On Savitri
THEME/S
XI
"The record of a seeing, of an experience..."; such is Sri Aurobindo's description of Savitri. He writes elsewhere: "When you see Light, that is vision; when you feel Light entering into you, that is experience; when Light settles in you and brings illumination and knowledge, that is a realisation."136 Vision, experience, realisation; Aswapati, Savitri-Satyavan, the Earthly Paradise (the Life Divine): this is the ascending scale. And to Sri Aurobindo, "the path of Yoga has always been a battle as well as a journey, a thing of ups and downs, of light followed by darkness, followed by greater light."137 It may therefore be assumed that much of what is poetically rendered in Savitri is based on Sri Aurobindo's own visions, experiences and realisations. Nor did he (and his spiritual collaborator, the Mother) rely on Faith alone, although it meant a good deal to them, but also, "on a great ground of knowledge which we have been developing and testing all our lives. I think I can say that I have been testing day and night for years upon years more scrupulously than any scientist his theory or his method on the physical plane."138 Savitri, then, is a whole universe of
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knowledge and experience—physical and spiritual—presented in the dramatic form of a journey and a battle and a victory. It is, in the words of Krishnaprem (Ronald Nixon), "neither subjective fancy nor yet mere philosophical thought, but vision and revelation of the actual inner structure of the Cosmos and of the pilgrim of life within its sphere."139
So much for the 'thematic content' of Savitri. But the 'mystic' vision, experience, realisation is one thing, its expression in terms of poetry is a somewhat different thing. "The poetry of mysticism",says Evelyn Underhill, "may de defined on the one hand as a temperamental reaction to the vision of Reality: on the other, as a form of prophecy."140 Of mystic poetry, with particular reference to Savitri, Sri Aurobindo writes:
The mystic Muse is more of an inspired Bacchante of the
Dionysian wine than an orderly housewife.141
The mystic feels real and present, even ever present to his
experience, intimate to his being, truths which to the ordinary
reader are intellectual abstractions or metaphysical speculations.
He is writing of experiences that are foreign to the ordinary
mentality.142
The attempt at mystical spiritual poetry of the kind I am at
demands above all a spiritual objectivity, an intense psycho
physical concreteness.143
Mystic poetry like Sri Aurobindo's Savitri demands concentrated attention from the reader. Where it is most articulate it is charged with the overhead afflatus, and the apparent unconventionality may itself be the gateway to the new audience-chambers of revelation. Imagery is frequently resorted to and the idea is often presented in symbolic terms. Fire, lights, sun, moon, sky, stars, colours, sounds of bells, sea, dawn, gold, tree, snakes, diamonds, bird, flowers, fruits, cow, ass, horse, milk, mountain, elephant, lion the aśwattha, goat, bull, frog, fish, lotus, swan, peacock, flute, conch, pearl, the cross, the cakra, bow, etc., all have symbolic meanings.144 And it is also the nature of mystic
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poetry to resort to multiple symbols, linked imagery and mixed metaphors. Above all, as in the opening canto, "...rapid transitions from one image to another are a constant feature in Savitri as in most mystic poetry."145
Besides the 'thematic content' and the symbolic language, there is the third element in overhead (indeed, all) poetry, namely the rhythm. The poetic line is really the miraculous fusion of idea, language and rhythm, and while we may no doubt desperately try to dissociate and study them separately, they are really the one-in-three, like Sat-Chit-Ananda\ Of the metre and rhythm of Savitri, Sri Aurobindo wrote as follows:
The structure of the pentameter blank verse in Savitri is of its
own kind and different in plan from the blank verse that has
come to be ordinarily used in English poetry. It dispenses with
enjambement or uses it very sparingly and only when a special
effect is intended; each line must be strong enough to stand
by itself, while at the same time it fits harmoniously into the
sentence or paragraph like stone added to stone; the sentence
consists usually of one, two, three or four lines, more rarely five
or six or seven: a strong close for the line and a strong close for
the sentence are almost indispensable except when some kind
of inconclusive cadence is desirable; there must be no laxity or
diffusiveness in the rhythm or in the metrical flow anywhere,
there must be a flow but not a loose flux.146
Sri Aurobindo had tried blank verse of the ordinary kind in his early poems, Urvasie and Love and Death and Baji Prabhou, as also the plays (including his translation of Kalidasa's Vikramorvasie as The Hero and the Nymph), but now his aim in Savitri was, "to catch something of the Upanishadic and Kalidasian movement, so far as that is a possibility in English."147
The Sanskrit śloka, or the popular verse in the anustup metre, has a clarity and edge of its own, a packed neatness and a crystalline power of suggestion; and a succession of great poets—Valmiki, Vyasa,
