On Savitri
THEME/S
Savitri: Assault of Ether and of Fire
A Divine cornucopia, Savitri is inexhaustible, and lends itself to as many approaches as there were seekers yesterday, are today and will be, in ever growing numbers, in times to come. This writer claims only the approach of a single seeker, at one vanishing point of time.
Two definitions of poetry come to mind. First, Louis Untermeyer's: "Poetry is the power of defining the indefinable in terms of the unforgettable." That may be a more or less acceptable definition for mental and vital poetry in the world's languages. But not for mantric poetry, and certainly not for Savitri. Sri Aurobindo never did attempt to define the indefinable. One would have thought that is best left undefined. Otherwise you risk one of those laboured and unreadable metaphysical treatises written by those who seek doctorates in Divinity— even if Christ himself did not boast any such qualification.
Sri Aurobindo took the direct route. He did not care to define Truth. He preferred to experience it at all its multiple levels. What he does do in Savitri is to evoke deep within us quite inexpressible responses to powerful vibrations of mantric verse. In short, for those who have receptive ears and inner beings primed for revelatory mantric rhythms and sound values, it is transformational poetry of the highest order. One more word. Someone once wrote to the Mother and asked:
In the end, what is the Divine?
The Divine can be lived, but not defined.1
Next, a redoubtable response from Emily Dickinson, one of the great foursome of classical American-English literature (the other three being Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman.) Asked how she would define poetry, Miss Dickinson replied: "If I read a book, and it makes my body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?"
There is no other way—at least for devotees! For them Supreme Love is at once the origin and consummation of knowledge, works, and life on earth. And Sri Aurobindo's Savitri, the Epic of the Triumph of Love over Death, constitutes the summum bonum of the Integral Yoga
1 Mother's Agenda, Vol. 8, p. 151.
Scholars of Poetics delve into the art and craft, the rhythms and metres employed to achieve unique poetic effects. Many would agree, however, that several passages in Savitri do blow the tops of their heads off. For Savitri is experiential poetry, the veritable Veda of the modem Age. Like the Veda, it communicates formidable mantric vibrations that defy analysis. Savitri may remain on hands, lap or desk, but we find ourselves soaring, in repeated flashes of extraordinary illumination, to normally inaccessible heights, or plunging into hitherto unsuspected and otherwise mortally dangerous depths.
The Bhakta's heart comprehends what the Jnani may find abstruse. In a conversation of 10 April 1965, the Mother said:
I have been asked a question:
How can I love the Lord? I have never seen Him and never He speaks to me.
This is my answer:
It is not what one sees or hears that one loves, it is love that one loves through the forms and sounds, and of all love the most perfect love, the most loving love is the Lord's love.
When I wrote it, it was an extraordinarily intense experience: one cannot love anything but love, and it is love that one loves behind all things—it is love that one loves.2
It is Love that loves itself everywhere.
And form and sound are excuses.3
It is significant that in canto 2 of the very first book of Savitri we encounter an exceptional flash-forward (rather than the usual flashbacks employed in modem novels and films) to the triumph of incarnate Supreme Love over Death. A few pregnant lines may be cited
But one stood up and lit the limitless flame.
Arraigned by the dark Power that hates all bliss
In the dire court where life must pay for joy ...
Her head she bowed not to the stark decree
Baring her helpless heart to destiny's stroke...
2 Ibid, Vol. 6, p. 70. 3 Ibid., pp. 70-71.
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In her own self she found her high recourse;
She matched with the iron law her sovereign right:
Her single will opposed the cosmic rule.
To stay the wheels of Doom this greatness rose....
This truth broke in in a triumph of fire;
A victory was won for God in man,
The deity revealed its hidden face.
The great World-Mother now in her 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.4
The Mother's own foreknowledge is worth mentioning here. In her categorical way, the Mother had written: "Love is at the origin of the world and Love is its Goal." We also read in the same book: "Love is the Supreme Victor."5 And one morning the Mother read out to a disciple four stunningly revelatory lines Savitri uttered in her debate with Death, as if they were a confirmation of the Mother's own experience of unification with the Supreme Love. I quote:
The great stars bum with my unceasing fire
And life and death are both its fuel made.
