On Savitri
THEME/S
In his introduction to Modern Indo-Anglian Poetry, P. Lai announces the adherence of the Unofficial Poets Workshop to certain basic "principles of language, method and intention." His statement raises a number of issues. I shall only deal here with one or two of them that refer to style and diction. For example, he says that he considers expressions like "the sunlight sweet" and "deep booming voice" to be ridiculous. I quite see what that statement implies. Nevertheless, I think that the verdict of "ridicule" may be passed only after examining the context in which such a phrase occurs. I look up a poem in the very anthology that P. Lai has edited and read on page 30 "wondrous subtlety", "rising sun", "taunting moon", "calm translucence", "wheeling planet" and "mutual flame", used in the course of 11 lines. But I should like to examine these phrases in their context before condemning them roundly. Double adjectives are not a rare phenomenon and inversion is a poetic device not infrequently patronised even by so sophisticated a poet as Dylan Thomas.
P. Lai goes on to say: "We claim that the phase of Indo-Anglian romanticism ended with Sarojini Naidu: 'I bring for you aglint with dew a little lovely dream.' Now, waking up, we must more and more aim at a realistic poetry reflecting, poetically and pleasingly, the din and hubbub, the confusion and indecision, the flashes of beauty and goodness, of our age. And leave the fireflies to dance through the neem." In a succeeding paragraph, he says that poetry must appeal "to that personality of man which is distinct, curious, unique and idealistic." Does this mean that we must aim at a realistic poetry in order to appeal to idealistic minds?
Why bring in "realism" and "idealism" into the discussion in this unhelpful fashion? We know that Sarojini Naidu was influenced considerably by the Decadent Poetry of the late nineteenth century, especially in her style and diction. The jewelled phrases and the preciosity were peculiar to her age and there is hardly any other Indo-Anglian, except probably Manmohan Ghose, who competes with her in this regard. Even he, in a poem like London, reveals a certain masculinity of diction which is wedded to a robustness of outlook. Indo-Anglian poetry had already entered the Decadent phase during the last quarter of the 19th century, the
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Georgian phase about the third decade of this century and the modernist phase in the late thirties. Is there any point, then, in saying that romanticism ended with Sarojini Naidu? Did it end with her death or the publication of her last collection of poems during her lifetime? There is a considerable gap of time between these two events.
Quite apart from Sarojini Naidu, what do we mean by saying that romanticism "ended" with Sarojini Naidu? A particular verbal mode of expressing romantic sensibility may have ended with her. But it does not mean that romantic sensibility itself came to an end with her. The fireflies will continue to dance, not only through the neem but also through the "din and hubbub", the confusion and indecision, precisely because the din and hubbub as well as the fireflies have been a part of our life and will continue to be so. Given a certain comprehensiveness of soul, every poet is bound to respond to the din as well as to the fireflies. P. Lai's own Because Her Speech Is Excellent is more romantic than many Romantic lyrics. It only means that we require a different kind of emotional precision in the use of words than what Sarojini Naidu was accustomed to.
I must say how untenable it is to speak of "nebulosity of form and substance", "clutches of soul-stuff, "greasy", "weak-spined and purple-adjectived 'spiritual' poetry", "a spasmodic burst of a spasmodic emotion" and "a flutter of pretty epithets" in connection with the poetry of Sri Aurobindo. We do not have the patience either to read a poem in the spirit in which it is conceived or to interpret it against the background of a system of thought in terms of which it is couched. And we think we have "punctured" a passage when all that we have punctured are our own toy balloons.
I think that one of the great achievements of Sri Aurobindo in Savitri is the creation of a great epic diction which is commensurate with the lordliness of the theme. I should like to touch on one or two aspects of it.
Speaking of the diction of a passage in Savitri, P. Lai says: "The entire game is reminiscent of Roget's Thesaurus, where redundant familiars like 'soul', 'spiritual', 'subtle', 'deeps', and 'deathless' enjoy a private tea-party."* But even a cursory glance at the vocabulary of Savitri will show that the choice of words here is one of the most comprehensive and varied and that it is not
* P. Lal, Modem Indo-Anglian Poetry, p. 11.
