On Savitri
THEME/S
XVII
Admittedly the experience that has gone into a poem of such magnitude may be both authentic and of profound significance. The philosophical worldview that serves as the frame-work of the poem may he both impressive and intellectually satisfying. The human drama played in the foreground may be capable of making an immediate appeal to our emotions; it may be sanctified by tradition, it may have a perennial human significance. The symbols employed in the poem may likewise hark back to the glorious childhood of the human race, the Age of the Veda, when the rishis looked out upon Nature with wonder and wild surmise and created the great myths of the race.
The race, the milieu, the moment may all create a favourable context for the poet who would sing of man and his developing destiny in the cosmos. But in spite of all these propitious circumstances, a great epic may fail to arrive. Is Savitri the supreme achievement in the epic genre, or is it a noble effort gone awry? Is it the one great cosmic poem of our time and of all time, or is it no more than a tour-de-force, worthy to be praised because it was undertaken at all, and not because it has been successfully accomplished? Only posterity can give the final answer to these questions but we too cannot shirk our responsibility to face the questions boldly and formulate our answers. The traditional Hindu dialectic has been to state first the Purvapaksha and then only the Siddhanta; in other words, first to allow the Devil's Advocate to have his worst say, and then only to give a chance of reply to the God's Advocate. It would not be amiss if such a method were followed here as well. There is an incidental advantage too, for it is often possible to hear Sri Aurobindo himself in defence of his aims and methods.
The criticisms may be ranged, for the sake of convenience, under five heads. First, then, about the size and structure of the poem. Savitri
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is a poem running" into 23,813 lines, longer even than Browning's The Ring and the Book, twice as long as Paradise Lost, and more than one-half the size of the Ramayana. Even so, Sri Aurobindo left it 'incomplete'. Not only is the poem unconscionably long, it has also a lop-sided structure. Retrospective narration takes up about three-fourths of the entire bulk of the poem; and even there, Aswapati's Yoga is given a disproportionate importance, and extends over nearly 400 (out of the total of 814) pages. For so voluminous an epic poem, there is insufficient matter, the fable is too thin, the characters are too few, the incidents too hazy.
So much for the Purvapakshin; and now for the Siddhantin. Appearances may be deceptive, as they are deceptive here. Length in a poem is by itself neither a virtue nor a blemish; the question to consider is how far length is related to amplitude. Objective measurements should thus be related to functions and not discussed in a kind of critical vacuum. Tillyard asks for "amplitude, breadth, inclusiveness, and so on", as also "a control commensurate with the amount included"; do we find these in Savitri? Likewise, Abercrombie asks for range as well as organisation; do we have these in Savitri? An affirmative answer is called for because Savitri, looked at from one angle, is a history of the cosmos itself, and the epic includes within its purview the past, the present and the future.
Man's life in the cosmos is the theme of the poem, and life, while it is forward-looking has to take frequent backward-glances as well. The past determines the present, and together they will determine the shape of things to come. Aswapati reviews the aeons of human endeavour in the past, the zig-zag course of human history, the many failures and the few significant advances; and he penetrates the mystery of the cosmos to seek the clue both to man's past failures and to the possibility of future victory. Yeats says that, "our little memories are but a part of some great memory that renews the world, and men's thoughts are not, as we suppose, the deep but a little foam upon the deep."157 Aswapati, however, skims the foam and dives much deeper,
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touching the very bottom; and soars high above the clouds, reaching the highest heights. He is able therefore to see behind veil upon veil of appearance and reveal the stairway of the occult worlds.
Even as there is amplitude, breadth, inclusiveness (it is the cosmic play itself that is here recorded), there is also the necessary organisation, as already explained in the two complementary schema given earlier. As in the human body the mere size of the respective organs—hands, legs, eyes, brain, heart—bears little proportion to their intrinsic or functional importance, and living man is a whole, a power and a personality, so too in an epic like Savitri it is not altogether relevant to talk of the relative size of this or that section of the poem; the total contents and the total impression are what matter ultimately, and Savitri, judged by such criteria, would be found to fulfil the 'structure ideal' at least as much as other poems of similar size and scope.
