On Savitri
THEME/S
-l-
All Sri Aurobindo's works lead up to Savitri: A Legend and A Symbol. He had been at work upon the poem for years, made several revisions. A work by itself unlike all the others, was the author's own considered view, not to be treated lightly. Yet he was aware that, for a long time to come, the appeal of the poem might be limited. The divided modem consciousness cannot experience, much less unify different levels of reality, it is this that largely explains the lack of response. The easiest way out of the difficulty is to describe the poem as philosophical and leave it at that. The charge might have some ground when applied to the earlier writings, but not now. The theme, the legend or the story, of a faithful wife who brings back to life her dead husband, is of course familiar. Then where does the difficulty lie? The difficulty comes from the subjective or symbolical dimension given to the story. Its absence of outward action, the prolonged but profound interior dialogues, the massive flashbacks, the timeless stance, call for "another breathing."1 But the symbol, symbol of what? The poem, which is its own best commentary, should make that clear. Its inner motive is one with the motive of all art: immortality. As Sri Aurobindo phrases, it is "the end of Death, the death of Ignorance." What Sri Aurobindo is concerned with is not an allegory, a philosophy or a doctrine but experience. Indeed, there lurks about the poem, and his long labour upon it, a prophetic note, of the shape of things to come. Psychologically viewed, he had to write it, the "inner epic" of which he had spoken in The Future Poetry. In the words of that eminent exegete, K. D. Sethna: "To create a poetic mould equally massive and multiform as The Life Divine... . such a task is incumbent on one who stands as the maker of a new spiritual epoch. Scattered and short pieces of poetry cannot build that sustained Weltanschauung required for putting a permanent stamp upon the times. Nothing except an epic or a drama can. Savitri is, from every angle the right correlate" to Sri
1Rilke's phrase. Poetry, he said, calls for "another breathing", an idea tantalisingly close lo the yogic hypothesis.
Aurobindo's total effort and status as a poet, its crown jewel. In the body of this single, encompassing poem he has revealed or restored a whole world. Come what may, he will be known as the Poet of Savitri.
As it is, not many have read the poem or read it aright. Even those who are well up in the Aurobindean lore fight shy of it, else they tend to reduce it to a kind of sacred canon. Little attempt has been made so far to relate it — the poetry of tomorrow, as the Mother once said — with world literature or stress its significance for the future man.
The poem no doubt demands a discipline of its own, a capacity for subjective experience and the Mysteries, and the symbolic imagination. This capacity the modem mind has more or less lost, else looks upon the loss itself as progress. This explains in a large measure the lack of understanding and interpretation. The inward and upward look has become alien to us and Savitri's reader soon finds himself on another terrain, "adventurer and cosmologist of a magic earth's obscure geography." The obscure geography is not without, but within; also whatever happens within lights up and is related to the outside. Not only is the inner voyage real in itself but it makes real, correlates everything else in the life we lead on the surface. Sri Aurobindo's unfailing capacity to clarify Existence puts every other poet into the shade. By the side of Savitri there is no poetry that does not appear a shade superficial.2
Roughly, there are two journeys in the book — of father and daughter. The first makes possible the incarnation of the heroine ("A world's desire compelled her mortal birth,") the second prepares the resurrection of Satyavan: "Built is the golden tower, the flame child born." Between the two journeys there are differences, but in both the archetypal worlds or levels of the Self have been 'realised'. In Savitri Sri Aurobindo had added a new dimension to modem poetry, enlarged the doors of perception beyond belief. But in order to receive we need to be almost the poet's equal.
Few of us will claim the poet's stance and sustaining power:
A colonist from immortality...
A skyward being nourishing its roots
2 See: "However various the donnèes of literature, the basic question is and will remain: what is Man?" Georg Lukacs, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, p. 19.
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On sustenance from occult spiritual founts
Climbed through white rays to meet an unseen Sun.3
for the story or the legend, it is too simple to be missed. But one does not read Sri Aurobindo's Savitri for the story but for what lies behind, the symbol. And what may that be and its system of occult correspondence, "the reading of the text of without from within"?
