Sri Aurobindo's Savitri - An Approach And A Study

IV

"SAVITRI" AS POETIC EXPRESSION

THE origin of poetry according to modern ideas lies in the primitive peoples' faith in the power of words, or more properly, in their faith in the mystic power of incantation. The primitive people believed that they were surrounded by forces which were not physical and that it was possible to connect themselves with those supra physical forces in order to fulfil some of their desires. Thus it was accepted even by the uncivilised man that life was surrounded and influenced by super-life and that it was possible for him by incantation to influence those beings of the super-life so as to secure their helpful intervention. Hence the earliest form of poetry—incantation —was mystic in a certain sense. There is a striking agreement between the primitive man's belief and that of the Greeks who recognised inspiration as a source of highest creation. They described the psychic state of the poet as that of an exaltation or "enthousiasmos", the state of being in God.¹ In India, the idea that poetry and all

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¹ Mr. C. Day Lewis in his work "the Poetic Image" analyses the process of poetic creation and at last finds that it is something "mysterious". He advises the poets of the future to resort to "Concentration"—"a brooding concentration, the prayer of the intellect"—to be able to create immortal poems. He even feels, like any spiritualist who knows it more intensely, that "the human soul is not a mere spring of pussillanimity in the midst of a trackless jungle". Like old Indian art masters. Day Lewis asks the poets of the future; "Look inward then, but outwards too no less steadily". The poets will always find "in man's unending struggle with fate their permanent myth". "His inspiration comes to the poet as the vision came to Eliphez the Terminite..." It is a veiled vision, a partial intuition communicated to him from the depth of human heart. If he needs mystery, the last mystery is there; and, of all that proceeds from man's heart, nothing is more mysterious than virtue—the disinterested movements of moral fervour and intellectual curiosity, the spontaneous springings of Mercy, Pity, Peace and Love. As he passionately responds to these, and with delightful images makes

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artistic creation of the highest order comes from a suprarational source was well established even in the earliest dawn of its culture —the Vedic Age. There is plenty of poetry written dominantly from the imaginative intelligence or from the rich field of experience of life, there is classical and romantic poetry but the Indian aesthete never forgot the distinction between poetry coming from the supra- rational source and that coming from the ordinary levels of being. In fact, the levels of speech or expression were classified under four heads. Vāk, the power of speech, including poetry, comes from four levels according to which it is named:

1. The Parā, the supreme supra-rational word which breaks on the level of consciousness far above the ordinary mental level and carries with it not only the power of the highest Reality it represents or conveys but also the intensity of the rhythm and the body of the word.

2. Second is Paśyanti, the word that sees, or the seeing speech. It is the utterance that comes spontaneously to the illumined mind above the level of reasoning intelligence, but below the highest level of over-mental creative consciousness. When it breaks into the mind it brings in with the word the light that does not require the help of reasoning or the imperfect sense-data. With the light it carries the force of the Reality.

3. Third is Madhyamā, the word that comes from the intermediate regions between the higher mind and the lower intelligence which deals mainly with life and matter.

4. The fourth is Vaikhari, the word or expression that comes from the throat, the sound expression, which generally deals with the outward life and outward expression of man's being.

Sri Aurobindo, in his introduction to "Hymns to Mystic Fire"

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them more true for us, he plays his unique part in a world where not only poets and their words but all men and all their actions are playthings of—

"The eternal spirit's, eternal pastime

shaping, re-shaping".

This attitude comes nearest to the conclusion arrived at by Sri Aurobindo in his book "Future Poetry" where he envisages the evolution of intuitive consciousness beyond the level of man's mental intelligence.

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explains the origin of the poetry of the Vedas. He says: "The name given to the sages who received the inspired poetry in their illumined minds rather than mentally constructed a great, universal, eternal and impersonal truth, was Kavi, which afterwards came to mean any poet but at the time, had the sense of a seer of truth,—Kavayaḥ Satyạ̣̣̣ śrutaḥ". Rishi Dirghatamas speaks of the Ṛks, the hymns of the Veda, as "existing in a supreme ether imperishable and immutable, in which all the gods are seated", and he adds, "One who knows not That, what shall he do with the Ṛks?. (1.164. 39.)

The idea of receiving the inspired word, an intuitive truth expression, a revelation in the illumined mind has come down from the Veda and the Upanishads down to the classical period. Bhavabhuti, the famous dramatist, in the opening verses of Uttarrāmcarit says, "We bow to the goddess of speech who is the Immortal art-expression of the Self", and then he proceeds, "In the case of ordinary saints, the speech follows their meaning, whereas in the case of the seers of old, the meaning pursues their word". There is even a tradition that the great epic Rāmāyaṇa was written before Rāma went through his experience in actual life. Probably it is a way of saying that the physical is only a result of a greater inner reality which the poet is able to envisage on a higher level of his consciousness before it projects itself on the physical. It is thus clear that poetical creation can go on rising from level to level of consciousness and the difference in the origin would mark the difference in the different grades of poetic creation. On the highest level, the poet becomes the seer, who is the creator, Kavi or Rṣi. The ancients gave the name Kavi to the God,—whose poem is the cosmos.

Rṣi is one who has the vision of the Reality beyond the range of mind and in whom the Vision finds a spontaneous expression in the body of rhythm and word. The Truth that he sees is not unrelated to life. In fact, he brings it into expression that it may be creative of life, of a life not yet realised here. The Truth seen presses for realisation. In this sense it has been said that the sages and seers of the Vedas and the Upanishads created the Indian people. It is their Vision that caught hold of the soul of the race which cast its whole life, in all its intellectual, aesthetic, religious, social and political forms of cultural activity into the mould of that Vision. The turn that the life of the race has taken is the result of the assimilation of the transcendent

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vision of life given by that early poetry of humanity. Sāvitrī is the expression of a truth-vision by the greatest seer of the modem age. It is an integral and cosmic truth beginning with the origin of the world and rising towards man's ultimate divine fulfilment on earth. Affirming that "a death-bound littleness is not all we are", it moves with the mounting aspiration of man "to the frontiers of Eternity". It passes beyond it into the realm of the Eternal Day fronting the supreme Creatrix Power with its moving prayer, and succeeds in bringing down upon earth a supreme manifestation of the Divine Power which makes possible the double victory of man and the Divine by conquering all the forces of darkness and Ignorance here and at last establishes the divine life on earth. It is this "Divine event" to which the whole creation of Sāvitrī tends.