The criticism of length—"unconscionable length"—has been made, not only against Savitri, but against Sri Aurobindo's major works generally. It was the reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement who in an otherwise eulogistic appreciation of The Life Divine found it also to be of "unconscionable length".158 The reviewer of Ilion in the Hindu found in it "descriptions, embassies, debates of desolating length...typically Aurobindo-esque."159 That Sri Aurobindo could be pointed, that he could give his statements a diamond-edge and brilliance, that his correspondence is full of the play of wit, humour, repartee and epigram, that he knew the virtue of brevity and succinctness in expression, must be clear to readers who are familiar with all parts of the Aurobindo canon. But there is no doubt that Savitri is a long poem, even as The Life Divine is a 'bulky' treatise. What is Sri Aurobindo's own defence? In the course of a long apologia written in 1947 he pleaded:
Its length is an indispensable condition for carrying out its
purpose and everywhere there is this length...in every part,
in every passage, in almost every canto or section of a canto.
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It has been planned not on the scale of Lycidas or Comus or
some brief narrative poem, but of the longer epical narrative,
almost a minor, though a very minor Ramayana; it aims not at
a minimum but at an exhaustive exposition of its world-vision
or world-interpretation...omitting nothing that is necessary,
fundamental to the completeness.. .It will of course seem much
too long to a reader who does not understand what is written
or, understanding, takes no interest in the subject; but that is
unavoidable.160
Of any long poem whatsoever some people would say in exasperation: "None wished it longer than it is!" And even a comparatively short poem like The Waste Land, notwithstanding whole hillocks of exegesis, might still baffle us with regard to its 'meaning' and 'structure'. Not all the evidence is available at once, and one is often burdened by preconceived notions of what is proper. If when facing a swan we start looking for a duck we shall only pronounce it an ugly duckling! Poetic appreciation, as Ezra Pound has reminded us, is a sort of profession of faith; but, of course, the 'profession' itself is preceded by a genuine first response to the poem, and should be followed by a patient examination of the total contents. If impatience or intolerance dictates a hasty conclusion, it should not be taken very seriously.
Secondly, Savitri is assailed because it carries insufficient human interest. The human characters are few—Aswapati, Savitri, Satyavan, Dyumatsena; a few more perhaps, but they are of little consequence; and Narad is hardly of this earth, and certainly not earthy. What sort of epic can you make of these people? There is no 'physical' action either. There is the Yoga of the King, there is the Yoga of the Wife, and there is the Yoga of Struggle and Victory. We don't know whether we stand on our feet (the legendary story) or our heads (the symbol). We move from the 'symbol dawn' to the stairway of the occult worlds; the interior countries are symbolic; the Void is symbolic, the Double Twilight and the Everlasting Day are symbolic. What are we to make of such a poem? We have heard
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this sort of criticism before, about-Paradise Lost, for example. Every time it is made, it sounds impressive, and must be answered. People say again: "I see nothing: there is nothing to hang on to. It is all too much in the air. The story has no contemporaneous relevance. It doesn't speak to us!"
Savitri is admittedly a legend and a symbol, answers the Siddhantin. But there is no jugglery about it: Savitri is the human character, and Savitri is the symbol; one goes back to the Mahabharata, the other goes back to the Veda, and both are as contemporaneous as the Sun that is shining today. The human and the cosmic action, too, centre in Savitri. "The great human appeal of idealism", writes Boodin, "has been a call to recreate the world into a better world, with the assurance that a power, greater than ourselves, is on the side of the creators. This call to creativeness involves the challenge that all is not well with the world—that the world needs to be made over."161 Savitri is both a human power (which is the appearance) and the incarnation of a power greater than ourselves; she is one of the two protagonists in the struggle that she wages, both as a human and as a cosmic power, and the resulting victory too has consequences both on the individual and the cosmic planes.
Of Beatrice, who plays in the Divina Commedia a role not unlike Savitri's in the Indian epic, Charles Williams writes: "Let us say then that this was the effort—the union of virtue and beauty. It is, I think, true that virtue eventually runs away with the book... Philosophy—lady or no lady—is the vaster subject matter. But his (Dante's) descriptions and explanations of philosophy are often put in terms applicable to the woman, and sometimes astonishingly so."162 Savitri is likewise the "union of strength and silence"; she is "an incarnation of the Divine Mother"; she is "the forerunner or first creator of a new race".163 The dialectic of world transformation, the change of darkness into light, of death into immortality, is the vaster subject matter; but the human drama of the young wife ready to fight for and save her immaculate husband is no less significant. Savitri is
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human though out of the ordinary, her love for Satyavan is human though it acquires a new dimension of protective power, and her anxiety is human though her silent strength is verily superhuman. Savitri is both herself and a power beyond her apparently limited human self. She is at one and the same time conscious of her humanity and of her potential divinity:
For I know now why my spirit came on earth
And who I am and who he is I love.164
Finding that there is no other way, she is obliged to show Death her cosmic form:
Her forehead's span vaulted the Omniscient's gaze,
Her eyes were two stars that watched the universe.165
With a tone of unquestionable authority she now commands Death:
Release the soul of the world called Satyavan...166
Savitri and Satyavan are Shakti and Shiva, they are Power and Truth; the victory certain, now they will realise its fruits on earth:
I know that I can lift man's soul to God,
I know that he can bring the Immortal down....
