Savitri

 XVIII

      CONCLUSION:

TOWARDS A GREATER DAWN

We have tried in the preceding pages to approach Savitri from various directions, to observe it from various stances, to make pointer readings from various positions of vantage. These pathways are seldom straight, and one has to zig-zag one's way through thickets and even jungles of controversy to the beckoning Holy Mount; and wherever we may take our stance, the view is obscured by sudden mists and passing clouds. There is no substitute for utter imaginative identification with the world of Savitri and with the power and personality of Savitri. Indeed, a total surrender to its ambrosial spiritual symbolism is called for, and a surrender also to the Creatrix in her marvellous human incarnation. But these are beyond the purview of literary criticism. Besides, intellectual approaches cannot be wholly avoided, and they may even prove useful within limits; analysis, comparison, contrast, aetiology, 'poetolatry'—inevitably these too invade our studies, and so long as they can be kept in their place, they may help to promote the final reality of poetic appreciation. Let me now make a final attempt to gather together some of the tentative conclusions of the preceding pages.

      From one point of view, Savitri may be described as a significant knot, a converging point, of divers threads and movements in Sri Aurobindo's own life and thought. His spiritual and artistic life, his yoga and his philosophy, his politics and his aesthetics, all find in Savitri their splendorous fulfilment. In this respect, what Wilson

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Knight says about Shakespeare and The Tempest is far more, and more truly, applicable to Sri Aurobindo and Savitri:

...But poetry works to render fully objective the deepest 'I'-

intuition.. .whether in plot or person, imaginative description and

atmosphere, or in the minutest details of imagistic impression; in

words themselves handled as rounded and worthy things well-

charged with meaning; in all this the literary artist, in either verse

or prose, attains the highest realisation, something more real

than either philosophy or science. This realisation is, moreover,

superpersonal and therefore universal.¹⁸⁹

We may start from Sri Aurobindo's first mystic experiences on his arrival in India, and trace the course of his spiritual life with the aid of such external sign-posts—his poems and his letters, for example —as are available: his experience of cosmic silence under Yogi Lele's guidance; his beatific vision of Narayana the Omnipresent God in the Alipore Jail; his experience of the besieging of his fields of trance by the cosmic ignorance; his spiritual association with Madame Richard, the Mother from 1914 onwards; his rendezvous with Night; his vision of the Paraclete, Thought, and of the ecstasy-laden Rose of God; and other experiences too, both before and after the climactic realisation of 1926, the Siddhi—and all achieve poetic recordation in Savitri.

      We may start, again, from Sri Aurobindo's early experiments in lyric and narrative poetry—Songs to Myrtilla, Urvasie, Love and Death and follow his career as a poet; his renderings from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata—the fragments, Nala and Chitrangada, the 'heroic' Vidula and Baji Prabhou, the blank verse dramas, the many philosophical poems culminating in Ahana—the numerous 'mystical' pieces included in the 1941 volume and in Last Poems—the varied experiments in quantitative metre culminating in the tour-de-force, Ilion: again, all these channels of poetic activity, lyrical, heroic, dramatic, mystical, philosophical, experimental, all flow into and merge in the epic ocean of Savitri.

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         His Yoga of the Life Divine, the 'integral Yoga' that sought to fuse into a potent engine of transformation the old disciplines that were centred on will, works, knowledge, love, any one of them alone; his own and the Mother's travail of spiritual voyage and vigil and defeat and discovery and ultimate victory; his hopes and visions and forecasts of the future: these too achieve vivid poetic expression in Savitri.

      So in due measure with Sri Aurobindo's philosophical worldview as well: the ground-plan in The Life Divine; the speculations about the future world polity, the future human society and the future poetry as elaborated in The Ideal of Human Unity, The Human Cycle and The Future Poetry: these also find their reflection or fulfilment or promise of ultimate realisation in the vast spaces of Savitri. Youth and age, wise passivity and creative dynamism, the bareness of the hermitage and the splendour of the court, love and fate and death and immortality, the real and the symbol worlds, visible and invisible powers: all are comprehended in Savitri, and earth meets heaven, and Time intersects Eternity, and for a blissful term there is the collapse of Time and the reign of Eternity.

      Savitri's sum of excellences is thus no measurable quantity. One might say with ample justification that Savitri was Sri Aurobindo's Faust, his Song of Myself and his Song of the Mother rolled into one; his Testament of Beauty and Love and his testament of truth and power; his Odyssey of self-discovery and world-discovery; his lyric of the evolving soul of humanity and his epic of the cosmos. It is not therefore surprising that, when a few days before he passed away, he dictated the final additions to The Book of Fate, he felt relieved—as the Venerable Bede had felt when he concluded his Ecclesiastical History of England—and said to his scribe with a smile of sovereign contentment, "Ah, it is finished!"

