On Savitri
THEME/S
Even a casual reader of Sri Aurobindo's poem Savitri will be struck by its profuse wealth of poetic images. Not a single page passes under his eyes without unloading its rich and varied cargo of imagery before him and it is a cargo from many countries, from many worlds; it is a cargo of dreams, nay, of dreamlike realities and of eternal verities lying beyond our poor limited human vision. Or, perhaps, those images are not a cargo at all, but are themselves the boats, the freighters in which is loaded the divine cargo; for the boats, the freighters are familiar to us since they are our own boats, freighters of our own world that have been sent by Sri Aurobindo, the master poet, to far off little known countries and still less known other-worlds, and they return filled with gems and curios and novelties that dazzle and enchant and surprise our unaccustomed eyes.
These images are the creations of a poet in whose vision even the most prosaic, even the most worldly things are transformed into exquisite or magnificient vehicles of profoundly mystic and at the same time utterly poetic ideas. Of these many gems, we shall here pass in review some of the extremely bright ones.
A throe that came and left a quivering trace,
Gave room for an old tired want unfilled,
At peace in its subconscient moonless cave
To raise its head and look for absent light,
Straining closed eyes of vanished memory,
Like one who searches for a bygone self
And only meets the corpse of his desire.1
And a little later we find another beautiful image,
A long lone line of hesitating hue
Like a vague smile tempting a desert heart
Troubled the far rim of life's obscure sleep.2
1 Savitri, p. 2. 2 p. 2.
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The dawn that rises in the world of Inconscience is represented in another image,
A wandering hand of pale enchanted light
That glowed along a fading moment's brink,
Fixed with gold panel and opalescent hinge
A gate of dreams ajar on mystery's verge,3
which is followed by
Interpreting a recondite beauty and bliss
In colour's hieroglyphs of mystic sense,
It wrote the lines of a significant myth
Telling of a greatness of spiritual dawns,
A brilliant code penned with the sky for page.4
And the same Dawn becomes an
Ambassadress twixt eternity and change.5
Priests and religious ceremonies and other churchly things are favorite images deftly chosen and marvellously and sometimes quite unexpectedly introduced. We shall note some of them now:
The wide-winged hymn of a great priestly wind
Arose and failed upon the altar hills;
The high boughs prayed in a revealing sky.6
In this image it is the happier side of religion that finds expression; in the following one the other and sorrier spectacle of credal religion is taken as an image:
A servile blinkered silence hushed the mind...
While mitred, holding the good shepherd's staff,
Falsehood enthroned on awed and prostrate hearts
The cults and creeds that organise living death
And slay the soul on the altar of a lie.7
The artificers of Nature's fall and pain
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Have built their altars of triumphant Night
In the clay temple of terrestrial life.
In the vacant precincts of the sacred Fire,
In front of the reredos in the mystic rite
Facing the dim velamen none can pierce,
Intones his solemn hymn the mitred priest
Invoking their dreadful presence in his breast:
Attributing to them the awful Name
He chants the syllables of the magic text
And summons the unseen communion's act,
While twixt the incense and the muttered prayer
All the fierce bale with which the world is racked
Is mixed in the foaming chalice of man's heart
And poured to them like sacramental wine.8
In another place greed and hate are pictured as the acolytes of Force;9 and we find, elsewhere,
An immortality cowled in the cape of death.10
In the kingdoms of the little life, the Life-Goddess is depicted in a very significant figure, showing the futility of petty vital pleasures
In her obscure cathedral of delight
To dim dwarf gods she offers secret rites.
But vain unending is the sacrifice,
The priest an ignorant mage who only makes
Futile mutations in the altar's plan
And casts blind hopes into a powerless flame.11
In a later Canto, while describing the World of Falsehood and the part played by Thought in that world, a full-fledged image drawn from Mystery-Religion is to be found. It is as follows:
Thought sat, a priestess of Perversity,
On her black tripod of the triune Snake
Reading by opposite signs the eternal script,
A sorceress reversing Life's God-frame.
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In the darkling aisles with evil eyes for lamps
And fatal voices chanting from the apse,
In strange infernal dim basilicas
Intoning the magic of the unholy Word,
The ominous profound Initiate
Performed the ritual of her Mysteries.12
Next, we take up another group of images which are based on geography:
Calm heavens of imperishable Light,
Illumined continents of violet peace,
Oceans and rivers of the mirth of God
And griefless countries under purple suns.13
This is the description given of what Sri Aurobindo calls the "Wonderworlds of Life," above which is situated "a breathless summit region, whose boundaries jutted into a sky of Self'.14 The Traveller of the Worlds finds himself ascending into the kingdom of a griefless life, where
Above him in a new celestial vault
Other than the heavens beheld by mortal eyes,
As on a fretted ceiling of the gods,
An archipelago of laughter and fire,
Swam stars apart in a rippled sea of sky.'5
A little later he becomes a traveller in the kingdoms of the little life, in which
A freak of living startled vacant Time...
Islands of living dotted lifeless space
And germs of living formed in formless air.16
A similar image is found in the description of Man, who is a "nomad of the far mysterious Light," (p. 336) and who is a stranger become awake in an unconscious world:
A traveller in his oft-shifting home
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Amid the tread of many infinitudes,
He has pitched a tent of life in desert Space.17
And the most daring and charming image in this group is:
The conscious ends of being went rolling back:
The landmarks of the little person fell,
The island ego joined its continent.18
From this group of geographical images, we now go to images of travel and communication. Aswapati, the Traveller, has become "a pilgrim of the everlasting Truth." (p. 80)
He has turned from the voices of the narrow realm
And left the little lane of human Time.
In the hushed precincts of a vaster plan
He treads the vestibules of the Unseen.19
And again,
He journeys to meet the Incommunicable,
Hearing the echo of his single steps
In the eternal courts of Solitude.20
The image of travelling appears again in a very unexpected context and in a happy and apt manner in the following lines:
And, traveller on the roads of line and hue,
Pursues the spirit of beauty to its home.
