On Savitri
THEME/S
PART V
A Few months ago waiting in the antechamber of the lecture hall of the Ramkrishna Institute of Culture, with Professor Spiegelberg of the Stanford University, as he was about to deliver his lecture, when he told me that after reading The Life Divine he had obtained the solution of many questions which had troubled him for the last ten years, I asked him what he thought of Sri Aurobindo's poetry. His only reply was: "Isn't it entirely Greek?" I was rather taken aback and asked him if he had read the two volumes of the Collected Poems, to which he replied that he had. I read a note of disappointment in his voice as if he expected them to be more Indian, as the word is understood by Western scholars. Yet the subject-matter and thought of the major portion of these poems is entirely Indian. What then made Professor Spiegelberg make this remark?
Laurence Binyon speaking of Manmohan Ghose in his Introduction to Songs of Love and Death remarks about the latter: "What struck me most was his enthusiastic appreciation of Greek poetry, not so much the books prescribed in school as those he had sought out on his own account. Theocrates, Meleager, above all Simonides were his special favourites. I had imagined that an oriental's taste must of necessity be for the luxurious and ornate but was surprised that he should feel so strong an attraction for the limpid and severe. Yet many of us are attracted to arts and literature remote from our own tradition and just because of qualities in them which these have not. Why should not an Indian feel a parallel attraction? Manmohon Ghose never forgot the Greeks and to the end his delight was in European Literature and European Art."
That Sri Aurobindo (a more brilliant classical scholar) shared this appreciation of Greek Art and Poetry with his elder brother is undoubted. We know that the libraries of both brothers were filled with volumes of Greek Poetry and Art. Mr. Sailendranath Mitra, Secretary of the Post-Graduate Council of Arts, Calcutta University, a nephew of the scholar and linguist Harinath De and a pupil of Manmohon Ghose, once told me how he often accompanied the latter to the house of Raja Subod Mullick where Sri Aurobindo was staying and how even in the thick of Sri Aurobindo's political period the two brothers happily reading and discussing Greek Poetry would
be entirely lost to a sense of time. Manmohon Ghose's poetry mainly lyrical in inspiration has an exquisite blending of the Greek and Elizabethan, but Sri Aurobindo's poetry, epic in range, is almost entirely Greek. Sanskrit literature, the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, Kalidasa, Bhavabhuti, may have opened a new world of vision and taste and supplied him with new subject-matter to transmute and make his own, but in flawless power and self-sufficiency, specially of the later and greater works, his poetry is comparable to the greatest Greek poets. The chiselled perfection of his images draws its inspiration from the master sculptors of Greece. The formal purity, the restraint even in richness, the freedom from rhetorical device and verbal excess mark his poetry away from Sanskrit poetry specially in its latter stages when artistic and literary bias predominated and poetry was overloaded with rhetoric and showed an unrestraint in word and image which when it settled down to conventionality became tiring. The predominant influence of Sanskrit literature has given to the poetry of Rabindranath its richness, its music as of a thousand-stringed lyre, but it has also given his poetry its non-restraint, its rhetorical and verbal excess. Rabindranath's poetry sweeps us forward on the surge of the dynamic flow of words and music, the rush and rapture of its ideas, so that poetic revelation comes to us in bright glimmerings and large flashes rather than in deep ultimate words and great lighted images. A comparison of some of the best suggestive lines of Rabindranath and Sri Aurobindo will show our meaning as to the difference. Here is Rabindranath:
And here is Sri Aurobindo:
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Then something in the inscrutable darkness stirred;
A nameless movement, an unthought Idea
Insistent, dissatisfied, without an aim,
Something that wished but knew not how to be,
Teased the inconscient to wake Ignorance.
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
Should we take the poetry of the two poets as a whole, the poetry of Sri Aurobindo gives us the impression of a great mountain range, prolific and verdant in the lower ranges, its top neighbouring the sky and clothed in eternal snow and light, whilst the poetry of Rabindranath is like a mighty river, sounding and scintillating at its start but widening and deepening in its onward flow, its movement answering the call of the infinite wash of waters towards which it is for ever flowing. In Rabindranath's poetry the poetic word radiates itself with infinite suggestions striving towards a wider liberation: in Sri Aurobindo the poetic word is harnessed in the cause of a deeper revelation and releases its own inner light tuning itself to the higher rhythm... .