About the subject-matter of Sāvitrī, Sri Aurobindo himself wrote:—

"Sāvitrī is the record of a seeing., of an experience which is not of the common kind and is often very far from what the general human mind sees and experiences. You must not expect appreciation or understanding".

Writing to a correspondent about the qualification of one who would be able to understand Sāvitrī, he says: "One who has had the kind of experience which Sāvitrī sets out to express or who, not having it, is prepared by his temperament, his mental turn, his previous intellectual knowledge or psychic training to have some kind of access to it, the feeling of it if not the full understanding, can enter into the spirit and sense of the poem and respond to its poetic appeal; but without that it is difficult for an unprepared reader to respond, all the more if this is as you contend, a new poetry with a new law of expression and technique". In the same connection while admitting the difficulty of the general reader in understanding Sāvitrī, he says: "But if I had to write for the general reader I could not have written Savitri at all. It is in fact for myself that I have written it and for those who can lend themselves to the subject-matter, images, technique of mystic poetry".

About style of Sāvitrī he made the following observations:

"I have not anywhere in Savitri written anything for the sake of mere picturesqueness or merely to produce a rhetorical effect; what I am trying

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to do, everywhere in the poem is to express exactly something seen, something felt or experienced".

The general difficulty in understanding and appreciating Sāvitrī proceeds, as can be seen from the quotations given above, from the extraordinary nature of the experience it describes. They are above the level of the general human mind. Like all new things it requires the reader to prepare his temperament or his taste to appreciate the new experience and the new technique of expression. It is Words- worth who seems to have said that every true poet creates his own taste. To some extent it requires a kind of readjustment of the mind and general consciousness so that it will be able to accommodate itself to the native vastness of the poem. It is when the reader is not ready or able to remain at the height in his consciousness with the poetic flight that he finds it difficult or complicated or even obscure. It would be advisable not to go on reading when one finds himself unable to keep to the height of the poet's inspiration. Probably it is the question of the reader's consciousness being acclimatised to the air of vastness and to the habit of seeing experiences in the light of intuition on a large scale, that is to say, to get accustomed to see things in their vast collectivity. It is then, that the reader would be able to enter into the spirit of the concentrated, intuitive or inspired utterance of the Master, which carries its own revealing light. It might require patience and application but the reader who would be able to undertake the task will find his labours amply rewarded. This vast difference between ordinary poetry and Sāvitrī comes from the fact that the Seer of Sāvitrī creates from the higher levels of consciousness than the mind and not from the mere imaginative intellect. Because he sees from above, he sees largely and widely The poet's consciousness is not overcome by the experiences he is describing and it is not an excited and temporary stir created by some experience of life that has stung him into creative activity; it is a permanent status of consciousness on which the author is living and therefore his voice has a spontaneity and concreteness of an experience which is real and constant to him. The reader who would appreciate the poem has to get accustomed to the Master's high and wide spiritual atmosphere.

The most outstanding power of Sāvitrī as poetry is its power

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of Truth, its Light of Knowledge. I deliberately refrain from calling it power of "thought", for the poet does not speak from the ground of mind nor does he primarily deal with what is understood as "thought". There are poets and critics who believe that the highest function of poetry is to convey thought,—of course convey it poetically. But as we have already made a distinction between vision of truth and thinking about truth it is clear that they are not the same thing. This is not to say that there is no thought element in Sāvitrī ; only the thought is not analytical or even imaginative mental stuff but is present in compressed form, almost one can say in the form of condensed light of Truth which can reveal or cast its light upon. various lines or masses of thought. It is not thought depending upon or derived from either reasoning or sense-data. This truth-revealing power is spontaneous in the expression itself that comes with the vision of the truth. This concentrated expression when taken up by the mind goes on revealing and suggesting chains or lines of thought concerning not only the particular field covered by the Vision but various other fields of knowledge, sometimes covering the whole of life. The expression and the words when taken up by the mind do not end by yielding an intellectual sense only, but go on reverberating in the mind, sinking and coming to the surface with a wealth of suggestions that are like overtones in a rich musical note. The reader therefore should not read hurriedly but pause often, especially where his mind or some part of his being gets either attracted or interested.

Take for instance a line like:

"God found in Nature, Nature fulfilled in God".

Sāvitrī , Book I, Canto 3.

which looks very simple, almost like a dry philosophic statement. Even taken without the consideration of the context, one can see that there is a whole world of thought, knowledge packed in the single line. The Nature we see around us, is made of material elements, compounds and objects. It extends from the earth to the stars, and the farthest solar systems and to the groups of nebula; but Nature is not only material, it is also living. It contains the whole world of life from the insects and invisible germs to the largest animals

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and the most evolved creatures. The same Nature is also mental and contains mind and all its multifarious manifestations in all the forms and institutions of human culture. The Master says that this Nature, manifested and potential, hides behind its external veil of form, the presence of the Divine. This truth has to be found if evolution is to reach its fulfilment. It also implies that every search by the mind in any field of nature is bound to lead to an unknowable, to a mystery indicating the veiled presence of the Divine. The Divine is infinite and it can be pursued by the human mind without exhausting it. Every little addition will certainly add to man's knowledge and his power but he will never come to the end of his intellectual search. This is what Iśopaniṣad says: "By ignorance they cross over death", that is to say, by the slow process of knowledge pursued by the mind, one would be able to devise means that may lead him to the conquest of physical death or to overcome the state of mortality but it is by the knowledge of the One, says the same Upaniṣad, that man attains immortality. The pursuit of knowledge through various subjects by the mind can be converted into the pursuit of the Divine through them. When God is at last found in Nature, there will be then perhaps an end of the aspect of imperfection of Nature. She would cast herself into the image of the Divine. In this effort. Nature would find her fulfilment which she is half blindly seeking at present through her outer instruments. Nature will then reveal herself as conscious manifestation of God, the power of God. All this, and much more is packed in this single line, and it is not necessary to mention that it is far more effective as an expression.