Life only was my blind attempt to love:
Earth saw my struggle, heaven my victory.6
She says that life and death are the fuel; then, in her blind attempt life only was her attempt to love. She later stressed again that it was not "life was only", but "life only" was the attempt. Because her attempt to love was blind, she limited it to life—but she won the victory in death.
It is very interesting.
Earth saw my struggle, heaven my victory.
Yes, but Savitri couldn't win the victory on earth because she lacked 'heaven'—she couldn't win the victory in life because she lacked death, and she had to conquer death in order to conquer life. That is the idea. Unless you conquer Death the victory cannot be won. Death must be overcome; there should be no more death. It is very clear.
4 Savitri, pp. 18-21. 5 White Roses. 6 Savitri, p. 638.
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Then the Mother added: According to what Sri Aurobindo says here, it is the principle of Love that changes into flame, and then into light. It isn't the principle of Light that changes into flame by materialising itself; it is the flame that changes into light. The great Stars give off light because they bum; they bum because they are the result of love... it is my experience of the 'pulsations'.7 The last thing one comes into contact with is love (emphasis mine). According to the experience, it is the last thing to manifest, now, in its full purity, and it is what has the power to transform. That's what Sri Aurobindo appears to say here: The victory of Love would seem to be the final victory. He said that Savitri was 'a legend and a symbol.' He is the one who made it into a symbol. It is the story of the meeting between Savitri, the principle of Love, and Death. And it is over Death that she won the victory, not in life. She couldn't win the victory in life if she hadn't won the victory over Death. ...
How many times, how many times I have seen that he had written down my experiences (emphasis mine).... Because for years and years I didn't read Sri Aurobindo's books; it was only after coming here that I had read The Life Divine, The Syntheis of Yoga, and another one, too. For instance, Essays on the Gita I had never read, Savitri I had never read. I read it very recently (that is to say, some ten years ago, in 1954 or 1955). The book Sri Aurobindo on Himself and on the Mother I had never read, and when I read it, I realised what he wrote to people about me—I had no idea, he had never told me anything about it!... You see, there are lots of things that I had said while speaking to people—that I had said just like that, because they came (gesture from above) and I would say them—and I realised he had written them. So, naturally, I appeared to be simply repeating what he had written—but I had never read it! And now, it's the same thing: I had read this passage from Savitri, but I hadn't noticed it— because I hadn't had the experience. But now that I have had the experience, I see that he tells it.8
We have Savitri's debate with Death. But to attempt debate with the Power of Supreme Love would be infinitely more presumptuous than to debate a hurricane in full force. The passage that follows could only have ensued from Sri Aurobindo's own tremendous experience of the Supreme Mother—not a secondhand account of someone else's.
7Refer Mother's Agenda, Vol. 3: the Mother's experience of the "great pulsations" of Divine Love (13 April 1962).
8Mother's Agenda, Vol. 6, pp. 235-37.
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An awesome authenticity vibrates in every line, leaving one all a-tremble.
Leaving behind the World-Soul, Aswapati (i.e Sri Aurobindo) journeys on:
Alone between tremendous Presences,
Under the watching eye of nameless Gods...
There he beheld in their mighty union's poise
The figure of the deathless Two-in-One,
A single being in two bodies clasped,
A diarchy of two united souls,
Seated absorbed in deep creative joy;
Their trance of bliss sustained the mobile world.
Behind them in a morning dusk One stood
Who brought them forth from the Unknowable.
Ever disguised she awaits the seeking spirit;
Watcher on the supreme unreachable peaks,
Guide of the traveller of the unseen paths,
She guards the austere approach to the Alone.
