Savitri

    X

Dante and Sri Aurobindo

      In Savitri Sri Aurobindo has tried to make poetry, partly out of his mystic experiences and realisations, partly out of the philosophy that he elaborated (plainly on the basis of these realisations) in The Life Divine, both sources of inspiration—the mystic and the philosophic—flowing into and filling with rich significance the mould of the ancient legend of Savitri and Satyavan. The question now arises: to what extent is mystic experience or philosophical statement amenable to transformation as poetry? It may be readily conceded that the rendering of mystical experience in terms of poetry, while it is perpetually necessary (for such poetry is the true nectar of mans rebirth in the spirit), is also perpetually unrealisable. The mystic has to express in words experiences that are beyond verbal expression. As Gilbert Highet perceptively says (he is thinking of poets like St John of the Cross, Holderlin, Valery, Donne and T.S. Eliot):

These people had a certain experience of life which they found so

complex, so dangerous and alarming, so much profounder than

normal thought and living, that they could not communicate it in

the ordinary speech—not even in ordinary poetic speech...only

in poetry which was deliberately fragmentary and inadequate

and symbolic;

but he makes an exception about Dante:

That is why Dante is such a superb writer. He was one of the

very few men in the world's history who have had such a vision

and have been able to communicate it as a coherent whole...

Most others cannot even think of making a complete exposition

of such experiences.⁸⁷

It is difficult, almost impossible, but it has been done once; it follows it could be done again if the circumstances are unusually propitious; and such circumstances may be said to have prevailed if the vision could be realised as an utterly adequate symbol or a linked system of symbols. The 'mirror' symbol in the Paradiso and the 'Dawn' symbol in Savitri are indeed such symbols, and they function as the śruti and the swaras or the background vibrations and musical tones that sustain and charge with rich significance the wonderful symphony.⁸⁸

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           If mystical experience is difficult to render in poetry, philosophy too—though for the opposite reason—is an intractable subject for poetry. If mystical experiences are ineffable by their very nature, philosophical systems or statements may prove too arid or too severely logical for poetical transplantation. Middleton Murry, for example, takes Sir Henry Newbolt to task for thinking that McTaggart's philosophy of Time and Eternity⁸⁹ could provide a future poet with an inspiring faith to enable him to give solace and encouragement to ailing humanity, and declares that philosophy can do no such thing. In so-called philosophical poetry, as Arnold might put it, the poetry is the reality, the philosophy is the illusion; "the philosophy merely serves the same office in philosophical poetry as the plot or myth in other kinds. We give to the one as to the other 'that willing suspension of disbelief which constitutes poetic faith'; if the poet is great enough to create by means of his philosophy or his story, a significant order in the chaos of human experience, we ask no more from philosophy."⁹⁰

      The point of view here urged is that there is—there can be—-no such thing as philosophical poetry; the substative alone is the reality. Love, Nature, politics, war, history, myth, philosophy, all could inspire the poet, but he would be writing only poetry! But Middleton Murry himself makes an exception in the case of Dante (even as Highet did): "The essential condition of philosophical poetry is that the poet should believe that there is a faculty of mind superior to the poetic; that was possible for Dante; but since Shakespeare lived and wrote it is not possible."⁹¹ What is Murry driving at? Does he not mean to say that real philosophical poetry is superior to philosophy alone or poetry alone because it is the creation of a mind superior even to the poetic mind? Dante is the great exception. He has successfully turned mystical experience into poetry; he has triumphantly turned philosophy into poetry. The ineffable has been made vivid beyond words, the impossible has become triumphantly possible. "We feel not so much," says G.G.Coulton, "that he is relating, nor that he is creating, as that he stands by, removes a veil, and shows us a truth

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preexistent from all eternity and living to all eternity; a picture that impresses itself as irresistibly upon the mind as ibid. use his own simile) the seal impresses itself upon the wax.⁹²

      It was Quiller-Couch who categorically affirmed that, "philosophy and poetry work on different planes, and their terms belong to different categories. The one seeks to comprehend, the other to apprehend; the one moving round, would embrace the circumference of God's purpose, the other is content to leap from a centre within us to a point of the circumference, and seize it by direct vision."⁹' On the other hand, T.S. Eliot bluntly says that, "nothing in this world or the next is a substitute for anything else; and if you find that you must do without something, such as religious faith or philosophical belief, then you must just do without it." The point Eliot is trying to make is that, while it may be possible to appreciate the Commedia or the Bhagavad Gita (which is "the next greatest philosophical poem" within Eliot's experience) as poetry without sharing the beliefs of the poet, yet, "actually, one probably has more pleasure in the poetry when one shares the beliefs of the poet."⁹⁴

      But he also immediately adds that, "there is a distinct pleasure in enjoying poetry as poetry when one does not share the beliefs"; whether one shares the beliefs or no, their presence must act either as a stimulant or an irritant. Eliot therefore concludes, in his characteristically guarded manner, that, "both in creation and enjoyment much always enters which is, from the point of view of 'Art', irrelevant."⁹⁵ It is when vision, idea and word—a whole world of direct mystic experience, a whole self-poised though complex pattern of ideas, and a whole stream of words in perfect rhythmical accord—fuse absolutely like Browning's conception of "three souls, one man" or, better still, Dante's vision of "three circles, of three colours and one magnitude",'"' it is when this miracle happens that we have a poem like the Commedia, the Bhagavad Gita, or Savitri.

