literature and art: Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition, Overmind. A fifth and highest plane, which he named Supermind and whose realisation above on its own peaks and ultimate descent below into the physical being are the aim of his own "Integral Yoga", was regarded by him as not having directly manifested yet.
The absence cannot help being regretted of what would have been a unique expository and elucidative document on the unusual poetic afflatus - unusual in both message and music - that blows through the nearly twenty-four thousand lines of this Legend of the past that he has presented as a Symbol of the future. Luckily, however, we have a substantial number of letters by him on his epic. Out of them an informal commentary has been compiled and put after the text with the object of throwing in the poet's own precious words some light on the poem's conception and development and on its qualities of inspiration, vision, style and technique. This commentary, which is now longer by a further sheaf of letters than when first published separately and follows a scheme of
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grouping differing in several respects from the one adopted then, serves also to add to the description of the Overhead planes given by Sri Aurobindo in Savitri itself as well as in his philosophical work The Life Divine and to clarify certain aspects of their role in poetic creation. It etches memorably on our minds what the author calls the metaphysical psychology of the new art inspired by the extraordinary experiences and significances that have gone to the making of his poem and, in seeking affinities for this art, it ranges over a wide terrain of world-poetry and gives us vivid illustration, penetrating analysis, suggestive evocation - aesthetic sensitiveness, intellectual grasp and spiritual insight moving harmoniously together.
Of course the letters, extending over eighteen years and often touching on various subjects at a time or dealing with the same subject at different times, could not always be arranged chronologically and in a regular series to make a continuous exposition. They have been sorted into sections, each section determined mostly by similarity of theme in its contents or by their broad subsumableness under a common head. One section has been specially devoted to comments on individual lines, phrases and words given as far as possible in the order of their occurrence in the poem. The order of the sections as well as of their contents has been dictated in the main by the consideration of either logical or textual sequence.
A short Note prefacing the wonderful letters gives us some valuable information on the way the poem was actually composed and finished. Not the least interesting and meaningful part of this Note is the quotation of some of the very last lines dictated by Sri Aurobindo - lines which strike one as being pregnant with a foreknowledge of the end at a time when there were no physical pointers to it and with a symbolic prefiguring of the spiritual situation that on his departure from his own body would face his comrade and co-worker in the Integral Yoga - the Mother.
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Both in quality and quantity Savitri must be counted as remarkable even among the world's major achievements. With its 23,813 lines,1 it is the longest poem in the English language, beating The Ring and the Book of Browning with its 21,116 to the place of runner-up: in fact it is the longest in any European language old or new, with the exception of Nicos Kazantzakis's recently published Odyssey: A Modern Sequel, written originally in present-day Greek and running into 33,333 lines. Among epics which can be compared with it in general poetic quality, only the Shah-Nameh, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata exceed it in length - three works which, like it, are products of the East. And indeed Savitri stands with the masterpieces of Valmiki and Vyasa in more than one respect. It has been conceived with something of the ancient Indian temperament which not only rejoiced in massive structures but took all human life and human thought into the spacious scope of its poetic creations and blended the workings of the hidden worlds of Gods and Titans and Demons with the activities of earth. A cosmic sweep is Savitri's and Sri Aurobindo wanted his poem to be a many-sided multi-coloured carving out, in word-music, of the gigantic secrets of his "supramental Yoga".
With the Mahabharata it has a direct link too. For, it is based on a story, in that epic, of a victorious fight by love against death. Such a fight is a theme that haunted Sri Aurobindo from his very youth, as is proved by his early narrative Love and Death which is somewhat similar in outward intention as well as based on an episode in the same ancient Indian epos. That other narrative of his twenties - Urvasie - is also a variant of the identical theme, since, though there is no death in it, it poetises a triumphant struggle against the fate which
1 Now adjudged to be a few less because some have been recognised as being alternative versions whose more natural place would be in footnotes than in the text. - K.D.S. (1970) [23,837 in the 1993 Revised Edition.]