At the beginning of each far-spread plane
Pervading with her power the cosmic suns
She reigns, inspirer of its multiple works
And thinker of the symbol of its scene-
Then in a sovereign answer to his heart
A gesture came as of worlds thrown away,
And from her raiment's lustrous mystery raised
One arm half-parted the eternal veil.
A light appeared still and imperishable.
Attracted to the large and luminous depths
Of the ravishing enigma of her eyes,
He saw the mystic outline of a face.
Overwhelmed by her implacable tight and bliss...
He fell down at her feet unconscious, prone.9
Those tremendous lines of supernal Light and Might contain more than all we can possibly conceive or imagine.
At our human vital level, we fall in love with the perversities of anger, hate, lust, greed, genocide and what have you! Or with another human being—a generalised phenomenon often dismissed as a purely
9 Savitri, pp. 294-96.
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biological device employed by evolutionary Nature to ensure the self-renewal of the race. But, like the purest white bloom that I once saw emerging from a dung-heap in an Indian village, a rarer love can also emerge from that 'evolutionary device'. The Taj Mahal stands as the monumental testimony of one such love.
Willy-nilly, all of us are driven—divinely or diabolically, as the case may be—by Love in diminished or grotesque forms of its primeval manifestations on earth. The worm would not wriggle, nor reptilian ecstasies thrash the slime, were it not for the Love that sustains them and all life under the wheeling stars. We recall the incredible depth of what the Mother wrote to Huta on 18 January 1965: "Love to all in you that loves and to all in you that does not know that it loves."10
Divine Love in its infinite purity and power cannot be mentioned in the same breath as mental and vital love. Caring nothing for their appointment diaries, it chooses to invade some mortals at the most unexpected of moments. Generally speaking, scientists and doctors know nothing of it, since they cannot either measure, quantify or scan it. As the renowned English physicist Eddington admitted: "Any attempt to scientifically measure a subjective experience is like trying to find the square root of a sonnet."
The deepest mystery known to mankind is that of all-inclusive, all-overpowering and inexpressible Divine Love. An all-shattering and uncompromising Love that leaves no room for bargaining, for it dissolves everything in its path, and irresistibly carries forward universes, worlds and life to their divine Fulfilment. That has nothing to do with love as commonly spoken of in human parlance. We might recall here the Mother's trenchant observation: "When people speak of sexual desire, instead of giving it the noble name of 'love', they should simply call it 'vital cannibalism.' "11
Vivekananda, speaking of Divine Love, told a sublime story: "A great saint said, using the language of a girl, describing love: 'Four eyes met. There were changes in two souls. And now I cannot tell whether he is a man and I a woman, or he a woman and I a man. This only I remember, two souls were. Love came, and there was one.' "12
Among powerful suggestions of Supreme Love so lavishly strewn about in the pages of Savitri, I may cite one:
10White Roses.
11Mother's Agenda; Vol. 7, p 258.
12Sister Nivedita, The Master as I saw Him, Appendix A.
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Then suddenly there came a downward look
As if a sea exploring its own depths;
A living Oneness widened at its core
And joined him to unnumbered multitudes.
A Bliss, A Light, a Power, a flame-white Love
Caught all into a sole immense embrace;
Existence found its truth on Oneness' breast
And each became the self and space of all.13
If Supreme Love be the invincible power that alone can transform human dross into divine gold, it is clear that crude, half-baked human vessels cannot bear even a drop of that stupendous power without being shattered, for it brooks no impurity, no imperfection anywhere in the being. Yoga is essentially a purifying process to prepare pure, perfectly baked human vessels that can contain and bear the influx of the first transforming drops of almighty Love without shattering into smithereens. We recall Sri Aurobindo's admonition: "You must keep the temple clean if you wish to instal there the living Presence."14
Well did the Supreme Mother warn Aswapati:
I am the Mystery beyond reach of mind,
I am the goal of the travail of the suns;
My fire and sweetness are the cause of life.
But too immense my danger and my joy.
Awake not the immeasurable descent,
Speak not my secret name to hostile Time;
Man is too weak to bear the Infinite's weight.
