On Savitri
THEME/S
SOME COMMENTS ON SAVITRI1
(I)
The opening passage of Sri Aurobindo's Savitri - the block of the first 78 lines from
It was the hour before the Gods awake [p. 1]
to
All can be done if the God-touch is there [p. 3]
is often regarded as the most difficult, the most obscure in the whole epic. Its obscurity lies precisely in its description of an obscurity, a darkness, a night which covers the world. What is the nature of the tenebrous phenomenon pictured in lines 2-4 of the passage in relation to the 1st? -
Across the path of the divine Event
The huge foreboding mind of Night, alone
In her unlit temple of eternity,
Lay stretched immobile upon Silence' marge.
The common impression is that the very beginning of the universal manifestation is spoken of. According to
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1 [Originally published in Mother India, August and September 1975.]
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Sri Aurobindo's spiritual philosophy, the manifestation, of which earth's history is a part, begins with a stark Inconscience in which all that we understand by the Supreme Divine is submerged and concealed. From the total Involution cosmic Evolution starts: the submerged qualities of the Supreme Divine gradually emerge, the concealed powers of the Superconscience come out of the Inconscience, grade after grade. First, organised Matter takes shape - next, Life with its sensations and desires springs forth - then, Mind perceptive and conceptive appears - and, finally, there will be a disclosure of all that lies beyond mentality, the various phases of the Supreme Divine culminating in the quaternary: Supermind (Vijnana), Bliss (Ananda), Consciousness-Force (Chit-tapas), Existence (Sat).
Now, does the Night, which features in Savitri's opening passage, stand for this Inconscience at the commencement of things?
The initial clue to the right answer is in the very title of the Canto: "The Symbol Dawn." The title refers to the dawn of the day which is characterised in the line which occurs at the end of the first canto:
This was the day when Satyavan must die. [p. 10]
The dawn in question serves as a symbol. The symbolic content is stated in the verses picturing the occult power that has the natural daybreak as its suggestive front and communicative medium:
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]
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A further pointer follows:
It wrote the lines of a significant myth
Telling of a greatness of spiritual dawns...
Almost that day the epiphany was disclosed
Of which our thoughts and hopes are signal flares...
A lonely splendour from the invisible goal
Almost was flung on the opaque Inane. [p. 4]
In short, what is symbolised is the descent of the Supramental Godhead into the world's mental human consciousness for a total transformative purpose. A brief fore-glimpse is given of the invasion of Cosmic Ignorance by the Transcendent Knowledge. This Cosmic Ignorance, whose highest term is the mind groping towards Truth, is itself an evolute from the basic Inconscience. If the Transcendent Knowledge is the Reality of which the symbol is the dawn of the last day in Satyavan's life, this basic Inconscience would be the Reality of which the symbol is the night preceding that dawn. And actually the night and the dawn are connected by Sri Aurobindo when he first brings in the dawn motif:
A hope stole in that hardly dared to be
Amid the Night's forlorn indifference. [p. 3]
These two lines come immediately after the opening passage of Savitri has closed with
All can be done if the God-touch is there. [Ibid.]
Thus "the huge foreboding mind of Night" is linked with the Symbol Dawn. And already before the opening passage ends we have the mention of this dawn:
Insensibly somewhere a breach began:
A long lone line of hesitating hue
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Like a vague smile tempting a desert heart
Troubled the far rim of life's obscure sleep. [p. 2]
What arrives in the wake of the hesitating hue is an illumining outbreak of the divine vision:
An eye of deity pierced through the dumb deeps; [Ibid.]
and the eye is called
A scout in a reconnaissance from the sun. [Ibid.]