Thus we draw near to the All-Wonderful
Following his rapture in things as sign and guide;
Beauty is his footprint showing as where he has passed,
Love is its heartbeat's rhythm in mortal breasts.21
And a weird image of the Traveller Soul coming across dreadful dangers in his journeying is the following:
On his long way through Time and Circumstance
The grey-hued riddling nether shadow-Sphinx,
Her dreadful paws upon the swallowing sands,
Awaits him armed with the soul-slaying word:
Across his path sits the dim camp of Night.22
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This "Circumstance" finds an equally weird apparel of an image elsewhere:
We hear the crash of the wheels of Circumstance23
and also,
The galloping hooves of the unforeseen event24
and again,
In a gallop of thunder-hooved vicissitudes
She swept through the race-fields of Circumstance.25
In this last image it is Life that is pictured as the rider. The next one is a mixed image of many hues, describing the journey of the Traveller through the kingdoms of the greater life
Around crowded the forest of her signs:
At hazard he read by arrow-leaps of Thought
That hit the mark by guess or luminous chance,
Her changing coloured road-lights of idea
And her signals of uncertain swift event,
The hieroglyphs of her symbol pageantries
And her landmarks in the tangled paths of Time26
And it will not be out of place here to note two occurrences of the image of an inn applied to Time. We do not feel that it is repeated again, for in both cases it is so differently used. The first occurrence is in these lines:
And hardly with his heart's blood he achieves
His transient house of the divine Idea,
His figure of a Time-inn for the Unborn.27
And on the second occasion it occurs in;
The home of a perpetual happiness,
It lodged the hours as in a pleasant inn.28
In the first instance it is Time that is conceived as the inn, while in this second one it is Matter that lodges the hours as in an inn. This shows what a great poet can do, even when he is using the same image.
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Next, we take up one of the most fertile sources of images, viz., communications:
Neighbours of Heaven are Nature's altitudes.
To these high-peaked dominions sealed to our search
Too far from surface Nature's postal routes,
Too lofty for our mortal lives to breathe,
Deep in us a forgottens kinship points.29
How wonderfully appropriate and apt this figure of postal routes is! For surface Nature's lines of communication are all restricted within the area of mind-bound and sense-bound consciousness, while these domains of the Self are lying outside and beyond those means of communication. It is not only the postal communications that have obliged by becoming an image, but even the telegraphic transmissions have become a magnificient figure in the hands of this mystic poet:
The troglodytes of the subconscious Mind,
Ill-trained slow stammering interpreters,
Only of their small task's routine aware
And busy with the record in our cells,
Concealed in the subliminal secrecies
Mid an obscure occult machinery,
Capture the mystic Morse whose measured lilt
Transmits the messages of the cosmic Force.30
In passing we may note here that there is a curious and at the same time brilliant mixture of two images, the first being that of troglodytes or cave-dwellers which reminds us of the Vedic figure of Panis who penned in the divine cows in their subconscient cave, and the second is that of the Morse code. But this is not all, for even one of the most prosaic of all persons, the newspaper reporter is not spared. In the hands of an ordinary poet such an image, especially when applied to such a sublime thing as Inspiration, would have become grostesque and jarring. But what an apposite figure it becomes in the following lines!
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A reporter and scribe of hidden wisdom talk,
Her shining minutes of celestial speech,
Passed through the masked office of the occult mind,
Transmitting gave to prophet and to seer
The inspired body of the mystic Truth.31
After post, telegraph and reporter, comes television:
Impure, sadistic, with grimacing mouths,
Grey foul inventions gruesome and macabre
Came televisioned from the gulfs of Night.32
From mathematics come images in a very great number. We will note the charm of some of them.
Only was missing the sole timeless Word...
The integer of the Spirit's perfect sum
That equates the unequal All to the equal One.33
This, indeed, is the strange arithmetic of the Spirit. Another instance of the same arithmetic:
At first was laid a strange anomalous base,
A void, a cipher of some secret Whole,
Where zero held infinity in its sum
And All and Nothing were a single term.34
And still another instance:
A Chance that chose a strange arithmetic
But could not bind with it the forms it made,
A multitude that could not guard its sum
Which less than zero grew and more than one.35
This is a charming idea expressed in an equally charming figure. The recurring decimals have become an oft-recurring image. This first refers to life:
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But now a termless labour is her fate:
In its recurrent decimal of events
Birth, death appear as its vibrating points;
The old question-mark margins each finished page,
Each volume of her effort's history.36
The following is a lofty image applied to the supreme Oneness:
It took up tirelessly into its scope
Persons and figures of the Impersonal,
As if prolonging in a celestial count,
In a rapturous multiplication's sum,
The recurring decimals of eternity...
It made all persons fractions of the Unique,
Yet all were being's secret integers.37
And here is a crowded imagery, a procession of images rising one above the other:
Existence seemed a vain necessity's act,
A wrestle of eternal opposites
In a clasped antagonism's close-locked embrace,
A play without denouement or idea,
A hunger march of lives without a goal,
Or, written on a bare blackboard of Space,
A futile and recurring sum of souls.38
Then there is another beautiful image in
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.39
And the next one which follows almost immediately after this last, is also an excellent one:
Out of the chaos of the Invisible's moods
Derived the calculus of Destiny.40
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How much is suggested by this single simple-looking image! All the problems of Destiny and Freewill, of Destiny and the Divine's Will, of Destiny and Divine Grace seem to be lurking behind this magnificient figure and trying invisibly to draw the reader's attention to them. And then,
The diameter of Infinity was drawn,
Measured the distant arc of the unseen heights.41
Leaving mathematics we now come to the most prosaic of things, from where one would least expect images could be drawn. They are business, commerce, economics, banking, etc.