Truth bom too soon might break the imperfect earth.15
Which explains why an infinite compassion doles out the power of Love in tiny homeopathic doses to our as yet poorly baked humanity. The all-inclusive cosmic love of a spiritual athlete like Sri Ramakrishna explains the well- known story of his crying out in pain when he saw a cart-driver beating his bullock, and found himself with bleeding lash marks on his own back.
After Savitri united with the Supreme Love she was told:
Thou shalt bear all things that all things may change.16
13 Savitri, pp. 322-23. 14 The Mother,SABCL,Vol.25,p.3.
15 Savitri, p. 335. 16 Ibid., p. 700.
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We know that the Mother, like Sri Aurobindo before her, bore all things that all things may change.
Such is the Divine challenge to seekers everywhere who decide to tread the road of the Integral Yoga opened up by the "One Consciousness in two bodies"—Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. A formidable challenge, one that can be accepted only by those prepared to be among the forerunners of the tomorrow of the earth—a tomorrow, we might add, that we are all willy-nilly rushing towards—whether we like it or not, know it or not—like a multitude of needles towards an omnipotent magnet. For it is a "tomorrow" that contains in itself past, present and future in an everlasting Now.
Savitri is the epic of the triumph of Love over Death. The human embodiment of the Supreme Mother, Savitri pursues that dread God, who has taken possession of the soul of Satyavan into ever deeper, darker layers of the Great Inconscient. That pursuit and its outcome make for the incredible mantric power of imperishable verse in the cantos of Books 9 to 11. The earlier Books of the epic covered the inspired and inspiring preparation of—to use the vocabulary of modem space exploration—the launching pad for the human take-off into the superhuman. We have here a reversal, as it were, of the original plunge of Divine Love into its seeming opposite—the Infinite Inconscient. This time, it was not the covert but overt Divine, emerging from its transformed human embodiment, that dared the Inconscient realms to recover the Soul of Earth.
It is crucial for the devotee to appreciate that it is only the Divine in us who can possibly undertake the Yoga of Transformation—not the mental or vital ego with its silly pride of being the cat's whiskers— and flaunting itself with the aid of pretentious adornments and titles. And the first hurdles the seeker has to leap over include the romantic reveries of "vital cannibalism" that masquerade in the human animal as "love". Sri Aurobindo makes all this abundantly clear:
Impersonally, all things here, even the movements of the Ignorance, are herself in veiled power and her creations in diminished substance, her Nature-body and Nature-force, and they exist because, moved by the mysterious fiat of the Supreme to work out something that was there in the possibilities of the Infinite, she has consented to the great sacrifice and has put on like a mask the soul and forms of the Ignorance. But personally too she has stooped to descend here into the Darkness that she may lead it to the Light, into the Falsehood and Error that she
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may convert it to the Truth, into this Death that she may mm it to godlike Life, into this world-pain and its obstinate sorrow and suffering that she may end it in the transforming ecstasy of her sublime Ananda. In her deep and great love for her children (emphasis mine) she has consented to put on herself the cloak of this obscurity, condescended to bear the attacks and torturing influences of the powers of Darkness and the Falsehood, borne to pass through the portals of the birth that is a death, taken upon herself the pangs and sorrows and sufferings of the creation, since it seemed that thus alone could it be lifted to the Light and Joy and Truth and eternal Life. This is the great sacrifice called sometimes the sacrifice of the Purusha, but much more deeply the holocaust of Prakriti, the sacrifice of the Divine Mother.17
The devotee-begins with the ardent aspiration that the return journey to his or her true home in the bosom of the Supreme Mother begins with the release of the Divine spark in us from the coils of Ignorance— the psychic being or soul. In truth, nowhere—not even in Hell—can we escape the Divine. A rishi of the Rig Veda knew this stupendous secret:
He is the child of the waters, the child of the forests, the child of things stable and the child of things that move. Even in the stone he is there for man, he is there in the middle of his house,— he is as one universal in creatures; he is the Immortal, the perfect thinker.18
Depending on the initial impetus to the Yoga, one may or may not begin with Bhakti. Yoga has multiple beginnings, indeed as many as there may or will be seekers. A fanatic of the Integral Yoga is hence, by definition, inconceivable. Sri Aurobindo attests to this vast catholicity of the Integral Yoga in unambiguous terms: '
By this Yoga we not only seek the Infinite, but we call upon the Infinite to unfold himself in human life. Therefore the Shastra of our Yoga must provide for an infinite liberty in the receptive human soul. A free adaptability in the manner and type of the individual's acceptance of the Universal and Transcendent into himself is the right condition for the full spiritual life in man.
