On Savitri
THEME/S
SOME NOTES ON SRI AUROBINDO'S
POEMS1
Apropos of the incarnation of the Divine and the advent of the Age of Gold on the heels of the Iron Age after "the last fierce spasms of the dying past" have shaken the nations, as suggested at the end of In the Moonlight, we may quote the magnificent passage from Book III, Canto 4 of Savitri:
A giant dance of Shiva tore the past,
There was a thunder as of worlds that fall;
Earth was o'errun with fire and the roar of Death
Clamouring to slay a world his hunger had made;
There was a clangour of Destruction's wings:
The Titan's battle-cry was in my ears,
Alarm and rumour shook the armoured Night.
I saw the Omnipotent's flaming pioneers
Over the heavenly verge which turns towards life
Come crowding down the amber stairs of birth;
Forerunners of a divine multitude
Out of the paths of the morning star they came
Into the little room of mortal life.
I saw them cross the twilight of an age,
The sun-eyed children of a marvellous dawn,
The great creators with wide brows of calm,
The massive barrier-breakers of the world
________________
1 Mostly published in Mother India, June-September 1957. [Here are included only the passages related to Savitri.]
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And wrestlers with destiny in her lists of will,
The labourers in the quarries of the gods,
The messengers of the Incommunicable,
The architects of immortality.
Into the fallen human sphere they came,
Faces that wore the Immortal's glory still,
Voices that communed still with the thoughts of God,
Bodies made beautiful by the Spirit's light,
Carrying the magic word, the mystic fire,
Carrying the Dionysian cup of joy,
Approaching eyes of a diviner man,
Lips chanting an unknown anthem of the soul,
Feet echoing in the corridors of Time.
High priests of wisdom, sweetness, might and bliss,
Discoverers of beauty's sunlit ways
And swimmers of Love's laughing fiery floods
And dancers within rapture's golden doors,
Their tread one day shall change the suffering earth
And justify the light on Nature's face.[pp. 343-44]
*
Among the poems of Sri Aurobindo's middle period, The Rishi represents, in a semi-dramatic form, the fullest philosophic statement of the all-round ancient Indian spirituality, at once life-transcending and life-embracing, which later ages broke up into many divergent strains and finally tended to narrow down to one predominant strain of other-worldly renunciation. The fourfold scheme of experience found in the Mandukya Upanishad is here: Virat, the gross outer, called Waking - Hiranyagarbha, the subtle inner, called Dream - Prajnā, the causal inmost, called Sleep - the sheer absolute Self, simply called Turiya or Fourth. We must remember that in the Upanishad's Dream there is no unreality, just as in its Sleep there is no emptiness: they merely designate depths of consciousness in which is an existence greater and truer than in the surface dimensions
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that are usually our life. In fact, Dream is the rich sustaining medium, the world-shaping Thought-power, through which the outer manifestation takes place, while Sleep is the ultimate cause and creator of things, the supreme omniscient and omnipotent Divinity hidden within all and holding in itself the archetypal seed-form of everything. The absolute Self is indeed utterly featureless, an indivisible unity of infinite Peace, but it is not cut off from the other three poises: those poises are its own and, though as the pure Ground of them it is free of them, their activity is its Peace loosened forth, their multiplicity its Oneness diversely deployed, and its freedom is not limited by non-manifestation even as it is not limited by manifestation.
A direct poetic version of the fourfold scheme is in a passage in Savitri, Book XI, Canto l.1
The Bird of Fire was originally attempted in quantitative metre but the poem did not progress. Then another form was tried and the result was successful - "a kind of compromise between the stress system and the foot measure." About the symbolism Sri Aurobindo wrote: "The Bird of Fire is the living vehicle of the gold fire of the Divine Light and the white fire of the Divine Tapas and the crimson fire of Divine Love - and everything else of the Divine Consciousness."
Here we may quote some lines from Savitri, Book I, Canto 2, together with Sri Aurobindo's remarks in reference to them:
Almost they saw who lived within her light
Her playmate in the sempiternal spheres
Descended from its unattainable realms
In her attracting advent's luminous wake,
The white-fire dragon bird of endless bliss
Drifting with burning wings above her days... [p. 16]
__________
1 [pp. 680-82.]