If the line is considered in its context, we will see that it has reference to Aswapathy who was preparing himself for a spiritual transformation. He had already attained a poise of spiritual equality, of tranquil strength and unaltered peace. He could remain above sorrow and delight and see all changes without feeling any change within himself. He helped the toiling world by the stillness of his Spirit. Thus he was slowly chiselling the imperfect material of his Nature into the image of a Divine being. When Nature would be completely transformed then a new creation with "God found in Nature, Nature fulfilled in God" as its basic condition, would come into existence The line forms, seen in this way, the natural culmination

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of the process of transformation which had just begun in the case of Aswapathy.

Take even without regarding the context these lines:

"In the enormous spaces of the self

The body now seemed only a wandering shell,

His mind the many-frescoed outer court

Of an imperishable Inhabitant."

Sāvitrī, Book I, Canto 5.

Here we have the experience of the Self described wherein the physical body seems only the outer shell wandering from place to place in the enormous, unlimited spaces of the consciousness of Self, even from birth to birth. The next two lines describe in a compact expression the view of the mind and of all mental activities from the chamber of the Self,—the inner chamber of the psychic being. To the Self the mind is only an "outer court"; mind is not the inmost chamber, the inmost sanctuary. This "court" of the mind is not only "outer" but "many-frescoed". Man goes on painting pictures on the walls of his mental consciousness. Thus the outer court of the "Imperishable Inhabitant" is nicely painted with many frescoes. This beautiful image brings out into clear relief, the place and the value of all mental activity, in relation to the Self. The self of man, the real inhabitant of his nature, is im- perishable because it is one in essence with the Divine. There is, thus seen, an enormous thought-content: the relation of self and the body, the self and the mind, the outer court and the inmost being, in those four lines which can go on releasing various lines of thought along many directions when it is allowed to sink into the mind.

We can take almost any line without reference to the context and we shall find that the power of Truth gives us a very great thought-content in each case: e.g.

"The high Gods watch and choose

" To-day's impossibles for the future's base", or

"A marriage of eternity divinised Time", or,

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"All knowledge was left a questioning ignorance". Or, "Know death for a cellar of the house of life", or, "Eternity drew close disguised as love".

This is also felt when one feels the content of Sāvitrī as a whole. It shows humanity as a small portion against the enormous background of a vast cosmos,—not merely material but a complex and vast cosmos made of a hierarchy of planes of consciousness. The human being and his whole world stands explained. Man here is not trotting the stage with his vain little mind and his half light or ideals. And yet, man is not relegated to an insignificant place. His movements, his efforts, his ideals are all shown in their proper perspective. Man is represented as not only great but Divine in his potentiality, and ultimate fulfilment. Beginning as a "death- bound littleness" man emerges at the end as the conqueror of death, as the Immortal who participates consciously in the Divine's work here to build a creation based upon the Divine Truth.

The second prominent power of Sāvitrī is its vast life-throb. The truth of the vision seen is the truth of life, is in fact, the dynamic truth that is pressing upon life for manifestation. It is at the same time the truth of all the efforts and struggles of the life-force on earth. It is the sense of all human efforts at perfection. Throughout the epic this vast double life,—a life on earth aspiring and ascending towards the heights and a vast infinite Divine Power above which is pressing down for manifestation below,—is felt by us in all its intensity under the Light of the revealing Vision. He sees in his cosmic view, and shows us by his miraculous power, the whole panorama of life from the dark Inconscient to the most intense inner spiritual efforts and attainments of man, and leads us with the same revealing view to the Golden heights that await their hour of descent upon earth. He gives us faith; he sustains our failing aspirations; he attracts us irresistibly to the higher peaks by the beauty with which he endows them. There burns throughout the poem an intense fire that wants to change Life into Superlife, Nature into a Super-nature and this Fire of aspiration in the poem is so intense and contagious that the reader invariably catches something of its flame or at least its life-giving warmth. It is true

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that there is no room in this poem for the expression, however intense, of the experience of ordinary life of man which is more or less spent in trivialities. The Master here has widened his life into the whole life of man and the whole poem throbs with movements and actions of this vast and complex life with which the consciousness of the creator is identified. And yet the Master stands on such a high pedestal of consciousness that the fortunes and vicissitudes of this vast life do not overcome him. In fact he comes to the help of this vast struggling and ignorant life of man with his soothing balm of faith, hope and superhuman sympathy which gives to the whole poem what I have called at another place its cosmic subjectivism. It is not an individual ego-centred mind which sees, but an enlightened being that has risen to not only the cosmic consciousness but has ascended to the regions of the Eternal trinity. Because the life in the poem is vast and cosmic, the emotion that we find in the poem is wide and impersonal, bordering almost on the universal. We do not meet here the play of restless emotions that arise in the ordinary consciousness of man. It is not even the emotion that accompanies the fervour of an ideal or the sentiment that arises in the pursuit of perfection. This vast impersonal emotion has two sides which are possible only to a consciousness that has a power of double identification,—an identification with the life of ignorance here, and an identification with the Higher consciousness above. When he comes to view the human, he brings with him the supporting and sustaining sympathy, faith and love from Above; and when he sees the labour of the Gods in the midst of this human ignorance to create perfection, he evokes in us an intense tragic emotion which arises from his complete identification with the life of struggling humanity. Thus there is a vast. Divine impersonal emotion which carries to us the Divine Grace from above and there is on the other side his Oneness with the human which feels the great tragedy and a sense of disappointment at the great human trials to which the Divine submits himself out of its tireless grace. The Master's solicitude for man and his life and the need of Divine perfection are so all-pervading in the poem that it would not be surprising if many readers miss it for the simple reason that it is natural and all-pervading like the air. The third power of Sāvitrī is its power of delight and beauty.

