Savitri

  SECTION B

 'THE BOOK OF ETERNAL NIGHT'

I

'Towards the Black Void'

Left alone in the "huge wood", with Satyavan's limp head on her bosom, she ignores the dread presence of the dark god and clasps to her the mute lifeless form of her dead lover and husband. She is a woman, and must feel her loss like a woman. But she is also Savitri, and of a sudden she stands revealed to herself, the human veil being torn; A new sight comes,...

      Immortal yearnings without name leap down,

      Large quiverings of godhead seeking run

      And weave upon a puissant field of calm

      A high and lonely ecstasy of will.⁹

She heaves to great heights of puissance and perceives near her a "slow embodiment of the aeonic will", a cosmic mightiness assuming a symbol form. On the eve of the tremendous struggle that is to commence, this "thousand-petalled home of Power and light", invulnerable to the shafts of time, omnipotent, "enters the mystic lotus" in Savitri's head and becomes the "doer of her works and fountain of her words".¹⁰

      Savitri is thus ready for the mighty hour and its momentous fray. The pain, the grief, the fear are gone; her mind is still; "now all her acts sprang from a godhead's calm." She gently lays Satyavan's head on the ground and rises to meet the "dreadful god", but not before one more look at the prone dead lover. Then, "like a tree recovering from a wind", she raises her eyes:

      Something stood there, unearthly, sombre, grand,

      A limitless denial of all being

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That wore the terror and wonder of a shape.

In its appalling eyes the tenebrous Form

Bore the deep pity of destroying gods;

A sorrowful irony curved the dreadful lips

That speak the word of doom...

His shape was nothingness made real, his limbs

Were monuments of transience and beneath

Brows of unwearying calm large godlike lids

Silent beheld the writhing serpent, life.¹¹

      As the two, Woman and Death, face each other unflinchingly, the sad formidable voice of worldly wisdom cries to Savitri to let go her invisible grasp of Satyavan, to weep for a while as is proper, and then to forget, as is human nature. She relaxes her hold, but otherwise listens not to the voice, but stands "gathered in lonely strength",

      Like one who drops his mantle for a race

      And waits the signal, motionlessly swift.¹²

Death too leans down, as if to draw out Satyavan; and "another luminous Satyavan" arises, starting up from the prone corpse and stands between the mortal woman and the God. Who will finally claim him? The issue is undecided:

      ...two spirits strove;

      Silence battled with silence, vast with vast.¹³

Now Satyavan moves forward, as if irresistibly pushed; behind him, Death; and Savitri last, her mortal pace equal with the God's; intent and wordless thus she follows Satyavan's steps "into the perilous silences beyond".

      They move on in single line for a while, still close to earth's familiar smell, "its sweetness and its greenness and delight", till they reach some unfamiliar "boundary's intangible bar", and she feels that they might escape and disappear. Her "violent spirit" therefore soars at Satyavan, leaving her own mortal body on the forest soil; she is no mere Savitri but an ocean surge of will, saving her treasured Satyavan "from the collapse of space". And so they keep step again in these new symbol realms of weird grass, weird treeless plains, weird roads running phantasmal between sombre pillared rocks and brooding gates. Turning round, Death now cries out to shadowing Savitri not to persist in a "vehement trespass" into forbidden worlds. But Savitri answers not:

      Her high nude soul,

      Stripped of the girdle of mortality,

      Against fixed destiny and the grooves of law

      Stood up in its sheer will a primal force...

      A columned shaft of fire and light she rose.¹⁴

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