To bring God down to the world on earth we came,
To change the earthly life to life divine...
I sacrifice not earth to happier worlds.167
Urban says truly that the religion of the mystics is, "that the love of man for God is also a love for all humanity...our human love, both for God and man, is also a witness of the love of God for us. In this love divine, all loves excelling, we know the oneness of the Good and of Being which our human reason, while it can demonstrate it as reasonable belief, can never completely prove. And in this knowledge all our other knowledge finds its fulfilment and its crown."168 Savitri's love is of this kind: she loves God and therefore humanity, and she is the divine inhabiting a human tenement.
The criticism that Savitri, even if it should be conceded to have some kind of human interest (for, after all, the Savitri story is human),
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is nevertheless spoilt as a poem because of the intrusion of too much philosophy and mysticism, is as little justified as the criticism that it lacks human interest and contemporary urgency. We have seen earlier that although mysticism and philosophy seldom prove tractable to poetic treatment at some length, yet Dante has somehow performed the miracle; if Dante, why not Sri Aurobindo? Dante, with great power of flight, describes the journey of the "two high creatures" through the nine heavens to the Empyrean, and we see that they "move in space and time still, but also through increasing knowledge of heaven."169 Though expressed with other figures, such too is the Aurobindonian dialectic of growth in spiritual knowledge, which is very different from the blind alleys of modern Existentialism. As Guido de Ruggiero brilliantly argues,
Positing an activity at the source of becoming not only gives it
a true protagonist, but explains also the levels which existence
assumes through the various stages of the journey...The
multiplication of planes and the activity of the protagonist, which
is never satisfied with single stages that have been attained but
continually surpasses them, creates in their intermingling dialectic
the variety and richness of spiritual life. In Existentialism, on
the contrary, all this relief vanishes and we get only a process
deprived of significance and value.. .170
Savitri is presented in the poem as the central figure in the great drama of Becoming. Aswapati's effort, which is really the culmination of the effort of all of our yesterdays, the gathered energy of all the aeons of the past, is the necessary prelude to the Divine Mother agreeing to be a human incarnation as Savitri. From Savitri radiate the lines of mankind's and earth's future destiny. Past, present and future thus meet in Savitri, and it may be said of her and of the epic to which she gives her name:
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.171
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Kindled and quenched and kindled again, the cosmic creative fires blaze and subside and blaze again, and Sri Aurobindo has seen this cosmic play and tries also to reason out the probable purposes behind it all and infer the probable directions of future advance. "The philosophy of Savitri", writes Sri Aurobindo, "expresses or tries to express a total and many-sided vision and experience of all the planes of being and their action upon each other. Whatever language, whatever terms are necessary to convey this truth of vision and experience it uses without scruple or admitting any mental rule of what is or is not poetic."172 The mystic experience, the philosophy of transcendence (from the mental to the supramental), and the poetic recordation of the vision and the idea all fuse in the figure of Savitri, the chaste wife whose silent strength is the sole visible reality.
FW. Bain tells an interesting story: A wife separated from her husband for some years lets a lighted lamp afloat on the waters of the Ganges. If the light burns, her husband is alive; if the light extinguishes, he is no more. A storm that is brewing subsides, and the waters are absolutely calm; the sky and the stars are reflected in the water. The sky thinks that the reflection is an illusion; the Lord therefore tells him: "Thou foolish sky, know that thou art thyself, with all thy stars, no less an illusion than is that other sky below. The sole reality of all is yonder little lamp, that floats midway, poised between the infinity above and that below. For it embodies the good quality of a faithful wife."173 Savitri is the reality, and she makes real the mysticism and the philosophy that sustain, like the overhanging sky and the reflected sky, and give cover and rich significance to the little floating lamp on the still waters of the Ganges on a clear night.
