Savitri

  VII

Savitri

      There remains Savitri.

      Reading Ilion people interject: "Isn't it entirely Greek?" Reading Savitri people might likewise exclaim: "How entirely Indian!" These can only be one's first reactions. Closer study must reveal whole new universes of meaning—and this is particularly true of Savitri. Gilbert Murray says rightly that, "one cardinal fact about great poetry.. .is that its main value lies in a process, not in a result.. .we do not understand a great poem till we have felt it through and as far as possible recreated in ourselves the emotions which it originally carried."¹²³ And A.E. Housman says that it is the peculiar function of poetry, "not to transmit thought, but to set up in the reader's sense a vibration corresponding to what was felt by the writer."¹²⁴

      The Hindu tradition is to read great poetry—say the Ramayana, the Gita or the Bhagavata—in a mood of reverent attention over a period of years, coming to it again and again, for not in one reading alone can one hope to conquer its heights of significance. Savitri too calls for such continuous and reverent study. If it baffles us at first, it may be that it is a new kind of poem, demanding a new alertness in response.

      Savitri was begun in the closing years of the last century and concluded about the mid-point of the present century. It is a great Yogi's ripest and completest poetic testament to our time and all time. It is the story of a heroine enshrined in immemorial Hindu legend, and it carries the name of the holiest of Hindu mantras. It spans the past, the present and the future, man, Nature and God; it has an immediate human urgency, and also an enveloping cosmic background. Its very composition is largely the result (so it is confidently claimed) of a new aesthesis with its source of origin located in the overhead planes. In The Human Cycle, Sri Aurobindo had written:

A time comes when the creator of beauty revolts and declares the

charter of his own freedom, generally in the shape of a new law

or principle of creation, and this freedom once vindicated begins

to widen itself and to carry with it the critical reason out of all its

familiar bounds. A more developed appreciation emerges which

begins to seek for new principles of criticism, to search for the

soul of the work itself and explain the form in relation to the soul

or to study the creator himself or the spirit, nature and ideas of

the age he lived in and so to arrive at a right understanding of his work.¹²⁵

      In Savitri, Sri Aurobindo declared his charter of freedom, and it behoves the reader of the poem to, "search for the soul of the work itself and explain the form in relation to the soul." This is no easy task, much less a task that can be hurried through, but one

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can at least approach this task with due humility. "There must be a new extension of consciousness and aesthesis," says Sri Aurobindo elsewhere, "to appreciate a new kind of mystic poetry."¹²⁶ At any rate, patience, receptiveness and humility may be expected to pave the way towards an appreciation of this great epic, this symphonic recordation of a great yogi's mystic apprehension of the aspirations and struggles of mankind for defeating death and achieving immortality.

         Let us now turn, in the next part, to the poem itself.

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