On Savitri
THEME/S
PART V
Let us try to put Savitri in the perspective of some of the world's great poems, if only for its own fuller grasp.
Valmiki, the first bom of poets, author of the Sanskrit epic the Ramayana, is the supreme singer; Veda-Vyasa coming after him, the author of the Mahabharata, is the supreme poet-thinker. Anyone versed in Sanskrit would sing the Ramayana in poetic transport and ease, carrying the listeners along with him, but when one turns to the Mahabharata one is simply awed at its immensitude (twenty-five thousand couplets without accretions and one hundred-thousand with accretions) and its cosmic comprehensibility. For, there is in it all that is there in the world, in the heavens, in human experience, in war and love and glory, in ethics and religion, in thought and philosophy, in the Veda and the Vedanta. A more comprehensive and intergrated vision of life it is difficult to find elsewhere. Savitri is in direct line of the Vedic mantric poetry, the poetry of vision where the poet like the Vedic Rishis is also a seer, a man who catches through insight an aspect of Reality and transfers its vibrations to the word, with a fusion in it of Valmiki's poetic felicity, Veda-Vyasa's thought-sublimity, though not its extensibility and, in addition, a 20th-century sensibility.
Homer possessed of a vision as wide as the world of his day, a sympathy as deep as the heart itself and a vast interpretative sense created, like a demiurge, in his Iliad and Odyssey, a world of his own: a whole human world of terror and pity and passion; the battlefield's blood-thirstiness, the tenderness of the heart, and the all-ruling majesty of calm, — a human world which yet included the gods above, the elements below and the inexorable Fate behind: an epic world indeed. Sri Aurobindo too looked at the entire extended world of his own day, stood confronting existence and tearing its veil of mystery. He gazes in, out, beyond above and comprehends dimensions that are cosmic and supracosmic; grasps at the centre of things, the élan vital and deeper still the élan divine, — dimensions and truths that were never Homer's; he creates a new kind of poetry that too as well couldn't be Homer's. Homer's is a world of Helen — a human passion; Sri Aurobindo's of Savitri -— a divine passion; and yet as creative geniuses both are supreme. Sri Aurobindo put Homer
along with Valmiki and Shakespeare in the first row of the world's supreme poets.
One thing, however, is strikingly similar in both the epics. Homer's Iliad is full "of images drawn from fire, the armies clash 'even as destroying fire that falls upon a limitless forest;' and the men 'fight together, a body of burning fire.' The whole poem is shot through with this fire, which seems like a symbol of the inward force of which we have been speaking, a fiery intensity of imagination."1 The images that intermittently invade the body of Savitri are too the images of Light: "a search-light stabs the Night's blind breast"; "a ripple of light and glory wraps the brain"; "through the pallid rift outpours the revelation and the flame", and so on, — all suggesting the fiery intensity of the poet's vision (imagination) that pierces into the deep's secret.
With far less a spontaneous breath of creative genius than Homer's, Virgil's eminence rests chiefly on the polish and refinement and an almost utmost finish in his chief work Aeneid (about fifteen-thousand verses). Sri Aurobindo too was an assiduous artist, but his was a labour on a demiurge scale, organising words coming from the sempiternal planes. In range too Aeneid, though embodying the greatness and glory of Rome and the Roman empire controlling "the Nations far and wide" and imposing "the rule of peace on vanquished foes"; figuring Dido as one of the most living warm-blooded women in poetry; rising in thought sublimity and elevating Jupiter from a mere tribal God bound up with the sanctity and destiny of Rome to a monotheistic divinity governing the whole world; sometimes touching in rare admirable passages lofty sentiments; even giving us utterances like "the touch of tears in mortal things" and
Superasque evadere ad auras
Hoc opus, hie labour est —
"to move out into the higher spaces — this the work, here is the labour," suggesting almost a direct descent from the overhead planes; in his Eclogues even foreseeing:
The ages' mighty march begins anew...