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The question asked was: "In the mystical region, is the dragon bird any relation of your Bird of Fire with 'gold-wings' or your Hippogriff with 'face lustred, pale-blue lined'? And why do you write: 'What to say about him? One can only see'?" Sri Aurobindo replied: "All birds of that region are relatives. But this is the bird of eternal Ananda, while the Hippogriff is the divinised Thought and the Bird of Fire is the Agni-bird, psychic and tapas. All that however is to mentalise too much and mentalising always takes most of the life out of spiritual things. That is why I say it can be seen but nothing said about it."
To many lines in the Sonnets one can find parallels in Savitri though, of course, not always with the same nuance and intent. Perhaps the most easily paralleled are some lines in The Indwelling Universal which begins,
I contain the whole world in my soul's embrace:
In me Arcturus and Belphegor burn.
Book VII, Canto 6, of Savitri has:
His soul must be wider than the universe
And feel eternity as its very stuff,
Rejecting the moment's personality,
Know itself older than the birth of Time,
Creation an incident in its consciousness,
Arcturus and Belphegor grains of fire
Circling in a corner of its boundless self...[p. 537]
Unlike the name "Arcturus", which is well-known for one of the brightest stars in the northern heavens and which has found its way not unoften into literature, "Belphegor" which Sri Aurobindo has brought in with powerful effect has practically no place in popular astronomy and has figured rarely in past literary usage.
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However, it has become famous, though not in an astronomical context, in contemporary France because of Julien Benda's book Belphégor where, turning its etymological significance (Baal-Peor, Semitic deity of licentiousness) to critical purposes, he has given a new adjective to the French language, Belphégorien, to designate certain strains of degeneracy and effeminacy in the intellectual and social life of his country.
About the composition of all his poetry (and even of all his prose) ever since the experience of the utterly silent mind in 1908, Sri Aurobindo has written in a letter: "I receive from above my head and receive changes and corrections from above without any initiation by myself or labour of the brain. Even if I change a hundred times, the mind does not work at that, it only receives. Formerly it used not to be so, the mind was always labouring at the stuff of an unshaped formation... The poems come as a stream beginning at the first line and ending at the last - only some remain with one or two changes, others have to be recast if the first inspiration was an inferior one." Savitri was recast eight or ten times "under the old insufficient inspiration": afterwards it was written and rewritten wholly "from above".
Concerning the blank-verse of Savitri we may touch on the "Miltonism" so often attributed to this epic. To be in general Miltonic is surely no defect, provided one is not merely an echo. But it does not help the ends of criticism to see Miltonism as soon as we have anywhere a high-pitched blank verse embodying at some length an epic or semi-epic theme. Of course, repeated end-stopping, as in Savitri, is bound to de-Miltonise the basic mould. But even the presence of enjambment is insufficient by itself to constitute the Miltonic movement. On the side of form, the latter consists not only of run-over lines but also of complicated sentences and grammatical suspenses building up a closely-knit verse-
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paragraph in an English markedly Latinised in its turn. On the side of style, the differentia is well touched off half-humourously by Sri Aurobindo himself in a remark drawn by the attachment of the Miltonic label to a couple of his lines: "Miltonic? Surely not. The Miltonic has a statelier more spreading rhythm and a less direct more loftily arranged language. Miltonically I should have written not
The Gods above and Nature sole below
Were the spectators of that mighty strife
but
Only the Sons of Heaven and that executive She
Watched the arbitrament of the high dispute."
On the side of substance, it is the strongly cut imaged idea in a religio-philosophical mood that is Miltonism - the substance which is proper, in one of its aspects, to what Sri Aurobindo has distinguished as the Poetic Intelligence from the really spiritual ranges that are "Overhead".
