Savitri

     XIV

 

'Dawn' in Savitri

 

There is no mistaking the vision that inspired, nor the voice that articulated, the magnificent 'Exordium', 'The Symbol Dawn':

 

      It was the hour before the Gods awake.

      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.

      Almost one felt, opaque, impenetrable,

      In the sombre symbol of her eyeless muse

      The abysm of the unbodied Infinite;

      A fathomless zero occupied the world.²⁰⁴

 

The knot of opposing tenses ('was' and 'awake') in the first line must tease our thought for a while till thought itself is transcended. The night is darkest before dawn. The soul wallows in its dark night before it reaches the shore that is Aurora, the Sunrise to Eternity, Jacob Boehme's ultimate heaven. St John of the Cross saw as night the journey of the soul to God, for the pilgrim has but the razor's edge of Faith for his road, his starting-point is divorce from the world's claims, and the goal is as yet incomprehensible. Although we have now come to look upon the dispersal of night and the coming of day as a matter of course, to our Vedic ancestors the Dawn was "the first

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miracle and the greatest revelation the world has ever seen".^20S Usha in the Veda is also Ahana; Usha had her affiliations with the Greek Eos, and Ahana with Athene and Daphne; and these bright goddesses were the harbingers of light, life, beauty, joy.²⁰⁶

 

      Throughout the Veda, according to Sri Aurobindo, Dawn as the daughter of Heaven, "...has always the same function. She is the medium of the awakening, the activity and the growth of the other gods; she is the first condition of the Vedic realisation."²⁰⁷ Usha is thus at once the physical dawn, mental awakening, and divine illumination. On the other hand, Darkness could mean both inconscience and ignorance; and even when the darkness seems most oppressive, "even in the night of earth-consciousness, the force of Agni blazes again and again and with the glow of Usha radiates the light." ²⁰⁸ Night has her temple of eternity, but it is unlit, whence all the inertness, confusion or perversion; so impenetrable is night that it is like a thing opaque; nothing can be seen, nothing can be done; it is like the reign of everlasting Zero. The 'divine Event', which is the manifestation of the Divine Consciousness on the earth, is retarded by the reign of zero-night, but this reign will see the beginning of its end when Usha arrives and awakens "the activity and growth of the other gods". Again and again the issue is joined between Night and Day, and the most oppressive hour is also that which precedes the coming of Dawn and the awakening of the gods of the Day. As A.E. asks:

 

      From what dark martyrdoms, there spring

      The resurrection and the life,

      The glow within the psyche's wing? ²⁰⁹

 

It is clear that the opening canto, even the opening line, is meant to convey in a succinct or quintessential form the meaning and message of the whole poem. Milton's "Of man's first disobedience", the marvellous opening phrase of his epic, at once projects the theme of Paradise Lost, so does the reference to the "wrath of Achilles" at the very beginning of Iliad. In Savitri, too, the opening line carries

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in itself, as a seed does the tree, the whole universe of this epic that is both a legend and a symbol. 'The hour' in the first line, and 'the path' and the 'Event' in the second line, have many layers of meaning, physical, mental, and spiritual. The temporary darkness that envelops man and Nature is to precede a new dawn and a new day. The bleak hour of Satyavan's death is to precede a renewal of life for him, and the flow of new happiness to him and to Savitri and to their parents. The dark hour of the body's inconscience and the soul's ignorance is to precede a new inrush of Light and the divinisation of man and Nature. The "divine Event" is decreed; the darkness is temporary; the Gods will now awake; Eternity will now meet Time.

 

      That these wonderful opening lines of Savitri are surely from the 'overhead' planes will become clearer if we compare with them other earlier descriptions of Dawn in Sri Aurobindo. The fragment, Chitrangada, begins thus:

 

In Manipur upon her orient hills

Chitrangada beheld intending dawn

Gaze coldly in. She understood the call.

