Sri Aurobindo's Savitri - An Approach And A Study

APPENDIX III

SAVITRI VOL. II

"Then Spring, an ardent lover, leaped through leaves".

—Book IV, Canto I.

Compare: Tagore's song to the "Spring". "Hetâ sapane Shyam dekhâdile boneri kinâre".

"To see her was a summons to adore,

To be near her drew a high communion's force."

—Book IV, Canto 2.

Compare: Four aspects of the Mother—"Mother" Ch. VI.

"This transient earthly being if he wills

Can fit his acts to a transcendent scheme". —Book IV, Canto .3

Compare: "A magic leverage suddenly is caught,

That moves the veiled Ineffable's timeless will:

A prayer, a master act, a king idea

Can link man's strength to a transcendent Force''

—Book I, Canto 2.

Compare: "May the divine doors swing open wide, that increase the Truth." —Rig Veda I 13. 6 and 48. 15)

"All time-made difference they overcame"

—Book IV, Canto 4.

Page 384

Compare: (a) Gita's description of "the sage with an equal vision"

"Samadarshin"

(b) "They reached the one self in all through boundless love" —Book IV, Canto 4.

"Their speech, their silence was a help to earth"

—Book IV, Canto 4.

Compare: "His spirit's stillness helped the toiling world."

—Book I, Canto 3.

"On the dumb bosom of this oblivious globe

Although as unknown beings we seem to meet,

Our lives are not aliens nor as strangers join,

Moved to each other by a causeless force"

—Book V, Canto 2.

Compare: Bhababhuti's: "Some inner purpose, indescribable, brings objects" together (in life)

Book VI Canto I: The beginning describes the descent of Narad from Immortal's world to this earth (1-30 Lines)

The Naishadhiya Charitam, a classical Sanskrit epic, by Magha opens with the description of descent of Narad from heaven. The student who is interested may compare these two to find for himself the difference between poetry which is from Overhead inspiration and one that rises from imaginative intellect.

"He sang of the Truth that cries from Night's blind deeps,"

—Book VI, Canto I.

Compare: "Arise from the yearning that sobs in Nature's abyss"

—Rose of God

Page 385

"To light one step in front is all his hope"

Compare: "One step enough for me"—Cardinal Newman

"Our sympathies become our tortures"

—Book VI, Canto I.

Compare: "To each his suffering all are men

Condemned alike to groan

The feeling for another's suffering

The unfilling for his own"—Thomas Moore.

"His march is a battle and a pilgrimage"

Book VI, Canto 2.

Compare: the Vedic idea of sacrifice as Adhwara, "a pilgrim— sacrifice", and also a battle with the powers of Darkness.

"He who has found his identity with God

Pays with the body's death his soul's vast light"

—Book VI, Canto 2.

Compare: "He who would save the world must be one with the world,

All suffering things contain in his heart's space

And bear the grief and joy of all that lives.

His soul must be wider than the universe

And feel eternity as its very stuff,

Rejecting the moment's personality,

Know itself older than the birth of Time,

Creation an incident in its consciousness,

Arcturus and Belphegore grains of fire

Circling in a comer of its boundless self,

The world's destruction a small transient storm

In the calm infinity it has become".

—Book I, Canto 6.

Page 386

Compare also: "He who would the bring heavens here

Must descend himself into clay

And the burden of earthly nature bear

And tread the dolorous way."

—God's Labour.

"It gives the cross in payment for the crown"

Book VI, Canto 2,

Compare: "The cross their payment for the crown they gave"

—Book I, Canto I.

"For this he must go down into the pit,

For this he must invade the dolorous Vasts"

—Book VI, Canto 2.

Compare: Passage cited above: A God's labour; and this quotation from a letter:

"As for the Mother and myself, we have had to try all ways, follow all methods, to surmount mountains of difficulties, a far heavier burden to bear than you or anybody else in the Ashram or outside, far more difficult conditions, battles to fight, wounds to endure, ways to cleave through impenetrable morass and desert and forest, hostile masses to conquer—work such as I am certain none else had to do before us. For the leader of the way in a work like ours has not only to bring down or represent and embody the Divine, but to represent too the ascending element in humanity and to bear the burden of humanity to the full and experience, not in a mere play or Lila but in grim earnest, all the obstruction, difficulty, opposition, baffled, hampered and only slowly victorious labour which are possible on die path".

—Letters of Sri Aurobindo

"Heaven's wiser love rejects the mortal's prayer"

—Book VI, Canto 2.

Page 387

Compare: Tagore's :

"My desires are many and my cry is pitiful

But ever didst thou save me by hard refusals"

—Gitanjali.

"Lingering some days upon the forest verge

Like men who lengthen out departure's pain,

"Unwilling to see for the last time a face

Heavy with the sorrow of a coming day

"They parted from her with pain-fraught burdened hearts

As forced by inescapable fate we part

From one whom we shall never see again,"

—Book VII, Canto I.

Compare: "Who ever left the warm precincts of the cheerful day

Nor cast one .longing lingering look behind"

—T. Grey.