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restricted to "poetic" words as in Tennyson, Swinburne and the Decadent poets. There is daring originality in such choice, as in:
We must fill the immense lacuna we have made,
Re-wed the closed finite's lonely consonant
With the open vowels of Infinity,
A hyphen must connect Matter and Mind,
The narrow isthmus of the ascending soul.1
Or in:
A growing volume of the will to be,
A text of living and a graph of force,
A script of acts, a song of conscious forms
Burdened with meanings fugitive from thought's grasp
And crowded with undertones of life's rhythmic cry,
Could write itself on the hearts of living things.2
In the following lines we have a daring use of the particular words connected with the printing trade:
Then in Illusion's occult factory
And in the Inconscient's magic printing house
Tom were the formats of the primal Night
And shattered the stereotypes of Ignorance.
Alive, breathing a deep spiritual breath,
Nature expunged her stiff mechanical code
And the articles of the bound soul's contract,
Falsehood gave back to Truth her tortured shape.
Annulled were the tables of the law of pain
And in their place grew luminous characters.3
Sri Aurobindo's verse touches occasionally the polar opposite of poetic words in lines like the following:
Imposing schemes of knowledge on the Vast
They clamped to syllogisms of finite thought
The free logic of an infinite consciousness,
Grammared the hidden rhythms of Nature's dance,
Critiqued the plot of the drama of the worlds,
Made figure and number a key to all that is:
The psycho-analysis of cosmic Self
1 Savitri, p. 56. 2 Ibid., p. 175. ' Ibid., pp. 231 -32.
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Was traced, its secrets hunted down, and read
The unknown pathology of the Unique.4
Here is another passage in which military terms are employed to typify the spirit's battle till the goal is reached:
Across the dust and mire of the earthly plain,
On many-guarded lines and dangerous fronts,
In dire assaults, in wounded slow retreats,
Or holding the ideal's battered fort
Or fighting against odds in lonely posts,
Or camped in night around the bivouac's fires
Awaiting the tardy trumpets of the dawn,
In hunger and in plenty and in pain,
Through peril and through triumph and through fall,
Through life's green lanes and over her desert sands,
Up the bald moor, along the sunlit ridge
In serried columns with a straggling rear
Led by its nomad vanguard's signal fires,
Marches the army of the waylost god.5
Far from being an ineffectual angel in the void, which Shelley was supposed to be, Sri Aurobindo resembles Browning in his assimilation of unusual words, as in the following:
The tree of evolution I have sketched,
Each branch and twig and leaf in its own place,
In the embryo tracked the history of forms,
And the genealogy framed of all that lives.
I have detected plasm and cell and gene,
the protozoa traced, man's ancestors,
The humble originals from whom he rose.6
At times he can use an archaism with telling effect:
Man harbours dangerous forces in his house.
The Titan and the Fury and the Djinn
Lie bound in the subconscient's cavern pit
And the Beast grovels in his antre den.7
As for Sri Aurobindo's "poetic" words, we have to note, in the first place, that quite a few of them have a technical rather than a
4Ibid., p. 269. 5 Ibid., p. 459. 6 Ibid., p. 518. 7 Ibid., p. 480.
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poetic import. Words like soul, spiritual, Inconscient, subliminal, Overmind, Supermind, All-Vision, the Deep, the Void, Nescience, Oversoul, World-Force, Self of Mind, World-Soul, Mother Might, Supemature, The Supreme, All-Truth, Sun-word, are no more poetic than words like pole, centre, diurnal, etc. are poetic in Milton. Like the astronomical terms of Milton and the theological terms of Dante, they yield to us their meaning only when we set out to study them.