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circumscribes mundane life and snatches away the beloved. As we know, Savitri itself was first drafted quite early in Sri Aurobindo's poetic career and, in it, the recurrent theme takes a form that clearly shows it to be bound up with Sri Aurobindo's own work in the world. The poem's heroine grew in detailed depth with each of the nearly twelve recasts he made in order to lift the meaning and music ever higher until they should press everywhere towards what the old Rishis had called the mantra and arrive again and again at this speech that Sri Aurobindo has distinguished as one in which the vision, the word, the rhythm are born with an intense wideness and un fathomable massiveness from the Overmind. Here Savitri of the Mahabharata fighting the God of Death who had taken away her consort Satyavan became more and more an Avatar of the eternal Beauty and Love plunging into the trials of terrestrial life and seeking to overcome them not only in herself but also in the world she had embraced as her own: she was sworn to put an end to earth's ignorant estrangement from God - estrangement whose most physical symbol is Death, the bodily opposite of the luminous inherent immortality of the Divine. Her story constitutes now a poetic structure in which Sri Aurobindo houses his special search and discovery, his uttermost exploration of hidden worlds, his ascent into the top ranges of the Spirit, his bringing down of their power to divinise man's total nature. And the figure of Savitri suggests in general his own companion in the field of Yoga, the Mother, who had carried on the great task set by the Master.
The technique of Savitri is attuned to the scriptural conception at work. The iambic five-foot line of blank verse is adopted as the most apt and plastic for harmonies like those of the Vedas and the Upanishads. The blank verse, however, is given certain special characteristics affining it still further to them. It moves in a series of blocks formed by a changing distribution of correctly proportioned sentence-lengths. Scarcely any block breaks off in the middle of a line and each
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thus forms, in spite of linkage with the others, a kind of self-sufficient structure like a stanza, but in general no two such "stanzas" are equally long. The units also of each block tell markedly in their own individual mass and force of word and rhythm, though a concordant continuity is maintained in the sense. Enjambment, which was used to impetuous effect in Urvasie and Love and Death, is not altogether avoided, yet end-stopping is the rule as serving better the graver more contained movement demanded by the scriptural mood.
Savitri begins with a picture of darkness passing into day. This transitionalhour has a particular appeal for Sri Aurobindo: several of his poems, short as well as long, are a-quiver with auroral suggestions. Among contemporary poets, we may point to Valéry as also responding very sensitively to the dawn-moment, but the glimmering obscurities of La Jeune Parque or the elusive lucidities of some other poems of his are "a sunrise upon ideas", as Thibaudet puts it, which, though penetrating, have little of Sri Aurobindo's spiritual evocativeness, least of all the largeness of it that is in Savitri.
In Savitri the passage of darkness into day is the last dawn in Satyavan's life, a dawn packed with the significance of the immortal light which Savitri has to win for earth by challenging the age-old decree of death. "The huge foreboding mind of Night" is first figured with a fathomless effectivity:
Almost one felt, opaque, impenetrable,
In the sombre symbol of her eyeless muse
The abysm of the unbodied Infinite...[p. 1]
But
A long lone line of hesitating hue[p. 2]
troubles at last the depths of the darkness in which consciousness seems sepulchred and we have poetry of an intense visionary loveliness:
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A wandering hand of pale enchanted light
That glowed along a fading moment's brink,
Fixed with gold panel and opalescent hinge
A gate of dreams ajar on mystery's verge.[p. 3]
Then the "pallid rift" widens and "the revelation and the flame" pour out - the poetry richly reflecting them:
The brief perpetual sign recurred above.
A glamour from the unreached transcendences
Iridescent with the glory of the Unseen,
A message from the unknown immortal Light
Ablaze upon creation's quivering edge,
Dawn built her aura of magnificent hues
And buried its seed of grandeur in the hours. [pp. 3-4]
Almost the epiphany appears to be disclosed, the goal of all our mortal gropings, and two lines at once simple and subtle in their sovereign spiritual suggestion afford us a glimpse of it:
Infinity's centre, a Face of rapturous calm
Parted the eternal lids that open heaven.[p. 4]
Only a little the God-light can stay[p. 5]
and the intensity of the wonderful Presence fades into accustomed sunshine.