A subjective poem, Savitri demands a different order of sensibility, an inwardness that is uncommon. To many it will appear as abstruse and obscure, at best philosophising. Sri Aurobindo — who once said he was "never, never a philosopher" — does not believe in taking away the poet's right to think, but he does not accept philosophy qua philosophy in poetry as either necessary or as a mark of superior virtue. But in Savitri he is not engaged in versifying doctrine, esoteric or otherwise. What he is doing is quite different, he is giving the ground plan of the cosmic reality on many interrelated levels as he has seen and known it. Considering that he is dealing with the order of the worlds (the World-Stair) and its corresponding hierarchy in the consciousness of man, the poem could not have been plainer. In fact, nothing is more striking than the poem's visionary and interpretative power, which some have mistaken as a prosaic element. Sri Aurobindo is at once a master of experience and exegesis. But what is the ordering principle? It should not be too difficult for the right reader to find out that Savitri's encyclopaedia of symbols is best understood in terms of the "infinite Identity, the multiple Unity" of the Self. If this is unacceptable the reader had better leave the poem aside.
As Krishnaprem put it so well: "Savitri is neither fantasy nor yet mere philosophical thought, but vision and revelation of the actual structure of the inner Cosmos and of the pilgrim of life within its sphere — the Stairway of the Worlds reveals itself to our gaze — worlds of Light above, worlds of Darkness beneath — and we see also ever-encircling life ('kindled in measure and quenched in measure') ascending that stair under the calm unwinking gaze of the Cosmic Gods who shine forth now as of old. Poetry is indeed the full manifestation of the Logos and, when as here, it is no mere iridescence dependent on some special standpoint, but the wondrous structure of the mighty Cosmos, the
3Savitri, pp. 22-23.
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'Adored One', that is revealed, then in truth does it manifest its full, its highest grandeur.77
Also, as he adds: "Such poetry can be written either in the early days before the rise to power of self-conscious mind or when the particular cycle has run its course and life establishes itself once more in the unity beyond, this time with the added range and power that has been gained during the reign of mind. It is an omen of the utmost significance and hope that in these years of darkness and despair such a poem as Savitri should have appeared." How one wishes that the literary pundits had shown as much understanding of the poem's motif and manner! Savitri may need a little effort but it is worth the carriage. After all, the poem is addressed to us, to "the powers that sleep unused within man." At some level we are all involved in the poem's action, engagé. Here a whole lost tradition has come alive in a modem idiom, and nothing is so striking as the richness of its images and metaphors and what these point to. With its integral image of Man, and its profound awareness of human becoming and destiny, seen against the stark background of an intense inner drama without pause or cease, concentrating centuries of development, here is an oecumenical poem, the inner epic of Man, its "harmonic order of the self s vastitudes," "the structured visions of the cosmic Self." This many-levelled order and exploration of the cosmic Self is the poem's own milieu, and its free gift to all who are able or willing to claim it. Like his own Aswapati, the poet is our Representative Man. Sometimes "one life is charged with earth's destiny."
Does this intense and abundant subjectivity mean that the action of the poem is wholly static? On the contrary. Things are always happening, even if the events are psychic rather than physical. And the action does not take place 'out there', to 'other' people. Both events and dramatis personae are within us. We are its locale and our lives its grand theatre. As Sri Aurobindo is careful to indicate, the poem's action takes place in an inner or soul-space, soul-scene, in "a larger self that lives within us, by ourselves unseen." It is part of the poem's achievement that it makes the larger self and the unseen realities vivid presences and the reader also feels that "his self s infinities begin to emerge." The poem is a continued evocation or illumination in depth, it "illumines every important concern of man."
But the psychological, subjective or occult emphasis should not make us forget the human side of the poem and the protagonist.
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The appeal of certain passages, not too few, is a fact of immediate experience. Even if the action, the plunge into the inner realm, the long encounter and debate with Death and Nothingness, is seen under the aspect of a cosmic drama or myth, the poem's main theme is love, may be love of a rarer birth. Sri Aurobindo calls it in the opening Book the drama of Earth, Love and Doom. The drama unrolls itself through a psychological rather than a time sequence. Its "endless moment" is also forever — again, a symbol rather than a legend. The symbolic content and enrichment are Sri Aurobindo's very own, a sign of superior sensibility and his affiliation with the seer-poets of old. Here is poetry such as the Rishis wrote or might write. It follows that the poem's basic or real theme is "the soul's search for lost Reality," or immortality, to which the poet restores its original meaning. In spite of its range of subjective explorations, the core of the poem remains dramatic, depending on a supreme change, challenge and choice. A death followed by a debate or encounter, or in its simplest term, a supreme crisis provides the backdrop of the "inner epic". The order of the worlds lends its own depth and massive reality, not as an imaginary or imagined decoration but as of the very substance of enlarging experience.