"Only if God assumes the human mind

And puts on mortal ignorance for his cloak

And makes himself the Dwarf with triple stride,

Can he help man to grow into the God".

—Book VII, Canto 3.

Compare: The Indian mythological story of Vaman—the Dwarf —the Incarnation of Vishnu, the All pervading Divine, and

his three steps that covered Earth, Mid region and Heaven—or Matter, Life and Mind.

"It dared the force that slays, the joys that hurt,"

Compare: "Chased the delights that wound" —Ahana P. 163

"angel of the House"—suggests a book of poetry by

Coventry Petmore.

Page 388

"A tool and slave of his own slave and tool,

He praises his free will and his master mind

And is pushed by her upon her chosen paths;

Possessor he is possessed and, ruler, ruled,

Her conscious automaton, her desire's dupe".

—Book VII, Canto 4.

Compare: GITA:—actions are being done by qualities of Nature on all sides yet the soul bewildered by ego believes "I am the

doer".

also:— "It is the self-nature that dominates".

—Book VII, Canto 4.

"God made experiments with animal shapes"

—Book VII, Canto 4.

Compare: A similar idea in the Upanishad.

"Many are God's forms by which he grows in man";

Compare: Gita; "As men approach Me so I accept them to my love"

Gita 4.11.

"He is the Good for which men fight and die"

beginning with this line up to:—

"These powers I am and at my call they come"

—Bock VII, Canto 4.

Compare: This passage with the "Vibhuti Yoga" of the Gita.

"My great philosophies are a reasoned guess,

Page 389

"All is a speculation or a dream:

In the end the world itself becomes a doubt:"

—Book VII, Canto 4.

Compare: AHANA: "Truths? or thought's structures bridging the vacancy mute and unsounded"

"In a frozen grandeur lone and desolate

Call me not to die the great eternal Death,

Left naked of my own humanity

In the chill vast of the spirit's boundlessness".

—Book VI I, Canto 4.

Compare: AHANA; Cold are the rivers of peace and their banks are

leafless and lonely.

also: "Art thou not weary of only the stars in their solemn

muster,

Sky-hung the chill bare plateaus and peaks where the

eagle rejoices

In the inhuman height of his nesting, solitude's voices

Making the heart of the silence lonelier?

—Ahana.

"Or his soul dream shut in sainthood's brilliant cell

Where only a bright shadow of God can come".

—Book VII, Canto 4.

Compare for a similar idea Isha Upanishad:

"A denser darkness they (enter) who get entangled in Vidya alone"

"And found herself amid great figures of gods

Conscious in stone and living without breath,

Compare: "That One lived without breath by its self-law"

Rig Veda X, 129.

Page 390

"She came out where there shone a deathless sun"

—Book VII, Canto 5.

Compare: "My spirit a vast sun of deathless light"

Transformation by Sri Aurobindo

"A being no bigger than the thumb of man

Into a hidden region of the heart"

—Book VII, Canto 5.

Compare: "The Purusha, the inner Self, no larger than the size of a man's thumb, stands in the centre of our self; he is the

master of the past and the present.

—Kathopanishad VI, 17; 12.

"Even the smallest meanest work become

A sweet or glad and glorious sacrament"

—Book VII, Canto 6

Compare: Its absence left the greatest actions dull,

Its presence made the smallest seem divine

—Book III, Canto I

"Thou shalt look into the eyes of the Unknown,"

—Book VII, Canto 6

Compare: "Invading the secret clasp of the Silence and crimson Fire

Thou frontest eyes in a timeless Face"

—Bird of Fire by Sri Aurobindo

"In that absolute stillness bare and formidable

There was glimpsed an all-negating Void supreme

Page 391

"A blank pure consciousness had replaced the mind.

Her spirit seemed the substance of a name,

The world a pictured symbol drawn on self,

A dream of images:...

—Book VII, Canto 6

Compare: "Nirvana" a poem by Sri Aurobindo.

also: "It watched the figure of the cosmic game,

But the thought and inner life in forms seemed dead

"A hollow physical shell persisted still.

All seemed a brilliant shadow of itself,

A cosmic film of scenes and images:

The enduring mass and outline of the hills

Was a design sketched on a silent mind

And held to tremulous false solidity

By constant beats of visionary sight;

—Book VII, Canto 6

Compare this with "Nirvana" and also with Herbert Read's "Mutation of the Phoenix"

"Yet how persuade a mind that the thing seen

Is habitant of the cerebral cave

And has elsewhere no materiality?

------------------------------------

Our world is invisible till vision

Makes a finite reflection

------------------------------------

Light bums the world in the focus of an eye.

The eye is all:

"This only could justify the labour of sight,

But sight could not define for it a form;

—Book VII, Canto 6

Compare: Kena: "That which sees not by the eye but by which the sight is able to see'.

Page 392

"All objects glimmerings of the Bodiless

That disappear from Mind when That is seen.