In the soul of Savitri, however, the sense of her mission never disappears. Hedged in though she is by mortality, her life's movement keeps the measure of the Gods. Painting her being and its human-divine beauty Sri Aurobindo achieves some of his supreme effects. Perhaps his grandest capture of the mantra are the nine verses which form the centre of a long
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passage, variously mantric, in which Savitri's avatarhood is characterised:
As in a mystic and dynamic dance
A priestess of immaculate ecstasies
Inspired and ruled from Truth's revealing vault
Moves in some prophet cavern of the gods,
A heart of silence in the hands of joy
Inhabited with rich creative beats
A body like a parable of dawn
That seemed a niche for veiled divinity
Or golden temple door to things beyond.[p. 15]
A hieratic poetry, demanding a keen sense of the occult and spiritual to compass both its subjective and objective values, is in this audacious and multi-dimensioned picture of a highly Yogic state of embodied being. Not all might respond to it and Sri Aurobindo knew that such moments in Savitri would have to wait long for general appreciation. But he could not be loyal to his mission without giving wide scope to the occult and spiritual and seeking to poetise them as much as possible with the vision and rhythm proper to the summits of reality. Of course, that vision and that rhythm are not restricted to the posture and contour of the summits, either the domains of divine dynamism or
The superconscient realms of motionless peace
Where judgment ceases and the word is mute
And the Unconceived lies pathless and alone [pp. 33-34]
or the mid-worlds, obscure or luminous, fearsome or marvellous, of which Savitri's father, King Aswapathy, carries out a long exploration which is one of the finest and most fascinating parts of the poem. They extend to the earth-drama too and set living amongst us the mysteries
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and travails of cosmic evolution, like that dreadful commerce of Savitri with one to whom Sri Aurobindo gives no name:
One dealt with her who meets the burdened great.
Assigner of the ordeal and the path
Who chooses in this holocaust of the soul
Death, fall and sorrow as the spirit's goads,
The dubious godhead with his torch of pain
Lit up the chasm of the unfinished world
And called her to fill with her vast self the abyss, [p. -17]
Savitri would hardly be the unique poem that it is if it did not try to bring home to us the Unknown as it is in itself. However, it is a poem of many layers and no mean part of its excellence lies in its deploying its imponderables of sight and sound and remaining intensely spiritual even when its innumerable ranges and changes are not ostensibly concerned with spirituality. It is Legend as well as Symbol, a story with many scenes and levels of development at the same time that it is instinct with a mystical light. That light itself plays over many regions and does not fail to cover most aspects of world-thought. It is therefore not possible for it to confine itself straightforwardly to mystical substance. What it must do in order to be, despite its complex plan, a direct poetising of the Divine is to sustain everywhere the Overhead afflatus with the help principally of the sound-thrill shaking up hidden tracts of our being even while the outer attention is engaged with apparently non-mystical subjects. Thus a direct poetising of the Divine is achieved without a rejection of human interest or of the teeming motives and currents of man's mind.
A few quotations will indicate the variety of matter as well as of style, that is yet infused with the typical Aurobindonian quality. Glimpses of Nature's moods come again and again, exquisitely evocative as in
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The colonnade's dream grey in the quiet eve,
The slow moonrise gliding in front of night, [p. 466]
or with a powerful haunting suggestion as in that transference into English of a phrase of Vyasa's:
some lone tremendous wood
Ringing for ever with the crickets' cry. [p. 385]
Glimpses of the human situation mix often with those of natural objects as in that simile cosmically sublime in its sweep:
As a star, uncompanioned, moves in heaven
Unastonished by the immensities of space,
Travelling infinity by its own light,
The great are strongest when they stand alone. [p. 460]
The inner strength of the great is also brought vividly home in that gesture of Savitri when, confronting Death's subtle arguments and refusing to employ the frail artifices of Reason, which are vain because always open to doubt, she chooses to match all fate with the nude dynamism of her heart and soul in a terrific line which we may term, in a phraseology popular today, super-existentialist:
I am, I love, 1 see, I act, I will.[p. 594]
Here is an expression deriving its force and resolution from deeper layers of being than the famous close in Tennyson's poem about Ulysses and his comrades:
Made weak by fate and time, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
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Those deeper layers render Sri Aurobindo's line more effective art also than Shelley's memorable words put into the mouth of Rousseau's ghost in his Triumph of Life:
Before thy memory,
I feared, loved, hated, suffered, did and died.