17 The Mother, SABCL, Vol. 25, pp. 24-25.
18 Rig Veda: Mandala One, Sukta 70.2
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Vivekananda, pointing out that the unity of all religions must necessarily express itself by an increasing richness of variety in its forms, said once that the perfect state of that essential unity would come when each man had his own religion, when not bound by sect or traditional form he followed the free self-adaptation of his nature in its relations with the Supreme. So also one may say that the perfection of the integral Yoga will come when each man is able to follow his own path of Yoga, pursuing the development of his own nature in its upsurging towards that which transcends the nature. For freedom is the final law and the last consummation.
Meanwhile certain general lines have to be formed which may help to guide the thought and practice of the Sadhaka. But these must take, as much as possible, forms of general truths, general statements of principle, the most powerful broad directions of effort and development rather than a fixed system which has to be followed as a routine. All Shastra is the outcome of past experience and a help to future experience. It is an aid and a partial guide. It puts up signposts, gives the names of the main roads and the already explored directions, so that the traveller may know whither and by what paths he is proceeding.
The rest depends on personal effort and experience and upon the power of the Guide.19
The same vast catholicity of spirit is enjoined on one who proceeds by Bhakti—the Path of Love. There is no hard and fast rule to bind down any Bhakta to one rigid code or another. Divine Love, we need to constantly remind ourselves, is all-inclusive, excluding no code, no seeker. This too is revealed in Savitri's own sequential responses, first to the heavenly sage Narad's prediction relating to Satyavan's death, then to her actual confrontation with the God of Death and, finally, with special force, in the ever-memorable mantric verse of The Book of Everlasting Day (Book Eleven). Only a few indications may be given here.
Sage Narad himself said in his last utterance to Aswapati and his distraught Queen:
In vain thou moumst that Satyavan must die;
His death is a beginning of greater life,
Death is the spirit's opportunity.
19 The Synthesis of Yoga, SABCL, Vol. 20, p. 51.
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A vast intention has brought two souls close
And love and death conspire towards one great end.20
Narad did not say what that "great end" might be.
The first response to Narad's prediction came from the human mother of Savitri, followed immediately by her own.
Mounting thy car go forth, O Savitri,
And travel once more through the peopled lands...
A choice less rare may call a happier fate.
But Savitri answered from her violent heart,—her voice was calm, her face was fixed like steel:
Once my heart chose and chooses not again.
The word I have spoken can never be erased,
It is written in the record book of God...
My heart has sealed its troth to Satyavan:
Its signature adverse Fate cannot efface,
Its seal not Fate nor Death nor Time dissolve...
Let Fate do with me what she will or can;
I am stronger than death and greater than my fate;
My love shall outlast the world, doom falls from me
Helpless against my immortality.
Fate's law may change, but not my spirit's will.21
An even deeper certitude emerges in Savitri' s reply to her mother's second plea.
My will is part of the eternal will,
My fate is what my spirit's strength can make,
My fate is what my spirit's strength can bear;
My strength is not the Titan's, it is God's.
I have discovered my glad reality
Beyond my body in another's being:
I have found the deep unchanging soul of love...
If for a year, that year is all my life
And yet I know this is not all my fate
20Savitri, p. 459.
21Ibid., pp. 431-32.
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Only to live and love awhile and die.
For I know now why my spirit came on earth
And who I am and who he is I love.