The silence and imperfect pallor passed

Into her heart and in herself she grew

Prescient of grey realities.²¹⁰

 

In Urvasie, Pururavas is described as gazing,

 

 .. .into the quiet maiden East,

Watching that birth of day, as if a line

Of some great poem out of dimness grew,

Slowly unfolding into perfect speech.

The grey lucidity and pearliness

Bloomed more and more, and over earth chaste again

The freshness of the primal dawn returned,

 Life coming with a virginal sharp strength,

Renewed as from the streams of Paradise.²¹¹

 

In silence she comes, virgin Usha who is vet 'mother of life', and

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behind her come the youthful immortal nymphs, decked in morning's gold. There is the touch of the unearthly in both passages, and more is read into the physical phenomenon of day-break than actually meets the prosaic eye; in short, actuality is wedded to romance.

 

      In the more mature Ilion, the description of Dawn with which the epic opens is charged with a new energy and force of utterance uniting the Homeric with the Aurobindonian:

 

      Dawn in her journey eternal compelling the labour of mortals,

      Dawn the beginner of things with the night for their rest or

      their ending,

      Pallid and bright-lipped arrived from the mists and the chill of the Euxine.

      Earth in the dawn-fire delivered from starry and shadowy vastness

      Woke to the wonder of life and its passion and sorrow and beauty,

      All on her bosom sustaining, the patient compassionate Mother...²¹²

 

      Ilion was to describe the course of the last day of the Trojan War, culminating perhaps in the death of Penthesilea at the hands of Achilles, Achilles at the hands of Paris, and the destruction of Troy at night, all to be presented with an Aurobindonian spiritual awareness matching the Homeric sense of imminent doom. Ilion, in short, was to be a tragedy, whereas Savitri is a paean of triumph celebrating Savitri's victory over Death. This vital difference is brought out also in the opening lines of the two epics. The 'dawn' over Ilion starts an action that is to end at night, but the 'symbol dawn' in Savitri leads to a night of struggle and victory, thus nursing in her bosom "a greater dawn". The Dawn in Savitri has thus a spiritual dimension in addition to the lower dimensions, and it is the sense of what may be called spiritual space and time, and above all spiritual light, that imparts to the opening lines of the poem an overhead movement and significance. The earth in Ilion is a "patient compassionate Mother"; in

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      Savitri, prone earth awaits "the divine Event", the imminent spiritual transformation.

 

      The 'overhead' level at which the poem opens is sustained over almost the whole of the first and second cantos. The description is neither scientific nor fanciful but poetical and mystical. For example,

 

      Earth wheeled abandoned in the hollow gulfs

      Forgetful of her spirit and her fate.

      The impassive skies were neutral, empty, still.²¹³

 

This is no scientific account of the earth going round the sun, but an "impressionistic symbol...of a partial and temporary darkness of the soul and nature". ²¹⁴ Likewise, when Sri Aurobindo writes that "an unthought Idea.../Teased the Inconscient to wake Ignorance", he is not making play with mere abstractions, any more than Keats did with words like Beauty and Truth. "Men have not yet learned to recognise the Inconscient on which the whole material world they see is built", wrote Sri Aurobindo, "or the Ignorance of which their whole nature including their knowledge is built. But it is not so with me and I take my stand on my own feeling and experience."²¹⁵ Keats writes in his Ode on a Grecian Urn that it "dost tease us out of thought/As doth eternity". Sri Aurobindo writes that a still unthought Idea "teased the Inconscient..." What is dead—or to all appearance dead—has to be tickled and energised back to life. Obscure but potent forces start working:

 

      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.

      One lucent corner windowing hidden things

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Forced the world's blind immensity to sight.