Now from high heaven descends a wondrous race —
1 The Oxford Professor of Poetry Mr. Mackail's observation cited by Prof. Gilbert Murray in his The Rise of the Greek Epic, Oxford, 1934, pp. 254-55.
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is yet on the whole far too narrow. Sri Aurobindo's cosmic vision is beyond Virgil's grasp.
Mention of Empedocles's Purifications (5th cen. B.C.), never a world poem, and of which only a fragment of about 500 verses in all is available in English translation, may look surprising; but its striking thematic similarity with Savitri is the only justification. The argument of the poem is: "How a Divine Life (a Daemon) descended into human life, suffered the agony of incarnation here, but redeemed himself by purifying the world wherein he was incarnate, and then reascended."2 Why at all did the Daemon come down to suffer mortal agony ? The poet who had in a rare moment of vision come to the possession of "a mighty conception of things," explains:
Necessity hath said it: and the gods
Have publisht it in an antique decree.3
And so the Daemon
...shall wander
Far from those Blessed Ones, and all the while
Incessantly being bom in every form
Of dying, taking in abhorred exchange
One of life's wretched curses after another.4
The Daemon himself says:
I have been ere this a boy, a girl,
A plant in the woods, an eagle in the heights,
And in the sea the glancing life of a fish.5
But till he was confined merely to the vegetable and lower animal forms of life, till he was only a 'boy', a 'girl', he could not be aware of his own divinity and destiny. He became so aware only when he emerged in man. Then could he (the Daemon, the Higher Awareness) say to man:
Be ruled by me ... belong no more
To misery and destruction; but to love
Love is the truth of being.6
Ultimately through love the purification of the world was effected and then
2 See Lascelles Abercrombie, Romanticism, London, (1926), p. 93.
2Ibid., p. 94. 4 Ibid., p. 95. 5 Ibid., p. 95. 6 Ibid., p. 99.
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...all the people of the world,
The ground and the air of it, the beasts and birds,
Were friendly: all were sparkles of one flame.
The kindliness of love.7
Thus Daemon, the divine spirit, descended into the world and brought about its transformation. That is Savitri's argument too. But the experience of Empedocles remains only a romantic idea, an object merely of cordial passion. Neither did he get a convincing vision of it nor did he perceive its scientific basis. Sri Aurobindo's experience of the divine spirit emerging as supraconsciousness is, on the other hand, based on his yogic vision, and is as plain and valid for him as an effect following a cause in the world of Newton's physics, or as life emerging from Matter in Darwin's world of biology. Purifications despite its sublime romanticism remains only a "fragment" compared with Sri Aurobindo's epic of the spirit.
The De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things) of Virgil's contemporary Lucretius is materialistic philosophy turned into poetry. If Savitri is the poetry of the science of Spirit, De Rerum Natura is the poetry of the science of Matter. The world of Lucretius is the world of atoms moving through space impelled by the very dynamism inherent in them and building the cosmos through a strange coherence. Its ruler is not God but Chance. In such a world when man dies his soul too dies. The range of the poem is as the universe's and the poet's manner as stately. "We seem to be reading," says George Santayana about this poem, "not the poetry of a poet about things, but the poetry of things themselves. That things have their poetry, not because of what we make them symbols of, but because of their own movement and life, is what Lucretius proves once for all to mankind."8 Sri Aurobindo proves that Spirit — the mystical consciousness — too has its poetry . "He (Lucretius) sees the whole universe," continues the philosopher-critic, "spread out in its true movement and proportions; he sees mankind freed from the incubus of superstition; and from the havoc of passion. The vision enkindles his enthusiasm, exalts his imagination, and swells his verse into unmistakable earnestness."9 But while Lucretius's poetry grows out of the earnestness of intellectual conviction and out of an earnestness,
7Ibid., p. 103.
8Three Philosophical Poets, Doubleday, New York, (1953), p. 38.