The impression of what P. Lai calls the vague "luminosity" of form is therefore a nebulous charge. There is remarkable imaginative as well as emotional precision in the diction developed by Sri Aurobindo in Savitri. The diction is neo-classical, metaphysical and modernistic even as it is Romantic. It changes its colour and contour according to the context and theme and Savitri is rich in its themes and contexts.
At the same time, there is a special reason why the Romantic phraseology has a unique place in Savitri. Sri Aurobindo endeavours in this epic to express the Inexpressible, to convey with the accuracy of a scientist, the clarity of a philosopher and the imaginative and emotional vividness of a poet, certain states of intuitive and spiritual experience which used to be expressed by the ancients in myths and parables. In other words, he is trying to carry the intellectual structure of the modem consciousness into mystical levels and planes of experience. The English language is not accustomed to being used for this purpose. Except in Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Earth, which is in prose, the language could not retain its intelligibility when Blake used it for a similar purpose in his mystical poems. Sri Aurobindo used the English language to convey his total vision of the modem world. The English language is used to reflecting some aspects of this vision in the manner of a prism, — by splitting it or fragmenting it. It shows the yellow of the intellect, the infra-red of the instinctive life, the rosy glow of delicate emotion and the ultra-violet of intuitive perception. It does not give us the dense blue of spiritual experience, nor does it fuse all these colours into a white radiance. Sri Aurobindo's synthetic vision could not rest satisfied with anything less than a precise and colourful expression of the subtlest possible spiritual states as well as an integrated expression of all this variety of his experience. He had therefore to evolve a poetic diction for this purpose. He needed to do this in English, not only because that was the only language in which he could best express
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himself but also because he wished to communicate his vision in a language which had a world status.
Let us note that the problem before Sri Aurobindo was not the construction of a dramatic diction, a diction like that of "myriad-minded" Shakespeare, but a diction suited to a substance that was epic, lyric and dramatic in its inspiration. He desired that his diction should have an Upanishadic charm and depth and a Kalidasian richness and concreteness. He therefore tried to see what quarry the English poetic tradition afforded him in this respect. He drew upon the Elizabethan predilection for old and learned and "romantic" words though he did not go to the length of Spenser, Sir Thomas Browne or the "sugary" sonneteers of the period. He resorted to the use of technical terms and unusual turns of speech, like the Metaphysicals, and to the use of Latinisms and involved syntax ("periods") like Milton. In his satirical and reflective passages, he instinctively goes back to the vigour of Dryden and Pope, their epigrammatic and antithetical manner, as in the following lines:
There is no miracle I shall not achieve.
What God imperfect left, I will complete,
Out of a tangled mind and half-made soul
His sin and error I will eliminate;
What he invented not, I shall invent:
He was the first creator, I am the last.8
Similarly, in passages which express subtle states of the soul, he hews his quarry from the Romantic tradition in poetry from the time of Spenser and Shakespeare to that of Swinburne and Yeats.
But this does not mean that Savitri is a mosaic in its design and fragmentary in its execution. It has a flexible diction, a diction that manages these transitions naturally and with ease and dignity and maintains, at the same time, a general air of depth and loftiness, clarity and grace and colour and picturesqueness.
We may now concentrate on some of the Romantic methods which Sri Aurobindo followed in designing his manifold diction. In the first place, he can employ the so-called 'poetic' words with authentic effect in his poetry:
Ambassadress twixt eternity and change,
8ibid., p. 512.
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The omniscient Goddess leaned across the breadths
That wrap the fated joumeyings of the stars
And saw the spaces ready for her feet...
The waking ear of Nature heard her steps
And wideness turned to her its limitless eye,
And, scattered on sealed depths, her luminous smile
Kindled to fire the silence of the worlds.
All grew a consecration and a rite.