The insufficiency of the mere Reason as compared either to the inner soul's moved perception or to the puissant supra-intellectual sight is pictured with an inspired conceit the Elizabethans or the Metaphysicals would have welcomed with a whoop:
A million faces wears her knowledge here
And every face is turbaned with a doubt.[p. 251]
As unexpectedly striking and happy, though in a different key of inspiration, is the simile applied to the truth-direct ways of the higher harmonies of consciousness to which Savitri's father Aswapathy climbed:
There was no gulf between the thought and fact;
Ever they replied like bird to calling bird...[p. 327]
The felicity and the novelty that are prominent features of Sri Aurobindo's style in Savitri come at times in weirdly surprising figurations, as when Aswapathy passes through an occult infernal region:
A dragon power of reptile energies
And strange epiphanies of grovelling Force
And serpent grandeurs couching in the mire
Drew adoration to a gleam of slime.[p. 213]
Here the surprising has a complex character shot with imagery. It can have a complexity without being imaged, yet
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with the same living vibrancy. An example is the suggestion of a sacred secrecy within us:
This dark knew dumbly, immensely the Unknown, [p. 522] The surprising can be in Sri Aurobindo's hands the most simple also, with but a minimum of image-glimmer. Perfect in their noble finality as in the hands of a Dante are the instances:
None can reach heaven who has not passed through hell... [p. 227]
All can be done if the God-touch is there.[p. 3]
His failure is not failure whom God leads...[p. 339]
Our life's repose is in the Infinite...[p. 197]
A certain type of effect, however, occurs often in Savitri, which escapes all comparison. One facet of it is that epigrammatic flash:
Earth's winged chimeras are Truth's steeds in Heaven... [p. 52]
This line is not only the pure Overhead style: it is also a sheer depth of Yogic insight conveyed with concentrated richness and audacity - the unique Aurobindonian effect. Less densely shaped yet with a body as bold and brilliant is the vision developed by the Yogi's eye in the phrases:
All things hang here between God's yes and no,...
The white head and black tail of the mystic drake,
The swift and the lame foot, wing strong, wing broken
Sustaining the body of the uncertain world,
A great surreal dragon in the skies.[pp. 654-55]
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A single sentence can be made by Sri Aurobindo the Yogi to sum up the whole Angst of the idealist whose feeling of the supramundane is confronted not only by the world's enigmatic opposites lit up in the above lines but also by the impersonal indifference under which the Numinous appears to a certain philosophic mood:
An awful Silence watches tragic Time.[p. 444]
Or look at the Overhead verbal alchemisation for the state which in the language of the poetic intelligence Sri Aurobin.do at one place in Savitri puts thus:
My mind transfigures to a rapturous seer -[p. 408]
and which, with the same language lifted closer to that of rapturous seerhood, he phrases elsewhere in the epic:
Splendours of insight filled the blanks of thought, [p. 37]
In the Overhead style at a high pitch and in the unique Aurobindonian tone we have:
Our minds hush to a bright Omniscient...[p. 48]
And, when the spiritual profundity has been realised, the entire knowledge-process is shown, in the same style, as altered:
Idea rotated symphonies of sight,
Sight was a flame-throw from identity...[p, 301]
And here, in a similar manner though with a more outward turn, is the dynamic reason of the change and of the possibilities of world-divinisation, the concrete movement
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of the Yogic seeker undaunted by the world's doubts or denials:
I cherish God the Fire, not God the Dream.[p. 614]
Something of this penetrating insight, at once mystical and clear-cut, comes into play at rare moments in Iqbal, flashing up his religious and philosophical passion, as in those vehement verses Englished by A.G. Arberry where the poet exemplifies the knowledge which Sufi love gives him of the world's kinship with his being:
I have seen the movement of the sinews of the sky,
And the blood coursing in the veins of the moon.
But this is more related to the adventurously imaginative style of Francis Thompson and we feel that for all its magnificence the knowledge is not directly Yogic. A similar impression we get vis-à-vis Tagore's lyrical soars, high and intense though they are, as in the lines of a somewhat Overhead breath he has translated thus into English prose-poetry: "There, where spreads the infinite sky for the soul to take her flight in, reigns the stainless white radiance. There is no day or night, nor form nor colour, and never, never a word." An affinity with Shelley in his less aching moments is here, an instinctive sense of the Spirit's ether and a moved felicity of articulation. Sri Aurobindo comes also at times recognisably with turns that have been admirably practised by the Thompsons and Iqbals, the Shelleys and Tagores of man's aspiration; but every now and then come effects of the direct Yogi, tranquilly amazing, as in
There looked out from the shadow of the Unknown
The bodiless Namelessness that saw God born
And tries to gain from the mortal's mind and soul
A deathless body and a divine name -[p. 40]
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or amazing with a graphic boldness, as in the disclosure suffered by "the occult Force...guardian of the earth-scene's Beyond":
Her gulfs stood nude, her far transcendences
Flamed in transparencies of crowded light.[p. 88]
Yes, Savitri is full of diverse excellences woven together. And it does not reject any strand of life, it includes and absorbs every theme of import in man's evolution towards deity. Ancient motifs and motifs of our own day are equally caught up. Even modern totalitarianism is seized in its essence in the occult figure of it that from demoniac planes behind earth precipitates amongst us the Hitlerite power and propaganda:
A bull-throat bellowed with its brazen tongue;
Its hard and shameless clamour filling space
And threatening all who dared to listen to truth
Claimed the monopoly of the battered ear;
A deafened acquiescence gave its vote,
And braggart dogmas shouted in the night
Kept for the fallen soul once deemed a god
The pride of its abysmal absolute.[p. 216]
Even the new physics that has replaced the classical concepts in which "all was precise, rigid, indubitable" enters the poetry:
Once more the world was made a wonder-web,
A magic's process in a magical space,
An unintelligible miracle's depths
Whose source is lost in the Ineffable....