9 Ibid., p. 55.
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calling logic to aid, to convince and instruct others, Sri Aurobindo's grows out of spiritual vision. He comprehends the materialist-poet's poetic universe of matter, of the formation of world through the movement of matter, of the phenomenon of life and mind evolving out of it; but, besides, he enters deeper still into the secret of Matter and observes behind its vibration the hidden will, the mystic consciousness. With that realisation his poetry grows also in depth, intensity and sublimity. He sees the world both in and out and feels the bliss of conscious creation; Lucretius sees only the out, and that too without its bliss, except only when sometimes he sees Venus (Empedocles's Love; Nature's creative enlivening activity) prevailing over Mars (Empedocles's Strife, Nature's disintegrating disheartening movement).
From Lucretius to Dante the transition is from naturalism to supematuralism which finds its sublimest expression in his Divina Commedia. A great poem, it strangely unifies romance, epic, drama, lyric; it grows on a scale that is grander even than the Iliad, in that it is based, philosophically, on the Scholastic system of St. Thomas Aquinas, ethically on the Neo-Platonic system, and spatially on an entire cosmos in which higher and lower worlds are marshalled "in concentric circles around this wild but pivotal lump of earth;" Hell and Heaven and tiers upon tiers of spheres fitting into the Neo-Platonic cosmology, inhabited by devils, angels, spirits, and all sorts of higher and lower beings, — its a strange complex world "made alive with vivid, graphic details," and brought nearer home by constant allusions to the history of Rome, Italy and the Church; to the political conflicts and feuds in which the poet himself had been concerned; and more intimately to events in his own personal life. In fact, the poem takes the form of an autobiographical narrative: Dante finds himself astray in a dark wood (sin ?) beyond which he sees a "Sunlit Mountain", which he aspires to scale but is barred by three beasts, — a leopard, a lion, a wolf (wicked habits). He is about to turn back in despair when a mysterious figure, the ghost of Virgil, sent by three heavenly Ladies — the Blessed Virgin St. Lucia and Beatric (the poet's own beloved)— accost him, promising that he could lead him there. Dante follows. The journey takes them through hideous and vast Hell (described in Inferno, the first part of the poem comprising 33 Cantos) to the Hill of Purgatory (described in Purgatorio, also comprising 33 cantos) at the top of which Dante sees "the mystical procession representing the triumphant march of the Church," the central figure of which
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is Beatrice herself, who leads Dante to the highest Heaven (Paradiso, in 33 cantos) where he has the vision climactic, the vision of "the infinite and motionless sea of divine love."
Its theme, taken literally, is the condition of souls after death; for on this and around this the whole action of the work turns: considered allegorically, it is man who has freedom of will and therefore justly deserves reward or punishment for his actions of merit or demerit. Rising both above literality and allegory as one comes across the very poetic utterances of Paradiso, one realises that the poet's main concern is not with hell or heaven or sin or virtue but is with that dangerous, alarming, profound experience which he had inside the Cathedral at whose gate he had seen Beatrice:
As I enter here from day to day,
And leave my burden at this minster gate,
Kneeling in prayer and not ashamed to pray,
The tumult of the time disconsolate
To inarticulate murmurs dies away,
While the eternal ages watch and wait.
Such was the experience which mystically had turned his love for Beatrice into something like a cosmic force:
And yet the will rolled onward, like a wheel
In even motion, by the love impelled
That moves the sun in heaven and all the stars.
The poet had arrived at a general sense of sublimity in existence.
