Sri Aurobindo considered Savitri as his "main work"¹ and out of his precious time allotted every day two and a half hours for its composition. This was in the late forties when the tempo of work had speeded up considerably. In fact he was otherwise engaged with it almost for fifty years though with some long gaps in between. Today we have a poem written in pentametric blank verse form running almost to twenty-four thousand lines. Divided into twelve Books as is the tradition for an epic, it has forty-eight Cantos and an Epilogue. Part I consisting of the first twenty-four Cantos was published about twelve weeks before Sri Aurobindo's passing away, in September 1950; Part II and Part III as a single volume appeared in May 1951.

It is significant to note that Sri Aurobindo regarded Savitri as his main work. It does not mean that he took time off from his spiritual pre-possession simply for the purposes of a happy literary pursuit. Rather it was his constant companion in the task of realisation and establishment of the dynamic Truth in this creation. He worked upon it again and again until the kind of yogic perfection he wanted was achieved in it, that it could also become a means to achieve that perfection even in a literary endeavour. We have an early letter of Sri Aurobindo to this effect: "I used Savitri as a means of ascension. I began with it on a certain mental level, each time I could, reach a higher level I rewrote from that level... . In fact Savitri has not been regarded by me as a poem to be written and finished, but as a field of experimentation to see how far poetry could be written from one's own yogic consciousness and how that could be made creative."² In another letter he writes: "Savitri is the record of a seeing."³ The birth and growth of Savitri as a "flame-child" is therefore a Yogi's spiritual autobiography. Its birth is in the Tapas-Shakti of one who is committed to discover the Word that can transform the lot of our mortality and its growth is in the action that can bring felicitous prosperity to it. Therefore

¹Nirodbaran, Twelve Years with Sri Aurobindo, p. 188.

²Savitri, pp. 727-28.

³Ibid., p. 794. Perspectives of Savitri, p. 13.

Savitri is also named the Sun-Word or the Daughter of Infinity.

To describe Savitri we may very well apply the epithets Vyasa used for characterising Aswapati's daughter Savitri. She is a radiant daughter, kanyā teasvini, she is a damsel of heaven, devakanyā, she is heavenly and radiant in form, devarupini; she is Goddess Fortune and one who brings the wealth of auspicious happiness, is beautiful and charming, and is also an adept in the Yoga of Meditation, dhyānayogaparāyana, thus equipped to accomplish the purpose for which she has taken this mortal birth in the world of men.⁴

In the Mother's words Savitri is the "supreme revelation of Sri Aurobindo's vision."⁵ Its subject is universal and its revelation is prophetic.⁶ About this prophetic character she speaks elsewhere as follows: "That marvellous prophetic poem... shall be humanity's guide towards its future realisation."⁷ A divine fulfilment in this long and difficult evolutionary process is its theme and the assertion is that it can bring even to this existence what it confirmatively states. Therefore Savitri becomes a Yogic Word which always has the power to affirm in life the transcendental Truth it proclaims.

The more we plunge into the tranquil-emerald of Savitri's ocean the more we discover its richnesses of truth, light, beauty, joy, sweetness, harmony, strength, perfection. Even when one reads Savitri on a mental level it can open out for us prospects of lustrous spiritual realisations; it can lead us to "understand deeper things".⁸Though Savitri is a text-book of the Yoga of Physical Transformation and continually needs the author's "knowledge and experience for understanding it," its esotericism in some respect can yet be grasped if we read it with a silent mind. Bhakti there is in it and the heart can also approach the wonderlands of its delight; but the mountain splendours of its climb take us to the worlds of higher spiritual illumination in the greatness of the triple glory of manifestation. The ascending and descending streams derive their waters from the secret source of its delight. It is now for us to pick up the text-book and profit from it.

And the nice thing is that the text-book has also a definite literary

⁴R.Y. Deshpande, Vyasa's Savitri.

⁵Words of the Mother, CWM, Vol. 13, p. 24.

⁶Ibid., p. 25.

⁷Some Answers from the Mother, CWM, Vol. 16, p. 294.

⁸ Ibid., p. 395.

form. It therefore becomes accessible to us; it makes available to us in a concrete way the profundities that can lead us along the spiritual path on and on. We have to open it and read it, we have to breathe in it. Indeed in its origin that form of Savitri is varam rupam, the auspicious form of savitra himself, the Light of the Supreme, which shall illumine us with the Truth.⁹ It will be therefore a mistake if we take it only as an epic written on traditional grounds.

For an epic there may be a story or there may not be a story, there may be events and physical happenings or there may be just episodes strewn together. Story and vigorous action are the conventional modes belonging to the classical poetry of this genre; then, in another age, there can also be literary presentations pertaining to a newer culture of the mind. But these need not necessarily exhaust everything; there could as well be other dimensions. An epic can be intensely subjective and at the same time can yet encompass in its fold the destiny of the world. It can bring to view the vistas that have remained far away from our sight; it can even make those wonderful realities a part of our life. An epic of action on another plane of consciousness can thus still be written in this manner. In a creative author of the future that is the newest form we expect shaping his work. The framework of its narrative can be that of a journey of the Spirit through occult and supracosmic regions, or the action of some transcendental Might facing the antagonist Power standing across the path of a desirable possibility in the manifestation of everlasting happiness. When we as a collectivity arrive at this point in our inner development we also recognise the progress that has been made in the aggregate awareness of the race. It is therefore assumed that we approach Savitri with that asset given to us by the long work of Time. It is meant for ripe souls ready to step into the days that have left the nights behind.

In one of the talks with his disciples Sri Aurobindo mentions that for "an epic one requires the power of architectural construction"¹⁰ and it is precisely that what we have in Savitri, though not in its accustomed sense; with the barest possible element of a legend on which it is based we see a majestic edifice rising from Matter's plinth to the Spirit's heights. And the remarkable

⁹Sri Aurobindo on Himself, SABCL, Vol. 26, p. 513.

^{10 (1} A. B. Purani, Evening Talks, p. 244.

thing about this Shrine of Infinity is that not only do men visit it to offer worship to the deity of their adoration or go there to breathe that atmosphere; but also the high gods long to dwell in this cherished abode that is lit by countless suns. About the nature of such an epic Sri Aurobindo clarifies the point in another talk as follows: "The idea that an epic requires a story has been there for long, but the story as a subject for an epic seems to be exhausted. It will have to be more subjective and the element of interpretation will have to be admitted. Paradise Lost has very little story and very few incidents, yet it is an epic. At present men demand something more than a great story from an epic."¹¹ That "something more" is the expectation and that is exactly what we have in Savitri fulfilled. To appreciate it and more so to enter into it a supple quick intuitive perception and a certain wideness of consciousness are needed. When we acquire these we actually enter into plenitudes of the "poem of sacred delight." That is why to enter into Savitri is also to live in the presence of its creator.

Many are its splendours, countless indeed like the stars in the sky. We may use a most powerful telescope on the top of a mountain or put a Hubble in outer space to look at the universe which is a boundless finite. Still it seems to escape all observation. So does Savitri. Galaxies after galaxies speed beyond our keenest comprehension,—as if to reach some Unknown which they glimpse at the far edge but of which we have no knowledge. Billions and billions of suns, even as they come or go out of sight, illumine the nightly expanse of space. And whatever of that Unknown they see they expectantly communicate to us; and these communications arrive in many ways, flashes, glimmers, electromagnetic bursts, quanta of various denominations or else steady radiations extending in all the directions of the spectrum, rich in content, rich in meaning. Suddenly in that process we become one with the sky. Astonishment is gone and also the nightly sky and ultimately what remains is only the luminous wisdom ever in progress towards the interminable Unknown that is infinity-bound. We don't need any more the night for the stars even as they become a part of majesty of the purple-gold day.

That is what Savitri gives to us. No wonder Sri Aurobindo considered it as his main work. When we receive it we receive the gift from a Yogi-Poet who attempted and achieved all for us. His

¹¹ Ibid., p. 233.

has been an untiring endeavour making all life a Yoga as well as Poetry of Delight in the fulfilment of the Divine in this earthly circumstance. It may be therefore quite relevant to know something about him in howsoever sketchy a manner that be.

All Life is Yoga

Commenting upon a biographer's attempt to present his life, Sri Aurobindo once remarked as follows: "Nobody except myself can write my life—because it has not been on the surface for man to see." Yet we should be concerned with a few worldly facts to keep our file complete. And the strange thing is that, for a discerning eye, they also bring an intuitive vision which can provide a distant bio-spiritual peep into the secrecies of the person whom we so much adore. No wonder philosophers have described him as the greatest synthesis between the East and the West; critics have acclaimed him as a poet par excellence; social scientists regard him as the builder of a new society based on enduring values of the life of the spirit; devotees throng in mute veneration offering their heart and their soul in a silent prayer that can secure for them the beatitude of the Supreme; Yogins long to live in the sunlight of his splendour to kindle in it their own suns; in the tranquil benignity of his spiritual presence is the fulfilment of all our hopes and all our keenest and noblest aspirations; gods of light and truth and joy and beauty and sweetness are busy in their tasks to carry out his will in the creation; in him the avataric incarnation becomes man to fulfil the divine in man. Such is the real birth of the Immortal in the Mortal. He comes here as Sri Aurobindo.

Sri Aurobindo was the third son of Swamalata and Dr Krishna Dhan Ghose and was bom on 15 August 1872 in the early hours of that Thursday in the aristocratic area of Calcutta. He was brought up in a highly Anglicised atmosphere at home, to the extent that he did not know even his mother tongue Bengali. His father intended to bring up his children in the perfect style and manner of the English society adopting its ways of life and thinking. Hence five-year old Auro was put in Loreto Convent School in Darjeeling which was otherwise exclusively meant for English children. In 1879, at the age of seven he, along with his brothers, was taken to England where he mostly stayed for the next fourteen years with an English family. In September 1884 Auro was admitted to St

Paul's School in London and had his education there until July 1890. Later in the same year, in October, he joined King's College at Cambridge.

Never during the entire period did young Sri Aurobindo come in contact with the traditional Indian life or culture. At the same time in England he "never was taught English as a separate subject but picked it up like a native in daily conversation. Before long he was spending much of his time reading. Almost from the start, he devoted himself to serious literature. As a ten-year-old he read the King James Bible."¹² Soon the attentive and wakeful student mastered half a dozen European languages, including Greek and Latin in which he scored highest marks ever obtained in a school examination. Not only languages; he knew intimately and incomparably well the literature and culture that dominated European life and history for centuries. These classical themes later found great expression in his poetic writings, e.g., Perseus the Deliverer as a play and Ilion as an epic in Homeric quantitative hexameter based on the naturalness of temperament of the English language. Here it may be mentioned en passant that Sri Aurobindo wrote that drama, with a Grecian theme, during his most hectic political activities in Bengal. It was published in 1907 in the weekly Bande Mataram.

After his return to India in 1893 Sri Aurobindo straightaway joined the state services of Baroda accepting the invitation of Sayajirao Gaekawar. But, more importantly, he plunged into the mainstream of Indian life and literature even as he learnt several native languages including classical Sanskrit. Not only did he study the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, the Puranas, works of Kalidasa and other authors; he also mastered Vedic, Upanishadic and other Scriptural writings to the extent that he wrote extensively on these subjects and issues concerned with them. In fact we see on them the indelible mark of an intuitive thinker disclosing their deeper and truer sense. He offered very independent and penetrating interpretations in the spirit they were actually revealed. While we witness in them both the robust pragmatism and subtlety of the modem mind, perhaps we more pertinently recognise the seer who quite visibly stands behind them. Sri Aurobindo by now acquired the foundational basis to give expression to his own creative talents in the wide and luminous range of universality characteristic of an

¹² Peter Heehs, Sri Aurobindo, p. 10.

authentic Indian personality. Knowledge flowed in as if a crystalline stream suddenly took birth in some perennial mountain-source of the hoary Wisdom. This wide-ranging and at the same time intensive Abhyasa Yoga of Sri Aurobindo prepared a thorough and strong base for his missioned task which he would soon accomplish in the future.

During this period Sri Aurobindo was drawn more and more into the current of the national life. Nay, he gave to it another direction, even as he gave to his own life by plunging into the thick of the active political life. Presently he left the secure life of the princely Baroda State and went to Calcutta accepting all the hardships entailed by it. The immediate provocation was the ill-conceived partition of Bengal in 1905. There he initiated a comprehensive programme of building the nation founded on its sounder values, on its ancient wisdom and culture. In it was bom Indian nationalism, in the nourishing soil of its rich past, firmly established in its worthy tradition, with its own natural disposition and governing character, its innate swabhāva and swadharma. True nationalism for Sri Aurobindo was Sanatana Dharma itself, the eternal religion based on spiritual knowledge and experience.¹³ He saw that in it alone grow the values that acquire merit in every respect, worldly and otherwise. To it he now committed himself completely. In a letter written to his wife Mrinalini, in 1905, he states the following:

I have three madnesses. The first is this. I firmly believe that the accomplishment, talent, education and means that God has given me, are all His. Whatever is essential and needed for the maintenance of the family has alone a claim upon me; the rest must be returned to God... The second madness which has recently seized hold of me is: I must somehow see God... If He exists there must be ways to perceive His presence, to meet Him. However arduous the way, I am determined to follow that path. In one month I have felt that the Hindu religion has not told lies—the signs and hints it has given have become a part of my experience... My third madness is that other people look upon the country as an inert piece of matter, a stretch of fields and meadows, forests and rivers. To me She is the

¹³ Karmayogin, SABCL, Vol. 2, p. 10.

Mother. I adore Her, worship Her. What will the son do when he sees a Rakshasa sitting on the breast of his mother and sucking her blood? Will he quietly have his meal or will he rush to deliver his mother from that grasp? I know I have the strength to redeem this fallen race. It is not physical strength, it is the strength of knowledge... This feeling is not new, I was bom with it and it is in my marrow. God has sent me to this world to accomplish this great mission.¹⁴

In this dynamic pursuit, and accepting its dangers without a second thought, he attempted all and achieved all. In the words of Nagendrakumar Guharay, Sri Aurobindo was always fearless, abhi and nothing deterred him from action.¹⁵ He spoke with God-given courage and acted unmindful of the consequences that followed in the sequel of the missioned task. Freedom as a birthright was proclaimed and war waged against the rulers of the time. He was charged for seditious activities and incarcerated for one year from May 1908. But during this period a new and glorious transformation came upon him. "That one year in Alipore jail was perhaps the most eventful for his future. The nationalist and political leader was now changed wholly into a mystic and a yogi."¹⁶ Another world opened out in front of Sri Aurobindo. A mighty hand was all the while guiding him, perhaps even without his knowledge.

Barrister C. R. Das triumphantly defended Sri Aurobindo in the Alipore Bomb Case and in his concluding argument made an inspired appeal in the following words: "My appeal to you therefore is that a man like this who is being charged with the offences imputed to him stands not only before the bar in this Court but stands before the bar of the High Court of History. And my appeal to you is this: That long after this controversy is hushed in silence, long after this turmoil, this agitation ceases, long after he is dead and gone, he will be looked upon as the poet of patriotism, as the prophet of nationalism and the lover of humanity. Long after he is dead and gone his words will be echoed and re-echoed not only in India, but across distant seas and lands."¹⁷ Prophetic words, indeed!

¹⁴ Nirodbaran, Sri Aurobindo for All Ages, p. 53.

¹⁵ Farewell to the God; quoted by Nirodbaran in his Sri Aurobindo for All

Ages, p. 121.

¹⁶Sisirkumar Ghose, The Poetry of Sri Aurobindo, p. 11.

¹⁷Mother India, March 2000, p. 189; for the complete defence argument see the previous issues.

We may say that this marks the completion of Sri Aurobindo's Jivan Yoga.

After his acquittal on 6 May 1909 Sri Aurobindo addressed a large gathering at Uttarpara: "When I went to jail the whole country was alive with the cry of Bande Mataram, alive with the hope of a nation, the hope of a million men who had newly risen out of degradation. When I came out of jail I listened for that cry, but there was instead a silence."¹⁸ He felt a deep concern for the country no doubt, but there was no trace of worry in him; he knew someone else had definitely taken the reins in his hands to guide the career and speed of events. In the course of the speech he gave a hint of what he had experienced in the jail. He was given the central truth of the Hindu religion and he knew that in it alone is the destiny of the nation, as if marked out for the fulfilment of a higher purpose. Personally, he had the experience of being surrounded by Vasudeva from all the sides. He looked around and "it was not the Magistrate whom I saw, it was Vasudeva, it was Narayana who was sitting there on the bench. I looked at the Prosecuting Counsel and it was not the Counsel for the prosecution that I saw; it was Sri Krishna who sat there, it was my Lover and Friend who sat there and smiled."¹⁹ All is Vasudeva, vāsudeva sarvam iti, became the basis for everything in life.

A new chapter had opened and soon Sri Aurobindo was to find his cave of tapasya in the South. There he was to carry out the task given to him as a Divine Command. With it Diksha Yoga stepped into the luminous Jnana Yoga of the Protagonist.

A great work awaited for him and for it he spared no effort. In a letter dated 12 July 1911, a little after one year of his coming to Pondicherry, he tells us what he was busy with.

I am developing the necessary powers for bringing down the spiritual on the material plane... What I perceive most clearly, is that the principal object of my Yoga is to remove absolutely and entirely every possible source of error and ineffectiveness... It is for this reason that I have been going through so long a discipline and that the more brilliant and mighty results of Yoga have been so long withheld. I have been kept busy laying down the foundation, a work

^l8 Kamayogin, SABCL, Vol. 2, p. 1.

¹⁹ Ibid., p. 5.

severe and painful. It is only now that the edifice is beginning to rise upon the sure and perfect foundation that has been laid.²⁰

The One who had kept him busy in the severe and painful work also arranged in 1914 for a collaborator in the Mother. In that glorious joint venture first began the announcement of the divine Agenda in the nature of a monthly, the Arya. It ran into some five-thousand pages for seventy-eight months and carried the knowledge and the power of realisation by which the lower could reach the higher, in as much as the higher manifest in the lower. The Life Divine, the Synthesis of Yoga, Essays on the Gita, Vedic and Upanishadic revelations, the nature of future Poetry, Social, Political and National themes—all these writings which he received in a silent mind brought a new vision and a possible new mode of collective life. Global in their outlook, they encompassed in their fold the worlds of men and gods and higher beings preparing themselves to participate in the terrestrial possibilities in the greatness of the triple Spirit itself. Obviously such an outcome is not conceivable in the analytical or linear method of our thinking. A new source of creativity was discovered, an infallible creativity that has its own power of expression and effectuation. Indeed, what we have in the Arya "was composed in the organ mode of Sri Aurobindo's English."²¹ There is no doubt that while it endures, it also attains what it attempts.

Not long after his coming to Pondicherry in 1910 Mme Alexandra David-Neel, who acquainted herself deeply with Tibetan occultism, met Sri Aurobindo in 1912. About her meeting with him she reports: "His perfect familiarity with the philosophies of India and the West wasn't what drew my attention: what was of greater importance to me was the special magnetism that flew out of his presence, and the occult hold he had over those who surrounded him."²² A glimpse of that special magnetism, which grew more and more luminous as his Yoga progressed, we may get from his diary records of the period between 1912-1920. Meticulous as a scientist's were his observations of the various spiritual siddhis or realisations achieved by him. These constitute a unique record

²⁰Sri Aurobindo on Himself, SABCL, Vol. 26, pp. 423-24.

²¹Georges Van Vrekhem, Beyond Man, p. 45.

²²K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar, Sri Aurobindo, p. 378.

in the entire annals of spirituality. About these documents, collectively called Record of Yoga, the compiler writes as follows: "This document is noteworthy in at least three respects... It provides a first-hand account of the day-to-day growth of the spiritual faculties of an advanced yogin... The language of Record of Yoga is bare, unliterary, often couched in arcane terminology... What it provides is a down-to-earth account of a multitude of events, great and small, inner and outer... It may be looked on as the laboratory notebook of an extended series of experiments in yoga."²³

In the Yogic parlance we may say that this was the period when Sri Aurobindo's attempts were chiefly directed towards supramentalisation of the mental planes that presently govern our evolutionary consciousness. There was soon to follow the supramentalisation of the vital. The last stage of the great triple transformation was to be preceded in 1926 by what Sri Aurobindo called overmentalisation of the physical. But before this Siddhi Yoga we also have two remarkable poetic creations of the Master-Poet.

Sri Aurobindo had started writing his epic llion while in Alipore jail;²⁴ he took it up again and worked upon it during the early period at Pondicherry. This was lightly revised by dictation in the late 40s. Then during 1916-1918, in the midst of his multidimensional Arya-writing, Sri Aurobindo also made a preliminary draft of his magnum opus Savitri. Eventually it "became a poetic chronicle of his yoga."²⁵ We have similarly the record of his later yogic realisations in his poetic compositions of the 30s. But what stands out as the double autobiography, his and the Mother's spiritual realisations in the transformative Yoga of the earth-consciousness, is his supreme creation—in the Mother's phrase, supreme revelation—Savitri. That indeed marks Divya Yoga of the Supreme himself.

Sri Aurobindo left his body on 5 December 1950, Tuesday at 1.26 a.m. In crimson-gold splendour it lay there for 111 hours before it was put in the Samadhi. The Mother's prayer expresses the gratitude for all that he had done in triumphantly accomplishing the divine task. "To Thee who hast been the material envelope of

²³ Peter Hees, op. tit., pp. 99-100.

²⁴ Ibid., p. 127.

²⁵ Ibid.

our Master, to Thee our infinite gratitude. Before Thee who hast done so much for us, who hast worked, struggled, hoped, endured so much, before Thee who hast willed all, attempted all, prepared, achieved all for us, before Thee we bow down and implore that we may never forget, even for a moment, all we owe to Thee."²⁶ About the significance of this event the Mother said later: "He was not compelled to leave his body, he chose to do so for reasons so sublime that they are beyond" our grasp.²⁷ As soon as Sri Aurobindo withdrew from his body the Mind of Light as the leader of the intermediate race, prior to the arrival of the gnostic being, got realised in the Mother.²⁸ It was only by "consciously experiencing and transforming death"²⁹ that the divine pace could be hastened in the earth consciousness. It was an occult imperative, an aspect of yogic action itself. The result was the manifestation of Supermind in the earth's subtle-physical on 29 February 1956. Thus in a bid to get things done in a most definitive way Sri Aurobindo left his body and completed the supreme or Param Yoga.

The Tale

Sri Aurobindo left his body in December 1950 but he left behind his consciousness for ever in Savitri. Through it we can get directly in touch with him. The poem is not only the narrative of a legend but is also a symbol presenting the work of its author. Rich in its spiritual contents and nuances it has full scope to winningly describe the prospects of a transformed life upon the earth. In a letter explaining the symbolism of the Savitri-legend Sri Aurobindo writes: "The tale of Satyavan and Savitri is recited in the Mahabharata as a story of conjugal love conquering death. But this legend is, as shown by many features of the human tale, one of the many symbolic myths of the Vedic cycle. Satyavan is the soul carrying the divine truth of being within itself but descended into the grip of death and ignorance; Savitri is the Divine Word, daughter of the Sun, goddess of the Supreme Truth who comes down and is bom to save; Aswapati, the Lord of the Horse, her human father, is

²⁶Words of the Mother, CWM, Vol. 13, p.7.

²⁷Quoted by Nirodbaran, op. cit., p. 238.

²⁸CWM, Vol. 13, p. 64.

²⁹Georges Van Vrekhem, op.cit., p. 278.

the Lord of Tapasya, the concentrated energy of spiritual endeavour that helps us to rise from the mortal to the immortal planes; Dyumatsena, the lord of the Shining Hosts, father of Satyavan, is the Divine Mind here fallen blind, losing its celestial kingdom of vision, and through that loss its kingdom of glory. Still this is not a mere allegory, the characters are not personified qualities, but incarnations or emanations of living and conscious Forces with whom we can enter into concrete touch and they take human bodies in order to help man and show him the way from his mortal state to a divine consciousness and immortal life."³⁰

In spirituo-metaphysical terms, it is the possibility of a divine creation arising out of the inconscience, out of the nonmanifest that has become the unmanifest. If by the force of concentration or Tapas-Shakti the Supreme created a void and plunged into it to become inconscient, if he did the occult Yoga of Self-Sacrifice triumphantly chanted in the Veda as the Holocaust of the Supreme, then by another force of action he has to emerge out of this state of utter forgetfulness and establish the dynamic delight of existence everywhere. For this to happen the Supreme has to do the evolutionary Yoga, the Yoga of progressive divine manifestation in the earth-consciousness. And this has to happen in the face of his own stubbornness; for he himself has become the Inconscient. One visible sign of this stubbornness of the inconscient Supreme is the presence of Death. The manifesting Supreme thus encounters the obstacle of the antagonist Supreme. The narration of this growing divinity is what we have in Sri Aurobindo's Savitri which indeed is the Epic of the Divine Creation itself. It is the story of the birth and victorious accomplishment of the supreme Goddess in this world of our ignorant mortality.

The Goddess comes down here as an incarnate force Savitri and espouses the cause of the evolutionary travail's death-bound life in the fulfilment of the Will of the Supreme himself. But this descending ocean of dynamic consciousness has to be upborne, lest it should drown the very void out of which is intended to emerge a manifestation in richnesses of the being of delight in awareness of its multiple splendour. Aswapati's tapasya is therefore directed towards this purpose, to prepare a safe base for the fiery power's transforming action. Aswapati prays to the supreme Goddess and seeks a boon from her. In response to it she comes down as a radiant

³⁰ On Himself, SABCL, Vol. 26, p. 265.

daughter, kanyā tejasvini as Vyasa says. In the legend of Savitri the issue is well focused in the inescapable death of her lover and husband Satyavan.

In the sequel of the narrative young Savitri is told that there is a force who is the infallible mover and guide of her life, that there is a light around her and within her to illumine her actions. Her first task is therefore to discover it. For that she should go abroad travelling distant lands and kingdoms. Then, in order to meet her fate, she is bidden to ascend from Nature to divinity's height. She has to prepare herself and answer Heaven's large question in which Love faces Death.

But she also realises that the conflict of Love and Death is intimately connected with the fate of the Earth. When she is in the company of her lover she also experiences intense pain and her benumbed body responds to a voiceless call:

Her strong far-winging spirit travelled back,

Back to the yoke of ignorance and fate,

Back to the labour and stress of mortal days,

Lighting a pathway through strange symbol dreams

Across the ebbing of the seas of sleep.³¹

The 'pang divine' cuts through the occult sky and stands like a crescent pointing to her the giant figure she has to meet or encounter in the night.

The event of Satyavan's death thus became pretextual in taking Savitri to the world of eternal darkness where reigns Death. Eventually in those thick occult spaces a decisive battle was fought and victory for the Divine won. In her conquering gaze Death disappeared. But it does not mean that he was destroyed or dissolved. What was until now covering him it is that which was removed. It was the dumb absolute who had put a veil on his face and it is this veil that was removed. The veil of Inconscience spread over the process of Time has now gone, thus revealing the true nature of Death. Death stands in his authentic Reality in front of Savitri who receives the boon of the Everlasting Day from Him.

Transfigured was the formidable shape.

His darkness and his sad destroying might

³¹ Savitri, p. 9.

Abolishing for ever and disclosing

The mystery of his high and violent deeds,

A secret splendour rose revealed to sight

Where once the vast embodied Void had stood.³²

Thus has Savitri cut a door to immortality leading through this terrifying Void.

In the legend of Savitri the participation of Narad is extremely significant. There is in it also a great sense of responsibility displayed by him while announcing the death of Satyavan in the presence of Savitri. She has come to know of this future event at the most appropriate moment in her life. Now her Yoga can begin. Without this Yoga she could not have met Death to deal with the problem of this evolutionary creation. Her mission needed an instrumental prompting and it was provided by the Sage. His was a participation in the Divine Work. Vyasa's narrative makes Narad the Preceptor of Aswapati, revered as he was even by the gods.³³How great indeed! In a certain luminous sense therefore he has initiated Savitri into Yoga. This was absolutely necessary and hence we can well appreciate his role in the entire development. Without this Yoga the question of Savitri vanquishing Death would have remained unanswered.

About the Savitri-tale we may get a certain light from the Pauranic accounts also. Once Brahma beheld himself and he was astonished to see that his own lustre was becoming dimmer and dimmer. A darkness was surrounding him and it was becoming more and more thick and opaque.

He could not find the cause of it and, perplexed as he got, consulted other gods. They decided that Varuna of the far vision should undertake the task of discovering this mysterious situation.

Finally the reason for the dimming of the lustre was discovered. It was due to the fact that Brahma's Power went so far away that it got separated from him. Varuna further reported to the gods that the Power not only separated, but also got arrested in the inconscience. She lost all her old memory and remembered not the origin from which she had come.

The gods conversed amongst themselves to find a way to awaken the supreme Power. It is in their reunion, in their coming together

³² Ibid., p. 679.

³³ R.Y. Deshpande, Vyasa's Savitri, pp. 19-21.

in another delight, that the lustre of Brahma will be restored to its original brightness. It may even become multiply bright.

In the beginning Brahma was alone and he desired company. There was the urge to be many, bahusyām prajāyeyeti. It is that which had caused the separation of his Power from himself.

After getting this report from Varuna the gods took the next step. They deputed Soma, the Moon-god of Delight, to awaken the inconscient Power. She was to be made aware of the sad state in which she was lying; she was also to be informed about the plight of her Lord, with his lustre getting faded. When told so, she felt concerned and agreed to join him.

The two gods, Varuna and Soma, accomplished the difficult mission, of uniting the two. The union of the Lord and the Spouse took place again in the meeting of Satyavan and Savitri in the wilderness of life here upon the earth.

This is one nice way of looking at the Savitri-legend. But being a simplistic though symbolic story it doesn't carry in it many shades and nuances that are present in the operative process. Actually it was Savitri's Lord who was caught in the stranglehold of Death. The dimming of Brahma's lustre perhaps ultimately led to this state for himself.

In the cosmic working the executive aspect is that of the dynamic Nature or Prakriti rather than of the quiescent Being, Purusha. Spinoza defined the ultimate reality God as substance and also as Nature-begetting, natura naturans, and looked upon the universe as Nature-begotten, natura naturata, which has a certain validity not only metaphysically but also occult-spiritually. But, of course, there is also the transcendental aspect to be taken note of. Pantheism generally does not recognise it and sees only the universal. In contrast to that the language of the Puranas has a certain richness and flexibility to understand things in an intuitive way.

The problem of the universe as Nature-begotten cannot be solved from within; for there is no agent present in it to tackle it when God stands outside of it as a Nature-begetting Potency. God's direct or indirect involvement in the process is not admitted in this theory. In a way, he just watches helplessly Nature working out whatever is meant to be worked out by her. It is assumed that there is a sort of self-sufficiency in her effort to reach the goal that has been set for her. But the aspect of the Divine's involvement is always there and at every crucial evolutionary stage he comes here as a special Avatar. There spiritual philosophy goes beyond all metaphysical

theses. That also makes the language of a symbol more revealing, rich in its suggestions and subtleties. No wonder Sri Aurobindo chose for his epic a legend and a symbol.

The Five Suns of Poetry

But to the modem mind symbolic art is also, in a way, distancing oneself from life as one lives in its daily rounds. It is often said that art should be realistic. Poetry, for instance, must reflect our common moods, our afflictions and our joys, pain and pleasure, hunger and surfeit, nudity and opulence, love and hatred, our failures and successes, jealousy, cruelty as much as kindness, humanitarianism. It cannot be irrelevant to us. All talk of idealism, nobility, grandeur is considered to be mere eloquence about things insubstantial and has no basis in our immediate common experience. Skylarks, daffodils, green cottages only imply escapism from the struggle and harshness of existence. Not only that; it leads to pretentious emotions and syrupyness which must be washed out from our mental make-up. There has to be a certain kind of directness and disaffected purity in our expressive creations. Modernists got tired of romanticism and turned more and more towards urban thinking and the conflicts of our daily occupations, towards existential issues. But that reaction itself was, paradoxically, indicative of a deeper search for other sets of values, of getting out of the routine and the common. While it has brought vigorous intellectualised intuition and a profoundness of thinking, it has also by its excesses made life boney and dry.

But then reality exceeds all imaginations and feelings, all ideas and fetishes. Therefore that intellectualised intuition itself is a search for a more comprehensive understanding of things in their truer essence, in the truth from which it derives itself and seeks to widen its possibilities of expression. If the voice of that ineffable, that unknown is to be seized in our language we have to set out on a new adventure. We have to make a new discovery in which the word we shall speak will carry other connotations and other associations. It will be not only loaded with thought and emotion but also will to do things in its expressive richness and opulence. When the poetic inspiration comes from an inexhaustible source of joy then it also finds its own style and technique. It could be a physical action on the battlefield, it could be a life-force asserting

itself in varied moods, it could be a justification of the creator's will in the creation, or it could be the epical song of triumph, or a search for beatitude in love that moves the sun and the other stars. For the poet all this is the discovery of the word which could be an adventure in itself. It need not be a mystic or occult or spiritual pursuit, or an intense expression of devotion, or adoration of Nature with its rivers and mountains and green pasture-lands and grazing cattle. And yet it could be all these. It could be even the deep-sounding thought that has the urge to explore itself in the domain wherefrom spring all thoughts. Thus, for example, when a modem poet {Listening in October, John Haines) says that

There are silences so deep

You can hear

The journeys of the soul,

we at once hear some authentic voice in the deeper chambers of that silence itself. We may read mysticism in it but essentially it is a realisation that has come in a secular way. Something has entered suddenly in the expression of which perhaps even the poet is not aware. Although in it is served well the Modernist's purpose, there is something more than that. It creates around us an atmosphere of silence in which is possible the birth of the Word which can express that silence in its joyous vigour and effectiveness; in it we can hear a voice that can lift us up, guide us in our search. Here is seized something of the profound and therefore it becomes meritorious, even spiritual. Yet what the poet has achieved here is simply the paraphemeliac preparation for the soul's aesthetic pilgrimage to the unknown. It sounds more like a well-rounded rhythmic thought than an intimately felt experience with its richnesses taking us on those journeys. In it the subtleties of silence are absent. In terms of Ezra Pound's rhythmic accord we do not have here overtones to set the absolute tempo of a masterpiece. If that journey has to be a soaring ascension to the snow-white peaks of silence in the ardour of climbing, in the warmth and intimacy of a vibrant experience, then it has yet to grow in the abundance of subtleties and suggestions that constitute multi-tonal harmonies, has to grow in its flaming poignancy, has yet to get in touch with the sun that lives on the summits of silence which carries us yet higher on the Vedic journey of the ascending slopes of heaven. It happens very rarely, particularly when our approach to life and

reality is entirely mind-based, mind with its thousand occupations of thought. But when given to omniscient hush unceasingly original inspiration streams forth, as we have in the following:

Oft inspiration with her lightning feet,

A sudden messenger from the all-seeing tops,

Traversed the soundless corridors of his mind

Bringing the rhythmic sense of hidden things.

A music spoke transcending mortal speech.³⁴

Or expression has actually its origin in silence,

Silence the nurse of the Almighty's power,

The omniscient hush, womb of the immortal Word.³⁵

It is in this context that we have to recognise what Sri Aurobindo tells us about the future poetry with its intuitive and revealing character, poetry that descends from the all-seeing heights with the rhythmic sense of the creative Word. While describing the nature of this poetry he speaks of its five suns which shall illumine our skies,—the splendid Suns of Truth, Beauty, Delight, Life and the Spirit.³⁶

This poetry of the future is a secret search for the Reality that is present behind all our thinking and understanding, our longings, our life and the rich world around us, our possibilities that can open out in its discovery, behind our gainful sense of dedication to it. In fact it could be more than a search; it could be an expression of the ineffable, of the all-beautiful. The more we shall try to know it the more we will begin to realise that there is much as yet to be secured, much to be won. It is a spiritual quest. "A poetic mind sees at once in a flood of coloured light, in a moved experience, in an ecstasy of the coming of the word, in splendours of form, in a spontaneous leaping out of inspired idea upon idea, sparks of the hoof-beats of the white horse Dadhikravan galloping up the mountain of the gods or breath and hue of wing striking into wing of the irised broods of Thought flying over earth or up towards

³⁴ Savitri, p. 38.

³⁵ Ibid., p. 41.

³⁶ The Future Poetry, SABCL, Vol. 9, p. 204.(N.B. pp. 199-256 describe these five suns of poetry.)

heaven."³⁷ One need not be a Yogi to be such a poet because the creative rhythm and the word-image can be received by one who is sufficiently perceptive of things revealingly aesthetic. Though the creative soul of man with his keen intellectualised intuition has a certain inner mental penetration in its persuasiveness, a certain flight of thoughtful imagination, yet it does not have this sure and inevitable sweep of expression, many-extended in its implications, and hence cannot hold the joy it has the power to hold. It has to grow and therefore also have to grow with that our perceptions of poetry, our appreciations of the broad new dimensions that arrive in its luminous as well as sweet melodious wake, in the emerald of its surge, in its moods of temperate or else swift-pacing happinesses.

Thought-content and pursuit of Truth apart, there are also things warmly spiritual and they bring out flavours and flames and felicities which are always there behind Truth and Life and the Spirit. In Beauty and Delight are the soul and the origin of all art, of poetry; the creative and expressive nature of the free self is in them. Indeed, in the poetry of a large spiritual inspiration we shall hear "the song of the growing godhead... of human unity, of spiritual freedom, of the coming supermanhood of man, of the divine idea seeking to actualise itself in the life of the earth, of the call to the individual to rise to his godlike possibility and to the race to live in the greatness of that which humanity feels within itself as a power of the spirit which it has to deliver into some yet ungrasped perfect form of clearness... to make life more intimately beautiful and noble and great and full of meaning is its higher office, but its highest comes when the poet becomes the seer and reveals to man his eternal self and the godheads of its manifestation."³⁸ The poet of the spirit becomes a seer and a hearer of the voices of the Truth, satyaśrutah.

But this great poetry is possible only by opening ourselves to the higher planes from where comes the inspired utterance. In that inspired utterance there is also a certain kind of inevitability which in its resolute manner confirms the revelatory truth that it is proposing to establish here. It becomes the Word of Knowledge and Power wearing a form of Beauty and having the soul of Delight. About this Overhead Poetry with its objective to express some inmost truth of things, the deeper reality which is behind them, Sri

³⁷ Ibid., p. 213.

³⁸ Ibid., p. 255.