Air was a vibrant link between earth and heaven;
The wide-winged hymn of a great priestly wind
Arose and failed upon the altar hills;
The high boughs prayed in a revealing sky.9
Here is an abundance of 'poetic' words like eternity, change, lean, wrap, fated, journeying, star, spaces, waking, limitless, scattered, sealed, depths, luminous, fire, silence, consecration, vibrant, fail, altar, hill, wind, pray, revealing and sky. We then have a romantically significant use of adjectives as in "fated joumeyings", "limitless eye" and "revealing sky". There is the Keatsian use of double adjectives which are not separated even by a comma: "a great priestly wind"; "wide-winged" in "wide-winged hymn" is a compound word coined by Sri Aurobindo and most will agree that it qualifies "wind" with marvellous propriety. Then, "altar hills" is a collection modelled after the manner of Keats and other Romantics who themselves took it over from the Elizabethans. Sri Aurobindo is very fond of such combinations of substantives and they are to be found in profusion in Savitri.
Lastly, there is something to be said about the element of literary allusiveness in his poetic diction. T.S. Eliot has shown how quotations from other poets can be fitted into new contexts in a manner which endows them with the novelty that distinguishes original writing itself. Sri Aurobindo does not quote. But he has oblique and indirect references to famous phrases and lines of poetry. These help him to gather together the revelatory hints and flashes and phrases in the poetic diction of great predecessors and to evolve in the English language, which does not have much of a tradition in this regard, a poetic diction that can build up the atmosphere and the imagery for interpreting the subtle soul-states that Sri Aurobindo wishes to communicate. For instance, the line
9 Ibid., p. 9.
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"All grew a consecration and a rite" reminds one of Wordsworth's great line: "The consecration and the poet's dream." The structural similarity that lies in the repetition of a word or phrase that has some affinity with "consecration" is too obvious to be missed. It is my view that in this and in many other more obvious references, Sri Aurobindo knew that the allusion would not be missed by the reader. If he had thought it objectionable, he would have easily given up the references. But he introduced them on purpose so. that the borrowed flash might help his readers to feel the original flame and the visitation and the gleam reveal to them the quality of sustained experience on the same level. This is an effective way of leading the aspiring reader to the heart of the poet's vision. This "air" or atmosphere of allusiveness gave to his diction the power to be a "vibrant link between earth and heaven". The other features of Romantic diction mentioned above help to conjure up this very atmosphere of interpretation and imaginative sympathy.
The last three lines of the passage quoted above are another example of allusive diction. They strike us as a peculiarly oriental piece of description. They are an unmistakable part of the general atmosphere of holiness that Sri Aurobindo is trying to create around the advent of Dawn. The "hymn" of the wind, the "altar hills", the "praying" of the boughs — all these details are not so un-English as they seem to use at first sight. The word "priest" helps us and we remember Keats's famous lines:
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores.10
Keats' s cosmic image enables us to capture the heightened beauty of a similar cosmicity in Sri Aurobindo's imagery.
We have referred to Sri Aurobindo's allusive style here only to throw some light on the many quarries in which he searched for rearing the foundations and walls of his great edifice. He constructed for himself a style of many dimensions, for this was what the epic substance of Savitri asked for. He searched far and wide. What he accepted he made his own by bending it to the expression of the unique context of Savitri.
The allusive is only one of the many kinds of style of which Sri Aurobindo is master. Here is an example of his narrative style employed when he has either to present a character or a situation.
10 Bright Star, (last sonnet.)
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In these lines which close Yoga of the King, he describes the life of the seer, Aswapati:
Apart he lived in his mind's solitude,
A demigod shaping the lives of men:
The universal strengths were linked with his;
Feeling earth's smallness with their boundless breadths.
He drew the energies that transmute an age.
Immeasurable by the common look,
He made great dreams a mould for coming things
And cast his deeds like bronze to front the years.
His walk through Time outstripped the human stride.
Lonely his days and splendid like the sun's.11
These lines have hardly any involved sentences. They are brief, like hammer-strokes. The vocabulary consists mainly of familiar and 'poetic' words, though some of the familiar words are high-sounding. A few metaphors and similes uplift the style from the level of mere narration and show that this kind of style can result in great poetry:
Lonely his days and splendid like the sun's.12
Here is an example of the narrative style when it deals with situations, — the marriage of Savitri and Satyavan:
Allured to her lashes by his passionate words
Her fathomless soul looked at him from her eyes;
Passing her lips in liquid sounds it spoke.