We can now see Savitri and The Divina Commedia together. One is symbolic, the other mainly allegoric, — and that makes a difference. Beatrice is love in man leading to personal salvation; Savitri is the grace on earth working for transformation of the race. Beatrice is Theology or Church, a force in history rather limited in its implications to Christianity alone; Savitri is a cosmic involvement. The supernatural — Hell, Purgatory, Heaven, the Devils, the Angels, etc. — of the Commedia is a belief or allegory; in Savitri it is a real experience of the psychic strata both in the Mind and the Cosmos. What for Dante are sin and vice, accepted as coetemal with the Devil, irredeemable and permanent, are for Sri Aurobindo ignorance and concomitants of the lower conscious-ness, which must disappear at the emergence of higher
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consciousness. Redemption for Dante, even though he may have achieved "an actual insight into the great dilemma, eternal life or eternal death"10 was elsewhere and not, as for Sri Aurobindo, here and now. In Dante's poetry there is a note of theological prejudice and irritation against the party and people who exiled him which detracts, however little, from the saintly purity of feeling. Such a thing is inconceivable in Sri Aurobindo: this fact is to be particularly noted. In the work of almost all mystic poets — in Kabir's , in Donne's, even in Blake's, to take only a few instances, — we may hear the scolding voice, but not so anywhere in Sri Aurobindo's poetry. He observed the discipline of the "Higher State" even if he ever descended to the egoistic plane.
As poetry, both Savitri and Commedia are unique; both evidencing that philosophy and mystical experience could be rendered in poetry; both conferring in a wonderful way poetic concerteness and objectivity on their supernatural or spiritual beings and realms and visions, as only supreme poetry could do. Both are great, but if one wants to hear more frequently the word supernal, resounding with the secret heart-throb of the cosmos, one will have to turn to Savitri rather than to Commedia.
Sri Aurobindo said that there was no poet greater than Shakespeare (Valmiki and Homer excepted).* When he said so he was thinking of him as a master of rhythm and language and of poetic beauty — of his essential poetic force: the pure and uncorrupted spontaneity, "expressions wherein hie flow's with that facility," "his mind and hand went together. And what he thought, he uttered with that easiness, that wee have scarce received from him a blot in his papers."" Verily, a Lord of words was he: his will and ego in abeyance, the perfect instrument of the Daemon. No harm if he did not blot out a thousand words: he was no artist, he was a creator. Others might be greater as artists, one might recall Racine; greater in his range, the poet of the Mahabharata, for instance; Milton a greater music-maker; but none approaches Shakespeare in word-magic. The "easily-come" word rather than the play was the thing for him. Sri Aurobindo, though regarding himself "first and foremost a poet," had yet his "vision" to burden
10 Allen Tate: Collected Essays, Allen Swallaw, Denver, (1959), p. 421.
11 John Heminges and Henry Condell, the editors of the First Folio.
* N.B.: In the first rank of poets Sri Aurobindo puts Valmiki, Vyasa, Homer, Shakespeare. The Future Poetry, SABCL, Vol. 9, pp. 520-21.
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his poetry with; while Shakespeare had no "self to express. The easily-come word was Shakespeare's; the word inevitable is Sri Aurobindo's : he had to blot out a thousand before he was "self-assured" by intuitive feeling if not by the intellect, that the entirely right transcription of the overhead inspiration had been obtained.
Now the poetic worlds into which they admit us, though both great, are different. Shakespeare's world though omitting neither the mid-summer night's dreams nor magic and fairy enchantments, is essentially the world of the vital: "the vital emotions and reactions or the thoughts that spring out in the life-mind under the pressure of life." ( Savitri, p. 802) It reeks with the human, with the scent of the soil, with the tickle-brain spilled at Mrs. Quickly's Boar Head Tavern, with the pricks and pranks of Puck, with roystering and swaggering about the streets and with love-making in forests, on islands and in richly courts; with jealousy, ambition, despair and suffering; with the pity and horror of life; with all that is natural and humanistic; at moments even transgressing into the mystic; into "a business more than nature/ Was ever conduct of," piercing for the moment into the referend beyond; Wilson Knight even attributing to him the vision in Nature of a striving after inevitable perfection, and Murry the vision of a super (divine) man emerging. Sri Aurobindo's poetic "cosmos" has all this — the naturalistic, the humanistic, the ineffable; but it is there only as implied; only as reference, or as background, nonetheless very solid and real for that. Centrally and essentially it is the world of the higher mind, of a consciousness that penetrates deep into the heart of Matter and of what may be beyond: a world in which Eternity and Infinity are playthings and you watch Nature involved in the destiny of self-discovery, yourself caught up in the process: a world of the self s rapprochement with the surrounding Vastness — a Friend accosting you in the impersonal Void. Very consistently and realistically it is this world, the refracted world of Matter, Life and Spirit, — not of Rosalind, Lear or Perdita.
