Savitri

     III

Paradise Lost and Savitri

      When Milton, "long choosing and beginning late", decided at last to make the Tall of Man' the subject of his epic, he felt the need for an aggressive defence of his choice and so devoted the Exordium of Book IX to this purpose:

      Sad task! yet argument

      Not less but more heroic than the wrath

      Of stern Achilles on his foe pursued

      Thrice fugitive about Troy wall; or rage

      Of Turnus for Lavinia disespoused;

      Or Neptune's ire, or Juno's, that so long

      Perplexed the Greek, and Cytherea's son:...

      Not sedulous by nature to indite

      Wars, hitherto the only argument

      Heroic deemed....

      ...or to describe races and games,

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Or tilting furniture, emblazoned shields,

Impresses quaint, caparisons and steeds,

Bases and tinsel trappings, gorgeous knights

At joust and tournament...

...Me, of these

Not skilled nor studious, higher argument

Remains...

He has a theme better in its own way and for his particular purpose than the themes of Homer and Virgil, of Ariosto and Tasso. Milton's ostensible aim is to "assert Eternal Providence,/And justify the ways of God to men." It is almost a theological aim; and he would therefore try to effect a marriage of theology and epic poetry.

      "The Story of the Fall", writes Herbert Read, "is merely the kernel, or theme, round which he elaborates, firstly, a dramatic myth, and secondly, a philosophic thesis. Here the epic, we might say, is dominated by an idea."¹⁹ It is not that the familiar paraphernalia of the old-time epics—elements like war councils, battles, single combats, domestic debates, scenes of temptation—are absent in Paradise Lost. They are memorably there, yet all these "are so transformed", says Bowra, "that their significance and even their aesthetic appeal are new...Before him the best literary epic had been predominantly secular; he made it theological, and the change of approach meant a great change of temper and of atmosphere."²⁰

      It would, perhaps, be truer to say that Milton tried to fuse Virgil and Dante, the epic manner of the former and the theological insights of the latter. This meant creating a new style, which is best summed up by the word 'sublime'. Analysing it, Gilbert Highet writes: "It was intended to be grand; to be evocative; and to be sonorous—three different aspects of sublimity, differing only in the means by which sublimity is achieved."²¹ The epic casts a spell on the reader with the opening lines, and although one might now and then venture to murmur, the spell continues till the end. Hell, all Hell, the whole

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of Heaven and entire Earth are comprehended in the scheme of the poem; Milton makes good the promise:

      .. .what surmounts the reach

      Of human sense I shall delineate so,

      By likening spiritual to corporal forms,

      As may express them best;²²

and if, besides, we find in the end that the 'structural ideal' is not seriously impaired, the credit goes, partly at least, to the poetic style, to the power of its unifying harmony.

      Highet's pointed emphasis on Milton's style in Paradise Lost is by no means misplaced. The hexameter of Homer and Virgil, the anustup of Vyasa and Valmiki, the terza rima of Dante, the symphonic blank verse of Milton, the crystalline iambic pentameter of Savitri, all play no mean part in charging these great epics with life and movement and a rounded significance. Ezra Pound makes an important point when he writes:

When we know more of overtones we shall see that the tempo of

every masterpiece is absolute, and is exactly set by some further

law of rhythmic accord. Whence it should be possible to show

that any given rhythm implies about it a complete musical

form, fugue, sonata, I cannot say what form, but a form, perfect,

complete. Ergo, the rhythm set in a line of poetry connotes its

symphony, which, had we a little more skill, we could score for

orchestra.²³

Once the perfect metrical medium has been hit upon or shaped anew on the poet's creative forge, his inspiration can flow with comparative ease, and the disparate epic material can be held together as if by magic. The detractors of Milton's verse notwithstanding, this verse by its blending of beauty and power to the point of sublimity has given us what is to be found nowhere else in English poetry. Hell yawns before us, and chaos presently envelops us; and Satan and Beelzebub and Mammon and Moloch and Belial are vivid, almost apocalyptic, projections.

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        But there is a debit side as well, for as Sri Aurobindo points out, "Milton has seen Satan and Death and Sin and Hell and Chaos; there is a Scriptural greatness in his account of these things: he has not so seen God and heaven and man or the soul of humanity at once divine and fallen, subject to evil and striving for redemption; here there is no inner greatness in the poetic interpretation of his materials." Even so, it is a failure of vision not a failure of speech or rhythm, for Sri Aurobindo readily concedes that, "rhythm and speech have never attained to a mightier amplitude of epic expression and movement, seldom to an equal sublimity."²⁴

      Dante's poem 'covered' the triple worlds of Hell, Purgatory and Paradise; Milton's, likewise, sweeps across Hell, Chaos, Earth and Heaven. In these two epics, the scene of action is wider than the environs of Troy, and vaster than the Mediterranean or the great globe itself. We have to reckon with new dimensions and unknown modes of being. While there is thus an immense, an incalculable, extension in space and time, there is also—paradoxically enough—an amazing constriction, even an annihilation of space and time. There is a hint of it at least, though not the permanent, ineffable realisation of it. In the ultimate analysis, the stage—be it Hell, Earth, Chaos, Purgatory, or Paradise—is the human heart; the microcosm is the macrocosm.

      Savitri may be said to be the third and final term in the series, of which the earlier terms are the Commedia and Paradise Lost. It is an attempt to, "reveal from the highest pinnacle and with the largest field of vision the destiny of the human spirit and the presence and ways and purposes of the Divinity in man and the universe." In 1920, such had seemed to him the worthy aim of "some profound and mighty voice of the future", a theme worthy of the future song of "greatest flight". It is difficult to say when exactly the idea of making this attempt himself came to Sri Aurobindo. At any rate we find him writing in 1931 with reference to Savitri: "There is a previous draft, the result of the many retouchings..."; in 1934 he wrote: "I made some eight or ten recasts of it originally under the old insufficient inspiration ,"²⁵

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      It is almost certain it was begun, along with or not long after Urvasie and Love and Death, in the Baroda period; he might have returned to it from time to time, retouching it here and there; but the decision to transform it altogether—"recasting the whole thing"—must have been taken sometime after 24 November 1926, the 'Day of Siddhi'. The 'recasting' was indeed very thorough. Although his handwriting was characteristic of him (being rather artistic) and he wrote clearly and apparently effortlessly, in his last years Sri Aurobindo too, like Milton, often dictated the additions to his epic to an amanuensis, but would on no account hurry through the job of revision. "What a revision!" reminisces Nirodbaran the amanuensis; "Every word must be the mot juste, every line perfect, even every sign of punctuation flawless. One preposition was changed five times; to change a punctuation-sign one had sometimes to read a whole section."²⁶ Savitri as we have it now is the fruit of almost twenty-five years' such intermittent labours, while the earliest draft might take us to a period twenty-five years earlier still.

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