Sri Aurobindo's Six Poems, Transformation and Other Poems, and the poems in quantitative metre carry us a step further. Vision, Dream, and Thought are abandoned and we get direct yogic experiences, in rhythm and music that is entirely new to English poetry. At last Sri Aurobindo has got the lyric metre in which he can portray his experiences, the external eye being closed and the thinking mind stilled. The condition of the poet in which these poems are written is described in Thought the Paraclete, who is seen by the poet as some bright arch-angle
The face
Lustred, pale-blue-lined of the hippogriff,
1Savitri, pp. 1-2. (Editor's Note: The Savitri-text quoted here belongs to the cantos that had appeared in the Ashram periodicals prior to 1949.)
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Eremite, sole, daring the boumeless ways,
Over world-bare summits of timeless being
Gleamed; the deep twilights of the world-abyss
Failed below. Sun-realms of supernal seeing,
Crimson-white mooned oceans of pauseless bliss
Drew its vague heart-yearning with voices sweet.
and
Thought the great-winged wanderer paraclete
Disappeared slow-singing a flame-word rune.
Self was left, lone, limitless, nude, immune.2
And then follows the soul state which is described in Nirvana,
All is abolished but the mute Alone,
The Mind from thought released, the heart from grief
Grow inexistent now beyond belief...
Only the illimitable Permanent
Is here, A Peace stupendous, featureless, still,
Replaces all, — what once was I, in It
A silent unnamed emptiness content
Either to fade in the Unknowable
Or thrill with the luminous seas of the Infinite.3
Nirvana is only one of the soul states described. In the Soul's Scene is described the state of the soul as it awaits the descent
Impassible she waits long for the sun's gold and the azure,
The sea's song with its slow happy refrain's plashes of pleasure,—
As man's soul in its depths waits the outbreaking of the light and the godhead
And the bliss that God felt when he created his image.4
And when the Descent comes,
All the world is changed to a single oneness;
Souls undying, infinite forces, meeting,
Join in God-dance weaving a seamless Nature,
Rhythm of the Deathless.
2 Collected Poems, SABCL, Vol. 5, p. 582.
3Ibid., p. 161. 4Ibid, p. 566.
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Mind and heart and body, one harp of being,
Cry that anthem, finding the notes eternal,—
Light and might and bliss and immortal wisdom
Clasping for ever.5
In this state of Ocean Oneness the poet realises,
Someone broods there nameless and bodiless,
Conscious and lonely, deathless and infinite,
And, sole in a still eternal rapture,
Gathers all things to his heart for ever.6
Besides these high realisations of the soul there are other visions, mystic sight of realms beyond the ken of the senses, other earths amid the tractless stars:
An irised multitude of hills and seas,
And glint of brooks in the green wilderness,
And trackless stars, and miracled symphonies
Of hues that float in ethers shadowless,
A dance of fire-flies in the fretted gloom,
In a pale midnight the moon's silver flare,
Fire-importunities of scarlet bloom
And bright suddenness of wings in a golden air,
Strange bird and animal forms like memories cast
On the rapt silence of unearthly woods,
Calm faces of the gods on background vast
Bringing the marvel of the infinitudes,
Through glimmering veils of wonder and delight
World after world bursts on the awakened sight.7
The special quality of Sri Aurobindo's poetry is that he does not veil his mystic realisations, his spiritual insight in allegory, myth or symbol; but he speaks of them in direct language of living experience. If to us what he speaks is strange and unrecognisable it is because we who live on the sense level or the mind level refuse to open ourselves to those other realisations which can only dawn
5 Ibid., p. 563. 6 Ibid., p. 557.
7 Ibid., p. 162.
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when our mind becomes still and rippleless and our senses withdrawn from their communication with outward things, so that
The city, a shadow picture without tone,
Floats, quivers unreal; forms without relief
Flow, a cinema's vacant shapes; like a reef
Foundering in shoreless gulfs the world is done.8
In Savitri we get the fulfilment of Sri Aurobindo's long poetic career. In one poem, perhaps the greatest epic of the human soul yet written, the poet records his knowledge of whatever wisdom the human soul is heir to. Milton set out to write a poem which would justify the ways of God to man but failed in his purpose. He has written a grand epic which has the elevation of the Hebrew mind, which has flashes of high intuitive knowledge as in the invocation to light, but which fails in the ultimate sight of the Supreme Realities. Dante's The Divine Comedy is full of mystic effulgence and unflattering lines in which the poetic Mantra is heard in all its beauty and sweetness, but moves in a shimmering prison of veiled light. Homer's Illiad has not the elevation of Paradise Lost or the effulgence of The Divine Comedy but it has the clear detached vision whose lines suggest the absolute because they take rise in the illumined mind. In the Illiad 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 the direct revelation which is characteristic of the Vedas and Upanishads. It has therefore the uttemess of the speech of the spiritual and not the glimmering beauty of mystical experience, it is not the Sibyl who speaks here but the Seer, the Master who has realised knowledge for himself, who enters the dark caves of inconscient being with the light and knowledge of the superconscient realms, the missioned spirit striving to transform the very texture of the human consciousness so that Sachchidananda may have here its abode.