This word alone she uttered and said all:
"O Satyavan, I have heard thee and I know;
I know that thou and only thou art he."
Then down she came from her high carven car
Descending with a soft and faltering haste;
Her many-hued raiment glistening in the light
Hovered a moment over the wind-stirred grass,
Mixed with a glimmer of her body's ray
Like lovely plumage of a settling bird.
Her gleaming feet upon the green gold sward
Scattered a memory of wandering beams
And lightly pressed the unspoken desire of earth
11 Savitri, pp. 44-45. 12 Ibid.
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Cherished in her too brief passing by the soil.
Then flitting like pale brilliant moths her hands
Took from the sylvan verge's sunlit arms
A load of their jewel faces' clustering swarms,
Companions of the spring-time and the breeze.
A candid garland set with simple forms
Her rapid fingers taught a flower song
The stanzaed movement of a marriage hymn.
Profound in perfume and immersed in hue
They mixed their yearning's coloured signs and made
The bloom of their purity and passion one.
A sacrament of joy in treasuring palms
She brought, flower-symbol of her offered life,
Then with raised hands that trembled a little now
At the very closeness that her soul desired,
This bond of sweetness, this bright union's sign,
She laid on the bosom coveted by her love.
As if inclined before some gracious god
Who has out of his mist of greatness shone
To fill with beauty his adorer's hours,
She bowed and touched his feet with worshipping hands;
She made her life his world for him to tread,
And made her body the room of his delight
Her beating heart a remembrancer of bliss.13
The same features of style are discernible in this passage, except in the middle, from "her many-hued raiment" to "a sacrament of joy in treasuring palms" where the style is descriptive. We notice in connection with this descriptive style, that it is marked by a profusion of imagery, a Kalidasian richness which strikes us as un-English at time, dominated as we are by current notions of "English"-ness. But a world language has to be hospitable to diverse kinds of style.
There is a more lyrical and currently acceptable variety of this style in the description of Spring:
A godlike packed intensity of sense Made it a passionate pleasure even to breathe; All sights and voices wove a single charm. The life of the enchanted globe became
13Ibid., pp. 409-10.
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A storm of sweetness and of light and song,
A revel of colour and of ecstasy,
A hymn of rays, a litany of cries:
A strain of choral priestly music sang
And, swung on the swaying censer of the trees,
A sacrifice of perfume filled the hours.
Asocas burned in crimson spots of flame,
Pure like the breath of an unstained desire
White jasmines haunted the enamoured air,
Pale mango-blossoms fed the liquid voice
Of the love-maddened coil, and the brown bee
Muttered in fragrance mid the honey-buds.
The sunlight was a great god's golden smile.
All Nature was at beauty's festival.14
The dramatic style of Sri Aurobindo centres around situations like Aswapati's colloquy with the Divine Mother, the debate of Savitri and Death and the loving exchange of words between Savitri and Satyavan. It also extends to characters like the triple soul-forces and their mouthpieces. The speeches are, no doubt, often long. But they are punctuated by questions and exclamations which help to make them animated. And many of them rise to the highest level of poetry. The Divine Mother opens her address to Aswapati with the following words:
OSon of Strength who climbst creation's peaks,
No soul is thy companion in the light;
Alone thou standest at the eternal doors.
What thou hast won is thine, but ask no more.15
Aswapati's reply begins with the lines:
How shall I rest content with mortal days
And the dull measure of terrestrial things,
1who have seen behind the cosmic mask
The glory and the beauty of thy face?
Hard is the doom to which thou bindst thy sons!16
The colloquy between Savitri and Death begins in a highly dramatic manner:
Vast like the surge in a tired swimmer's ears,
14 Ibid., p. 352. 15 Ibid., p. 335. 16 Ibid., p. 341.
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Clamouring, a fatal iron-hearted roar,
Death missioned to the might his lethal call.