Aurobindo writes as follows: "The voice of poetry comes from a region above us, a plane of our being above and beyond our personal intelligence, a supermind which sees things in their innermost and largest truth by a spiritual identity and with a lustrous effulgency and rapture and its native language is a revelatory, inspired, intuitive word limpid or subtly vibrant or densely packed with the glory of this ecstasy and lustre... The inspired word comes, as of the old Vedic seers, from the home of Truth... The word comes secretly from above the mind, but it is plunged into the intuitive depths and emerges imperfectly to be shaped by the poetic feeling and intelligence."³⁹ It is bom as the Mantra. In a letter written to Amal Kiran Sri Aurobindo explains that the Mantra is "a word of power and light that comes from the overmind inspiration or from some very high plane of Intuition. Its characteristics are a largeness that conveys infinitely more than the mere surface sense of the words seems to indicate, a rhythm that means even more than the language and is bom out of the Infinite and disappears into it... and the power to convey not merely the mental, vital or physical contents or indications or values of the thing uttered, but its significance and figure in some fundamental and original consciousness which is behind all these and greater."⁴⁰

Seers and hearers of the Truth are those who shall receive this Word from the transcendental Muse in the delight of the truth-existent. It is in the greatness of the Mantra that the Upanishadic golden lid gets removed and is then received the higher power of expression. The suns of poetry can then freely pour their radiances in our creative expression. In it the "rhythmic revelation or intuition arising out of the soul's sight of God and Nature and the world and the inner truth—occult to the outward eye—of all that peoples it, the secret of inner life and being"⁴¹ gives value to our life and thought and to our aesthetic existence. In the completeness of its expression poetry is not only word and rhythm but is also vision. In it has to be the expressive power carrying sense and sound and sight all together borne by the spirit of joyous creation. Such a worship of the divine Muse also means our being able to receive

³⁹ Ibid., p. 279.

⁴⁰ Ibid., pp. 369-70. See also The Secret of the Veda, SABCL, Vol. 10, pp. 303-13; The Upanishads, SABCL, Vol. 12, pp. 168-72; Sri Aurobindo Archives and Research, Vol. 3, p. 19, April 1979.

⁴¹ Ibid., p. 34.

more and more of her inexhaustible gifts. Savitri is that. To grow in it, to explore our inner potentialities, to climb the peaks of creation and live on those heights as their happy and bright denizens we have to be the worshippers of that golden-tongued Muse of Felicity. Joy grows in that growth and

The sun of Beauty and the sun of Power⁴²

bestow their greatnesses in the abundance of the dynamic spirit that wishes to be in its living expression. That also implies our being perceptive of the new taste, new aesthetic pleasure, new meanings and shades, new sounds and new rhythms, new subtleties that are offered to us by such a creation. We have to open ourselves to it.

Overmind Aesthesis

When in the 1940s Sri Aurobindo was extensively revising Savitri and giving to it the final shape, he also took some time off for writing detailed letters or notes to explain the various criticisms that were levelled on certain aspects of his poetry, particularly his magnum opus. During this period some texts were sent to Amal Kiran at his request when, at that time, he was staying in Bombay. He used to raise several literary or technical points and seek elucidation from the Master. About this correspondence between them Nirodbaran writes as follows: Sri Aurobindo's "long answers and illuminating self-commentary on his own poetry dictated at this time, consumed much of our time but we could see from the reply how Sri Aurobindo welcomed such remarks from Amal whom he had prepared in the art of poetry. No one except Amal, or perhaps Arjava had he lived, could have talked with Sri Aurobindo almost as equals on English poetry and drawn out many intricate movements on rhythm, overhead poetry, etc., which are now a permanent treasure in English literature."⁴³ We should indeed be quite thankful to Amal Kiran for these invaluable letters most of which now form the Letters-section of Savitri. After completing

⁴²Savitri, p. 631.

⁴³ Twelve Years with Sri Aurobindo, pp. 190-91; see also Perspectives of Savitri, p. 80.

Savitri Sri Aurobindo actually intended to write a long introduction to it but it never happened. These letters with their tone of informality, at the same time possessing an inspired professional tightness, serve that purpose of the introduction well. In this mode the writer can, dispossessing pedantism, present his point of view in a more intuitive way to the perceptive reader who has also the necessary background to understand and appreciate its nuances and subtleties. The correspondence is undoubtedly of rare literary eminence forming "a great poet's informal self-commentary."⁴⁴

About the overhead note in poetry and particularly the nature of overmind aesthesis we have a number of expressive revelations made by Sri Aurobindo in his 1946 letter written to Amal Kiran. We shall first briefly summarise these in the following.⁴⁵ One significant character of the Overmind Poetry is that there is something behind it which comes from the cosmic self that puts us also in direct contact with that greater consciousness. There is a wide and happy globality in it which luminously comprehends the play of multiplicity in the creative delight of the one in its relationship with all. A language that has its joy of the beautifully true has also the power to express that true beautifully."... there is always an unusual quality in the rhythm... often in the very building and constantly in the intonation and the association of sounds... linked together by a sort of inevitable felicity. There is also an inspired selection or an unusual bringing together of words which has the power to force a deeper sense on the mind.. .⁴⁶ The second characteristic is that the overmind "thinks in a mass; its thought, feeling, vision is high or deep or wide or all these things together... it goes vast on its way to bring the divine riches, and it has a corresponding language and rhythm."⁴⁷ These are present on a great sustained scale in the Vedic poetry.

Maintaining that the aesthesis is the very soul and essence of poetry, Sri Aurobindo writes that it brings us a Rasa not only "of word and sound but also of the idea and, through the idea, of the things expressed by the word and sound and thought, a mental or vital or sometimes the spiritual image of their form, quality, impact upon us or even, if the poet is strong enough, of their world-essence,

⁴⁴Note in the 1954-edition of Savitri, p. 817.

⁴⁵Savitri, SABCL, Vol. 29, pp. 802-16; see also Perspectives of Savitri, pp. 28-43.

⁴⁶Perspectives of Savitri, pp. 30-31.

⁴⁷Ibid., 32.

their cosmic reality, the very soul of them, the spirit that resides in them as it resides in all things."⁴⁸ In the overmental aesthesis Rasa or essence and its enjoyment can get linked up with the Ananda that creates everything in this world.

As the growing aesthetic enjoyment enters in, he further adds, "the overhead planes the ordinary aesthesis turns into a pure delight and becomes capable of a high, a large or deep abiding ecstasy. The ground is... a spiritual ease and happiness upon which the special tones of the aesthetic consciousness come out or from which they arise... In the overmind we have a first firm foundation of experience of a universal beauty, a universal love, a universal delight... This universal aesthesis of beauty and delight... draws a Rasa from them and with that comes the enjoyment, Bhoga, and the touch or the mass of the Ananda."⁴⁹ There is a completeness of the expression and of the sense of beauty; the truth of things and the underlying harmony become natural in that delight of creation.

In another letter Sri Aurobindo writes: "Overmind in all its dealings puts truth first; it brings out the essential truth (and truths) in things and also its infinite possibilities... When it speaks through poetry, this remains its first essential quality."⁵⁰ These considerations demand a certain kind of readiness on the part of the writer in order to receive that overhead inspiration. It is not that he should be a spiritual person but perhaps that can extend to him the possibility of receiving such inspiration on a sustained basis. There is also a sufficiently important demand as far as the recipient or the reader is concerned. He too has to be quite alert to the moods and manners of that aesthesis.

When the overmind word finds its natural expression we have the supreme Mantra with the power to speak the Truth and give to that Truth the means to assert itself in life. In the transmission of that word there has to be no distortion, no mutilation, no discordant element to take away its executive harmonies. When received thus its metrical movement can set into motion newer worlds. "In the system of the Mystics... the Word is a power, the Word creates." We should also recognise that "the sacred mantras as symbolic of the rhythms in which the universal movement of things is cast"⁵¹

⁴⁸ Ibid., 35.

⁴⁹Ibid., pp. 36-37.

⁵⁰Savitri, p. 743.

⁵¹ The Secret of the Veda, SABCL, Vol. 10, p. 258.

is an ancient Vedic knowledge based on spiritual experience. Indeed, the Sanskrit word Brahma also means the creative Word, the sacred and mystic syllable Om. In its manifestive-expressive sense it connotes the Gayatri Mantra. Thus it is in the dynamic breath of Gayatri as Chhanda-Devata, Goddess of the Metre, that the universe grows more and more in Light. This transcendental Gayatri, the radiant Spouse of Brahma,⁵² in Truth-movement the Force of the Supreme, comes to the evolutionary world and takes the name of Savitri, the Daughter of the Sun; she becomes the incarnate Word.⁵³ It is she who upon the earth sets those ever-widening movements of Light into truth-rhythms. The Symbol Dawn with which Sri Aurobindo's epic Savitri opens is actually the hour before the gods awake, the early dawn, brahmarātra, in which the manifestation is about to take place, a new creation is soon to begin, to get going. It will happen by the double action of Yajna and Mantra which recover the lost Sun of the Veda;⁵⁴ it will happen by the holy sacrifice and the affirmative will in creation, by Aswapati's Brahmic tapasya and Savitri's assertive Truth-dynamism.

In his exposition of the poetry of the future Sri Aurobindo writes about the Mantra as follows: It is ".. .a direct and most heightened, an intensest and most divinely burdened rhythmic word which embodies an intuitive and revelatory inspiration and ensouls the mind with the sight and the presence of the very self, the inmost reality of things and with its truth and the divine soul-forms of it, the Godheads which are bom from the living Truth. Or, let us say, it is a supreme rhythmic language which seizes hold upon all that is finite and brings into each the light and voice of its own infinite."⁵⁵

This is precisely what we have in Savitri. There is no doubt that it is by entering into that Mantra that we shall spiritually profit from it in the completest manner conceivable. Indeed "Savitri is a Song of Joy, the Spirit of Delight itself borne by the might of the Calm. It is the Mantra of the Real in whose body of Silence is enshrined the soul of Rapture, Ananda Rasa flowing in the ocean of Shanta Rasa."⁵⁶ In it is present "all that is needed to realise the

⁵² Savitri, p. 525. 53 Ibid., p. 175; p. 693.

⁵⁴The Secret of the Veda, SABCL, Vol. 10, p. 147.

⁵⁵The Future Poetry, SABCL, Vol. 9, p. 200.

⁵⁶R.Y. Deshpande, Sri Aurobindo and the New Millennium, p. 178.

Divine,"⁵⁷—the Divine not only in the radiant world, divyaloka, but also in the mortal world, mrityuloka. Thus when the truest and the widest sense of the overmind aesthesis arrives at this satyamantra, the Mantra of the Real, the Word of Truth-Revelation, then in the evolutionary everlastingness is also achieved at once the highest possible realisation.

The Composition of Savitri

But how exactly did the Mantra arrive in our midst? In a letter dated 1934 Sri Aurobindo wrote: "Savitri is a work by itself unlike all the others. I made some eight or ten recasts of it originally under the old insufficient inspiration."⁵⁸ This remark was essentially concerned with the epic as it stood then, basically consisting of a few portions of the first part. In 1947 he writes to Amal Kiran: "... I have made successive so many drafts and continual alterations till I felt that I had got the thing intended by the higher inspiration in every line and passage."⁵⁹ The Book of Yoga, for instance, had yet to be written at this time. About his earlier drafts we get some idea from the letter written in 1936. The first five Books of Part I, he writes, "will be, as I conceive them now, the Book of Birth, the Book of Quest, the Book of Love, the Book of Fate, the Book of Death. As for the second Part, I have not touched it yet. There was no climbing of planes there in the first version—rather Savitri moved through the worlds of Night, of Twilight, of Day—all of course in a spiritual sense—and ended by calling down the power of the Highest Worlds of Sachchidananda. I had no idea of what the supramental World could be like at that time, so it could not enter into the scheme. As for expressing the supramental inspiration, that is a matter of the future."⁶⁰ Then, in 1948, he writes to Dilip Kumar Roy: "Savitri is going slow, confined mainly to revision of what has already been written, and I am as yet unable to take up the completion of Part II and Part III which are not finally revised and for which a considerable amount of new matter has to be written."⁶¹

⁵⁷The Mother's Talk, Perspectives of Savitri, pp. 45-46.

⁵⁸Savitri, p. 728. ⁵⁹ Ibid., p. 759.

⁶⁰Ibid., pp. 728-29.

⁶¹Sri Aurobindo Came to Me, p. 492.

Indeed, the composition of Savitri spans several years, almost over fifty years interspersed with many long gaps in between. The significant periods could be 1916-18, the thirties now and then, and of course the last eight years of the forties. The first draft perhaps belongs to the Baroda-period when Sri Aurobindo was writing poetry picking up themes from the Mahabharata. In 1936 he recalls in a letter that Savitri was "originally written many years ago before the Mother came."⁶² This "many years ago" before 1914 could therefore correspond only to the period,—mostly the Baroda period,—when he was engaged in writing narrative poems with similar themes drawn from Indian history and mythology. We have in this group poems such as Urvasie (1896) and Love and Death (1899) where the style as well as the similarity of spellings of the Indian names bears plausible confirmation of Savitri as a composition of that time, around 1900. There is also a reasonable and hence quite acceptable corroboration of it from a Bengali literary man Dinendra Kumar Roy who lived with Sri Aurobindo in Baroda to assist him in Bengali conversation.⁶³ In a letter written to Amal Kiran in 1931 Sri Aurobindo mentions that there was "a previous draft" which would have made Savitri just "a legend and not a symbol".⁶⁴

In this context it will be quite interesting to know when exactly Sri Aurobindo made that Tale a Symbol. In a pertinent letter when he tells Nirodbaran that he began writing Savitri "on a certain mental level",⁶⁵ then we have to definitely go to the period prior to the Arya which was launched on 15 August 1915. The suggestion that Sri Aurobindo began working on Savitri from August 1916 is based on a certain question mark (?) in the margin against "Baroda" on some sheet of paper found among his papers.⁶⁶ That he did not strike it out later only means that, perhaps, he intended to add there something more apropos of it. In any case the non-existence of any such draft today does not necessarily rule out the possibility of the first composition belonging to this period.⁶⁷ However, for

⁶² Savitri, p. 728.

⁶³ Nirodbaran, Twelve Years with Sri Aurobindo, p. 171; see also Perspectives of Savitri, p. 68.

⁶⁴ Savitri., p.m.⁶⁵ Ibid.

⁶⁶Sri Aurobindo: Archives and Research, December 1986, Vol. 10, No. 2, p. 169.

⁶⁷Ibid., December 1981, Vol. 5, No. 2, p. 190.

the purposes of comparative studies we can now take only the available 1916-compostion as the starting point. This implies that the work on Savitri could be considered to have spread over thirty-four years. But there was not much done on it till the thirties, thus compressing the span to the last fifteen years or so, with the intensive effort really put forth during the forties.

The composition of Savitri during its final stages was as follows: "In its first dozen or so drafts the work does not exceed fifty handwritten pages. During the thirties the first of this narrative poem's 'cantos' was developed into three 'books' consisting each of many cantos. By 1944 a draft of the first 'part' of the poem consisting of three books (twenty-four cantos) had been completed. This draft, handwritten by Sri Aurobindo in two columns on standard-size bond paper, was then revised. Many of the extensive alterations were taken down by Nirodbaran. Some of the revision is on the double-column manuscript; longer passages were written on small sheets of a 'chit-pad', which were later pinned to the manuscript, or else written in separate notebooks. The work did not stop here. The entire first part was now hand-transcribed by Nirodbaran into a 393-page ledger. This transcription was then read out to Sri Aurobindo and revised at his dictation. After this a typed copy incorporating the new revision was made. This was revised in its turn; sometimes two stages (top and carbon copy) or even three stages of revision exist. At this point, in the year 1946, separate cantos began to be printed... . The proofs... were read out and corrected by him. He also heard and corrected the printed text of each of the cantos after it was published. Finally, in 1950, the whole of the first part was printed in book form by the Ashram press. The proofs of this first edition were read out to Sri Aurobindo and he made some changes and additions."⁶⁸ Part I consisting of the first three Books was published in September 1950 just before Sri Aurobindo withdrew from his physical body in December that year; the publication of Part II and Part III as the second volume of the epic can be taken, from the date available from the printer's page, to be May 1951. Which means that a major part of the manuscripts must have already gone to the press while Sri Aurobindo was still giving final revision to certain portions. The Book of Fate was the last to be revised and it is there that we see many of the prophetic statements made by him about the yogic

⁶⁸ Ibid.

nature of the work to be done and the danger involved in it.

A brief first-hand account of how the work on Savitri proceeded during the forties is described by Nirodbaran in his Twelve Years with Sri Aurobindo.⁶⁹ He gives a graphic picture of how Sri Aurobindo went on with the magnum opus. "He would be sitting in a small armchair with a straight back where now the present big armchair stands, and listen to my reading. The work proceeded very slowly to start with, and for a long time, either because he didn't seem to be in a hurry or because there was not much time left after attending to the miscellaneous correspondence. Later on, the time was changed to the morning... He would dictate line after line, and ask me to add selected lines and passages in their proper places, but they were not always kept in their old order. I wonder how he could go on dictating lines of poetry in this way, as if a tap had been turned on and the water flowed, not in a jet of course, but slowly, very slowly indeed. Passages sometimes had to be re-read in order to get the link or sequence, but when the turn came of The Book of Yoga and The Book of Everlasting Day, line after line began to flow from his lips like a smooth and gentle stream and it was on the next day that a revision was done to get the link for further continuation."⁷⁰ In this way the seal of "incomplete completion" was put on Savitri just before about three weeks of Sri Aurobindo's passing away. 1950 thus marks a double event.

It is hard for us to imagine the complexity of the procedure through which the composition of Savitri went.⁷¹ Draft after draft and revision after revision and handling of thousands of pages or sheets of various sizes have practically made the whole sequence intractable. The unfortunate result is at times the loss of unusually wonderful passages which should have really come in some proper place in the final text. Thus the following lines

Voices that seemed to come from unseen worlds

Uttered the syllables of the Unmanifest

And clothed the body of the mystic Word⁷²

⁶⁹See Perspectives of Savitri, pp. 68-85. ⁷⁰ Ibid., p.78.

⁷¹The facsimile of a manuscript page reproduced in Appendix I may give some idea about it. Refer also Mother India, May 2000, p. 351.

⁷²Sri Aurobindo Archives and Research, Vol. 10, No 2, (December 1986), p. 150. See also Supplement to the Revised Edition of Savitri, pp. 112-13.

charged with occult-spiritual power have unhappily remained unused.

Recently Richard Hartz has made an elaborate and painstaking study of the several drafts of Savitri and indicated the manner in which a reasonably faithful text of the epic could be edited. In his introduction to The Composition of Savitri he writes: "The story of the composition of Savitri is almost an epic in itself. Much work will have to be done before this story can be told in detail. Now only a broad overview can be given, tracing the development of a few passages as examples. But even this should enrich our understanding of the poem."⁷³ True, and it is felt that the whole effort will bear meritorious fruits. There might be differences in approach but they should not stand in the way of researches that could be pursued in examining the texts of Savitri.

In this context we may look into some factual details which are revealing in many ways. The first available draft of Savitri, dated 8/9 August 1916, has only 1637 lines which became in the final printed version 23,837 lines. Part I which was mostly written by Sri Aurobindo himself in his own hand had, in 1944, about 9000 lines; but as the revision by dictation proceeded it grew to 11,683 lines in the printed text of 1950. This kept on happening in the fair copy made by Nirodbaran, in the typescripts, proofs, and the printed versions which had come out either in the Ashram journals or as fascicles. The very first line of the epic in the twenty-first version appears as follows:

It was the hour before the gods awake.

While it continued to be in that form in the later drafts the only change made was to replace "gods" with "Gods".

The fact that Savitri went back and forth through so many stages of composition entails, inevitably, that a few possible slips or mistakes would creep into the printed version. There could be copying, typing, proof-reading mistakes, or else mistakes due to wrong hearing of words, or using a wrong homophonic, or wrong positioning of newly dictated lines. The present editorial task therefore becomes very daunting. In that sense there is a certain

⁷³ Mother India, p. 989, October 1999. The series is still continuing in the periodical. See also Invocation, Savitri Bhavan Study Notes, April 1999.

justification also in the archival statement that "an author is not responsible for every point, indeed not even for every word that is printed as his."⁷⁴ Too many hands have entered into the entire business each, quite unconsciously but always with a sense of devotion to the Master, contributing its share of departures from the original.

But this archival statement about 'an author not responsible for every word that is printed' needs to be seen more carefully. The intention is perhaps only to bring into discussion the contextual aspect; it cannot have validity or acceptability in any absolute sense. Otherwise we shall simply prove ourselves to be like Newton's famous contemporary Richard Bentley, the classical scholar. He was five when Paradise Lost was published in 1667. Later Bentley rewrote the poem entirely to his taste, thinking that it was the printer who had made all those hundreds of blunders in it. But then, eventually, what he rewrote also carried in it an awkward "gawkishness". As an example let us take his last two lines of the epic:

Then hand in hand, with social steps their way

Through Eden took, with Heav'nly Comfort cheer'd.

But the task of Savitri-editing is a serious matter. It becomes hazardous also in view of the complexity of going through pages and pages of the provisional drafts, with revision and new dictation going on almost at every stage.

Based on very careful studies and researches an attempt was made in the 1980s to bring out a critical edition of Savitri; but it proved abortive. By any reckoning this was an enormous amount of work, of going through all the 'manuscripts' and noting down with respect to them the departures present in the 1972 version. Instead of the critical edition of Savitri we have now, established on these textual examinations and collations, a revised edition (1993). This revised edition is also accompanied by a supplement that lists several editorial details. These provide, as well as explain, the method of approach adopted while accepting the readings as given in the edited work. There are, however, certain issues which need another look to take care of objections that could be raised in some particular contexts.

⁷⁴ Sri Aurobindo Archives and Research, Vol. 5, No. 2, (December 1981), p. 191.

Let us first take an example from Canto Four Book Three about Aswapati's return to the mortal world after receiving an assurance from the Divine Mother:

Once more he moved amid material scenes,

Lifted by intimations from the heights

And twixt the pauses of the building brain

Touched by the thoughts that skim the fathomless surge

Of Nature and wing back to hidden shores.⁷⁵

He by his yogic tapasya climbed the summits of spirituality and reached the top of creation where he met the supreme Goddess who alone, Aswapati knew, could change the circumstance of our transience and suffering, of our life in ignorance that has bound us to death, and bring to it the transforming felicity of immortality. The course of the evolutionary Fate could be altered only if she would incarnate herself here and deal with the one who stands as an antagonist against a happy manifestation in the possibilities of the superconscient. An exceptional boon has now been granted to him. He got the Word, that things shall be fulfilled in Time; this shall be so by herself taking birth as his unfaltering and radiant daughter. Aswapati returns to the earth, now with a splendid certitude, and attends to his kingly office of governance. Presently he is no more an apprentice, a "seeker" to tread the hazardous path of a beginner with its slow and arduous climb; he is a Master, an accomplished, in fact a fulfilled Siddha with the forces of Life under his full command,—he has become Aswapati. All his actions flow in the dynamism of the spirit and the higher intimations that he gets are received not only in a quiescent state, but also when he is preoccupied with the thousand problems that afflict us here in our daily transactions. He is spiritual even in these secular matters. The poetic expression Sri Aurobindo has given to this greatness of the Yogi is very precise in its connotation and we have to be pretty alert to its implications.

But from the editors who examined the Savitri-manuscripts in detail we have rather an unfortunate statement about the third line of this passage. While proposing the replacement of "twixt" by "in", this is what they say: "The last emendation of a handwritten line was necessitated by what the editors consider to be a slip made

⁷⁵Savitri, p. 347.

by the author while revising. All handwritten versions, except the last, of line 491 [p. 347] of Book Three, Canto 4, run as follows:

And in the pauses of the building brain.

When he copied this line in the 'final version', Sri Aurobindo wrote 'twixt' instead of 'in'. This word, although somewhat archaic, is perfectly legitimate, and 'in fact of fairly frequent occurrence in Savitri. But here it does not make sense. The 'pauses' of the brain are what come between, or twixt, its ordinary activities. Sri Aurobindo's intention surely was that it is in these pauses that, as the sequel says, 'thoughts' from hidden shores come in and touch the seeker. Perhaps he meant to alter 'pauses' when he substituted 'twixt' for 'in'. At any rate, the unrevised version of the line, as given above, seems to represent Sri Aurobindo's intentions better than the revised one, and it has therefore been restored to the text."⁷⁶ The editors seem to be too confident to say that "twixt" for "in" was a slip on the part of Sri Aurobindo. We do not know.

But this "twixt" must have been read out to Sri Aurobindo at least on three or four occasions later. The typescript, the proofs of the Canto when it was published in the Advent in 1947, the fascicle that had come out again in 1947, and finally when the proofs of the 1950-edition of Part I of Savitri were read out to Sri Aurobindo. We cannot say that in the sequence the same slip kept on happening at every stage. Further, in the last version that is in Sri Aurobindo's own handwriting, the copy-text, as well as in the ledger in which Nirodbaran copied the text the word concerned is "twixt"; it is also noticed that this word has been underlined in the ledger and that there is a tick mark in the margin. From this we can be reasonably certain that a reference about "twixt" was made to Sri Aurobindo and that he deliberately retained it as the correct expression. In other words, this was not an accidental departure from the earlier drafts, though these had "in" at least on thirteen occasions. Nor can we say that Sri Aurobindo was unconscious while he made this change or when he heard it a number of times subsequently.

76 Sri Aurobindo Archives and Research, Vol. 10, No. 2, (December 1986), p. 186.

For a discussion about this passage reference may be made to R.Y. Deshpande, Sri Aurobindo and the New Millennium, pp. 173-74. See also K. D. Sethna, Mother India, November 1990, pp. 745-54.

We may take another example, that of the Book of Death. Basically this is a 1916-18 version which was very lightly revised during the forties. The first fair copy has just 133 lines of which 108 are identical to what they are now. Presently, we have 177 lines with 25 lines altered and 44 added by dictation.⁷⁷ On a page belonging to this manuscript Sri Aurobindo also dictated "Book of Death / III / Death in the Forest". Regarding this nomenclature of III some doubt has arisen whether it can be taken as Canto III of the present Book of Death with the first two cantos having remained unwritten, or that it is simply a third part of the earlier version of the epic that belongs to the Arya-period.

Added to the Book of Death there is a footnote in the 1954-edition of Savitri which runs as follows: "This Book was not completed. This Canto which the author named Canto III was compiled by him from an earlier version and rewritten at places." A further clarification was presented in the footnote of the 1972-edition: "This Canto was compiled by the poet from an early version of Savitri in which it had been called Canto Three. It was the third Canto of that poem, not the third canto of any particular Book. When, after being rewritten at places, it was included in the present version, its number remained unchanged." But this statement seems to be misrepresentative of the available facts. The 1993 revised edition has a more explicit statement: "The Book of Death was taken from Canto Three of an early version of Savitri which had only six cantos and an epilogue. It was slightly revised at a later stage and a number of new lines were added, but it was never fully worked into the final version of the poem. Its original designation, 'Canto Three', has been retained as a reminder of this."⁷⁸

But while attending to the Book of Death in 1946 Sri Aurobindo dictated, in three rows, "Book of Death / III/ Death in the Forest" and hence all is in Nirodbaran's hand ; this was done on a page of the earlier draft that was taken for revising. There is also a double tick mark at this place. To reiterate: from the facsimile of this page it is clear that all this forms a revised draft prepared on the original manuscript page. Seeing the abruptness of III at this place, in the absence of I and II anywhere, perhaps a doubt had arisen in the mind of the typist, Nolini Kanta Gupta, and he must have sought clarification from Sri Aurobindo. The double tick mark is

⁷⁷Richard Hartz, Mother India, November 1999, p. 1072.

⁷⁸Ibid., August, 2000, p. .

undoubtedly a confirmation of what Sri Aurobindo had originally dictated to Nirodbaran, that it is meant to be the third canto of the present Book and not something belonging to the earlier version. Being a provisional revision of the draft we should take the existing Book of Death as incomplete.

Apropos of this situation Richard Hartz, who has done extensive studies of the Savitri-manuscripts, writes: "At the place in the manuscript where the present Book Eight begins, a roman numeral III was written by the scribe under the heading Book of Death, as if Death in the Forest was meant to be the third canto of that Book. It is possible that when Sri Aurobindo revised this manuscript, he had begun to envisage a description of the Yoga of Savitri, but had not yet conceived of The Book of Yoga as a separate Book. The Book of Death would then have become an expanded version of the whole of the old canto entitled 'Death', and would have been numbered Book Seven. Its first canto might have been similar to the present Book Seven, Canto One. The second canto could have been an account of Savitri's Yoga much shorter than what was eventually written, while Death in the Forest would have been the third canto. But this explanation is purely speculative."⁷⁹

The cautious approach in this note is commendable indeed. But we should also remember what Sri Aurobindo had told Nirodbaran when the final revision of the Book of Fate was completed. This was during the last session of his work on Savitri in 1950. Sri Aurobindo had asked Nirodbaran if there was still something to be revised. When told about the Book of Death and Epilogue, Sri Aurobindo said: "We shall see about that later on."⁸⁰ That perhaps adds quite a bit of significance to the abruptness of number three of the canto; it definitely shows that this Book would have had considerable additional matter which Sri Aurobindo, had he attended to it, would have incorporated at the time of taking it up again: we can be reasonably certain that Sri Aurobindo intended to expand the 1916-18 draft later. This may even imply that he would disclose in the epic some other occult aspects connected with the role of death in this creation. These aspects could possibly indicate the difficulties of transformation of the physical nature governed by decay, disintegration and death, difficulties at the

⁷⁹Ibid.

⁸⁰Nirodbaran, Twelve Years with Sri Aurobindo (1988), p. 266.

cellular level itself.⁸¹ From the point of view of composition we need not therefore necessarily tie this 'III / Death in the Forest' with the Book of Yoga which was practically not present in any earlier draft, a fact which is clear from Sri Aurobindo's letters also.

In a letter written to Amal Kiran in 1946 Sri Aurobindo summarises the position of the two Books concerned as follows: "The Book of Yoga and the Book of Death have still to be written, though a part needs only a thorough recasting."⁸² At this point of time the Book of Yoga, as we have already seen, did not exist and as there was an early draft of the Book of Death, this "thorough recasting" only indicates the latter which Sri Aurobindo wanted to take up again at a suitable stage afterwards. But this didn't happen. Perhaps that disclosure would have been too early for us to understand as a spiritual fact in life.

There seems to be another kind of hieratic logic behind the sudden appearance of canto three in the Book of Death. If we consider that the poem is specifically a spiritual tale of Savitri,— and we know it is so,—then we have at the end of the first canto— the Symbol Dawn—an announcement about the inevitability of her husband Satyavan's death. The second canto—the Issue— speaks of the awakening of the great World-Mother in Savitri, an awakening which is to happen on the fated day as foretold by Narad. The central theme of the narrative has thus already been introduced by now. The long intervening description in the next thirty-eight cantos, from page 22 to page 557 consisting of 535 pages or about 19,000 lines, then forms a kind of necessary interlude in the story; it is a sort of desirable digression. With that the announced death occurs in the third canto of the Book of Death. From this point onward the story, of death, runs in direct relationship with the theme. There is thus an inner consistency in the entire scheme, making it very appealing to the aesthetic sense of superior poetry. If someone has proposed such an argument then surely there is a certain merit in his line of thinking; but despite its charm and the plausibility of an occult occurrence it sounds rather a wild tour de force.

However, in view of such features,—and more important from the point of editing the Savitri-text,—we must take due care of the

^8l R.Y. Deshpande, Perspectives of Savitri, pp. 546-49, Notes 8 and 9.

⁸² Savitri (1993), p. 733.

complexities and many possible dimensions that are present in the entire work. In this regard perhaps the best procedure for the editors of the Savitri-text could be to compile all the data and leave things for the perceptive reader to take readings according to his judgement. This entails an enormous amount of labour but the gain is a certain scientific documentation that can stand permanently as reference material for generations to come who may have another approach towards the epic. That will thus satisfy the intention of an objective researcher who is always keen to have facts at his disposal rather than judgments which generally carry the element of subjectivity in them being invariably based on a given line of approach. But these are issues rather of a minor kind and may have generally a relevance only in their academic contexts. What is significant is the authenticity as well as the validity of the Word of Savitri in its pristine glory and the power that can give expression to the Real-Idea in our life. That is the true merit of its poetry and that will always remain undeformed,—because behind it is the yogic force of its creator.

The Musician of the Spirit

About Savitri Raymond Franck Piper writes as follows: "We know that we must resort to the art of poetry for expressing, to the fullest possible artistic limits, the yearnings and battles of mankind for eternal life. And fortunately a tremendous new body of metaphysical and mystical poetry has already inaugurated the new Age of Illumination. This poetry radiates from the master metaphysician, mystic, and poet, Sri Aurobindo, and his Ashram in Pondicherry, India. During a period of nearly fifty years before his passing in 1950, he created what is probably the greatest epic in the English language and the longest poem (23, 837 lines of iambic blank verse) in any language of the modem world. I venture the judgement that it is the most comprehensive, integrated, beautiful and perfect cosmic poem ever composed. It ranges symbolically from a primordial cosmic void, through earth's darkness and struggles, to the highest realms of supramental spiritual existence, and illumines every important concern of man, through verse of unparalleled massiveness, magnificence, and metaphysical brilliance.

This epic is called Savitri, A Legend and a Symbol, 1951 published by the Ashram. A sentence from K. D. Sethna [Amal Kiran] indicates its plot. 'Savitri fighting Satyavan's death, is in Sri Aurobindo's hands an avatar of the immortal Beauty and Love plunging into the trials of terrestrial life and seeking to overcome them not only in herself but also in the world she has embraced as her own: she is sworn to put an utter end to earth's estrangement from God.'⁸³ The poem begins,

It was the hour before the Gods awake...

A fathomless zero occupied the world.

And it ends

She brooded through her stillness on a thought

Deep-guarded by her mystic folds of light,

And in her bosom nursed a greater dawn.

Savitri is perhaps the most powerful artistic work in the world for expanding man's mind towards the Absolute."⁸⁴

In contrast to this we also meet not infrequently very , knowledgeable critics who assert that Sri Aurobindo might have been a great writer, thinker, or a spiritual person, but was never a poet. Even if they happen to read his three thousand pages of poetry including Savitri, they yet refuse to consider him as capable of writing genuine poetry in a medium which was not his mother tongue. "English learned as a foreign language can never nourish the invisible roots of poetry," so states Kathleen Raine.⁸⁵ She clarifies further that "its beauty lies in its ability to convey the very nature of England, its woods and flowers and weather and animals and people with their peculiarly English attitudes."⁸⁶ In that case "to wish to write in an alien language seems to me," she maintains, "a failure to perceive and experience that which poetry is... words in their feeling-content and their local sense-impression.

⁸³The Poetic Genius of Sri Aurobindo, p. 119(1947).

⁸⁴The Hungry Eye, Ch 15 Expansions of Aesthetic Experience. See also Mother India, November 1958.

⁸⁵The English Language and the Indian Spirit,

Correspondence between Kathleen Raine and K. D. Sethna, (1986), p. 7.

⁸⁶Ibid., p. 30.

There is involved, in such a wish, a separation of abstractions from words—the very antithesis of poetry."⁸⁷ Again, "... the language of the poet is a language of image and symbol—there must be forms to contain the abstractions which are, without these containing vessels, what Yeats has called 'Asiatic vague immensities'. Blake writes of the 'minute particulars' and of these there are virtually none in Sri Aurobindo's poem... . Certainly Savitri is an ambitious and impressive attempt—an impressive failure."⁸⁸ Also, whereas Sri Aurobindo "understands poetry in general, he has little sense of the precise—or rather of the associative magic of the words themselves."⁸⁹

Here we have another comment, from P. Lai as quoted by V. K. Gokak.⁹⁰ P. Lai considered that Indo-Anglian romanticism ended with Sarojini Niadu. "Now, waking up we must more and more aim at a realistic poetry reflecting, poetically and pleasingly, the din and hubbub, the confusion and indecision, the flashes of beauty and goodness, of our age. And leave the fireflies to dance through the neem." "The entire game is reminiscent of Roget's Thesaurus where redundant familiars like 'soul', 'spiritual', 'subtle', 'deeps', and 'deathless' enjoy a private tea-party." He sees "vague luminosity of form" in Sri Aurobindo.

Is Savitri a failure then?"

In response to such criticisms Amal Kiran argued extensively, from all angles, positive and negative, but his untiring attempts did not avail anything worthwhile. In the face of such a deafness should then one sing for that person the glories of Musa Spiritus who ever offers her gifts in great abundance which, in whatever language it be, we can receive only if we can breathe in her living presence?

If we strictly analyse the statement that English learned as a foreign language can never nourish the invisible roots of poetry, it just means that Sri Aurobindo might have been a poet but he was a bad poet in English because, unfortunately, he chose a medium

⁸⁷Ibid., p. 46.

⁸⁸Indian Poets and English Poetry,

Correspondence between Kathleen Raine and K. D. Sethna, (1994), pp. 29-30. See also Mother India, pp. 753-58, September 1996. 89 Ibid., p. 131.

⁹⁰ Sri Aurobindo - Seer and Poet, pp. 64-65, (1973); Perspectives of Savitri, p. 223.

that was not his own,—which we also know that it is not true. He employed "words for uses they never were born for." Perhaps that was the tragedy of Tagore and Yeats too when they wrote in English. But then words are not frozen icebergs. They are capable of growing and acquiring newer warmer shades of meaning and newer powers of expression, newer associations and subtleties, rich in many proportions. Indeed for English a new possibility been opened out by Sri Aurobindo, a possibility which Tagore could not open out even for his own native Bengali? After all, words can take new birth and can gain new sense and sound and sensibility, new joys and new significances which they have been always doing in their ever-widening urge to reach out that which is happy and felicitous, unfalsifiably true and unmutably beautiful.

But the most amazing thing is that Kathleen Raine passed judgements without reading Sri Aurobindo! If we apply Eliot's dictum that a good critic should have a great "sense of fact", then we are constrained to say that she did not have facts with her. It is also strange that several decades ago a critic in the The Times Literary Supplement said that Sri Aurobindo's poetry did not have the magical rhythm of Tagore, Iqbal and Sarojini Naidu,—which only shows that he was not perceptive of the deeper and subtler rhythms that go far beyond just the lyrical. However, in his defence it may be said that much of Sri Aurobindo's poetry including Savitri appeared only afterwards.

The question is, whether Sri Aurobindo has brought the greatness of the soul to Savitri's blank verse. If so, it would immediately take care of Blake's "minute particulars", "minute discrimination on which is founded all sublimity of creation"; at the same time it would embrace "language of image and symbol" disposing of Yeats's "Asiatic vague immensities". It would also take care of Hegel's "concrete universals" that are otherwise too abstract or philosophic. Spiritual experience, as vast as the universe and as detailed as counting each star with its brightness in countless galaxies, always takes care of all such aesthetic stipulations which otherwise seem to be just mind-set.