      It would, however, be no less fruitful to see Savitri in close relation to other epics and other philosophical poems than to see it in relation to Sri Aurobindo's own life and work. Albeit a new epic,

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 the epic of the coming supramental age in human history, Savitri has its affiliations with the epics and epic narratives of other times and of our own time. Thus we may start with the Veda, follow the symbolism of Ahana, Usha, Savitri, Aswin, the lost herds and their ultimate recovery, linger on the Mahabharata story of Savitri and Satyavan, linger too near the field of battle where Krishna and Arjuna enact the dialectic of the Bhagavad Gita, and find ourselves at last in the world of Savitri wherein the old Vedic symbolism, the simple bardic story, and the dialectic of doubt and faith, inaction and right action, are brought together in terms of rich significance to sāhrdayas and spiritual seekers alike.

      Other similar approaches to Savitri, too, are possible. We have viewed it, for example, alongside of Faust. We have, again, seen it as the third term of a series whose first two terms are The Prelude and Song of Myself. There is also Bridges's long poem, The Testament of Beauty. The Prelude, apart from its fine mystical insights, is really an account of the growth of a poet's mind from childhood to early manhood, while the The Testament of Beauty is the philosophical stock-taking of a poet past eighty; chronologically coming in between these two poems, Song of Myself is somewhat 'alien' in cast and almost explosive in utterance; its range, too, is wider, and its sweep approaching the cosmic. All three are 'autobiographical' poems, though each has its own distinctive quality. What these share with Savitri, however, is an earnestness and integrity in facing the problem of man set in a universe which he would fain understand and in which he would like to feel at home. On the other hand, Savitri is less consciously or deliberately subjective than the Song of Myself or The Prelude, and the equation that man and his cosmos are quintessentially one, forever changing and yet forever the same, is more central to the scheme of Savitri than that of the others.

      Or we may approach Savitri by yet another road, passing on the way the two formidable milestones, the Cantos of Ezra Pound and Kazantzakis' 'modern sequel' to the Odyssey. The modern American-

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European, the modern Cretan-Greek, the modern Hindu with an English education: all three poets—Pound, Kazantzakis and Sri Aurobindo—are masters of many languages and heirs to more than one cultural tradition, and each in his magnum opus has tried to explore human history, human experience or human consciousness to the utmost possible limits. But since Sri Aurobindo as man and as thinker experienced and comprehended more, since as yogi and as philosopher he outdistanced the other two in the range of his vision and the reach of his understanding, and since as poet he evolved an overhead aesthesis which was quite beyond the scope of their poetic utterance, Savitri has a new dimension of understanding and a piercing total power of revelation to which the other two poems cannot lay claim.

      Or, finally, we may start again with stories of old like the wanderings of Odysseus, the mission of Hanuman to Lanka in the Ramayana, or Gilgamesh's voyage through Darkness, follow the peregrination motif as it found expression in the epics of later times, notably in the Divina Commedia, mark its variation in Satan's voyage across Chaos in Paradise Lost, and observe how the motif is treated in Savitri, first in the description of Aswapati's Yoga, apparently (though not really) an 'exteriorised' journey through the worlds, and secondly in Savitri's Yoga, an apparently (and also really) 'interiorised' exploration of the inner countries of the mind, heart and soul.

      But here we must pause a little. Dante and Milton are great figures in poetry, and it would of course be wrong to include them as mere steps in an argument in any cavalier fashion. Both Dante and Milton had an exalted view of their poetic function and responsibilities. They tried, in fact, to "assert Eternal Providence, and justify the ways of God to men"; they wished, like the Seer-Poets of old, to see the inner structure of the Cosmos—the wires, the machinery, the currents, the processes, the powers—and to use the "magic of the divine Logos" to describe what they had seen. Did Dante succeed? Did Milton succeed? To quote Sri Krishnaprem,

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Perhaps the last great Western poet to have made any real