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It brings in the very first canto when the Omniscient Goddess approaches the dark Night of the Nescience. The author sees the delight breaking out in the whole of creation from the earth to the air, the trees and the hills and the sky. The delight of the play of manifestation of the Two-who-are-One finds expression more than once in terms which raises Sāvitrī to the highest expression imaginable—of love. And throughout this utterance runs an intense spiritual delight which renders the understanding of^the cosmic play so easy and so sweet. The Puruṣa, in this game of hide and seek, is all for Prakṛti and Prakṛti throughout her effort is trying to rise to the Puruṣa's highest possibility. The higher regions to which the Vision takes are not only the regions of Light and Truth and Divine Power, but are also regions of "Beauty and a Sweetness dire". If Light is their attraction. Delight is no less an added attraction. This Delight is not confined to the higher levels of consciousness only but is an inhabitant and the sustaining power of the whole manifestation on earth. The seasons, the outbreak of conscious Life upon earth, the reaching out of Mind to the frontiers of Eternity, Sāvitrī going out to select the partner of her life, her meeting Satyavan and their permanent union, all throughout earth-scenes we feel an intense power of Delight which the author communicates to us in his expression. The fulfilment of earth-consciousness would be possible when the Divine would descend into the most material consciousness. It would then, says the author, take the world of ignorance by storm because the Divine would be manifested in form as beauty and it is the Divine Beauty which would capture the heart of Ignorance. The wide vision of the author sees the all-pervading Delight even in the midst of life of ignorance but his revealing gaze never forgets the difference between true spiritual Delight and its deformation that we find prevalent in life. But there are portions in Sāvitrī, for instance—"The Heavens of the Ideal" (Book II, Canto 12) to give only one example, where this delight is overflowing, and exercises upon us an irresistible attraction. So also in Book IV— The Book of Love—a similar attraction of beauty is felt. There is an expression of beauty throughout, not only when he describes "the Glory of Life Heavens" but even in the description of "the Descent into Night", there is beauty that verges on the sublime, though it is not the sublime of the super-conscient but of the Nescient

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that seemed alive but without body or mind that it might be forever nude and sole,—"an eternity of pain, inhuman and intolerable".

Sāvitrī can be called "the song of life divine" in which humanity will find its fulfilment. It sees the spirit, the divine, the supreme who is Absolute, that by a graded, self-regulated descent from its realms of highest infinities of knowledge, consciousness and bliss descends creating at each step of its descent a universe that manifests its glory. When it reaches the kingdom of the subtle matter in its descent, it takes, or seems to our mind to take, a leap into the Unknown abyss of the Nescience which is the opposite end of the Supreme, the Infinite and the Eternal. It is an eternity of Darkness, of Night, of not only the absence of Light but seems to deny the very possibility of any light, consciousness or feeling. From this unfathomable dark Night,—this negative eternity, there arises to our view the gross material world, but this world seems to bring out into her gross forms the beauty and delight of the subtle material world. The spirit that gradually approached the creation of form in the subtle material kingdom is able to overcome the resistance of gross matter and bring out into expression some of its beauty in this gross material world. Above this subtle material plane comes the manifestation of Life on earth, and this life connects itself with the kingdom of the lower and the higher vital worlds of the Spirit. Similarly the mental world when it manifests here on earth gets connected with the worlds of higher Mind and its powers and beings. The Master takes us from these mental realms to the centre of this creation and from there to the realms of the Eternal from where a Truth- world governs the whole movement of the cosmos, waiting for the fulfilment of its purpose here in Time. Man, the mental being, holds within himself the capacity of releasing true divinity of him- self, of the cosmos and of that which is beyond the cosmos. He releases in himself the divine spark and retaining all the instrumentation of his nature widens out into a vast cosmocity of being and of nature. He can even rise to the supra-cosmic, the Transcendent and by an act of supreme surrender bring down into his apparently individual self, the Transcendent being and his Divine Power. This would be possible when his nature rejects the attraction of the lower life of darkness and ignorance, rejects the false puppet self,—the ego, and surrenders its being and nature to the

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Supreme and his Higher nature. It would then be possible to manifest the Divine in life, to establish the victory of the Spirit here in Matter, that is, to create a new humanity which is the intention of the Divine.

Sāvitrī as a poem has many cantos of sustained height of inspiration and the reader should prepare himself to breathe in the rare and high atmosphere on which Sāvitrī moves. There are even in those inspired long passages portions that rise to the heights of the Overmind where the vision and the word fuse. The reader has to make some effort to allow the expression to sink into him instead of trying to understand it with too much mental effort. Take for instance the description of Savitri in the very first canto where we see that "even her humanity was half divine" and to her "her own calamity" was "the private sign" of the evil that is at the root of life. After this, when we come to the second canto, the author again gives us a more detailed description of her personality. The first canto reminds us of her transcendent origin and her contact with the life-situation, but here in the second we have a more detailed and intimate description beginning with:

"Near to earth's wideness, intimate with heaven" upto

"In her he met his own eternity".

Sāvitrī, Book 1, Canto 2.