No wonder the action involves the fate of man rather than of this or that man. And the finale? The poet is explicit on that issue. The drama of destiny or deification can have but one denouement:
The end of Death, The death of Ignorance.4
This may sound rather eschatological. But in truth the poem is a dramatic myth set against a cosmic background. A single gonglike sentence at the end of the very first Canto is enough to set the pace:
This was the day when Satyavan must die.5
Satyavan's death is not the end but the beginning of the encounter, reminiscent of Orphic archetypes that the mind can never forget or disown, archetypes that return and resurrect at every crisis. What is involved in the poem's myth is the deepest longing of the heart and the imagination, — and more than imagination, if the evidence of the poem is any proof. As we read it we have a feeling that an ancient Mystery — "the sun-word of an ancient Mystery's sense"
4 Ibid., p. 708. 5 Ibid., p. 10.
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— is being enacted before our eyes. How bare and original the confrontation can be the reader will see through nearly half the length of a fairly long poem. The hint had been dropped early that:
Her soul's debate with embodied Nothingness
Must be wrestled out on a dangerous dim background:
Her being must confront its formless Cause,
Against the universe weigh its single self...
In the world's death-cave uphold life's helpless claim
And vindicate her right to be and love.6
Later, when Savitri sticks to her choice to marry the doomed Satyavan, Narad anticipates the turn of events, her solitary wager with destiny:
A day may come when she must stand unhelped
On a dangerous brink of the world's doom and hers,
Carrying the world's future on her lonely breast,
Carrying the human hope in a heart left sole
To conquer or fail on a last desperate verge...
Where all is won or all is lost for man.
In that tremendous silence lone and lost
Of a deciding hour in the world's fate,
In her soul's climbing beyond mortal time
When she stands sole with Death and sole with God
Apart upon a silent desperate brink
Alone with her self and death and destiny
As on some verge between Time and Timelessness
When being must end or life rebuild its base,
Alone she must conquer or alone must fall...
Cry not to heaven, for she alone can save.7
Nothing could be plainer nor, to the eye of vision, more prophetic. This, then is the stark issue: of "self and death and destiny." There are also numerous collateral issues, martyrdom, for instance. Why does, why need Satyavan die and how is his death "the spirit's opportunity"? For such as are looking for autobiography, is the poet to be identified with Aswapati or with Satyavan, or both? Perhaps we shall never wholly know, unless we too dare to go along the ancient Path, the path of "the dark mysterious sacrifice." Incidentally, the following passage comes as close to a deeply felt
6 Ibid., p. 12. 7 Ibid., p. 461.
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rationale of the Crucifixion as one may hope to get from a non-Christian imagination. A half-veiled autobiographical hint but adds to the Mystery:8
He who would save the race must share its pain:
This he shall know who obeys the grandiose urge.
The great who came to save this suffering world
And rescue out of Time's shadow and the Law,
Must pass beneath the yoke of grief and pain...
The Son of God bom as the Son of man
Has drunk the bitter cup, owned Godhead's debt,
The debt the Eternal owes to the fallen kind
His will has bound to death and straggling life
That yearns in vain for rest and endless peace.
Now is the debt paid, wiped off the original score.
The Eternal suffers in a human form,
He has signed salvation's testament with his blood:
He has opened the doors of his undying peace.
The Deity compensates the creature's claim,
The Creator bears the law of pain and death;
A retribution smites the incarnate God.
His love has paved the mortal's road to Heaven:
He has given his life and light to balance here
The dark account of mortal ignorance.
It is finished, the dread mysterious sacrifice.9
But martyrdom by itself is incomplete; part of a deeper mystery it points to resurrection. An allied theme of the poem, on which the action hangs, is resurrection, the resurrection of Satyavan, the soul of the world, telos. Not defiance of the Law, not personal desire, but Grace alone can do the miracle, some descent of the Supreme. This exactly is what Savitri, the Eternal Feminine, the World Mother, represents. "Fate shall be changed by an unchanging Will," the World Mother had assured the aspiring Aswapati. And to Death Himself, Savitri, her deputy, throws the deathless challenge:
I am stronger than death and greater than my fate;
My love shall outlast the world, doom falls from me
Helpless against my immortality.