For all we have acquired soon loses worth,
An old disvalued credit in Time's bank,
Imperfection's cheque drawn on the Inconscient.42
A similar idea but expressed in an entirely different form and in an entirely different context is to be found in:
... in Thought's broad impalpable Exchange
A speculator in tenuous vast ideas,
Abstractions in the void her currency
We know not with what firm values for its base.
Only religion in this bankruptcy
Presents its dubious riches to our hearts
Or signs unprovisioned cheques on the Beyond.43
This is a full-fledged image showing us the futility of thought and also of religion in our ordinary life. That life is pictured as a speculator in Thought's Exchange is a very forceful and significant image. A similar image is presented to us in the following lines?
She accepted not to close the luminous page,
Cancel her commerce with eternity,
Or set a signature of weak assent
To the brute balance of the world's exchange.44
Here it is Savitri who is referred to. The luminous page is of
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"the unfinished story of her soul graved in Nature's book." (p. 19) Here she refuses to set her signature to the brute balance, but in another place she is shown to be exhausting an old account:
Altered must be Nature's harsh economy;
Acquittance she must win from her past's bond,
An old account of suffering exhaust,
Strike out from Time the soul's long compound debt.45
The idea of Time's bank is repeated once again in
A doubt corroded even the means to think,
Distrust was thrown upon Mind's instruments;
All that it takes for reality's shining coin,
Proved fact, fixed inference, deduction clear,
Firm theory, assured significance,
Appeared as frauds upon Time's credit bank
Or assets valueless in Truth's treasury.46
Here we can see that even when a figure is repeated, it is so very different and so uniquely lovely, that we hardly feel or even become aware of its repetition. The frustration that the human being feels in this world is brought out in the following lines:
Cheated by counterfeits sold to us in life's mart,
Our hearts clutch at a forfeited heavenly bliss.47
A somewhat similar image appears in
A city of the traffic of bound souls,
A market of creation and her wares
Was offered to the labouring mind and heart.48
This image of city-life comes in a different form in
...the ego's factories and marts
Surround the beautiful temple of the soul.49
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Next we take up images drawn from grammar, language, logic, etc.
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.50
Here there is a fusion of three images. The first is that of a consonant and vowels. The second is a very daring and fascinating image, viz., that of a hyphen, which is followed by the third still more daring and fascinating image taken from geography, that of an isthmus. The hyphen that connects Matter and Mind becomes in its turn the isthmus; thus there is an image upon an image. The three images coming in succession, one after another, raise the idea of linking, — which is the common quality of all the three, — to a climax in the last.
From the image of a hyphen we go to the image of punctuation:
His little pleasures punctuate frequent griefs:
Hardship and toil are the heavy price he pays
For the right to live and his last wages death.51
Even in the following lines there is a mixed image:
Love's adoration like a mystic seer
Through vision looks at the invisible,
In earth's alphabet finds a Godlike sense.52
And here is another image suggested by the double meaning of a word:
United were Time's creative mood and tense
To the style and syntax of Identity.53
It is the word "mood" and its association with grammar that has given rise to the whole image. Even a schoolboy is not spared
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from becoming an image: our circumscribed little being becomes in it
A backward scholar on logic's rickety bench.54
There is a bunch of images pertaining to writing and printing, coming one after another within a short passage.
The skilful Penman's unseen finger wrote
His swift intuitive calligraphy;
Earth's forms were made his divine documents.55
He imposed upon dark atom and dumb mass
The diamond script of the Imperishable,
Inscribed on the dim heart of fallen things
A paean-song of the free Infinite
And the Name, foundation of eternity,
And traced on the awake exultant cells
In the ideographs of the Ineffable
The lyric of the love that waits through Time
And the mystic volume of the Book of Bliss
And the message of the superconscient Fire.56
But before these things are written,
...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.57
This is an amazingly bold and daring metaphor and is expressed in a perfectly deft manner.
This brings us to another image of the Book of Being, equally marvellous and apt; although long drawn out, it does not become cumbrous or unwieldy or dull.
There in a hidden chamber closed and mute
Are kept the record graphs of the cosmic scribe,
And there the tables of the sacred Law,
There is the Book of Being's index page,
The text and glossary of the Vedic truth
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Are there; the rhythms and metres of the stars
Significant of the movements of our fate:
The symbol powers of number and of form,
And the secret code of the history of the world
And Nature's correspondence with the soul
Are written in the mystic heart of life.
In the glow of the Spirit's room of memories
He could recover the luminous marginal notes
Dotting with light the crabbed ambiguous scroll,
Rescue the preamble and the saving clause
Of the dark Agreement by which all is ruled
That rises from material Nature's sleep.58
And a little latter we find how the great Mother works out
By a miraculous birth in plasm and gas
The mystery of God's convenant with the Night.59
And still further:
He read the original ukase kept back
In the locked archives of the spirit's crypt,
And saw the signature and fiery seal
Of Wisdom on the dim Power's hooded work
Who builds in Ignorance the steps of Light.60
And lastly,
Its earthly dialect to God-language change.61
The idea of "the dark Agreement" and that of "God's convenant with the Night" are similar to another one appearing in
Abolished were conception's covenants
And, striking off subjection's rigorous clause,
Annulled the soul's treaty with Nature's nescience.62
As we have taken up this group of images which are based on writings and treaties and agreements, the following two images will be found to be in their proper place here. The first one is in
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connection with "A hostile and perverting Mind at work"63 in the dark world of Night.