A quotation from K. D. Sethna will help the reader in forming a correct idea of the character of Savitri:

"The rhythm has an overpowering fidelity to the inner thrill of the experience suggested and symbolised. Here are the figures and values of a superhuman state of consciousness at the very top, breaking upon us in their own stuff and vibrancy through the medium of language. This is not the mind imagining the highest it can beyond itself. This is an overmind actually holding all the magnitudes that are pictured; its vision is from within, composed of its own substance and lit up with its own vast vitality. As a result, the pictures are at once extra-immediate and extra-remote: they make, as A. B. Housman would have said, an impact upon our solar plexus as no mental reflection of mystical realities can, but while convincing us of their living concreteness they dodge our mental apprehension by refusing to yield their meanings easily and to affine themselves to what our thought can size up. To adopt Sri Aurobindo's own turn, the ways of

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thought are overflown, worlds of splendour and calm above the human level are crossed and unborn things reached. Not that everything is difficult to conceive: Sāvitrī's 'magnanimity', 'kindly care' and 'inmost help' reach us through emblems that are not resistant to analysis, though we shall be deprived of a considerable amount of their stimulus unless we use the Eye behind the eye and the Bar behind the ear to sense that the elemental or cosmic analogies and metaphors with their supporting breadth of phrase and sonance are no eloquent exaggerations but are accurately intrinsic to the special nature of Sāvitrī's 'self-giving'. The 'sea of white sincerity' too is within our imaginative grasp and so, again, in this. era of the psycho- analysed subconscious are the gulfs which are 'secrecies of light'. No less steeped in the overmind run the language and rhythm of the lines where they are mentioned and it will be poor justice to them if we did not thrill to the rapturous wideness drowning all thought in the one case and in the other the ecstatic opening of depth beyond depth unsounded by the Freudian intellect, but we are able to adapt ourselves without much strain to the general vision". —(K. D. Sethna)

Some passages, like the one in Book I, Canto 4, page 62, beginning with "The Absolute, the Perfect, the Alone" and ending with "our life is a paradox with God. for key" have to be read more than once to allow the vision of the poet to sink into our mind. Its flight takes the consciousness to a higher height than the general level of inspiration of the canto and it would be advisable that reader should read them as he would try to read a revelatory passage of the Upanishads, not that the poetic beauty of these parts is less than the others but the beauty is of a very unusual kind standing on a higher level of consciousness where men are not accustomed to ascend. This small passage of 35 lines gives a perfect poetical rendering of the Transcendent Supreme.

So also the passage on page 64 beginning with "This is a sailor on the flow of time" (Book I, Canto 4) right upto the end of page 66 ending with the lines "And the moms of God have overtaken his night", consisting of about 103 lines is one of the most sustained symbolic and at the same time poetical flight in the whole range of literature. The individual soul here is the sailor and the discoverer. The poet throughout has maintained marvellously the symbol which is at the same time the most perfect metaphor of man's journey through the ocean of Time.

There are other flights like the one we find in Book II, Canto 14 which are difficult at first to grasp because of their sheer vastness

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and the unfamiliarity of the nature of experience described therein. Even if the reader cannot rise to the cosmic vision of the Seer, or rather to the cosmic hearing of the Rishi, it would be possible for him to enter with the aid of his imagination into a region where an echo of the cosmic "murmur" would be audible to him. How rich is the wealth of the cosmic murmur! It is the subtle spiritual sound that rises from the Universe and reaches the ear of the Cosmic Being. And because it is cosmic it is so multitudinously various. It is as if the Master had entered into the heart of the world's soul and listened from there to this "murmur-multitudinous and alone". To him, "all sounds it was in turn, yet still the same". It is to him "a hidden call", "the immortal cry", and it becomes even "a whisper circling round the soul". It rises from the whole of the cosmos like "the yearning of a lone flute"; at times it becomes the crickets' "fiery single note". It is "a jingling silver laugh of anklet bells" carrying with it to the solitary heart the sobbings of a "forgotten sweetness". When the Master hears it as the "tinkling pace of a long caravan" he almost makes us feel the slow march of die cosmic evolution like a slow moving caravan on the paths of Time. Suddenly the cosmos becomes a vast forest and he hears "a vast forest's hymn" rising from it; in another instant, it becomes a "reminder of a temple gong". It carries to the ear of the world-soul "a bee-croon honey- drunk" conveying the ardent ecstasy of universal life. It is the far "anthem of a pilgrim sea". One feels the whole cosmos like the sea moving on a pilgrimage to the Divine with its unceasing anthem. Here, as in the simile of the caravan, we not only see the cosmos but hear its sound and feel its movement. The whole is an inseparable experience.

There are passages where spiritual experiences of exceptional intensity have found expression unequalled in world's literature. Of several such,—the one on page 74 can be taken as typical. As Aswapathy's soul was released from the bonds of Ignorance and rose to the heights of pure Spiritual Being he was suddenly surprised by a powerful Descent from above the mind. This is how it came:

"To meet him bare and pure

A strong Descent leaped down. A Might, a Flame,

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A Beauty half-visible with deathless eyes,

A violent Ecstasy, a Sweetness dire,

Enveloped him with its stupendous limbs

And penetrated nerve and heart and brain

That thrilled and fainted with epiphany";

Sāvitrī, Book1, Canto 5.

and the description that follows upto the end of the page gives one an intense word-picture which is inseparable from the experience described.

In Book III, Canto 4 (page 314), we have Aswapathy's vision of the Supreme Creatrix and her granting of the boon in answer to his passionate plea which is in fact the concentrated and intense expression of the whole of humanity's aspiration for the Divine's descent on earth. And the Voice that arises in response, though contained in 24 lines only, yet is among the most sublime, stirring, gripping and yet consoling utterances in world's poetry. They carry in them the dynamic power of the prophetic vision.

In more than one sense, Sāvitrī can be said to be a poem which "justifies the ways of God to man". It would take us long-because the whole poem is full of them-to try to give a detailed enumeration of this justification. We will only give one or two illustrations. In Book II, Canto 10 dealing with "The kingdoms of Godheads of the Little Mind" he enumerates various mental faculties and not only their limitations but their possibilities and the service they render to the growing soul of humanity. "Logic" and "inventiveness" have their place; then he brings only "imagination" and gives us a picture of its service to man's mental growth. Among the products of imagination is included myth. Now see how myth which has been generally regarded by modern positivist reason as something not only childish and superstitious but even harmful to the growth of man finds its justification on the Master's vision:

"A bright Error fringed the mystery-altar's frieze;

Darkness grew nurse to wisdom's occult sun,

Myth suckled knowledge with her lustrous milk;

The infant passed from dim to radiant breasts."