The fourth group of critics assail Savitri, not on the score of its size or structure or matter or meaning, but on account of its imperfect articulation. The language is too dry and too abstract, or too sentimental and too rhetorical. There is too much repetition, and too much repetitive elaboration. The same features recur (journeys, expositions, forecasts), and certain words—tenebrous, golden, nude, plan, lone,
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bright, moon, sun, dark, soul, spirit, self, space, depth, etc. tend to occur again and again. The use of words is not imaginative enough, the rhythm chosen (namely the iambic pentameter) is used with insufficient elasticity, and there are individual word-combinations, especially line-endings, which are harsh and uncouth. "Self-space" occurs twice (123,206); in the course of two consecutive pages (330-1) occur the combinations "spirit-depths", "soul-stuff", "soul-ground" and "soul-joy". Many of these line-endings—sun-march, soul-signs, spirit-sense, swim-range, heart-pulse, life-drift, world-scheme, life-plan, self-search, world-cloak, dream-brush, life-wants, soul-change, thought-hue and field-paths—-make the rhythmic movement difficult, and have often to be read as spondees. There is, finally, a certain inequality in the style, sometimes descending to mere prose, though there are occasional elevations and crests as well. Savitri fails ultimately because its language fails and its rhythm fails to rise to the true pitch of epic utterance. One critic, himself a writer of magazine verse, has indeed gone to the extent of condemning the verse of Savitri as "slushy" and has roundly condemned "the temptation to slip into greasy, weak-spined and purple-adjectived 'spiritual' poetry".174 And a Western journalist has called Savitri one of the "longest and worst epic poems of all time".175
What is distinctive and new, what is probably unique, in Sri Aurobindo's use of language and rhythm has been discussed towards the end of the previous chapter on 'Overhead' poetry and Savitri, and it is not therefore necessary to cover the entire ground once again. Here is a passage not untypical of Savitri:
Distrust was thrown upon Mind's instruments;
All that it takes for reality's shining coin,
Proved fact, fixed inference, deduction clear,
Firm theory, assured significance,
Appeared as frauds upon Time's credit bank
Or assets valueless in Truth's treasury.
An Ignorance on an uneasy throne
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Travestied with- a fortuibid.us sovereignty
A figure of knowledge garbed in dubious words
And tinsel thought-forms brightly inadequate.176
Is it too dry and abstract, too inarticulate, or too ineffective? Is 'fortuibid.us sovereignty' too "pompous and bombastic"? Is the simile too obvious? Is the personification of Ignorance untenable? In itself and in its particular context, the passage seems to be edged and clear and evocative and effective. "The whole passage", explains Sri Aurobindo, "is of course about mental movements and mental powers, therefore about what the intellect sees as abstractions, but the inner vision does not feel them as that. To it mind has a substance and its energies and actions are very real and substantial things."177 He always claimed the right to use words, not in terms of any notion of 'poetic diction' or any set so-called poetical rule, but by an intuitive feeling, leaving the final judgement to posterity. He has freely used scientific and technical words like plasm, wave particles, atom, proton, photon, robot, chemic, cells, stratosphere, morse, fractions, integers, decimals, camera, fifth-columnist, logarithmic-table, quantum, television, and various others drawn from the whole world of modern life and thought, but always with a clinching or suggestive appropriateness.
Repetition there no doubt is, plenty of it, but this, after all, is a characteristic feature of all epic poetry. Besides, Sri Aurobindo makes the legitimate claim that the repetitions of, "the same key ideas, key images and symbols, key words or phrases, key epithets, sometimes key lines or half-lines.. .give an atmosphere, a significant structure, a sort of psychological frame, an architecture"; the poet, especially the mystic poet, can thus resort to āvrtti, repetition, "as one of the most powerful means of carrying home what has been thought or seen and fixing it in the mind in an atmosphere of light and beauty."178 Eliot uses repetition to almost hypnotic effect in the Choruses from the 'Rock', Four Quartets, and several other poems; in fact most poets of the first order are adepts at exploiting the 'uses' of repetition.
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And often, in expert hands, repetitive elaboration casts a spell by purposefully running unity and variety together, as for example in sangathis (improvisations) while rendering kritis (songs) in classical South Indian music or in the repetition of motifs in Indian temple architecture or in the Ajanta paintings .Things are not to be judged on apriori grounds but only by their valid effects upon us.
'Rhetoric', of course, is another ready stick, to brandish, but it is apt more often than not merely to claw the air. Speeches in epic poetry generally acquire a rhetorical cast (somewhat like speeches in Greek tragedy), though now and then they may be lifted up by a superlative emotional intensity or they may acquire a fluid charm or whispering cadence or dance of joy or haunting moan on account of the emotional nuances involved. When an Aswapati addresses the Divine Mother, how does he talk? How does the Divine Mother respond? Sri Aurobindo doesn't avoid the situation; he is willing to dare the impossible and find words to fit the situation. Thus Aswapati says:
O radiant fountain of the world's delight...
Let thy infinity in one body live,
All-Knowledge wrap one mind in seas of light,
All-Love throb single in one human heart...