It captured the oracles of the occult gods,
Effaced the signposts of Life's pilgrimage,
Cancelled the firm rock-edicts graved by Time,
And on the foundations of the cosmic Law
Erected its bronze pylons of misrule.64
And the second image is a very similar one:
An iron decree in crooked uncials written
Imposed a law of sin and adverse fate.65
In another place there is still one more image that resembles the foregoing two. This is only one image in a series of dozens of superb images applied to human Reason:
On the huge bare walls of human nescience
Written round Nature's deep dumb hieroglyphs
She pens in clear demotic characters
The vast encyclopaedia of her thoughts.66
This brings us to two images drawn from the legal profession. Both are found applied to Reason. The first is a mixed image and the second one is as it were a continuation of the first from where the legal portion in the first is left unfinished:
The eternal Advocate seated as judge
Armours in logic's invulnerable mail
A thousand combatants for Truth's veiled throne
And sets on a high horseback of argument
To tilt for ever with a wordy lance
In a mock tournament where none can win
Assaying thought's values with her rigid tests
Balanced she sits on wide and empty air,
Aloof and pure in her impartial poise.
Absolute her judgments seem but none is sure;
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Time cancels all her verdicts in appeal.67
The next one is in reference to the destiny of the Earth:
An immortal godhead's perishable parts
She must reconstitute from fragments lost,
Re-word from a document complete elsewhere
Her doubtful title to her divine Name.68
This also is an image clothed in legal phraseology and is a very suggestive one, pointing out to us the relation of the Earth with the Divine. Most unexpected and surprising in the context is the use of the following image, which too is in semi-legal terminology. It is applied to the Earth-Goddess:
Heaven's privilege she claims as her own right.
Just is her claim the all-witnessing Gods approve,
Clear in a greater light than reason owns:
Our intuitions are its title-deeds.69
Even when we have read the first three lines we are not in the least able to anticipate the most amazing metaphor that comes crashingly upon us in the fourth line; for, the words "privilege", "right" and "claim" are as much ordinary terms as they are legal technical terms and the phrase "all-witnessing", although followed by the verb "approve", is not sufficient to bring to our mind the technical legal sense attached to it, as we usually take the phrase to mean "all-seeing". That is why the image of title-deeds as applied to intuitions comes as a complete surprise, and it is only after rereading the first three lines in the light of the surprise given to us by the fourth line that we awake to the legal sense of the various terms used in them.
Here is another image taken from the canto dealing with the descent of Aswapati into the kingdom of Night:
Injustice justified by firm decrees
The sovereign weights of Error's legalised trade,
But all the weights were false and none the same;
Even she watched with her balance and a sword
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Lest any sacrilegious word expose
The sanctified formulas of her old misrule.70
The whole description of Aswapati's sojourn through that nocturnal kingdom is simply marvellous, showing us how even the best things in life become perverted and are put to use by the dark forces to achieve their fiendish ends.
This last image of trade leads us to mention another image used in another setting. This time it is a grotesque figure that is applied to Reason to show what hampered and puny a place she occupies in this world.
bullock yoked in the cart of proven fact,
She drags huge knowledge-bales through Matter's dust
To reach utility's immense bazaar.71
This is another of the dozens of images applied to Reason, that we referred to just a little earlier.
Now we come to a group of images which might have been inspired by the World War.
A cowled fifth-columnist is now thought's guide;
His subtle defeatist murmer slays the faith
And, lodged in the breast or whispering from outside,
A lying inspiration fell and dark
A new order substitutes for the divine.72
The next one also is from the same canto, and is clearly taken from war-conditions:
So might one fall on the Eternal's road Forfeiting the spirit's lonely chance in Time And no news of him reach the waiting gods, Marked "missing" in the register of souls, His name the index of a failing hope, The position of a dead remembered star.73
Another image is that of flares:
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And like a sky-flare showing all the ground
A swift intuitive discernment shone.74
The following image is more fully developed:
As far as its self-winged airplanes could fly,
Visiting the future in great brilliant raids,.
It reconnoitered vistas of dream-fate.75
This image refers to the "high-winged Life-Thought" (p. 258) which is above the human Mind and Reason and overshadows them. The next image is a mixed one:
A specialist of logic's hard machine
Imposed its rigid artifice on the soul;
An aide of the inventor intellect,
It cut Truth into manageable bits
That each might have his ration of thought-food.76
This image of food is found once before in The Decent into Night, but in a quite different context and as forming part of another bigger image:
Progress became a purveyor of Death.
A world that clung to the law of a slain Light
Cherished the putrid corpses of dead truths,
Hailed twisted forms as things free, new and true,
Beauty from ugliness and evil drank
Feeling themselves guests at a banquet of the gods
And tasted corruption like a high-spiced food.77
The images derived from business, trade, mathematics, language, law and even modem warfare show how even the most modem things can become, in the hands of a great poet and mystic, beautiful and at the same time apt figures in a poetry dealing with little known spiritual and mystic topics. And here lies also the difference between that group of modem English poets headed by T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and others on one side and Sri Aurobindo on the other. Those English poets as well as Sri Aurobindo use
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modem images and still what a difference! Not that the former use ineffective images; far from it: an image such as
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon the table,
suggests much more than what it bears upon its face; and we cannot say that such images are ineffective or insipid. But all the same our soul and even our deeper aesthetic sense always remain dissatisfied, always feel that something is wrong somewhere in these kinds of images. At any rate, we never feel that we are reading some soul-uplifting poetry when we peruse the works of those modernist authors. The images that are inspired in their minds have got their source somewhere no doubt in the deeper layers of our consciousness, but they are the layers that had better be left untapped rather than be made the founts of our poetic inspiration. For they are not the sublime domains of Saraswati, the Goddess-Muse of real divine poetry. On the other hand, Sri Aurobindo's images are equally modem, sometimes even too modem, but at the same time they are not fed by the underworld beings inhabiting our subconscient. Their food is the ambrosia of the gods, their drink the nectar dripping from the Superconscient.
But it would be a mistake to call Sri Aurobindo modem even as it would be incorrect to call him ancient either. For he is beyond Time: he accepts whatever is good from the past equally as whatever is good in the present. But pre-eminently he is a poet of the future. The poetry he has given in Savitri, especially while dealing with Aswapati's Yoga and his travelling in the other worlds, is as yet unfathomable for the average human mind of today. The knowledge he has utilised as the basis of that poetry is the Yogic knowledge which has yet not become the common possession of human consciousness. That poetry will be appreciated better when, some time in future, humanity — or at least a part of it — has received glimpses of those invisible yet very real occult worlds.