Not that thought-form is absent in Savitri: there is plenty of it and that is why the poem is a philosophy no less than a legend and a symbol. But the thinking is not from the mental level which is usually associated with thought. Thought-form can be taken by what arrives from Overhead through the Yogi's silent mind and the philosophy in Savitri is an idea-structure expressing a mystical vision, a spiritual contact or knowledge which have come by processes of consciousness other than the intellectual. The thought-element in Savitri therefore differs from that which is found usually in poets credited with a philosophical purpose -even a poet like Milton whose rhythmic roll seems to have a largeness reminiscent of overhead inspiration. For, though the rhythm catches something of the Overhead breath, Milton's substance, as Sri Aurobindo has pointed out in a
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letter, "is, except at certain heights, mental - mentally grand and noble" and his "architecture of thought and verse is high and powerful and massive, but there are usually no subtle echoes there, no deep chambers: the occult things in man's being are foreign to his intelligence." And it is because of the mixture of a semi-Overhead sweep of sound with a mostly intellectual-imaginative substance that Sri Aurobindo, for all his admiration for Milton, has said: "The interference of this mental Miltonic is one of the great stumbling-blocks when one tries to write from 'above'."
Some notion of the difference between the "mental Miltonic" and the Overhead Aurobindonian may be caught, together with other impressions of the latter's rare quality, if we compare a few phrases collected from several sections of Paradise Lost with a few from the opening of Savitri. Milton apostrophises the Divine Spirit:
Thou from the first
Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread
Dovelike satst brooding on the vast abyss
And madst it pregnant.1
He addresses too the original spiritual Light:
Bright effluence of bright essence increate!...
Before the Heavens thou wert, and at the voice
Of God as with a mantle didst invest
The rising world of waters dark and deep,
Won from the void and formless infinite.2
About the advent of this illumination we may quote him further in the verses:
_________
1Book I,19-22.
2Book III, 6,9-12.
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But now at last the sacred influence
Of light appears, and from the walls of Heaven
Shoots far into the bosom of dim Night
A glimmering dawn.1
He has also depicted an ethereal revelation, an entrance to God's grandeur, in the illumined distance:
The work as of a kingly palace-gate,
With frontispiece of diamond and gold
Embellished; thick with sparkling orient gems
The portal shone, inimitable on Earth
By model, or by shading pencil drawn.2
Now look at Savitri:
...The huge foreboding mind of Night, alone
In her unlit temple of eternity,
Lay stretched immobile upon Silence' marge.
Almost one felt, opaque, impenetrable,
In the sombre symbol of her eyeless muse
The abysm of the unbodied Infinite...
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 pierced through the dumb deeps...
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.
1Book II, 1034-37.
2Book III, 505-09.
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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...
Into a far-off nook of heaven there came
A slow miraculous gesture's dim appeal.
The persistent thrill of a transfiguring touch
Persuaded the inert black quietude
And beauty and wonder disturbed the fields of God.
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.[pp. 1-3]
In one of the sentences of the multi-imaged Dawn-description there is a grammatical inversion which I could recognise only after Sri Aurobindo had explained it. In the lines –
As if solicited in an alien world
With timid and hazardous instinctive grace,
Orphaned and driven out to seek a home,
An errant marvel with no place to live,
A slow miraculous gesture's dim appeal -[p. 3]
the word "solicited" is not a past participle passive but the past tense and the subject of this verb is "an errant marvel" delayed to the fourth line by the parenthesis "Orphaned", etc. The object of the inversion is to throw a strong emphasis and prominence upon the line,
An errant marvel with no place to live...
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The sense, after "as if", is not that somebody was being gracefully solicited but that somebody solicited with a timid grace.
Another inversion, not much later, taxes us a little in:
Thus trapped in the gin of earthly destinies,
Awaiting her ordeal's hour abode,
Outcast from her inborn felicity,
Accepting life's obscure terrestrial robe,
Hiding herself even from those she loved,
The godhead greater by a human fate.[p. 8]
The subject of the verb "abode" is the whole last line.
The adjective "emerald" seems to have been a favourite of Sri Aurobindo's during the period of Savitri. Its first occurrence in his poetry in general comes in Songs to Myrtilla:
Behold in emerald fire
The spotted lizard crawl
Upon the sun-kissed wall...