Truth expresses itself to the limited human understanding through
8Ibid, p. 161.
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both myth and symbol, and every age reads these legends and symbols according to its own appreciation of the truth they represent. The legend of Shiva and Parvati has afforded to the common people of Bengal an outlet for all their simple joys and sorrows, but to the seeker of truth the myth symbolises the highest truths. In the language of the Vaishnava mystics there is the Prakrita and the Aprakrita Rupa, and that which here has a transient form has its counterpart in the realm of eternal realities. Thus from the legend of Savitri not only has the poet won its symbolic truth; through a process of āropa or superimposition he has made the legend the purveyor of his spiritual realisations. The realisations of Aswapati, his yogic self-release, compelling the descent of Savitri, the self-diffusing peace, the ocean of untrembling virgin fire whose duty it was to disrupt the past which blocked the immortal's road on earth and shape anew the fate of the world, are the realisations of Sri Aurobindo himself.
Savitri is the great fulfilment of Sri Aurobindo's poetic genius. It contains the record of all that Sri Aurobindo has been doing in that self-imposed silence in which away from the world he has been working for the higher evolution of the world. A wide gap separates it from Ahana which in spite of all its high debate ends in a significant symbol. Man is asked to take his place in the blissful paradise of the eternal Vrindavan identifying himself with the Divine Lila. The poems which succeeded have recorded yogic experiences in the form of unconnected lyrics; but in this one poem we get the whole spiritual legend of the striving of Sri Aurobindo as a grand sage of the human soul and the cosmic salvation that awaits it.
The poem begins with the description of the Symbol Dawn, that mystic hour which was to witness the superhuman struggle of Savitri to transform human fate and wrest it from the inconscience symbolised by the death of Satyavan. And indeed a great beginning is here, taking us back to that first dawn which came to break Nescience and make Being possible. And now this new dawn had come, when upon the inconscient the superconscient was to impose the conscient.
It was the hour before the Gods awake.
Across the path of the divine Event
The huge foreboding mind of Night, alone
In her unlit temple of eternity,
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Lay stretched immobile upon Silence' marge.
Almost one felt, opaque, impenetrable,
In the sombre symbol of her eyeless muse
The abysm of the unbodied Infinite;
A fathomless zero occupied the world. 9
And in this fathomless zero, athwart the vain enormous trance of space, the earth is seen
A shadow spinning through a soulless Void,10
as if abandoned in the hollow gulls, forgetful of her spirit and her fate. In this impassive neutral sky, some thing stirred, an unthought idea,
Teased the Inconscient to wake Ignorance.11
And then,
A thought was sown in the unsounded Void,
A sense was bom within the darkness' depths,
A memory quivered in the heart of Time
As if a soul long dead were moved to live. 12
And as if in answer a hope stole in that hardly dared to be and there came,
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.
One lucent comer windowing hidden things
Forced the world's blind immensity to sight 13
9Savitri. p.1.. 10Ibid. 11Ibid., p. 2.
12Ibid., p. 3. 13Ibid.
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Once more a tread perturbed the vacant Vasts;
Infinity's centre, a Face of rapturous calm
Parted the eternal lids that open heaven;
A Form from far beatitudes seemed to near.
Ambassadress twixt eternity and change,
The omniscient Goddess leaned across the breadths
That wrap the fated joumeyings of the stars
And saw die spaces ready for her feet14
Such was the dawn on which Savitri awoke with the knowledge that it was the day on which Satyavan must die. And in her mind withdrawn in secret fields of thought she knew the hour had come when she must alter Nature's harsh economy so that, looking in the lonely eyes of immortal Death, she must with her nude spirit measure the Infinite's night Thus Savitri stands "a combatant in dreadful lists," without knowledge of the world but championing the world.