But let us return once again to our subject from this little digression. So far we have on the whole seen the images that are so much liked by the modem mind. But there are perhaps an equal number of other images given by Sri Aurobindo, which are conventional and found used throughout the length and breadth of the literature of the world. But in Sri Aurobindo's hands they cease to be conventional or stereotyped; they are infused by him with a
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new breath and a new spirit. We shall consider here only some of them, for they are literally in hundreds, perhaps even in thousands.
The well-known image of the mother suckling her child is used by Sri Aurobindo in various places; but in each use of it, there is a unique force and significance gushing forth from it.
The calm indulgence and maternal breasts
Of Wisdom suckling the child-laughter of Chance.78
The amazing originality in the application of this image needs no comment.
A spirit dreamed in the crude cosmic whirl,
Mind flowed unknowing in the sap of life
And Matter's breasts suckled the divine Idea.79
This is still more daring than the above. And here is a third instance, which is quite different from the above two.
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.80
From the mother-child relation we shall pass on to images drawn from other human relations. But before doing that, here is a curious image drawn from midwifery. It is curious because one least expects a figure could be drawn from that profession; and it is curious because of its strange application:
Caught in a blind stone-grip Force worked its plan
And made in sleep this huge mechanical world,
That Matter might grow conscious of its soul
And like a busy midwife the life-power
Deliver the zero carrier of the All.81
Now we turn our attention to images based on other human relations, especially love, marriage, etc. It would appear queer that such figures should be woven into a poetry that is purely spiritual;
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for it is usually supposed that spirituality is something that should remain alove all such human relations, especially marriage and love between the opposite sexes. But we shall see that it is never the vital or grossly sexual love that is pictured in the images. Love has got many aspects and spirituality cannot reject such love in toto. In Sri Aurobindo's Yoga and Yogic spirituality everything that can be transformed into spiritual values is accepted and only that which cannot be so transformed is to be dropped. There are many things in love between the opposite sexes which can be so spiritualised and raised towards the Divine that they cease to be what they were and get transformed; all such things are taken up, without the least care for the conventional notions of what spirituality should be.
Occult behind this grosser Nature's walls,
A gossamer marriage-hall of Mind with Form
Is hidden by a tapestry of dreams...
A carnival of beauty crowds the heights
In that magic kingdom of ideal sight.
In its antechambers of splendid privacy
Matter and soul in conscious union meet
Like lovers in a lonely secret place:
In the clasp of a passion not yet unfortunate
They join their strength and sweetness and delight.82
And here is another one:
Power laid its head upon the breasts of Bliss.83
And yet another,
She has lured the Eternal into the arms of Time.84
And the following is a wonderful picture:
As if sitting near an open window's gap,
He read by lightning-flash on crowding flash
Chapters of her metaphysical romance
Of the soul's search for lost Reality...
The magnificent wrappings of her secrecy
That fold her desirable body out of sight...
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In her green wildernesses and lurking depths,
In her thickets of joy where danger clasps delight,
He glimpsed the hidden wings of her songster hopes,
A glimmer of blue and gold and scarlet fire...
In the sleepy splendour of her noons he saw,
A perpetual repetition through the hours,
Thought's dance of dragon-flies on mystery's stream
That skim but never test its murmurs' race,
And heard the laughter of her rose desires
Running as if to escape from longed-for hands.85
Not only such human relations of love and marriage, but even the criminal side of human nature, such as is displayed by plunderers and smugglers, becomes the source of beautiful images for the Spirit's poetry. In the following lines the image is applied to Inspiration that comes from the higher planes of our being:
Overleaping with a sole and perilous bound
The high black wall hiding superconscience,
She broke in with inspired speech for scythe
And plundered the Unknowable's vast estate.86
The following is a very peculiar figure:
His body glimmered like a skyey shell;
His gates to the world were swept with seas of light.
His earth, dowered with celestial competence,
Harboured a power that needed now no more
To cross the closed customs-line of mind and flesh
And smuggle godhead into humanity.87
Here is one image drawn from a social gathering where guests are invited:
In moments when the inner lamps are lit
And the life's cherished guests are left outside,
Our spirit sits alone and speaks to its gulfs.88
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Then, there is a somewhat similar image emphasising the vanity and futility of human happiness:
Here even the highest rapture Time can give
Is a mimicry of ungrasped beatitudes,
A mutilated statue of ecstasy...
Or a simulacrum of enforced delight
In the seraglios of Ignorance.89
Now we come to images drawn from Nature. Animals, birds, trees, ocean, sky, moon, are all taken by Sri Aurobindo and woven into images of lovely form and hue. Nature is usually the source from which almost all the poets draw their inspiration, but we see that in Sri Aurobindo she occupies a place quite unique; she breaks through all the conventional figures that have become so boring to us or have lost their significance because of over-use. In his hands the field of Nature becomes as it were a virgin piece of land ploughed for the first time and yielding a wonderful harvest:
A highland world of free and green delight
Where spring and summer lay together and strove
In indolent and amicable debate,
Inarmed, disputing with laughter who should rule.90
An insect hedonism fluttered and crawled
And basked in the sunlit Nature's surface thrills,
And dragon raptures, python agonies
Crawled in the marsh and mire and licked the sun.91
This is a wonderful series of figures drawn from insect and animal life in Nature. Here we may remind ourselves of another image from the same world, already quoted:
That skim but never test its murmurs' race.92
Images drawn from bird-life are also equally fresh and beautiful. Here is one from a long passage:
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He glimpsed the hidden wings of her songster hopes.93
The following is the image of a bird tired of ceaselessly remaining on the wing:
A prototypal deft Intelligence
Half-poised on equal wings of thought and doubt
Toiled ceaselessly twixt being's hidden ends.94
These are strange wings indeed for any bird. The next one is applied to the spirit of Savitri following Satyavan's soul:
Then flaming from her body's nest, alarmed,
Her violent spirit soared at Satyavan.95
And finally, there is a gorgeous image from bird-life:
Delight shall sleep in the cloud-net of her hair
And in her body as on his homing tree
Immortal Love shall beat his glorious wings.96
Then there are images drawn from animal-life.