Nowhere do we find any disjunction between the symbol dawn and the night preceding it. All that we find is different phases of this night. From a condition which Sri Aurobindo describes by saying,
A fathomless zero occupied the world [p. 1]
and later
The impassive skies were neutral, empty, still [Ibid.]
we pass to another state about which he says:
Then something in the inscrutable darkness stirred;
A nameless movement, an unthought Idea
Insistent, dissatisfied, without an aim,
Something that wished but knew not how to be,
Teased the Inconscient to wake Ignorance.[pp. 1-2]
In other words, the symbolised Inconscience shades off into the less stark symbolised Ignorance - a state comparatively closer to the hesitating hue's "long lone line".
So much for the initial clue of the Canto's title. It has led us to several points in the whole passage driving home its
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suggestion. But in fact we do not need to go far afield to prove that the night is the particular period of darkness prior to the particular period of light during which Satyavan is going to die. We have only to consider turns of expression like the following, which occur on the heels of "the huge foreboding mind of Night":
Almost one felt, opaque, impenetrable,
In the sombre symbol of her eyeless muse
The abysm of the unbodied Infinite...
As in a dark beginning of all things,
A mute featureless semblance of the Unknown...
Cradled the cosmic drowse of ignorant Force... [p. 1]
Here directly the word "symbol" is used about the night and we are told that what is happening is "as if" at the time when the original Inconscience started to disgorge an evolving universe from its depths. We have an explicit comparison in either instance. Again, there is the obvious word "semblance" telling us that this night is not the "Unknown" itself but only something like it in muteness and featurelessness. And the line,
matches the two later ones commencing with "Almost", which we have already quoted. Just as these declare the unmanifest Superconscience in the dawn-glamour, this one provides an inkling of the original Inconscience in the dark hour upon which that magic light breaks. It is this hour, and not anything else, that is spoken of in Savitri's opening line. And in the line itself a subtle sign that we are not at "the dark beginning of all things" is caught from the difference in the tenses:
It was the hour before the Gods awake. [Ibid.]
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Why does Sri Aurobindo not write "awoke"? The reason is that he is pointing not to an event which once happened but to one that constantly and repeatedly happens. It will hardly do to say that the Historic Present - a literary device to secure vividness - is being used. If such is the case, what is the idea of not employing the same narrative device in the first half of the line? Why are we not told: "It is the hour..."?
We get again a significant present tense slightly later when Sri Aurobindo tells us of the cosmic drowse of ignorant force
Whose moved creative slumber kindles the suns
And carries our lives in its somnambulist whirl. [Ibid.]
A situation covering a long span of ages, including the continuous cosmic phenomenon of stars shining and the continuous terrestrial phenomenon of human history, finds an allusion in "kindles" and "carries". The night described is not the primeval Inconscience but an image of it such as comes numberless times in that long span of the ages during which the kindling of suns and the carrying of lives are ever present. The coming, time and again, of the primeval Inconscience's image in the form of night preceding day is clinched for us by Sri Aurobindo writing:
Thrown back once more into unthinking dreams,
Earth wheeled abandoned in the hollow gulfs
Forgetful of her spirit and her fate. [Ibid.]
"Once more" is unmistakable in its implication. Nor is it an isolated locution. Its occurrence fairly early in the Night-passage links up with a reiteration of it at almost the conclusion of the passage and in the middle of the Dawn-passage following it:
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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... [p. 3]
Once more a tread perturbed the vacant Vasts;
Infinity's centre, a Face of rapturous calm
Parted the eternal lids that open heaven;
A Form from far beatitudes seemed to near. [p. 4]
Evidently what happened several times in the course of things is indicated - what is painfully recovered after each oblivious sleep which represents the primeval Inconscience, an obtruding on the night's vacancy by the advent of the Dawn-goddess who momentarily lets the transcendent Light through. We may add that just a little before the one passage's end we have a preparation of the next passage with the mention of the scout from the Sun. About the "message" of this "eye of deity" which "pierced through the dumb deeps" Sri Aurobindo continues:
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. [pp. 2-3]
Mark the adjective "renewed". The "consent to see and feel" comes not just on one occasion but on a series of occasions as dawn follows night time after time.
What, in fact, Sri Aurobindo posits in
is a religio-mythic concept, that has been part of India's temple-life for millennia: the daily awaking of the Gods.