In the over-all subjective and artistic experience it is the poet's personality that matters the most; it stamps his uniqueness, even his presence in the enjoyment of poetic delight that flows from it. But there is an aspect of impersonality too, impersonality not of aloofness but of universality, even of the transcendent. Savitri has all the three. That makes the poetic work minutely elaborate; also.

being an experience, there does not remain any question of vagueness.

Let us take one or two illustrative examples. When image and symbol crowd in a great succession of subjective feelings—and feelings are always poignantly subjective—we at once open ourselves to a vision that we never had earlier. Thus we see a new wonder in the beauty of romanticism, as in the following:

Mastered by the honey of a strange flower-mouth,

Drawn to soul-spaces opening round a brow,

He turned to the vision like a sea to the moon

And suffered a dream of beauty and of change,

Discovered the aureole round a mortal's head,

Adored a new divinity in things.⁹¹

Such an abundance of honey-thick sweetness can flow only when spiritual felicity drunk in the delight of existence finds its true native expression which is the essence or Rasa of poetic creation. In it one is sure that the poet has seen "a new divinity in things."

There is a universality emerging from the very specificity of symbol and image. If the light that illumines everything is found then all that is living or inanimate opens out its secrecies and wonder after wonder begins to flood our awareness. What has been enigmatic all along ceases to be so and there is only the working of one miraculous cosmic Force.

Even a simple line like

Savitri, Savitri, O Savitri⁹²

pierces with the power of that name all the three worlds of Ignorance existing in us and in its cry takes us to the Safe and the Beatific. This may sound rather hyperbolic, an excitedly exaggerated observation; but the line is remarkably direct in its statement and content and is charged with the power of the mantric name itself. It combines in its art the charge of the supernatural. We do not have to know Sanskrit but only listen to the sound that can fill the inner skies with its outspreading sovereignty of force. In fact, lying in the lap of Savitri and uttering her name means that death cannot

⁹¹Savitri, p. 396.

⁹²Ibid., p. 765.

touch us; if it should, it is death who would then get destroyed,— and that is exactly what happened in the case of Satyavan.

Now and then the poet comes out with the inspired artistry that is elaborate in design but sure in its effect. So is the Immortals' vision drawn closer to us:

Only the Immortals on their deathless heights

Dwelling beyond the walls of Time and Space,

Masters of living, free from the bonds of Thought,

Who are overseers of Fate and Chance and Will

And experts of the theorem of world-need,

Can see the Idea, the Might that changes Time's course,

Come maned with light from undiscovered worlds,

Hear, while the world toils on with its deep blind heart,

The galloping hooves of the unforeseen event,

Bearing the superhuman rider, near

And, impassive to earth's din and startled cry,

Return to the silence of the hills of God;

As lightning leaps, as thunder sweeps, they pass

And leave their mark on the trampled breast of Life.⁹³

Suggestion upon suggestion with the finest sweep of poetry is piled with great skill and artistry in a statement that can be simply paraphrased thus: the Immortals come maned with light and hear the nearing of the unforeseen event and return. The whole passage is exact, is to the point, and is most perfect in its mystico-spiritual details. Only one who is a master of language and a seer of visions can accomplish such a task. The subtlety and many-sidedness of thought running through this 14-line sentence is absolutely marvellous, in the sense that the more we ponder on it the more of the truth it brings out. That is the power of spiritual poetry. It is also a fine example of intuitive thought reaching an absolute of the Truth. One wonders whether such descriptions exist anywhere else in English poetry.

In this context we may also recall what Sri Aurobindo wrote to Amal Kiran regarding his blank verse style in Savitri. "... when I attempted the single line blank verse on a large scale in Savitri I found myself falling involuntarily into a series of four-line

⁹³Ibid., pp. 53-54.

movement. But even though I was careful in the building, I found it led to a stiff monotony and had to make a principle of variation—-one line, two line, three line, four line or longer passages (paragraphs as it were) alternating with each other; otherwise the system would be a failure." The above-quoted passage is an excellent example of the technique illustrating the success he achieved with the blank verse in Savitri.⁹⁴

There are levels of inspiration in Savitri, but nowhere does the poet go below a certain mark set by him for the poem. The landscapes have many vistas and many variations, green grasses and tall trees and smiling valleys and tranquil mountains climbing in a prayer of offering to the skies; there are primroses and cottages as well as sandy deserts and caravans with their slow tinkling paces. There may even appear 'arid' tracts here and there; but they have their own beauty of bareness. Savitri's aesthetic enjoyment or Rasa has many flavours and hues and cadences and it is the enjoyer who has to develop the taste for its richnesses, for its varied sweetnesses of the joy that flows from the spirit of creativity.

Not only thoughts and images but many sounds go to make the body of the poem. We are reminded of Mallarme's le Musicien de Silence who is also le Musicien de Son. After having counted all the sounds in the World-Soul what we wonder at is that, paradoxically, they all become countless! What the poet has done, it appears, is simply given a few suggestive examples of these innumerable notes and intonations, each one with its own timbre and pitch. Each matter has its own manner and each substance its sense and when poetry attempts to describe these then there no mental rule can really be applied. Style and technique are an integral part of the poet's inspiration and one has to go entirely by its force; obviously any critical appreciation has to be fully cognisant of it.

We are dealing with Overhead Poetry which Sri Aurobindo explained in great detail in his letters on poetry. It is an utterance that comes from some higher plane carrying with it its rhythm and tonal resonances as much as its substance and flavour. It is a creative word that sets into motion new worlds of perception; also it initiates the surge of new ideas and their forces to shape our lives in their likeness. In terms of the Savitri-phrase it is "a voice that carries the sound of infinity."⁹⁵ To understand and enjoy it is needed

⁹⁴Sri Aurobindo on Himself, SABCL, Vol. 26, p. 308.

⁹⁵p. 663.

another kind of aesthetic sensibility, to hear it speak to us in its many nuances we have to keep aside our own preferences, we have to listen to it in the inner silence which is the real receiver of its imports and its significances. An intuitive association with things and images and sounds can alone put us in direct contact with it. A new spirit in poetry can be appreciated only with a new taste.

The failure of the modem mind is characteristically due to its insensitivity to things supraphysical. It has the least notion or idea of Overhead Poetry, to such an extent that it cannot identify it even in works that have come down to us. The Theory of Aesthesis based on parameters of the multifold Word in its joyous mellifluity demands a new outlook towards things. Everybody is not open to it nor is expected to be open to it, but certainly a perceptive critic cannot neglect or bypass it. At times even a well-versed Aurobindonian can miss it.

There are Victorian elements in Sri Aurobindo no doubt, but Savitri is an epic crowded with several echoes, Indian and European, ancient and modem, and is full of several Rasas, essences of aesthetic enjoyment in their unadulterated purity, and nothing would be taboo just because it may belong to the forms of the past. This poetry can be "modem" too. The glorious Victorian can be as much a city-dweller with a perfectly urban mind: thus, for example, 'nothingness' becomes 'the waste stuff from which all is made. The ultra-modernism comes out with full violence when

... bodies bom out of some Nihil's womb

Ensnare the spirit in the moment's dreams,

Then perish vomiting the immortal soul

Out of Matter's belly into the sink of Nought.⁹⁶

Or take the miasma-description, Euclidean in precision, epically elaborate, yet Keatsian in execution of art:

Grey forces like a thin miasma creep

Stealing through chinks in his closed mansion's doors,

Discolouring the walls of upper mind

In which he lives his fair and specious life,

And leaves behind a stench of sin and death.⁹⁷

⁹⁶ Ibid., p. 494. ⁹⁷ Ibid., p. 480.

Savitri's modernism does not rest at all in the sordid and the ugly although there is a certain necessity to represent their psychological character in the totality of functioning. The point is, Sri Aurobindo is not a Victorian that some people make of him. If these strains do come in, they only add to its assimilated richness. He exploits, so to say, everything that can serve tellingly if not revealingly his purpose. Kalidasian moods of seasons and the featurelessness of Nirvana, for example, are as important to it as Homeric similes or the correlative expressions of the Modernists. It is so because Savitri is an epic and the standards of short lyrical verses cannot be applied to it. Besides, it is another kind of epic. The Epic of the Universal is full of Rasas—madhura, karuna, vātsalya, adbhuta, vira, bibhatsa, shānta, etc. But, at the same time, it is the Epic of the Individual,—and also the Transcendental,—with the Rasa of Shantam pervading all through. It is in this great Silence that the Epic was bom,—Silence the true home of Overhead Poetry. To really appreciate it one has to enter into it.

But the modem mind has no patience for that; that is its tragedy. It even declares that now the days of the epic are over. In the mood of a rightful reaction against Victorianism the modem mind has certainly brought mental profundity and penetration which were very desirable. It has won a new freedom also. When it touches Eliot-wise the Gita's core that "the time of death is every moment" and therefore one must remember Krishna always, we have here another possibility opened out for poetry, a possibility of the inner mental expression coming to the fore with its gifts even of the occult. But, unfortunately, in that search for newer moods and manners it leaned on Freudian psychology and got totally misled. It took the path of the inconscient Nirvana. The Overhead planes remained sealed; in fact, they started receding.

The rise of Modernism, though in its "final orientation" as yet undetermined (written in 1919), was necessary against the "Victorian type".⁹⁸ Something had to be done and Modem Poetry was that attempt. But it has not delivered the goods and even today man's deepest aspirations have remained unfulfilled. "Empty and barren is the sea," but it must find new waters and new tides. Modernism was after all a total reaction against all traditions, even against future possibilities. Therefore, when Sri Aurobindo

⁹⁸ The Future Poetry, SABCL, Vol. 9, pp. 144; 133-34.

essentially leaps from the traditions into the Overhead he gets bypassed in the current aesthesis. Obviously, this is a passing phase and the aesthesis will have to change and gather itself into a future form. To recognise it perhaps a certain temporal separation from it is needed.

Poetry is not only image and symbol, but is also sound and silence; if there is sight's sound, there is also sound's sight. And when le Musicien de Silence becomes one with le Musicien de Son we have an unsurpassable marvel. Listen to Ezra Pound: "When we know more of overtones we shall see that the tempo of every masterpiece is absolute, and is exactly set by some further law of rhythmic accord. Whence it should be possible to show that any given rhythm implies about it a complete musical form, perfect, complete. Ergo, the rhythm set in a line of poetry connects its symphony, which, had we a little more skill, we could score for orchestra."

If one is deaf to these sounds, to these rhythmic accords, to the happinesses that intend to rush out from the creative possibilities not just of the "easy-come" but "inevitable" Word, then what can the poor symbol do? And in the Overhead Poetry as proposed and most convincingly demonstrated by Sri Aurobindo what we have are the perfect rhythm, thought-substance, and the soul-vision fused into one, the supreme Mantra itself. Reading Savitri is entering into that mantric world and living in it is to live in the manifestive Truth itself.

Some Studies of Savitri

What we have considered so far are just a few aspects of Savitri. The most important is of course its affirmation of the Spirit as dynamic Truth shaping the destiny of this creation. This also implies that to enter into it we have to make considerable yogic-spiritual progress. While Savitri itself can become a means for that progress, there is needed the equally important basis of our willingness to undertake such a task. We have to be also prepared to undergo the hardships of its discipline by keeping ready all the instrumental aspects of our personality—with the mind capable of receiving intimations of luminous knowledge and the heart responding to the ardencies of life-movements in their thousand moods of magnificence and dignity and the will steady in its intent like a

blight flame of sacrifice burning upward to heaven. There has to be a "call" to live in Savitri who shall give us the Truth and the things of the Truth. Rare are such souls who have that urge, have received that call, and rarer still who will practise its Yoga.

In the meanwhile, however, we can live in its presence in several expectant ways. In Savitri there is spiritual philosophy put in the revealing language of a poet, its expression carrying the inspired and inevitable Word. We have in it mysticism, occult knowledge, religion, metaphysics, art, science, literature, history of man and history of earth, all that is noble and living, that can impart to our perception the sense of infinity which can give meaning to our daily occupations. Any one of these can become our foundational engagement; in fact it has thus already opened out an altogether new world of creative action for us. Based on Savitri we already have Sunil Bhattacharya's music and Huta Hindocha's paintings under the direct guidance of the Mother. These are examples of the new art that is to come in its wake and there shall be many more creations to bring Savitri itself closer to us. We thus envisage the coming of new schools of thought, choreography, poetry, criticism, comparative research and studies, fiction, songs, oratorical dissertations, discourses, recitations and readings all welling up from this inexhaustible fountain of creativity. The poem has also been translated into several languages mostly in verse-form but also at times as prose renderings. Maybe some of these are rudimentary attempts and much will have to be done to achieve some minimum aesthetic satisfaction that is to be expected from a work connected with it; nonetheless these attempts do demonstrate the possibilities that have sprung up from Savitri's world of delight. If around the stone-still statue of Buddha in Ellora there is the calm of infinity that nothing can disturb, we shall expect a crystalline stream of sweetness and joy rushing from the marble face of Savitri halo'd by the moon of beauty, or carved in the heart of amethyst she shall prove to be "the Sun from which we kindle all our suns."⁹⁹

During the last fifty years an enormous amount of literature has gathered around Savitri. Even before it came out as a complete poem articles based on a few cantos that were published in some periodicals had started appearing. Since then picking up one theme or another, any number of studies and reflections have been

⁹⁹Savitri, p. 314.

presented. Either giving expository details or taking the occasion to get into the spirit of Savitri, they bring out several shades of meaning that are there in its secret depths; or else we suddenly have at times marvellous insights and revelations that can lift us to higher planes of awareness. On a research level there are also doctoral theses dealing with one or other specific literary aspect of the epic. A good number of books are now available and they offer certain features that have an important bearing on our approaching and understanding the subjects it delineates.

In this compilation we propose to bring together some of these representative studies in two edited volumes under the common title Perspectives of Savitri. The first volume consists of articles essentially written by the first generation authors. One or two from this group will be included in the second volume. We are fortunate in this respect that many of them came directly in contact with Sri Aurobindo and therefore in them is the glow of intimacy providing a rarer personal feeling which is so valuable in a work of the kind that Savitri is. For instance, we have Nirodbaran who acted as a scribe and took down the Savitri-dictation as Sri Aurobindo, because of his failing eyesight, was not able to write himself. Being a man of literature trained by the Master himself his account provides the sweet story of its composition which is so endearipg to us. Amal Kiran had the extraordinary privilege of discussing several literary aspects and fine points of poetry with the Poet-Critic and, in the process, he drew out a number of important letters from him; these invaluable letters can now be treated as the author's preface or introduction to the epic. This introduction gives us an idea about the theory of poetry proposed by Sri Aurobindo and more so how he put it in practice. That all genuine poetry derives its inspiration from some high Overhead plane is something new to the general aesthetic world and it is that which has been compellingly brought out in them. A foundation for the appreciation of the future poetry with Savitri as its example has been laid and we should now approach it on that basis. Similarly, Nolini Kanta Gupta had been a long-time associate of Sri Aurobindo since his political days and was himself a person with high attainments. His writings are extensive, both in Bengali and in English, and provide a deep insight into literary, cultural and spiritual matters. His own direct connection with the Savitri-work was to prepare its typescript which would be eventually sent to the press. What we get from them all is the gold of the touch they received directly from the

divine Guru. For that we shall always remain thankful to them. We are fortunate that the first two in their late nineties are amongst us today.

While making a selection of articles from various authors in the present volume the working thumb-rule followed was to see that the compilation is sufficiently broad-based to cover in an over-all way the numerous aspects of the epic. However, from a given author only one or two selections could be picked up, essentially because of space limitations. But care was taken to make sure that due justice was done to the author concerned, that the selected pieces would be quite representative of his established style and manner of thematic development. For the sake of general editorial uniformity very minor changes were made here and there without affecting the textual contents; at times it was also necessary to change the original title of the article or chapter heading to avoid repetition or to make the contents more explicit. But for a few minor exceptions, all the references to Sri Aurobindo's works in this compilation have been made uptodate by quoting from the Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library that was brought out as a 30-volume publication in 1972. For the sake of a certain completeness of the present work a couple of articles not belonging to the 'first generation' have also been included here.

Perspectives of Savitri as we have in the first volume is broadly divided into six parts. A definite internal affinity amongst the articles has been the guideline for grouping them together. Not that this arrangement has always been successful to highlight or project several topical aspects in their totality; but it is believed that a fairly good picture will emerge from it for doing the concentrated work that lies ahead of us in order to enter into the worlds of Savitri, its realms of gold. A companion volume soon to follow will contain articles by the present-day authors.

R. Y. DESHPANDE

PART I

Sri Aurobindo's Three Letters on Savitri

1: Between Ourselves

[In a long letter dated 4 May 1947 Sri Aurobindo gave his comments on certain criticisms made against his poetry by a friend of Amal Kiran (K.D. Sethna) apropos of a book* by him on Sri Aurobindo's poetry. He had asked Sri Aurobindo's permission to show this letter to his friend Frederick Mendonca, professor of English at St Xavier's College in Bombay; but in a second letter dated 7 July 1947 Sri Aurobindo had explained the reasons why he did not favour the idea of making it public. Since, however, any possibility of the first long letter being misconstrued is removed if it is read along with the second explanatory letter, it has been thought fit to publish it, especially as it contains extremely valuable data relating to Sri Aurobindo's own literary development. The letter dated 7 July 1947 is placed here first followed by the long letter dated 4 May 1947.]

The... letter was to be, as I suggested, "between ourselves"; there is too much that is private and personal in it for publicity. It is something that can be shown to those who can appreciate and understand, but to an ordinary reader I might seem to be standing on my defence rather than attacking and demolishing a criticism which might damage the appreciation of it in readers who are not sure of their own critical standard and reliability of their taste and so might be shaken by well-phrased judgments and plausible reasonings such as Mendonca's: they might make the same confusion as Mendonca himself between an apology and an apologia. An idea might rise that I am not sure of the value of my own poetry especially the earlier poetry and accept his valuation of it. The humility you speak of is very largely a Socratic humility, the element of irony in it is considerable; but readers not accustomed to fineness of shades might take it literally and conclude wrongly that I accepted the strictures passed by an

* The Poetic Genius of Sri Aurobindo (1947).

unfavourable criticism. A poet who puts no value or a very low value on his own writing has no business to write poetry or to publish it or keep it in publication; if I allowed the publication of the Collected Poems* it is because I judged them worth publishing. Your friend's objection has therefore some value. On the other hand in defending I may seem to be eulogising my own work, which is not a thing that can be done in public even if a poet's estimate of his achievement is as self-assured as that of Horace, Exegi monumentum aere perennius, or as magnificent as Victor Hugo's. Similarly, the reply was not meant for Mendonca himself and I do not think the whole can be shown to him without omissions or some editing; but if you wish and if you think that he will not resent any strictures I have made, you can show to him the passages relevant to his criticisms.

7.7.1947

* First published in 1942.

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2: Poetry of the Spiritual Empire

You have asked me to comment on your friend Mendonga's comments on my poetry and especially on Savitri. But, first of all, it is not usual for a poet to criticise the criticisms of his critics though a few perhaps have done so; the poet writes for his own satisfaction, his own delight in poetical creation or to express himself and he leaves his work for the world, and rather for posterity than for the contemporary world, to recognise or to ignore, to judge and value according to its perception or its pleasure. As for the contemporary world he might be said rather to throw his poem in its face and leave it to resent this treatment as an unpleasant slap, as a contemporary world treated the early poems of Wordsworth and Keats, or to accept it as an abrupt but gratifying attention, which was ordinarily the good fortune of the great poets in ancient Athens and Rome and of poets like Shakespeare and Tennyson in modem times. Posterity does not always confirm the contemporary verdict, very often it reverses it, forgets or depreciates the writer enthroned by contemporary fame, or raises up to a great height work little appreciated or quite ignored in its own time. The only safety for the poet is to go his own way careless of the blows and caresses of the critics; it is not his business to answer them. Then you ask me to right the wrong rum your friend's critical mind has taken; but how it is to be determined what is the right and what is the wrong turn, since a critical judgment depends usually on a personal reaction determined by the critic's temperament or the aesthetic trend in him or by values, rales or canons which are settled for his intellect and agree with the viewpoint from which his mind receives whatever comes to him for judgment; it is that which is right for him though it may seem wrong to a different temperament, aesthetic intellectuality or mental viewpoint. Your friend's judgments, according to his own account of them, seem to be determined by a sensitive temperament finely balanced in its own poise but limited in its appreciations, clear and open to some kinds of poetic creation, reserved towards others, against yet others closed and cold or excessively depreciative. This sufficiently explains his very different reactions to the two poems, Descent and Flame-Wind,¹ which he unreservedly admires

¹Collected Poems, SABCL, Vol. 5, pp. 563, 559.

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and to Savitri. However, since you have asked me, I will answer, as between ourselves, in some detail and put forward my own comments on his comments and my own judgments on his judgments. It may be rather long; for if such things are done, they may as well be clearly and thoroughly done. I may also have something to say about the nature and intention of my poem and the technique necessitated by the novelty of the intention and nature.

Let me deal first with some of the details he stresses so as to get them out of the way. His detailed intellectual reasons for his judgments seem to me to be often arbitrary and fastidious, sometimes based on a misunderstanding and therefore invalid or else valid perhaps in other fields but here inapplicable. Take, for instance, his attack upon my use of the prepositional phrase. Here, it seems to me, he has fallen victim to a grammatical obsession and lumped together under the head of the prepositional twist a number of different turns some of which do not belong to that category at all. In the line,

Lone on my summits of calm I have brooded

with voices around me,²

there is no such twist; for I did not mean at all "on my calm summits', but intended straightforwardly to convey the natural, simple meaning of the word. If I write "the fields of beauty" or "walking on the paths of truth" I do not expect to be supposed to mean "in beautiful fields" or "in truthful paths'; it is the same with "summits of calm", I mean "summits of calm" and nothing else; it is a phrase like "He rose to high peaks of vision" or "He took his station on the highest summits of knowledge". The calm is the calm of the highest spiritual consciousness to which the soul has ascended, making those summits its own and looking down from their highest heights on all below: in spiritual experience, in the occult vision or feeling that accompanies it, this calm is not felt as an abstract quality or a mental condition but as something concrete and massive, a self-existent reality to which one reaches, so that the soul standing on its peak is rather a tangible fact of experience than a poetical image. Then there is the phrase "A Face of rapturous calm"³: he seems to think it is a

²Not in Savitri but in Trance of Waiting. See Ibid., p. 558.

³Savitri, SABCL, Vol. 28, p. 4:

Infinity's centre, a Face of rapturous calm

Parted the eternal lids that open heaven.

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mere trick of language, a substitution of a prepositional phrase for an epithet, as if I had intended to say "a rapturously calm face" and I said instead "a face of rapturous calm" in order to get an illegitimate and meaningless rhetorical effect. I meant nothing of the kind, nothing so tame and poor and scanty in sense: I meant a face which was an expression or rather a living image of the rapturous calm of the supreme and infinite consciousness, — it is indeed so that it can well be "Infinity's centre". The face of the liberated Buddha as presented to us by Indian art is such an expression or image of the calm of Nirvana and could, and that would be an apt and live phrase and not an ugly artifice or twist of rhetoric. It should be remembered that the calm of Nirvana or the calm of the supreme Consciousness is to spiritual experience something self-existent, impersonal and eternal and not dependent on the person — or the face — which manifests it. In these two passages I take then the liberty to regard Mendonca's criticism as erroneous as its base and therefore invalid and inadmissible.

Then there are the lines from the Songs of the Sea:

The rains of deluge flee, a storm-tossed shade,

Over thy breast of gloom...⁴

"Thy breast of gloom" is not used here as a mere rhetorical and meaningless variation of "thy gloomy breast"; it might have been more easily taken as that if it had been a human breast, though even then, it could have been entirely defensible in a fitting context; but it is the breast of the sea, an image for a vast expanse supporting and reflecting or subject to the moods or movements of the air and the sky. It is intended, in describing the passage of the rains of deluge over the breast of the sea, to present a picture of a storm-tossed shade crossing a vast gloom: it is the gloom that has to be stressed and made the predominant idea and the breast or expanse is only its support and not the main thing: this could not have been suggested by merely writing "thy gloomy breast". A prepositional phrase need not be merely an artificial twist replacing an adjective; for instance, "a world of gloom and terror" means something more than "a gloomy and terrible world", it brings forward he gloom and terror as the very nature and constitution, the whole content of the world and not merely an attribute. So also if one wrote "Him

⁴'Translations SABCL, Vol. 8, p. 366.

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too wilt thou throw to thy sword of sharpness" or "cast into thy pits of horror", would it merely mean "thy sharp sword" and "thy horrible pits"? and would not the sharpness and the horror rather indicate or represent formidable powers of which the sword is the instrument and the pits the habitation or lair? That would be rhetoric but it would be a rhetoric not meaningless but having in it meaning and power. Rhetoric is a word with which we can batter something we do not like; but rhetoric of one kind or another has been always a great part of the world's best literature; Demosthenes, Cicero, Bossuet and Burke are rhetoricians, but their work ranks with the greatest prose styles that have been left to us. In poetry the accusation of rhetoric might be brought against such lines as Keats's

Thou wast not bom for death, immortal Bird!

No hungry generations tread thee down....*

To conclude, there is "the swords of sheen" in the translation of Bande Mataram. ⁵ That might be more open to the critic's stricture, for the expression can be used and perhaps has been used in verse as merely equivalent to "shining swords"; but for anyone with an alert imagination it can mean in certain contexts something more than that, swords that emit brilliance and seem to be made of light. Mendonca says that to use this turn in any other than an adjectival sense is unidiomatic, but he admits that there need be no objection provided that it creates a sense of beauty, but he finds no beauty in any of these passages. But the beauty can be perceived only if the other sense is seen, and even then we come back to the question of personal reaction; you and other readers may feel beauty where he finds none. I do not myself share his sensitive abhorrence of this prepositional phrase; it may be of course because there are coarser rhetorical threads in my literary taste. I would not, for instance, shrink from a sentence like this in a sort of free verse, "Where is thy wall of safety? Where is thy arm of strength? Whither has fled thy vanished face of glory?" Rhetoric of course, but it has in it an element which can be attractive, and it seems to me to bring in a more vivid note and mean more than "thy strong arm" or "thy glorious face" or than "the strength of thy arm" and "the glory of thy face".

I come next to the critic's trenchant attack on that passage in

* Ode to a Nightingale.

⁵'Ibid., p. 309.

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my symbolic vision of Night and Dawn in which there is recorded the conscious adoration of Nature when it feels the passage of the omniscient Goddess of eternal Light. Trenchant, but with what seems to me a false edge; or else if it is a sword of Damascus that would cleave the strongest material mass of iron he is fusing it to cut through subtle air, the air closes behind his passage and remains unsevered. He finds here only poor and false poetry, unoriginal in imagery and void of true wording and true vision, but that, is again a matter of personal reaction and everyone has a right to his own, you to yours as he to his. I was not seeking for originality but for truth and the effective poetical expression of my vision. He finds no vision there, and that may be because I could not express myself with any power; but it may also be because of his temperamental failure to feel and see what I felt and saw. I can only answer to the intellectual reasonings and judgments which turned up in him when he tried to find the causes of his reaction. These seem to me to be either fastidious and unsound or founded on a mistake of comprehension and therefore invalid or else inapplicable to this kind of poetry. His main charge is that there is a violent and altogether illegitimate transference of epithet in the expression "the wide-winged hymn of a great priestly wind".⁶ A transference of epithet is not necessarily illegitimate, especially if it expresses something that is true or necessary to convey a sound feeling and vision of things: for instance, if one writes in an Ovidian account of the denouement of a lovers' quarrel

In spite of a reluctant sullen heart

My willing feet were driven to thy door,

it might be said that it was something in the mind that was willing and the ascription of an emotion or state of mind to the feet is an illegitimate transfer of epithet; but the lines express a conflict of the members, the mind reluctant, the body obeying the force of the desire that moves it and the use of the epithet is therefore perfectly true and legitimate. But here no such defence is necessary because there is no transfer of epithets. The critic thinks that I imagined the wind as having a winged body and then took away the wings from its shoulders and clapped them on to its voice or hymn which could have no body. But I did nothing of the kind; I am not bound to give wings to the wind. In an occult vision the breath, sound, movement

''Savitri, p. 4.

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by which we physically know of a wind is not its real being but only the physical manifestation of the wind-god or the spirit of the air, as in the Veda the sacrificial fire is only a physical birth, temporary body or manifestation of the god of Fire, Agni. The gods of the Air and other godheads in the Indian tradition have no wings, the Maruts or storm-gods ride through the skies in their galloping chariots with their flashing golden lances, the beings of the middle world in the Ajanta frescoes are seen moving through the air not with wings but with a gliding natural motion proper to ethereal bodies. The epithet "wide-winged" then does not belong to the wind and is not transferred from it, but is proper to the voice of the wind which takes the form of a conscious hymn of aspiration and rises ascending from the bosom of the great priest, as might a great-winged bird released into the sky and sinks and rises again, aspires and fails and aspires again on the "altar hills". One can surely speak of a voice or a chant of aspiration rising on wide wings and I do not see how this can be taxed as a false or unpoetic image. Then the critic objects to the expression "altar hills" on the ground that this is superfluous as the imagination of the reader can very well supply this detail for itself from what has already been said: I do not think this is correct, a very alert reader might do so but most would not even think of it, and yet the detail is an essential and central feature of the thing seen and to omit it would be to leave a gap in the middle of the picture by dropping out something which is indispensable to its totality. Finally he finds that the line about the high boughs praying in the revealing sky does not help but attenuates, instead of more strongly etching the picture. I do not know why, unless he has failed to feel and to see. The picture is that of a conscious adoration offered by Nature and in that each element is conscious in its own way, the wind and its hymn, the hills, the trees. The wind is the great priest of this sacrifice of worship, his voice rises in a conscious hymn of aspiration, the hills offer themselves with the feeling of being an altar of the worship, the trees lift their high boughs towards heaven as the worshippers, silent figures of prayer, and the light of the sky into which their boughs rise reveals the Beyond towards which all aspires. At any rate this "picture" or rather this part of the vision is a complete rendering of what I saw in the light of the inspiration and the experience that came to me. I might indeed have elaborated more details, etched out at more length but that would have been superfluous and unnecessary; or I might have indulged in an ampler description but this would have been appropriate only if this part of

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the vision had been the whole. This last line⁷ is an expression of an experience which I often had whether in the mountains or on the plains of Gujarat or looking from my window in Pondicherry not only in the dawn but at other times and I am unable to find any feebleness either in the experience or in the words that express it. If the critic or any reader does not feel or see what I so often felt and saw, that may be my fault, but that is not sure, for you and others have felt very differently about it; it may be a mental or a temperamental failure on their part and it will be then my or perhaps even the critic's or reader's misfortune.

I may refer here to disparaging characterisation of my epithets. He finds that their only merit is that they are good prose epithets, not otiose but right words in their right place and exactly descriptive but only descriptive without any suggestion of any poetic beauty or any kind of magic. Are there then prose epithets and poetic epithets and is the poet debarred from exact description using always the right word in the right place, the mot juste"? I am under the impression that all poets, even the greatest, use as the bulk of their adjectives words that have that merit, and the difference from prose is that a certain turn in the use of them accompanied by the power of the rhythm in which they are carried lifts all to the poetic level. Take one of the passages I have quoted from Milton,

On evil days though fall'n, and evil tongues...

Blind Thamyris and blind Maeonides

And Tiresias and Phineus, prophets old,*

here the epithets are the same that would be used in prose, the right word in the right place, exact in statement, but all lies in the turn which makes them convey a powerful and moving emotion and the rhythm which gives them an uplifting passion and penetrating insistence. In more ordinary passages such as the beginning of Paradise Lost the epithets "forbidden tree" and "mortal taste" are of the same kind, but can we say that they are merely prose epithets, good descriptive adjectives and have no other merit? If you take the lines about Nature's worship in Savitri, I do not see how they can be described as prose epithets; at any rate I would never have dreamt of using in prose unless I wanted

⁷The high boughs prayed in a revealing sky. — Ibid.

* Paradise Lost, VII. 26; III. 35-36.

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to write poetic prose such expressions as "wide-winged human" or "a great priestly wind" or "altar hills" or "revealing sky"; these epithets belong in their very nature to poetry alone whatever may be their other value or want of value. He says they are obvious and could have been supplied by any imaginative reader; well, so are Milton's in the passages quoted and perhaps there too the very remarkable imaginative reader whom Mendonca repeatedly brings in might have supplied them by his own unfailing poetic verve. Whether they or any of them prick a hidden beauty out of the picture is for each reader to feel or judge for himself; but perhaps he is thinking of such things as Keats's "magic casements" and "foam of perilous seas" and "fairly lands forlorn", but I do not think even in Keats the bulk of the epithets are of that unusual character.

I have said that his objections are sometimes inapplicable. I mean by this that they might have some force with regard to another kind of poetry but not to a poem like Savitri. He says, to start with, that if I had had a stronger imagination, I would have written a very different poem and a much shorter one. Obviously, and to say it is a truism; if I had had a different kind of imagination, whether stronger or weaker, I would have written a different poem and perhaps one more to his taste; but it would not have been Savitri. It would not have fulfilled the intention or had anything of the character, meaning, world-vision, description and expression of spiritual experience which was my object in writing this poem. Its length is an indispensable condition for carrying outits purpose and everywhere there is this length, critics may say an "unconscionable length" — I am quoting the Times' reviewer's description" in his otherwise eulogistic criticism of The Life Divine — in every part, in every passage, in almost every canto or section of a canto. It has been planned not on the scale of Lycidas or Comus or some brief narrative poem, but of the longer epical narrative, almost a minor, though a very minor Ramayana; it aims not at a minimum but at an exhaustive exposition of its world-vision or world-interpretation. One artistic method is to select a limited subject and even on that to say only what is indispensable, what is centrally suggestive and leave the rest to the imagination or understanding of the reader. Another method which I hold to be equally artistic or, if you like, architectural is to give a large and

⁸The Times Literary Supplement, 17 January 1942.

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even a vast, a complete interpretation, omitting nothing that is necessary, fundamental to the completeness: that is the method I have chosen in Savitri. But Mendonca has understood nothing of the significance or intention of the passages he is criticising, least of all, their inner sense — that is not his fault, but is partly due to the lack of the context and partly to his lack of equipment and you have there an unfair advantage over him which enables you to understand and see the poetic intention. He sees only an outward form of words and some kind of surface sense which is to him vacant and merely ornamental or rhetorical or something pretentious without any true meaning or true vision in it: inevitably he finds the whole thing false and empty, unjustifiably ambitious and pompous without deep meaning or, as he expresses it, pseudo and phoney. His objection of longueur would be perfectly just if the description of the night and the dawn had been simply of physical night and physical dawn; but here the physical night and physical dawn are, as the title of the canto clearly suggests, a symbol, although what may be called a real symbol of an inner reality and the main purpose is to describe by suggestion the thing symbolised; here it is a relapse into Inconscience broken by a slow and difficult return of consciousness followed by a brief but splendid and prophetic outbreak of spiritual light leaving behind it the "day" of ordinary human consciousness in which the prophecy has to be worked out. The whole of Savitri is, according to the title of the poem, a legend that is a symbol and this opening canto is, it may be said, a key beginning and announcement. So understood there is nothing here otiose or unnecessary; all is needed to bring out by suggestion some aspect of the thing symbolised and so start adequately the working out of the significance of the whole poem. It will of course seem much too long to a reader who does not understand what is written or, understanding, takes no interest in the subject; but that is unavoidable.

To illustrate the inapplicability of some of his judgments one might take his objection to repetition of the cognates "sombre Vast', "unsounded Void", "opaque Inane", "vacant Vasts" and his clinching condemnation of the inartistic inelegance of their occurrence in the same place at the end of the line. I take leave to doubt his statement that in each place his alert imaginative reader, still less any reader without that equipment, could have supplied these descriptions and epithets from the context, but let that pass. What was important for me was to keep constantly before the view

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of the reader, not imaginative but attentive to seize the whole truth of the vision in its totality, the ever-present sense of the Inconscience in which everything is occurring. It is the frame as well as the background without which all the details would either fall apart or stand out only as separate incidents. That necessity lasts until there is the full outburst of the dawn and then it disappears; each phrase gives a feature of this Inconscience proper to its place and context. It is the entrance of the "lonely splendour" into an otherwise inconscient obstructing and unreceptive world that has to be brought out and that cannot be done without the image of the "opaque Inane" of the Inconscience which is the scene and cause of the resistance. There is the same necessity for reminding the reader that the "tread" of the Divine Mother was an intrusion on the vacancy of the Inconscience and the herald of deliverance from it. The same reasoning applies to the other passages. As for the occurrence of the phrases in the same place each in its line, that is a rhythmic turn helpful, one might say necessary to bring out the intended effect, to emphasise this reiteration and make it not only understood but felt. It is not the result of negligence or an awkward and inartistic clumsiness, it is intentional and part of the technique. The structure of the pentameter blank verse in Savitri is of its own kind and different in plan from the blank verse that has come to be ordinarily used in English poetry. It dispenses with enjambment or uses it very sparingly and only when a special effect is intended; each line must be strong enough to stand by itself, while at the same time it fits harmoniously into the sentence or paragraph like stone added to stone; the sentence consists usually of one, two, three or four lines, more rarely five or six or seven: a strong close for the line and a strong close for the sentence are almost indispensable except when some kind of inconclusive cadence is desirable; there must be no laxity or diffusiveness in the rhythm or in the metrical flow anywhere, — there must be a flow but not a loose flux. This gives an added importance to what comes at the close of the line and this placing is used very often to give emphasis and prominence to a key phrase or a key idea, especially those which have to be often reiterated in the thought and vision of the poem so as to recall attention to things that are universal or fundamental or otherwise of the first consequence — whether for the immediate subject or in the total plan. It is this use that is served here by the reiteration at the end of the line.

I have not anywhere in Savitri written anything for the sake of

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mere picturesqueness or merely to produce a rhetorical effect; what I am trying to do everywhere in the poem is to express exactly something seen, something felt or experienced; if, for instance, I indulge in the wealth-burdened line or passage, it is not merely for the pleasure of the indulgence, but because there is that burden, or at least what I conceive to be that, in the vision or the experience. When the expression has been found, I have to judge, not by the intellect or by any set poetical rule, but by an intuitive feeling, whether it is entirely the right expression and, if it is not, I have to change and go on changing until I have received the absolutely right inspiration and the right transcription of it and must never be satisfied with any à peu prs or imperfect transcription even if that makes good poetry of one kind or another. This is what I have tried to do. The critic or reader will judge for himself whether I have succeeded or failed; but if he has seen nothing and understood nothing, it does not follow that his adverse judgment is sure to be the right and true one, there is at least a chance that he may so conclude, not because there is nothing to see and nothing to understand, only poor pseudo-stuff or a rhetorical emptiness but because he was not equipped for the vision or the understanding. Savitri is the record of a seeing, of an experience which is not of the common kind and is often very far from what the general human mind sees and experiences. You must not expect appreciation or understanding from the general public or even from many at the first touch; as I have pointed out, there must be a new extension of consciousness and aesthesis to appreciate a new kind of mystic poetry. Moreover if it is really new in kind, it may employ a new technique, not perhaps absolutely new, but new in some or many of its elements: in that case old rules and canons and standards may be quite inapplicable; evidently, you cannot justly apply to the poetry of Whitman the principles of technique which are proper to the old metrical verse or the established laws of the old traditional poetry; so too when we deal with a modernist poet. We have to see whether what is essential to poetry is there and how far the new technique justifies itself by new beauty and perfection, and a certain freedom of mind from old conventions is necessary if our judgment is to be valid or rightly objective.