A few years later we meet it in Urvasie:
a mystic dewy
Half-invitation into emerald worlds–
and in Love and Death:
...wandering mid leaves
Through emerald ever-new discoveries...
We find it also in the opening passage of Ilion:
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There, like a hope through an emerald dream sole-pacing for ever,
Stealing to wideness beyond, crept Simois lame in his currents,
Guiding his argent thread mid the green of the reeds and the grasses.
In Savitri it is first found in:
A dense magnificent coloured self-wrapped life
Draped in the leaves' vivid emerald monotone... [p. 13]
This is on p. 17. The next comes after a gap of hundreds of pages - on p. 404:
Lost in the emerald glory of the woods...[p. 355]
Thereafter it is fairly frequent and always applied to forest-scenes. Once it is found twice on the same page: 442 [p. 466]. Altogether in Savitri it plays the part of a stock epithet 21 times. Its last appearance is on p. 806 [p. 718].
The lines –
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]
where the intellectual style is clean overpassed may be juxtaposed with the well-known phrases of Francis Thompson's about the human heart's unrealised grandeurs:
The world, from star to sea, cast down its brink–
Yet shall that chasm, till He who these did build
An awful Curtius make Him yawn unfilled.
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The comparison is interesting particularly because, while it is certain that Sri Aurobindo knew of the act of the fierce Roman patriot Sextus Curtius who jumped, horse-backed and full-armoured, into the deep trench which according to the augurs had to be packed with what Rome deemed most precious if she was to escape heavenly punishment, it is equally certain that he had not seen Thompson's lines where some of the very words used by Sri Aurobindo - "world", "chasm", "fill" - occur. We become aware how an afflatus with the same charge, as it were, of imaginative words comes in sheer intuitive visionariness and with an undiluted Overhead rhythm in the one instance and in the other with a no less poetic impact but with a more intellectually formulated substance and a vigorous movement which has a rather staccato effect in certain places and which, even when there is a wide sweep, seems to go from point to point in order to enlarge itself instead of presenting immediately a sense of the mysterious depths of being that are astir in the yawning chasm and the tremendous greatness of the Presence that alone can appease them.
Not only the intuitive directness blended with a keen gnomic turn is remarkable in the line:
Earth's winged chimeras are Truth's steeds in Heaven... [p- 52]
The line is notable for its metrical structure also. We have two equal parts balanced on either side by the connecting verb "are" which implies their equivalence on two different planes - and the exact balance of essential significances constituted by the identical number of syllables is reinforced by the stress-scheme being precisely the same in either part: two consecutive stresses followed by a stress between two slacks -
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"Earth's winged chimeras", "Truth's steeds in Heaven". Metrical as well as rhythmical effects of expressive originality are abundant in Savitri. There is:
With the Truth-Light strike earth's massive roots of trance... [p. 72]
Here we have a sense of both striking power and massive rootedness through the five successive stresses after the first two words. Or take
Heaven's wa | ters trailed | and dribbled | through the | drowned land. [p. 350]
Here, together with the various suggestive alliterations, particularly of r in association with t, d, th and of "d" in association with "1" and "n", we have a scansion diversely pointing the many shades of the description.
We have again - towards the close of Book I, Canto 5- some fine metrical and rhythmical effects in the passage about the hierarchy of worlds. The lines,
Her gulfs stood nude, her far transcendences
Flamed in transparencies of crowded light.[p. 88]
have a strong startling impact of disclosure in the three consecutive stresses at almost the beginning, the last on a quantitatively long syllable reinforcing the sense of a penetration of depths. The second part of the opening line has two unstressed syllables at the end, giving a sense of the remote and unseized. The inverted foot, a trochee, starting with an accented intrinsic long the next line, counteracts this sense and creates a revelatory stroke, and the word
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"transparencies" which balances the word "transcendences" of the preceding line and has the same dying away slack-ending gives now an impression which is the very opposite of the remote and unseized, an impression of the unresisting and easily grasped. The final phrase "crowded light" is all the more accurately expressive because the stresses are not successive: the light, for all its crowdedness, has yet to be not dense but transparent and this is achieved metrically and rhythmically by a slack coming between the stresses, while the crowdedness is conveyed by the divided stresses falling on two quantitatively long syllables and thus counteracting whatever dispersiveness may be suggested by the division.
