Savitri

   XV

      SAVITRI: HER POWER AND PERSONALITY

      Gods and men and all Nature awake with the Dawn, and Savitri awakes too on this day of all days "when Satyavan must die". She is burdened by the foreknowledge about her Satyavan's fate, but she would share the burden with none; she cannot cry, she will not woo despair:

      Amid the trivial sounds, the unchanging scene

      Her soul arose confronting Time and Fate.²²⁵

The issue will soon be joined, and she must gather force and be ready. And she is ready. "All in her pointed to a nobler kind", for she might very well be "the forerunner or first creator of a new race."²²⁶ Then follows a fifty-one line description of Savitri, as uniformly sustained a passage of overhead (even clearly overmind) poetry, unmistakably recognisable in rhythm and language, as anywhere else in the poem. The main effect is to project a divine-human power who symbolises a union of beauty and grace, strength and silence:

Near to earth's wideness, intimate with heaven,

Exalted and swift her young large-visioned spirit

Voyaging through worlds of splendour and of calm

Overflew the ways of Thought to unborn things.

Ardent was her self-poised unstumbling will;

Her mind, a sea of white sincerity,

Passionate in flow, had not one turbid wave.

As in a mystic and dynamic dance

A priestess of immaculate ecstasies

Inspired and ruled from Truth's revealing vault

Moves in some prophet cavern of the gods,

A heart of silence in the hands of joy

Inhabited with rich creative beats

A body like a parable of dawn

That seemed a niche for veiled divinity

     Or golden temple door to things beyond.

      Immortal rhythms swayed in her time-born steps;

      Her look, her smile awoke celestial sense

      Even in earth-stuff, and their intense delight

      Poured a supernal beauty on men's lives.

      A wide self-giving was her native act...

      A deep of compassion, a hushed sanctuary,

      Her inward help unbarred a gate in heaven;

      Love in her was wider than the universe,

      The whole world could take refuge in her single heart...

      At once she was the stillness and the word,

      A continent of self-diffusing peace,

      An ocean of untrembling virgin fire:

      The strength, the silence of the gods were hers.²²⁷

There are other descriptions of Savitri, in other contexts, and

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A. B. Purani has brought them all together in his valuable study.²²⁸ There is, in the first place, the promise of a daughter to Aswapati:

A music of griefless things shall weave her charm;

The harps of the Perfect shall attune her voice,

The streams of Heaven shall murmur in her laugh,

Her lips shall be the honeycombs of God,

Her limbs his golden jars of ecstasy,

Her breasts the rapture-flowers of Paradise...²²⁹

There is, then, Aswapati's vision of full-grown virgin Savitri, who suddenly appears to him a goddess rather than a human being, an unearthly splendour of beauty rather than the daughter he had known and loved:

There came the gift of a revealing hour...

Annulled were the transient values of the mind,

The body's sense renounced its earthly look,

Immortal met immortal in their gaze...

He saw through the familiar cherished limbs

The great and unknown spirit born his child.²³⁰

The most impassioned description, however, is that by Rishi Narad when he sees Savitri returning after her meeting with Satyavan. Her eyes glow with the enchantment of love, she is the bride, the flame-born. Homer's Helen enslaves with her beauty Priam himself and all the Trojan elders; here, in Sri Aurobindo's poem, Savitri casts a spell on Narad the immaculate Rishi and celestial Bard! He flings on her "his vast immortal look", yet reins back knowledge and yields to the wonder of the moment:

What feet of gods, what ravishing flutes of heaven

Have thrilled high melodies round, from near and far

Approaching through the soft and revelling air,

Which still surprised thou hearest? They have fed

 Thy silence on some red strange-ecstasied fruit

And thou hast trod the dim moon-peaks of bliss.. .²³¹

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There is also the great scene in the last canto of "The Book of the Double Twilight' where Savitri assumes her viivarupa "in a flaming moment of apocalypse":

      Her forehead's span vaulted the Omniscient's gaze,

      Her eyes were two stars that watched the universe...

      Eternity looked into the eyes of Death.

      And Darkness saw God's living Reality.²³²

Savitri the redeemer, as the Supreme promised to fashion her; Savitri the flame-virgin, as her father glimpsed her; Savitri transfigured by Love, as Rishi Narad saw her; and Savitri, the body of the living Truth, showing Death his place at last: these are magnificent evocations, each striking and memorable in its own way. But the description of Savitri as she awakes on the fateful morning, self-poised with self-gathered force ready for the mortal challenge that is to turn into "the divine Event", is the apex, the Mount Kailas of the poem. It is when we read passages of sustained spiritual glow like the description of the 'Symbol Dawn or of Savitri when as the World-Mother she, the young Bride awakes on the appointed day to meet and master Fate, that we come near to realising the truth of A. B. Purani's words:

Sri Aurobindo does not get, as do some other great creators of

beauty, intermittent glimpses of the supreme beauty; he seems to

have his permanent station on those heights.²³³

If Milton in his 'mighty-mouthed' moments is inspired by the Higher Mind, if Shakespeare in his great dazzling moments of supreme utterance is the poet with the Illumined Mind, if Dante's poetry is charged again and again with the marvellous revelatory power of the Intuitive Mind, then Sri Aurobindo's Savitri embodies the sovereignty of the Overmind and comes to us with the direct, potent and radiant force of the Upanishadic mantra, a sustained feat of poetic recordation never before attempted or achieved.²³⁴

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