8 One wonders why the Eighth Book, The Book of Death, was left incomplete by the poet.
9 Savitri, p. 445.
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Fate's law may change, but not my spirit's will.10
Thus the epic moves beyond tragedy, but not in terms of a sentimental family reunion. Rather is it a prelude to the coming of a new order, a new life or race, a possibility, when
The Spirit shall look out through Matter's gaze
And Matter shall reveal the Spirit's face.11
The Mighty Mother shall take birth in Time
And God be bom into the human clay
In forms made ready by your human lives.12
The apocalyptic strain should not make us overlook the fact that Savitri is primarily a poem of love and Sri Aurobindo a poet of love. This is true not only of Book Five, called The Book of Love, but of the poem as a whole, its major motive. Let a few, less metaphysically burdened excerpts show. To the young heroine
Here with the suddenness divine advents have,
Repeating the marvel of the first descent,
Changing to rapture the dull earthly round,
Love came to her hiding the shadow, Death.13
Later, when Savitri's father sends her out to seek "the unknown lover" he speaks of both the agony and ecstasy of love:
Depart where love and destiny call your charm.
Venture through the deep world to find thy mate.
For somewhere on the longing breast of earth,
Thy unknown lover waits for thee unknown....
Then shall you grow like vibrant kindred harps,
One in the beats of difference and delight,
Responsive in divine and equal strains,
Discovering new notes of the eternal theme.
One force shall be your mover and your guide,
One light shall be around you and within;
Hand in strong hand confront Heaven's question, life:
Challenge the ordeal of the immense disguise.14
But when she returns and speaks of her choice of Satyavan, who has but one year to live, the disconsolate parents try to dissuade her.
10Ibid., p. 432. 11Ibid., p. 709. 12Ibid., p. 705. 13Ibid.., p. 14.
34 bid., pp. 374-75.
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How does she react? She speaks simply:
My father, I have chosen. This is done... .15
I have discovered my glad reality
Beyond my body in another's being:
I have found the deep unchanging soul of love...
My spirit has glimpsed the glory for which it came...
My eternity clasped by his eternity
And, tireless of the sweet abysms of Time,
Deep possibility always to love.
This, this is first, last joy and to its throb
The riches of a thousand fortunate years
Are a poverty. Nothing to me are death and grief...
If for a year, that year is all my life.
And yet I know this is not all my fate
Only to live and love awhile and die.16
To Death's repeated importunities to cease from the hope and the vain attempt to have Satyavan back to life this is what she says, thrice:
And silently the woman's heart replied:
"Thy peace, O Lord, a boon within to keep
Amid the roar and ruin of wild Time
For the magnificent soul of man on earth.
Thy calm, O Lord, that bears thy hands of joy."
And passionately the woman's heart replied:
"Thy energy, Lord, to seize on woman and man,
To take all things and creatures in their grief
And gather them into a mother's arms."
Then all the woman yearningly replied:
"Thy embrace which rends the living knot of pain,
Thy joy, O Lord, in which all creatures breathe,
Thy magic flowing waters of deep love,
Thy sweetness give to me for earth and men."17
Compassionate, "a wonderful mother of countless souls," yet courageous, she hurls at the dread Lord of Death her mahāvākyas, the great words: lam, I love, I see, I act, I will. And, when, finally, she has won her heart's desire, what does she tell her amazed, awakened husband? Only this:
15 Ibid., p. 424. 16Ibid., p. 435. 17 Ibid., pp. 696-97.
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Let us go through this new world that is the same.
For it is given back, but it is known,
A playing-ground and dwelling-house of God
Who hides himself in bird and beast and man
Sweetly to find himself again by love,
By oneness____18
That 'sweetly' is surely a master touch. Of such is the kingdom of "the eternal bridegroom and the eternal bride." To read Savitri, as it ought to be read, is to be present at the marriage of time and eternity, the bridal of Spirit and Matter. It is to be bom anew, level after level.
He stood alone on a high roof of things
And saw the light of a spiritual sun.