Pack with the eternal might one human hour
And with one gesture change all future time.
Let a great word be spoken from the heights
And one great act unlock the doors of Fate.179
And the Divine Mother vouchsafes the answer:
O strong forerunner, I have heard thy cry.
One shall descend and break the iron Law,
Change Nature's doom by the lone Spirit's power...
A seed shall be sown in Death's tremendous hour,
A branch of heaven transplant to human soil;
Nature shall overleap her mortal step;
Fate shall be changed by an unchanging will.180
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Words have to be found to express the movements of aspiration and response, and since a total correspondence is neither here nor there, a lucid and luminous clarity is here successfully attempted. The rhythm is a gentle swaying one, Kalidasian in its lilt, regular but not lacking in variation within the line. Like words and phrases and images, situations too seem to repeat themselves, but it is repetition always with a difference. For example, there is Aswapati's Yoga and there is Savitri's; the difference is more important than the similarity. Seekers of God sometimes seek him without, sometimes within, and sometimes in his own abode or as the transcendent; the destination is the same though the path-ways may be different.181The situations, the imagery, the words thus seem to recur, but it is not due to a failure of the creative energy but for special purposes.
How about the uncouth word-combinations? The effects intended seem to be deliberate, for such expressions (recalling sometimes the practice of a poet like Hopkins) come so frequently that they cannot be explained away as chance occurrences. Might it be that Sri Aurobindo found the need to hammer out these word-combinations much as the old Anglo-Saxon poets felt the need to coin their 'kennings'? According to Douglas C. Collins, "In essence a kenning is a metaphorical expression: it is because the Anglo-Saxon mind did not make the comparison in the obvious way that there are few similes. The comparison is much closer: the Anglo-Saxon poet saw the comparison not as like something else but as something else—the idea was completely assimilated."182The poet thus aimed at a 'unity of meaning', as in sund-hengestas (ocean-steeds) and ydhmearas (stallions of the waves); sometimes with a hyphen, sometimes without, the unity was effected by telescoping two words to yield a new meaning. It is remarkable how often Sri Aurobindo produces like effects:
The world's thought-streams traveled into his ken.. .183
Climbing with foam-maned waves to the Supreme...184
The brilliant time-flakes of eternity...185
Its gold-horned herds trooped into earth's cave-heart..186
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Numerous are such audacious hyphenated combinations: 'sun-herds and moon-flocks', 'thought-food', 'sleet-drift', 'world-kindergarten', 'sea-heart', 'sun-laugh', 'soul-nature and mind-sense', 'star-field space', 'dense-maned monsoon', 'flower-mouth', 'Sun-word', 'heaven-bliss', etc. Even as the Anglo-Saxon poet had somehow to convey in the most vivid or picturesque way possible his ideas and feelings about the sea and the heroic exploits of Beowulf, Sri Aurobindo too had somehow to get across his impressions of the cosmos, to snap the vicissitudes of the cosmic play, and to convey his unique spiritual insights. He would, in defiance of euphony and convention if need be, make his images concrete and living and apt. The epithets are meant to grip our understanding by main force, and an expression like 'soul-space' or 'self-space' occurs more than once. The promiscuous use of such expressions may hinder more than help the aims of the poet, but it cannot be said that Sri Aurobindo overdoes these 'kennings' or rather curtal metaphors.
The ultimate detraction is that Savitri is a tour-deforce, not a supreme poetic creation. "This sort of thing, well, impressive though it may be, once is enough!" At least, once is necessary! Of Tillyard's four criteria, two—'amplitude, breadth and inclusiveness' and 'the structural ideal'—are exemplified in Savitri. There are, then, the remaining criteria of 'high quality and high seriousness' and the 'choric' quality. High quality and high seriousness of purpose may also be allowed readily enough, but does Savitri speak with a 'choric' voice of general acceptance? Here, too, the answer must be 'yes'—at any rate in India, for Savitri speaks to the Hindu woman, and the quintessential Hindu woman speaks through Savitri. The philosophical ideas and the mystic experiences that help Savitri to speak with such amazing insight and such passionate intensity are, on a general view, by no means foreign to the Indian way of thinking and feeling about these profound problems of life and fate and death and immortality.
And even as regards the language and the versification, there is no need to be apologetic. "In total impact his (Sri Aurobindo's) blank verse—thousands of lines...—-is Miltonic", said the Poetry Review of London.187 Not an altogether apt description, but at least it is meant to be complimentary. It would, however, be more accurate to describe Savitri, borrowing a phrase of Boodin's though in an entirely different context, as a "celestial chorus of ideals".188
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