—Book VI I Canto 6

Compare: Rig Veda: "When It is approached by Thought it vanishes"

Rig Veda I.

"Or she might wake into God's quietude

Beyond the cosmic day and cosmic night

And rest appeased in his white eternity

—Book VII, Canto 6

Compare: "...the rapture-white foam-vest of the waters of Eternity"

Bird of Fire

"As if Love's deathless moment had been found,

A pearl within eternity's white shell.

Compare: C. Day Lewis:

"As lovers count for luck

Their own heart-beats and believe

In the forest of time they pluck

Eternity's single leaf"

"The Poet”

"In every heart is hidden the myriad One"

—Book IX, Canto 2

Compare: "Vasudeva is all that is" Gita

The passage beginning with "Here in the seat of Darkness mute and lone", upto "Till only a few black remnants stained that Ray"

—Book X, Canto I

Book X Canto I may be compared with Book I Canto I in its main substance. The Dawn there in the first canto is symbol-Dawn.

Page 393

The hour was "before the Gods awake". Here, we have a "morning twilight of the gods".

"A Mother's eyes are on them and her arms

Stretched out in love desire her revel sons".

—Book X, Canto 2

Compare: "Mother" by Sri Aurobindo.

"Inconscient in the still inconscient Void"

—Book X, Canto 2

Compare: "In the beginning Darkness was hidden by darkness"

Rig Veda, X. 120. 1-5

"For something on its nescient breast was born

Condemned to see and know, to feel and love,"

—Book X, Canto 2

Compare: "Intervening in a mindless universe,

Its message crept through the reluctant hush

"Calling the adventure of consciousness and joy

And; conquering Nature's disillusioned breast,

Compelled renewed consent to see and feel."

—Book I, Canto I

"Infinite wore a boundless zero's form

—Book X, Canto 3

Compare: "A fathomless zero occupied the world".

—Book I, Canto I

"A soul in God's tremendous Void was lit,

A secret labouring glow of nascent fire.

"Infant and dim the eternal Mights awoke.

In inert Matter breathed a slumbering Life,

Page 394

"In waking Life it stretched its giant limbs

To shake from it the torpor of its drowse,"

—Book X, Canto 3

The whole idea is a sort of succint account of evolution upto Mind and "Now through Mind's windows stares the dead-god"

—Book X, Canto 3

"A blaze of his sovereign glory is the sun,

A glory is the gold and glimmering moon."

Compare: Vibhuti Yoga of the Gita.

"A hidden Bliss is at die root of things.

A mute Delight regards Time's countless works:

"This universe an old enchantment guards;

Its objects are carved cups of World-Delight"

—Book X, Canto 3

Compare: From Delight all these beings are born, by Delight they live, to Delight they return."

Taittiriya III 6

Lines beginning with "The All-Wonderful has packed heaven with his dreams", have something of the suggestion of the Vibhuti Yoga of the Gita.

"In me are the Nameless and the secret Name"

—Book X, Canto 3

Compare: "Passion-flower of the Nameless, bud of the mystical Name".

Rose of God

"Where leads the march, whither the pilgrimage?

—Book X, Canto 4

Page 395

Compare: Tagore's Balaka: "Not here, not here—where elsewhere other where?"

"Because thou knowest the wisdom that transcends

Both veil of forms and the contempt of forms,"

—Book X, Canto 4

Compare: Isha: "One who knows both knowledge and Ignorance— by ignorance crosses over Death and by knowledge attains—enjoys —immortality".

"In a flaming moment of apocalypse

The Incarnation thrust aside its veil"

—Book X, Canto 4

Compare: the 'Visva Rupa'—Vision of the cosmic form Chapter XI Gita.

Lines beginning with "The lowest of these earths was still a heaven" Book XI, Canto I and describing the subtle earth are comparable in substance to the sonnet "The other Earths". At any rate the two might help the reader to enter into the spirit of both.

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

—Book XI, Canto I

Compare: "Among thousands of men a rare one tries for perfection"

Gita VII 3

"All shall be done by the long act of Time"

—Book XI, Canto I

Compare: "All things shall change in God's transfiguring hour"

—Book III, Canto 4

Page 396

"An energy of the triune Infinite,

In a measureless Reality she dwelt,

A rapture and a being and a force,

—Book XI, Canto I

This is the power of Sat, Chit, Ananda.

"Living for me, by me, in me they shall live".

—Book XI, Canto I

Compare: Gita 12-8; 9, 34; l0, 9

"And step into the Truth, the Right, the Vast."

—Book XI Canto I

Compare: "Satyam, Ritam, Brihat" Atharva Veda

"All earth shall be the Spirit's manifest home"

—Book XI Canto I

Compare: "All this is for habitation by the Lord" Isha

The difference is "Manifest home" in Savitri

"In Nature's fixed inevitable course

Decreed since the beginning of the worlds

In the deep essence of created things"

—Book XI Canto I

Compare: "The Self-existent who becomes everywhere has ordered perfectly all things from years sempiternal" Isha 8

Page 397