Aspiring he transcends his earthly self;
He stands in the largeness of his soul new-bom
Redeemed from encirclement by mortal things
And moves in a pure free spiritual realm
As in the rare breath of a stratosphere.19
When poetry can do that, what more does one ask for? As Raymond Piper put it: "We know that we must resort to the art of poetry for expressing to the fullest possible artistic limits, the yearning and battles of mankind for eternal life. I venture the judgement that Savitri is the most comprehensive cosmic poem ever composed. It ranges symbolically from a primordial cosmic void, through earth's darkness ad struggle, to the highest realm of spiritual existence, and illumines every important concern of man, through verse of unparalleled massiveness, magnificence and metaphorical brilliance. Savitri is perhaps the most powerful artistic work in the world for expanding man's mind." Any one who has read the poem with an open mind will agree.
The first thing to do, then, is to read it, as it should be read, as the epic of tomorrow, "this Legend of the Past that is a Symbol of the Future." As one shall read it, at every step the reader will find that the poet is there to help him. And when that shall happen, all else will be added unto him
No one who goes through the Aurobindean corpus can deny his claim to be counted among world poets. The corpus is impressive both in quantity and quality. As for the yogic life, the Wisdom of
18Ibid., p. 720. 19 Ibid., p. 486.
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the East, that too does not entail any abandonment or weakening of the poetic impulse. On the contrary, it brings in a new tone and range, characteristic of the author. While his earlier works would be considered as accomplished and promising, the later poetry opens up a new world and a new language. True, the philosophic strain is too pervasive to disappear at once or wholly but in the main it is vision rather than reflection that is the mark of the later yogic and mystical poetry. "Out of thought we must leap up to sight." Or, as he says elsewhere in Savitri:
And with a silver cry of opening gates
Sight's lightnings leaped into the invisible.20
It is a pity that, in spite of the fairly explicit statements, the poem should remain unread, unappreciated and inaccessible to the many, even to poets. Even when "staring at the frontiers of the Infinite," there is nothing deliberately difficult or obscure about Sri Aurobindo's poetry. Nor is it a blank Infinite; rather is it related to what is happening here and now. The poetry is part of a living whole, a "complete existence". The total self, the complete individual, as Sri Aurobindo says, "is the cosmic individual, since only when we have taken the universe into ourselves — and transcended it — can our individuality be complete." In The Future Poetry he had noted: "To find our self and the self of things is not to go through a rarefied ether of thought into Nirvana, but to discover the whole greatest integral power of our complete existence." It is this integral power or unification of fields, bhumis, that distinguishes Sri Aurobindo from idealising poets. It is a mistake to look upon his reconciling and fusing vision and its interpretative power as a purely prosaic element.
Never does the poet lose his balance or firm control, and the outward balance is the index of an inward grace or victory. Whatever happens,
A deep spiritual calm no touch can sway
Upholds the mystery of the Passion-play.
The serenity, and authenticity, of such soul-states, their noetic nuances, are an addition to the world's poetry. To an unprejudiced reader their relevance for the renewal of man ought to be obvious. Sri Aurobindo's later poetry marks an ontological re-discovery
20Ibid., p. 31.
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and triumph. Briefly, he has helped us to get rid of the false view of man which has dominated history for the last four hundred years or so. And this widening, liberating experience, his "self-discovery's flaming witnesses", he has freely shared with us. Savitri remains a challenge and an opportunity to enter into the "kingdom of the seer". One can only wonder at the discipline that must have gone to its making:
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.21
The recovery or revelation of "the secret face that is our own" brings in the world of the adept and the yogi, a world of pure perception* into the modem consciousness and opens up a new possibility for a modem, subjective, hieratic poetry, subjective but profoundly real: "A self-discovery that could never cease." It is a discovery which all of us have to make, one way or the other. In his Cosmic Art of India Radhakamal Mukherjee has pointed out that the image of Man in the art of India reflects the moods, tensions and transcendences of his real Self or Being. Only that ageing enfant terrible, the positivist, allergic as well as ignorant, will deny the value of what Sri Aurobindo has called "Mantras of the Real". Only in so far as we admit this possibility, and with this evidence before us there is little else one can do, can there be hope for poetry or hope for man. The hope of the race lies, as our poet-critic has
The gifts of the spirit crowding came to him;
They were his life's pattern and privilege.