In both one can't miss the wonder and the magic and the power of the Word, in one the word of the Vital and in the other the word of Light.
The modems, Eliot-Pound group, might deprecate Milton for his Latinisms, his inflated, ritualistic or incantatory style lacking intimacy and even for the unmodemistic characters of his two epics; but they would fail to unseat him from his position as the second of the first three great poets of England. Real value must find its
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just place in the durable judgement of the world. In fact Milton is great for the very qualities — the grandeur and the incantatory power of his verse, qualities which are Savitri's too — for which the detractors detract him. An epic like Paradise Lost or Savitri cannot be approached in any light or easy mood. One should have an ear for Milton's organ music and the hushed mind for Sri Aurobindo's superconscient voice. Even the opening lines of both give us the sensation that some great thing is about and once deep in them one's mind, without knowing how, is transformed by "a new strength and width and brightness and zest." This is great poetry. Here is Milton's defiance of Heaven by Satan: He spoke and to confirm his words outflew
Millions of flaming swords, drawn from the thighs
Of mighty Cherubim; the sudden blaze
Far round illumin'd Hell: highly they rag'd
Against the Highest, and fierce with grasped Arms
Clash's on their sounding shields the din of war.
Hurling defiance toward the vault of heav'n12
Here is Sri Aurobindo's defiance of Darkness by a spiritual aspirant:
The Immobile's ocean-silence saw him pass,
An arrow leaping through eternity
Suddenly shot from the tense bow of Time,
A ray returning to its parent sun.
Opponent of that glory of escape,
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.
One-pointed to the immaculate Delight,
Questing for God as for a splendid prey
He mounted burning like a cone of fire.13
Also take Milton's lines describing boundless space pregnant with unformed universes. The gate of Hell opens into Chaos and to the Angels of Hell in a sudden view appear
The secrets of the hoarie Deep, a dark
12 Paradise Lost, Book I, 663-669. 13 Savitri, pp. 79-80.
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Illimitable Ocean without bound,
dimension, where length, breadth and height,
And time and place are lost: where eldest Night
And Chaos, Ancestors of Nature, hold
Eternal Anarchie, amidst the noise
Of endless wars, and by confusion stand."14
Compare this with the total vision of a whole cosmos given by Sri Aurobindo in a few lines which are a marvel of poetic expression:
He saw a lone immense high-curved world-pile
Erect like a mountain chariot of the Gods
Motionless under an inscrutable sky.
As if from Matter's plinth and viewless base
To a top as viewless, a carved sea of worlds
Climbing with foam-maned waves to the Supreme
Ascended towards breadths immeasurable:
It hoped to soar into the Ineffable's reign:
A hundred levels raised it to the Unknown.15
Milton's lines are grand on Milton's plane of imagination, Sri Aurobindo's grand on his own.
In Milton it is not the failure of speech or rhythm; Sri Aurobindo readily concedes: "Rhythm and speech have never attained to a mightier amptitude of epic expression and movement, seldom to an equal sublimity."16 But the failure is in the poet's vision that one can immediately notice. Milton's epic no doubt sets before us the cosmic story, — the creation of the world, of hell, of man, of man's fall and his eventual emancipation, — a dimension vast enough; but not as vast as Savitri's. Not Milton's fault perhaps; because in age in which he lived he could not but be bound to Christian theology; Copernicus was only just known and Darwin and Einstein were yet to come. Then, despite lines of vision like:
About him all the Sanctities of Heaven
Stood thick as stars and from his sight received
Beatitude past utterance.17
Milton lacks Dante's religious (mystical) intensity; Sri Aurobindo has in him both Milton and Dante. Belief in literal and metaphorical
14Paradise Lost, II, 890-897. 15Savitri, p. 98.
