Savitri

   IV

Song of Myself and Savitri

While it is natural to see Savitri as a sort of continuation and fulfilment of the two earlier 'cosmic' epic narratives—the Divina Commedia and Paradise Lost—there were other formative influences as well, and some of these too deserve mention and even some scrutiny. The primary inspiration flowed no doubt from the fount of his own Yogic experiences and realisations; the 'overhead aesthesis' canalised this rush of afflatus into a blank verse that was Upanishadic in its packed clarity and Kalidasian in its light-glancing unhurried movement; and his sense of structure or power of architectural construction 'contained' the cosmic drama in the old legend of Savitri and Satyavan. But the Yogi and the metaphysician was also a student and critic of poetry, he was responsive to new movements in the world of poetry, and he was not unwilling to pcercise, to experiment, in divers poetic moulds and modes.

      We have seen in the previous chapter how Sri Aurobindo tried, with not a little success, to transplant some of the classical metres, and notably the hexameter, in the soil of English verse. If the profound Greek and Latin scholar in Sri Aurobindo felt attracted to these tried old classical metres, another part of him felt attracted, with a no less enthusiastic readiness, to a comparatively modern poet like Walt Whitman. Unlike his predecessors in America, Whitman had a giant individuality of his own and when he turned to the profession of poetry, he strove to find his bearings in the cosmos and to express himself and his new-found sense of freedom and power in a verse partaking of this freedom and this power.

      Sir Aurobindo refers to Whitman as, "this giant of poetic thought with his energy of diction, this spiritual crowned athlete and vital prophet of democracy, liberty and the soul of man and Nature and all humanity."²⁷ In an audacious phrase, Sri Aurobindo calls Whitman "the most Homeric voice since Homer", because "he has the nearness to something elemental" and he has, "the elemental Homeric power of sufficient straight-forward speech, the rush too of oceanic sound though it is here the surging of the Atlantic between continents, not the magic roll and wash of the Aegean around the isles of Greece."²⁸ The magic, the disciplined grace, the unfailing beauty of Homer are absent, but there is energy, there is mass and amplitude. Whitman's Song of Myself is an attempt to "embody a universe in the rough";²⁹ in it the zero-self successfully grapples with and comprehends the infinite universe. Whitman is himself "a kosmos, of Manhattan the son", and at the height of his self-identification with his milieu and his ambience, he declares:

      I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and

      each moment then,

      In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own

      face in the glass,

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I find letters from God dropt in the street, and every

one is sign'd by God's name,

And I leave them where they are, for I know that

 wheresoe'er I go,

Others will punctually come forever and ever.³⁰

Song of Myself is written in a new kind of verse and it is a new kind of epic; unabashed he announces that he is its central figure; but he derives his meaning and his power from the fact of his location in the universe, in the cosmos. "The end of Song of Myself, writes Roy Harvey Pearce, "the moral object which synchronises with its poetic object, is to know that the world is there, and in the knowing, to know itself as there; in effect, through such a transaction to create itself and the possibility for readers to create themselves."³¹ The chronic malady that man suffers from is the malady of isolation, of feeling completely estranged from his environment, from the universe. To be in the universe yet feel no sense of belonging to it is a misery, or at least the boredom of a living death. D.H. Lawrence was thus right when he said that, "whoever can establish or initiate a new connection between mankind and the circumambient universe is, in his own degree, a saviour."³²

      Wordsworth in his best poetry (notably, The Prelude) and Whitman in his Song of Myself in their different unique ways, have thus proved to be mankind's saviours. Savitri carries the process a stage further, and the sense of belonging is here included and exceeded by the sense of becoming. Heaven, not Hell, is our rightful habitat; we are required to be in this pestilential congregation of vapours no longer than our decision and determination to change it nearer our heart's desire. We can not only rise to any heaven that we ourselves choose but we can also change this Hell-infected earth itself into any heaven we choose. And when we take such a decision, when we will such a change, we shall receive adequate response from the higher powers of the Universe, and out of this meeting of the heart's desire and the Spirit's response a new heaven and a new earth can be brought here into being. Such, indeed, is the message of hope that Savitri embodies in the vast spaces of its symbolic action culminating in the decisive victory of Light over Darkness.

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