Savitri

   XII

 

Similes in Savitri

 

      The simile, already quoted on an earlier page, that describes the effect on the yogin of the mantra, in the context of Savitri's response to the word from Aswapati, is a remarkable example of the 'overhead' poetry; the Word is the Spirit, it is Power, it is creative joy, it is the aftermath of calm as well. The following simile compares Aswapati the pioneer and leader of the human race to a solitary star:

 

      As shines a solitary witness star

      That burns apart, Light's lonely sentinel,

      In the drift and teeming of a mindless Night,

      A single thinker in an aimless world

      Awaiting some tremendous dawn of God,

      He saw the purpose in the works of Time.¹⁷⁵

Aswapati is the 'witness star', the solitary spark of Light, in the 'mindless Night' of Nescience. Here the symbol (a solitary star) and the thing symbolised (a single thinker, a solitary pioneer of the race) are explicitly related; likewise, in another simile, the effect of a searchlight is compared to the burst of revelation when Aswapati gazes into the misty continent of the 'Little Life':

 

      As when a search-light stabs the Night's blind breast

      And dwellings and trees and figures of men appear

      As if revealed to an eye in Nothingness,

      All lurking things were torn out of their veils

      And held up in his vision's sun-white blaze.¹⁷⁶

 

Not only do the consonants 's' 'st' 'b' and 'I' play at assonance in the first line to rich effect, the imagery itself is most striking; a sudden streak of light pierces the dark, the soul's penetrating gaze disperses the 'siege of mist'.

 

      Again, in yet another simile, the dark-light antinomy is presented by invoking the suggestive symbol of the tunnel:

 

      As one who between dim receding walls

      Towards the far gleam of a tunnel's mouth,

      Hoping for light, walks now with freer pace

      And feels approach a breath of wider air,

      So he escaped from that grey anarchy.¹⁷⁷

 

The tunnel-image is strikingly apt and memorably pictures Aswapati slowly groping his way from the Little Life to the Greater Life. Elsewhere, however, the Aurobindonian simile (or, rather metaphor) luxuriates with many a familiar detail drawn from our 'civilised' life; the veiled Purusha is the purblind man, he is the hesitant voyager, timid explorer:

 

      An expert captain of a fragile craft,

      A trafficker in small impermanent wares,

      At first he hugs the shore and shuns the breadths,

      Dares not to affront the far-off perilous main.

      He in a petty coastal traffic plies,

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His pay doled out from port to neighbour port,

Content with his safe round's unchanging course,

He hazards not the new and the unseen.

But now he hears the sound of larger seas...

On a commissioned keel his merchant hull

Serves the world's commerce in the riches of Time

Severing the foam of a great land-locked sea

To reach unknown harbour lights in distant climes...

Or passing though a gate of pillar-rocks...

Steering on the trade-routes of Ignorance.

His prow pushes towards undiscovered shores,

He chances on unimagined continents...

He turns to eternal things his symbol quest...¹⁷⁸

 

It is a sustained feat of elaboration starting from the description of the veiled Purusha as "the sailor on the flow of Time"; the sailor image suggests the rest, and the whole passage—extending to over a page—becomes a cunningly wrought piece of metaphorical ingenuity in which the experiencing Purusha and the voyaging mariner keep throughout abreast of each other.

 

      The effect is hardly different in the following shorter but no less brilliantly executed expanded metaphor:

 

In the dim gleam of habit's passages,

In the subconscient's darkling corridors

All things are carried by the porter nerves

And nothing checked by subterranean mind,

Unstudied by the guardians of the doors

And passed by a blind instinctive memory,

The old gang dismissed, old cancelled passports serve,

Nothing is wholly dead that once had lived.

In dim tunnels of the world s being and in ours

The old rejected nature still survives...¹⁷⁹

 

This is the picture of the hazy clashing confusion of our subconscious mind, and images like 'dim gleam' 'darkling corridors' 'sub-terranean

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mind' and 'dim tunnels' project this picture before us. Metaphorical language sometimes waxes into sheer violence as in:

 

      Agents, not masters, they serve Life's desires

      Toiling forever in the snare of Time.

      Their bodies born out of some Nihil's womb

      Ensnare the spirit in the moment's dreams,

      Then perish vomiting the immortal soul

      Out of Matter's belly into the sink of Nought.¹⁸⁰

 

A few lines later, describing Savitri's safe passage through the 'valley of the wandering Gleam', Sri Aurobindo resorts to figurative language again:

 

      All this streamed past her and seemed to her vision's sight

      As if around a high and voiceless isle

      A clamour of waters from far unknown hills

      Swallowed its narrow banks in crowding waves

      And made a hungry world of white wild foam:

      Hastening, a dragon with a million feet,

      Its foam and cry a drunken giant's din

      Tossing a mane of Darkness into God's sky,

      It ebbed receding into a distant roar... ¹⁸¹

 

In the first line 'streamed' and 'seemed' form a pair of internal rhymes; the current of life is the reality, the clamour of waters is its image, the simile; and presently the rush of waters becomes a dragon, all sound and fury, but signifying nothing in the end.