Your friend may say as he has said in another connection that all this is only special pleading or an apology rather than an apologia. But in that other connection he was mistaken and would be so here too, for in neither case have I the feeling that I had been

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guilty of some offence or some shortcoming and therefore there could be no place for an apology or special pleading such as is used to defend or cover up what one known to be a false case. I have enough respect for truth not to try to cover up an imperfection; if I have not poetical genius, at least I can claim a sufficient, if not an infinite capacity for painstaking: that I have sufficiently shown by my long labour on Savitri. Or rather, since it was not labour in the ordinary sense, not a labour of painstaking construction, I may describe it as an infinite capacity for waiting and listening for the true inspiration and rejecting all that fell short of it, however good it might seem from a lower standard until I got that which I felt to be absolutely right. Mendonca was evidently under a misconception with regard to my defence of the wealth-burdened line; he says that the principle enounced by me was sound but what mattered was my application of the principle, and he seems to think that I was trying to justify my application although I knew it to be bad and false by citing passages from Milton and Shakespeare as if my use of the wealth-burdened style were as good as theirs. But I was not defending the excellence of my practice, for the poetical value of my lines was not then in question; the question was whether it did not violate a valid law of a certain chaste economy by the use of too many epithets massed together: against this I was asserting the legitimacy of a massed richness, I was defending only its principle, not my use of the principle. Even a very small poet can cite in aid of his practice examples from greater poets without implying that his poetry is on a par with theirs. But he further asserts that I showed small judgment in choosing my citations, because Milton's passage⁹ is not at all an illustration of the principle and Shakespeare's¹⁰ is inferior in poetic value, lax and rhetorical in its richness and belongs to an early and inferior Shakespearean style. He says that Milton's astounding effect is due only to the sound and not to the words. That does not seem to me quite true: the sound, the rhythmic resonance, the rhythmic significance is undoubtedly the predominant factor; it makes us

⁹With hideous ruin and combustion, down

To bottomless perdition, there to dwell

In adamantine chains and penal fire.

¹⁰With thou upon the high and giddy mast

Seal up the shipboy's eyes and rock his brains

In cradle of the rude imperious surge?

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hear and feel the crash and clamour and clangour of the downfall of the rebel angels: but that is not all, we do not merely hear as if one were listening to the roar of ruin of a collapsing bomb-shattered house, but saw nothing, we have the vision and the full psychological commotion of the "hideous" and flaming ruin of the downfall, and it is the tremendous force of the words that makes us see as well as hear. Mendonga's disparagement of the Shakespearean passage on "sleep" and the line on the sea considered by the greatest critics and not by myself only as ranking amongst the most admired and admirable things in Shakespeare is surprising and it seems to me to illustrate a serious limitation in his poetic perception and temperamental sympathies. Shakespeare's later terse and packed style with its more powerful dramatic effects can surely be admired without disparaging the beauty and opulence of his earlier style; if he had never written in that style, it would have been an unspeakable loss to the sum of the world's aesthetic possessions. The lines I have quoted are neither lax nor merely rhetorical, they have a terseness or at least a compactness of their own, different in character from the lines, let us say, in the scene of Antony's death or other memorable passages written in his great tragic style but none the less at every step packed with pregnant meanings and powerful significances which would not be possible if it were merely a loose rhetoric. Anyone writing such lines would deserve to rank by them alone among the great and even the greatest poets.

That is enough for the detail of the criticism and we can come to the general effect and his pronounced opinion upon my poetry. Apart from his high appreciation of Flame-Wind and Descent, Jivanmukta and Though the Paraclete and his general approval of the mystic poems published along with my essay on quantitative metre in English, it is sufficiently damning and discouraging and if I were to accept his verdict on my earlier and latest poetry, the first comparatively valueless and the last for the most part pseudo and phoney and for the rest offering only a few pleasant or pretty lines but not charged with the power and appeal of true or great poetry, I would have to withdraw the Collected Poems from circulation, throw Savitri into the wastepaper-basket and keep only the mystical poems, — but these also have been banned by some critics, so I have no refuge left to me. As Mendonga is not a negligible critic and his verdict agrees with that of the eulogist of my philosophy in The Times Literary Supplement, not to speak of

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others less authoritative like the communist reviewer of Iyengar's book who declared that it was not at all certain that I would live as a poet, it is perhaps incumbent on me to consider in all humility my dismal position and weigh whether it is really as bad as all that. There are some especial judgments in your friend's comments on the Collected Poems but these seem to concern only the translations. It is curious that he should complain of the lack of the impulse of self-expression in the Songs of the Sea as in this poem I was not busy with anything of the kind but was only rendering into English the self-expression of my friend and fellow-poet C. R. Das in his fine Bengali poem Sagar Sangit. I was not even self-moved to translate this work, however beautiful I found it; I might even be accused of having written the translation as a potboiler, for Das knowing my impecunious and precarious condition at Pondicherry offered me Rs. 1,000 for the work. Nevertheless I tried my best to give his beautiful Bengali lines as excellent a shape of English poetry as I could manage. The poet and litterateur Chapman condemned my work because I had made it too English, written too much in a manner imitative of traditional English poetry and had failed to make it Bengali in its character so as to keep its native spirit and essential substance. He may have been right; Das himself was not satisfied as he appended a more literal translation in free verse but this latter version does not seem to have caught on while some at least still read and admire the English disguise. If Mendonca is right in finding an overflow of sentiment in the Songs, that must be my own importation of an early romantic senti-mentalism, a contribution of my own "self-expression" replacing Das's. The sea to the Indian imagination is a symbol of life, — one speaks of the ocean of the sa-fsf ra and Indian Yoga sees in its occult visions life in the image of a sea or different planes of being as so many oceans. Das's poem expresses his communing with this ocean of universal life and psychic intimacies with the Cosmic Spirit behind it and these have a character of grave emotion and intense feeling, not of mere sentimentalism, but they come from a very Indian and even a very Bengali mentality and may seem in translation to a different mind a profuse display of fancy and sentiment. The Songs are now far away from me in a dim backward of memory and I will have to read them again to be sure, but for that I have no time.

Again, I am charged with modern nineteenth-century romanticism and a false imitation of the Elizabethan drama in my

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rendering of Kalidasa's Vikramorvasie; but Kalidasa's play is romantic in its whole tone and he might almost be described as an Elizabethan predating by a thousand years at least the Elizabethans; indeed most of the ancient Sanskrit dramas are of this kind, though the tragic note is missing, and the general spirit resembles that of Elizabethan romantic comedy. So I do not think I committed any fault in making the translation romantic and in trying to make it Elizabethan, even if I only achieved a "sapless pseudo-Elizabethan" style. One who knew the Sanskrit original and who, although an Indian, was recognised as a good critic in England as well as a poet, one too whose attitude towards myself and my work had been consistently adverse, yet enthusiastically praised my version and said if Kalidasa could be translated at all, it was only so that he could be translated. This imprimatur of an expert may perhaps be weighed against the discouraging criticism of Mendonca. The comment on my translation of Bharatrihari is more to the point; but the fault is not Bharatrihari's whose epigrams are as concise and lapidary as the Greek, but in translating I indulged my tendency at the time which was predominantly romantic: the version presents faithfully enough the ideas of the Sanskrit poet but not the spirit and manner of his style. It is comforting, however, to find that it makes "attractive reading", — I must be content with small mercies in an adversely critical world. After all, these poems are translations and not original work and not many can hope to come within a hundred miles of the more famous achievements of this kind such as Fitzgerald's splendid misrepresentation of Omar Khayyam, or Chapman's and Pope's mistranslations of Homer which may be described as first-class original poems with a borrowed substance from a great voice of the past. Mendonca does not refer specifically to Love and Death, to which your enthusiasm first went out, to Poems, to Urvasie and to Perseus the Deliverer though this last he would class, I suppose, as sapless pseudo-Elizabethan drama; but that omission may be there because he only skimmed through them and afterwards could not get the first volume. But perhaps they may come under his general remark that this part of my work lacks the glow and concentration of true inspired poetry and his further judgment classing it with the works of Watson and Stephen Phillips and other writers belonging to the decline of romantic poetry. I know nothing about Watson's work except for one or two short pieces met by chance; if I were to judge from them, I would have to regard him as a genuine poet with a considerable elevation of

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language and metrical rhythm but somewhat thin in thought and substance: my poems may conceivably have some higher quality than his in this last respect since the reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement grants deep thought and technical excellence as the only merits of my uninspired poetry. It is otherwise with Stephen Phillips: I read Marpessa and Christ in Hades, the latter in typescript, shortly before I left England and they aroused my admiration and made a considerable impression on me. I read recently a reference to Phillips as a forgotten poet, but if that includes these two poems I must consider the oblivion as a considerable loss to the generation which has forgotten them. His later poetry disappointed me, there was still some brilliance but nothing of that higher promise. The only other poet of that time who had some influence on me was Meredith, especially his Modern Love which may have helped in forming the turn of my earlier poetic expression. I have not read the other later poets of the decline. Of subsequent writers or others not belonging to this decline I know only A. E. and Yeats, something of Francis Thompson, especially the Hound of Heaven and the Kingdom of God, and a poem or two of Gerald Hopkins; but the last two I came across very late, Hopkins only quite recently, and none of them had any influence on me, although one English reviewer in India spoke of me in eulogistic terms as a sort of combination of Swinburne and Hopkins and some have supposed that I got my turn for compound epithets from the latter! The only romantic poets of the Victorian Age who could have had any influence on me, apart from Arnold whose effect on me was considerable, were Tennyson perhaps, subconsciously, and Swinburne of the earlier poems, for his later work I did not at all admire. Still it is possible that the general atmosphere of the later Victorian decline, if decline it was, may have helped to mould my work and undoubtedly it dates and carries the stamp of the time in which it was written. It is a misfortune of my poetry from the point of view of recognition that the earlier work forming the bulk of the Collected Poems belongs to the past and has little chance of recognition now that the aesthetic atmosphere has so violently changed, while the later mystical work and Savitri belong to the future and will possibly have to wait for recognition of any merit they have for another strong change. As for the mystical poems which your friend praises in such high terms, they are as much challenged by others as the rest of my work. Some reviewers have described them as lacking altogether in spiritual feeling and void of spiritual experience; they are, it seems, mere mental work,

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full of intellectually constructed images and therefore without the genuine value of spiritual or mystic poetry.

Well, then, what is the upshot? What have I to decide as a result of my aesthetic examination of conscience? It is true that there are voices on the other side, not only from my disciples but from others who have no such connection with me. I have heard of individuals nameless or fameless in England who chanced to come across Love and Death and had the same spontaneous enthusiasm for it as yourself; others have even admired and discovered in my earlier work the beauty and the inspiration which Mendonca and the Times reviewer find to be badly lacking in it. It is true that they have differed in the poems they have chosen; Andrews cited particularly the Rishi and the epigram on Goethe as proof of his description of me as a great poet; an English critic, Richardson, singled out Urvasie and Love and Death and the more romantic poems, but thought that some of my later work was less inspired, too intellectual and philosophical, too much turned towards thought, while some work done in the middle he denounced altogether, complaining that after feeding my readers on nectar for so long I came later on to give them mere water. This critic made a distinction between great poets and good poets and said that I belonged to the second and not to the first category, but as he classed Shelley and others of the same calibre as examples of the good poets, his praise was sufficiently "nectarous" for anybody to swallow with pleasure! Krishnaprem (Ronald Nixon), Moore and others have also had a contrary opinion to the adverse critics and these, both English and Indian, were men whose capacity for forming a true literary judgment is perhaps as good as any on the other side. Krishnaprem I mention, because his judgement forms a curious and violent contrast to Mendonca's: the latter finds no overtones in my poetry while Krishnaprem who similarly discourages Harin's [Harindranath Chattopadhyaya] poetry on the ground of a lack of overtones finds them abundant in mine. One begins to wonder what overtones really are, or are we to conclude that they have no objective existence but are only a term for some subjective personal reaction in the reader? I meet the same absolute contradiction everywhere; one critic says about Perseus the Deliverer* that there is some good poetry in it but it is not in the least dramatic except

* Collected Plays, SABCL, Vol. 6.

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for one scene and that the story of the play is entirely lacking in interest, while another finds in it most of all a drama of action and the story thrilling and holding a breathless interest from beginning to end. Highest eulogy, extreme disparagement, faint praise, mixed laudation and censure, — it is a see-saw on which the unfortunate poet who is incautious enough to attach any value to contemporary criticism is balanced without any possibility of escape. Or I may flatter myself with the idea that this lively variation of reaction from extreme eulogy to extreme damnation indicates that my work must have after all something in it that is real and alive. Or I might perhaps take refuge in the supposition that the lack of recognition is the consequence of an untimely and too belated publication, due to the egoistic habit of writing for my own self-satisfaction rather than any strong thirst for poetical glory and immortality and leaving most of my poetry in the drawer for much longer than, even for twice or thrice, the time recommended by Horace who advised the poet to put by his work and read it again after ten years and then only, if he still found it of some value, to publish it. Urvasie, the second of the only two poems published early, was sent at first to Lionel Johnson, a poet and litterateur of some reputation who was the Reader of a big firm. He acknowledged some poetic merit, but said that it was a repetition of Matthew Arnold and so had no sufficient reason for existence. But Lionel Johnson, I was told, like the Vedantic sage who sees Brahman in all things, saw Arnold everywhere, and perhaps if I had persisted in sending it to other firms, some other Reader, not similarly obsessed, might have found the merit and, as romanticism was still the fashion, some of the critics and the public too might have shared your and Richardson's opinion of this and other work and, who knows, I might have ranked in however low a place among the poets of the romantic decline. Perhaps then I need not decide too nastily against any republication of the Collected Poems [ 1942 edition] or could even cherish the hope that, when the fashion of anti-romanticism has passed, it may find its proper place, whatever that may be, and survive.

As regards your friend's appraisal of the mystical poems," I need say little. I accept his reservation that there is much inequality as between the different poems: they were produced very rapidly — in the course of a week, I think — and they were not given the

¹¹Collected Poems, SABCL, Vol. 5, pp. 557-569.

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long reconsideration that I have usually given to my poetic work before publication; he has chosen the best, though there are others also that are good, though not so good; in others, the metre attempted and the idea and language have not been lifted to their highest possible value. I would like to say a word about his hesitation over some lines in Thought the Paraclete¹² which describe the spiritual planes. I can understand this hesitation; for these lines have not the vivid and forceful precision of the opening and the close and are less pressed home, they are general in description and therefore to one who has not the mystic experience may seem too large and vague. But they are not padding; a precise and exact description of these planes of experience would have made the poem too long, so only some large lines are given, but the description is true, the epithets hit the reality and even the colours mentioned in the poem, "gold-red feet" and "crimson-white mooned oceans", are faithful to experience. Significant colour, supposed by intellectual criticism to be symbolic but there is more than that, is a frequent element in mystic vision; I may mention the powerful and vivid vision in which Ramakrishna went up into the higher planes and saw the mystic truth behind the birth of Vivekananda. At least, the fact that these poems have appealed so strongly to your friend's mind may perhaps be taken by me as a sufficient proof that in this field my effort at interpretation of spiritual things has not been altogether a failure.

But how then are we to account for the same critic's condemnation or small appreciation of Savitri which is also a mystic and symbolic poem although cast into a different form and raised to a different pitch, and what value am I to attach to his criticism? Partly, perhaps, it is this very difference of form and pitch which accounts for his attitude and, having regard to his aesthetic temperament and its limitations, it was inevitable. He himself seems to suggest this reason when he compares this difference to the difference of his approach as between Lycidas and Paradise Lost. His temperamental turn is shown by his special appreciation of Francis Thompson and Coventry Patmore and his response to Descent and Flame-Wind and the fineness of his judgment when speaking of the Hound of Heaven and the Kingdom of God, its limitation by his approach towards Paradise Lost. I think he would be naturally inclined to regard any very high-pitched poetry as

¹² Ibid., p. 582.

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rhetorical and unsound and declamatory, wherever he did not see in it something finely and subtly true coexisting with the high-pitched expression, — the combination we find in Thompson's later poem and it is this he seems to have missed in Savitri. For Savitri does contain or at least I intended it to contain what you and others have felt in it but he has not been able to feel because it is something which is outside his own experience and to which he has no access. One who has had the kind of experience which Savitri sets out to express or who, not having it, is prepared by his temperament, his mental turn, his previous intellectual knowledge or psychic training, to have some kind of access to it, the feeling of it if not the full understanding, can enter into the spirit and sense of the poem and respond to its poetic appeal; but without that it is difficult for an unprepared reader to respond, — all the more if this is, as you contend, a new poetry with a new law of expression and technique.

Lycidas is one of the finest poems in any literature, one of the most consistently perfect among works of an equal length and one can apply to it the epithet "exquisite" and it is to the exquisite that your friend's aesthetic temperament seems specially to respond. It would be possible to a reader with a depreciatory turn to find flaws in it, such as the pseudo-pastoral setting, the too powerful intrusion of St. Peter and puritan theological controversy into that incongruous setting and the image of the hungry sheep which someone not in sympathy with Christian feeling and traditional imagery might find even ludicrous or at least odd in its identification of pseudo-pastoral sheep and theological human sheep: but these would be hypercritical objections and are flooded out by the magnificence of the poetry. I am prepared to admit the very patent defects of Paradise Lost: Milton's heaven is indeed unconvincing and can be described as grotesque and so too is his gunpowder battle up there, and his God and angels are weak and unconvincing figures, even Adam and Eve, our first parents, do not effectively fill their part except in his outward description of them; and the later narrative falls far below the grandeur of the first four books but those four books stand for ever among the greatest things in the world's poetic literature. If Lycidas with its beauty and perfection had been the supreme thing done by Milton even with all the lyrical poetry and the sonnets added to it, Milton would still have been a great poet but he would not have ranked among the dozen greatest; it is

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Paradise Lost that gives him that place. There are deficiencies if not failures in almost all the great epics, the Odyssey and perhaps the Divina Commedia being the only exceptions, but still they are throughout in spite of them great epics. So too is Paradise Lost. The grandeur of his verse and language is constant and unsinking to the end and makes the presentation always sublime. We have to accept for the moment Milton's dry Puritan theology and his all too human picture of the celestial world and its denizens and then we can feel the full greatness of the epic. But the point is that this greatness in itself seems to have less appeal to Mendonca's aesthetic temperament; it is as if he felt less at home in its atmosphere, in an atmosphere of grandeur and sublimity than in the air of a less sublime but a fine and always perfect beauty. It is the difference between a magic hill-side woodland of wonder and a great soaring mountain climbing into a vast purple sky: to accept fully the greatness he needs to find in it a finer and subtler strain as in Thompson's Kingdom of God. On a lower scale this, his sentence about it seems to suggest, is the one fundamental reason for his complete pleasure in the mystical poems and his very different approach to Savitri. The pitch aimed at by Savitri, the greatness you attribute to it, would of itself have discouraged in him any abandonment to admiration and compelled from the beginning a cautious and dubious approach; that soon turned to lack of appreciation or a lowered appreciation even of the best that may be there and to depreciation and censure of the rest.

But there is the other reason which is more effective. He sees and feels nothing of the spiritual meaning and the spiritual appeal which you find in Savitri; it is for him empty of anything but an outward significance and that seems to him poor, as is natural since the outward meaning is only a part and a surface and the rest is to his eyes invisible. If there had been what he hoped or might have hoped to find in my poetry, a spiritual vision such as that of the Vedantin, arriving beyond the world towards the Ineffable, then he might have felt at home as he does with Thompson's poetry or might at least have found it sufficiently accessible. But this is not what Savitri has to say or rather it is only a small part of it and, even so, bound up with a cosmic vision and an acceptance of the world which in its kind is unfamiliar to his mind and psychic sense and foreign to his experience. The two passages with which he deals do not and cannot give any full presentation of this way of

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seeing things since one is an unfamiliar symbol and the other an incidental and, taken by itself apart from its context, an isolated circumstance. But even if he had had other more explicit and clearly revealing passages at his disposal, I do not think he would have been satisfied or much illuminated; his eyes would still have been fixed on the surface and caught only some intellectual meaning or outer sense. That at least is what we may suppose to have been the cause of the failure, if we maintain that there is anything at all in the poem; or else we must fall back on the explanation of a fundamental personal incompatibility and the rule de gustibus non est disputandum, or to put it in the Sanskrit form nānārucirhi lokah. If you are right in maintaining that Savitri stands as a new mystical poetry with a new vision and expression of things, we should expect, at least at first, a widespread, perhaps, a general failure, even in lovers of poetry to understand it or appreciate; even those who have some mystical turn or spiritual experience are likely to pass it by if it is a different turn from theirs or outside their range of experience. It took the world something like a hundred years to discover Blake; it would not be improbable that there might be a greater time-lag here, though naturally we hope for better things. For in India at least some understanding or feeling and an audience few and fit may be possible. Perhaps by some miracle there may be before long a larger appreciative audience.

At any rate this is the only thing one can do, especially when one is attempting a new creation, to go on with the work with such light and power as is given to one and leave the value of the work to be determined by the future. Contemporary judgments we know to be unreliable; there are only two judges whose joint verdict cannot easily be disputed, the World and Time. The Roman proverb says, securus judicat orbis terrarum; but the world's verdict is secure only when it is confirmed by Time. For it is not the opinion of the general mass of men that finally decides, the decision is really imposed by the judgment of a minority and elite which is finally accepted and settles down as the verdict of posterity; in Tagore's phrase it is the universal man, viśva mānava, or rather something universal using the general mind of man, we might say the Cosmic Self in the race that fixes the value of its own works. In regard to the great names in literature this final verdict seems to have in it something of the absolute, — so far as anything can be that in a temporal world of relatives in which the Absolute reserves itself hidden behind the veil of human ignorance. It is no use for some to

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contend that Virgil is a tame and elegant writer of a wearisome work in verse on agriculture and a tedious pseudo-epic written to imperial order and Lucretius the only really great poet in Latin literature or to depreciate Milton for his Latin English and inflated style and the largely uninteresting character of his two epics; the world either refuses to listen or there is a temporary effect, a brief fashion in literary criticism, but finally the world returns to its established verdict. Lesser reputations may fluctuate, but finally whatever has real value in its own kind settles itself and finds its just place in the durable judgment of the world. Work which was neglected and left aside like Blake's or at first admired with reservation and eclipsed like Donne's is singled out by a sudden glance of Time and its greatness recognised; or what seemed buried slowly emerges or re-emerges; all finally settles into its place. What was held as sovereign in its own time is rudely dethroned but afterwards recovers not its sovereign throne but its due position in the world's esteem; Pope is an example and Byron who at once burst into a supreme glory and was the one English poet, after Shakespeare, admired all over Europe but is now depreciated, may also recover his proper place. Encouraged by such examples, let us hope that these violently adverse judgments may not be final and absolute and decide that the wastepaper-basket is not the proper place for Savitri. There may still be a place for a poetry which seeks to enlarge the field of poetic creation and find for the inner spiritual life of man and his now occult or mystical knowledge and experience of the whole hidden range of his and the world's being, not a comer and a limited expression such as it had in the past, but a wide space and as manifold and integral an expression of the boundless and innumerable riches that lie hidden and unexplored as if kept apart under the direct gaze of the Infinite as has been found in the past for man's surface and finite view and experience of himself and the material world in which he has lived striving to know himself and it as best he can with a limited mind and senses. The door that has been shut to all but a few may open; the kingdom of the Spirit may be established not only in man's inner being but in his life and his works. Poetry also may have its share in that revolution and become part of the spiritual empire.

I had intended as the main subject of this letter to say something about technique and the inner working of the intuitive method by which Savitri was and is being created and of the intention and plan of the poem. Mendonca's idea of its way of creation, an

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intellectual construction by a deliberate choice of words and imagery, badly chosen at that, is the very opposite of the real way in which it was done. That was to be the body of the letter and the rest only a preface. But the preface has become so long that it has crowded out the body. I shall have to postpone it to a later occasion when I have more time.

4.5.1947

Amal Kiran writes:

In that long letter on your own poetry, apropos of my friend's criticisms, you have written of certain influences of the later Victorian period on you. Meredith's from Modern Love I have been unable to trace concretely — unless I consider . some of the more pointed and bitter-sweetly reflective turns in Songs to Myrtilla to be Meredithian. That of Tennyson is noticeable in only a delicate picturesqueness here and there or else in the use of some words. Perhaps more than in your early blank verse the Tennysonian influence of this kind in general is there in Songs to Myrtilla. Arnold had influenced your blank verse in respect of particular constructions like two or three "buts" as in

No despicable wayfarer, but Ruru,

But son of a great Rishi,

or,

But tranquil, but august, but making easy ...

Arnold is also observable in the way you build up and elaborate your similes both in Urvasie and in Love and Death. Less openly, a general tone of poetic mind from him can also be felt: it persists subtly in ever the poems collected in Ahana, not to mention Baji Prabhou. I don't know whether Swinburne is anywhere patent in your narratives: he probably does have something to do with Songs to Myrtilla. Stephen Phillips is the most direct influence in Urvasie and Love and Death. But as I have said in my essay on your blank verse he is assimilated into a stronger and more versatile genius, together with influences from the Elizabethans, Milton and perhaps less consciously Keats. In any case, whatever the influences, your early narratives are intensely original in

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essential spirit and movement and expressive body. It is only unreceptiveness or inattention that can fail to see this and to savour the excellence of your work.

Sri Aurobindo's replies:

The influences I spoke of were of course only such influences as every poet undergoes before he has entirely found himself. What you say about Arnold's influence is quite correct; it acted mainly, however, as a power making for restraint and refinement, subduing any uncontrolled romanticism and insisting on clear lucidity and right form and building. Meredith had no influence on Songs to Myrtilla; even afterwards I did not make myself acquainted with all his poetry, it was only Modern Love and poems like the sonnet on Lucifer and the Ascent to Earth of the Daughter of Hades that I strongly admired and it had its effect on the formation of my poetic style and its after-effects in that respect are not absent from Savitri. It is only Swinburne's early lyrical poems that exercised any power on me, Dolores, Hertha, The Garden of Proserpine and others that rank among his best work, — also Atalanta in Calydon, his later lyrical poetry I found too empty and his dramatic and narrative verse did not satisfy me. Once critic characterised Love and Death as an extraordinarily brilliant and exact reproduction of Keats: what do you say to that? I think Stephen Phillips had more to do with it.

7.7.1947

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3: Overmind Aesthesis

Something more might need to be said in regard to the Overhead note in poetry and the Overmind aesthesis; but these are exactly the subjects on which it is difficult to write with any precision or satisfy the intellect's demand for clear and positive statement.

I do not know that it is possible for me to say why I regard one line or passage as having the Overhead touch or the Overhead note while another misses it. When I said that in the lines about the dying man¹ the touch came in through some intense passion and sincerity in the writer, I was simply mentioning the psychological door through which the thing came. I did not mean to suggest that such passion and sincerity could of itself bring in the touch or that they constituted the Overhead note in the lines. I am afraid I have to say what Arnold said about the grand style; it has to be felt and cannot be explained or accounted for. One has an intuitive feeling, a recognition of something familiar to one's experience or one's deeper perception in the substance and the rhythm or in one or the other which rings out and cannot be gainsaid. One might put forward a theory or a description of what the Overhead character of the line consists in, but it is doubtful whether any such mentally constructed definition could be always applicable. You [Amal Kiran] speak, for instance, of the sense of the Infinite and the One which is pervasive in the Overhead planes; that need not be explicitly there in the Overhead poetic expression or in the substance of any given line: it can be expressed indeed by Overhead poetry as no other can express it, but this poetry can deal with quite other things. I would certainly say that Shakespeare's lines

Absent thee from felicity awhile,

And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain²

have the Overhead touch in the substance, the rhythm and the feeling; but Shakespeare is not giving us here the sense of the One and the Infinite. He is, as in the other lines of his which have this note, dealing as he always does with life, with vital emotions and

'I spoke as one who ne'er would speak again

And as a dying man to dying men.

²Hamlet, V.ii.

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reactions or the thoughts that spring out in the life-mind under the pressure of life. It is not any strict adhesion to a transcendental view of things that constitutes this kind of poetry, but something behind not belonging to the mind or the vital and physical consciousness and with that a certain quality or power in the language and the rhythm which helps to bring out that deeper something. If I had to select the line in European poetry which most suggests an almost direct descent from the Overmind consciousness there might come first Virgil's line about "the touch of tears in mortal things":

Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt.³

Another might be Shakespeare's

In the dark backward and abysm of Time⁴

or again Milton's

Those thoughts that wander through eternity.⁵

We might also add Wordsworth's line

The Winds come to me from the fields of sleep.⁶

There are other lines ideative and more emotional or simply descriptive which might be added, such as Marlowe's

Was this the face that launched a thousand ships,

And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?⁷

If we could extract and describe the quality and the subtle something that mark the language and rhythm and feeling of these lines and underlie their substance we might attain hazardously to some mental understanding of the nature of Overhead poetry.

The Overmind is not strictly a transcendental consciousness — that epithet would more accurately apply to the supramental and to the Sachchidananda consicousness — though it looks up to the transcendental and may receive something from it and though it does transcend the ordinary human mind and in its full and native self-power, when it does not lean down and become part of mind, is superconscient to us. It is more properly a cosmic consciousness,

³Aeneid, I. 462. ⁶Ode on the Intimations of Immortality, iii.

⁴ The Tempest, I. ii. ⁷Doctor Faustus, V. i.

⁵Paradise Lost, II. 148.

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even the very base of the cosmic as we perceive, understand or feel it. It stands behind every particular in the cosmos and is the source of all our mental, vital or physical actualities and possibilities which are diminished and degraded derivations and variations from it and have not, except in certain formations and activities of genius and some intense self-exceeding, anything of the native Overmind quality and power. Nevertheless, because it stands behind as if covered by a veil, something of it can break through or shine through or even only dimly glimmer through and that brings the Overmind touch or note. We cannot get this touch frequently unless we have torn the veil, made a gap in it or rent it largely away and seen the very face of what is beyond, lived in the light of it or established some kind of constant intercourse. Or we can draw upon it from time to time without ever ascending into it if we have established a line of communication between the higher and the ordinary consciousness. What comes down may be very much diminished but it has something of that. The ordinary reader of poetry who has not that experience will usually not be able to distinguish but would at the most feel that here is something extraordinarily fine, profound, sublime or unusual, — or he might turn away from it as something too high-pitched and excessive; he might even speak depreciatingly of "purple passages", rhetoric, exaggeration or excess. One who had the line of communication open could on the other hand feel what is there and distinguish even if he could not adequately characterise or describe it. The essential character is perhaps that there is something behind of which I have already spoken and which comes not primarily from the mind or the vital emotion or the physical seeing but from the cosmic self and its consciousness standing behind them all and things then tend to be seen not as the mind or heart or body sees them but as this greater consciousness feels or sees or answers to them. In the direct Overmind transmission this something behind is usually forced to the front or close to the front by a combination of words which carries the suggestion of a deeper meaning or by the force of an image or, most of all, by an intonation and a rhythm which carry up the depths in their wide wash or long march or mounting surge. Sometimes it is left lurking behind and only suggested so that a subtle feeling of what is not actually expressed is needed if the reader is not to miss it. This is oftenest the case when there is just a touch or note pressed upon something that would be otherwise only of a mental vital or physical poetic value

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and nothing of the body of the Overhead power shows itself though the veil, but at most a tremor and vibration, a gleam or a glimpse. In the lines I have chosen there is always an unusual quality in the rhythm, as prominently in Virgil's line, often in the very building and constantly in the intonation and the association of the sounds which meet in the line and find themselves linked together by a sort of inevitable felicity. There is also an inspired selection or an unusual bringing together of words which has the power to force a deeper sense on the mind as in Virgil's

Sunt lacrimae rerum.

One can note that this line if translated straight into English would sound awkward and clumsy as would many of the finest lines in Rig Veda; that is precisely because they are new and felicitous turns in the original language, discoveries of an unexpected and absolute phrase; they defy translation. If you note the combination of words and sounds in Shakespeare's line

And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain

so arranged as to force on the mind and still more on the subtle nerves and sense the utter absoluteness of the difficulty and pain of living for the soul that has awakened to the misery of the world, you can see how this technique works. Here and elsewhere the very body and soul of the thing seen or felt come out into the open. The same dominant characteristic can be found in other lines which I have not cited, — in Leopardi's

Insano indegno mistero delle cose

(The insane and ignoble mystery of things)⁸

or in Wordsworth's

Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone.⁹

Milton's line lives by its choice of the word "wander" to collocate with "through eternity"; if he had chosen any other word, it would no longer have been an Overhead line, even if the surface sense had been exactly the same. On the other hand, take Shelley's stanza —

⁸Le Ricordanze, 71-72. Leopardi's original has one different word and is spread over parts of two lines:

I'acerbo indegno

Mistero delle cose...

"The Prelude, III. 63.

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We look before and after,

And pine for what is not:

Our sincerest laughter

With some pain is fraught;

Our sweetest songs are that tell of saddest thought.¹⁰

This is perfect poetry with the most exquisite melody and beauty of wording and an unsurpassable poignancy of pathos, but there is no touch or note of the Overhead inspiration: it is the mind and the heart, the vital emotion, working at their highest pitch under the stress of a psychic inspiration. The rhythm is of the same character, a direct, straightforward, lucid and lucent movement welling out limpidly straight from the psychic source. The same characteristics are found in another short lyric of Shelley's which is perhaps the purest example of the psychic inspiration in English poetry:

I can give not what men call love;

But wilt thou accept not

The worship the heart lifts above

And the Heavens reject not, —

The desire of the moth for the star,

Of the night for the morrow,

The devotion to something afar

From the sphere of our sorrow?¹¹

We have again extreme poetic beauty there, but nothing of the Overhead note.

In the other lines I have cited it is really the Overmind language and rhythm that have been to some extent transmitted; but of course all Overhead poetry is not from the Overmind, more often it comes from the Higher Thought, the Illumined Mind or the pure Intuition. This last is different from the mental intuition which is frequent enough in poetry that does not transcend the mental level. The language and rhythm from these other Overhead levels can be very different from that which is proper to the Overmind; for the Overmind thinks in a mass; its thought, feeling, vision is high or deep or wide or all these things together: to use the Vedic expression about fire, the divine messenger, it goes vast on its way to bring

¹⁰To a Skylark.

¹¹One Word is too often Profaned.

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the divine riches, and it has as corresponding language and rhythm. The Higher Thought has a strong tread often with bare unsandalled feet and moves in a clear-cut light: a divine power, measure, dignity is its most frequent character. The outflow of the Illumined Mind comes in a flood brilliant with revealing words or a light of crowding images, sometimes surcharged with its burden of revelations, sometimes with a luminous sweep. The Intuition is usually a lightning flash showing up a single spot or plot of ground or scene with an entire and miraculous completeness of vision to the surprised ecstasy of the inner eye; its rhythm has a decisive inevitable sound which leaves nothing essential unheard, but very commonly is embodied in a single stroke. These, however, are only general or dominant characters; any number of variations is possible. There are besides mingled inspirations, several levels meeting and combining or modifying each other's notes, and an Overmind transmission can contain or bring with it all the rest, but how much of this description will be to the ordinary reader of poetry at all intelligible or clearly identifiable?

There are besides in mental poetry derivations or substitutes for all these styles. Milton's "grand style" is such a substitute for the manner of the Higher Thought. Take it anywhere at its ordinary level or in its higher elevation, there is always or almost always that echo there:

Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit

Of that forbidden tree,¹²

On evil days though fall'n, and evil tongues,¹³

Blind Thamyris and blind Maeonides,

And Tiresias and Phineus, prophets old.¹⁴

Shakespeare's poetry coruscates with a play of the hues of imagination which we may regard as a mental substitute for the inspiration of the Illumined Mind and sometimes by aiming at an exalted note he links on to the illumined Overhead inspiration itself as in the lines I have more than once quoted:

Wilt thou upon the high and giddy mast

¹²Paradise Lost, I. 1-2. ¹⁴ Ibid., III. 35-36.

¹⁵ Ibid.. VII. 26.

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Seal up the shipboy's eyes and rock his brains

In cradle of the rude imperious surge?¹⁵

But the rest of that passage falls away in spite of its high-pitched language and resonant rhythm far below the Overhead strain. So it is easy for the mind to mistake and take the higher for the lower inspiration or vice versa. Thus Milton's lines might at first sight be taken because of a certain depth of emotion in their large lingering rhythm as having the Overhead complexion, but this rhythm loses something of its sovereign right because there are no depths of sense behind it. It conveys nothing but the noble and dignified pathos of the blindness and old age of a great personality fallen into evil days. Milton's architecture of thought and verse is high and powerful and massive, but there are usually no subtle echoes there, no deep chambers: the occult things in man's being are foreign to his intelligence, — for it is in the light of the poetic intelligence that he works. He does not stray into "the mystic cavern of the heart", does not follow the inner fire entering like a thief with the Cow of Light into the secrecy of secrecies. Shakespeare does sometimes get in as if by a splendid psychic accident in spite of his preoccupation with the colours and shows of life.

I do not know therefore whether I can speak with any certainty about the lines you quote; I would perhaps have to read them in their context first, but it seems to me that there is just a touch, as in the lines about the dying man. The thing that is described there may have happened often enough in times like those of the recent wars and upheavals and in times of violent strife and persecution and catastrophe, but the greatness of the experience does not come out or not wholly, because men feel with the mind and heart and not with the soul; but here there is by some accident of wording and rhythm a suggestion of something behind, of the greatness of the soul's experience and its courageous acceptance of the tragic, the final, the fatal — and its resistance; it is only a suggestion, but it is enough: the Overhead has touched and passed back to its heights. There is something very different but of the same essential calibre in the line you quote:

Sad eyes watch for feet that never come.

It is still more difficult to say anything very tangible about the

¹⁵Henry IV, III. i.