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The Gods are the Powers that carry on the harmonious functions by which the universe moves on its progressive path. According to an old belief, based on a subtle knowledge of the antagonism between the Lords of Falsehood and the Lords of Truth, the period of night interrupts the work of the Truth-Lords by its obscuration of sight and by its pulling down of the consciousness into sleep. Each day, with the onset of darkness the Gods are stopped in their functions by the Demons: the Gods pass into an oblivious slumber. Each day, with the advent of light they emerge into activity and continue their progress-creating career. Traditionally the moment of their awaking, termed "Brahma-muhurta", is 4 a.m. Every temple in India rings its bells and clangs its cymbals at 4 a.m. to stir the deities, no less than the devotees, into action. The "hour", therefore, which Savitri depicts at its start may be taken, if we are to be literal, as 3-4 a.m. The termination of this hour is "the divine Event" mentioned in the second line.
That this is so and that a particular religious custom which points to a local and temporal occurrence is in view are most aptly indicated by the 4th line, stating the place where Night's mind was alone:
In her unlit temple of eternity.[p.1]
Connecting the event of the Gods' awaking after the hour between 3 and 4 a.m. every day in Indian temples, there is the hit-in-the-eye word "temple" used by Sri Aurobindo.
Yes, the common impression that the very beginning of the universal manifestation is depicted is definitely off the mark. But we must not overlook the background of such an impression. The original primeval Inconscience from which all manifestation has sprung is certainly a looming enormity visible through the Night-passage. If it were not so the passage would not be as symbolic as the Dawn-passage. The exaggeration we must guard against is the forgetting of the
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symbolic act: we must refrain from mixing up the Symbol and the Reality.
Perhaps we may effect a species of reconciliation between the common impression and our explanation by another manner of presenting the symbolisation - a manner which, also can be justified from Sri Aurobindo. Here we have to say: "There is in each night a small temporary Inconscience, a passing snatch of the Great Darkness that is the divinely ordained womb of our cosmos. In this snatch we can glimpse the movement by which the Darkness grew less and less impenetrable and passed into what we may call Dimness awaiting illumination: the phenomenon which Sri Aurobindo tersely catches in the phrase about the Inconscient being teased to wake Ignorance. The symbolisation consists in each night being the primeval Night itself in a local transient miniature."
Before we close our discussion we may warn against the temptation to say: "Sri Aurobindo is sketching the old Indian conception of the Cosmos passing into laya, non-manifestation, again and again and emerging repeatedly out of that Darkness into phenomenal existence." First of all, laya is not Darkness: it is simply non-manifestation. Secondly the emergence of Ignorance from the Inconscient, the appearance of half-knowledge or finite consciousness, on the way to plenary knowledge or Super-conscience by means of a progressive evolution, is not considered by Sri Aurobindo a repetitive process. He conceives it to be one extreme possibility of self-revelation adopted by the Divine in the course of His varied "adventure of consciousness and joy" in terms of time and space. For, as Sri Aurobindo says in The Riddle of This World,1 "once manifestation began infinite possibility also began and among the infinite possibilities which it is the function of the universal manifestation to work out, the negation, the apparent effective negation - with all
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1 The 1933 edition, Calcutta, p. 101.
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its consequences, - of the Power, Light, Peace, Bliss was very evidently one." Here is a unique dire experiment, a horrific wager with Himself that the Almighty makes because this too must appear at some point as a mode of phenomenal self-projection. Besides, an actual full repetition of "a dark beginning of all things" would never be called a "symbol", a "semblance" and introduced by "as if".
* * *
So far we have gone by internal evidences and general considerations. Now for a couple of quotations from Sri Aurobindo's letters on Savitri, providing an indirect elucidation of the problem. When we say "indirect", we do not mean that they leave any doubt lingering: we merely mean that they are not directly meant to solve the difficulty. The solution emerges in the course of answers to other questions.