A quantum dance remained, a sprawl of chance
In Energy's stupendous tripping whirl:...
The rare-point sparse substratum Universe
On which floats a solid world's phenomenal face.
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Alone a process of events was there
And Nature's plastic and protean change
And, strong by death to slay or to create,
The riven invisible atom's omnipotent force. [pp. 254-55]
But here too the accent is recognisably Aurobindonian. The Overhead breath flows everywhere and in the last line we have its art at top pitch. The craftsmanship of that line is superb, with its dense humming sound dextrously mixed with other expressive vibrations, and all moving in a metre packing fourteen syllables and a predominantly anapaestic run into a scheme of five strong stresses which are helped by massed consonants in several places to beat out clearly as well as to contain the overflowing music. The four "i"s and the four "o"s suggest at once penetration and expansion, the latter as if from an all-round fastness. The "v" in "riven", pronounced as it is with the upper teeth touching the lower lip, aids the sense of cutting that is in the word, while the "v" in "invisible" not only supports and increases the cutting suggestion but also hints by occurring in that particular word and in the midst of several syllables successively short in quantity the marvellous carrying of the power of fission into the mystery of the infinitesimal that constitutes the unseen atomic nucleus. Then there are the two "m"s with their movements of lip-closure corresponding to the closed secrecy that is being spoken of and they are preceded and followed by the labials "b" and "p" respectively which correspond to the initial motive of breaking open the closed secrecy and to the final accomplishment of that explosion. The hard strokes of the three "t"s mingle a further nuance of breaking. The "f" of "force" picks up again the fission-power of the "v"s and completes it with its own acute out-loosening sound accompanied by the somewhat rolled sibilance at the end. The sibilance itself, giving clear body to the softer sound of the pair of "s"s earlier in the line,
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achieves the idea of a full escape of the power that was so far not sweeping out of the charmed circle, as it were, of the atom's vibrant energy.
Indeed, the craftsmanship of the line is superb, but its success is different from what most poets might have attained, for it is due to the choice and collocation of particular words so as to create a particular rhythm embodying the vision-thrill of an Overhead consciousness. A Homer could be grandly resonant, a Milton make majestic thunder, a Shakespeare deploy a crowded colourful strength, and all be perfect poets thereby, but they could not charge their utterances, except in rare self-exceeding moments, with that vision-thrill, for the simple reason that the psychological levels on which they were accustomed to draw inspiration were specifically neither Overhead nor even orientated towards Yoga. And least of all without being a Yogi in a direct sense and having easy access to the planes above the mind would a poet, however great, be able to infuse into a verse about atomic energy or about some other apparently non-mystical subject the very enthousiasmos of the mantra.
However, it is in the frequently mantric expression of reality's occult dimensions rather than of familiar or terrestrial objects that the major virtue of Savitri resides. For mainly by that expression, endowing with concrete intimacy what is usually a remote Wonder, it seizes our minds with the ideal of the spiritual Superman that we have to become through inward growth into and outward manifestation of the unexplored intensities and magnitudes of our subliminal and supraliminal being. Only, we must remember that no narrowly esoteric aim animates this poetry. The intensities and magnitudes of the Unknown that are expressed are not meant to be mysteries to which a mere handful can have the key. Although they may not be immediately comprehended by the major bulk of readers, they are voiced with a luminous faithfulness, not with a recondite or recherché ambiguity, and are brought into
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commerce with the familiar, the terrestrial. Their poet is never unaware of his mission to help by his calm
the swaying wheels of life
And the long restlessness of transient things... [p. 427]
No less do his pulses throb with earth's in Savitri, where the utmost heavens are spanned by
The lines that tear the veil from Deity's face,[p. 677]
than in Urvasie and Love and Death and Baji Prabhou with their more directly human interest and - to adapt slightly a Savitri-phrase to characterise them - their
Words winged with the red splendour of the heart. [p. 615]
Indeed, just as they touch the skies with hands of clay, Savitri touches the poor dust with "the high Transcendent's sunlike hands". Man's earth-born heart is never forsaken by it. And perhaps the intensest throb of that heart is heard in those four long colloquies - first, the dialogue between King Aswapathy and the Divine Mother who grants him the boon he so passionately craves:
O radiant fountain of the world's delight
World-free and unattainable above,
O Bliss who ever dwellst deep hid within
While men seek thee outside and never find,
Mystery and Muse with hieratic tongue,
Incarnate the white passion of thy force,
Mission to earth some living form of thee....