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Overmind aesthesis. When I wrote about it I was thinking of the static aesthesis that perceives and receives rather than of the dynamic aesthesis which creates; I was not thinking at all of superior or inferior grades of poetic greatness or beauty. If the complete Overmind power or even that of the lower Overhead planes could come down into the mind and entirely transform its action, then no doubt there might be greater poetry written than any that man has yet achieved, just as a greater superhuman life might be created if the supermind could come down wholly into life and lift life wholly into itself and transform it. But what happens at present is that something comes down and accepts to work under the law of the mind and with a mixture of the mind and it must be judged by the laws and standards of the mind. It brings in new tones, new colours, new elements, but it does not change radically as yet the stuff of the consciousness with which we labour.

Whether it produces great poetry or not depends on the extent to which it manifests its power and overrides rather than serves the mentality which it is helping. At present it does not do that sufficiently to raise the work to the full greatness of the worker.

And then what do you mean exactly by greatness in poetry? One can say that Virgil is greater than Catullus and that many of Virgil's lines are greater than anything Catullus ever achieved. But poetical perfection is not the same thing as poetical greatness. Virgil is perfect at his best, but Catullus too is perfect at his best: even each has a certain exquisiteness of perfection, each in his own kind. Virgil's kind is large and deep, that of Catullus sweet and intense. Virgil's art reached or had from its beginning a greater and more constant ripeness than that of Catullus. We can say then that Virgil was a greater poet and artist of word and rhythm but we cannot say that his poetry, at his best, was more perfect poetry and that of Catullus less perfect. That renders futile many of the attempts at comparison like Arnold's comparison of Wordsworth's Skylark with Shelley's. You may say that Milton was a greater poet than Blake, but there can always be people, not aesthetically insensitive, who would prefer Blake's lyrical work to Milton's grander achievement, and there are certainly things in Blake which touch deeper chords than the massive hand of Milton could ever reach. So all poetic superiority is not summed up in the word greatness. Each kind has its own best which escapes from comparison and stands apart in its own value.

Let us then leave for the present the question of poetic greatness

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or superiority aside and come back to the Overmind aesthesis. By aesthesis is meant a reaction of the consciousness, mental and vital and even bodily, which receives a certain element in things, something that can be called their taste, Rasa, which, passing through the mind or sense or both, awakes a vital enjoyment of the taste, Bhoga, and this can again awaken us, awaken even the soul in us to something yet deeper and more fundamental than mere pleasure and enjoyment, to some form of the spirit's delight of existence, Ananda. Poetry, like all art, serves the seeking for these things, this aesthesis, this Rasa, Bhoga, Ananda; it brings us a Rasa of word and sound but also of the idea and, through the idea, of the things expressed by the word and sound and thought, a mental or vital or sometimes the spiritual image of their from, quality, impact upon us or even, if the poet is strong enough, of their world-essence, their cosmic reality, the very soul of them, the spirit that resides in them as it resides in all things. Poetry may do more than this, but this at least it must do to however small an extent or it is not poetry. Aesthesis therefore is of the very essence of poetry, as it is of all art. But it is not the sole element and aesthesis too is not confined to a reception of poetry and art; it extends to everything in the world: there is nothing we can sense, think or in any way experience to which there cannot be an aesthetic reaction of our conscious being. Ordinarily, we suppose that aesthesis is concerned with beauty, and that indeed is its most prominent concern: but it is concerned with many other things also. It is the universal Ananda that is the parent of aesthesis and the universal Ananda takes three major and original forms, beauty, love and delight, the delight of all existence, the delight in things, in all things. Universal Ananda is the artist and creator of the universe witnessing, experiencing and taking joy in its creation. In the lower consciousness it creates its opposites, the sense of ugliness as well as the sense of beauty, hate and repulsion and dislike as well as love and attraction and liking, grief and pain as well as joy and delight; and between these dualities or as a grey tint in the background there is a general tone of neutrality and indifference bom from the universal insensibility into which the Ananda sinks in its dark negation in the Inconscient. All this is the sphere of aesthesis, its highest is ecstasy. Ecstasy is a sign of a return towards the original or supreme Ananda: that art or poetry is supreme which can bring us something of the supreme tone of ecstasy. For as the consciousness sinks from the supreme levels through various degrees towards the Inconscience the general

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sign of this descent is an always diminishing power of its intensity, intensity of being, intensity of consciousness, intensity of the delight in things and the delight of existence. So too as we ascend towards the supreme level, these intensities increase. As we climb beyond Mind, higher and wider values replace the values of our limited mind, life and bodily consciousness. Aesthesis shares in this intensification of capacity. The capacity for pleasure and pain, for liking and disliking is comparatively poor on the level of our mind and life; our capacity for ecstasy is brief and limited; these tones arise from a general ground of neutrality which is always dragging them back towards itself. As it enters the Overhead planes the ordinary aesthesis turns into a pure delight and becomes capable of a high, a large or a deep abiding ecstasy. The ground is no longer a general neutrality, but a pure spiritual ease and happiness upon which the special tones of the aesthetic consciousness come out or from which they arise. This is the first fundamental change.

Another change in this transition is a turn towards universality in place of the isolations, the conflicting generalities, the mutually opposing dualities of the lower consciousness. In the Overmind we have a first firm foundation of the experience of a universal beauty, a universal love, a universal delight. These things can come on the mental and vital plane even before those planes are directly touched or influenced by the spiritual consciousness; but they are there a temporary experience and not permanent or they are limited in their field and do not touch the whole being. They are a glimpse and not a change of vision or a change of nature. The artist for instance can look at things only plain or shabby or ugly or even repulsive to the ordinary sense and see in them and bring out of them beauty and the delight that goes with beauty. But this is a sort of special grace for the artistic consciousness and is limited within the field of his art. In the Overhead consciousness, especially in the Overmind, these things become more and more the law of the vision and the law of the nature. Wherever the Overmind spiritual man turns he sees a universal beauty touching and uplifting all things, expressing itself through them, moulding them into a field or objects of its divine aesthesis; a universal love goes out from him to all beings; he feels the Bliss which has created the worlds and upholds them and all that is expresses to him the universal delight, is made of it, is a manifestation of it and moulded into its image. This universal aesthesis of beauty and delight does not ignore or fail to understand the differences and oppositions,

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the gradations, harmony and disharmony obvious to the ordinary consciousness; but, first of all, it draws a Rasa from them and with that comes the enjoyment, Bhoga, and the touch or the mass of the Ananda. It sees that all things have their meaning, their value, their deeper or total significance which the mind does not see, for the mind is only concerned with a surface vision, surface contacts and its own surface reactions. When something expresses perfectly what it was meant to express, the completeness brings with it a sense of harmony, a sense of artistic perfection; it gives even to what is discordant a place in a system of cosmic concordances and the discords become part of a vast harmony, and wherever there is harmony, there is a sense of beauty. Even in form itself, apart from the significance, the Overmind consciousness sees the object with a totality which changes its effect on the percipient even while it remains the same thing. It sees lines and masses and an underlying design which the physical eye does not see and which escapes even the keenest mental vision. Every form becomes beautiful to it in a deeper and larger sense of beauty than that commonly known to us. The Overmind looks also straight at and into the soul of each thing and not only at its form or its significance to the mind or to the life; this brings to it not only the true truth of the thing but the delight of it. It sees also the one spirit in all, the face of the Divine everywhere and there can be no greater Ananda than that; it feels oneness with all, sympathy, love, the bliss of the Brahman. In a highest, a most integral experience it sees all things as if made of existence, consciousness, power, bliss, every atom of them charged with and constituted of Sachchidananda. In all this the Overmind aesthesis takes its share and gives its response; for these things come not merely as an idea in the mind or a truth-seeing but as an experience of the whole being and a total response is not only possible but above a certain level imperative.

I have said that aesthesis responds not only to what we call beauty and beautiful things but to all things. We make a distinction between truth and beauty; but there can be an aesthetic response to truth also, a joy in its beauty, a love created by its charm, a rapture in the finding, a passion in the embrace, an aesthetic joy in its expression, a satisfaction of love in the giving of it to others. Truth is not merely a dry statement of facts or ideas to or by the intellect; it can be a splendid discovery, a rapturous revelation, a thing of beauty that is a joy for ever. The poet also can be a seeker and lover of truth as well as a seeker and lover of beauty. He can

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feel a poetic and aesthetic joy in the expression of the true as well as in the expression of the beautiful. He does not make a mere intellectual or philosophical statement of the truth; it is his vision of its beauty, its power, his thrilled reception of it, his joy in it that he tries to convey by an utmost perfection in word and rhythm. If he has the passion, then even a philosophical statement of it he can surcharge with this sense of power, force, light, beauty. On certain levels of the Overmind, where the mind element predominates over the element of gnosis, the distinction between truth and beauty is still valid. It is indeed one of the chief functions of the Overmind to separate the main powers of the consciousness and give to each its full separate development and satisfaction, bring out its utmost potency and meaning, its own soul and significant body and take it on its own way as far as it can go. It can rake up each power of man and give it its full potentiality, its highest characteristic development. It can give to intellect its austerest intellectuality and to logic its most sheer unsparing logicality. It can give to beauty its most splendid passion of luminous form and the consciousness that receives it a supreme height and depth of ecstasy. It can create a sheer and pure poetry impossible for the intellect to sound to its depths or wholly grasp, much less to mentalise and analyse. It is the function of Overmind to give to every possibility its full potential, its own separate kingdom. But also there is another action of Overmind which sees and thinks and creates in masses, which reunites separated things, which reconciles opposites. On that level truth and beauty not only become constant companions but become one, involved in each other, inseparable: on that level the true is always beautiful and the beautiful is always true. Their highest fusion perhaps only takes place in the Supermind; but Overmind on its summits draws enough of the supramental light to see what the Supermind sees and do what the Supermind does though in a lower key and with a less absolute truth and power. On an inferior level Overmind may use the language of the intellect to convey as far as that language can do it its own greater meaning and message but on its summits Overmind uses its own supreme utterance, and no intellectual speech, no mentalised poetry can equal or even come near to that power and beauty. Here your intellectual dictum that poetry lives by its aesthetic quality alone and has no need of truth or that truth must depend upon aesthetics to become poetic at all, has no longer any meaning. For there truth itself is highest poetry and has only

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to appear to be utterly beautiful to the vision, the hearing, the sensibility of the soul. There dwells and from there springs the mystery of the inevitable word, the supreme immortal rhythm, the absolute significance and the absolute utterance.

I hope you do not feel crushed under this avalanche of metaphysical psychology; you have called it upon yourself by your questioning about the Overmind's greater, larger and deeper aesthesis. What I have written is indeed very scanty and sketchy, only some of the few essential things that have to be said; but without it I could not try to give you any glimpse of the meaning of my phrase. This greater aesthesis is inseparable from the greater truth, it is deeper because of the depth of that truth, larger by all its immense largeness. I do not expect the reader of poetry to come anywhere near to all that, he could not without being a Yogi or at least a sadhak: but just as the Overhead poetry brings some touch of a deeper power of vision and creation into the mind without belonging itself wholly to the higher reaches, so also the full appreciation of all its burden needs at least some touch of a deeper response of the mind and some touch of a deeper aesthesis. Until that becomes general the Overhead or at least the Overmind is not going to do more than to touch here and there, as it did in the past, a few lines, a few passages, or perhaps as things advance, a little more, nor is it likely to pour into our utterance its own complete power and absolute value.

I have said that Overhead poetry is not necessarily greater or more perfect than any other kind of poetry. But perhaps a subtle qualification may be made to this statement. It is true that each kind of poetical writing can reach a highest or perfect perfection in its own line and in its own quality and what can be more perfect than a perfect perfection or can we say that one kind of absolute perfection is "greater" than another kind? What can be more absolute than the absolute? But then what do we mean by the perfection of poetry? There is the perfection of the language and there is the perfection of the word-music and the rhythm, beauty of speech and beauty of sound, but there is also the quality of the thing said which counts for something. If we consider only word and sound and what in themselves they evoke, we arrive at the application of the theory of art for art's sake to poetry. On that ground we might say that a lyric of Anacreon is as good poetry and as perfect poetry as anything in Aeschylus or Sophocles or Homer. The question of the elevation or depth or intrinsic beauty

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of the thing said cannot then enter into our consideration of poetry; and yet it does enter, with most of us at any rate, and is part of the aesthetic reaction even in the most "aesthetic" of critics and readers. From this point of view the elevation from which the inspiration comes may after all matter, provided the one who receives it is a fit and powerful instrument; for a great poet will do more with a lower level of the origin of inspiration than a smaller poet can do even when helped from the highest sources. In a certain sense all genius comes from Overhead; for genius is the entry or inrush of a greater consciousness into the mind or a possession of the mind by a greater power. Every operation of genius has at its back or infused within it an intuition, a revelation, an inspiration, an illumination or at the least a hint or influx from some greater power or level of conscious being than those which men ordinarily possess or use. But this power has two ways of acting: in one it touches the ordinary modes of mind and deepens, heightens, intensifies or exquisitely refines their action but without changing its modes or transforming its normal character; in the other it brings down into these normal modes something of itself, something supernormal, something which one at once feels to be extraordinary and suggestive of a superhuman level. These two ways of action when working in poetry may produce things equally exquisite and beautiful, but the word "greater" may perhaps be applied, with the necessary qualifications, to the second way and its too rare poetic creation.

The great bulk of the highest poetry belongs to the first of these two orders. In the second order there are again two or perhaps three levels; sometimes a felicitous turn or an unusual force of language or a deeper note of feeling brings in the Overhead touch. More often it is the power of the rhythm that lifts up language that is simple and common or a feeling or idea that has often been expressed and awakes something which is not ordinarily there. If one listens with the mind only or from the vital centre only, one may have a wondering admiration for the skill and beauty of woven word and sound or be struck by the happy way or the power with which the feeling or idea is expressed. But there is something more in it than that; it is this that a deeper, more inward strand of the consciousness has seen and is speaking, and if we listen more profoundly we can get something more than the admiration and delight of the mind or Housman's thrill of the solar plexus. We can feel perhaps the Spirit of the universe lending its own depth to

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our mortal speech or listening from behind to some expression of itself listening perhaps to its memories of

Old, unhappy, far-off things

And battles long ago¹⁶

or feeling and hearing, it may be said, the vast oceanic stillness and the cry of the cuckoo

Breaking the silence of the seas

Among the farthest Hebrides¹⁷

or it may enter again into Vyasa's

A void and dreadful forest ringing with the crickets' cry

variant pratibhayam śunyam jhillikāgananāditam."¹⁸

or remember its call to the soul of man,

anityam asukham lokam imām prāpya bhajasva mām

Thou who hast come to this transient and unhappy world,

love and worship Me.¹⁹

There is a second level on which the poetry draws into itself a fuller language of intuitive inspiration, illumination or the higher thinking and feeling. A very rich or great poetry may then emerge and many of the most powerful passages in Shakespeare, Virgil or Lucretius or the Mahabharata and Ramayana, not to speak of the Gita, the Upanishads or the Rig Veda, have this inspiration. It is a poetry "thick inlaid with patines of bright gold" or welling up in a stream of passion, beauty and force. But sometimes there comes down a supreme voice, the Overmind voice and the Overmind music and it is to be observed that the lines and passages where that happens rank among the greatest and most admired in all poetic literature. It would be therefore too much to say that the Overhead inspiration cannot bring in a greatness into poetry which could surpass the other levels of inspiration, greater even from the purely aesthetic point of view and certainly greater in the power of its substance.

A conscious attempt to write Overhead poetry with a mind aware of the planes from which this inspiration comes and seeking

¹⁶Wordsworth, The Solitary Reaper.

¹⁷Ibid. ¹⁸ The Mahabharata, Vana Parva, 641. ¹⁹ The Gita, IX.33.

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always to ascend to those levels or bring down something from them, would probably result in a partial success; at its lowest it might attain to what I have called the first order, ordinarily it would achieve the two lower levels of the second order and in its supreme moments it might in lines and in sustained passages achieve the supreme level, something of the highest summit of its potency. But its greatest work will be to express adequately and constantly what is now only occasionally and inadequately some kind of utterance of the things above, the things beyond, the things behind the apparent world and its external or superficial happenings and phenomena. It would not only bring in the occult in its larger and deeper ranges but the truths of the spiritual heights, the spiritual depths, the spiritual intimacies and vastnesses as also the truths of the inner mind, the inner life, an inner or subtle physical beauty and reality. It would bring in the concreteness, the authentic image, the inmost soul of identity and the heart of meaning of these things, so that it could never lack in beauty. If this could be achieved by one possessed, if not of a supreme, still of a sufficiently high and wide poetic genius, something new could be added to the domain of poetry and there would be no danger of the power of poetry beginning to fade, to fall into decadence, to fail us. It might even enter into the domain of the infinite and inexhaustible, catch some word of the Ineffable, show us revealing images which bring us near to the Reality that is secret in us and in all, of which the Upanishad speaks,

anejad ekam manaso javῙyo nainad devā āpnuvan pūrvam arṣat...

tad ejati tan naijati tad dūre tad u antike.

The One unmoving is swifter than thought, the gods cannot overtake It, for It travels ever in front; It moves and It moves not, It is far away from us and It is very close.

The gods of the Overhead planes can do much to bridge that distance and to bring out that closeness, even if they cannot altogether overtake the Reality that exceeds and transcends them.

1946

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The Mother on Savitri — A Talk to a Young Disciple

Do you read Savitri?

Yes, Mother, yes

You have read the whole poem?

Yes, Mother, I have read it twice.

Have you understood all that you have read?

Not much, but I like poetry, that is why I read it.

It does not matter if you do not understand it— Savitri, read it always. You will see that every time you read it, something new will be revealed to you. Each time you will get a new glimpse, each time a new experience; things which were not there, things you did not understand arise and suddenly become clear. Always an unexpected vision comes up through the words and lines. Every time you try to read and understand, you will see that something is added, something which has hidden behind is revealed clearly and vividly. I tell you the very verses you have read once before, will appear to you in a different light each time you re-read them. This is what happens invariably. Always your experience is enriched, it is a revelation at each step.

But you must not read it as you read other books or newspapers. You must read with an empty head, a blank and vacant mind, without there being any other thought; you must concentrate much, remain empty, calm and open; then the words, rhythms, vibrations will penetrate directly to this white page, will put their stamp upon the brain, will explain themselves without your making any effort.

Savitri alone is sufficient to make you climb to the highest peaks. If truly one knows how to meditate on Savitri, one will receive all the help one needs. For him who wishes to follow this path, it is a concrete help as though the Lord himself were taking you by the hand and leading you to the destined goal. And then, every question, however personal it may be, has its answer here, every difficulty finds its solution herein; indeed there is everything that is necessary for doing the Yoga.

He has crammed the whole universe in a single book. It is a marvellous work, magnificent and of an incomparable perfection.

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You know, before writing Savitri Sri Aurobindo said to me: "I am impelled to launch on a new adventure; I was hesitant in the beginning, but now I am decided. Still I do not know how far I shall succeed. I pray for help." And you know what it was? It was — before beginning, I warn you in advance — it was His way of speaking, so full of divine humility and modesty. He never... asserted Himself. And the day He actually began it, He told me: "I have launched myself in a rudderless boat upon the vastness of the Infinite." And once having started, He wrote page after page without intermission, as though it were a thing already complete up there and He had only to transcribe it in ink down here on these pages.

In truth, the entire form of Savitri has descended en masse from the highest regions and Sri Aurobindo with His genius only arranged the lines — in a superb and magnificent style. Sometimes entire lines were revealed and He has left them intact; He worked hard, untiringly, so that the inspiration could come from the highest possible summit. And what a work He has created! Yes, it is a true creation in itself. It is an unequalled work. Everything is there, and it is put in such a simple, such a clear form; verses perfectly harmonious, limpid and eternally true. My child, I have read so many things, but I have never come across anything which could be compared with Savitri. I have studied the best works in Greek, Latin, English and of course in French literature, also in German and all the great creations of the West and the East, including the great epics; but I repeat it, I have not found anywhere anything comparable with Savitri. All these literary works seem to me empty, flat, hollow, without any deep reality apart from a few rare exceptions, and these too represent only a small fraction of what savitri is. What grandeur, what amplitude, what reality: it is something immortal and eternal He has created. I tell you once again there is nothing like it in the whole world. Even if one puts aside the vision of the reality, that is, the essential substance which is the heart of the inspiration, and considers only the lines in themselves, one will find them unique, of the highest classical kind. What He has created is something man cannot imagine. For, everything is there, everything.

It may then be said that Savitri is a revelation, it is a meditation, it is a quest of the Infinite, the Eternal. If it is read with this aspiration for Immortality. To read Savitri is indeed to practise Yoga, spiritual concentration; one can find there all that is needed to realise the Divine. Each step of Yoga is noted here, including the secret of all other Yogas. Surely, if one sincerely follows what is revealed here in each line one will reach finally the transformation of the

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Supramental Yoga. It is truly the infallible guide who never abandons you; its support is always there for him who wants to follow the path. Each verse of Savitri is like a revealed Mantra which surpasses all that man possessed by way of knowledge and, I repeat this, the words are expressed and arranged in such a way that the sonority of the rhythm leads you to the origin of sound, which is om.

My child, yes, everything is there: mysticism, occultism, philosophy, the history of evolution, the history of man, of the gods, of creation, of Nature. How the universe was created, why, for what purpose, what destiny — all is there. You can find all the answers to all your question there. Everything is explained, even the future of man and of the evolution, all that nobody yet knows. He has described it all in beautiful and clear words so that spiritual adventurers who wish to solve the mystery of the world may understand it more easily. But this mystery is well hidden behind the words and lines and one must rise to the required level of true consciousness to discover it. All prophecies, all that is going to come is presented with a precise and wonderful clarity. Sri Aurobindo gives you here the key to find the Truth, to discover the Consciousness, to solve the problem of what the universe is. He has also indicated how to open the door of the Inconscience so that the light may penetrate there and transform it. He has shown the path, the way to liberate oneself from the ignorance and climb up to the superconscience; each stage, each plane of consciousness, how they can be scaled, how one can cross even the barrier of death and attain immortality. You will find the whole journey in detail and, as you go forward, you can discover things altogether unknown to man. That is Savitri and much more yet. It is a real experience — reading Savitri. All the secrets that man possesses, He has revealed, — as well as all that awaits him in the future; all this is found in the depth of Savitri. But one must have the knowledge to discover it all, the experience of the planes of consciousness, the experience of the Supermind, even the experience of the conquest of Death. He has noted all the stages, marked each step in order to advance integrally in the integral Yoga.

All this is His own experience, and what is most surprising is that it is my own experience also. It is my sadhana which He has worked out. Each object, each event, each realisation, all the descriptions, even the colours are exactly what I saw and the words, phrases are also exactly what I heard. And all this before having read the book. I read Savitri many times afterwards, but earl ier, when He was writing He used to read it to me. Every morning I used to hear Him read

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Savitri. During the night He would write and in the morning read it to me. And I observed something curious, that day after day the experiences He read out to me in the morning were those I had had the previous night, word by word. Yes, all the descriptions, the colours, the pictures I had seen, the words I had heard, all, all, I heard it all, put by Him into poetry, into miraculous poetry. Yes, they were exactly my experiences of the previous night which He read out to me the following morning. And it was not just one day by chance, but for days and days together. And every time I used to compare what He said with my previous experiences and they were always the same. I repeat, it was not that I had told Him my experiences, no, He knew already what I had seen. It is my experiences He has presented at length and they were His experiences also. It is, moreover, the picture of Our joint adventure into the unknown or rather into the Supermind.

These are experiences lived by Him, realities, supracosmic truths. He experienced all these as one experiences joy or sorrow, physically. He walked into the darkness of inconscience, even in the neighbourhood of death, endured the sufferings of perdition, and emerged from the mud, the world-misery to breathe the sovereign plenitude and enter the supreme Ananda. He crossed all these realms, went through the consequences, suffered and endured physically what one cannot imagine. Nobody till today has suffered like Him. He accepted suffering to transform suffering into the joy of union with the Supreme. It is something unique and incomparable in the history of the world. He is the first to have traced the path in the Unknown, so that we may be able to walk with certitude towards the Supermind. He has made the work easy for us. Savitri is his whole Yoga of Transformation, and this Yoga appears now for the first time in the earth consciousness.

And I think that man is not yet ready to receive it. It is too high and too vast for him. He cannot understand it, grasp it; for it is not by the mind that one can understand Savitri. One needs spiritual experiences in order to understand and assimilate it. The farther one advances on the path of Yoga, the more does one assimilate and the better. No, it is something which will be appreciated only in the future, it is the poetry of tomorrow of which He has spoken in The Future Poetry. It is too subtle, too refined, — it is not in the mind or through the mind, it is in meditation that Savitri is revealed.

And men have the audacity to compare it with the work of Virgil or Homer and to find it inferior. They do not understand, they cannot

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understand. What do they know? Nothing at all. And it is useless to try to make them understand. Men will know what it is, but in a distant future. It is only the new race with the new consciousness which will be able to understand it. I assure you there is nothing under the blue sky to compare with Savitri. It is the mystery of mysteries. It is a super-epic, it is super-literature, super-poetry, supervision, it is a super-work even if one considers the number of lines He has written. No, these human words are not adequate to describe Savitri. Yes, one needs superlatives, hyperboles to describe it. It is a hyper-epic. No, words express nothing of what Savitri is, at least I do not find them. It is of immense value — spiritual value and all other values; it is eternal in its subject, and infinite in its appeal, miraculous in its mode and power of execution; it is a unique thing, the more you come in contact with it, the higher will you be uplifted. Ah, truly it is something! It is the most beautiful thing He has left for man, the highest possible. What is it? When will man know it? When is he going to lead a life of truth? When is he going to accept this in his life? This yet remains to be seen.

My child, everyday you are going to read Savitri; read properly, with the right attitude, concentrating a little before opening the pages and trying to keep the mind as empty as possible, absolutely without a thought. The direct road is through the heart. I tell you, if you try to really concentrate with this aspiration you can light the flame, the psychic flame, the flame of purification in a very short time, perhaps in a few days. What you cannot do normally, you can do with the help of Savitri. Try and you will see how very different it is, how new; read with this attitude, with this something at the back of your consciousness, as though it were an offering to Sri Aurobindo. You know it is charged, fully charged with consciousness, — as if Savitri were a being, a real guide. I tell you, whoever wanting to practise Yoga tries sincerely and feels the necessity for it, will be able to climb with the help of Savitri to the highest rung of the ladder of Yoga, will be able to find the secret that Savitri represents. And this without the help of a Guru. And he will be able to practise it anywhere. For him Savitri alone will be the guide; for, all that he needs he will find in Savitri. If he remains very quiet while facing a difficulty, or when he does not know where to turn to go forward and how to overcome obstacles, for all these hesitations and incertitudes which overwhelm us at every moment, he will have the necessary indications, and the necessary concrete help. If he remains very calm, open, if he aspires sincerely, always he will be as if led

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by the hand. If he has faith, the will to give himself and essential sincerity he will reach the final goal.

Indeed, Savitri is something concrete, living, it is all replete, packed with consciousness, it is the supreme knowledge above all human philosophies and religions. It is the spiritual path, it is Yoga, Tapasya, Sadhana, everything, in its single body. Savitri has an extraordinary power, it gives out vibrations for him who can receive them, the true vibrations of each stage of consciousness. It is incomparable, it is truth in its plenitude, the Truth Sri Aurobindo brought down on the earth. My child, one must try to find the secret that Savitri represents, the prophetic message Sri Aurobindo reveals there for us. This the work before you, it is hard but it is worth the trouble.

Blessings

5.11.1967

THE MOTHER

(The talk was written down by Mona Sarkar from memory after several years. It was not seen by the Mother.)

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PART II

Savitri — The Word of Sri Aurobindo

-l-

Savitri, the poem, the word of Sri Aurobindo is the cosmic Answer to the cosmic Question. And Savitri, the person, the Godhead, the Divine Woman is the Divine's response to the human aspiration.

The world is a great question mark. It is a riddle, eternal and ever-recurring. Man has faced the riddle and sought to arrive at a solution since he has been given a mind to seek and interrogate.

What is this universe? From where has it come? Whither is it going? What is the purpose of it all? Why is man here? What is the object of his existence?

Such is the mode of human aspiration. And Aswapati in his quest begins to explore the world and see what it is, the way it is built up. He observes it rising tier upon tier, level upon level of consciousness. He mounts these stairs, takes cognisance of the modes and functions of each and passes on enriched by the experiences that each contributes to his developing consciousness. The ascent he finds is from ignorance to knowledge. The human being starts from the darkest bed of ignorance, the solid basis of rock as it were, the body, the material existence. Ignorance here is absolute inconscience. Out of the total absence of consciousness, the being begins to awake and rise to a gradually developing — widening, deepening and heightening — consciousness. That is how Aswapati advances, ascends from a purely bodily life and consciousness, to the next rung of the ladder, the first appearance and expression of life-force, the vital consciousness — energies and forms of the small lower vital. He moves on, moves upward, there is a growing light in and mixed with the obscurity; ignorance begins to shed its hard and dark coatings one by one and gives place to directed and motivated energies. He meets beings and creatures appropriate to those levels crawling and stirring and climbing, moved by the laws governing the respective regions. In this way Aswapati passes on into the higher vital, into the border of the mental.

Aswapati now observes with a clear vividness that all these worlds and the beings and forces that inhabit them are stricken as

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it were with a bar sinister branded upon their bodies. In spite of an inherent urge of ascension the way is not a straight road but devious and crooked breaking into by-lanes and blind alleys. There is a great corruption and perversion of natural movements towards Truth: falsehoods and pretensions, arrogance of blindness reign here in various degrees. Aswapati sought to know the wherefore of it all. So he goes behind, dives down and comes into a region that seems to be the source and basis of all ignorance and obscurity and falsehood. He comes into the very heart of the Night, the abyss of consciousness. He meets there the Mother of Evil and the sons of darkness. He stands before

...the gate of a false Infinite,

An eternity of disastrous absolutes.¹

Here are the forces that pull down and lure away to perdition all that man's aspirations and the world's urge seek to express and build things divine. It is the world in which the forces of the original inconscience find their primitive play. They are dark and dangerous: they prey upon earth's creatures who are not content with being vassals of darkness but try to move to the Light.

Dangerous is this passage for the celestial aspirant:

Where the red Wolf waits by the fordless stream

And Death's black eagles scream to the precipice.²

He must be absolutely vigilant, absolutely on his guard, absolutely sincere.

Here must the traveller of the upward way —

For daring Hell's kingdoms winds the heavenly route —

Pause or pass slowly through that perilous space,

A prayer upon his lips and the great Name.³

But there is no escape. The divine traveller has to pass through this region. For it lies athwart his path to the goal. Not only so; it is necessary to go through this Night. For Aswapati

Knew death for a cellar of the house of life,

¹Savitri, p. 221.

²Ibid., p. 230.

³1bid., p.210.

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In destruction felt creation's hasty pace,

Knew loss as the price of a celestial gain

And hell as a short cut to heaven's gates.⁴

Aswapati now passes into the higher luminous regions. He enters regions of larger breath and wider movement — the higher vital and then into the yet more luminous region of the higher mind. He reaches the heavens where immortal sages and the divinities and the gods themselves dwell. Even these Aswapati finds to be only partial truths, various aspects, true but limited, of the One Reality beyond. Thus he leaves all behind and reaches into the single sole Reality, the transcendental Truth of things, the status vast and infinite and eternal, immutable existence and consciousness and bliss.

A Vastness brooded free from sense of Space,

An Everlastingness cut off from Time...⁵

A stillness absolute, incommunicable...⁶

Here seems to be the end of the quest, and one would fain stay there ever and ever in that status

...occult, impenetrable, —

Infinite, eternal, unthinkable, alone.⁷

Aswapati was perhaps about to be lured into that Bliss but suddenly a doubt enters into him — there is a hesitation, a questioning; he hears a voice:

The ego is dead; we are free from being and care,

We have done with birth and death and work and fate.

O soul, it is too early to rejoice!

Thou hast reached the boundless silence of the Self,

Thou hast leaped into a glad divine abyss;

But where hast thou thrown self s mission and self s power?

On what dead bank on the Eternal's road?⁸

Aswapati veers round. A new perception, a new consciousness begins to open within him. A new urge moves him. He has to start on a new journey, a new quest and achievement. The world exists neither as a Truth nor as an illusion in itself. It exists in and through

⁴ Ibid., p. 231. ⁵ Ibid., p. 308. ⁶ Ibid., p. 310.⁷ Ibid., p. 309. ^s Ibid., p. 310.

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the Mother of the Worlds. There is a motive in its existence and it is her will that is being worked out in that existence. The world moves for the fulfilment of a purpose that is being evolved through earth-life and human-life. The ignorant incomplete human life upon earth is not the be-all and end-all of the life here. That life has to evolve into a life of light and love and joy perfect here below. Nature as it is now will be transmuted into a new pure and radiant substance. Aswapati is filled with this new urge and inspired by this new vision. He sees and understands now the truth of his life, the goal that has to be achieved, the great dream that has to be realised here upon earth in and through matter. He sees how nature has been labouring ceaselessly and tirelessly through aeons, through eternity onward. He is now almost impatient to see the consummation here and now. The divine Voice however shows him the wisdom of working patiently, hastening slowly. The Voice admonishes him:

I ask thee not to merge they heart of flame

In the Immobile's wide uncaring bliss...

Thy soul was bom to share the laden Force;

Obey thy nature and fulfil thy fate:

Accept the difficulty and godlike toil,

For the slow-placed omniscient purpose live....⁹

All things shall change in God's transfiguring hour.¹⁰

But the human flame once kindled is hard to put down. It seeks an immediate result. It does not understand the fullness of time. So Aswapati cries out:

Heavy and long are the years our labour counts

And still the seals are firm upon man's soul,

And weary is the ancient Mother's heart...

Linger not long with thy transmuting hand

Pressed vainly on one golden bar of Time...

Let a great word be spoken from the heights

And one great act unlock the doors of Fate."

This great cry of the human soul moved the Divine Mother and she granted at last its prayer. She answered by bestowing of her motherly comfort on the yearning thirsty soul:

⁹Ibid., pp. 335-36. ¹⁰ Ibid., p. 341. ¹¹ Ibid., p. 345.

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O strong forerunner, I have heard thy cry.

One shall descend and break the iron Law...

A seed shall be sown in Death's tremendous hour,

A branch of heaven transplant to human soil;

Nature shall overleap her mortal step;

Fate shall be changed by an unchanging will.¹²

And She herself came down upon earth as Aswapati's daughter to undertake the human labour and accomplish the Divine work.

-2-

The Divine Mother is upon earth as a human creature. She is to change the mortal earth into an immortal paradise. Earth at present is a bundle of material inconscience. The Supreme Consciousness has manifested itself as supreme unconsciousness. The Divine has lost itself in pulverising itself, scattering itself abroad. Immortality is thus entombed here below in death. The task of the incarnate Supreme Consciousness is to revive the death-bound divinity, to free the human consciousness, re-install it in its original radiant status of the Divine Consciousness.

Such is Savitri's mission. This mission has two sessions or periods. The first, that of preparation; the second, that of fulfilment. Savitri, the human embodiment was given only twelve months out of her earthly life and in that short space of time she had to do all the preparation. She knew her work from her very birth, she was conscious of her nature and the mission she was entrusted with. Now she is facing the crisis. Death is there standing in front. What is to be done, how is she to proceed? She was told she is to conquer Death, she is to establish immortal life upon mortal earth. The Divine Voice rings out:

Arise, O soul, and vanquish Time and Death.¹³

Yes, she is ready to do it, but not for herself, but for her Love, the being who always is the life of her life. Savitri is the Divine Consciousness but here in the mortal body she is clothed in the human consciousness; it is the human consciousness that she is to lead upward and beyond and it is in and through the human

¹² Ibid., p. 346. ¹³ Ibid., p. 474.

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consciousness that the Divine Realisation has to be expressed and established. The human Savitri declares: If Death is conquered, it is for the sake of Satyavan living eternally with her. She seems to say: What I wish to see is the living Satyavan and I united with him for ever. I do not need an earthly life without him; with him I prefer to be in another world if necessary away from the obscurity and turmoil of this earth here.

My strength is taken from me and given to Death,

Why should I lift my hands to the shut heavens...

Why should I strive with earth's unyielding laws

Or stave off death's inevitable hour?

This surely is best to pactise with my fate

And follow close behind my lover's steps

And pass through night from twilight to the sun.¹⁴

But a thunderous voice descends from above, shaking Savitri to the very basis of her existence.

And what shall thy soul say when it wakes and knows The work was left undone for which it came?¹⁵

Thus a crisis very similar to that which Aswapati had to face now confronts Savitri also. Both of them were at the crossroads away from the earth in the pure delights of the heavens or in the world labouring on earth's soil. Savitri's soul was now revealed to her in its fullness. She viewed the mighty destiny for which she had come down and the great work she had to achieve here upon earth, not any personal or individual human satisfaction or achievement but a cosmic fulfilment, a global human realisation. The godhead in Savitri is now fully awake, established in its plenitude — the Divinity incarnate in the human frame. All the godheads, all the goddess-emanations now entered into her and moulded the totality of her mighty stature.

Here begins then the second stage of her mission, — her work and achievement, the conquest of Death. Only the Divine human being can conquer Death. Savitri follows Death step by step revealing gradually the mystery of death, his personality and his true mission, although the dark God thinks that it is he who is taking away Satyavan and Savitri along with him, to his own home, his black annihilation. For Death is that in its first appearance, it is

¹⁴ Ibid., pp. 474-75. ¹⁵ Ibid., p. 475.

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utter destruction, nothing-ness, non-existence. So the mighty Godhead declares in an imperious tone to the mortal woman Savitri:

This is my silent dark immensity,

This is the home of everlasting Night,

This is the secrecy of Nothingness

Entombing the vanity of life's desires...

Hopest thou still always to last and love?¹⁶

Indeed Death is not merely a destruction of the body; it is in reality nothingness, non-being. The moment being, existence, reality manifested itself, established itself as a material fact, simultaneously there came out and stood against it, its opposite non-being, non-existence, non-reality; against an everlasting 'yes' there was posited an everlasting 'no'. And in fact, this everlasting No proves to be a greater effective reality, it has wound itself around every constituent atom of the universe. That is what has expressed itself in the material domain as the irreversible degradation of energy and in the mortal world it is denial and doubt and falsehood, — it is that which brings about failure in life, and frustration, misery and grief. But then Savitri's vision penetrated beyond and she saw death is a way of achieving the end more swiftly and more completely. The negation is an apparent obstacle in order to increase, to purify and intensify the speed of the process by which the world and humanity are being remodelled and recreated. This terrible Godhead pursues the human endeavour till the end; until he finds that nothing more is to be done; then his mission too is fulfilled.* So a last cry, the cry of desperate dying Death, pierces the universe and throws the final challenge to Savitri:

O human claimant to immortality,

Reveal thy power, lay bare thy spirit's force

Then will I give back to thee Satyavan.