The first excerpt1 runs:
"...do you seriously want me to give an accurate scientific description of the earth half in darkness and half in light so as to spoil my impressionist symbol or else to revert to the conception of the earth as a flat and immobile surface? I am not writing a scientific treatise, I am selecting certain ideas and impressions to form a symbol of a partial and temporary darkness of the soul and Nature which seems to a temporary feeling of that which is caught in the Night as if it were universal and eternal. One who is lost in that Night does not think of the other half of the earth as full of light; to him all is Night and the earth a forsaken wanderer in an enduring darkness. If I sacrifice this impressionism and abandon the image of the earth wheeling through dark space I might as well abandon the symbol altogether, for this is a necessary part of it. As a matter of fact in the passage itself earth in its wheeling does come into the dawn and pass from darkness
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1 The 1972 edition of Savitri, pp. 733-34.
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into the light. You must take the idea as a whole and in all its transitions and not press one detail with too literal an insistence..."
Obviously the objection to which Sri Aurobindo replies is that the opening passage of Savitri suggests the whole earth to be plunged in darkness whereas the actuality disclosed by post-Copernican science is half-earth experiencing night and half-earth experiencing day. The very terms of the objection imply the view we have presented in our comments - namely, that Sri Aurobindo's immediate subject is one particular earthly night. If this view had been wrong, Sri Aurobindo would at once have criticised it. But his reply proceeds on the same view and thereby supports our presentation and, while thus proceeding, he has several expressions which leave no room for the notion that the original Inconscience prior to the earth was the explicit vision. The explicit vision is: "the image of the earth wheeling through dark space...." Through this image a number of profound insights are conveyed, but nowhere does it lose its central and frontal position. And we have to mark the adjectives in the phrase: "a symbol of a partial and temporary darkness of the soul and Nature" - as well as to observe the clear pointers everywhere that it is the earth's partial and temporary night that impressionistically serves for the symbolisation.
Our next excerpt dwells further on the symbolisation, in answer to a critic's feeling that the poet is drawing out his description to an inordinate lergth. Sri Aurobindo's defence1 goes:
"His objection of longueur would be perfectly just if the description of the night and the dawn had been simply of physical night and physical dawn; but here the physical night and physical dawn are, as the title of the canto clearly suggests, a symbol, although what may be called a real symbol of an inner reality and the main purpose is
1 Ibid., pp. 792-93.
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to describe by suggestion the thing symbolised; here it is a relapse into Inconscience broken by a slow and difficult return of consciousness followed by a brief but splendid and prophetic outbreak of spiritual light leaving behind the 'day' of ordinary human consciousness in which the prophecy has to be worked out. The whole of Savitri is, according to the title of the poem, a legend that is a symbol and this opening canto is, it may be said, a key beginning and announcement. So understood there is nothing here otiose or unnecessary; all is needed to bring out by suggestion some aspect of the thing symbolised and .so start adequately the working out of the significance, of the whole poem."
The chief operative turn of speech for our purpose in the above is: "a relapse into Inconscience." The term "relapse" indicates indisputably a new setback, involving in the case before us a particular occasion for the unconscious condition such as happens each night in the course of the 24-hour cycle through which the earth passes repeatedly. We may also note that what makes the symbol of an inner reality and so takes us beyond the merely physical in import is, after all, the physical night and physical dawn constituting the earth's daily phases. The Inconscience that is there is primarily the one in which the soul and Nature sink during the recurrent nocturnal phase. Even though "the main purpose" of the description is to conjure up the "dark beginning of all things" as a presence, it is only through an instance of the earth's recurrent nocturnal phase that this presence is conjured up.
II
Savitri opens with a single self-sufficing line - a complete sentence in iambic pentameter consisting of eight words:
It was the hour before the Gods awake. [p.1]
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This line is the shortest start of any epic. The Iliad has a dactylic line starting the theme with a greater number of syllables proper to the quantitative hexameter - a number which Pope is obliged to match by a full heroic couplet:
Achilles' wrath, to Greece the direful spring
Of woes unnumbered, heavenly Goddess sing!