The darkness failed and slipped like a falling cloak

From the reclining body of a god.^2l6

 

 While making an attempt to elucidate his own 'Ode to the Confederate Dead', Allen Tate wisely says that a poem, if it is a real creation, is "a kind of knowledge that we did not possess before. It is not knowledge 'about' something else; the poem is the fullness of that knowledge." ²¹⁷ An explanation or a paraphrase is no substitute for the poem itself, but it may stimulate appreciation, and help the reader to avoid false trails. Like Tate, Sri Aurobindo too has offered his own explanations of some of the passages in Savitri, especially in the earlier Books, and these are invaluable because they show us, just when we are extremely puzzled, the way to the "fullness of that knowledge". In defence of the double adjective 'slow miraculous' in the second line above, Sri Aurobindo cited Shakespeare's:

 

Wilt thou upon the high and giddy mast

Seal up the shipboy's eyes and rock his brains

In cradle of the rude imperious surge;

 

and as regards the line itself, with its obvious overhead charge of meaning and flow of rhythm, he wrote: "The 'gesture' must be 'slow miraculous'...it is the combination that renders the exact nature of the mystic movement, with the 'dimly came' supporting it, so that 'gesture' is not here a metaphor, but a thing actually done."²¹⁸ In the lines that follow, we start with the 'darkness' which, to give it a kind of symbolic solidity, is called "inert black quietude"; then a series of quick images follow, their cumulative effect being to suggest the falling back of darkness and the splendour of the new dawn:

 

There is first a black quietude, then the persistent touch, then

the first 'beauty and wonder' leading to the magical gate and the

'lucent corner'. Then comes the failing of the darkness, the simile

used ['a falling cloak'] suggesting the rapidity of the change.

Then as a result the change of what was once a rift into a wide

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luminous gap.. .Then all changes into 'a brief perpetual sign', the

iridiscence, then the blaze and the magnificent aura.²¹⁹

 

The whole passage is hard, but it is the hardness of a diamond, for the lights flash almost to blinding effect; from night we have made the passage to day, and it is a thrilling and glorious experience. Even the falling of the cloak was, for Sri Aurobindo, "not an image but an experience"; and unless we can feel it too as an experience rather than as an interesting figure of speech, we shall be missing the force and nuance of the passage.

 

      The burst of sunrise fills the earth with beauty; and all earth responds in joyous adoration:

 

A Form from far beatitudes seemed to near...

Earth felt the Imperishable's passage close:

The waking ear of Nature heard her steps

And wideness turned to her its limitless eye,

And, scattered on sealed depths, her luminous smile

Kindled to fire the silence of the worlds.

All grew a consecration and a rite.

Air was a vibrant link between earth and heaven;

The wide-winged hymn of a great priestly wind

Arose and failed upon the altar hills;

The high boughs prayed in a revealing sky.

Here where our half-lit ignorance skirts the gulfs

On the dumb bosom of the ambiguous earth...

Our prostrate soil bore the awakening ray.²²⁰

 

The general sense is clear enough, as in Ralph Hodgson's Song of Honour ²²¹; but being emanations as it were of an overhead aesthesis, some of the lines raise difficulties to the ordinary mentality. What is meant by "the wide-winged hymn of a great priestly wind"? To an objection that Sri Aurobindo had transferred the 'wings' from the 'wind' to the 'hymn', he answered that he had done no such thing; the Vedic tradition gave no wings to the gods of the air. 'Wide-winged', on the other hand, was "proper to the voice of the wind which takes

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the form of a conscious hymn of aspiration and rises ascending from the bosom of the great priest."²²²The whole picture, Sri Aurobindo assures us, far from being artificial or cunningly made-up, was but a complete rendering of the experience that had actually come to him:

 

The picture is that of a conscious adoration offered by Nature...

The wind is the great priest of this sacrifice of worship, his voice

rises in a conscious hymn of aspiration, the hills offer themselves

with the feeling of being an altar of the worship, the trees lift

their high boughs towards heaven as the worshippers, silent

figures of prayer, and the light of the sky into which their boughs

rise reveals the Beyond towards which all aspires.²²³

 

But the hard earth-crust is still an "anguished and precarious field of toil", which now receives the awakening ray that is both of the Sun and of the new Truth-Consciousness. Even the earth—frail and foul clay, as Hopkins calls it—agreeably responds to the revealing light; and this too is but a faithful transcription of Sri Aurobindo's own experiences at various times.²²⁴

 

   

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