      The memory of the vision of Beatrice filled Dante's spiritual life, while the philosophy of St Thomas Aquinas filled his mental horizon;

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in the fullness of time there was a fusion of these with his poetic aesthesis, and the result was the Divina Commedia. Were there comparable circumstances in Sri Aurobindo's life so that we may legitimately look for a repetition of the great miracle? Highet and Murry, starting from different premises, come nevertheless to the conclusion that Dante is the unique exception; Allen Tate says that Dante's poem, "is a vast paradigm of the possibility of the Beatific Vison",⁹⁷ and Eliot says that one learns, "from the Inferno that the greatest poetry can be written with the greatest economy of words... From the Purgatorio... that a straightforward philosophical statement can be great poetry; from the Paradiso, that more and more rarefied and remote states of beatitude can be the material for great poetry."⁹⁸ To repeat our question more succinctly: Was Sri Aurobindo the kind of poet who could have "done a Dante" and made of his Savitri another Commedia?

      Before attempting to answer this very, very difficult question, let me preface my remarks with the following obiter dicta by Ezra Pound:

Any sincere criticism of the highest poetry must resolve itself into

a sort of profession of faith. The critic must begin with a 'credo',

and his opinion will be received in part for the intelligence he

may seem to possess, and in part for his earnestness.⁹⁹

Continuous absorption in Savitri has convinced me of its greatness as a poem, but rationalising my conviction is not easy. Since the Commedia is the acknowledged exemplum, it is interesting to note that certain circumstances in the lives of Dante and Sri Aurobindo seem to strike a somewhat similar note. Dante, like Sri Aurobindo, was involved in active politics for a time; Sri Aurobindo left Calcutta in 1910, first for Chandernagore, and finally for Pondicherry, where he remained for the rest of his life, even as Dante left Florence in 1302, to spend the remaining nineteen years of his life in exile; and they were both about the same age (36-37) when this transplantation occurred, and they both left their wives behind, and did not meet them again.

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       The nodal event in Dante's life was his meeting Beatrice Portinari at her father's house when she was eight, and he but a few months older; they met off and on, and spoke once; and she died some sixteen years after they had first met. Although they had not married, she had kindled in Dante's heart a flame that was never again to be extinguished, that still burns with undiminished intensity in his Vita Nuova; it was also the flame that lighted up his path in the Commedia. There is no exact parallel to this nodal event in Sri Aurobindo's life. It is certainly true that India appeared to him, not simply as a geographical area or subcontinent, but as the Mother, verily as the Mother. He wrote to his wife in 1905 that a demon was sucking his Mother's blood, that he must strive to redeem Her from the demon's grasp.¹⁰⁰ He had a vision of the Lord as Narayana, as Vasudeva, in the Alipore Jail.¹⁰¹ But there is no hint of a 'Savitri' in these experiences. We have to wait till 1914 for the first definite clue. In that year Madame Mira Richard, who had been seeking the Divine for years, came to Pondicherry, and under date 30 March she recorded:

It matters not if there are hundreds of beings plunged in the

densest ignorance. He whom we saw yesterday is on earth: His

presence is enough to prove that a day will come when darkness

shall be transformed into light, when Thy reign shall be indeed

established upon earth.

O Lord, Divine Builder of this marvel, my heart overflows with

joy and gratitude when I think of it, and my hope is boundless.

My adoration surpasses all words and my reverence is silent.¹⁰²

On this passage Iyengar comments as follows: "This 'marvel', 'he whom we saw yesterday', was Sri Aurobindo."¹⁰³ Madame Richard presently became Sri Aurobindo's spiritual collaborator, and for about thirty years they were jointly the spiritual directors of the thousands of disciples who gathered around them in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram. When Sri Aurobindo passed away on 5 December 1950, to many of their disciples it was as though Satyavan himself had died, and Savitri had been left behind to carry on the fight with the forces of darkness.¹⁰⁴ One of the disciples, Nirodbaran, has also posed the leading question: "What is, after all, Savitri if not the inner life-episodes of the Mother and the Master?"¹⁰⁵

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