attempt to grasp the inner unity was Dante, and even he made

use of merely traditional myth—and somewhat degenerated

myth at that—for most of his structure, while Milton who came

later used even more degenerated myth for purposes which it is

not unfair to describe as theological apologetics. Still later, Blake,

a genuine but undisciplined seer, attempted to recover the lost

unity but lost his way in uncharted private worlds.¹⁹⁰

The Commedia and Paradise Lost are among the half a dozen great epics of the Western world; the criticism in the above passage is thus directed, not against the poems as poems, but against their insufficiency as cosmic poems. Ultimately the intellect rules both Dante and Milton, and the intellect alone is not enough. Neither can the modern man dispense with the intellect. It is because Sri Aurobindo has been able to reach and function from the overhead—the above-mind—planes and write in terms of an overhead aesthesis that what was not possible even for Dante and Milton has been largely possible for him. He has relied on the age-old myth of Savitri whose meaning is as fresh and invigorating today, and literally so, as the freshness and brightness of the morning Sun. For the rest, he has avoided heavy or cumbersome mythology Death is referred to as Death throughout, not as Yama. The worlds, the powers, the symbol kingdoms—almost as in The Pilgrims Progress—have tell-tale names: Subtle Matter, Little Life, Greater Life, Pigmy Thought, Night, Falsehood, Life-Gods, Little Mind, Greater Mind, Heavens of the Ideal, World-Soul, and so on. What is seen directly, with no haze or ambiguity, is presented as directly, the right words (even when they seem unpoetic to us) being chosen and arranged in the right rhythm. In short, the poetic is welded and fused with the actual, subjective truth with objective reality. The Irish poet, A.E., once wrote to Dilip Kumar Roy that the English language was pitifully ill-equipped to convey spiritual ideas; but Sri Aurobindo could not subscribe to this view:

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...this seems to me a reasoning from the conventions of a past

order which cannot apply to a new poetry dealing with spiritual

things. A new art of words written from a new consciousness

demands a new technique...Truth first—a technique expressive

of the truth in the forms of beauty has to be found if it does

not exist. It is no use arguing from the spiritual inadequacy of

the English language. It has been plastic enough in the past to

succeed in expressing all that it was asked to express, however

new: it must now be urged to a farther new progress.¹⁹¹

It was a challenge which Sri Aurobindo felt bound to accept, and Savitri is the astonishing result.

      The title itself, at any rate to Hindu ears, is charged with untold significance. A very gem of a title, Savitri has a self-sufficing beauty of its own; trisyllabic, trinitarian, a union of light, strength and silence, three circles radiating from one centre, love. Again, Savitri, being the other name of the holiest and hoariest of the Vedic mantras—the Gāyatrī—which for some thousands of years Hindus have chanted morning, noon and evening, at once starts psychic vibrations of incommensurable potency. There are endless overtones and undertones from the Vedic and Upanishadic structures of myth and symbolism and spiritual knowledge. Then the story itself; the tremendous issue and its vast implications; the human and the cosmic backgrounds; and the struggle and the victory. In all this Savitri does convincingly project before us a human and a cosmic drama, and we are able to respond at once to this impact of poetry and this invasion of cosmic actuality. To quote Sri Krishnaprem again,

Savitri...is neither subjective fantasy nor yet mere philosophical

thought, but vision and revelation of the actual inner structure

of the Cosmos and of the pilgrim of life within its sphere—Bhu,

Bhuvar, Swar: the Stairway of the Worlds reveals itself to our

gaze—worlds of Light above, worlds of Darkness beneath—and

we see also ever-circling life ('kindled in measure and quenched

in measure') ascending and descending that Stair under the calm

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unwinking gaze of the Cosmic Gods who shine forth now as

of old...Poetry is indeed the full manifestation of the Logos,

and when, as here, it is no mere iridescence dependent on some

special standpoint, but the wondrous structure of the mighty

Cosmos, the 'Adorned One', that is revealed, then in truth does it

manifest in its full, its highest grandeur.¹⁹²

We have here gone beyond logic and metaphysics, ethics, politics and philosophy; beyond debate and argument, theorising and demonstration; the thing itself—the cosmos—is there before us, it awes and dominates us, it seizes and possesses us. And, wonder of wonders, the Infinity which Aswapati spans across as he races up and down the Stairway of the Worlds and the Zero that Savitri tracks down in its innermost cave of the inner countries—they are the same! How can the mere mind grasp these paradoxes of cosmic sovereignty?

       In the childhood of the human race, before self-conscious mind— that "dwarf three-bodied trinity"—started governing the affairs of man, poets like the Vedic rishis glimpsed the great truths relating to the matrix of universal life in sudden lightning flashes of  illumination and expressed them through myth and symbol, in mantric incantation and song. If poetry is to be written again with such inner certainty and total cosmic vision, the new poet has both to return to those ancient wells of integral knowledge and to be a master of the mental knowledges of our age of advancing science and technology; he has to master the variety of all this specialised and compartmentalised knowledge, yet impose on it all the unity of the Spirit with the aid of a new faculty, the spiritual power of the supermind, or at least an overmental vision and power.

      The claim has to be made on behalf of Sri Aurobindo and Savitri that this great task of the modern age has been at last boldly attempted and impressively accomplished. Savitri is more than a poem, more even than a cosmic poem, for it is not about the dawn, or about light, or about the Life Divine; Savitri is the Dawn itself, it is Light, it

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is Life. There is so much darkness and despair in the world today; the remedy can only be a new invasion of Light and Hope, a new incarnation of Love, and Savitri is such an invasion, it is nothing less than such a revelation of receding Night and the imminent arrival of a greater Dawn.

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