Savitri

SECTION D

      'THE BOOK OF EVERLASTING DAY'

 I

'The Eternal Day'

      The great Savitri-Yama dialectic has spanned the ineluctable spaces of Eternal Night and the Double Twilight, and with the withdrawal of the shadow, twilight gives place to day—the symbol realm of Everlasting Day—and Savitri and Satyavan are alone though still with the nameless veil, the translucent wall, between them. Death's thesis and Savitri's antithesis have rung in our ears and echoed through the corridors of the symbol worlds of night and twilight. With Death's retreat, can it be said that Savitri's antithesis has decisively and finally vanquished Death's thesis? This would be too crude an end to the cosmic debate. A synthesis is called for, a harmony that involves both thesis and antithesis, both a changed Yama and a subdued Savitri. The poetic projection of the synthesis is the subject of 'The Book of Everlasting Day.'

      When night flees, when twilight lifts, then is the time for day's unfolding. What is this Eternal Day like? Paradisal must be its colour and texture and tone and rhythm. Sri Aurobindo invades this invisible realm and in trying to snap its extravagance of paradisal beauty achieves one of the greatest flights of poetic imagination on record. Light, power, beauty, harmony, truth-consciousness, bliss, are some of the features of paradise as conceived by man, but the picturing ot the realm itself is seldom attempted and hardly ever satisfies. Sri Aurobindo, however, makes us see with Savitri's eyes, share her sense of wonderment and exultation and her own awakened sense of voyaging through beautiful seas of light and felicity. These are "worlds of deathless bliss", a marvellous sun looks down upon them; here is "perfection's home", surrounded by God's "everlasting day".

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Savitri quivers "with eternity's touch" and her soul stands "close to the founts of the infinite". Here she sees 'immortal clarities of form", since twilight and night are no more and all is awake to the splendour of the sun:

      Arisen beneath a triple mystic heaven

      The seven immortal earths were seen, sublime:

      Homes of the blest released from death and sleep

      Where grief can never come nor any pang...⁶⁸

Earth-nature seems changed, the very air seems "an ocean of felicity", the lowliest of earths seems a heaven now. All Nature hymns the glory of the ordainer of order. Rivers taking their origin on hills and flowing to the sea, when translated into their divine archetypes, become a celestial choir:

      A chanting crowd from mountain bosoms slipped

      Past branches fragrant with a sigh of flowers

      Hurrying through sweetnesses with revel leaps;

      The murmurous rivers of felicity

      Divinely rippled honey-voiced desires,

      Mingling their sister eddies of delight,

      Then, widening to a pace of calm-lipped muse,

      Down many-glimmered estuaries of dream

      Went whispering into lakes of liquid peace.⁶⁹

The inhabitants of this realm enjoy an unending happiness, and neighbouring realms are peopled by "eternity's luminous tribes" Colour, shape, word, rhythm, all fuse into perfection. Variety and harmony, richness and sufficiency, impulse and law, all achieve a splendid co-existence. In this community of spirits, one wanders in the wind, another broods on leaf or stone, and from others rise "unfathomed, inexpressible, chantings":

      In those far-lapsing symphonies she could hear,

      Breaking through enhancements of the ravished sense,

      The lyric voyage of a divine soul

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Mid spume and laughter tempting with its prow

The charm of innocent Circean isles,

Adventures without danger beautiful

In lands where siren Wonder sings its lures

From rhythmic rocks in ever-foaming seas.⁷⁰

Savitri feels feasted in her senses and her soul, and it is a marvel to her that things limited or imperfect or maimed or causing satiety on earth should, in this other kingdom, be flawless, whole, and of perennial relish. The heart is a "torch lit from infinity", the limbs are "trembling densities of soul". But Savitri realises that there are even nobler worlds, opening beyond the large sapphire gates:

      Endless aspired the climbing of those heavens;

      Realm upon realm received her soaring view.⁷¹

On the crown of a glorious ascent where the finite mates with the infinite, she beholds great forms of deities, apsara goddesses, heaven's cupbearers, magician builders, wind-haired Gandharvas, and also our great ancestors, high seers and poets. At the last point of vision,

      Beyond what tongue can utter or mind dream,

      Worlds of an infinite reach crowned Nature's stir.⁷²

Here all is a "potent and lucid joy"; here time dwells with Eternity as one; and here immense felicity joins rapt repose.

      When the first dizziness of this impact of paradisal beauty and bliss wears off, Savitri looks about herself and sees a familiar yet strange being who is the "living knot and source" of all the worlds:

      One whom her soul had faced as Death and Night

      A sum of all sweetness gathered into his limbs

      And blinded her heart to the beauty of the suns.

      Transfigured was the formidable shape.⁷³

The Dark has become exceeding Light, the dread aspect is now sweet, the sombre cowl is replaced by the "godhead's lurking love". He seems a God carrying all godheads "in his grandiose limbs", with the "fourfold being" for his crown. He is first, Virat the architect, Will working through Matter and creating the visible world. He is second, Hiranyagarbha, thinker and dreamer and the creator of the invisible worlds of possibility, "the Angel of mysterious ecstasies". The third spirit, the hidden cause of the other two, is "a mass of superconscience closed in light,/Creator of things in his all-knowing sleep/...the centre of the circle of God. ⁷⁴ Fourth and last is the 'brooding bliss of the Infinite,/Its omniscient and omnipotent repose/Its immobile silence absolute and alone."⁷⁵ Crowned by this "fourfold being", the transfigured God meets Savitri's gaze, and "Soul sees Soul in equality and understanding".⁷⁶

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