Savitri

 XVI

Savitri and the 'Sonnets'

Some of the key-ideas projected vividly in Savitri, and especially in the Book of the Traveller of the Worlds, are not only elaborately expounded in The Life Divine but are also succinctly and poetically expressed in the series of sonnets that Sri Aurobindo wrote during the thirties and the forties, roughly contemporaneously with the composition of Savitri in its present form. Indeed, K.D. Sethna goes so far as to say that, "in many respects the Sonnets are the best brief approach for us to Savitri", and in many of these sonnets we have broad clues to the worldview inherent in the drama of Savitri as also, "the element of spiritual autobiography that is found worked in a non-personal narrative shape into that poem in detailed abundant vividness."¹⁴⁷ One of the last sonnets, Evolution, is an incandescent summing-up of the Aurobindonian worldview:

I passed into a lucent still abode

And saw as in a mirror crystalline

An ancient Force ascending...

Earth was a cradle for the arriving God

And man but a half-dark half-luminous sign

Of the transition of the veiled Divine

From Matter's sleep and the tormented load

Of ignorant life and death to the Spirit's light.¹⁴⁸

The ascending Force is not unlike Kazantzakis Combatant, but it is also the veiled Divine, the beckoner of the arriving God. The entire Aurobindonian dialectic of the supramentalisation or divinisation of man and the earth is here presented in sharp miniature. In this drama of transformation, man plays a protagonist's role:

Yet his advance,

Attempt of a divinity within,

A consciousness in the inconscient Night,

To realise its own supernal Light

Confronts the ruthless forces of the Unseen.

Aspiring to godhead from insensible clay

He travels slow-footed towards the eternal day.¹⁴⁹

But this insensible clay is yet the home of the veiled Spirit, and from where it is hid, it may emerge when the occasion is ripe. Even the electron is the Spirit's minute particle of movement and power: The electron on which forms and worlds are built, Leaped into being, a particle of God. A spark from the eternal Energy split, It is the Infinite's blind minute abode. In that small flaming chariot Shiva rides. The One devised innumerably to be; His oneness in invisible forms he hides, Time's tiny temples of eternity.¹⁵⁰ 'Dead' matter, they said once; we now know that matter, being

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made up of these flaming whirling electrons and other infinitesimal particles that are really minute bundles of energy, is not 'dead' but wonderfully 'alive' under the surface. It is clear, then, that darkness, death, inconscience cannot be real, cannot be final:

      What stark Necessity or ordered Chance

      Became alive to know the cosmic whole?

      What magic of numbers, what mechanic dance

      Developed consciousness, assumed a soul?

      The darkness was the Omnipotent's abode,

      Hood of omniscience, a blind mask of God...¹⁵¹

      As with the figures of a symbol dance

      The screened Omniscient plays at Ignorance.¹⁵²

What's the point of it all, it may be asked. We have to fall back on the explanation that all is God's play, the lila of the Supreme:

      One who has made in sport the suns and seas

      Mirrors in our being his immense caprice.¹⁵³

Call it lila or the 'infinite adventure' of Becoming: the seeming opposites clash, the contrasts meet and merge, and there is no end to the rapture of the play. When the "skiff is launched", it leaves its sheltered harbour-home, and must surrender to the Unknown completely, though there is an all-knowing Captain who will invisibly control the rudder and guide the bark through the threatening abysses to the safe thither shore.¹⁵⁴ When consciousness exceeds the cribbed average mentality and scours the oceans of the Unknown, when the mind breaks through its prison-house and engages in a cosmic task, when man's courageous soul makes "an assignation with the Night" and comes to woo "her dark and dangerous heart", man then achieves a vast extension in his being and his power:

      This mute stupendous Energy that whirls

      The stars and nebulae in its long train... It rises from the dim inconscient deep

      Upcoiling through the minds and hearts of men,

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      Then touches on some height of luminous sleep

      The bliss and splendour of the eternal plane.¹⁵⁵

It is a preparation for the possession of 'cosmic consciousness', a prelude to the exercise of such sovereignty; nothing is now hidden from view, neither the origins nor the course of events, neither the glory of Shiva in his "mystic loneliness of nude ecstasy" nor the passion of Krishna's flute and the beauty of his immortal eyes:

      I have wrapped the wide world in my wider self

      And Time and Space my spirit's seeing are.

      I am the god and demon, ghost and elf,

      I am the wind's speed and the blazing star.

      All Nature is the nursling of my care,

      I am its struggle and the eternal rest;

      The world's joy thrilling runs through me, I bear

      The sorrow of millions in my lonely breast.

      I have learned a close identity with all,

      Yet am by nothing bound that I become;

      Carrying in me the universe's call

      I mount to my imperishable home.

      I pass beyond Time and life on measureless wings,

      Yet still am one with born and unborn things.¹⁵⁶

Such is 'Cosmic Consciousness'; there is an edged intellectual clarity, but it by no means destroys the nuances of powerful suggestion, the rumbling undertones of dhvani.

      These sonnets are, of course, no more than stray 'sparks' from the fiery Aurobindonian forge that was mainly engaged in the creation of Savitri. The neat turns of phrase, the apt imagery, the striking symbolism in some of these sonnets are a tribute to Sri Aurobindo's poetic powers and artistic integrity. But as a sample and a foretaste of the characteristic philosophical poetry of Savitri and of its mystical muse, these sonnets are no less valuable.

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