16The Future Poetry, SABCL, Vol. 9, p. 83.
17Paradise Lost, HI, 60.
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truth of the Bible apart, Milton embodies in his epic his own rational life-experience too: the lesson is that, despite original sin, man himself is responsible for his fall and that he can avoid making a wrong choice in a world where he can choose freely and that, through practice of humility and mind-control, he can be happy. Experience embodied in Savitri is rational-cum-transrational, throughout experience and burning intensity of the divine.
To summarise in Lotika Ghosh's words: "In the Iliad we have the highest reach of the Hellenic mind. In The Divine Comedy we have the highest attainment of Christian mystical experience; in Paradise lost we have the highest elevation of Christian ethical striving. Unlike these, Savitri has the clarity of direct revelation which is the characteristic of the Vedas and Upanishads. It has therefore the uttemess of the speech of the spiritual and not the glimmering beauty of a mystical experience, it is not the sybil who speaks here but the seer."18
Goethe's Faust, accounted after Dante's Divina Commedia as the greatest single poem of the Western world, is the work of "a high poetic intelligence, written with a great skill and inspired subtlety of language and effective genius." But there is a touch which is mostly wanting, the touch of the absolute, the intensely inspired or revealing inevitability that is Sri Aurobindo's. " Goethe might have gone much deeper than Shakespeare, sounded problems of life and thought Shakespeare had no means of approaching even;" but he never saw the light that Sri Aurobindo had seen, nor reached the height of realisation Sri Aurobindo had reached.
Goethe's hero Faust, given the active awareness, "the gleam of heavenly light," would not rest till he had found a final "stay", in search of which he passes from bookish study (of all knowledge) to the direct study of Nature, thence to magic, thence to passion (love), infatuously involved in Margaret's love; but even this phase of passion closes without giving him lasting rest (Part I). Faust (now symbolising humanity) seeks satisfaction in a social ideal and in his "vision of a free people, living upon a free soil, courage, intelligence, and patriotism constantly developed anew by danger," he really gets a moment of satisfaction. Faust declares: "I now enjoy the highest moment: This." But in an "unhappy" moment of
18Lotika Ghosh: The Poetry of Sri Aurobindo, in Sri Aurobindo Mandir Annual, 1949, p. 148.
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intellectual abstraction, he had a glimpse of the realm of the infinite Beyond, — and that is his misery. Sundered by the antithesis of "this world" and "the Beyond" he continues to suffer:
Two beings Ah ! within my breast are fighting !
— one clinging to the earth, one mightily thrusting upward to the sky. And though in moments of intuitive intensity he catches flashes of the Supernal Light
The Sun comes forth!
Yet he bemoans
Alas, already blinded,
I turn away, with eyesight
Pierced and wounded.
He fails to reconcile the rational with the suprarational. No doubt, in the final moment he comes to the realisation that
Eternal womanhood
Summons us on
even as Helena saves him. But this Helena is a sad-sweet romantic Psyche, tantalizing, never peace-giving (Goethe ever remained a romantic, never achieving the classic harmony) while Savitri, the cosmic force, is the pure divine. Goethe of his century had a sense of the need of resolving the conflict; but he could not. In Sri Aurobindo's Savitri we find the conflict resolved and supramental existence conceived as inevitable in the very nature of things. In human history as Aeneid shadowed a turning point between two primitive sensibilities, animism and monotheistic conception of the divine, and Faust between faith and rationalism, so Savitri does between rationalism and suprarationalism. It transcribes the present ethos of the biological and rational man evolving into the spiritual.