Virgil's Aeneid has two hexameters and an extra foot for the initial grammatical unit. C. Day Lewis represents them by:
To tell of the war and the hero who first from Troy's frontier,
Displaced by destiny, came to the Lavinian shores,
To Italy....
Dante's Divina Commedia runs its start into a trio of lines setting the terza rima moving. In Dorothy Sayers's version we have:
Midway this way of life we're bound upon,
I woke to find myself in a dark wood,
Where the right road was wholly lost and gone.
Milton's Paradise Lost beats all by his long-drawn-out overture:
Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one Greater Man
Restore us and regain the blissful seat,
Sing, Heavenly Muse...
But Sri Aurobindo's opening, though the shortest, is not by any means the simplest. As we have seen, it preludes the most tough "knot" of the whole poem. It has cosmogonic
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overtones, metaphysico-religious implications, and refers to a religio-mythic concept: the moment of the Gods' awaking.
The next line -
Across the path of the divine Event - [p.l]
at once recalls with its two concluding words Tennyson's well-known
And one far-off divine event
To which the whole creation moves.
But there is no direct parity between the Aurobindonian "Event" and the Tennysonian. Sri Aurobindo points to a daily occurrence, while Tennyson presumably talks of the end of universal history. And yet, behind the daily working of divine forces to which Sri Aurobindo alludes, we may discern a final "divine Event", when the Gods, the Lords of Truth and Light, will awake forever and the Avivdya, the Ignorance, in which the world's consciousness lives at present, will be dispelled for good. As we have already observed, the habitual awaking of the Gods on the particular day with which Savitri begins its story is infused with a brief appearance of the ultimate glory: a touch of the "epiphany" is seen for a short while. The "one far-off divine event" is momentarily glimpsed. Yes, a Tennysonian suggestion glimmers in the background. But, of course, the consummation which Tennyson alludes to is not quite the same as the world-fulfilment Sri Aurobindo's yoga labours towards. Tennyson has a Christian outlook, and strains his eyes in the direction of a world-end leading to a Supreme Hereafter for all the elements of the Creation, which Christ, reappearing, will gather up into God. Sri Aurobindo has in view a crowning of the world's evolutionary effort by an establishment of the Supermind here in time and space with a divinised mind, vitality and body. Unlike the Christian
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visionary, he is spiritually this-worldly not only in "organic process" but also in ultimate achievement.
We may note in passing that Sri Aurobindo does not particularise his "Event" by qualifying it as "this" or "that": he employs only the general definite article "the". A sort of known generality is indicated: there is no pinning down of the Event to a specific occasion nor is any direct attention focused on it: it is named unobtrusively in spite of its magnitude - as if it were a matter of recurrent greatness, a common uncommonness - a splendour to be repeated interminably. The use of "the" rather than "this" or "that" turns us away again from some once-and-for-all Event and conforms to the pattern we have drawn of a night like any other in the long series of dark intervals, except that Satyavan is to die during the ensuing day.
In the line that follows -
The huge foreboding mind of Night, alone - [Ibid.]
what is it that is foreboded? One may argue that it must be an unpleasant thing - a deeper and larger gloom - rather than a pleasant thing, namely, the light to come. One may imagine the deeper and larger darkness to be the original Inconscience, which was the beginning of the world; but how can that Inconscience be boded in advance? "Fore" implies a future, not a past. What is symbolised is not the same as what is anticipated. We should think only of the light to come. But then the atmosphere of gold that would go with this light would stand in the way: forebodings are gloomy, whereas the anticipation of light would be cheerful. However, we must remember two points. First, it is gloom that is in an anticipatory state: so the anticipation has itself to be gloomy, sharing as it does the nature of the anticipating entity, even though what is anticipated is bright. Secondly, what is anticipated would spell the end of gloom and surely gloom anticipating its own end cannot be cheerful about it!
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Psychologically it cannot help being gloomy about the event which would deal a death-blow to it.