The neighing pride of rapid life that roams
Wind-maned through our pastures, on my seeing mood
Cast shapes of swiftness...97
This image of a horse applied to life reminds us of the same image frequently used in the Veda. The next two images are both applied to the Desire-Mind of man. Sri Aurobindo also calls it, "A hunchback rider of the red Wild-Ass, A rash Intelligence... lionmaned."
A huge chameleon gold and blue and red
Turning to black and grey and lurid brown,
Hungry it stared from a mottled bough of life
To snap up insect joys, its favourite food,
The dingy sustenance of a sumptuous frame
Nursing the splendid passion of its hues.98
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What an apt and splendid image it is for the Desire-Mind wearing a thousand shapes and taking numberless names! The next one too is very appropriate:
A snake of flame with a dark cloud for tail,
Followed by a dream-brood of glittering thoughts,
A lifted head with many-tinged flickering crests,
It licked at knowledge with a smoky tongue.99
If this Desire-Mind is a chameleon and a snake, "pigmy thought", which is a "rivetter of Life of habit's grooves", is a watch-dog of the spirit's house; while human Reason is a bullock. We give here the image of the watch-dog in full:
Or in an ancient Night's dim environs
It dozes on a little courtyard's stones
And barks at every unfamiliar light
As at a foe who would break up its home,
A watch-dog of the spirit's sense-railed house
Against intruders from the Invisible,
Nourished on scraps of life and Matter's bones
In its kennel of objective certitude.100
This is an image marvellously conceived and superbly executed in its details. Reason is not simply a bullock dragging knowledge-bales, but is comparable to another animal as well:
By the power of sense and the idea and word
She ferrets out Nature's process, substance, cause.101
The image of horses is suggested in another place, where the subject is Life:
...she has stabled her dreams in Matter's courts.102
And another image from horse-racing is this:
Our minds are starters in the race to God.103
Next we have some images drawn from plant-life and flowers and gardening. The first one is applied to Life:
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Only she clung with her roots to the safe earth,
Thrilled dumbly to the shocks of ray and breeze
And put out tendril fingers of desire.104
The next one is a fine image pertaining to the lotus:
In gleaming clarities of amethyst air
The chainless and omnipotent Spirit of Mind
Brooded on the blue lotus of the Idea.l05
Then there is a lovely image following upon another lovely image (p. 405):
Mountains and trees stood there like thoughts from God.
Pranked butterflies, the conscious flowers of air.
And here is an equally vivid picture drawn in a single line:
He tore desire up from its bleeding roots.106
The following one is taken from gardening and is applied to the world of Falsehood:
There Good, a faithless gardener of God,
Watered with virtue the world's upas-tree
And, careful of the outward word and act,
Engrafted his hypocrite blooms on native ill.107
Then we take images drawn from natural scenery like mountains, sea, sky, moon, etc.
There walled apart by its own innemess
In a mystical barrage of dynamic light
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-maned waves to the Supreme
Ascended towards breadths immeasurable.108
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Another bunch of related images we have already noted and we shall not repeat them here. The following is a conventional image but used with a charm all its own:
Her body of beauty mooned the seas of bliss.109
Then there is a lovely mixed image:
An architect hewing out self s living rock,
Phenomenon built Reality's summer-house
On the beaches of the sea of Infinity."110
And the next one is a picture conjured up in a single line
A foam-leap travelling from the waves of bliss.'111
And another one:
Deep glens of joy ad crooning waterfalls.112
And still another:
... imagination's comet trail of dream.113
The following is an image partly drawn from Nature and partly human life, and somewhat reminiscent of Shelley and Francis Thompson:
The nude God-children in their play-fields ran
Smiting the winds with splendour and with speed;
Of storm and sun they made companions,
Sported with the white mane of tossing seas.114
This image of playfields occurs elsewhere in a different context:
The little plot of our mortality
Touched by this tenant from the heights became
A playground of the living Infinite.115
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There are two beautiful images taken from agriculture. The first is applied to Inspiration, in which she is called.
A gleaner of infinitesimal grains of Truth,
A sheaf-binder of infinite experience.116
The second is applied to man:
A lightning from the heights that think and plan,
Ploughing the air of life with vanishing trails,
Man, sole awake in an unconscious world,
Aspires in vain to change the cosmic dream.117
In the image of grains we have "grains of Truth" (p. 39), while quite in opposite is the case of the "early being" described in the following thus:
Its treacherous elements spread like slippery grains
Hoping the incoming Truth might stumble and fall.118
There are two images of passport, which are quite different from each other:
Assigned to meet the cosmic mystery
In the dumb figure of material world,
His passport of entry false and his personage,
He is compelled to be what he is not.119
This is the description of the plight of man and so is the next:
Our spirits depart discarding a futile life
Into the black unknown or with them take
Death's passport into immortality.120
There are two images which somewhat resemble each other:
A mounting endless possibility
Climbs high upon a topless ladder of dream.121
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Page 381
The second one shows the stair of Time:
And things long known and actions always done
Are to its clinging hold a balustrade
Of safety on the perilous stair of Time.122
This figure is applied to the "pigmy habitual Thought" we have referred to before. The next image relates to the greater life.
Across a luminous dream of spirit-space
She builds creation like a rainbow bridge
Between the original Silence and the Void.123
This idea of creation becoming a bridge between the Silence and the Void is a lovely idea. The double image of bridge and rainbow is extremely happy and full of significance.