This is my silent dark immensity
This is the home of everlasting Night,
This is the secrecy of Nothingness
Entombing the vanity of life's desires.
Hast thou beheld thy source, O transient heart,
And known from what the dream thou art was made?
In this stark sincerity of nude emptiness
Hopest thou still always to last and love?17
Savitri's reply begins with the powerful line:
I bow not to thee, O huge mask of Death.18
Later to the long-winded arguments of Death she replies, saying
ODeath, who reasonest, I reason not,
Reason that scans and breaks, but cannot build
Or builds in vain because she doubts her work.
I am, I love, I see, I act, I will.19
When Savitri herself, in her capacity as Divine Mother, commands Death to stand aside "And leave the path of my incarnate Force"(p. 666), Death vanishes into thin air:
The two opposed each other face to face.
His being like a huge fort of darkness towered;
Around it her life grew, an ocean's siege.20
The colloquy between Savitri and the Supreme also centres round an intensely dramatic situation. This has been discussed while commenting on Sri Aurobindo's metaphysical poetry. There are some tense pauses in it during which the face of the whole of creation seems to hang in the balance.
There are quite a few varieties to be found in Sri Aurobindo's reflective style. Where the matter is familiar to the reader and it can therefore be spicily presented, we have the balanced and antithetical style developed in the manner of Dryden and Pope:
17 Ibid., p. 586. 18 Ibid., p. 588. 19 Ibid., p. 594. 20 Ibid., p. 667.
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He was the first creator, I am the last.
I have found the atoms from which he built the worlds:
The first tremendous cosmic energy
Missioned shall leap to slay my enemy kin,
Expunge a nation or abolish a race,
Death's silence leave where there was laughter and joy.
Or the fissured invisible shall spend God's force
To extend my comforts and expand my wealth,
To speed my car which now the lightnings drive
And turn the engines of my miracles.21
At a more intense level this style develops into a series of paradoxes as in the Debate of Love and Death:
Thou has used words to shutter out the Light
And called in Truth to vindicate a lie.
A lying reality is falsehood's crown
And a perverted truth her richest gem.
ODeath, thou speakest Truth but Truth that slays,
Ianswer to thee with the Truth that saves.
A traveller new-discovering himself,
One made of Matter's world his starting-point,
He made of Nothingness his living-room
And Night a process of the eternal light
And death a spur towards immortality.
God wrapped his head from sight in Matter's cowl,
His consciousness dived into inconscient depths,
All-knowledge seemed a huge dark Nescience;
Infinity wore a boundless zero's form.
His abysms of bliss became insensible deeps,
Eternity a blank spiritual Vast.22
Another variety of the reflective style is marked by the use of learned words or technical terms. It is difficult, flowing like a stream on rocky ground. But it flows on triumphantly. Here is a description of the subtle archangel race that lives in the mind and knows truth from within:
Imposing schemes of knowledge on the
Vast They clamped to syllogisms of finite thought
21 Ibid., pp. 512-13. 22 Ibid., p. 621.
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Was traced, its secret hunted down, and read
The unknown pathology of the Unique.
Assessed was the system of the probable,
The hazard of fleeing possibilities,
To account for the Actual's unaccountable sum,
Necessity's logarithmic tables drawn,
Cast into a scheme the triple act of the One.23
A fourth variety of this style is seen in Book I Canto 4 (The Secret Knowledge) where Sri Aurobindo describes the play of the Two in One, of Purusha and Prakriti, Being and Becoming. Here the difficulty is not one of language, but of the thought itself which is paradoxical and subtly metaphysical:
There are Two who are One and play in many worlds;
In Knowledge and Ignorance they have spoken and met
And light and darkness are their eyes' interchange.
Our pleasure and pain are their wrestle and embrace,
Our deeds, our hopes are intimate to their tale;
They are married secretly in our thought and life....
Author and actor with himself as scene,
He moves there as the Soul, as Nature she....