"The event" - there we have named the very identity of the blow-dealer. What the mind of night forebodes is the preceding line's "divine Event" - the moment of the Gods' awaking. Actually the word "before" of the first line of Savitri should identify the object of night's foreboding activity.
Now we may dwell on the literary, as distinguished from the psychological quality of the participial adjective. From Sri Aurobindo's manuscripts we learn that the third line of Savitri originally ran:
The huge unslumbering spirit of Night, alone -
and was followed, two lines later, by:
Lay stretched immobile upon Silence' marge,
Mute with the expectation of her change.
Later the final line became:
Mute with the unplumbed prevision of her change.
In the present version of the opening passage the substance of both forms of the line in question has been concentrated in "foreboding" in the immediate context and later assimilated into two lines:
An unshaped consciousness desired light
And a blank prescience yearned towards distant change. [p- 2]
We are pointing this out by the way; the literary problem we should like to raise is: how would an adjective like "expectant" or "previsioning" do as a substitute for "foreboding"?
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"Previsioning" would not be quite amiss, especially in view of the verse coming some 150 lines or so afterwards about the Dawn-Goddess:
On life's thin border awhile the Vision stood. [p. 4]
But "previsioning" will introduce an anapaest in the line's third foot and spoil the steady, slow and even sombre movement: a kind of skip would come with the anapaestic intrusion. Besides, the quantitative values of the word - one semi-long and three intrinsic shorts - would be out of accord with the large-vowelled rhythm:
The huge foreboding mind of Night alone
There are six intrinsic longs and all the five stresses of the pentameter coincide with five out of these six voice-lengths. The line remarkably bears out by its sound the sense of the immense solitariness of the brooding Night-mind.
If one may be forgiven for recalling some verses of one's own I would quote:
One with night's incommunicable mind1
and
A loneliness of superhuman night.2
But, though here too by Sri Aurobindo's estimation is overhead poetry and at least in the last line a pure Mantra, still there is not such a succession of long vowels mostly driven home by strong stresses as in Sri Aurobindo's picture
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1[Amal Kiran, The Secret Splendour, 'Dante on the Eve of the Divina Commedia', p. 34.]
2[Ibid., 'No Mortal Breath', p. 162.]
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-a picture supported grandly, after a one-line interval, by the vision of the verse which is concerned directly with the disposition of Night's mind:
Lay stretched immobile upon Silence' marge
-again six quantitative longs and five stresses rendered more effective by the long quantities under them, particularly the stupendous opening spondee which seems to give a Presence extending right across the whole horizon that is "Silence' marge" at this occult hour with which Savitri breaks upon us. ("Stretched", I may remark, has a vowel which for all its intrinsic shortness is stretched out by the three consonantal sounds following it no less than preceding it.)
As for "expectant" instead of "previsioning", it is still worse. Even apart from the ridiculous suggestion of a woman expecting the birth of a baby, the poetry suffers an irremediable fall. There is a lack of suggestion in the adjective - it has a drab vacuous neutrality. It makes an abstract prose statement - no conjuring up of a presence, no calling forth of Night's characteristic mentality. And the whole sound rings flat and false, coming between "huge" and "mind". "Previsioning" had at least four syllables to suggest some kind of length making up for the brevity of the vowel-values. "Expectant" has nothing except three short vowels.
Finally, both these adjectives are wanting in the peculiar beauty and aptness of the two long o's that belong to "foreboding". Without their occurrence the long o of "alone" concluding the line would itself be alone and the word in which it figures would toll its bell as if in a void. Perhaps a more appropriate way of speaking would be: the void which the-line suggests would be a dead one instead of a living "fathomless zero" (to quote a Savitri-expression a little further on) if "alone", which rounds off the verse, were not prepared by what we may call - using a term from
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elsewhere in the poem - the "ciphered round" of each of the two o's earlier in the line. Echoing them, it fills out with a vibrant mystery.