There follows a description of the human Savitri, wonderful in its concept the veiled goddess in the woman and all the possibilities inherent in womanhood growing towards her own divinity,
Immortal rhythms swayed in her time-bom steps;
Her look, her smile awoke celestial sense
Even in earth-stuff, and their intense delight
Poured a supernal beauty on men's lives.
A wide self-giving was her native act;
A magnanimity as of sea or sky
Enveloped with its greatiless all that came.
Her kindly care was a sweet temperate sun,
Her high passion a blue heaven's equipoise ...
So deep was her embrace of inmost help, that
The whole world could take refuge in her single heart
The great unsatisfied godhead here could dwell.15
But the obstacles that bar the way to the fulfilment of Savitri's mission are indeed great:
14Ibid., p. 4. 15Ibid., p. 15.
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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. 16
Yet the missioned spirit of Savitri is indomitable,
Her head she bowed not to the stark decree
Baring her helpless heart to destiny's stroke.17
And so
She faced the engines of the universe;
A heart stood in the way of the driving wheels:
Its giant workings paused in front of a Mind,
Its stark conventions met the flame of a soul.18
Thus a magic leverage suddenly was caught and a godhead stood revealed behind the brute machine. And in Savitri the great World-Mother arose:
A flaming warrior from the eternal peaks
Empowered to force the door denied and closed
Smote from Death's visage its dumb absolute
And burst the bounds of consciousness and Time.19
Thus end the first two cantos of Savitri. The rest of the published portion of the poem deals with the Yoga of Aswapati, the father of Savitri. We have already mentioned that this portion of the poem deals with the poet's own soul-adventures in the realm of Yoga: Whilst a world's desire has compelled the mortal birth of Savitri, the transforming light which will champion man's cause against death and ignorance, it is the conscious effort of Sri Aurobindo himself,
A thinker and toiler in the ideal's air,20
16Ibid., p. 18. 17Ibid., p. 19. 18 Ibid, p. 20. 19Ibid.,p.2l.
20 Ibid., p. 22.
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that has brought down to earth's dumb need the radiant power of Savitri. About Aswapati the poet writes:
His was a spirit that stooped from larger spheres
Into our province of ephemeral sight,
A colonist from immortality...
His birth was as a symbol and a sign,
His human self a curtain and a shield...
His soul lived as eternity's delegate,
His mind was like a fire assailing heaven,
His will a hunter in the trails of light.
An ocean impulse lifted every breath;
Each action left the footprints of a God,
Each moment was a beat of puissant wings.
The little plot of our mortality
Touched by this tenant form the heights became
A playground of the living Infinite.21
It would be out of place to deal in detail here with Savitri. But the publication of Savitri raises the question: Can yogic experience form the subject-matter of poetry? Dante took the Christian mystical experience and made an attempt to grasp the inner unity through a traditional myth. The result was an epic of wonderous pictorial beauty full of living unforgettable touches, a feast for the high sensuous imagination. Sri Aurobindo too uses a myth, but the myth here is made to yield up its truth-element and embody the poet's realisations. Though these realisations come to us as thought-forms in which the poet sees what he conveys to his listeners, transcendental pictures form themselves in our mind, till an overhead world in formed; Sri Krishnaprem remarks: "The stairway of the worlds reveals itself to our gaze—the worlds of light above, the worlds of darkness beneath—and we see also ever circling life ('kindled in measure and quenched in measure') ascending and descending that Stair under the calm unwinking gaze of the Cosmic Gods who shine forth now as of old." The power of poetry does not lie in the subject matter it deals with, (though the elevation, depth or intrinsic beauty of the subject matter must form part of the aesthetic reaction, as Sri Aurobindo points out,) but in the amount
21 Ibid., pp. 22-23.
Page 417
of illumination it renders to its subject, the vividness, reality, truth that lies hidden in the subject-matter that it has power of evoking for us. Dante's pictures of hell, in spite of their terribleness, have not less power of poetic evocation than the mystic figure of Beatrice presiding over the whole poem. Thus each form of poetry must have its own standard of judgment, and greatness will depend on its nearness to absolute truth conveyed in language of absolute beauty. He would be a bold critic indeed who would deny to Savitri packed with lines of utter thought and beauty this high estimate of poetry.
(Editor's Note: For the complete article by the author reference may be made to Sri Aurobindo Mandir Annual: Jayanti Number 8, published on 15 August 1949.)
LOTIKA GHOSE
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