His soul, silent, supports the world and her,
His acts are her commandment's registers.
Happy, inert he lies beneath her feet:
His breast he offers for her cosmic dance
Of which our lives are the quivering theatre,
And none could bear but for his strength within,
Yet none would leave because of his delight....
She through his witness sight and motion of might
Unrolls the material of her cosmic Act...
Her empire is the cosmos she has built,
He is governed by her subtle and mighty laws.
His consciousness is a babe upon her knees,
Her endless space is the playground of his thoughts,
His being a field of her vast experiment.24
23Ibid.,p.269. 24 Ibid., pp. 61-64.
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A fifth variety of reflective style is seen in the allegorical presentation of the three serfs of Mind: Physical Mind, Vital Mind and Reason.
Then there is the expository or analytical style which communicates facts or states of the higher or lower consciousness: superconscience or inconscience. This is a piece of work fraught with many difficulties. A soul-state or superconsciousness can be experienced. But it is not easily communicable, for it is only through figures of speech and images of earthly life that some idea of it can be conveyed to the reader. If precision is insisted upon in the presentation of what is a new experience altogether, the poet is likely to be confronted with an almost insoluble problem. But this is what Sri Aurobindo faces in a number of places in Savitri. We see the adequate level of the expository style in the following passage:
All there was soul or made or sheer soul-stuff:
A sky of soul covered a deep soul-ground.
All here was known by a spiritual sense:
Thought was not there but a knowledge near and one
Seized on all things by a moved identity,
A sympathy of self with other selves,
The touch of consciousness on consciousness
And being's look on being with inmost gaze
And heart laid bare to heart without walls of speech
And the unanimity of seeing minds
In myriad forms luminous with the one God.
Life was not there, but an impassioned force,
Finer than fineness, deeper than the deeps
Felt as a subtle and spiritual power,
A quivering out from soul to answering soul,
A mystic movement, a close influence,
A free and happy and intense approach
Of being to being with no screen or check,
Without which life and love could never have been.
Body was not there, for bodies were needed not,
The soul itself was its own deathless form
And met at once the touch of other souls
Close, blissful, concrete, wonderfully true.25
25 Ibid., pp. 291-92.
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P. Lai fails to appreciate this passage; for he takes it as a lyrical outburst, missing its expository character altogether. It is a miracle of exactitude, considering the region of intangible experience in which it moves.
I have so far considered that varieties of style as they arise and are mostly determined by the exigencies of subject-matter. But there is another way of looking at style. Sri Aurobindo has himself mentioned four different kinds of style, — the adequate, the dynamically effective or rhetorical poetic manner, the metaphorical or illuminative style and the more purely intuitive, inspired or revelatory and inevitable utterance. These four levels of poetic style or 'seeing speech' are "different grades of its power of vision and expression of vision."26 It follows that these levels can be detected in each one of the styles we have listed — narrative, dramatic, descriptive, reflective and expository.
We have discussed an example of the adequate level in expository style. Let us see what the other three levels are like under this very head, the rhetorical poetic manner or the dynamically effective level can be illustrated by the following passage:
In the Witness's occult rooms with mind-built walls
On hidden interiors, lurking passages
Opened the windows of the inner sight.
He owned the house of undivided Time.
Lifting the heavy curtain of the flesh
He stood upon a threshold serpent-watched,
And peered into gleaming endless corridors,
Silent and listening in the silent heart
For the coming of the new and the unknown.
He gazed across the empty stillnesses
And heard the footsteps of the undreamed Idea
In the far avenues of the Beyond.
He heard the secret Voice, the Word that knows,
And saw the secret face that is our own.27
Sri Aurobindo describes the gradual opening of Aswapati's soul in this passage.
One sees exposition moving into the illuminative level in a
26The Future Poetry, SABCL, Vol. 9, p. 271.