Another piece of metrical and rhythmical memorableness is the line,
A last high world was seen where all worlds met. [p. 89]
Here the coming together of stresses in exactly the same way in two places (the first two feet and the last two) and the close play of long quantities there and the stance of a single long quantity in the middle foot of the fine's five and the arrangement of the vowel sounds either differing from or agreeing with one another and, finally, the unbroken uniform run on and on of monosyllables - all these conjure up vividly the subtle reality expressed with simple and clear words.
On p. 214, in
Watched her charade of action for some hint,
Read the No-gestures of her silhouettes - [pp. 188-89]
"Nō" refers to a form of Japanese lyric drama, also known as "Noh". Naturally, it has nothing to do with negation such as in the lines:
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A limping Yes through the aeons journeys still
Accompanied by an eternal No.[p. 201]
The line in Savitri which seems to take the longest time to read is on p. 348:
The great schemed worlds that they had planned and wrought... [p. 307]
Every word is. a monosyllable and six out of the ten words - "great, schemed, worlds, they, planned, wrought" - are quantitatively long, being either supported on a vowel-sound of intrinsic length or else having the vowel-time drawn out by succeeding consonants.
The line in Savitri composed of the least number of words is on:
Architectonic and inevitable...[p. 273]
The passage about the abysm of Hell in Book II, Canto 7, one of the most intensely etched in Savitri, has a marked play of alliteration in several lines hammering home the ubiquitous hellishness:
Neighbouring proud palaces of perverted Power...
The implacable splendour of her nightmare pomps...
Trampled to tormented postures the torn sense....
A bull-throat bellowed with its brazen tongue...
A travelling dot on downward roads of Dusk...
In a slow suffering Time and tortured Space... [pp. 211-18]
In the use and choice of words, too, Savitri comes often with highly original gestures. There is the uplifting of a non-
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poetic word beyond its common connotation into poetic effectiveness, as in
Then shall the business fail of Death and Night, [p. 633]
where the commercial note is fully exploited by "fail" being added to "business" and even a partnership indicated. There is an energy of unsqueamish violence which is yet memorable poetry, as in
Then perish vomiting the immortal soul
Out of Matter's belly into the sink of Nought. [p. 494]
There is a drawing upon other languages for exact effects, as in
Knowledge was rebuilt from cells of inference
Into a fixed body flasque and perishable,[p. 267]
where the French word "flasque" is more significant in sound and serves better the rhythmic end than would its English synonyms - "slack", "loose" or even "flaccid". Over and above all these gestures of original utterance Sri Aurobindo shows an inventive audacity by the employment of new words and new usages, either based on English or continental languages. We have
A single law simplessed the cosmic theme -[p. 273]
or a similar treatment of an English noun:
Ambitioned the seas for robe, for crown the stars... [p. 117]
We have even a clear neologism for "immensities" in
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And driven by a pointing hand of Light
Across his soul's unmapped immensitudes,[p. 80]
on the analogy of "infinitudes" for "infinities." It recurs:
A little gift comes from the Immensitudes,
But measureless to life its gain of joy...[p. 237]
The same neologism comes also in the singular number along with "infinity":
In their immensitude signing infinity
They were the extension of the self of God... [p. 524]
Savitri's father, who is "the traveller of the worlds" and whose Yogic explorations start with Canto One of Book II and come to an end with Canto Four of Book III, covering in all nineteen Cantos, is nowhere mentioned by name until the very last one.