What we may consider in contrast an insubstantial vacuity is caught in the line which intervenes between the two that are actively related to Night's mind, namely,
In her unlit temple of eternity.[p. 1]
The rhythmic antithesis to those two verses is complete: there is not a single quantitative long in the 11 syllables -short vowel follows short vowel to create the impression of a sheer lack of substantial reality. The semi-long of the first e in "eternity" hardly avails as a break. In addition to the short-vowelled character of the line, we should observe that there are only three real stresses as against the five in the other pair. Further, the line begins with an anapaest, as though a quick movement were easily possible in the utterly unresisting "atmosphere" of the temple. Lastly, we have no strong close as with "alone" and "marge" but a weak falling away into some endless unknown: "eternity" is without a true accent in its terminal syllable, a sort of half-pressure falls there merely because the line comes to an end: no actual end occurs and we get the sense of an indeterminable void with no life in it.
One more technical remark. In the earlier version of Savitri when there was "the huge unslumbering spirit of Night", our line stood:
In her unlit temple of immensity.
Now, with "eternity", Sri Aurobindo does not describe the temple's dimensions but the object to which the temple was dedicated: Night serves eternity in her temple. This change further takes away "substance" from what is described. "Immensity" is a positive term and indicates magnitude,
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the power of a spatial extension: "eternity" is non-indicative of any spatial as well as of any temporal continuity. We are carried off into the indefinite and imponderable.
The three lines about Night's mind lying lonely upon the marge of Silence in eternity's temple bring to my mind the three that come much later (in Canto 3 of Book One):
The superconscient realms of motionless peace
Where judgment ceases and the word is mute
And the Unconceived lies pathless and alone, [pp. 33-34]
The lying immobile and silent and lonely recur, though the ultimate mood is different - the all-freeing tranquillity of an unnameable Nirvana instead of the ominous profundity of a hushed emptiness. What, from the standpoint of literary psycho-phonetics, links the two passages is the end-term "alone" in the second line of the one and in the closing line of the other. We encounter this effect elsewhere too in Savitri, but not so impressively as here, nor does it confront us with such a self-contained poetic generality - except once, as we shall soon see. No doubt, "foreboding" actually points to a particular object - the divine Event of the Gods' awaking - yet it can stand on its own as the expression of a psychological movement typical of and natural to the mind of Night, a movement fraught with a formless fear of the future. Again, in the other line the "And" at the start points to a special context and is necessary to the progressive revelation, yet metrically it is a superfluous conjunction, making the initial foot a glide-anapaest when the line could be a perfect pentameter without it and have the first foot an lamb.
Comparable self-contained small-scale masterpieces with the same termination to various descriptive, reflective or suggestive phrases may be cited. There is Housman's delightfully atmospheric snatch from Nature:
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The cuckoo shouts all day at nothing
In leafy dells, alone.
There is the deeply poignant religious conviction of an early Sonneteer:
All love is lost except on God alone.
Wordsworth's greatest moment is that unfathomable phrase about Newton's bust at Cambridge with its silent face that is the marble index of
a mind for ever
Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone.
John Chadwick, "Arjava" to the inmates of Sri Aurobindo's Ashram, matches the Upanishadic mystery and magnificence of Wordsworth by his lines:
This patter of Time's marring steps across the solitude
Of Truth's abidingness, Self-blissful and alone.
A mixture of the descriptive, reflective and suggestive in four verses of terrific power, with a cosmic sweep of imagination, meets us in Canto 2 of Savitri's "Book of Fate":
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]
These verses have a special interest and importance for us because they are some of the absolutely last that Sri Aurobindo dictated to Nirodbaran a little before December 5, the day when not Satyavan but Sri Aurobindo himself was to "die" and when, as a result of his passing into the inner planes, his
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co-worker and companion, the Mother, would undergo the fate of loneliness on the visible earth-stage - although
God-given her strength can battle against doom. [p. 462]
(The Sun and the Rainbow, 2008, pp. 143-62)
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Amal Kiran
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