Or if the Mighty Mother is with thee,

Show me her face that I may worship her;

Let deathless eyes look into the eyes of Death.¹⁷

Death's desire, his prayer too is fulfilled. He faces Savitri but this is not the Savitri against whom he fought. Whose is this voice?

¹⁶Ibid., p. 586.

* Please see the footnote on the next page.

¹⁷Ibid., p. 664.

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I hail thee almighty and victorious Death,

Thou grandiose Darkness of the Infinite...

I have given thee thy awful shape of dread

And thy sharp sword of terror and grief and pain

To force the soul of man to struggle for light.¹⁸

What happens thereafter is something strange and tremendous and miraculous. Light flashed all around, a leaping tongue of fire spread out and the dark form of Death was burnt, — not to ashes but to blazing sparks of light:

His body was eaten by light, his spirit devoured.¹⁹

Thus Death came to his death, — not to death in reality but to a new incarnation. Death returned to his original divine Reality, an emanation of the Divine Mother.

A secret splendour rose revealed to sight

Where once the vast embodied Void had stood.

Night the dim mask had grown a wonderful face.²⁰

In that domain of pure transcendent light stood face to face the human Savitri and the transformed Satyavan.

-3-

Savitri has entered into the deathless luminous world where there is only faultless beauty, stainless delight and an unmeasured self-gathered strength. Savitri heard the melodious voice of the Divine:

You have now left earth's miseries and its impossible conditions, you have reached the domain of unalloyed felicity and you need not go back to the old turbulent life: dwell here both of you and enjoy eternal bliss.

But Savitri answered firm and moveless:

* We are reminded here of a parallelism in Goethe's conception of the role of Satan (the Negative Principle) in human affairs. Satan is not merely a destroying devil, he is a constructive angel. For it is he

Who must good and lease

And toil to serve creation

whenever

Man's efforts sink below his proper level.

¹⁸ Ibid., p. 666. ¹⁹ Ibid., p. 667. ²⁰ Ibid., p. 679.

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I climb not to thy everlasting Day,

Even as I have shunned thy eternal Night...

Earth is the chosen place of mightiest souls;

Earth is the heroic spirit's battlefield...

Thy servitudes on earth are greater, king,

Than all the glorious liberties of heaven.²¹

Once more Savitri, even like Aswapati, has to make a choice between two destinies, two soul-movements, — although the choice is already made even before it is offered to her, Aswapati had to abandon, we know, the silent immutable transcendent status of pure light in order to bathe in this lower earthly light. Savitri too, as the prototype of human consciousness, chose and turned to this light of the earth.

The Rishi of the Upanishad declared: They who worship only Ignorance enter into darkness, but they who worship Knowledge alone enter into a still darker darkness. This world of absolute light which Savitri names 'everlasting day' is what the Upanishadic Rishi sees and describes as the golden lid upon the face of the Sun. The Sun is the complete integral light of the Truth in its fullness. The golden covering has to be removed if one is to see the Sun itself — to live the integral life, one has to possess the integral truth.

So it is that Savitri comes down upon earth and standing upon its welcoming soil speaks to Satyavan, as though consoling him for having abandoned their own abode in heaven to dwell among mortal men:

Heaven's touch fulfils but cancels not our earth...

Still am I she who came to thee mid the murmur

Of sunlit leaves upon this forest verge-

All that I was before, I am to thee still.²²

Voicing Satyavan's thought and feeling, all humanity, the whole world in joy and gratefulness, utters this Mantra of thanksgiving:

If this is she of whom the world has heard,

Wonder no more at any happy change.²³

²¹ Ibid., p. 686. ²² Ibid., p. 719. ²³ Ibid., p. 723.

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-4-

In her Prayers and Meditations* the Mother says:

Comme I'homme n'a pas voulu du repas que j'avais préparé avec tant d'amour et de soin, alors j'ai invité le Dieu á leprendre.

Et mon Dieu, Tu as accepté man invitation et Tu es venu T 'asseoirdma table; et en change de mapauvre et humble offrande Tu rn'as octroyé la finale liberation*

What is this banquet that she prepared for man and which man refused? It is nothing else than the Life Divine here below — the life of the Gods enjoying immortality, full of the supreme light and power, love and delight. Man refused because for him it is something too high, too great. Being a creature earth-bound and of small dimensions he can seize and appreciate only small things, little specks of a material world. He refused, first of all, because of his ignorance, he does not know, nor is he capable of conceiving that there are such things as immortal life, divinity, unobscured light, griefless love, or a radiant, tranquil, invisible energy. He does not know and yet he is arrogant, arrogant in his little knowledge, his petty power, in his blind self-sufficiency. Furthermore, besides ignorance and arrogance there is an element of revolt in him; for in his halfwakefulness with his rudimentary consciousness, if ever he came in contact with something that is above and beyond him, if a shadow of another world happens to cross his threshold, he is not at peace, does not want to recognise but denies and even curses it.

The Divine Mother brings solace and salvation. For the Grace it is such a small and easy thing, it is a wonder how even such a simple, natural, inconspicuous thing could be refused by anybody.

If man finds no use for the gift she has brought down for him, naturally she will take it back and return it to Him to whom it belongs, for all things belong to the Supreme Lord, even She

* CWM, Vol. 1, p. 372; SABCL, Vol. 25, p. 490:

Since the man refused the meal I had prepared with so much love and care, I invoked the God to take it.

My God, Thou hast accepted my invitation, Thou hast come to sit at my table, and in exchange lor my poor and humble offering Thou hast granted to me the last liberation.

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belongs to Him, as She is one with Him. The Gita says: There is nothing else than the Brahman in the creation — the doer, the doing and the deed, all are essentially He. In the sacrifice that is this moving, acting universe, the offerer, the offering and the offered, each and every element is the Brahman —brahmārpanam brahma haviḥ.

This gesture of the Divine Mother teaches us also what should be the approach and attitude of human beings in all their activities. In all our movements we should always remember Him, refer to Him, consider that in the last analysis each and every movement comes from Him and we must always offer them to Him, return them to the parent-source from where they come; therein lies freedom, the divine detachment which the individual must possess always in order to be one with Him, feel one's identity with Him.

-5-

Man's refusal of the Divine Grace has been depicted very beautifully and graphically in a perfect dramatic form by Sri Aurobindo in Savitri. The refusal comes one by one from the three constituent parts of the human being. First of all man is a material being, a bodily creature, as such he is a being of ignorance and misery, of brutish blindness. He does not know that there is something other than his present state of misfortune and dark fate. He is not even aware that there may be anything higher or nobler than the ugliness he is steeped in. He lives on earth-life with an earth-consciousness, moves mechanically and helplessly through vicissitudes over which he has no control. Even so the material life is not a mere despicable thing; behind its darkness, behind its sadness, behind all its infirmities, the Divine Mother is there upholding it and infusing into it her grace and beauty. Indeed, she is one with this world of sorrows, she has in effect become it in her infinite pity and love so that this material body of hers may become conscious of its divine substance and manifest her true form. But the human being individualised and separated in egoistic consciousness had lost the sense of its inner reality and is vocal only in regard to its outward formulation. It is natural for physical man therefore to reject and deny the physical Godhead in him, he even curses it and wants to continue as he is. He yells therefore in ignorance and anguish:

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I am the Man of Sorrows, I am he

Who is nailed on the wide cross of the universe...

I toil like the animal, like the animal die.

I am man the rebel, man the helpless serf ...

I know my fate will ever be the same,

It is my Nature's work that cannot change...

I was made for evil, evil is my lot;

Evil I must be and by evil live;

Nought other can I do, but be myself;

What Nature made me, that I must remain.²⁴

The Divine glory manifests itself for a moment to the earthly consciousness but man refuses to be pulled out of its pigsty. The Grace withdraws but in its Supreme Consciousness of unity and love consoles the fallen creature and gives it the assurance:

One day I will return, a bringer of strength...

Misery shall pass abolished from the earth;

The world shall be freed from the anger of the Beast.²⁵

The basic status or foundation of Man, in fact of creation, is earth, the material organisation. After the body, next comes the life and Life-power. Here man attains a larger dynamic being of energy and creative activity. Here too, on this level, what man is or what he achieves is only a reflection, a shadow, but mostly a misshapen resemblance, an aberration of the divine reality that hides behind, and yet half-reveals itself. That Godhead is the Mother's form of Might; we name it variously, Kali and Durga and Lakshmi, for it is Her Grace that is ultimately expressed and fulfilled in this world of vital power. It is because of this realising power of the Mother that

Slowly the Light grows greater in the East,

Slowly the world progresses on God's road.

His seal is on my task, it cannot fail;

I shall hear the silver swing of heaven's gates

When God comes out to meet the soul of the world.²⁶

But man in the strength of his ignorance and arrogance does not recognise this Goddess. Human power, we have said, is a reflection, a shadow of the Divine Power but most often it is a deformed, a perverted Divine Power. Man is full of his egoistic vital self-

²⁴ Ibid., pp. 505-07. ²⁵ Ibid.,p.507. ²⁶Ibid., p.510

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confidence: he believes it is his own will that is realising all, all which is achieved here; whatever he has created, it is through the might of his own merit and whatever new creations will be done in the future will be through the Grace of his own genius. A mighty vital selfhood obscures his consciousness and he sees nothing else, understands nothing else beyond the reach of that limited vision. This is the Rakshasa, this is the Asura in man. Here is his philosophy of life:

I climb, a claimant to the throne of heaven.

The last bom of the earth I stand the first...

I am God still unevolved in human form;

Even if he is not, he becomes in me...

No magic can surpass my magic's skill.

There is no miracle I shall not achieve.²⁷

So this vital being in man in his Rakshasic hunger and Asuric self-conceit rejects the Divine Power that is in fact behind him too, supporting him. The Goddess, in the wake of her predecessor, goes back from where she came, leaving however a consoling word, assuring that one day she will return; she will bide her time. For one day,

The cry of the ego shall be hushed within,

Its lion roar that claims the world as food,

All shall be might and bliss and happy force.²⁸

In his body man is the beast, in the vital he is the Rakshasa and the Asura, he rises now into the mind. And in the mind he is the human being proper, he has attained his own humanity. Here he has received the light of knowledge, a wider and deeper consciousness, he has unveiled the secret mysteries of Nature, brought to play hidden forces that were unknown and untapped. All these achievements have been possible for man because it is the Mother of Light that is behind and has come forward to shed something of her luminous presence around. But man has no inkling of the presence of this luminous Deity; his own light has been a screen in front of the inner divine light. It is not possible for the human mind to seize the higher light: his consciousness, his knowledge is too narrow, too superficial, too dull to comprehend what is beyond.

²⁷Ibid., pp. 511-12. ²⁸ Ibid., p. 514.

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This Divine Light is also a thing of delight, the consciousness it possesses is also the very essence of Joy and Felicity. But all that is occult to the human knowledge. Man considers Truth is his property, whatever truth is there his understanding can grasp it and bring it to play: Truth and Reality are commensurate with his own consciousness, his mental comprehension. What others speak of as realities of the spirit, truths transcendental, are an illusion and delusion. This is what is usually known as the scientific mind, the rational consciousness. An orthodox scientific mentality is in the first instance a thing of overweening self-confidence, of arrogant self-assertion. It declares in its formidable pride:

I have seized the cosmic energies for my use.

I have pored on her infinitesimal elements

And her invisible atoms have unmasked...

If God is at work his secrets I have found.²⁹

This imperiousness in man seems however to be a sheer imperviousness: it is a mask, a hollow appearance; for with all his knowledge, at the end he has attained no certainty, no absoluteness. There is something behind, all the outer bravado he flourishes has a sense of helplessness, at times almost as pitiable as that of a child; for he finds at last

All is a speculation or a dream:

In the end the world itself becomes a doubt.³⁰

It is true his survey of the universe, his knowledge of boundless Nature and the inexhaustible multiplicities of creation have given him a sense of the endless and the infinite but he has not the necessary light or capacity to follow those lines of infinity, on the contrary, there is a shrinking in him at the touch of such vastnesses; his small humanity makes him desperately earth-bound, his aspiration follows the lines of least resistance:

Our smallness saves us from the Infinite.

In a frozen grandeur lone and desolate

Call me not to die the great eternal Death-

Human I am, human let me remain

Till in the Inconscient I fall dumb and sleep.³¹

Thus, this Goddess too, is rejected like her previous comrades,

²⁹ Ibid., pp. 518-19. ³⁰ Ibid., p. 519. ³¹ Ibid., p. 520.

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the Mother of Light, the Deity who is properly the guide and ruler of man's own destiny. Even she is refused but hers is not to complain; in tranquil quietness she brings comfort and hope to the troubled human mind and says she goes to come back in the fullness of her incarnation. She utters divinely:

One day I shall return, His hands in mine,

And thou shalt see the face of the Absolute.

Then shall the holy marriage be achieved,

Then shall the divine family be bom.³²

-6-

To the inconscient ignorant human nature, Savitri, the Divine's delegate presents the powers and personalities that are behind man's present infirmities — these broken images of true realities lying scattered about in the front of existence. Man will be made conscious, he is being made conscious step by step precisely by such relations from time to time. The Vedic image is that of the eternal succession of dawns whose beginning no one knows, nor the end, that creation proceeds from light to light, from consciousness to higher reaches of consciousness. From the material life through the vital and the mental life he first reaches the spiritual life and finally the Life Divine. From the animal he rises to manhood, and in the end to Godhood.

But there are intermediaries. The fullness of the realisation depends on the fullness of the incarnation. The Evil in the body, the Evil in the vital, the Evil in the mind are, whatever their virulence and intransigence, subsidiary agents, for they serve only a mightier Lord. The first original Sin is Death, the God of Denial, of non-existence. That is the very source, the fount and origin, — fons ct origo — of all the misfortune, the fate that terrestrial life involves. This demon, this anti-Divine has to be tracked and destroyed or dissolved into its original Origin. This is the Nihil that negates the Divine — Asat that seeks to nullify Sat and that has created this world of ignorance and misery, that is to say, in its outward pragmatic form. So Savitri sees the one source and knows the remedy. Therefore she pursues Death, pursues him to the end,

³² Ibid., p. 521.

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that is, to the end of Death. The luminous energy of the Supreme faces now its own shadow and blazes it up. The flaming Light corrodes into the substance of the darkness and makes of it her own transfigured substance. This then is the gift that Savitri brings to man, the Divine's own immortality, transfusing the mortality that reigns now upon earth.

In view of the necessity of the age, for the crucial, critical and, in a way, final consummation of Nature's evolutionary urge, the Divine Himself has to come down in the fullness of His divinity; for only then can the earth be radically changed and wholly transformed. In the beginning the Divine once came down, but by sacrificing Himself, being pulverised, scattered and lost in the infinitesimals of a universal, material, unconsciousness. Once again He has to come down, but this time in the supreme glory of His victorious Luminosity.

This then is the occult, the symbolic sense of the Mother's gesture turning away from man with her gifts and returning to the Divine Himself, and inviting Him as the chief guest of honour upon this earth. Or, in the Vedic image, He is to come as the flaming front and leader of the journeying sacrifice that is this universal existence.

NOLINI KANTA GUPTA

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The Opening Scene of Savitri

"It was the hour before the Gods awake." Only when the Gods awake, does the light begin to appear on earth. Otherwise it is all night here, black, impenetrable and unfathomable. Indeed the very creation begins with the awakening of the Gods. When the Gods are asleep, it is the non-existence — tama āslt tamasā gūḍdhamagre — "in the beginning darkness was engulfed in darkness." This is theasat, non-being, this is the acit, the inconscience, this the blackest night. The Bible also speaks of a similar darkness — Job's terrible vision: "A land of darkness, as darkness itself; and of the shadow of death, without any order and where the light is as darkness."¹ The lamp of consciousness is not yet lit. The dark vacancy stretches across the path of creation yet to be, the light that is to come. This shadow is the negation of the light behind, it is the original of the creation. It is presented as the mere material universe apparently dead and dry, the utter inconscience with no sign of consciousness anywhere. And earth seems to be there part of it, a shadow within the shadow, a dark spot wheeling in a dark mass.

It is the pre-creation, one might say, the creation before the creation — the shadow creation. We know coming events cast their shadow before, as a kind of forewarning, foreboding: that is the dark messenger; the bright messenger will follow. For, after all, it is His shadow — "And into the midnight his shadow is thrown."

The original inconscience is a non-existence, a nihil in which all existence is rolled up and dissolved, an infinite non-entity or zero. This is the zero here below, on the reverse side of the reality. But there is another zero up above and beyond, beyond the superconsciousness, the śunyam, beyond Sachchidananda. In between is the world of night, the world of gestation where the Gods are asleep. When the Divine, the One indivisible existence felt the first stirring and was moved to create, he divided himself and cast himself as it were out of himself. And the Light and Consciousness of his Being forthwith leaped into darkness and inconscience. That is the involution of the Supreme into material existence.

This original darkness is the womb of creation, it is something akin to Hiranyagarbha of Indian tradition. The fiat has gone from

¹Book of.lob, 10.21.

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the Supreme to resurrect this darkness — his alter-ego — and he sends down the messenger-light. So the Gods are about to wake, there is a stir in their slumber. The creation as manifestation begins when the first ray of light strikes the darkness. That is, when the Gods open their eyes. But the spell of darkness returns and swallows up the light.

The earth too, one with the surrounding mass of darkness and inconscience, is asleep and insentient. She has to wake up and start on her journey moving forward, unveiling her secret mysteries towards the supreme revelation, the Divine incarnation in matter. The Gods are awake, in order to awaken the earth. A first ray is sent down and it touches, as it were, the sleeping Mother. The Divine Ray is just like a finger of a child touching her mother trying to persuade her to open her eyes and look at her child. The first ray, however, comes not as a caress to the inert being of darkness, it is a sharp prick, even a hard blow. Such is the first impact of light upon dead matter; and the light is thrown back, as an unwelcome intruder, into what it came from; and the darkness grovels in its old groove. The second stage comes when the impact is not felt as a pain or something totally foreign and strange; its touch is felt as something soothing, something that heals an eternal sore. But this too was not suffered long and the light has to go back again.

These are the successive dawns of which the Vedic Rishis speak, through which the light and consciousness in the dark inconscience gradually grows, increases in volume and strength. The continued descent of the light into earth brings about the change upon earth, that is called evolution, that is to say, the transformation of the dark inconscience here below into the original Super-Light of which it was the shadow cast out because of the original separation from the Source.

Savitri represents one such divine dawn at a crucial moment of the earth-life. She embodies creation's entire past and shows in her life how that past is transformed through the alchemy of Divine Grace into glorious future — the inevitable destiny that awaits man and earth.

NOLINI KANTA GUPTA

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Savitri —- A Factual Account of its Composition

Savitri is the supreme revelation of Sri Aurobindo's vision*

It is my task to give here factual account of the long process that led to Savitri in its final form. As the grand epic has captured many hearts all over the world by its supernal beauty, I thought that they would be much interested in the history of its growth, development and final emergence — the birth of the Golden Child. But I own that it is a formidable task. Though I had the unique good fortune to see Sri Aurobindo working on the epic in its entire revised version, and had some small share in being its scribe, to try in retrospect to reconstruct the imposing edifice from such a distance in memory is indeed difficult, for there are many versions, plenty of revisions, additions, subtractions, emendations from which the final version was made. To give an accurate report of all this process is beyond my capacity. For I am not a scholar, and have no aptitude for research into old (or new) archives, neither did I ever dream that I should one day be called upon to render an account of what the Master had done, or left undone, through this poor mortal as his instrument. Had I not been helped by my esteemed and multi-purposed friend Amal Kiran (K.D. Sethna)— indefatigable researcher no less than a poet — and by a young friend Sudha as assistant, my readers would have had to remain content with just a bare outline.

The apology submitted, let the rash venture begin. Savitri, according to Dinen Roy¹ was started by Sri Aurobindo in Baroda. From all the extant versions, for there are quite a number, it appears that originally, the scheme of the poem consisted of two parts: I Earth, II Beyond. Each part had four Books — rather the first part had four Books and the second had three Books and an epilogue.

Afterwards there came to be three parts but without names. Each part had a series of Books. The first Book was called Love. Then it was named Quest, and Love became the second Book. In some

* The Mother, About Savitri.

'Dinendra Kumar Roy was a Bengali literary man and was brought to Baroda to live with Sri Aurobindo to assist him in Bengali conversation.

early versions we have Cantos instead of Books. Later the Books came to contain the Cantos.

Sri Aurobindo made a good number of recasts before the final form was reached. The first form was begun and completed in Baroda. Other recasts were made in Pondicherry. One of the early ones is subtitled A Tale and a Vision. Later the subtitle was A Legend and a Symbol. It was after several recasts that the present opening line was struck upon: "It was the hour before the Gods awake."

The version before the very last one had practically the same scheme as the latter, but the Gantos were much shorter and many themes, which were treated at some length, received briefer treatment. Particularly the Book now called The Traveller of the Worlds was greatly expanded. He began adding lines in considerable amount in 1938. Sri Aurobindo wrote in the Letters on Savitri to Amal in 1931: "There is a previous draft, the result of many retouchings of which somebody told you; but in that form it would not have been stmagnum opus at all. Besides, it would have been a legend, and not a symbol. I therefore started recasting the whole thing; only the best passages and lines of the old draft will remain, altered so as to fit into the new frame."²

In 1936 he writes: "Savitri was originally written many years before the Mother came, as a narrative poem in two parts, Part I Earth and Part II Beyond.... The first Book has been lengthening and lengthening out... As for the second Part, I have not touched it yet. There was no climbing of planes there in the first version — rather, Savitri moved through the Worlds of Night, of Twilight, of Day — all of course in a spiritual sense — and ended by calling down the power of the Highest Worlds of Sachchidananda. I had no idea of what the supramental World could be like at that time, so it could not enter into the scheme."³

In another letter of the same year: "The poem was originally written from a lower level, a mixture perhaps of the inner mind, psychic, poetic intelligence, sublimised vital, afterwards with the Higher Mind, often illumined and intuitivised, intervening. Most of the stuff of the first Book is new, or else the old so altered as to be no more what it was; the best of the old has sometimes been kept almost intact because it has already the higher inspiration. Moreover, there have been made several successive revisions each

² Savitri, p. 727. ³ Ibid., pp. 728-29.

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trying to lift the general level higher and higher towards a possible Overmind poetry. As it now stands there is a general Overmind influence, I believe, sometimes coming fully through, sometimes colouring the poetry of the other higher planes fused together, sometimes lifting any one of these higher planes to its highest or the psychic, poetic intelligence or vital towards them."⁴

The position arrived at in 1946 can be apprehended from a letter written in that year. Sri Aurobindo says: "You will see when you get the full typescript [of the first three Books] that Savitri has grown to an enormous length so that it is no longer quite the same thing as the poem you saw then. There are now three Books in the first part. The first, The Book of Beginnings, comprises five Cantos which cover the same ground as what you typed but contains also much more that is new. The small passage about Aswapati and the other worlds has been replaced by a new Book, The Book of the Traveller of the Worlds, in fourteen [now fifteen] Cantos with many thousand lines. There is also a third sufficiently long Book, The Book of the Divine Mother. In the new plan of the poem there is a second part consisting of five Books: two of these, The Book of Birth and Quest and The Book of Love, have been completed and another, The Book of Fate, is almost complete. Two others, The Book of Yoga and The Book of Death, have still to be written, though a part needs only a thorough recasting. Finally, there is the third part consisting of four Books, The Book of Eternal Night, The Book of the Dual Twilight, The Book of Everlasting Day and The Return to Earth, which have to be entirely recast and the third of them largely rewritten. So it will be a long time before Savitri is complete...."⁵ Again, on 20 July 1948 he writes to Amal: "I am afraid I am much preoccupied with the constant clashes with the world and the devil ... even Savitri has very much slowed down and I am only making the last revisions of the First Part already completed; the other two Parts are just now in cold storage."⁶

Here then we get a brief survey of the work accomplished and what still remained to be done. During the last four years, from 1946 to 1950, he laboured constantly on the unfinished parts and gave them an almost new birth, with the exception of The Book of Death and The Epilogue, which, for some inscrutable reason, he

⁴ Ibid., p. 729. ⁵ Ibid., p. 731.

⁶ Fourth Revised Edition of Savitri, 1993, pp. 733-35.

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left practically unrevised.

Let us now go into details.

The earliest extant draft of Savitri is in an exercise book that came from Madras to Pondicherry evidently in the early years of Sri Aurobindo's stay in Pondicherry, years in which his habit of writing the English e like the Greek epsilon e persisted. This copy appears to have been made from some version already with him, which is lost to us. The draft exists in two sections. The first comprising Book I and a few pages of Book II are in ink which has become brown now. The second is in light greenish-blue ink. Some corrections in this ink occur in the first section. Both the sections have been revised in places in darker blue ink with a thicker nib. The revisions are clear in some places, but unclear and inconclusive in others. Book I is complete, Book II unfinished. The spelling of the three chief characters is: Savithri, Uswapathy, Suthyavan. In the first Book, after a short description of Night and Dawn, there is a very brief account of the Yoga done by Uswapathy; then Savithri is bom, grows up and goes out, at Uswapathy's prompting, to find her mate. She finds Suthyavan. In the meantime Narad comes down to earth and visits Uswapathy's palace. There is a talk between the two; Savithri returns from her quest and discovery, and a talk takes place among the three. The opening lines of this earliest draft run:

In a huge forest where the listening Night

Heard lonely voices, and in the large hush

Was conscious of the sigh and tread of things

That have no sound for the rich heart of day.

Book II commences:

So she was left alone in the huge wood

By Death the god confronted...

The poem is simply called Savithri.

The second version is called Savithri, A Tale and a Vision. Apparently it was meant to be in more than one part, because, before Book I we have the general title Earth. Book I is called Quest. It begins:

The boundless spirit of Night dreamless, alone

In the unlit temple of immensity

Waiting upon the marge of silence sat

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Mute with the expectation of her change.

The⁷ hour was near of the transfiguring gods.

Uswapathy's yoga in this version is a little longer.

The third version is also called by the same general name and its first part is Earth, and Book I is Quest. It starts:

It was an hour of the transfiguring Gods.

The huge unbound spirit of Night, alone

In her⁸ unlit temple of immensity

Waited immobile upon Silence' marge...

Mute with the expectation of her change.

In the fourth version we get for the first time the spelling Savitri though Uswapathy persists. There is no indication of a division into Part I and Part II. Book I is there, called Quest. The poem starts:

It was the hour of the transfiguring Gods The large and vacant spirit of Night, alone In the unlit temple of immensity Immobile lay on slumber's waiting marge Mute with the expectation of her change.

In the fifth version we have a mention of Part I, but it is not called by any name. We also have Book I, unnamed. The opening line runs:

An hour was near of the transfiguring Gods.

The spelling Uswapathy persists. Book II is entitled Love.

In the sixth version there are no parts again, but Book I is called Quest. The first line is:

It was the hush of a transfiguring hour.

The seventh version has: I Quest.

Now for the first time we have, after two corrections, the opening line as in the final version:

It was the hour before the Gods awake.

In the eighth version we have everything as in the seventh except

⁷ An. ⁸The.

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Savitri — A Factual Account of its Composition

that the spelling Uswapathy comes in. Book II is there entitled Love.

The ninth version has the same opening arrangement.

The tenth version stands: Savitri Parti Earth. Book I The Book of Birth. Spelling Aswapathy continues, but there is now Sathyavan.

In each succeeding version after the first, there is a growing expansion in which old lines are taken up into a new framework. The development into separate Books from what was originally all contained within Book I and Book II takes place after the second or third version of the opening matter. This matter now becomes The Book of Quest, followed by The Book of Love, The Book of Fate, The Book of Death. Thus Part I, Earth, is completed. Then starts Part If, Beyond, with The Books of Night, Twilight, Day and The Epilogue.

Each version of Book I runs approximately to one exercise book of 40-80 pages, though the stage of the story differs from exercise book to exercise book when their end is reached.

The tenth version of Book I, made sometimes before 1936, is the one on which the later Savitri is based. Even here there is no climbing of planes by Aswapati. It is only in the version to Amal, that we find for the first time, brief descriptions of the planes, starting with the plane of subtle matter.

Later these brief descriptions are amplified and each plane gets a fairly long Canto to itself. In the 1936 version there are no Cantos yet — there are only sections with subheadings.

Such is the story of Savitri as we found it in November 1938, the time of Sri Aurobindo's accident. The work on it had to be stopped as a result of this unfortunate event and could not be taken up before the middle of 1940. For, though he recovered from the accident sufficiently to take up intellectual work, his first preoccupation was with The Life Divine. After its publication in 1940, he resumed his work on Savitri. By that time he had started sitting in a chair in the morning hours, but in the afternoon he continued for sometime doing the work seated on the bed.

I had no access to the work or to any of his other writings till that year. Though all the works must have been lying on the table or in the drawers, I had to curb my strong impulse to have a peep into the legend of Savitri. For, we had come there for a different purpose and it would have been a breach of trust on our part to lay hands on his sacred private property. The chance came in 1940, first only to place the requisite manuscripts before him, then gradually to work as a scribe. I still distinctly remember the day

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when, sitting on the bed with the table in front of him, he remarked: "You will find in the drawers long exercise books with coloured covers. Bring them." I think I went wrong in the first attempt; the second one met with his smiling approval. What he actually did with them, I cannot say, for he was working all alone, and we were sitting behind. I guess that he must have been giving a first reading to all the versions; for, there were quite a number. He had already written to us before his accident that he had recast the first Book about ten times. Perhaps he was going through these and making a selection of the lines and passages for the final version. Then a few months after — and at this time he was sitting in the morning in a chair — he told me that he needed some exercise books. Without informing the Mother about it, I at once ran to the market and bought two or three exercise books from Manikachetty. He accepted them with a smile and I was happy to find that he used them for copying Savitri. At the end of one of the books he has written: "Last draft of Savitri, 6 September 1942." In another exercise book, containing, matter up to the end of The Book of the Divine Mother, only at the end of Canto V of Book I, the date is written: 24 April 1944. (This, by the way, was the morning of the Darshan Day.) From these two dates we can surmise that from 1940, the year in which we presume he took up the work on Savitri, to 1944 he continued working on the first three Books. Now, how much new material did he add to them? We know from his letter to Amal that Book II at any rate, The Book of the Traveller of the Worlds, was just a small passage. Here now we find the fully lengthened and developed Book running into 15 Cantos. The third Book, The Book of the Divine Mother, was also written probably for the first time, for he writes to Amal in 1946: "...there is also a third sufficiently long Book, The Book of the Divine Mother."⁹

The next step in the development was his re-copying the entire three Books on big white sheets of paper, in two columns in fine handwriting. There is one date at the end of The Book of the Divine Mother 1 May 1944, which suggests that the copying of the entire three Books had taken about a year. When this was completed I was called in. Perhaps because his eyesight was getting dim, I was asked to read to him this final copy. Now began alterations and additions in my own hand on the manuscript itself. I regret to say that they marred the clean beauty of the original, and I realise now

⁹ Savitri, p. 731.

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that it was a brutal act of sacrilege on my part, tantamount to desecration of the carved images on the temple wall. But I cannot imagine either how else I could have inserted so many corrections and additions, one line, one word here, two there, more elsewhere, throughout the entire length, We know how prodigious were the corrections and revisions in so far as Savitri was concerned. One is simply amazed at the enormous pains he has taken to raise Savitri to his ideal of perfection. I wonder if any other poet can be compared with him in this respect. He gave me the example of Virgil who, it seems, wrote six lines in the morning and went on correcting them during the rest of the day. Even so, his Aeneid runs not even half the length of the first three Books of Savitri. Along with all these revisions, Sri Aurobindo added, on separate small sheets of paper, long passages written in his own hand up to the Canto The Kingdom of the Greater Mind of Book II. All this work was completed, I believe, by the end of 1944.

The next step was to make a fair copy of the entire revised work. I don't know why it was not given straightaway for typing. There was a talk between the Mother and Sri Aurobindo about it; Sri Aurobindo might have said that because of copious additions, typing by another person would not be possible. He himself could not make a fair copy. Then the Mother suggested my name and brought a thick blue ledger like book for the purpose. I needed two or three reminders from the Mother before I took up the work in right earnest. Every morning I used to sit on the floor behind the head of the bed and, leaning against the wall, start copying like a student of our old Sanskrit tols. Sri Aurobindo's footstool would serve as my table. The Mother would not fail to cast a glance at my good studentship. Though much of the poetry passed over my head, quite often the solar plexus would thrill at the sheer beauty of the images and expressions. The very first line made me gape with wonder. I don't remember if the copying and revision with Sri Aurobindo proceeded at the same time, or revision followed the entire copying. The Mother would make inquiries from time to time either, I thought, to make me abandon my jog-trot manner or because the newly started Press was clamouring for some publication from Sri Aurobindo. Especially now that people had come to know that after The Life Divine, Sri Aurobindo was busy with Savitri, they were eagerly waiting for it. But they had to wait quite a long time, for after the revision, when the whole book was handed to the Mother, it was passed on to Nolini for being typed

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out. Then another revision of the typescript before it was ready for the Press! Again, I cannot swear if the typing was completed first before its revision or both went on at the same time. At any rate, the whole process went very slowly, since Sri Aurobindo would not be satisfied with Savitri done less than perfectly. Neither could we give much time to it, not, I think, more than an hour a day, sometimes even less. The Press began to bring it out from 1946 as fascicules of several Cantos. At all stages of revision, even on Press proofs, alterations, additions never stopped. It may be mentioned that the very first appearance of anything from Savitri in public was in the form of passages quoted in the essay Sri Aurobindo: A New Age of Mystical Poetry by Amal, published in The Bombay Circle and later included as Part III in Amal's book: The Poetic Genius of Sri Aurobindo.

So far the account of the procedure which was followed for working on the three Books seems approximately correct. We have been considerably helped by some dates mentioned before in the account. But in what follows about the rest of the epic, I am afraid that the report cannot claim as much exactness owing to my lapse of memory. I can sum up the position obtained at this stage by quoting Sri Aurobindo's letter to Amal in 1946. After investigating all the documents available, we have come to the following conclusions about the rest of the Books. Book IV, The Book of Birth and Quest, is fairly revised by Sri Aurobindo. Several versions before the end of 1938 have been worked upon — these versions-are expansions of much older drafts, one of them possibly dating back to Baroda. The revised version was later corrected and amplified with my help as scribe and has been divided into four Cantos. In re-doing Book V, The Book of Love, to Sri Aurobindo took up, at a certain point, an earlier version than that of 1936. There are quite a number of versions with various titles before 1936. Here too originally there were no different Cantos. There are three old versions of The Book of Fate of equal length. They were called Canto II, and were fairly short. One of these versions was expanded into enormous length and developed into two Cantos, the very last touches given almost during the final month of Sri Aurobindo's 'Life'. An instance of the expansion is the passage "O singer of the ultimate ecstasy... Perhaps the blindness of our will is Fate."¹⁰ There was no Book of Yoga in the original

¹⁰Savitri, p. 425.

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scheme of the poem. One old version called Book III, Death, has been changed into The Book of Yoga. It was enormously expanded and named Canto I. All the rest of the six Cantos were totally new and dictated. They were all at first divided into Cantos with different titles. Apparently all these Cantos except the first one are entirely new. I couldn't get trace of any old versions from which they could have been developed. I am now amazed to see that so many lines could have been dictated day after day, like The Book of Everlasting Day. The Book of Death contains three old versions — all called Canto III; the final version is constructed from one of these and from another version some lines are taken to be inserted into The Book of Eternal Night. The old version called Canto IV, Night, of the early poem served as the basis of The Book of Eternal Night. It was revised, lines were added and split into two Cantos. Then in the typescript further revisions took place. Canto I first called The Passage into the Void of Night, was changed into Towards the Black Void. Book X, The Book of the Double Twilight, called only Twilight, Canto V in the earlier versions of which there are four or five, had no division into Cantos. From these early versions a fair number of lines have been taken and woven into a larger version. The old lines are now not always in their original form. Book XI had three old drafts. One which was larger than the other two has been "used for the final version and was enormously expanded; even whole passages running into hundreds of lines have been added, as I have mentioned before. About The Epilogue, except for a few additions, it almost reproduces the single old version.

Now we can go into the detailed working procedure of all these later Books. I had to take now a more and more prominent part as scribe, for after the completion of the fourth Book, The Book of Quest, from 1944 or so, Sri Aurobindo's eyesight began to grow dim and he didn't want to strain his eyes by going through all the old manuscripts with their faint, small handwriting. So I was asked to bring out these old versions from the drawer; I now had access to all the manuscripts. Most of them were in loose sheets of notebook size written on one side. Unfortunately no dates were given to suggest when they were written. I was asked to read aloud Book by Book before him, but I don't remember by what method we proceeded. Did we give a general reading to all the Books before we started with the actual working on them individually? Or did we go about systematically finishing one Book after another? Perhaps the latter. Taking this procedure to be probable, I was

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asked, when there were more than one version of a Book, to read them, sometimes all, sometimes one or two and selecting out of them the best one, he indicated the lines to be marked in the margin for inclusion; sometimes lines or passages were taken from other versions too. As I have shown, and as Sri Aurobindo's dictated letter has already hinted, all these Books were either thoroughly revised or almost entirely re-written.

As far as I remember, we worked on these drafts in the evening for an hour or so after all the correspondence work was over. He would be sitting in a small armchair with a straight back where now the present big armchair stands, and listen to my reading. The work proceeded very slowly to start with, and for a long time, either because he didn't seem to be in a hurry or because there was not much time left after attending to the miscellaneous correspondence I have mentioned elsewhere. Later on, the time was changed to the morning. After the selections had been made from one or two versions of a Book, let us say The Book of Fate, we were occupied with it. Never was any Book except The Book of Death and The Epilogue taken intact. He would dictate line after line, and ask me to add selected lines and passages in their proper places, but which were not always kept in their old order. I wonder how he could go on dictating lines of poetry in this way, as if a tap had been turned on and the water flowed, not in a jet of course, but slowly, very slowly indeed. Passages sometimes had to be re-read in order to get the link or sequence, but when the turn came of The Book of Yoga and The Book of Everlasting Day, line after line began to flow from his lips like a smooth and gentle stream and it was on next day that a revision was done to get the link for further continuation. In the morning he himself would write out new lines on small notebooks called 'bloc' notes which were incorporated in the text. This was more true as regards The Book of Fate. Sometimes there were two or even three versions of a passage. As his sight began to fail, the letters also became gradually indistinct, and I had a good sight and, more than that, the gift of deciphering his hieroglyphics, thanks to the preparatory training I had received during my voluminous correspondence with him before the accident. At times when I got stuck he would help me out, but there were occasions when both of us failed. Then he would say. "Give it to me, let me try." Taking a big magnifying glass, he would focus his eyes but only to exclaim: "No, can't make out!" I would chuckle at these vain attempts and mutter to myself

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egoistically: "If I fail with my good vision, how can you succeed, Sir?"