27 Savitri, p. 28.
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passage like the following which describes the Goddess of Night:
A strong and fallen goddess without hope,
Obscured, deformed by some dire Gorgon spell,
As might a harlot empress in a bouge,
Nude, unashamed, exulting she upraised
Her evil face of perilous beauty and charm
And, drawing panic to a shuddering kiss
Twixt the magnificence of her fatal breasts,
Allured to their abyss the spirit's fall.28
We see this dynamically effective style in another passage in which Sri Aurobindo speaks of the Immortals that guide the world:
Above the illusion of the hopes that pass,
Behind the appearance and the over act,
Behind the clock-work chance and vague surmise,
Amid the wrestle of force, the trampling feet,
Across the triumph, fighting and despair,
They watch the Bliss for which earth's heart has cried,
On the long road which cannot see its end
Winding undetected through the sceptic days
And to meet it guide the unheedful moving world....
In Matter shall be lit the spirit's glow,
In body and body kindled the sacred birth;
Night shall awake to the anthem of the stars,
The days become a happy pilgrim march,
Our will a force of the Eternal's power,
And thought the rays of a spiritual sun.
A few shall see what none yet understands;
God shall grow up while the wise men talk and sleep;
For man shall not know the coming till its hour
And belief shall be not till the work is done.29
The illuminative level is found in the following lines which describe the play of eternal children in the worlds of griefless life:
Of storm and sun they made companions,
Sported with the white mane of tossing seas,
Slew distance trampled to death under their wheels
And wrestled in the arenas of their force.
38 Ibid., p. 212. 29 Ibid., pp. 54-55.
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Imperious in their radiance like the sun
They kindled heaven with the glory of their limbs
Flung like a divine largesse to the world.30
Another example of the same level is found where the Heavens of the Ideal are described:
What here is in the bud has blossomed there.
There is the secrecy of the House of Flame,
The blaze of Godlike thought and golden bliss,
The rapt idealism of heavenly sense;
There are the wonderful voices, the sun-laugh,
A gurgling eddy in rivers of God's joy,
And the mysteried vine-yards of the gold moon-wine....
There are the imperishable beatitudes.
A million lotuses swaying on one stem,
World after coloured and ecstatic world
Climbs towards some far unseen epiphany.31
As for the inspired or revelatory utterance, Savitri's reply to the Supreme after her conquest of Death is a good example.
Earth is the chosen place of mightiest souls;
Earth is the heroic spirit's battlefield,
The forge where the Archmason shapes his works.
Thy servitudes on earth are greater, king,
Than all the glorious liberties of heaven.
The heavens were once to me my natural home,
I too have wandered in star-jewelled groves,
Paced sun-gold pastures and moon-silver swards
And heard the harping laughter of their streams
And lingered under branches dropping myrrh;
I too have revelled in the fields of light
Touched by the ethereal raiment of the winds,
Thy wonder-rounds of music I have trod,
Lived in the rhyme of bright unlabouring thoughts,
I have beat swift harmonies of rapture vast,
Danced in spontaneous measures of the soul
The great and easy dances of the gods.
Oh, fragrant are the lanes thy children walk
And lovely is the memory of their feet
30 Ibid., p. 126. 11 Ibid., p. 279.
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Amid the wonder-flowers of Paradise....
Too far thy heaven for me from suffering men
Imperfect is the joy not shared by all....
O life, the life beneath the wheeling stars
For victory in the toumement with death,
For bending of the fierce and difficult bow,
For flashing of the splendid sword of God !
O thou who soundest the trumpets in the lists,
Part not the handle from the untried steel,
Take not the warrior with his blow unstruck.
Are there not still a million fights to wage?
O King-smith clang on still thy toil begun,
Weld us to one in thy strong smithy of life.
Thy fine-curved jewelled hilt call Savitri,
Thy blade's exultant smile name Satyavan.
Fashion to beauty, point us through the world.32
I have hardly touched here the fringe of my subject. This is inevitable because a whole book could be written about Sri Aurobindo's style and diction in Savitri. I have only indicated the lines on which such a study can be planned.
V. K. Gokak
32 Ibid., pp. 686-87.
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