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Kalidasa—have found in it almost an ideal, at least a wonderfully elastic, medium for poetic expression, inexhaustible in its potentialities, rather comparable to blank verse in the Age of Shakespeare or heroic verse (or the couplet) in the Age of Dryden and Pope. It is said that the Adi-Kavi (the 'first' poet), Valmiki, was walking on the shores of the Yamuna one morning when he perceived a pair of kraunca birds in sportive play on the branch of a tree. Even as he was feeling engrossed in the spectacle of the birds at play, an arrow as from nowhere struck the male bird and killed it, leaving the female disconsolate. Valmiki's humanity felt a deep wound, his anger flashed up for an instant, and he broke out into a curse—but the curse took a rhythmic form. The shock of tragedy and the welling up of pity had produced a sudden tension in Valmiki's mind which sought natural release in the form of the verse which was presently to provide the metrical norm—the śloka or the anustup—for his great epic, the Ramayana.148
The śloka is made up of four parts, each of eight syllables, and has proved a fit enough instrument for description and dialogue, for narration and discussion, for the highest poetry as well as the loftiest philosophy. A union of simplicity and strength, of grace and suppleness, is perhaps the chief claim of the śloka to unique distinction as a metrical form. The passion of the heroic figures, the agony of a Kausalya or of a Kunti, the clash of battle, the tasks of peace, the climb of philosophy, the revelation of Upanishadic wisdom, the lure of beauty, the enchantment of love, all have flowed into the handy and shining mould of the śloka. A passage made up of a series of ślokas is no massed Miltonic blank verse paragraph, but a clear-cut bricked-up wall where the unity of the whole doesn't quite obliterate the lines of the brick-laying. Here is a sample of dramatic blank verse from Sri Aurobindo's early (though only posthumously published) play, Rodogune:
Was Fate not satisfied
With my captivity? Waits worse behind?
It was a grey and clouded sky before
And bleak enough but quiet. Now I see
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Fresh clouds come stored with thunder toiling up
From a black-piled horizon.149
Here is another passage, from the narrative poem, Baji Prabhou:
Clamorous, exultant blared
The Southron trumpets, but with stricken hearts
The swords of Agra back recoiled; fatal
Upon their serried unprotected mass
In hundreds from the verge the bullets rained,
And in a quick disordered stream, appalled,
The Mogul rout began.150
Sri Aurobindo's early blank verse achieved such effects of easy naturalness and nervous sinuosity with little apparent effort. Savitri must originally have been conceived as a companion piece to Urvasie and Love and Death, and written in blank verse of the same kind, with enjambement and shifting caesura and a tendency to form verse paragraphs in the Miltonic manner. Writing in 1934, Sri Aurobindo remarked: "Savitri is a work by itself unlike all the others. I made some eight or ten recasts of it originally under the old insufficient inspiration. Afterwards I am altogether rewriting it, concentrating on the first Book and working on it over and over again."151 The "insufficient inspiration" doubtless covers both the absence of the overhead aesthesis and the currency of the old or "ordinary" blank verse. Here and there, especially in those later parts of the poem to which Sri Aurobindo could not perhaps give the final revision, the verse has still the traditional cast:
The wish to lessen
His suffering, the impulse that opposes pain
Were the one mortal feeling left.152
Savitri
Drew back her heart's force that clasped his body still
Where from her lap renounced on the smooth grass
Softly it lay, as often before in sleep
When from their couch she rose in the white dawn
Called by her daily tasks...153
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On the other hand, there is no mistaking the sound of the new rhythm. In the projection of this blank verse which is Kalidasian not Miltonic-the syllabic energy is discharged, not continuously as in the above passages, but in linear quanta, in discrete bundles of about ten syllables as in
Thus trapped in the gin of earthly destinies, Awaiting her ordeal's hour abode,
Outcast from her inborn felicity,
Accepting life's obscure terrestrial robe,
Hiding herself even from those she loved,
The godhead greater by a human fate.154
Each line stands almost by itself, and the series of six lines making a complete grammatical sentence moves with a graceful and dignified gait that is characteristic of poise and maturity and strength. In the following passage, however, we have a succession of 1,1,1,1,2,1,2,4 line quanta respectively, the result being that there is a gradual heightening of expectancy and a mounting up of the rhythmic tension:
A combatant in silent dreadful lists,
The world unknowing, for the world she stood:
No helper had she save the Strength within;
There was no witness of terrestrial eyes;
The Gods above and Nature sole below
Were the spectators of that mighty strife.
Around her were the austere sky-pointing hills,
And the green murmurous broad deep-thoughted woods
Muttered incessantly their muffled spell.