There, on p. 386, for the first time and quite casually as if it were a familiar appellation by now, we come to know that he is "Aswapathy":
But Aswapathy's heart replied to her...[p. 341]
And the meaning of the name is indirectly conveyed to us at the conclusion of the same Canto:
The Lord of Life resumed his mighty rounds
In the scant field of the ambiguous globe.[p. 348]
"Aswapathy" literally stands for "The Lord of the Horse". But in the old Vedic symbolism the Horse represents the Life Force.
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The true Sanskrit form is without the h. Sri Aurobindo originally had the h both in the daughter's name and in her lover's, but later dropped it. For some reason he retained it in the father's. Ultimately it was dropped here also.
In Book VII, Canto 5, concerned with the finding of the Soul, the line
A being no bigger than the thumb of man,[p. 526]
is a translation from the Katha Upanishad where the inmost soul of man, divine in essence, governing his many lives and evolving through the ages into the Supreme Spirit's infinity, is spoken of in these terms.
In the long passage (pp. 598-99) beginning –
But now the half-opened lotus bud of her heart
Had bloomed and stood disclosed to the earthly ray;
In an image shone revealed her secret soul.
There was no wall severing the soul and mind,
No mystic fence guarding from the claims of life.
In its deep lotus home her being sat
As if on concentration's marble seat,
Calling the mighty Mother of the worlds
To make this earthly tenement her house.
As in a flash from a supernal light,
A living image of the original Power,
A face, a form came down into her heart
And made of it its temple and pure abode.
But when its feet had touched the quivering bloom,
A mighty movement rocked the inner space
As if a world were shaken and found its soul:
Out of the Inconscient's soulless mindless Night
A flaming serpent rose released from sleep–
[pp. 527-28]
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an experience is described, which is well-known to Indian Yoga. But here the process is a little different. The Power or Shakti of the Divine - Kundalini - sleeping coiled like a serpent in the chakra or lotuslike circle in the subtle body - sukshma sharira - at a place corresponding to the base of the spine in the gross physical body is here awakened not directly from below by Yogic concentration and special breath-exercise (prānāyāma) but by the descent of an Overhead Force into the lotuslike circle situated in the heart-region through which the evolving soul, the being no bigger than the thumb of man, gets most directly into contact with the rest of man's complex nature organised round it.
It is not easy to construe the passage :
A brute half-conscious body serves as means
A mind that must recover a knowledge lost
Held in stone grip by the world's inconscience,
And wearing still these countless knots of Law
A spirit bound stand up as Nature's king.[p. 108]
If we put a comma after "Law" and after "bound" and mentally read "must" before "stand", the sense is clarified. The last line would then link up with
A mind that must recover a knowledge lost...
The line -
Above the Masters of the Ideal throne -[p. 261]
has "Above" as an adverb, "Ideal" as a noun and "throne" as an intransitive verb equivalent to "as if throned" or more significantly "sit throned".
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A Latin construction not infrequent in Sri Aurobindo may be exemplified by a line on p. 811, the middle one of the passage:
And the swift parents hurrying to their child,–
Their cause of life now who had given him breath, –
Possessed him with their arms.[p. 722]
Here "Their" = "of them". The relative pronoun "who" goes with the understood "them". The meaning of the line is: "Satyavan who having been revived, was now the cause of the life of his parents who had given him life."
Some untangling is required for the last words (p. 813) spoken by Savitri:
"Awakened to the meaning of my heart,
That to feel love and oneness is to live
And this the magic of our golden change
Is all the truth I know or seek, O sage."[p. 724]
There should be a comma after "heart": otherwise the next line would seem an explanation of the word "meaning" in the first. But if we join up these two lines, no sense can be made of them, for a verb would be missing. "Is" of the last line cannot serve the purpose. Nor can it be the verb for the third line without leaving the first two verbless. The only way out, it seems, is to make "Awakened" go with "I", and then the prose-order of the passage would be "That to feel love and oneness is to live, and (that) this (is) the magic of our golden change, is all the truth which I, awakened to the meaning of my heart, know or seek, O sage," or one may put "And this the magic of our golden change" between two dashes as a parenthetical comment.
(Sri Aurobindo - The Poet, 1999, pp. 327-60)
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