I have looked at him from my immortal Self,
I have seen God smile at me in Satyavan;
I have seen the Eternal in a human face.22
The Divine Drama gathers momentum in Canto Two Book Six. Narad's words are prophetic regarding Savitri's choice.23
A greatness in thy daughter's soul resides
That can transform herself and all around,
But must cross on stones of suffering to its goal.
Although designed like a nectar cup of heaven,
Of heavenly ether made she sought this air,
She too must share the human need of grief
And all her cause of joy transmute to pain...
In this enormous world standing apart
In the mightiness of her silent spirit's will,
In the passion of her soul of sacrifice
Her lonely strength facing the universe,
Affronting fate, asks not man's help nor god's:
Sometimes one life is charged with earth's destiny,
It cries not for succour from the time-bound powers.
Alone she is equal to her mighty task...
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,
Alone with death and close to extinction's edge...
In her the conscious Will took human shape:
She only can save herself and save the world...
Her hour must come and none can intervene...
Even though all falters and falls and sees an end
And the heart fails and only are death and night,
God-given her strength can battle against doom
Even on a brink where Death alone seems close
22Ibid, pp. 435-36.
23Ibid, pp. 456-62.
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And no human strength can hinder or can help.24
Don't these lines provide some inkling of what happened on 17 November 1973? We will underestimate Sri Aurobindo's attainment of trikāla drishti if we believe that the Mother failed on that fateful day. He at least had the same foreknowledge that he put in Narad's mouth. None ever knew what really did happen in her inner being that day. Sri Aurobindo was not physically present either to suggest in mantric words what did happen. But, at least, we do have the Mother's own voice on an Agenda-tape saying that she had seen and been her new sexless body. So?
To get back to some of Savitri's statements on love in her debate with Death, that repeatedly clarify the significance of the word 'love' as used by Sri Aurobindo in his epic. Savitri is unambiguous when she tells Death:
My love is not a hunger of the heart,
My love is not a craving of the flesh;
It came to me from God, to God returns.
Even in all that life and man have marred,
A whisper of divinity still is heard,
A breath is felt from the eternal spheres.
Allowed by Heaven and wonderful to man
A sweet fire-rhythm of passion chants to love.
There is a hope in its wild infinite cry;
It rings with callings from forgotten heights,
And when its strains are hushed to high-winged souls
In their empyrean, its burning breath
Survives beyond, the rapturous core of suns
That flame for ever pure in skies unseen,
A voice of the eternal Ecstasy.25
The Love that survives beyond as "the rapturous core of suns" is radically different from the purely vital vibes that pass between the sexes as Hollywood or Hollywood would have them.
Next, Death hears:
For I the Woman am the force of God,
He the Eternal's delegate soul in man.
24Ibid, pp. 457-62.
25Ibid, pp. 612-13.
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My will is greater than thy law, O Death;
My love is stronger than the bonds of Fate:
Our love is the heavenly seal of the Supreme.
I guard that seal against thy rending hands.
Love must not cease to live upon the earth...
Love is man's lien on the Absolute.26
Briefly about The Eternal Day: The Soul's Choice and the Supreme Consummation. Here, to say the least, we confront the most magnificently powerful mantric poetry ever written, and in such an incomparable "royalty of mighty ease27—so potently evocative of the Supreme Himself and his infinite realms of incredible beauty and wonder. Indeed, in the Master-Poet's own words: "The lines that tear the veil from Deity's face."28 An indescribable vibratory response within recognises an affinity to the true Truth at supreme levels of existence and being, as does a single string of the Veena vibrate in resonance with all others. And this time we recall:
There is a being beyond the being of mind,
An Immeasurable cast into many forms,
A miracle of the multitudinous One.29
One also comes across a reference in the Canto to the "forefathers" often mentioned in the Vedas.
Our great forefathers in those splendours moved;
Termless in power and satisfied of light,
They enjoyed the sense of all for which we strive.