Blake stands out among the mystic poets of Europe. Kathleen Raine ranks him "as one of the half-dozen greatest men of genius of the modem world," and regards him as one of those spiritual presences that are felt in the world."19 Sri Aurobindo writes about Blake's creative process that "he did not let his mind disfigure what came I from spiritual vision and audition! by trying to make
19Kathleen Raine, William Blake, p. 7.
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it intellectual. He transcribed what he saw and heard." Sri Aurobindo easily meets the charge of obscurity that is generally levelled against Blake's poetry: "His occasional obscurity — he is more often in his best poems lucid and crystal clear — is due to his writing of things which are not familiar to the physical mind and writing them with fidelity instead of accommodating them to the latter." Even then, the pantheon — Ore, Los, Urizen, Enitharmon, Tharmas, Enion, a dozen of them, and their sons and daughters — that he has created is a little cumbersome to an English reader, although the gods conceived are unmistakably English. There is no theology or pantheon in Sri Aurobindo's poetry and therefore we can easily follow it; nor are the symbols obscure: being universal they at once begin to sound the depths of our souls.
Ignoring the Christian ideal that fulfilment of the spirit in heaven demands absolute rejection of the earthly life, Blake from personal realisation, spoke of a higher truth, the truth of the marriage of the body and soul, of heaven and hell, here and now. That is very much in the spirit of Sri Aurobindo and the Vedic Rishis who sang of the marriage of heaven and earth: "Heaven is my Father and this Earth my Mother." The highest must come down and inhabit the lowest; the lowest must give up its own norms and lift itself into the substance and form of the highest. It is such divinisation of man and nature that is envisaged by Blake and by Sri Aurobindo. But while Blake predicated such divinisation only for the individual, Sri Aurobindo sees divine transformation going on in the cosmic process itself. Although Blake too did see the vision of "Jerusalem" being established in "London", we wonder if this vision had acquired with him the full cosmic sense that was Sri Aurobindo's. And further, although Blake's "spiritual aim was a widening of consciousness," there is no evidence in his poetry that he had a vision of the supramental Consciousness.
The world of Romantic poets is a psychic world, deeper than it was Chaucer's or even Shakespear's, a realisation of the psychic life deeper than the merely emotional. Sri Aurobindo's is still deeper, and higher and wider: it is spiritual. The Romantic hears the throb of the heart personal; Sri Aurobindo hears, besides, the throb of the heart cosmic. The Romantic's art is generally uncontrolled; Sri Aurobindo's is classic in a higher sense. Wordsworth's Prelude tries to be an epic but remains a mere lyric, an enraptured memory of personal involvement in the phenomenon of the physical fading away into the inffeble and the transcendental.
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Savitri is epical both in tone and conception and its involvement is cosmic. In this respect Keats's Hyperion and Shelley's Prometheus Unbound are nearer to it. The idea
Spirit, behold
The glorious destiny
nascent in Shelley's earlier work, Queen Mab, finds its fuller poetic expression in Prometheus Unbound. If this is a veritable cosmic lyric, Savitri is a cosmic epic. Prometheus, the man undergoing "pain, pain ever, for ever" for having defied Jupiter, grows wiser through suffering, gains knowledge of the visible as well as of the "ideal" invisible world.
But deliverance would not come until he was united with his love, Asia the child of Ocean who alone could break the rest of the Voice sleeping in the unknown world. On the other hand Savitri, the child of Eternity, alone could reveal the mystery sleeping in the heart of Nature. Asia rises up. steps into the "secret way", accosts Demagorgon, embodied as Jupiter's own son, in overthrows him to establish on earth the rule of a higher moral conscience, the rule of love. Prometheus is now unbound, joins Asia, the new day dawns, all things renovate:
... and when the dawn
Came, wouldst thou think that toads, and snakes, and efts,
Could e'er be beautiful? Yet so they were.
And that with little change of shape or hue:
All things had put their evil nature off.
Spirits awake and sing. Here are the spirits of human mind singing after emancipation:
We come from the mind Of human kind
Which was late so dusk, and obscene and blind.
Now 'tis an ocean Of clear emotion,
A heaven of serene and mighty motion...