There is another pair or ideas which also is equally beautiful and equally apt:
The Immobile's ocean-silence saw him pass,
An arrow leaping through eternity
Suddenly shot from the tense bow of Time.124
This refers to the Traveller of the Worlds, King Aswapati. The originality of the image of the arrow shot from the bow of Time is very striking. A very similar image is to be found in the following line:
In every hour loosed from the quiver of Time
There rose a song of new discovery,
A bow-twang's hum of young experiment.125
In the first it is the image of bow that is applied to Time, while in this second it is the image of quiver. But there all the resemblance stops. For the arrow in the first case is Aswapati himself and he is shown to be leaping out of Time into the Timeless Eternity, while in the second case it is the hour that is the arrow. In the next image also there is wonderful freshness:
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Page 382
Alone he moved watched by the infinity
Around him and the Unknowable above.126
And the sense of immensity it suggests stirs the profoundest depths of our being. A similar feeling is stirred within us when we read:
The dire velamen and the bottomless crypt
Between which life and thought for ever move,
Forbidden still to cross the dim dread bounds,
The guardian darknesses mute and formidable,
Empowered to cricumscribe the wingless spirit
In the boundaries of Mind and Ignorance,
Vanished rescinding their enormous role:
Once figure of creation's vain ellipse,
The expanding zero lost its giant curve...
A boundless being in a measureless Time
Invaded Nature with the infinite;
He saw unpathed, unwalled his titan scope.127
The image of two fires joining with each other is seen in two places, but in quite different moods and contexts:
Emotion clasped emotion in two hearts,
They felt each other's thrill in the flesh and nerves
Or melted each in each and grew immense
As when two houses burn and fire joins fire.128
Yet were there regions where these absolutes met
And made a circle of bliss with married hands;
Light stood embraced by light, fire wedded fire.129
Now we shall take some other images which could not be taken in groups, but are exceedingly beautiful. The first one is a mixed figure:
The black Inconscient swung its dragon tail
Lashing a slumberous Infinite by its force
Into the deep obscurities of form:
Death lay beneath him like a gate of sleep.130
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Page 383
This is a very daring picture and a very suggestive one too.
A finer substance in a subtler mould
Embodies the divinity earth but dreams;
Its strength can overtake joy's running feet;
Overleaping the fixed hurdles set by Time,
The rapid net of an intuitive clasp
Captures the fugitive happiness we desire.131
In these six lines or, rather, in the last four of them, there are more than one image huddled together. Time receives many images, each lovelier than the other. Here are some:
Out of that formless like stuff Time mints his shapes.132
Like a song of pleasure on the lips of Time.133
Talking of Time, we may mention two images applied to days:
This brilliant courtyard of the House of Days.134
A fortunate gait of days in tranquil air.135
The image of a ship foundering occurs in two places:
A fruitful world-wide Ignorance foundered there.136
In the second place where it is used there is a double image:
His self-bound nature foundered as in fire.137
The image of a house also is used twice. Once in the following lines, where it is a mixed image:
Our mind is a house haunted by the slain past,
Ideas soon mummified, ghosts of old truths,
God's spontaneities tied with formal strings
And packed into drawers of reason's trim bureau,
A grave of great lost opportunities,
Or an office for misuse of soul and life.138
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Page 384
And again in:
He saw in Night the Eternal's shadowy veil,
Knew death for a cellar of the house of life.
In destruction felt creation's hasty pace.139
The following lines refer to the "agents of shadowy Force" of evil:
The doors of God they have locked with keys of creed
And shut out by the Law his tireless Grace.
Along all Nature's lines they have set their posts
And intercept the caravans of Light.140
Then there is a beautiful image drawn from colonisation:
Ourselves are citizens of that mother State,
Adventurers, we have colonised Matter's night.
But now our rights are barred, our passports void;
We live self-exiled from our heavenlier home.141
The mother State referred to here is the Kingdom of the Greater or Ideal Mind. We may note, in passing, the image of passport given here and compare it with the two already given earlier.
And here is a modernist image of exquisite beauty utilised for spiritual ends; it is applied to 'a subtle archangel race', 'theoricians of unknowable truths', on one of the levels of the Greater Mind:
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
Was traced, its secrets hunted down, and read
The unknown pathology of the Unique.142
In the fourth line in the above quotation we get an image which is
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Page 385
a miracle one for Nature's dance. There is another strangely mixed image drawn from the art of dancing, this time the combination being made of Eastern and Western imagery:
Creation and destruction waltzed inarmed
On the bosom of a torn and quaking earth;
All reeled into a world of Kali's dance.143
From these images taken from dancing, we go to an image drawn from drama and stage:
No wandering ray of Heaven can enter there.
Armoured, protected by their lethal masks,
As in a studio of creative Death
The giant sons of Darkness sit and plan The drama
of the earth, their tragic stage.144
We have already seen some images applied to human Reason. Here is one more taken from science:
Arriving late from a far plane of thought...
Came Reason, the squat godhead artisan,
To her narrow house upon a ridge in Time-
Armed with her lens and measuring-rod and probe,
She looked upon an object universe
And the multitudes that in it live and die
And the body of Space and the fleeing soul of Time,
And took the earth and stars into her hands
To try what she could make of these strange things.145
And another image also applied to Reason, is the following:
At will she spaces in thin air of mind
like maps in the school-house of intellect hung,
Forcing wide Truth into a narrow scheme,
Her numberless warring strict philosphies.146
An effective image is:
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Page 386
A piston brain pumps out the shapes of thought.147
And a quite unexpected image and a daring one at that, is:
A million faces wears her knowledge here
And every face is turbaned with a doubt.148
Our world's comparison to a gaol is beautifully given in the following lines:
A gaol is this immense material world.
Across each road stands armed a stone-eyed law,
At every gate the huge dim sentinels pace.