Sāvitrī, Book II, Canto 10

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The reader will see here how myth, if at all an error, is a bright Error; its very darkness nurses the growth of spiritual wisdom in man. And the vision brings before us the infant human being—a symbol of infant humanity,—who is being suckled by this dark nurse so that when it grows it will pass—to the radiant realms,—radiant breasts of true spiritual knowledge. And also see how in the lines that follow, we find a true value given to the myths by the divine power that works for the growth of man. There is. also a contrast of the value of reason which has been overestimated by the modem mind:

"Thus worked the Power upon the growing world;

Its subtle craft withheld the full-orbed blaze,

Cherished the soul's childhood and on fictions fed

Far richer in their sweet and nectarous sap

Nourishing its immature divinity

Than the staple or dry straw of Reason's tilth,

Its heaped fodder of innumerable facts,

Plebeian fare on which today we thrive."

Sāvitrī, Book II, Canto 10.

There is here not only an explanation of why the divine power at work in the cosmos does not give the full blaze of spiritual knowledge to the infant soul of humanity, but there is also here a true appraisement of reason and its service to the growth of knowledge in man. If poetry is criticism of life, here we find indirectly the criticism of the modem mind's insistence on reason as the only and reliable faculty of knowledge in man. Reason depending upon innumerable accumulation of facts is like grass, while myth and fancy are like milk indispensable to the growing soul, while the dry grass of reason would never nourish the growing, infant man. This and much more is included in the thought-content which accompanies the penetrating vision embodied in these lines.

When he gives us a vision of the mind of man, he makes us see it as an instrument of the Divine Spirit in man. So to him, all the attainments of mind are "on an infant's scale". Mind and life, says the author, are the playthings of this Divine Child. The great divine wisdom that is working behind the cosmos uses this mind in order to "teach the Ignorance". Mind "looked within

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itself but saw not God". Naturally one is surprised,—Why? Because if it is the Divine Spirit that is using the mind as an instrument, the mind should immediately and spontaneously be able to see God. See how the poet justifies the divine wisdom which permits the ignorance to the mind:

"A material interim diplomacy

Denied the truth that transient truths might live

And hid the deity in creed and guess

That the World-Ignorance might grow slowly wise".

Sāvitrī, Book II, Canto 10.

The lines that follow make us dearly understand and accept the truth that "only a slow advance the earth can bear".

The range of Sāvitrī is as wide as the cosmos and includes within it conditions pre-existent to the manifestation of the cosmos and ranges of Eternal and Infinite being and Superconscient levels of consciousness that have not yet manifested here on earth. That is to say, it includes unfathomable abyss of darkness of the Nescience mounting gradually to the realms of Eternal Day. There is very often a kind of parallelism between the lower ranges of Darkness and the higher realms of Light. There is, that is to say, what the author calls:

"Against this glory of spiritual states

Their parallels and yet their opposites".

Sāvitrī, Book III, Canto 3.

We shall not follow this clue from level to level but just take one only to show how the vision becomes poetically effective in the expression of these opposites; how they move on their own planes, each duplicating something of its opposite. Take Book II, Canto 7, p. 184—"Descent into Night" and Book III, Canto I, "The Pursuit of the Unknowable". The first one contains the description of Night, the most intense form of which is the Nescience, what he calls, "an abysmal Absolute". When Aswapathy descends into this depth of Darkness, he finds that "nothing was left, not even evil face", it was a "formless void", a "threatening waste", a "a sinister loneliness"; there "he faced a sense of death and conscious

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void". The reader would do well to read the description of this extreme of darkness in the original to see for himself how everything that is described contributes to the condensation, an intensification of not only darkness, but horror, repulsion, fear and ultimate extinction in the Dark Void. Now let us compare the opposite parallel of the Unknowable. Aswapathy had there to march:

"across a neutral all-supporting void

whose blankness nursed his lone, immortal spirit",

but it was:—

"always a signless, vague immensity"

"condemning finite things to nothingness",

that is to say,

"a height was reached where nothing made could live".

But this is not the same as "death" or "conscious void". For once our mind asks—"Would not glorious things and things of harmony and beauty and knowledge live there? See what the author says:

"All glory' of outline, sweetness of harmony

Rejected like a grace of trivial notes,

Expunged from Being's Silence, nude, austere

Died into a fine and blissful Nothingness".

"It was a stark, companionless reality"—the other was "a sinister loneliness". Increasing still the unutterable aloneness of the Unknowable, the Master rises to the pitch of supreme expression when he says:—

"Eternity prepared to fade and seemed

A hue and imposition on the Void,

Space was the fluttering of a dream that sank

Before its ending into Nothing's deep."

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The reader will see a kind of parallel opposites which heightens the contrast even when the same words and adjectives are used. Both are voids, but what a difference!

When the whole poem moves on the heights of revelation, inspiration;, illumined mind and never comes down to a lower plane than intuitive sight and expression, it is very difficult to make a choice of passages with special poetical merit. But there are single lines.. double lines, quartets throughout the poem that have a power of poetic beauty which grips our mind and can go on revealing its wealth like a mine. See how the three lines reach an Upanishadic height and grandeur in the intensity of the Vision in "The Heavens of the Ideal"! Aswapathy saw:

"A million lotuses swaying on one stem;

World after coloured and ecstatic world

Climbs towards some far-unseen epiphany".

Sāvitrī, Book II, Canto 12.

Or, for its content of knowledge take the following lines:

"Our human knowledge is a candle burnt

On a dim altar to a sun-vast Truth,

Man's virtue, a course-spun ill-fitting dress,

Apparels wooden images of good".

Sāvitrī, Book II, Canto 12.