Well pass the eyes
Of the starry skies
Into the hoar deep to colonise;
Death, Chaos, and Night.
From the sound of our flight,
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Shall flee, like mist from a tempest's might...
And our singing shall build
In the Void's loose field
A world for the Spirit of Wisdom to wield;
We will take our plan
From the new world of man
And the work shall be called the Promethean:
Demagomgon reappears and addresses all basic existences — the Earth, the Moon, the Sun, and the Stars, the elemental genii, the beasts and the birds and finally Man, — in a voice of universal sound:
This is the day —
When Love spings and folds over
The world
Its healing wings.
Keats's Hyperion, a great attempt in epic code, similarly poetises the fall of Uranus (representing the rule of shapeless chaos) at the hands of Saturn (representing the rule of cosmic order), and his fall in turn at the hands of Apollo (Jove), the Power of Light and Beauty. Here is cosmic story told by the thoughtful Titan Oceanus, to his brother, the fallen Saturn:
We fall by course of Nature's law, not force
Or thunder, or of Jove. Great Saturn, then
Hast sifted well the atom — universe...
And first, as thou wast not the first of powers,
So art thou not the last; it cannot be —
Thou art not the beginning nor the end.
From chaos and parental darkness came
Light the first fruits of that intestine broil,
That sullen ferment, which for wonderous ends
Was ripening in itself. The ripe hour came,
And with it light, and light, engendering
Upon its own producer, forthwith touched
The whole enormous matter into life...
So on our heels a fresh perfection treads,
A power more strong in beauty, bom of us —
And fated to excel us, as we pass
In glory that old Darkness — nor are we
Thereby more conquered, than by us the rule
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Of shapeless chaos... for 'tis the eternal law
That first in beauty should be first in might.
Verily the idea reads like a page from Savitri. But while the romantic poets had only a feeble apprehension of the cosmic heart's throb, Sri Aurobindo felt and comprehended it fully. Yet if Sri Aurobindo's Savitri is epic poetry of the future, I wouldn't hesitate in venturing to state that Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, a wonderfully revealing and prophetic poetic utterance as it is, lyric poetry of the future.
As one enters comparatively the modern age one finds poets, including world-dramatists Ibsen, Shaw, Maeterlinck, O'Neill, generally involved in a predicament of the existentialist, grappling with the tragedy at the heart of things, with the age's Angst. The Dynasts of Hardy echoes the age's scepticism "that refuses everything but the general tragic fatality of existence. Napoleon appears as an insect on a leaf, armies look like caterpillars, earth a microscopically verminous mote and man a mere puppet jerked in heedless drama, while the unconscious Will, — the tragically unconscious Will, — eternally goes on "uselessly uttering existence." Hardy at close of the play has the word that "deliverance" will be offered, "consciousness the will informing;" but it is lost in the tragic immensity of the whole. Eliot, despite the saving grace of his vision of Marina and the experience of the still moment of interaction between Time and Eternity, would still, like a true Catholic, doubt if man could transcend the Original Sin before the Doom's Day. Yeats may be mystically deeper, but he too for all his attraction for the occult and his meddling with the Vision continues to be torn between Maud Gonne and Byzantium. A.E. rises higher — his soul venturing through the twilight world of mystic-shadowism takes flight into clearer and sunny skies where it communes with the Divine. But he fails when he comes to sing of his experience as a poet, except on very rare occasions, to harmonise the overhead vision with an equally lofty word-rhythm, an achievement which so eminently in Sri Aurobindo's. Anyway, these poets have given articulation to that indefinable feeling which is stirring in the deep heart of the world at present and which Sri Aurobindo apprehended like a seer and sang like a poet. The word of hope, born of realisation, comes from him alone:
Page 482
We are not left alone in a closed scheme
Between a driving of inconscient Force
And an incommunicable Absolute.20
RAMESHWAR GUPTA
20 Savitri, p. 110.
Page 483
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