High seers, moved poets saw the eternal thoughts
That, travellers on high, arrive to us
Deformed by our search, tricked by costuming mind,
Like gods disfigured by the pangs of birth,
Seized the great words which now are frail sounds caught
By difficult rapture on a mortal tongue.
The strong who stumble and sin were calm proud gods.30
The God of Death himself is here altogether transfigured
26 Ibid, p. 633. 27 Ibid., p.26. 28Ibid., p. 677. 29 Ibid., p. 705.
30Ibid., p. 677.
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One whom her soul had faced as Death and Night
A sum of all sweetness gathered into his limbs
And blinded her heart to the beauty of the suns.
Transfigured was the formidable shape...
A marvellous form responded to her gaze
Whose sweetness justified life's blindest pain;
All Nature's struggle was its easy price,
The universe and its agony seemed worth-while.31
Several times Savitri gave voice to the highest terrestrial aspirations in her responses to the supreme allurements that tested her. Her love passes every such grandiose test with flying colours.32 First:
Obesetter of man's soul with life and death...
Iclimb not to thy everlasting Day,
Even as I have shunned thy eternal Night.
To me who turn not from thy terrestrial Way,
Give back the other self my nature asks,
Thy spaces need him not to help their joy;
Earth needs his beautiful spirit made by thee
To fling delight down like a net of gold...
O thunderer with the lightnings of the soul,
Give not to darkness and to death thy sun,
Achieve thy wisdom's hidden firm decree
And the mandate of thy secret world-wide love.33
Her second divinely inspired response:
In vain thou temptst with solitary bliss
Two spirits saved out of a suffering world;
My soul and his indissolubly linked
In the one task for which our lives were bom,
To raise the world to God in deathless Light,
To bring God down to the world on earth we came,
To change the earthly life to life divine...
Let a greater being then arise from man,
The superhuman with the Eternal mate
And the Immortal shine through earthly forms.34
31 Ibid, pp. 678-79. 32 Ibid, pp. 685-87. 33 Ibid.
34Ibid, pp. 692-93.
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Finally follows the deathless charge to the "incarnate Word" that was Savitri:
Because thou hast obeyed my timeless will
I lay my hands upon thy soul of flame,
I lay my hands upon thy heart of love,
I yoke thee to my power of work in Time...
O Sun-Word, thou shalt raise the earth-soul to Light
And bring down God into the lives of men;
Earth shall be my work-chamber and my house,
My garden of life to plant a seed divine.35
My hidden presence led thee unknowing on
From thy beginning in earth's voiceless bosom
Through life and pain and time and will and death,
Through outer shocks and inner silences
Along the mystic roads of Space and Time
To the experience which all Nature hides.
Who hunts and seizes me, my captive grows:
This shalt thou henceforth learn from thy heart-beats.
For ever love, O beautiful slave of God!
O lasso of my rapture's widening noose.
Become my cord of universal love.
The spirit ensnared by thee force to delight
Of creation's oneness sweet and fathomless,
Compelled to embrace my myriad unities
And all my endless forms and divine souls.
O Mind, grow full of the eternal peace;
O Word, cry out the immortal litany:
Built is the golden tower, the flame-child bom.36
Nothing else needs to be said. Those who know how to recite Savitri —and there are several—might communicate its mantric force and power to others. And, perhaps, make their listeners' entire being throb with the Supreme Certitude in the very last line in the above. Clearly, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother did not walk the earth in vain.
Finally, it is important to stress, in the strongest possible terms: no essay can do even a modicum of justice to the unparalleled wonder and majesty of Savitri in its entirety. The best one can do is to read, or better still, recite the entire epic to oneself—and find
35 Ibid, pp. 698-99. 36 Ibid., p. 702.
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oneself on the thresholds of a multitude of doors, each opening out, one after another, to the greatest of all possible adventures in human Time. And perhaps the best is to walk out of one or other door— impelled by an irrepressible—consciously accepting the invitation to Love, by Love!
C.V. DEVAN NAIR
Page 339
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