When a Book was completed and copied out, it went to Nolini for typing. On the typescript again, fresh lines were added or the order changed. In this respect The Book of Fate gave us a great deal of trouble. Though Sri Aurobindo says in his letter to Amal in 1946 that the Book was almost finished, it was again taken up at the end, and many changes were introduced which contained prophetic hints of his leaving the body very probably after he had taken his decision to do so.

As I have already recorded, one day Champaklal observed that Sri Aurobindo was moving his lips at the end of his bath. Suspecting that he was probably murmuring lines of poetry, he told him that if he wanted to dictate them, I could take them down. He caught up the suggestion and did dictate. Had there been no suggestion he would have retained them in his memory and dictated them next day.

But our routine changed after the Mother started going out in the afternoon. Though the hour of work appointed for Savitri and correspondence was shifted to the morning, we could get very little time for Savitri. Many interruptions came in the way. The preliminary work of reading old versions, selections etc., took up much time before we could actually start writing. We find from the letters to Amal even at the end of 1946 the second part of the Book had not begun. After that too, the work rolled on in a jog-trot fashion till one day in 1950 he exclaimed: "My main work is being delayed." From about the middle of that year the time was fixed from 11 a.m. to 1.30 p.m. without any break or interruption. Only once in between he would ask for a peppermint pastille and Champaklal was always at hand to serve it. As soon as the clock struck 11 a.m. I was ready with the usual small heap of manuscript and notebooks; would sit on the floor by his left side, and he would be sitting on the bed in an expectant attitude, give a glance of welcome and we would start from where we had stopped. Sometimes sitting upright, sometimes leaning on the left side cushion, keeping his gaze in front, he would dictate in a quiet, subdued voice slowly and distinctly, with an English accent. There was no rise or fall or any other dramatic quality in the intonation; it was in the manner of simple prose dictation with end stops of course.

My initiation by him into English poetry rendered the scribe's work congenial as well as convenient. If I missed some words, I

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would ask again, but sometimes I was so cocksure that I put down what I heard as correct. Later on, after his passing away, at many places experts found the meaning of a word to be dubious, ambiguous, or even wrong, and they have harassed me with repeated charges of wrong scribing! Faulty punctuation was of course in abundance. Sometimes Sri Aurobindo did not give the punctuation and I didn't ask. One couldn't always remind the poet, while he was dictating, of the necessity of punctuation and thus put a curb on his flow. People asked whether I used shorthand for transcribing. There was no need for it at all, for the dictation was very slow and at times halted, waiting for inspiration, I suppose. I don't know what the nature was of Milton's dictation, but one thing was certain: Sri Aurobindo had not Milton's temper, and I didn't suffer his daughter's fate!

The tempo of the work was subsequently speeded up and it proceeded smoothly without break till the seal of incomplete completion was put about two weeks before the November Darshan. Very probably he had taken up his decision to withdraw from this world of the sad music of humanity and leave in compensation his divine music of Savitri. A curious incident has stuck in my memory. One day he continued working even beyond 1.30 p.m. — a rare occurrence — and that was the day I was invited for lunch at a friend's place. I thought I would certainly be free by 2 p.m. but no, he seemed to be unusually inspired! I believe I was showing some signs of restlessness at which he remarked: "What's the matter?" I don't remember whether I kept quiet or told him the truth. He however shut shop soon after. This incident reminds me strongly of Champaklal's valuable admonition that those who want to serve the Divine must have no ties or strings of the past.

During this period Amal, on perusal of some texts that had been sent to him at his request, began to send from Bombay criticisms, objections to some lines or words in Savitri and even alternative suggestions. A long communication that had passed between him and a friend of his on Savitri was also sent to Sri Aurobindo for his opinion or reaction. His long answers and illuminating selfcommentry on his own poetry dictated at this time, consumed much of our time but we could see from the reply how Sri Aurobindo welcomed such remarks from Amal whom he had prepared in the art of poetry. No one except Amal, or perhaps Arjava had he lived, could have talked with Sri Aurobindo almost as equals on English poetry and drawn out many intricate movements on rhythm, overhead

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poetry, etc., which is now a permanent treasure in English literature.

Sri Aurobindo's quotations from memory from Homer, Shakespeare, Milton and others which he said should be verified, were, in most cases, correct. When I read Homer's lines trying to imitate Sri Aurobindo's intonation, but forgetting the quantitative length, he corrected me. That reminds me also of how he encouraged me indirectly to learn the Sanskrit alphabet. I didn't know it, as I learnt Pali in my school. So whenever I met with a Sanskrit word while reading correspondences to Sri Aurobindo, I had either to show it to him, or get somebody's help. I thought this wouldn't do, I must learn at least the alphabet. I put my mind to it and, getting some smattering of it, began to show my learning before him. Instead of discouraging me he took interest and if I pronounced a bit, he helped me with the rest as one does with a child. Fortunately, I managed, after getting the Mother's approval, to learn French also during the break from my work. She said it would be very useful, and so it was, for when some French communications came, I could read them to him.

This is roughly the story of the grand epic Savitri, tracing from the earliest conception to its final consummation. Undoubtedly the first three Books were of a much higher level of inspiration and nearer perfection than the rest, for with ample leisure, and working by himself he could devote more time and care to that end which unfortunately could not be said about the rest of the Books. Apart from the different versions I have mentioned, there is a huge mass of manuscripts which we have left unclassified since they are in fragments — all of which testifies to the immense labour of a god that has gone into the building of the magnificent epic. For a future research scholar, when Savitri earns as wide a recognition as for instance Dante's or Homer's epic, if not more, a very interesting work remains to be done, going into the minutest detail, he would show where new lines or passages have been added, or where one line slightly changed becomes an overhead line, or how another line after various changes comes back to its original version, etc., etc. I was chosen as a scribe probably because I didn't have all these gifts, so that I could like a passive instrument jot down faithfully whatever was dictated, while Amal would have raised doubts, argued with him or been lost in sheer admiration of the beauty Aid the grandeur! Dilip would have started quoting lines after lines in rapturous ecstasy before the poem had come out! I submit no apology, nor am I conscience-stricken for my failures, for he knew what was the worth

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of his instrument. I am only grateful to him for being able to serve him with the very faculty which he had evoked and developed in me.

We can at last see how from among scattered seeds a single huge Banyan tree has grown and spread itself to the transcendent and the cosmic infinite and excites our perpetual wonder. I wish I could provide a more faithful and vivid picture of its daily growth, a branch here, an offshoot there, trimming the old twigs, reviving the dying ones, discarding the outworn crowding branches till there soared up into the sky a majestic vision under whose perennial shade the world can repose a while in its long journey to the Eternal. To show how he expanded the poem I may quote one long new passage which he appended to the end of Book II, Canto VI, The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Life:

In a high state where ignorance is no more,

Each movement is a wave of peace and bliss,

Repose God's motionless creative force,

Action a ripple in the Infinite

And birth a gesture of Eternity.

A sun of transfiguration still can shine

And Night can bare its core of mystic light;

The self cancelling, self-afflicting paradox

Into a self-luminous mystery might change,

The imbroglio into a joyful miracle.

Then God could be visible here, here take a shape;

Disclosed would be the spirit's identity;

Life would reveal her true immortal face.

But now a termless labour in her fate:

In its recurrent decimal of events

Birth, death appear as its vibrating points;

The old question-mark margins each finished page,

Each volume of her effort's history.

A limping Yes through the aeons journeys still

Accompanied by an eternal No.

All seems in vain, yet endless is the game.

Impassive turns the ever-circling Wheel,

Life has no issue, death brings no release.

A prisoner of itself the being lives

And keeps its futile immortality;

Extinction is denied, its sole escape.

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An error of the gods has made the world.

Or indifferent the Eternal watches Time."

I desist from giving my own impression of the incomparable epic. I have no such competence and though I have been made a poet by the Master I leave it to more efficient authorities. One fact alone makes me dumb with a reverent awe and exalted admiration: the colossal labour Sri Aurobindo put forth to build this unique structure. It reminds me of one of those majestic ancient temples like Konarak or of a Gothic architecture like Notre Dame before which you stand and stare in speechless ecstasy, your soul takes a flight beyond time and space. Before I knew much about Sri Aurobindo, I asked him in my foolish way, why, himself being the master of inspiration and having all higher planes at his command, sending inspiration to others, should he still have to work so hard? With his consciousness entirely silent, he had only to hitch to the right source and words, images, ideas would tumble down in a Brahmaputra of inspiration! To which he answered in his habitual indulgent tone, perhaps a bit piqued by my facile observation: "The highest planes are not so accommodating as all that. If they were so, why should it be so difficult to bring down and organise the supermind in the physical consciousness? What happy-go-lucky fancy-webspinning ignoramuses you all are! You speak of silence, consciousness, overmental, supramental, etc., as if they were so many electric buttons you have only to press and there you are. It may be one day, but meanwhile I have to discover everything about the working of all possible modes of electricity, all the laws, possibilities, perils, etc., construct modes of connection and communication, make the whole far-wiring system, try to find out how it can be made foolproof and all that in the course of a lifetime. And I have to do it while my blessed disciples are firing off their gay or gloomy a priori reasonings at me from a position of entire irresponsibility and expecting me to divulge everything to them not in hints but at length. Lord God in omnibus!"¹²

Then, with regard to hard labour on Savitri he wrote: "That is very simple. I used Savitri as a means of ascension. I began with it on a certain mental level, each time I could reach a higher level I rewrote from that level. Moreover I was particular—if part seemed

¹¹Savitri, pp. 200-01.

¹²Nirodbaran's Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo, pp. 544-45; also SABCL, Vol. 26, p. 230, letter dated 29 March 1936.

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to come from any lower levels I was not satisfied to leave it because it was good poetry. All had to be as far as possible of the same mint. In fact Savitri has not been regarded by me as a poem to be written and finished, but as a field of experimentation to see how far poetry could be written from one's own yogic consciousness and how that could be made creative. I did not rewrite Rose of God or the sonnets except for two or three verbal alterations made at the moment."¹³ [Nirodbaran's question to Sri Aurobindo was: "We have been wondering why you should have to write and rewrite your poetry — for instance, Savitri, ten or twelve times — when you have all the inspiration at your command and do not have to receive it with the difficulty that faces budding yogis like us." 29 March 1936]

All this was written to me in 1936. Since then the work proceeded slowly and gradually until between 1938 and 1950 he succeeded to a great extent in achieving what he aimed at, as stated in the letter above. I am sure if he had more time at his disposal and could work by himself, he would have tried to raise it to his ideal of perfect perfection. As it is, Savitri is, I suppose, the example par excellence of the future poetry he speaks of in his book The Future Poetry. Founder of the New Age, pioneer in the field of poetry, as in many others, he has left us an inexhaustible heritage of words, images, ideas, suggestions and hints about which we can only say: — here is God's plenty. Rameshwar Gupta very aptly calls it Eternity in Words.¹⁴ Generation after generation will drink in its soul's nectar from this perennial source. The life-span of the English language itself has increased a thousandfold. Shakespeare, it is said, increased the life-span of the English language by centuries. Sri Aurobindo said about Shakespeare: "That kind of spear does not shake everywhere." Now we find another far greater that will shake the world to its very roots. If for no other reason, the English-speaking races ought to be eternally grateful to the supreme poet of the grand epic for this miracle.

Sri Aurobindo, quoting in The Future Poetry these lines of an Elizabethan poet,

¹³Savitri, pp. 727-28.

¹⁴Eternity in Words: Chetna Prakashan, Bombay (1969).

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Or who can tell for what great work in hand

The greatness of our style is now ordained?

What powers it shall bring in, what spirits command?

writes: "It has since brought in many powers, commanded many spirits; but it may be that the richest powers, the highest and greatest spirit yet remain to be found and commanded."¹⁵1 believe that Sri Aurobindo's Savitri fulfils the sovereign potentiality he has foreseen.

Dr. Piper of Syracuse University says about Savitri that it already has inaugurated the New Age of Illumination and is probably the greatest epic in the English language... the most comprehensive, integrated, beautiful and perfect cosmic poem ever composed .... It ranges symbolically from primordial cosmic void, through earth's darkness and struggles, to the highest realms of supramental 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 towards the Absolute.¹⁶

The Mother has pronounced the last word on Savitri. I quote some extracts from a long talk on it to a young aspirant: "Before writing Savitri Sri Aurobindo told me, T am impelled to launch on a new adventure. I was hesitant in the beginning, but now I am decided. Still I do not know how far I shall succeed.' And the day on which he actually started he said, 'I have launched myself in a rudderless boat upon the vastness of the Infinite.' "^I7

"He has crammed the whole universe in a single book. It is a marvellous, magnificent work and of an incomparable perfection. It is a revelation, a meditation and seeking of the Infinite and the Eternal. Each verse of Savitri is like a Mantra which surpasses man's entire knowledge and the words are used and arranged in such a fashion that the sound of the rhythm itself takes you to the original sound of om... everything is there: mysticism, occultism, philosophy, history of evolution, history of man, gods of the creation and of Nature... Savitri is the spiritual path, the Tapasya, Sadhana — everything in its unique body. It has an extraordinary

¹⁵ The Future Poetry, SABCL, Vol. 9, p. .57.

¹⁶Raymond Frank Piper, Sri Aurobindo's Savitri, see Mother India, pp. 38-39, November 1958.

¹¹ Perspectives of Savitri, p. 45.

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power, it is the Truth in all its plenitude that he has brought down here on earth. These are his own experiences, the realities, the supracosmic truths. He has experienced them as one does the joy and the pain in a physical manner. He was walked in the darkness of Inconscience, even stepped near Death, endured the sufferings of Hell and he has come out of the mud, earthly misery in order to breath the sovereign Plenitude and enter into the supreme Ananda. He has crossed all these kingdoms, accepted all the consequences, suffered and endured physically what none can imagine. None up till now has suffered like him. He has accepted the suffering to transform it into the joy of union with the Supreme."¹⁸

NlRODBARAN

¹⁸Ibid, pp. 44-49. There are slight differences between the passages quoted here and as reported by Mona Sarkar.

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Savitri — the Epic of the Spirit

Once speaking at the Lingaraj College, Belgaum, on Sri Aurobindo's personality I said that looking round for a personality of the past with whom Sri Aurobindo can be compared in the wideness and the versatility of his genius, in the grandeur of revelation, in a superhuman atmosphere of sympathy for humanity which pervades his temperament and works, in high poetic achievement, in complexity and subtlety of intellect, in a rare synthesising and integrating power, in a total view of human perfection individual and collective, I could not find anybody except perhaps Veda-Vyasa, the great seer-poet of India. But, Veda-Vyasa has been regarded as a mythical figure by European scholars, for they could not believe that one single person could have written all the various works ascribed to him. They admit he must have written some works, but believe that subsequent generations have gone on adding to his works in order to borrow the halo of his genius and authority. But, if ever I believe now in the existence of Veda-Vyasa as one single personality responsible for all the works ascribed to him, it is because I know Sri Aurobindo today. It is not easily possible to believe that one and the same person could have written not only the greatest masterpiece of philosophy of the time but also indicated solutions for social problems and international politics, laid down new lines of poetical criticism and written not only short poems of striking merit both from the point of view of poetical substance and form — some of them ranking equal to the highest lyrical expression in the English language — but also a great epic poem of humanity.

This is an age of what is called "modernist" poetry and even the possibility of an epic being written in modem times is strongly discounted. It is supposed that the epic requires a certain primitive atmosphere for its birth and growth and, as modem times are anything but primitive, it is impossible for an epic to be written now. Even though in some of their latest tendencies in painting, sculpture and poetry the modernists are trying hard to reproduce or create according to primitivism with a vengeance, still, this being a critical age in which reason dominates and materialism is a living force, it is considered a practical impossibility to attempt a great epic and succeed. But we should be prepared for agreeable surprises

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from the creative spirit which can burst forth at the most unexpected moments in human history; for, the breath of the Lord bloweth where it listeth.

The conclusion about the impossibility of writing an epic in modem times rests mainly upon the examination of the trend of poetical spirit by European critics. They have taken for granted the cultural domination of the world by Europe as they took its economic and political domination. But culture is something much deeper than economics and politics. There are historical instances where a declining culture, politically dominated by another nation, has revived with a remarkable power of creativity. Very often the literary impact of an alien culture stimulates, invigorates and resuscitates the dormant creative possibilities of the subject race. This seems to have happened in the case of modem India. It is true that the various literatures of regional Indian languages were stagnant on account of the decline of national life, and all of them received a powerful impetus by the impact of European culture, especially as represented by the English language. Novel, drama, poetry, criticism, history, research along all the lines of literary effort have received an unprecedented inspiration as a means for the expression of national genius. A remarkable degree of literary progress has been achieved in every Indian language. But apart from these regional languages, English was adopted all over the vast continent not only as a medium of instruction but also as a vehicle of literary expression by its most advanced writers and thinkers. This gave rise to what has been termed Indo-English literature*, and has led to a curious literary phenomenon which is a very hopeful prelude to the cultural unification of mankind.

While the creative spirit of European nations is showing distinct signs of exhaustion and even some tendencies of decline, the resurgent spirit of India with all its rich spiritual heritage and possibilities is finding expression in the English language. The first sign of this remarkable achievement in poetic creation was given by the success of Tagore's Gitanjali. It showed that the expression of the Indian Spirit even in a remarkably Indian manner can find a high place in the cultural achievement of the human spirit. In fact, that which finds expression in Tagore is something of the fundamental spiritual elements and forms of Indian culture, not its widest sweep and utter depth. National resurgence after a

*Now called Indian Writings in English.

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period of political and social decline stirs the soul of the race to its very depths in the process of its re-awakening, throwing up all the elements of the culture with their characteristics into a ferment. Those elements that are found capable of survival, utility and vitality are retained, while those that have outlived their utility are rejected and dissolved. The basis of Indian culture goes back to the living spiritual experience embodied in the Vedas and Upanishads, the Gita, and Tantras and the Vedanta. Apart from the wide diffusion of spirituality in the consciousness of the masses, a traditional continuity of the practical process of self-realisation runs throughout the period of Indian history including the period of her decline. The names of Kabir, Nanak, Ramanand, Tulsi, Dadu, Chaitanya and others easily come to the mind while tracing the continuity to the very dawn of the Indian renaissance, which can be said to begin with the appearance of the colossal figure of Ramkrishna Paramhansa.

The fundamentally spirituo-religious character of the first forms which this movement of awakening took shows that it was not merely in isolated individuals that the Indian spiritual tradition persisted but that it had entered into the conscious life-forms, religious, social and even the sub-conscious of the whole race. The Brahmo Samaj, the Prarthana Samaj, the Arya Samaj are some of its well-known expressions. The national awakening and the struggle for political freedom gave inspiration to many writers and poets who boldly experimented with new forms of literary expression.

Poets are not lacking who tried to invent new forms suitable to the expression of the rising spirit of the nation and in almost every Indian regional language all the forms of European poetical expression have been accepted and experimented upon. Blank verse, prose poetry, — all have been tried, some of them with remarkable success. They all contributed to the awakening of the new spirit of literary expression, though it must be acknowledged that a conscious search for an epic form did not meet with success. Usually it ended with a discovery of a new metre, or of new combinations of old metres or a novel use of an old metre by introducing into it new laws of rhythm so as to yield some form very near to the blank verse of English language. But a search for a mere new poetic form for an epic was perhaps bound to fail because though form is important, and very important, in literary expression, yet it is the spirit which the form embodies that really gives life to the form.

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It argues well for the cultural unification of mankind that India has begun to pay back the great cultural debt it owes to Europe by her new creations in the English language. It was therefore a phenomenon of very great significance when Sri Aurobindo turned his remarkable poetical capacity to the creation of an epic in English to embody his grand vision of the Spirit. It is well-known that Sri Aurobindo had devoted himself to the pursuit of spirituality which is the foundation of the Indian culture. He is not merely a revivalist, his spirituality is not of the type of a traditional repetition; it is a resurgence, a reorientation, which carries the tradition many steps forward by his spiritual discovery of the Supermind. In him the Indian spirit finds its greatest exponent. The Divine, the sense of that living Reality, the need of bringing the influence and the presence of the Divine in all human activities and the consequent transformation of human nature and life into an expression of the Divine, — these are some of the fundamental concepts of his great vision of man's future. In the words of K.D. Sethna: "Philosophical statement lending logical plausibility to facts of the Spirit is necessary in a time like ours when the intellect is acutely in the forefront and Sri Aurobindo has answered the need by writing that expository masterpiece, The Life Divine.... To create a poetic mould equally massive and multiform as The Life Divine for transmitting the living Reality to the furthest bound of speech — such a task is incumbent on one who stands as a maker of a new spiritual epoch." Savitri fulfils that task.

Epic as a form of literary expression has not been static and conventional but has been continually developing, both with regard to the subject matter, manner and form. This can be seen from the remark of a critic who says: "Homer fixes the type and way and artistic purpose; Virgil perfects the type; Milton perfects the purpose." Whether one agrees with this opinion or not, it is clear that the epic has not been a stereotyped form of literary expression throughout history. It has not been a form constantly present; it has been recurrent. Looking at the whole field of epic poetry, one may divide it into two main classes: the authentic epic, generally intended for recitation, and the literary epic mainly intended for reading. The first type has a simple concrete subject and a sustained grandeur and splendour. Generally it concerns a great story which has been absorbed into the prevailing consciousness of the people.

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The story is supposed to have taken place in what has been termed the 'heroic age' in which hot racial elements and nascent cultural trends are brought out boldly and simply. While in the Iliad, Odyssey and in the Niebelungenlied, the subject matter concerns a great fight which has stamped itself indelibly on the memory of the race, in Dante's The Divine Comedy there is no story at all in that sense. With regard to this difference, a great critic says: "It is not necessary for the story to be a historical fact. Only it must have poetic reality." The authentic epic tells the story greatly, that is, in a high manner. This consists in endowing life with a significance. One of its purposes can be said to be to create values in life. Life by itself seems to have no significance, it is valueless. When there is this sense of utter want of significance of life, a sense of its ultimate uselessness, "a blankness of unperturbable darkness," then, says a critic, "the word 'hell' is not too strong to express it." In the authentic epic wherein courage in the face of danger, heroism in fighting for a cause is portrayed, the significance of life is brought out, its value found. This bringing out of the purpose in the epic may not be intellectually precise, but it is deeply felt. Let us observe in passing also, that courage or heroism are not the only values of life, and that love, sacrifice, attainment of perfection and other ideals can rank even higher.

Another critic of the epic says: "Epic-purpose will have to abandon the necessity of telling a story." We have already observed that The Divine Comedy has neither a mythological nor a historical story. It is in fact allegorical. Dante himself distinguishes between two senses in a poem, — a literal and an allegorical sense. "The literal sense of The Divine Comedy is the fortunes of a certain soul after death. Its allegorical sense is the destiny of man and the idea of perfect justice." Dante has made a reliable symbol out of his own experience. In Milton's Paradise Lost the pure story element is absent. "Milton from the knowledge of himself created Satan and Christ," — says Lascelles Abercrombie. His angels are not like Homer's Gods. To Homer the Gods are close and real, whereas Milton's angels are far and seem abstract. Milton's story deals with the mystery of the individual will in eternal opposition to the Divine Will. Satan, the creator of all evil on earth is conscious — very acutely conscious, of his limitations and also of the Divine Power that contains and drives him. It seems almost certain that after Milton an epic dealing entirely with an objective story is not possible, for, the rationalism with which the modern age began

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has been pushing man more and more towards a greater and greater subjective trend.

Sometimes it is said that "man and man's purpose in the world" is the theme for all epics. This may be accepted if a progressive evolution of man and of his purpose also is admitted. Man has been trying to discover, or "uncover" his Self— and in this great discovery he is bound to discover also this purpose as an individual and as a collectivity.

Efforts at writing an epic in European languages after Milton have, so far, not been successful. The feeling among the critics is that epic-manner and epic-content are trying for a divorce at present. The last effort, on a sufficiently large scale on the continent, was Goethe's Faust which, however, falls far short of the epic height and grandeur. Efforts in the English language were more or less of the nature of exercises and experiments lacking vitality and inspiration, and have therefore not attained success. Shelley's Revolt of Islam, Keats's incomplete Hyperion have something of the epic accent, but they do not go far enough. Hugo's La Légende des Siécles or Browning's The Ring and the Book, Hardy' s Dynasts — all seem to have some element which can be called epic in the sense of a developing significance of life which they see, but they fail to achieve the largeness, the grandeur and the sustained height and an integration which can give the sense of unity. We have already referred to a feeling among critics that the authentic epic as a literary form is doomed. Guesses have been hazarded as to the possible future of the epic content and of the epic form. The question has been debated whether it is possible to combine the epic and the dramatic forms with success. Some have thought of a connected sequence of separate poems like Hugo's as a possible and even an appropriate form. But the creative spirit has its own surprises for us. This was exemplified once in the past when the dictum that an epic should be a narrative on a large scale was falsified by Dante. For the modem lover of the muse another such pleasant surprise is offered by Savitri.

European critics have not taken any serious notice of the epics of India, both authentic and literary, because the Indian form naturally did not fall within the idea and the form — or rather the formal definition — of epic in the West. But that is no reason to deny the right of epic to the Indian Mahabharata, Ramayana and Bhagavata

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of the Sanskrit language and Shahanama of the Persian besides literary epics like the Raghuvaṃśa of Kalidasa and Jānakiharanam of Kumardas. The Indian epics represent "the ancient historical or legendary traditional history turned to creative use as a significant mythus or tale expressive of some spiritual or religious or ethical or ideal meaning, and thus formative of the mind of the people... The work of these epics was to popularise high philosophic and ethical ideas and cultural practice."

Sri Aurobindo has given an estimate of the two Indian epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana in his Foundations of Indian Culture which is quoted here:

The Mahabharata especially is not only the story of the Bharatas, the epic of an early event which had become a national tradition but on a vast scale the epic of the soul and religious and ethical mind and social and political ideals and culture and life of India. It is said popularly of it and with a certain measure of truth that whatever is in India is in the Mahabharata. The Mahabharata is the creation and expression not of a single individual mind, but of the mind of a nation; it is the poem of itself written by a whole people. It would be vain to apply to it canons of a poetical art applicable to an epic poem with a smaller and a more restricted purpose, but still a great and quite conscious art has been expended both on its detail and its total structure. The whole poem has been built like a vast national temple unrolling slowly its immense and complex idea from chamber to chamber, crowded with significant groups and sculptures and inscriptions, the grouped figures carved in divine or semi-divine proportions, a humanity aggrandised and half-uplifted to superhumanity and yet always true to the human motive and idea and feeling, the strain of the real constantly raised by the tones of the ideal, the life of this world amply portrayed but subjected to the conscious influence and presence of the powers of the worlds behind it, and the whole unified by the long embodied procession of a consistent idea worked out in the wide steps of the poetic story. As is needed in an epic narrative, the conduct of the story is the main interest of the poem and it is carried through with an at once large and minute movement, wide and bold in the mass, striking and effective in detail, always simple, strong and epic in its style and pace. At the

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same time though supremely interesting in substance and vivid in the manner of the telling as a poetic story, it is something more, — a significant tale, Itihas, representative throughout of the central ideas and the ideals of Indian life and culture. The leading motive is the Indian idea of the Dharma. [Here the Vedic notion of the struggle between powers of Light and powers of Darkness, powers of truth and powers of falsehood is continued in these epics and takes the figure of a story. It is the old struggle of Deva and Asura, God and Titan, but represented in terms of human life.]

The Ramayana is a work of the same essential kind as the Mahabharata; it differs only by a greater simplicity of plan, a more delicate ideal temperament and a finer glow of poetic warmth and colour. The main bulk of the poem... is evidently by a single hand and has a less complex and more obvious unity of structure. There is less of the philosophic, more of the purely poetic mind, more of the artist, less of the builder. The whole story is from beginning to end of one piece and there is no deviation from the stream of the narrative. At the same time, there is a like vastness of vision, and even more wide-winged flight of epic sublimity in the conception and sustained richness of minute execution in the detail. The structural power, strong workmanship and method of disposition of the Mahabharata remind one of the art of the Indian builders, the grandeur and the boldness of outline and wealth of colour and minute decorative execution of the Ramayana suggest rather a transcript into literature of the spirit and style of Indian painting... On one side is portrayed an ideal manhood, a divine beauty of virtue and ethical order, a civilisation founded on the Dharma and realising an exaltation of the moral ideal which is presented with a singularly strong appeal of aesthetic grace and harmony and sweetness; on the other are wild and anarchic and almost amorphous forces of superhuman egoism and self-will and exultant violence, and the two ideas and powers of mental nature living ad embodied are brought into conflict and led to a decisive issue of the victory of the divine man over the Rakshasa....

The poetical manner of these epics is not inferior to the greatness of their substance. The style and the verse in which

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they are written have always a noble epic quality, a lucid classical simplicity and directness rich in expression but stripped of superfluous ornaments, a swift, vigorous flexible and fluid verse constantly sure of the epic cadence. There is a difference in the temperament of the language. The characteristic diction of the Mahabharata is almost austerely masculine, trusting to force of sense and inspired accuracy of term, almost ascetic in its simplicity and directness and a frequent fine and happy bareness; it is the speech of a strong and rapid poetical intelligence and a great and straightforward vital force, brief and telling in phrase but by virtue of a single-minded sincerity and, expect in some knotted passages or episodes, without any rhetorical labour of compactness, a style like the light and strong body of a runner nude and pure and healthily lustrous and clear without superfluity of flesh or exaggeration of muscle, agile and swift and untired in the race. There is inevitably much in this vast poem that is in an inferior manner, little or nothing that falls below a certain sustained level in which there is always something of this virtue. The diction of the Ramayana is shaped in a more attractive mould, a marvel of sweetness and strength, lucidity and warmth and grace; its phrase has not only poetic truth and epic force and diction but a constant intimate vibration of the feeling of the idea, emotion or object: there is an element of fine ideal delicacy in its sustained strength and breath of power. In both poems it is a high poetic soul and inspired intelligence that is at work; the directly intuitive mind of the Veda and Upanishads has retired behind the veil of the intellectual and outwardly psychological imagination.

We shall close this long citation of the estimate of the two great Indian epics by Sri Aurobindo with a comparison with the European epic which he himself has given:

These epics are therefore not a mere mass of untransmuted legend and folklore, as is ignorantly objected, but a highly artistic representation of intimate significances of life, the living presentment of a strong and noble thinking, a developed ethical and aesthetic mind and a high social and political ideal, the ensouled image of a great culture. As rich in

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freshness of life but immeasurably more profound and evolved in thought and substance than the Greek, as advanced in maturity of culture but more vigorous and vital and young in strength than the Latin epic poetry, the Indian epic poems were fashioned to serve a greater and completer national and cultural function and that they should have been received and absorbed by both the high and the low, the cultured and the masses and remained through twenty centuries an intimate and formative part of the life of a whole nation is of itself the strongest possible evidence of the greatness and fineness of this ancient Indian culture.¹

Savitri possesses unity of structure in a remarkable degree. The legend on which it is founded affords an ample story element for such a unity. The opening canto with the Symbol Dawn brings us straight to the crisis of the story — the imminent death of Satyavan —and introduces the chief character Savitri in glowing and divine colours. It brings out at the same time the nature of the crisis, its cosmic significance and thereby raises the character of Savitri to that of the "saviour" of men. The attention of the reader is gripped, —if he can enter into the Seer's vision — and he is anxious to know how Savitri is going to meet Yama, the god of Death. To show how Savitri came to be constituted as a "half-divine" being even in her external being, the Seer rightly pursues the thread of her birth and explains to us how "a world's desire compelled her mortal birth." This brings us to the character of Aswapati, her father, who is no ordinary king but a "colonist from immortality." His attempts at self-perfection and his great spiritual attainments form a very natural background for the birth of so great a spiritual figure as Savitri. The "epic climb" of human soul really gains an epic grandeur in the vision of the Master and endows this earth with a tremendous significance. There are greater worlds than the earth, higher levels of consciousness than man's, but there is no more significant world than this our earth in the great divine destiny that it holds.

The canvas of Savitri is as wide as the cosmos and it takes into its purview worlds of being that are connected with humanity which are not perceived by it because of its limitations of ignorance. Nevertheless, these levels do act upon human consciousness. They

¹ The Foundations of Indian Culture, SABCL, Vol. 14, pp. 286-93.

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also include higher planes of consciousness which have not yet manifested here but which are pressing upon the earth-consciousness for manifestation. They contain beings, powers and presences that live on those planes of Light, Consciousness and Bliss, the worlds of Truth. The soul of aspiring humanity symbolised in Aswapati, the Lord of manifested Life, first descends from his human consciousness into nether regions of unconsciousness and materiality, the regions of the lower vital, its heaven and its hell, as a conscious witness. He then ascends to the regions of Heavens of the higher Vital and then crosses over to the Heavens of the Mind. After soaring into regions above Mind, into the Heavens of the Ideal and Illumined Mind he passes beyond the borders of manifested creation to the centre from which creation proceeds. Through a great shaft of Light across a tunnel that leads to the centre, he comes face to face with the World-Soul, the Two-in-One. It is there that he experiences the presence of the Divine Mother who supports the cosmos. It is She, the Power of the Supreme, supporting the cosmos, who bestows on him the boon that saves mankind from the stark imprisonment of Ignorance and subjection to Death. Being a power of the Truth-Consciousness, Savitri not only liberates man but creates conditions here for the embodiment of the Light Supreme. She shows how man's life here can be fulfilled in a life divine.

This complex and rich yet clear cosmogony revealed in Aswapati's voyage enriches the significance of the earth as a crucial centre of a divine experiment and enriches the life of man beyond his highest dreams. Incidentally, it indicates the nature of the task awaiting Savitri and the tremendous odds against which she would have to contend. Aswapati himself has advanced a great deal on the path to self-perfection. Throughout his vast journey through the various worlds.

He travelled in his mute and single strength

Bearing the burden of the world's desire.²

But he,— a "protagonist of the mysterious play", "a thinker and a toiler in the ideal's air", "one in the front of the immemorial quest", — felt baffled when he considered the destiny of the race. When the Divine Mother commands him to continue his labours for man's perfection he invokes her help. A boon is given to him in answer

² Savitri, p. 101 .

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to his prayer. Savitri's mortal birth was thus in answer to "a world's desire". Even ordinary incidents in Savitri get endowed with cosmic significance. There is nothing that is not conscious — even the seasons are not a mere mechanical succession of external changes but conscious operations in the cosmic body.

Thus we see the problem and the difficult conditions for its solution. The problem is of man's imperfection and his unquenchable thirst for perfection, of his groping in the darkness of ignorance and his seeking for Light, of his mortality and his thirst for immortality. It can be solved by spiritual effort alone — no external change however well-meaning or seemingly successful would really solve his problem. And even the highest spiritual effort of man cannot attain the goal unaided, — the task is impossible. It can be solved only if the supreme Divine can be persuaded to descend on earth and take up the burden of man. Such higher and divine source of help are available to man. In fact, that is the claim and testimony of man's religion, mysticism, philosophy, and all his upward efforts. Savitri lays down the conditions of the problem in the clearest manner. The story attains its cosmic significance and the fate of Satyavan rings with the destiny of man. Man, the middle term between the Nescience and the Superconscience, sees the forces of the nether worlds and feels their impact upon his life. He sees also the possibilities of Higher Worlds and feels their action upon himself. He has to work out his destiny with the Divine help upon this terrestrial globe. This has been determined by a supreme Wisdom and Power. All this we see while we share the Master's cosmic gaze turned towards the earth. The vision of the elements that help and those that hinder, — and by their very hindrance make the final victory possible, — the imprisoning limitations even of those that help, gives us some idea of the tangled weft of human life with its baffling complexity and brings out the need of looking up beyond all mental and ethical idealism to something above all that man has attempted and attained up till now.

The Indian conception of the Avatar, the descent of the Divine in earth-consciousness, undergoes in the character of Savitri a profound change. Savitri, the Supreme Power of Grace descended into life, is the only feminine Avatar in the world. It is perhaps in the fitness of things that the Divine Mother in all her love, sympathy and deep understanding should descend to help her children on earth in the fight against the forces of Inconscience and bring to

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birth a new race of men embodying here the higher Supramental Consciousness. But in the current Indian conception, even though the Avatar is the Divine descended into the earth-consciousness, he is not supposed to participate in human imperfections. He comes down generally to do a divine work, — to save humanity in a crisis or help it forward in its evolution. But he remains all the time and always Divine and to the Divine nothing could be impossible. When he labours at his task it is only to conform to the human law that he does so. In reality, his divinity does everything. An Avatar, thus, is in humanity but not of it; his experiences are not like those of other men. Sri Aurobindo for the first time has brought out clearly the necessity of complete identification by the Avatar in his nature-part with the nature of man in order to save humanity. This identification, be it noted, is not an ignorant subjection on his part to Nature or even an outcome of sympathy as ordinarily understood by man. It proceeds on the basis of knowledge, — it is an act of divine compassion, an act of grace.

The greatest saviours of men do not have to deal directly with outwardly great or critical events in the life of humanity. For, when properly understood, man's problems are all inner, psychological and spiritual. The roots of man's conflicts are within him and it is his inner conflict that projects itself into his outer life. Some of the great spiritual battles that are fought within man's soul stamp themselves on human history, as in the case of Christ and Buddha. The epic Savitri accomplishes two difficult tasks: it creates a personality, Savitri, a human-divine character and, secondly, it succeeds in making all the inner spiritual experiences of man real, concrete and direct. It is well known that the highest spiritual experiences defy expression in language. But Savitri for the first time succeeds in such a thorough objectification of them in terms of images and symbols that the sensitive reader feels their concreteness. Out of many examples we shall just give one here as an illustration; it describes the work of the Goddess of inspiration:

In darkness' core she dug out wells of light,

On the undiscovered depths imposed a form,

Lent a vibrant cry to the unuttered vasts,

And through great shoreless, vioceless, starless breadths

Bore earthward fragments of revealing thought

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Hewn from the silence of the Ineffable.³

One feels the concreteness of the silence of the Ineffable and the "hewn fragments of revealing thought" being borne slowly earthwards.