A pure perception lent its lucent joy:
Its intimate vision waited not to think;
It enveloped all Nature in a single glance,
It looked into the very self of things.22
21 Ibid., p. 28. 22 Ibid., p. 26.
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said elsewhere, in "the fidelity of its intellect to the larger perceptions it now has of the greater self of humanity, the turning of its will to the inception of delivering forms of thought, art and social endeavour which arise from these perceptions and the raising of the intellectual mind to the intuitive supra-intellectual consciousness which alone can give the basis for a spiritualised life of the race and the realisation of its divine potentialities." If that is so, Sri Aurobindo's role as an awakener is beyond question. Not to see the truth for what it is is to declare oneself insensitive:
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.23
To read Sri Aurobindo is once more to believe. More than that, it is to be aware, aware on all levels. As for the ordeals that await the adventurer soul, few poets have known these more than the poet of transformation, how and why
The Dragon of the dark foundations keeps
Unalterable the law of Chance and Death;
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.24
It is an ancient secret: the descent into the underworld known to all wayfarers. "None can reach heaven who has not passed through hell."25 Out of the encounter with the "abodes of the dead" there rises the star of a new creation, tender and terrible:
O star of creation pure and free,
Halo-moon of ecstasy unknown,
Storm-breath of the soul-change yet to be,
Ocean-self enraptured and alone!26
But alone is company enough, since the poet, a cosmic man, is one with the cosmic consciousness. Not only does he "carry the
23 Ibid., p. 210. 24 Ibid., p. 336. 25 Ibid., p. 227.
26 Collected Poems, SABCL, Vol. 5, p. 572.
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sorrow of millions in his lonely breast," but
In rare and lucent intervals of hush
Into a signless region he could soar
Packed with the deep contents of formlessness
Where world was into a single being rapt
And all was known by the light of identity
And spirit was its own self-evidence.27
Sri Aurobindo's poetry is a celebration of this self-evidence. Instead of the settled anarchy of all things, he has proposed a new centre of the creative self, a luminous totality, in brief, the New Being.
It is this strongly held idea — more than an idea, a vision — of human evolution that distinguishes Sri Aurobindo's later poems. The experience has been expressed in a variety of ways, an encyclopaedia of insights, clear, consistent, rewarding:
I saw my soul a traveller through Time;
From life to life the cosmic way it trod,
Obscure in the depths and on the heights sublime,
Evolving from the worm into the god.2K
Again:
My senses change into gold gates of bliss;
An ecstasy thrills through touch and sound and sight
Flooding the blind material stream's dull ease:
My darkness answers to his call of Light.29
From all this we should not hastily conclude that the poet is only an idealising agent wanting in a sense of the actual, a mistake frequently made. Sri Aurobindo has given every aspect of reality or experience its full share. "All is there, even God's opposites." As he once explained in a letter: The poem Savitri "expresses or tries to express a total and many-sided vision and experience of all the planes of being and their action upon each other." He who had written in The Synthesis of Yoga that "by contact with the facts of life Art attains to vitality" would not himself play truant. The conditions needed for acquiring and stabilising the new poise or consciousness cannot be unknown to him. The alchemist of consciousness does not quarrel with his material, is not easily put
27 Savitri, p. 31. 28 Collected Poems, SABCL, Vol. 5, p. 147.
29 Ibid., p. 144.
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out by the so-called contradictions and difficulties. Indeed his whole labour, as poet and yogi, has been to mediate between the truth of life and the truth of the spirit. Poery and art, he has told us, are bom mediators between the immaterial and the material, the spirit and life. This cannot be done by working on or from the surface. The meeting of opposites is within and above. In these poems Sri Aurobindo calls us into "the unborn skies". If this involves a certain inwardness or subjectivity that is as it should be. After all, as Sri Aurobindo is there to show, the ascent of poetry is the ascent to self:
Only when we have climbed above ourselves...
The Ineffable shall find a secret voice.30
The poet is that "secret voice". Sri Aurobindo announces a new myth or symbol, of evolutionary change, the laws of our inner becoming. The poet of transformation, he looks forward to, as he also makes possible, the marriage of Earth and Heaven, when Matter shall be the Spirit's willing bride. In Rose of God we hear the poet say:
Transform the body of the mortal like a sweet and magical rhyme;
Bridge our earthhood and heavenhood, make deathless the children of Time."