Here we see not only the inadequacy of human knowledge, a candle held out before the sun-light of Truth, but also the insufficiency of man's morality and virtue. What a fine image of virtue as "a coarse and ill-fitting dress" of man's spirit and how the pride of the moralist is crushed when he sees that all his virtue is an apparel of the good which is far from living, for it is only the "wooden image" and not the living Reality to whom it is offered!

There is a realm of sheer beauty which can enrapture the imaginative mind. In Book II, Canto 14, while reaching the level of the world-soul Aswapathy finds that:

"There was a strange spiritual scenery,

A loveliness of lakes and streams and hills,

A flow, a fixity in a soul-space,

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And plains and valleys, stretches of soul-joy,

And gardens that were flower-tracts of the spirit,

Its meditations of tinged reverie.

Air was the breadth of a pure infinite.

A fragrance wandered in a coloured haze

As if the scent and hue of all sweet flowers

Had mingled to copy heaven's atmosphere.

Appealing to the soul and not to the eye

Beauty lived there at home in her own house,

There all was beautiful by its own right

And needed not the splendour of a robe."

Sāvitrī, Book II, Canto 14.

An apt symbol clothes a great psychological truth when the Seer sees the life-force in man:

"astray in the echo-caverns of Desire,

It guards the phantoms of a soul's dead hopes

And keeps alive the voice of perished things

Or lingers upon sweet and errant notes

Hunting for pleasure in the heart of pain".

Sāvitrī, Book II, Canto 8.

The repetition of the sound in the echo makes the desire soul run from echo to echo in search for an unreality, imposing upon it impossible labour of "hunting for pleasure in the heart of pain".

At times we have a total vision of all the worlds,—the whole cosmos given in a few lines which is one of the marvels of poetical expression:

"He saw a lone immense high-curved world-pile

Erect like a mountain chariot of the Gods

Motionless under an inscrutable sky.

As if from Matter's plinth and viewless base

To a top as viewless, a carved sea of worlds

Climbing with foam-manned waves to the Supreme

Ascended towards breadths immeasurable;

It hoped to soar into the Ineffable's reign:

A hundred levels raised it to the Unknown".

Sāvitrī, Book II, Canto I.

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When we have a description of a. spiritual experience—and there are several dozens of them—we find the language adequate and appropriate to the experience. There are intensities of delight, of power, of ecstasy, of calm-wideness of self, each carrying its authentic atmosphere with the expression. When Aswapathy felt the approach of the supreme Power, the Divine Mother, here is what he felt:

"Spirit and body thrilled identified,

Linked in the grasp of an unspoken joy;

Mind, members, life were merged in ecstasy.

Intoxicated as with nectarous rain

His nature's passioning stretches flowed to her

Flashing with lightnings, mad with luminous wine.

All was a limitless sea that heaved to the moon.

A divinising stream possessed his veins,

His body's cells awoke to spirit sense,

Each nerve became a burning thread of joy:

Tissue and flesh partook beatitude."

Sāvitrī, Book III, Canto 4.

The intensity of the experience of Delight and Power and its transforming influence penetrating right upto the physical body is vivid here. If this one gives us an experience of the higher consciousness and its nearness with at! the exaltation that accompanies it, there is another type in which Aswapathy comes down to his physical consciousness from Trance,—after the intense experience on the highest level of his being, where he communicates with the Supreme Power. This is how he felt:

"The warm-lipped sentient soft terrestrial wave,

A quick and many-murmured moan and laugh,

Came gliding in upon white feet of sound.

Unlocked was the deep glory of Silence heart;

The absolute unmoving stillness

Surrendered to the breadth of mortal air,

Dissolving boundlessly the heavens of trance

Collapsed to waking mind."

Sāvitrī, Book III, Canto 4.

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The soft wave of the earthly air came like living warm lips, perhaps almost kissed him, and conveyed to him its moan and laugh, many-murmured. At its approach the heart of the supreme Silence in which Aswapathy was abiding unlocked its doors and the heavens of trance were dissolved because the absolute stillness willingly surrendered to the breadth of mortal air and so Aswapathy collapsed to waking mind. It is not that with rare spiritual experiences only the Master gives us peaks of poetical expression, even with very ordinary experiences of life Ills revealing Light is equally effective. Man has believed in the efficacy of prayer for ages or in the inevitable conquest of an Idea or a Will. In four lines, see how he reveals its truth:

"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."

Sāvitrī, Book I, Canto 2.

At times there is a description of perfection which the earth is seeking through the laborious march of evolution. We have several ideals of perfection given us by many philosophers and poets. Here is one which gives the integral vision of the final fulfilment in which the earth,—

"Outstretching arms to the unconscious Void,

Passionate she prays to invisible forms of Gods

Soliciting from dumb Fate and toiling Time

What most she needs, what most exceeds her scope,

A Mind unvisited by illusion's gleams,

A Will expressive of soul's deity,

A Strength not forced to stumble by its speed,

A joy that drags not sorrow as its shade".

Sāvitrī, Book I, Canto 4.

Explaining how the life-force in man, his vital being is unable to attain its most constantly pursued aims of absolute knowledge, absolute power, and absolute delight, he affirms that it has a vision

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of gods in heaven, but is able to create here on earth out of mortal elements at first only an ape, and then man, the demi-god. As to the failure of life-force in attaining joy, this is what he says:

"A poignant paradox pursues her dreams:

Her hooded energy moves an ignorant world

To look for a joy her own strong clasp puts off:

In her embrace it cannot turn to its source".

Sāvitrī, Book II, Canto 6.

The life-energies that move here in this ignorant world are not really blind but "hooded" and act as if they were blind, and in their search for joy they lay strong clasp upon things with the result that those objects cannot turn in the hard embrace to the delight which is their source. It is thus that life inflicts upon itself by her own blind efforts the joylessness about which she complains, and shuts out the joy she is seeking.