A dense magnificent coloured self-wrapped life
Draped in the leaves' vivid emerald monotone
And set with chequered sunbeams and blithe flowers
Immured her destiny's secluded scene.155
The first line states with utter succinctness that Savitri is a 'combatant'; the next line has a caesura which cuts the line into
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two, signifying thereby the 'dreadful lists'; then follow two more single lines of neat self-sufficiency and pointed brevity; the next two lines go together, and already the 'Gods above' and 'Nature' below are implicated in the drama; a single line, and two more lines, follow and these colourfully draw out the meaning of the word 'Nature'; now comes like a flood a four-line unit of verse which brilliantly fuses the imagery of Nature with Savitri's own purposive solitariness and strength. That such blank verse is Sanskritic and Kalidasian rather than Shakespearian or Miltonic does not make it a less elastic or less powerful instrument of poetic expression.
Professor Vivian de Sola Pinto has drawn my attention to the marked resemblance between Tennyson's blank verse at its best and the verse of Savitri. Writing of Tennyson in The Future Poetry, Sri Aurobindo remarked:
There has been no more consummate master of the language,
and this mastery is used with a careful, sure and unfailing hand.
Whatever has to be expressed, whether it be of considerable,
mediocre or no worth, is yet given a greater than its intrinsic
value by a power of speech which without any such remarkable
or astonishing energy as would excite or exalt the mind or disturb
it from a safe acquiescence and a luxurious ease of reception, has
always a sufficient felicity, curiously worked even when it affects
simplicity, but with a chastened if not quite chaste curiosity...
This art is that of a master craftsman, a goldsmith, silversmith,
jeweller of speech and substance with much of the decorative
painter in his turn.. .The spirit is not filled, but the outer aesthetic
mind is caught and for a time held captive.. .His art suffers from
the excess of value of form over value of content.. .He has left his
stamp on the language and has given starting-points and forms
for poets of a rarer force to turn to greater uses and pass beyond
them to a new construction.156
A strictly judicial appraisement which notes the merits as well as the defects of Tennyson's verse, and notes too its limitations
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and possibilities.There is a sufficiency and beauty in the opening lines of Tithonus:
The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,
The vapours weep their burthen to the ground,
Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath,
And after many a summer dies the swan.
In Oenone, again, the verse moves smoothly in easy regular steps suggesting a superficial adequacy and fullness of articulation:
O mother Ida, many-fountaind Ida,
Dear mother Ida, hearken ere I die.
I waited underneath the dawning hills,
Aloft the mountain lawn was dewy dark,
And dewy dark aloft the mountain pine:
Beautiful Paris, evil-hearted Paris,
Leading a jet-black goat white-horn'd, white-hooved,
Came up from ready Simosis all alone.
Morte d'Arthur has "some natural magic and vision", and the verse often has a taut quality, a noble clarity of utterance:
And if indeed I cast the brand away,
Surely a precious thing, one worthy note,
Should thus be lost forever from the earth,
Which might have pleased the eyes of many men.
What good should follow this, if this were done?
What harm undone? deep harm to disobey,
Seeing obedience is the bond of rule...
But even at its best, the spirit is not quite filled, the content is not quite adequate, to the mould, and there is therefore—especially when Tennyson's verse is taken in long stretches—an impression of thinness, artificiality and mere prettiness. But Sri Aurobindo evidently found the Tennysonian mould itself useful, and his "starting-points and forms" helpful, and has turned them to greater uses and achieved a wholly "new construction" in Savitri.
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The danger to all verse—and not least to blank verse of this kind—is monotony, which can be death. But Pope's verse, for all its 'correctness' and symmetry and geometrical patterning, seldom fails to tingle with life, even life with a touch of fiendishness or ferocity. To dismiss any verse as monotonous merely on a priori grounds can therefore be utterly wrong. By its effects alone we should judge verse like that of Savitri. There are lines that neatly divide, like a typical line of Pope's, into balanced halves:
Near to earth's wideness, intimate with heaven...157
Pain with its lash, joy with its silver bribe...158
But wisdom comes, and vision grows within...159
A deep of compassion, a hushed sanctuary...160
A dense veil was rent, a mighty whisper heard...161
The immobile lips, the great surreal wings... 162
Sunbelts of knowledge, moonbelts of delight...163
Fair on its peaks, it has dangerous nether planes...164
It plans without thinking, acts without a will...165
Voices of prophets, scripts of vanishing creeds...166
All Time is one body, Space a single book...167
Objects are his letters, forces are his words...168
Near, it retreated; far, it called him still...169
The appreciative comment that Lytton Strachey made in his Leslie Stephen lecture at Cambridge on Pope's neatly balanced single lines with their contrasted pairs of nearly antithetical words also fits lines like the above. 'Earth' and 'heaven, 'Pain...lash' and 'joy...bribe', and similar contrasted or balanced words and epithets give to the lines an epigrammatic edge and finish that bespeak a careful and consummate craftsman in verse. On the other hand, whereas such lines occur in Pope's verse with a frightening frequency, they appear but rarely in Savitri, and when they come, the effect is refreshing and
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most satisfying. Sri^Aurobindo realised that what he was trying to do in Savitri was new as well as difficult; "You can't take that as a model," he wrote to a correspondent in 1932,"it is too difficult a rhythm-structure to be a model. I shall myself know whether it is a success or not, only when I have finished two or three Books."170 Since he persevered with the experiment till almost the entire epic was recast or rewritten—and this must have occupied much of his spare time during the last twenty years of his life—it may be assumed that Sri Aurobindo himself was reasonably satisfied with the results of his labours.