No more existence seemed an aimless fall,
Extinction was no more the sole release.
The hidden Word was found, the long-sought clue,
Revealed was the meaning of our spirit's birth,
Condemned to an imperfect body and mind,
In the inconscience of material things
And the indignity of mortal life.32
Heidegger has reminded us — echoing, without knowing, the Vedic idea — that genuine poetry is the establishing of Being by means of the word and that what the poet names is holy. "Poetry is the act of establishing by the word and in the word. What is established in this manner? The Permanent and the holy." If that is so, Sri Aurobindo's role as a poet is easily established. For Sri Aurobindo poetry becomes an instrument of the human becoming, "a rhythmic voyage of self-discovery in these inner and outer worlds," "the highest force of speech available to man for the expression whether
30 Savitri, p. 110. 31 Collected Poems, SABCL, Vol. 5, p. 584.
32Savitri, p. 313.
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of his self-vision or of his world vision." Though our present literary fashions obscure such a possibility, is it so small a thing to have established the New Being, complete, harmonious, creative, with the help of poetry, the Overhead poetry of the peak, peaks imagination cannot tread?
Breaking the vacancy and voiceless hush,
Piercing the limitless Unknowable,33
— that is its power. The words of the poet are worlds:
On peaks where Silence listens with still heart
To the rhythmic metres of the rolling worlds,
He served the sessions of the triple fire.
On the rim of two continents of slumber and trance
He heard the ever unspoken Reality's voice
Awaken revelation's mystic cry,
The birth-place found of the sudden infallible Word
And lived in the rays of an intuitive Sun.34
In such a time as ours when the images are all blurred, when men go starved because they cannot wish in common poetry alone imagines and, imagining, creates. The essential Aurobindean poetry creates anew the universe and the foundations of a profounder faith. If, as Erich Heller has suggested, the discovery and colonisation of inwardness is the story of poetry from the Renaissance to our own day, no empire is as extensive as Sri Aurobindo's, for none has led so many raids into the inarticulate. He has made more things possible and that is the work of a poet.
If and when the modem crisis of identity is over that will be the time to read Sri Aurobindo again, in a new light, "the sealed astonishment of Light." Then we shall learn again, with amazement and gratitude, that which can never be wholly forgotten, the truth of our larger self that lives within us by ourselves unseen:
A deathbound littleness is not all we are:
Immortal our forgotten vastnesses
Await discovery in our summit selves;
Unmeasured breadths and depths of being are ours...
Even when we fail to look into our souls
Or lie embedded in earthly consciousness,
33Ibid., p. 312. 34 Ibid., p. 299.
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Still have we parts that grow towards the Light...
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.
A wider consciousness opens then its doors;
Invading from spiritual silences
A ray of the timeless Glory stoops awhile
To commune with our seized illumined clay
And leaves its huge white stamp upon our lives...
These signs are native to a larger self
That lives within us by ourselves unseen.35
Drawing the harmony of higher spheres, Sri Aurobindo has recovered for us the joy and the knowledge, the unbounded experience of the cosmic self that lives within us, by ourselves unseen. He has established poetry where it belongs — in the self. Thus he is a poet per se, poet of poets.
Sri Aurobindo had once said that he had been first and foremost a poet and a politician, only later he became a yogi. Sri Aurobindo is a poet because, in terms of our self-discovery, he has enlarged and harmonised not only existence but levels of existence. That is, when he became a yogi he also became first and foremost among poets, a Rishi who aspired to live poetry as well as write it. Leader on the inner roads, beyond the mind's imaginings
A seer, he has entered the forbidden realms;
A magician with the omnipotent wand of thought,
He builds the secret uncreated worlds.
Armed with the golden speech, the diamond eye,
His is the vision and the prophecy:
Imagist casting the formless into shape,
Traveller and hewer of the unseen paths,
He is the carrier of the hidden fire,
He is the voice of the Ineffable,
He is the invisible hunter of the light,
The Angel of mysterious ecstasies,
The conqueror of the kingdoms of the soul.36
SlSIRKUMAR GHOSE
35 Ibid., pp. 46-48. 36 Ibid., p. 681.
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