The personality of man is not integrated; in fact, integration of personality is one of the problems of human psychology. The solution proposed in Sāvitrī, for integrating finally the human personality is one that is in keeping with the spiritual ideal of Indian culture. This is what he proposes:

"A Union of the Real with the Unique,

A gaze of the Alone from every face,

The Presence of the Eternal in the hours would make

Whole the fragment-being we are here".

Sāvitrī, Book I Canto 3.

It would require the union of the Individual with the Transcendent, and also the realisation of the One Divine everywhere and the realisation of the Tune-movement as an expression of the Eternal. The first union would replace the ego and consequently remove all the dividing inflictions to which man is subject. The second would harmonise his relations with the surrounding collectivity thus helping the integration of his personality, and the realisation of the universe as the manifestation of the Eternal would make him free from the transitoriness of the movement of time and settle his consciousness in the Eternal,

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In Book II, Canto 3, "The Glory and Fall of Life", life makes her landing on this globe. As a result of the inner pressure of aspiration from matter and the descent of life-force on earth the magnificent panorama of life-manifestation takes place. This is how the earth felt and looked:

"Alive and clad with trees and herbs and flowers

Earth's great brown body smiled towards the skies,

Azure replied to azure in the sea's laugh;

New sentient creatures filled the unseen depths,

Life's glory and swiftness ran in the beauty of beasts,

Man dared and thought and met with his soul the world".

In five lines we get the most complete picture of the outbreak of life-force on earth in innumerable forms.

Speaking about the limitations of reason as an inconclusive instrument of knowledge and action, he gives us a fine image of the utilitarian aspect of its work:

"A bullock yoked in the cart of proven fact,

She drags huge knowledge-bales through Matter's dust

To reach utility's immense bazar".

Sāvitrī, Book II Canto 10.

In one revealing image there is an incomparable picture of the utilitarian action of human reason.

There are passages throughout the poem in which the sympathy and love for humanity find a very vast and intense expression. When Aswapathy realises the presence of the supreme Power, it does not remain a realisation confined to his little personality, for, says the the author, the Divine Power:

"built a golden passage to his heart

Touching through him all longing sentient things"

so that he became a centre for the action of a Higher Power over the whole of humanity. The Divine that he wants man to realise is not one devoid of sympathy and love, for he describes it in his experience as:

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"a Nature throbbing with a Heart divine"—and it was— "a love that bore the cross of pain with joy".

In the same context, he speaks of it as "a burning Love from white spiritual founts". (Sāvitrī, Book III, Canto 2.) It is the Divine Power that commands Aswapathy to continue his labours in the field of life, by telling him:

"Help still humanity's blind and suffering life"

and then, it says further on:

Sāvitrī, Book III, Canto 4.

"only one joy, to raise thy kind desire".

Sāvitrī, Book III, Canto 4.

Aswapathy standing in the presence of the Supreme Divine Power had grown wide and he found that "his single freedom could not satisfy" his soul that had grown cosmic and so "her light, her bliss he asked for earth and men".

In this vast universal sympathy and compassion the Master is divine and therefore not likely to be easily understood by men whose ideas of compassion and sympathy are very crude.

There are many single lines carrying with them concentrated expression of the poetic vision, and they sink into our mind and go on echoing and re-echoing with wealth of suggestions in our consciousness.

1. "Nature's vision climbs beyond her acts".

Sāvitrī, Book II, Canto 6.

2. "Truth is wider, greater than her forms".

3. "Lulled by Time's beats eternity sleeps in us".

4. "Our minds are starters in the race to God".

5. "None lived for himself alone".

6. "Each lived for God in him, and God in all".

7. "The pilgrimage of Nature to the Unknown".

8. "All knowledge was left a questioning ignorance".

9. "She has lured the Eternal into the arms of Time".

10. "He saw a world that is from a world to be".

Sri Aurobindo writing about the spirit and form of "Future

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Poetry" some thirty years back in one of his recently published works, writes:—

* *

"But this new vision will not be as in the old times something hieratically remote, mystic, inward, shielded from the profane, but rather a sight which will endeavour to draw these godheads again to close and familiar intimacy with our earth and embody them not only in the heart of religion and philosophy, not only in the higher flights of thought and art, but also, as far as may be, in the common life and action of man. For in the old days these things were mysteries, which man left to the few, to the initiates and by so leaving them lost sight of them in the end, but the endeavour of this new mind is to reveal, to divulge, and to bring near to our comprehension all mysteries".

* *

"A poetry of this kind need not at all be something high and remote or beautifully delicately tangible, or not that alone, but will make too the highest things near, close and visible, will sing greatly and beautifully of all that we are from outward body to very God and self, of die finite and the infinite, the transient and the Eternal, but with a new reconciling and fusing vision that will make them other to us than they have been when yet tile same. If it wings to the heights, it will not leave the earth unseen below it, but also will not confine itself to earth, but And too other realities and other powers of men and take all the planes of existence for the empire....And then the attempt itself would be a rejuvenating elixir and put the poetic spirit once more in the shining forefront of the powers and guides of the ever progressing soul of humanity. There it will lead in the journey like the Vedic Agni, the fiery giver of the word, the youth, the seer, the beloved and im- mortal' guest, with his honied tongue of ecstasy, the truth-conscious— Rit-Cit, the truth-finder-Ritava—, born as a flame from earth and yet the heavenly messenger of the Immortals". (Future Poetry.)

"The voice of the poet will reveal to us by the inspired rhythmic word the God who is the Self of all things and beings, the Life of the Universe, the Divinity in man, and he will express all the emotion and delight of the endeavour of the human soul, to discover the touch and joy of that Divinity within him in whom he feels the mighty founts of his own being and life and effort and his fullness and unity with all cosmic experience and with Nature and with all creatures", (ibid)

* *

Now after the publication of Sāvitrī, it appears that he was un- consciously (?)—or rather consciously, anticipating his own work and establishing his title as a seer-poet of the future age.

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