A grey tribunal of the Ignorance,
An Inquisition of the priests of Night
In judgment sit on the adventurer soul,
And the dual tables and the Karmic norm
Restrain the Titan in us and the God.149
The next image is applied to life:
Chance she has chosen and danger for playfellows;
Fate's dreadful swing she has taken for cradle and seat.150
Fate becomes a cradle, mind becomes a nursery in which Nature and soul carry on their play:
A blindfold search and wrestle and fumbling clasp
Of a half-seen Nature and a hidden Soul,
A game of hide and seek in twilit rooms,
A play of love and hate and fear and hope
Continues in the nursery of mind
Its hard and heavy romp of self-bom twins.151
Nature and soul play on their game of hide and seek in the nursery of human's mind, but it is equally true that,
His life is a blind-man's-buff, a hide-and-seek.152
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Is this play aimless or is there any purpose behind it? There must be some purpose behind all these multitudinous events that happen in the universe, but as yet are
only seen foulness and force,
The secret crawl of consciousness to light
Through a fertile slime of lust and battening sense,
Beneath the body's crust of thickened self
A tardy fervent working in the dark,
The turbid yeast of Nature's passionate change,
Ferment of the soul's creation out of mire.153
Fate is taken by life not only for cradle but also for seat. But the seat of Aswapati is very unique;
In the unapproachable stillness of his soul,
Intense, one-pointed, monumental, lone
Patient he sat like an incarnate hope
Motionless on a pedestal of prayer.154
There is a very fine image in the description of Aswapati's descent into light:
In rejected heaps by a monotonous road
The old simple delights were left to lie
On the wasteland of life's descent to Night.155
In those "menacing realms" of Night, "guarded like termite cities from the sun" (p. 216),
Assailed by thoughts that swarmed like spectral hordes,
A prey to the staring phantoms of the gloom
And terror approaching with its lethal mouth,
Driven by a strange will down ever down,
The sky above a communiqué of Doom,
He strove to shield his spirit from despair.156
Before reaching the "large lucent realms of Mind", Aswapati
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Page 388
...met a silver-grey expanse,
Where Day and Night had wedded and were one...
A coalition of uncertainties...
On a ground reserved for doubt and reasoned guess,
A rendezvous of Knowledge with Ignorance.151
Quite different is the picture given of Aswapati when he reaches the final part of his Sadhana and feels the presence of the Divine Mother.
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.158
But perhaps the most gorgeous description in the whole poem (so far published, May 1951) is that in which Aswapati describes to the Divine Mother what he saw. Figure after figure, image after image, "come crowding down" with the spendour of the "marvellous dawn" mentioned therein. Here is the description:
I saw the Omnipotent's flaming pioneers
Over the heavenly verge which turns towards life
Come crowding down the amber stairs of birth;
Forerunners of a divine multitude
Out of the paths of the morning star they came
Into the little room of mortal life.
I saw them cross the twilight of an age,
The sun-eyed children of a marvellous dawn,
The great creators with wide brows of calm,
The massive barrier-breakers of the world
And wrestlers with destiny in her lists of will,
The labourers in the quarries of the gods,
The messengers of the Incommunicable,
the architects of immortality.
Into the fallen human sphere they came,
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Page 389
Faces that wore the Immortal's glory still,
Voices that communed still with the thoughts of God,
Bodies made beautiful by the Spirit's light,
Carrying the magic word, the mystic fire,
Carrying the Dionysian cup of joy,
Approaching eyes of a diviner man,
Lips chanting an unknown anthem of the soul,
Feet echoing in the corridors of Time.
High priests of wisdom, sweetness, might and bliss,
Discoverers of beauty's sunlit ways
And swimmers of Love's laughing fiery floods
And dancers within raptures golden doors.159
And here is a gorgeous imagery of Shiva applied to nature, reminding us of similar images of the poet Magha in his great Sanskrit poem:
A matted forest-head invaded heaven
As if a blue-throated ascetic peered
From the stone fastness of his mountain cell
Regarding the brief gladness of the days.160
And another image is
The morning like a lustrous seer above.161
Which is followed closely by another exquisite image:
As if a wicket-gate to joy were
there Ringed in with voiceless hint and magic sign,
Upon the margin of an unknown world
Reclined the curve of a sun-held recess.162
And a little farther:
Life ran to gaze from every gate of sense.163
And a crowning one,
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Page 390
...this celestial summary of delight,
Thy golden body...164
Descriptions of Nature in the forest are teeming with splendour-dripping images:
I witnessed the virgin bridals of the dawn
Behind the glowing curtains of the sky
Or vying in joy with the bright morning's steps
I paced along the slumberous coasts of mom,
Or the gold desert of the sunlight crossed
Traversing great wastes of splendour and of fire...
I have beheld the princes of the Sun
Burning in thousand-pillared homes of light.165
And another equally lovely description is:
Close is my father's creepered hermitage
Screened by the tall ranks of these silent kings,
Sung to by voices of the hue-robed choirs
Whose chants repeat transcribed in music's notes
The passionate coloured lettering of the boughs.166
And the last one:
Apparelled are the moms in gold and green,
Sunlight and shadow tapestry the walls
To make a resting chamber fit for thee.167
And finally,
As if Love's deathless moment had been found,
A pearl within eternity's white shell.168
Here we end our perusal of Sri Aurobindo's imagery in Savitri. These are only a few among the thousands of images which form
A caravan of the inexhaustible
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Page 391
Formations of a boundless Thought and Force.169
And we also feel that to Sri Aurobindo,
As if to a deeper country of the soul
Transposing the vivid imagery of earth,
Through an inner seeing and sense a waking came.170
For Savitri is no composition of an ordinary poet, but that of a Poet and Seer of the Supermind, chosen by the Divine for the fulfilment of the next step in the evolution of mankind.
RAJANIKANT MODY
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Page 392
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