 

      Imagery drawn from the sea is again effectively used while describing Death's arrogant confrontation of Savitri:

 

      As when the storm-haired Titan-striding sea

      Throws on a swimmer its tremendous laugh

      Remembering all the joy its waves had drowned,

      So from the darkness of the sovereign night

      Against the Woman's boundless heart arose

      The almighty cry of universal Death... ¹⁸²

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A magnificent simile that almost sums up Death's speech and its wave upon wave of hysterical megalomaniac affirmation. Death has drowned with a laugh millions of life-enamoured mariners: as the waves strike down the swimmer, Death abridges human life; as the sea roars its defiance, so does universal Death. Sri Aurobindo returns to the imagery of the sea voyage in the passage where he describes how stray thoughts from a cosmic source come tranquilly to Savitri, only to be thrown back at once:

 

      As smoothly glides a ship nearing its port,

      Ignorant of embargo and blockade,

      Confident of entrance and the visa's seal,

      It came to the silent city of the brain

      Towards its accustomed and expectant quay,

      But met a barring will, a blow of Force

      And sank vanishing in the immensity.¹⁸³

 

This is a typical simile, the comparison is properly proclaimed, and in true Homeric fashion it is worked out at some length and even with some extravagance ('embargo', 'blockade', 'visa', 'quay'). But, perhaps, the following passage with its triple simile insinuates its meaning with more subtlety and certainty:

 

      As if an old remembered dream come true She recognised...

      The mystic cavern in the sacred hill

      And knew the dwelling of her secret soul.

      As if 'in some Elysian occult depth,

      Truth's last retreat from thought's profaning touch,

      As if in a rock-temple's solitude hid,

      God's refuge from an ignorant worshipping world,

      It lay withdrawn...¹⁸⁴

 

The triple simile is a means of reinforcing the holy hush and secrecy and inviolable loneliness of the ultimate home of Savitri's secret soul, and only such imagery can communicate so ineffable a

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spiritual experience. 'Mystic cavern, 'occult depth', 'God's refuge': either they are wholly opaque, or they are 'open sesames', 'charmed magic casements' opening on the threshold of Eternity. Three more similes may also be cited in illustration of Sri Aurobindo's mastery of imagery and metaphorical language:

 

      As might a soul fly like a hunted bird,

      Escaping with tired wings from a world of storms,

      And a quiet reach like a remembered breast,

      In a haven of safety and splendid soft repose

      One could drink life back in streams of honey-fire,

      Recover the lost habit of happiness,

      Feel her bright nature's glorious ambiance,

      And preen joy in her warmth and colour's rule... ¹⁸⁵

 

      As one who spells illumined characters,

      The key-book of a crabbed magician text,

      He scanned her subtle tangled weird designs

      And the screened difficult theorem of her clues,

      Traced in the monstrous sands of desert Time

      The thread beginnings of her titan works,

      Watched her charade of action for some hint,

      Read the NO-gestures of her silhouettes...

      As if sitting near an open window's gap,

      He read by lightning-flash on crowding flash

      Chapters of her metaphysical romance

      Of the soul's search for lost Reality...¹⁸⁶

 

      Then in Illusion's occult factory

      And in the Inconscient's magic printing house

      Torn were the formats of the primal Night

      And shattered the stereotypes of Ignorance...

      The skilful Penman's unseen finger wrote

      His swift intuitive calligraphy... ¹⁸⁷

 

Everyday phenomena, mundane occurrences, facts and features in our mental, vital and physical life are thus touched up again, and

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again, and yet again, to yield meanings relevant to the vast spiritual drama unfolded in Savitri. The 'four basic elements' of metaphor have been named as analogy, double vision, sensuous image and animistic projection, although now one, now another element, is prominent in the conception of particular metaphors.¹⁸⁸ In Sri Aurobindo's similes and metaphors, however, the double vision is the base, and the rest are ancillary; one sees the two meanings at once, or almost at once: star and thinker, search-light and penetrating gaze, Purusha and voyager, and so on; first the double vision, then the corollaries, the ancillary analogies and sensuous images and vivid projections; and the whole complex of ideas and impressions and images builds a picture that delights and informs and carries many layers of meaning.

 

      Middleton Murry says that, "metaphor appears as the instinctive and necessary act of the mind exploring reality and ordering experience. It is the means by which the less familiar is assimilated to the more familiar, the unknown to the known: it 'gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name', so that it ceases to be airy nothing."¹⁸⁹ A poet like Sri Aurobindo who is engaged in communicating spiritual experiences and truths has a special need for metaphorical and symbolic language, for it is through such language alone that he can sting us into excitement and expectancy, and induce a condition that may prove responsive to the impact of 'news' from God, messages from the Infinite. Savitri verily speaks this language, it is heard almost everywhere, and while sometimes one is taken aback, or left rather bewildered, constant re-reading and listening with imaginative attention more often than not clear up ambiguities and reveal the intended vistas of meaning.

 

     

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