Let thy infinity in one body live,
All-Knowledge wrap one mind in seas of light,
All-Love throb single in one human heart....
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Omnipotence, girdle with the power of God
Movements and moments of a mortal will,
Pack with the eternal might one human hour
And with one gesture change all future time - [p. 345]
then the sage Narad's talk with King Aswapathy and his Queen-wife about the fate chosen by their daughter Savitri and the pain involved by it:
Pain is the hand of Nature sculpturing men
To greatness: an inspired labour chisels
With heavenly cruelty an unwilling mould.
Implacable in the passion of their will,
Lifting the hammers of titanic toil
The demiurges of the universe work;
They shape with giant strokes their own; their sons
Are marked with their enormous stamp of fire - [p. 444]
then the debate of the God of Death and the incarnate Love that is Savitri, in which Savitri affirms:
Love must not cease to live upon the earth;
For Love is the bright link twixt earth and heaven,
Love is the far Transcendent's angel here;
Love is man's lien on the Absolute,[p. 633]
and defines against the lure of the Death-god towards escape beyond earth into pure peace the meaning of true freedom:
Freedom is this with ever seated soul,
Large in life's limits, strong in Matter's knots,
Building great stuff of action from the worlds
To make fine wisdom from coarse scattered strands
And love and beauty out of war and night,
The wager wonderful, the game divine.
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What liberty has the soul which feels not free
Unless stripped bare and cannot kiss the bonds
The Lover winds around his playmate's limbs,
Choosing his tyranny, crushed in his embrace?
To seize him better with her boundless heart
She accepts the limiting circle of his arms,
Bows full of bliss beneath his mastering hands
And laughs in his rich constraints, most bound, most free.
This is my answer to thy lures, O Death -[p. 653]
and lastly the passage of ecstatic words between the Godhead of the supramental glories and Savitri the conqueror of Satyavan's mortality facing now the test and temptation of heaven's bountiful wonders and still holding out the claim of earth-life as the field of the divine Spirit:
O life, the life beneath the wheeling stars
For victory in the tournament with death,
For bending of the fierce and difficult bow,
For flashing of the splendid sword of God!
O thou who soundest the trumpet in the lists,
Part not the handle from the untried steel,
Take not the warrior with his blow unstruck.
Are there not still a million fights to wage?
O King-smith, clang on still thy toil begun,
Weld us to one in thy strong smithy of life.
Thy fine-curved jewelled hilt call Savitri,
Thy blade's exultant smile name Satyavan.[p. 687]
Savitri is granted her prayer by the Supreme and allowed to be the centre of His manifestation among the cosmic myriads:
O lasso of my rapture's widening noose,
Become my cord of universal love. [p. 702]
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Thus the earth-born heart of man is shown in the poem not only in its finiteness aching for the Infinite but also in an apocalyptic fulfilment. And this fulfilment, though dense with the mystical light, is again and again depicted in terms which go home to us and which set forth in a colossal clarity the Eternal in the movements of Time. For, Sri Aurobindo did not write his epic with the disposition of either a sworn Surrealist wedded to the obscurely entangled or a strict Symbolist cherishing a cult of the glimmeringly elusive. Behind the poet in him is the Master of Yoga whose work was to enlighten and not to puzzle and who, with all his roots in India's hoary past of spirituality, was yet a modern among moderns and the seer of a new mystical progression, a collective advance in consciousness from mind to Supermind, a whole world evolving Godwards and breaking the fetters not only of political or social tyranny but also of mortal ignorance. A democracy of the Divine liberating the human was his goal, as in those words he puts into the mouth of his Savitri:
A lonely freedom cannot satisfy
A heart that has grown one with every heart:
I am a deputy of the aspiring world,
My spirit's liberty I ask for all.[p. 649]
(Sri Aurobindo - The Poet, 1999, pp. 136-55)
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