A modern blank verse epic in about 24,000 lines, an epic that is a 'legend' and a 'symbol'; in blank verse, not of the ordinary, but of a special kind; and intended to be the living image of a vision, an experience, a realisation: such is Savitri. The old bardic story, as we have seen in the previous chapter, has also been conceived by Sri Aurobindo as a profound symbol, perhaps "a symbol of what can never be symbolised",171 yet as a hint, a promise, of humanity drawing near to the Divine, and bringing the Divine to our midst. What is presented as a logical or dialectical possibility in The Life Divine and as being realisable in practice in The Synthesis ofYoga is now projected in Savitri as an experienced actuality, vivid and inspiring and alive.
It is said that Rishi Visvamitra, created by the power of his tapasya a new heaven, the Triśahku Swarga; and the wizard that the poet is creates likewise whole new worlds with the power of his aesthesis. In his own way a supreme lord of language, Sri Aurobindo summons the rhythmic word to his aid, charges it with semantic 'electricity', and out of it builds the Reality he has seen, experienced and realised. The great poet is thus not only the lord of language but also the lord of rhythm and the lord of architecture. The rhythmic unit in Savitri is the blank verse line, the iambic pentameter, and this has been likened by Lytton Strachey to,
...the Djinn in the Arabian Nights; it is either the most terrible of
masters, or the most powerful of slaves. If you have not the magic
secret, it will take your best thoughts, your bravest imaginations,
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and change them into toads and fishes; but, if the spell be yours,
it will turn into a magic carpet and lift your simplest utterance
into the highest heaven.172
Added to the inherent difficulty of the blank verse medium is Sri Aurobindo's decision to avoid enjambement as far as possible and to make walls of clearly discernible bricks rather than massed forms of reinforced concrete. The 'subject' or 'thematic content', being removed from everyday experience since it largely concerns the worlds of the occult and the Spirit, raises difficulties in comprehension rather out of the ordinary; and this was at least part of the reason why Sri Aurobindo decided upon this edged crystalline, in preference to the old overflowing, blank verse. The subject being apparently nebulous (nebulous, that is, to the large mass of readers), the verse should be as neatly pointed as possible, making it easier for the interested reader to concentrate, to follow the unfolding meaning with growing comprehension, to persevere hopefully towards a total apprehension of the revealed universe of Reality.
Densely packed yet illimitably suggestive, diamond-edged but also hard as diamond and often as richly brilliant: such is the model of this 'Kalidasian blank verse which could be both studied in miniature and in the mass. Thus blank verse in Savitri, while it may strike the reader at first sight as rather mechanical and monotonous, will be seen on closer acquaintance to have its own characteristic beauty and rhythm. Within the limits of the generally end-stopped iambic pentameter, purposive variation and modulation, assonance and internal rhyme (though this is rare), bring out subtle effects of rhythm that cannot fail to appeal to the inward ear.173 In Savitri, Sri Aurobindo frequently races beyond what is perceivable through the senses, what is organisable by the merely poetic intelligence, and hence he is often obliged, in his attempts to express the inexpressible, to resort to the potent—if also sometimes confusing—language of symbols and images. Evelyn Underhill rightly observes,
The mystic, as a rule, cannot wholly do without symbol and
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image, inadequate to his vision though they must always be: for
his experience must be expressed if it is to be communicated,
and its actuality is inexpressible except in some side-long way,
some hint or parallel which will stimulate the dormant intuition
of the reader, and convey, as all poetic language does, something
beyond its surface sense. Hence the large part which is played
in all mystical writings by symbolism and imagery; and also by
that rhythmic and exalted language which induces in sensitive
persons something of the languid ecstasy of dream.174
The meaningful core of Savitri is the dynamics of the passage from Darkness to Light, Ignorance to Knowledge, Death to Immortality, from dark ignorant mortal humanity to the golden truth-conscious eternal Divine. This 'idea'—which is really idea, movement, action and realisation in one—fills the whole poem, as the ether fills all space and time. Even the epic similes come from this creative forge and reinforce the central meaning with astonishing force.
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