Savitri

      II

'The Soul's Choice'

Savitri has successfully withstood the blandishments and temptations of the Dark God. An even subtler trial awaits her now. A voice rises as it were from her heart. The voice of "inviolable Ecstasy", she is the "beauty of the unveiled Ray", and death itself is the "tunnel" she drives through life to reach her "unseen distances of bliss". Heaven and Earth have an intimate kinship:

      Heaven in its rapture dreams of perfect earth,

      Earth in its sorrow dreams of perfect heaven.⁷⁷

Savitri and Satyavan can "serve the dual law" now only distantly glimpsed, and serve the earth and its inhabitants; but if they would rather leave the earth to its fate and achieve their own permanent felicity, now is the time to ascend into the "blissful home". Earth's desire is but an "ambiguous myth"; Savitri and Satyavan might as well rise to their own immortality. Savitri at once rejects this promise to her of personal salvation:

      I climb not to thy everlasting Day,

      Even as I have shunned thy eternal Night...

      Earth is the chosen place of mightiest souls;

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      Earth is the heroic spirit's battlefield,

      The forge where the Archmason shapes his works.

      Thy servitudes on earth are greater, King,

      Than all the glorious liberties of heaven.⁷⁸

She cannot solace herself in heaven when earth is full of suffering men. With Satyavan by her side, she will be able to give battle to the world's woe, lift man's soul to God, and bring immortality to the earth.

      A fresh doubt is posed before Savitri. Is it ever possible that the basic distinction between earth and heaven can be annulled? With average humanity preoccupied with the routine cares of the earth, a general emancipation is out of question:

      Heaven's call is rare, rarer the heart that heeds;

      The doors of light are sealed to common mind,

      And earth's needs nail to earth the human mass...⁷⁹

Not merely ascent is difficult, relapse and descent are far easier and quicker; no wonder the human mass is content to lay waste their lives merely eating and spending. It is easy to say that existential limitations should be transcended; but how? It is easier said than done. How is man to borrow the Omniscient's eyes? Or the Omnipotent's force? Savitri's compassionate heart does great credit to her, but she is foredoomed to failure if she is going to make the earth the stage of her action:

      Leave to its imperfect light the earthly race:

      All shall be done by the long act of Time.⁸⁰

Let Savitri consent to breaking into eternity "her mortal mould", receive Satyavan into her boundlessness, and ignore the world and its intolerable budget of woes. But Savitri refuses to be tempted with the promise of solitary bliss for herself and Satyavan. She says simply:

      To bring God down to the world on earth we came,

      To change the earthly life to life divine.⁸¹

She will not sacrifice earth to "happier worlds". Wasn't it God

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who made the earth and planted in it the seed for perfection? God has made earth, and earth must bring down her God. Savitri has actually "felt a secret spirit stir in things/Carrying the body of the growing God", and hence earth's climb to its own eternity is certain.

      Realising at last that Savitri's purpose holds despite the doubts posed and the difficulties prophesied, the god tells her that while he appreciates the strength of her vision and will and voice—because these have had their origin in him—he must warn her about "the tardy process of the pace of Time"; a quick transformation of human and earth-nature is not to be thought of and she should guard against daring "too soon the adventure of the Light". But he will not raise impediments of his own any further:

      As I have taken from thee my load of night

      And taken from thee my twilight's doubts and dreams,

      So now I take my light of utter Day.

      These are my symbol kingdoms but not here

      Can the great choice be made that fixes the fate

      Or uttered the sanction of the Voice supreme.

      Arise upon a ladder of greater worlds

      To the infinity where no world can be.⁸²

But the double-faced god, one side dark and the other bright, who is the master of the magic that makes the worlds, is himself no more than a mediate power, and his worlds of night, twilight and day too are only mediating links between the Spirit above and Matter below. If Savitri is determined indeed to deliver humanity from its thrall of incapacity, misery and death, she should ascend into her timeless self, "choose destiny's curve and stamp thy will on Time". With these valedictory words, the god withdraws, and with him the "heaven-worlds" too vanish in "spiritual light". And Savitri lives fulfilled in "an ineffable world", experiencing a rapture, a virgin unity,

      Housing a multitudinous embrace

      To marry all in God's immense delight,

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      Bearing the eternity of every spirit,

      Bearing the burden of universal love,

      A wonderful mother of unnumbered souls.⁸⁵

In her condition of superlative receptiveness, "a crypt and sanctuary of brooding light/...the last recess of things beyond" now opens before her, and she listen again, and catches the accents of another voice. This is the very last test, although it is repeated four times. Savitri is asked to choose between life on earth and,

      An immense extinction in eternity,

      A point that disappears in the infinite, -...⁸⁴

The woman's heart replies: Thy peace, thy oneness, thy energy, thy joy of the embrace, O Lord:

      Thy magic flowing waters of deep love,

      Thy sweetness give to me for earth and men.⁸⁵

Not for herself, or for Satyavan and herself, but "for earth and men". Four times the choice is given, and four times Savitri elects earth-life and shared sorrow to easy escape into the "negative eternity" of extinction in the infinite. She will need all heaven's powers, but earth will be the area of her action. She cannot forget the cry of a million creatures, nor ignore the "dreadful whirlings of the world"; she must go back to the earth with Satyavan and start building the house divine there.

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