This was no result of a happy accident but a result of the conscious art of the great Master. That he was conscious of it becomes clear from the following quotation taken from a letter in reply to certain criticism of Savitri. He speaks about the plan of Savitri:

It has been planned not on the scale of Lycidas or Comus or some brief narrative poem, but of the larger epical narrative, almost a minor, though a very minor Ramayana; it aims not at the minimum but at an exhaustive exposition of its world-vision or world-interpretation. One artistic method is to select a limited subject and even on that to say what is indispensable, what is centrally suggestive and leave the rest to the imagination or understanding of the reader. Another method which I hold to be equally artistic or, if you like, architectural is to give a large and even a vast, a complete interpretation, omitting nothing that is necessary, fundamental to the completeness: that is the method I have chosen in Savitri.⁴

Savitri deals with a realm of experience that is not known to the common man and it is therefore likely that it may not meet with general appreciation or understanding at first. The creator of Savitri knew this very well and so he wrote: "Savitri is a record of a seeing, of an experience, which is not of the common kind, and it is often very far from what the general human mind sees or experiences." But even the modernist poet cannot lay claim to a universal understanding and appreciation of his work. Savitri demands a certain minimum of capacity of vision in addition to a broad cosmopolitan enlightened outlook familiar with the latest advances in several branches of human knowledge. But that cannot be a bar to its high epic qualities. On the contrary, it opens out an altogether new and rich realm of experience to the reader and if he has to make an effort to enter into the spirit of it, he will find that his labours are more than amply rewarded.

³ Savitri, p. 41. ⁴ Ibid,, p. 792. (Perspectives of Savitri, pp. 10-11.)

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We have brought to the notice of the reader that there is spiritual affinity between the poetical expression of the Veda and that of Savitri. In a general sense it can even be asserted that the subject matter of Savitri has an affinity with the subject matter of the Veda. That is to say, not only in some parts does the manner of expression resemble the Vedic style; but the vision of Savitri is surcharged with a constant play of the light of inspiration and revelation from which the Vedic seers received their hymns. The Veda deals with the struggle between the powers of the Light and the powers of the Darkness in terms of symbols. Of course, there is a basic difference between the symbolism of Savitri and that of the Veda. The occult system of symbolism which the Vedic seers used as a sort of spiritual algebra fell into disuse and was forgotten because of the conscious veil of secrecy used by them. In Savitri it is replaced by an open psychological and spiritual symbolism which interprets the legend using it as a transparent veil for conveying its world of spiritual experience. In fact the legend lends itself easily to such an interpretation. It is itself full of incidents and characters into which the poet's inspiration has woven the whole question of the supreme silent Eternal and its manifestation in Time beginning with the dark Night of the Nescience and mounting step by step by evolution towards some superconscient expression of the Eternal in earth consciousness. In that unfolding manifestation of the cosmic effort man appears as a transitional being between the Nescience and the Superconscient Divine. This vision alters entirely the value of man and his life and places before him the high destiny he is here to fulfil as an instrument. Throughout the poem this grand purpose dominates the atmosphere and wherever poetically necessary the Seer brings it to our view by apt repetition. Another important point of difference between symbolic Vedic poetry and Savitri is that the Vedic hymns are a creation of various seers with their natural temperamental characteristics of expression, while Savitri is the creation of a single genius.

This vast subject, compared with those of other epics that are extant turns out to be greater than any that has been sung by any epic poet. Dante speaks of inferno, — hell, — through which the human spirit has to pass to arrive at purgatory to be purified of all its dross in order to reach the vision beatific. But the Beatitude is far in the heaven of the Divine and this earth is condemned to remain a vale of tears, — it is a place where the soul of man is tested in order to prove its worthiness to reach the kingdom of

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God away from the earth. Milton wanted "to justify the ways of God to man"; but he does not succeed in his task because perhaps the inspiration of puritanic Christianity was not sufficient to fulfil that task. Savitri is a poem of hope and fulfilment on earth. It is a poem of knowledge in the sense that it weaves the conditions of man's highest fulfilment in its epic pattern.

Sri Aurobindo has said that his Savitri is planned like a Ramayana on a small scale, but it is full-bodied so far as the subject-matter is concerned, therefore it is to be taken as a full-fledged epic. Though from the point of length Savitri already overpasses that of all European epics, yet all earnest critics would agree with Abercrombie that length by itself is not enough to gain the stature of epic greatness for a poem. It is the sustained breath of inspiration, the high tone of poetical expression that are important.

Between the Ramayana and the Mahabharata on the one hand and Savitri on the other there can be no real and direct comparison for obvious reasons. The spirit of the two languages Sanskrit and English would itself bring in so many incommensurate elements. And yet it is possible to consider them as expressions of the Indian spirit in poetry separated by a period of at least two thousand years. "Ramayana," says Sri Aurobindo, "has epic sublimity in the conception and sustained richness of minute execution in detail." The Ramayana has more feeling of ideas and emotions of things. It has "ideal delicacy and sustained strength of power." It portrays ideal manhood, and a "divine beauty of virtue and ethical order, a civilisation founded on dharma, the ideal law of conduct." It gives us on the one hand the picture of "an exaltation of moral ideal which is presented with a singularly strong appeal of aesthetic grace and harmony and sweetness; on the other hand are wild and anarchic and almost amorphous forces of superhuman egoism and self-will and exultant violence." These two ideals and powers of the mental nature are brought into conflict in the embodiments of Rama and Ravana, and led to a decisive issue of victory of the ideal man over Rakshasa.

The Mahabharata proceeds from a "strong and quick intelligence and a great and straight vital force and single-minded sincerity." Both the Mahabharata and the Ramayana are "products of inspired intelligence with a high poetic tone." Both are "ensouled images of a great culture." These epics give us the spiritual significance of individual and collective life from a strong and noble thought-power of a mind that has high social, political and ethical ideals

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and is artistically delicate and refined. Savitri too offers a whole world of experience but it is altogether a new world in which the life of man, — in fact the whole view of the cosmos, — undergoes a great and radical change. In Ramayana, for instance, the ideal law of conduct, dharma, is seen triumphing over the forces of Titanic egoism that were trying to establish their reign. Savitri is not a rendering, or a vision of the world in terms of the current laws of human evolution as seen by the ideal mind. In enunciates a new law, a new world of consciousness transcending — and yet fulfilling at the same time — the evolution attained by man up till now. And it renders it with such a rare power of inspiration and vision that it succeeds in making the rare experience concrete to our minds. The Ramayana hints at the suprarational and openly speaks of the Divine as against the Asura and the Rakshasa — the Titanic force. But there it remains something mystical and therefore unknown. Savitri deals with the suprarational but makes it a natural part of its vision of man and deals with it as one of the legitimate fields of consciousness to be attained by man. In spite of these differences one can say that there is similarity in the poignant pathos pervading the life of Rama, the Sattwic hero, and of Savitri, — the embodiment of Divine Grace descended to save mankind from the bondage of Ignorance and Inconscience. In Ramayana, Dharma, the ideal law of life as formulated by the religious seeking in man, and Rama, the man who embodies that law, seem to reign supreme, or rather, to pervade the whole atmosphere of the poem, while in Savitri not merely an ideal law of life, but the Divine and his Purpose reign and pervade the atmosphere. In Ramayana the Divine is brought face to face with a great crisis through his own formed Sattwic nature, — the highest human mould attained by Nature in her evolution up till then. The conflict there is with the exaggerated forces of egoism and ambition trying to dominate the world. In Savitri evolution reaches a higher rung than the mind and Savitri, the Divine Grace incarnate, has to fight not merely with the hostile demonic ego merely but with the original force of cosmic Ignorance, the Inconscient represented by its extreme form of death. In raising this basic problem of elimination of the Inconscient, the cause of man's subjection to his imperfection, suffering and evil, Savitri is unique, and goes deeper than other epics towards its solution. It calls out the Divine that is hidden at present in the human mould to deal direct with the problem of man's emancipation and of establishment of the divine kingdom on earth. To

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the vision of Savitri, to the vision of Truth seen by the Seer, the whole of life is the legitimate field for the Divine to manifest himself in. It also sees with equal clearness the great and formidable obstacles in the path of the divine victory.

The Mahabharata as Sri Aurobindo has said "embodies not only the whole national tradition of India but is an expression of the religious and the ethical mind and social and political ideals of India. It is a vast store of story within story, a whole string of mythology built like a vast national temple," "a humanity aggrandised and half uplifted to superhumanity yet always true to the human motive, idea and feeling." Life of this world in Mahabharata is amply portrayed but is subjected to constant conscious influences and divine powers of worlds behind it and a consistent idea brings about a sort of complex unity in the epic. Savitri lifts the veil for man from over the worlds that are behind. In fact it is a world upon world full of beings and powers heaped upon one another laying bare the interaction of these complex worlds and man's life upon earth. Here in Savitri it is not the ethical and the religious soul of India embodying a national tradition only; it is the soul of man in the mould of the Indian spirit widening out into the vast Soul of Humanity under the stress of an intense spiritual aspiration — ascending to the highest and turning its gaze upon the whole complex field of cosmogony illuminating with its power of rare knowledge all the worlds that are the legitimate field for the spiritual adventure of man. It is said: "Whatever is in India, is in the Mahabharata." It can be said that all that man is and holds within himself, all that he is likely to be, is in Savitri. The poet of the Mahabharata perhaps saw with his prophetic vision the Age of Kali, the Iron Age, approaching and sang his song celestial of the triumph of righteousness against the apparently overwhelming array of the forces of unrighteousness by the play of the secret Divine managing the whole plot of the human drama from behind the veil. Savitri turns its grand vision to the Age of Gold that is coming, the reign of Truth that is in prospect and envisages the supreme fulfilment of man by his ascent to the Divine and the open reign of the Divinity over life to the most external aspect. It is a creative vision that calls upon the soul of man to rise to its highest. It synthesises all the spiritual gains of humanity in a living and organic unity. It is like a vast cosmic temple built for humanity. It unrolls, unfolds its structure of immense complex worlds through which the Master's vision shows us the voyaging soul of man

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traversing and ascending till it reaches at last its own Reality in the Divine and brings down the Divine Presence here on earth to transform the life of man. In Mahabharata with its different purpose, the outer story engulfs our attention. We get lost in the human and emerge after long intervals for a short while so see the spiritual significance of things or feel the play of hidden divine forces behind the surface. At times, character dominates. The Mahabharata enchants us by the play of the changing colours of life, the play of hazard, its high mental ideals, the deep pathos of human life and fate. Kings and royal dynasties and their fate claim our willing attention and interest. In Savitri the basic issue of subjection of man to the Darkness of Ignorance — earth, and love and doom — and the inevitability of death grips us from the first. The problem stands out clear and is never out of sight. Events and characters come but have significance in so far as they are conscious agents in the working out of the problem of man's destiny. Savitri lifts us out of the mundane and the ordinary rut of human life to a point of view from where we see the whole play of life, in fact, the whole cosmos, with a cosmic vision of a divine Purpose trying to work itself out through the life of man. The ultimate significance of life as emanating from the Mahabharata is often ambiguous, depending upon individual interpretation of events, of motives of characters and of the ideals pursued. We often meet people drawing diametrically opposite conclusions about the significance of the Mahabharata. So far as Savitri is concerned it is free from such possible ambiguity. In the Mahabharata man suffers, struggles, tries to win, sometimes succeeds or fails, fate intervenes in human life, and the relation between man and God is in a very great degree indirect. In Savitri man, even as a struggling and a suffering being, is raised to a higher status because man knows himself to be an episode between the Inconscient and the unattained Superconscient. In this view, the whole life of man becomes a part in the working out of a higher purpose, a supreme will. In Savitri the relation between man and God is direct.

Throughout Savitri one finds the question of Eternity and Time and their relation constantly repeated in different contexts to bring out their interdependence, or rather, the dependence of Time-Eternity on Timeless-Eternity. It is Timeless-Eternity of the Absolute that wells out into the flow of Time-Eternity, carrying

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with it the unrolling of the cosmos. "The Eternal's quiet holds the cosmic act," (p. 120) says the Master. There are two ends of Eternity visible in Savitri, — an Eternal below facing man with its unfathomable depth of darkness of the Nescience which may be called the Dark Eternity described in the Veda as "darkness covered thickly by darkness" in which there was neither "being nor non-being". The other is the Eternity of the Divine Absolute, beyond the realms of the three supemals — Sat, Cit and Ananda. Many have felt an irreconcilable opposition between Timeless Eternity of the Absolute and Time-eternity which is constantly flowing. Time is posited as something contradictory to the Timeless, the Eternal. It is maintained that the Eternal beyond Time alone is the Real and that time-movement is unreal and even non-existent. Savitri throughout gives the vision of the true reconciliation of this opposition. It shows us the Nescience, the dark Night, as a mask of the Divine, the Eternal and wherever an opportunity occurs it also shows that Timeless Eternity (of the Absolute) is the fount and origin of Time and that behind the veil the Divine is Himself the creator and dynamic support of the cosmos. The conception of a Time-Eternity as a dynamic Reality depending organically upon Timeless Eternity is one enunciated clearly for the first time by Sri Aurobindo in the world of thought. He constantly speaks of the two ladders, one of descent of the Absolute into the Nescience and the other of ascent from Nescience to the Supreme. Far from Eternity being in opposition to Time-movement, the grand vision of Savitri constantly brings Eternity in moments of Time. This opposition between Time and Eternity is, in fact, a result of our mind's divided consciousness and its inability to reconcile what seems to it the opposites. Mind commits the error of applying its own logic which is that of the finite to the Infinite whose logic is different. The result is that mind can give us only a partial view of the Infinite. In any supreme vision of the Reality the two — Eternity and Time — are not only reconciled but become organic and indivisible. Viewed as an expression of the supreme Divine — on some date in the "calander of the Unknown"* — the moments of Time become replete with the presence of the Eternal and then the whole cosmos, from the infinitesimal material particle to the highest Infinite Being, is seen pulsating with such a multiple and vast play of Eternity that the word "eternity" itself seems to gain an ineffable

*lbid., p. 59.

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significance in that great vision. It is about such a moment of realisation that Savitri says "a marriage with eternity divinised Time." It is possible that the mind may continue to ask: "Why at all this movement, this cosmic manifestation from the Supreme and Silent Eternity?" The answer — one among the many poetical answers — is:

That the eyes of the Timeless might look out from Time And world manifest the unveiled Divine.⁵

To another question "How did this miracle happen?" the Seer says that it is Life that "has lured the Eternal into the arms of Time."⁶ It is true that man does not feel this eternity in his present state of consciousness because there it is hidden by the movement of Time which exclusively occupies him. But even there it is present behind the veil. The Master expresses it so poetically! "Lulled by Time's beats eternity sleeps in us."⁷ We then feel the justification of the line which says, spiritual beauty "squanders eternity on a beat of Time,"⁸ and also of the description of Savitri as "a prodigal of her rich divinity'"' who gave herself and all she was to men. He speaks of Aswapati, the human king, as "a colonist from immortality" because in his inner being he was conscious of his origin in the Eternal. He sees the relation between Eternity and Time-movement:

Ascending and descending twixt life's poles

The seried kingdoms of the graded Law

Plunged from the Everlasting into Time,

Then glad of a glory of multitudinous mind

And rich with life's adventure and delight

And packed with the beauty of Matter's shapes and hues

Climbed back from Time into undying Self,

Up a golden ladder carrying the Soul,

Tying with diamond threads the Spirit's extremes.¹⁰

Let us for a moment suppose that Eternity is realised here in Time and man succeeds in manifesting the Divine in life. What then would happen? The Master envisages an endless divine unfoldment in time. Says he:

⁵ Ibid., p. 72. ⁶ Ibid., p. 178. ⁷ Ibid., p. 170. ⁸ Ibid., p. 5.

⁹Ibid., p. 7. ¹⁰Ibid., pp. 88-89.

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The Spirit's greatness is our timeless source

And it shall be our crown in endless Time.¹¹

The opposition between Eternity and Time seems to be resolved in human life by the intervention of a power of the Divine. It is She who acts as an "ambassadress" between Eternity and Time. She embodies herself forth in the form of Divine Love, or rather, of a being carrying the saving power of the Divine Love within herself. All true human love has this divine element in it, however, perverted it may be in its actual expression. The highest ideal of love conceived by man is, really speaking, a manifestation of this "infinity's centre". Love is that embodiment of the Eternal in Time which carries with it the stamp of immortality.

Eternity drew close disguised as Love

And laid its hands upon the body of Time.¹²

In the language of the Master: "Death is a shadow of love."

This love "wider than the universe" is really the Divine Love. Love and Death seem to embody two contradictory principles, one affirming the divine eternity and immortality, the other, insisting on the eternity of the Nescience, of mortality. Through three of his poems this subject of love has been treated by the Master and it is in Savitri that it reaches its highest height. In Urvasie Pururavas struck by the shaft of immortal love, denied fulfilment by the power of the gods, at last gains his immortal love on the heights of Heaven. In Love and Death Ruru recovers Priyamvada from the dark nether regions of Death by the power of the charm of the supreme Mother and that of the God of Love. In both of these poems the immortality and eternity of Love are affirmed. It is in Savitri that Love divine comes as the embodiment of the Supreme Grace to deliver the soul of man out of the clutches of Death. Savitri raises the whole problem to its cosmic proportions and brings in the necessary divine elements whose intervention alone can lead to the successful solution of the opposition. The colloquy between Savitri, Love Divine incarnate, and Death is among the most inspired utterances of world's poetry. Conquest over death, attainment of immortality has been the dream of man from the dawn of his awakening. It finds expression in the Vedic hymns, in the famous aspiration of the seer of the Upanishad who

¹³Ibid., p. 110. ¹² Ibid., p. 237.

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chanted "from death lead me to immortality," and who affirmed in a mortal world the immortality of man's soul by addressing men as "children of immortality". Savitri takes up the same subject, brings out all the necessary conditions for the realisation of this dream of man. It affirms the necessity of the birth of a new Power, the Power of Divine Grace, or Love, which alone can save man from the reign of Ignorance which is Death.

We have said in the beginning that Sri Aurobindo's Savitri in its origin and in the realm of experience with which it deals — and even in some of its expressions — is comparable to the highest spiritual poetry of the world, the Veda and the Upanishads. Some passages have already been cited showing the deep spiritual affinity between Savitri and the Veda. We shall pursue the subject a little further to show that the epic height and manner of expression which is native to the Veda and the Upanishads is in Savitri the most sustained element giving to the whole poem the most sublime throb of an organic divine creation. This is because Sri Aurobindo's life-work comes naturally in a line with that of the Rishis of the Veda and the Upanishads. His work in fact adds to the rich spiritual treasures of the past by giving to mankind his great vision of the Supermind, — the divine gnosis, — and by his insistence that life must be related to the Divine if man wants to arrive at the true solution of his problems. Besides, his mode of poetical creation is akin to that of the ancient seers. It is not to say that he takes them as models for imitation, but in him the Goddess of Speech seems to act—consciously on his part — from above the plane of human mind and is constantly bringing in currents, — and torrents even — of Light from higher planes which have been touched or tapped occasionally but are far from being the normal possession of even the highest genius of poetical expression. When Sri Aurobindo speaks of "a torrent of rapid lightnings" which represents the irresistible current of illuminating inspiration, he is not using merely a figure of speech but is expressing his own personal experience. It is by such an onrush from above the mental level that, as K.D. Sethna says, "knowledge of the Deathless Divine leaps on the human consciousness and by whose thronged and glittering invasion the revelatory speech of the Overhead spiritual is bom."

Again when he says

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Missioned voices drive to me from God's doorway

Words that live not save upon Nature's summits,

Ecstasy's chariots,¹³

he is stating his own experience.

It is because he derives his poetical inspiration from this higher world known to the ancient Rishis that his poems bear a kinship to the creation of the ancient sages. In the Gita perhaps the eleventh chapter giving the vision of the Vishwarupa, the Cosmic Divine, bears a resemblance to some portion of Savitri. The student may compare the utterance of Arjuna in his exaltation of the vision, and of Vishwarupa, as the Destroyer of the World, with the colloquy of Aswapati and the Divine Mother in the third Book.

Savitri has got the intense directness, vastness and comprehensiveness of the Vedas and the Upanishads. The Vedas and the Upanishads speak of the One, the Divine, the Supreme Ineffable. It is that which finds expression in myriad forms in the cosmic dance. In the Seer's vision, the shadows of the lower planes of cosmic existence are shot through with the Light of this Eternal Reality and to him, therefore, the whole Nature seems to be bathed in an ether of Delight. This experience seems so far from the ordinary experience of man that one would have thought that its expression in poetry would lack the sense of a convincing Reality. But the most miraculous power of the Goddess of Poetry is that the expression of this experience by the ancient sages carried with it a very intense sense of concreteness, what Sethna calls "a burning throb of realisation." This power of expression comes to them, not from the realms of mere mind but from Overhead regions of intuition, inspiration, revelation and even beyond it from the Overmind. It is the spiritual alchemy of this overhead poetical expression that renders this immeasurably remote realm of experiences intimately near to us, and carries a sense of their reality to our most outward mind. While reading those inspired utterances one feels opening before him altogether a new world of experiences, a world of beings "more real than living man"; for, in it breathe and move "nurslings of immortality". Like Veda and the Upanishads, Savitri also opens us to this realm of the Eternal. It is not merely a reproduction of the experience of the past; for, Sri Aurobindo has discovered new realms of the spirit. Savitri,

¹³ Collected Poems, SABCL, Vol. 5, p. 563.

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therefore, is charged with a similar inspirational afflatus but is also at the same time, "a spiringing forward". We are not here concerned with the difference of spiritual content, which could take us far, but with the similarities in their content and mode of expression.

In the Kathopanishad there is a situation which is apparently similar to the one we find in Savitri. There, the boy Nachiketa like Savitri confronts Yama, the God of Death. But the similarity is only apparent because Death does not meet its challenge, neither is Nachiketa faced with the inevitability of death. The precocious boy seeks the acquaintance of Death and turns Death into his instructor and learns from him the way to reach the immortal Self. The question of the world-existence does not arise there. The question of man struggling on earth, subject to ignorance and his possible emancipation from seemingly eternal bonds during his earth-existence, is not there in the picture. But apart from the dissimilarity of content, one can see that there are passages where the expression of the Upanishad rises to a plane of impersonality of Illumined Mind which sees life in large and compact masses and is at the same time itself suffused with a wide and intense emotion of the tragedy of life subject to human ignorance. It is a very effective and direct poetical utterance. When he reaches the house of Death, Nachiketa thinks within himself:

Like grain a mortal ripens!

Like grain he is bom hither again,

and when the God of Death dissuades him from seeking Knowledge of the Self and offers him temptations instead, he replies:

O Ender of all things; transient, ephemeral are all these. Moreover, they wear out the brightness of such sense-powers as a mortal has. Even aeonic life is short.

Not with wealth is a man to be satisfied and if we should desire it, having once seen thee we shall surely obtain it.

There are many passages in Savitri that convey a similar inspiration. We choose one in which the insignificance of man, inconsequential nature of all his works, and the ephemeral nature of all his enjoyments is brought out effectively:

An inconsequence dogs every effort made,

And chaos waits on every cosmos formed:

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In each success a seed of failure lurks.¹⁴

Man is

A thinking being in an unthinking world,

An island in the sea of the Unknown,

He is a smallness trying to be great,

An animal with some instincts of a god,

His life a story too common to be told,

His deeds a number summing up to nought...

His hope a star above a cradle and a grave.¹⁵

The tragedy of human life subject to ignorance is intensely brought home to us. And yet there is much more than that in these lines. And about the nature of man's enjoyments, he says:

Here even the highest rapture time can give

Is a mimicry of ungrasped beatitudes,

A mutilated statue of ecstasy,

A wounded happiness that cannot live,

A brief felicity of mind or sense,

Thrown by the World-Power to her body-slave,

Or a simulacrum of enforced delight

In the seraglios of Ignorance.¹⁶

These lines indicate to our minds that there exists an unchanging delight, an unwounded happiness and ecstasy somewhere towards which are directed all the pathetic strivings of the ignorant human soul. "A statue mutilated", a "happiness" mortally "wounded" or the "enforced delights" of the harems "of Ignorance" — are marvellously vivid images.

Throughout Savitri one feels the pulsating presence of the One, the Perfect, the Divine, and there are moments when the inspired utterance expresses this presence:

Then by a touch, a presence or a voice

The world is turned into a temple ground

And all discloses the unknown Beloved.¹⁷

The Immanent lives in man as in his house.¹⁸

¹⁴ Ibid., p. 78. ¹⁵ Ibid., ¹⁶ Ibid. ¹⁷Ibid., p. 278. ¹⁸ Ibid., p. 66.

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The opening verse of the Ishopanishad runs:

All this visible universe is for habitation by the Lord.

The world becomes a holy place when we enter into this vision.

It is the same truth we find in the expression of the Gita:

All is Vasudeva, — the Divine Being: Vāsudevah Sarvam.

Take another passage from the Isha reconciling the Static and the Dynamic aspects of the ultimate Reality in a powerful image:

That moves, and That moves not; That is far and the same is near; That is within all this and That also is outside all this.

It is similar to a passage of Katha which says:

Sitting, He proceeds far;

Lying, He goes everywhere.

The Seer of Savitri gives us a similar vision in his own inspired utterance:

Near, it retreated; far, it called him still.¹⁹

Hidden by its own works it seemed far off.²⁰

The Rishi in the Isha speaks symbolically of the necessity of breaking beyond the limitations of the mind in order to reach the highest Truth which is beyond. It says:

The face of Truth is covered with a brilliant golden lid; that do thou remove, O fosterer, for the law of the Truth, for sight.

The Master in Savitri speaks in the language of living symbolism. Describing Aswapati's spiritual achievement he says:

And broken the intellect's hard and lustrous lid.²¹

In another context recounting the limitations of the mental being which remains satisfied and self-complaisant, he says:

There comes no breaking of the walls of mind.²²

The basic idea both in Isha and Savitri in these expression is that

¹⁹ Ibid., p. 305. ²⁰ Ibid. ²¹ Ibid., p. 25. ²² Ibid., p.251.

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the highest Truth is above the plane of the mind which acts as a barrier to the Truth above, and it is attained by breaking the obstruction of the mind and ascending beyond.

How the spirit and the vision of the Master in Savitri moves on the regions of the Superconscient and how some of the symbols and modes of expression come out of the creative power as organic parts of a living process can be seen from a line like the following which describes Aswapati's wanderings in the dark world of Falsehood, the world where the Mother of Evil gives birth to her sons of Darkness, where he

...roamed through desolate ways

Where the red Wolf waits by the fordless stream.²³

This reminds one of the Vedic hymn:

Once the red Wolf saw me walking on the path.²⁴

The Red Wolf is the symbol of the powers that tear the 'being', that suddenly fall upon it to destroy it. They are persistent, destructive, cruel, unscrupulous powers of the lower Darkness. Sri Aurobindo in his expression has made the symbol more effective, improving spontaneously upon the original in the alchemy of his poetical process by the image of "fordless stream". In the original hymn there is only 'path'. The "fordless stream" brings in the needed element of danger and difficulty of the path of the aspirant when he has to cross this dangerous region.

He does the same with several Vedic symbols which he employs. For instance, consider the line:

Its gold-homed herds trooped into earth's cave-heart.²⁵

It indicates the descent of the "gold-homed" Cows — symbolising the richly-laden Rays of Knowledge — into the Inconscient of the earth, its "cave-heart". Generally, in the Veda the action is that of breaking open the Cave of the inconscient and releasing the pen of Cows, the imprisoned Rays of Light for the conscious possessions by the seeker. Here is how a Vedic hymn speaks about it:

²³ Ibid., p. 230. ²⁴ Rig Veda: aruno ma sakrit yantam dadarsha hi. See also SABCL, Vol. 10. pp. 565-66. In this context it may be noted how amusing Ralph T. H. Goriffith's footnote to VII: 68:8 is! —Editor.

²⁵ Savitri, p. 243.

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They drove upwards, the luminous ones, — the good milch-cows, in their stone-pen within the hiding cave.²⁶

Or, take another, similar one:

By a mind seeking the Ray-cows, they rent the firm massed-hill which encircled and repressed shining herds, man desiring, laid open the strong pen, full of Ray-Cows by the Divine Word.²⁷

One sees in Savitri the processes reversed and the Master's vision lays open the original act of involution of the Light into the darkness of the Inconscient.

The growth of the divine potentialities in man is spoken of in Veda as the growth of a Child. The Master takes the symbol straight and employs it thus:

Where the God-child lies on the lap of Night and Dawn.²⁸

The idea is that through the state of ignorance that is Night and through the state of awakening that is Dawn, — through the alterations of the two —, the God-child in man attains its growth. Ignorance is not thus something anti-divine. It contributes to the growth of the Divine in man. This certainly reminds one of the hymn in the Veda which runs as follows:

Two are joined together, powers of truth, powers of Maya. They have built the Child and given him birth and they nourish his growth.²⁹

In Savitri the symbol has been made more clear and effective by the word "God-child".

Speaking about the rise of the Many from the One, the Master says,

The Sole in its solitude yearned towards the All.³⁰Or, in another context he speaks of

The seed of the Spirit's blind and huge desire³¹

²⁶ Rig Veda IV: 1:13; SABCL, Vol. 11, p. 164. ²⁷ Ibid., IV: 1:15; Ibid.

²⁸ Savitri, p. 36. ²⁹ Rig Veda X:5:3; SABCL, Vol. 11, p. 385.

³⁰ Savitri, p. 326. ³¹Ibid., p. 40.

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to explain the rise of the many which reminds us of "He desired 'May I be many'." (Taittiriya Upanishad 2:6)

The omnipresence of the Divine, not merely as an abstract principle but as a living Reality finds expression in a concrete and convincing image as in the following lines:

And garbed in beggar's robes there walks the One.³²

It is similar to a passage in the Swetashwatara Upanishad:

Old and worn, Thou walkest bent over a staff.

The same basic idea of the Self perceived in all and all perceived in the Self finds similar expression both in Savitri and the Isha.

Where all is in ourselves, ourselves in all.³³

The Self in all existence, and all existences in the Self.

There is also a similar passage in the Gita (6:29) which speaks of the same truth.

The mystic Self that is present-in all but is hidden is spoken of by the Master as:

...a large self

That lives within us, by ourselves unseen.³⁴

There are many passages in the Upanishad that speak of the presence of this mystic Self, sometimes in the cave of the heart, sometimes as merely hidden. The Katha for instance, says:

This secret self, present in all beings, does not shed its light, that is not apparent.

The Gita describes the condition of the sage:

That which is Night to all the beings, in it wakes the man who controls the self; that in which the creatures awake, is to the awakened sage, the dark Night.

The change that comes over the consciousness of Aswapati as a result of his awakening to the inner Light is compactly described in Savitri as a "grand reversal of Night and Day," which conveys the same idea as the verse of the Gita quoted above.

When the secret Presence of the divine in the heart begins to

³² Ibid., p. 169. ³³ Ibid., p. 112. ³⁴ Ibid., p. 48.

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manifest itself it becomes, in the words of the poet, "a living image seated in the heart" no longer hidden and working indirectly but overt and working directly. There is a similarity in the tone of expression with the verse of the Gita:

The Lord abides in the heart of all beings.

So also, the two lines referring to the original Transcendent One:

He was here before the elements could emerge,

Before there was light of mind or life could breathe.³⁵

These are similar to a Vedic hymn

That One lived without breath.

We may also see the line

There was nothing else, nor aught beyond it.³⁶

The identity of the Two who are One is expressed in the following:

He is the Maker, and the world he made,

He is the vision, and he is the seer;

He is himself the actor and the act,

He is himself the knower and the known.³⁷

At first it looks rather a philosophical statement to our intellect; but really speaking, in the context of the poem where the poet speaks of the whole cosmos as the figure of the Transcendent One and sees the process of the creation of duality from the original Identity, each of these lines adds an aspect and a colour to the apparent self-division of the One. The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad expresses it thus:

It is not a second or other than, and separate from himself that he sees, speaks to, hears, knows.

While describing the spirit of man struggling in this world, apparently without success, the Seer penetrates behind the appearance and sees the deeper significance of the struggle and says, in spite of all appearances to the country,

His is a search of darkness for the Light,

Of mortal life for immortality.³⁸

³⁵ Ibid., p. 60. ³⁶ Rig Veda X: 129:1; SABCL, Vol. 10, p. 306.

³⁷Savitri, p. 61. ³⁸Ibid.,p.71.

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This vision echoes the well-known aspiration of the Brihadaranyaka:

Lead me from darkness to Light

From death to immortality.

The One as the basis of the multiple expression is beautifully figured in Canto I of Book II where the silence of the Eternal sees its own Universal Power building up the whole cosmos with all its innumberable elements including all subjective experiences which fall into "a single plan" and become "the thousandfold expression of the One", (p. 96) Swetashwatara speaks of this as "the One fashions one seed in many ways." That Savitri touches the same suprarational and supernal regions of the infinite can be seen from many passages. We shall only here touch upon one or two, which in their similarity to the Upanishadic utterances are striking:

For not by Reason was creation made

And not by Reason can the Truth be seen.³⁹

Where judgment ceases and the word is mute.⁴⁰

But mind too falls back from a nameless peak.⁴¹

And not by thinking can its knowledge come.⁴²

But thought nor word can seize eternal Truth.⁴³

This is similar to Katha:

This wisdom which thou hast attained is not to be gained by any Process of logical thought.

This Atman is not to be attained by exposition, nor by intellectual thinking nor by much hearing.

Some passages in Savitri bear a very close resemblance to, — in fact are identical in content with, — some of the passages of the book The Mother which reach the height of epic expression in prose, for example:

Our life is a holocaust of the Supreme.

The great World-Mother by her sacrifice

³⁹Ibid., p. 256. ⁴⁰Ibid., p. 33. ⁴¹ Ibid., p. 260. ⁴²Ibid. ⁴⁵Ibid., p. 276.

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Has made her soul the body of our state;

Accepting sorrow and unconsciousness

Divinity's lapse from its own splendours wove

The many-patterned ground of all we are.⁴⁴

These lines are from The Mother.

... 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 Light, into the Falsehood and Error that she may convert it to the Truth, into this Death that she may turn 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 she has consented to put on herself the cloak of this obscurity, condescended to bear the attacks and torturing influences of the powers of the 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.⁴⁵

Or, take from another context:

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.⁴⁶

And all creation is her endless act.⁴⁷

The one original transcendent Shakti, the Mother stands above all the worlds and bears in her eternal consciousness the Supreme Divine. Alone, she harbours the absolute Power and

⁴⁴ Ibid., p. 99. ⁴⁵ The Mother, SABCL, Vol. 25, pp. 24- 25.

^{46 Savitri. p. 295. 47 Ibid.}

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the ineffable Presence.... The Mahashakti, the universal Mother, works out whatever is transmitted by her transcendent consciousness from the Supreme and enters into the worlds that she has made; her presence fills and supports them with the divine spirit and the divine all-sustaining force and delight without which they could not exist.... Each of the worlds is nothing but one play of the Mahashakti of that system of worlds or universe, who is there as the cosmic Soul and Personality of the transcendent Mother.⁴⁸

The spiritual truth conveying the logic of the Infinite is contained in the following lines:

Each soleness inexpressibly held the whole.⁴⁹

It made all persons fractions of the Unique,

Yet all were being's secret integers.⁵⁰

Shtntiptt°a of the Isha opens with a similar Mantra:

This is perfect, so is 'that' perfect; from the perfect what arises is Perfect; deducting Perfect from the Perfect the Perfect alone remains.

"Each soleness" holds the "whole", and all persons though fractions of the Unique are "integers" in the logic of the Infinite.

The passages cited here are by no means exhaustive but they serve to show the affinity of content and the revelatory and inspired character of the expression. In the Vedas and the Upanishads the same Overhead lightnings break forth revealing the universe in so different a light from that of the intellect that it has remained for mankind a new world of spiritual experience to which it has aspired from the dawn of its history. The lightning has revealed sometimes the higher regions of Solar Light, the regions of golden light or Truth, at times, the moonlit worlds of infinite Delight, at times, deep chasms of the Darkness of the Inconscient and the whole whole world of teeming cosmic life. Savitri is like a vast band of lightning steadied into the poetic empyrean, illuminating the cosmos from end to end, from the deepest and the darkest Night of the Nescience to the highest heights of the Transcendent Divine,

⁴⁸The Mother, SABCL, Vol. 25, pp. 20-22.

⁴⁹ Savitri, p. 324. ⁵⁰ Ibid.

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revealing the double ladder of divine dynamics, the ladder of Descent of the Divine and the ladder of ascent of the Divine into the earth-consciousness and the consequent transformation of the earth-nature into the divine nature. K. D. Sethna in his book says: "Only the ancient Vedas and Upanishads embody with anything like a royal freedom these ranges of mystical and spiritual being, hidden beyond the deepest plunge and highest leap of intuition known to the great masters. Over and above opening up such movements, Sri Aurobindo stands as a creator of new Vedic and Upanishadic age of poetry." It is not only the content but the poetic manner, the height of the tone, the inevitability of the word, in fact all the elements that go to make up the highest manner and technique of poetic creation are also present in Savitri. In the words of Sethna: "The expression is organic to the sight and consequently carries an authentic and convincing power." We will close this section with an apt quotation from Sethna:⁵¹

To create a poetic mould equally massive and multiform as The Life Divine for transmitting the living Reality to the furthest bounds of speech — such a task is incumbent on one who stands as the maker of a new spiritual epoch. Without it he would not establish on earth in a fully effective shape the influence brought by him. All evolutionary influences, in order to become dynamic in toto, must assume poetic shape as a correlate to the actual living out of them in personal consciousness and conduct. In that shape they can reach man's inner being persistently and ubiquitously over and above doing so with a luminous and vibrant suggestiveness unrivalled by any other mode of literature or art. But scattered and short pieces of poetry cannot build the sustained and organised Weltanschaung required for putting a permanent stamp upon the times. Nothing except an epic or a drama can, moving as they do across a wide field and coming charged with inventive vitality, with interplay of characters and events. Nor can an epic which teems with ultra-mental realisations by wholly adequate to its aim if it does not embody these realisations in ultra-mental word and rhythm. Hence Savitri is from every angle the right correlate to the practical drive towards earth-transformation by India's mightiest Master of spirituality in

⁵¹ The Poetic Genius of Sri Aurobindo, pp. 140 - 41 (1947).

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his Ashram at Pondicherry. Next to his own personal working as Guru on disciples offering themselves for a global remoulding of their lives, this poem that is at once legend and symbol will be the chif formateur of the Aurobindonian age. Out of its projected fifty-thousand lines, about twelve-thousand only are said to be ready yet in final version, but even that number is enough to give it a central place, for the whole length of Paradise Lost is exceeded and in no other art-creation so continually and cumulatively has inspiration, the lightning-footed goddess, "a sudden messenger from the all-seeing tops," disclosed the Divine's truth and beauty:

Even was seen as through a cunning veil

The smile of love that sanctions the long game,

The calm indulgence and maternal breasts

of wisdom suckling the child laughter of Chance,

Silence, the nurse of the Almighty's power,

The omniscient hush, womb of the immortal Word,

And of the Timeless the still brooding face,

And the creative eye of Eternity....

From darkness' heart she dug out wells of light,

On the undiscovered depths imposed a form,

Lent a vibrant cry to the unuttered vasts,

And through great shoreless, voiceless, starless breadths

Bore earthward fragments of revealing thought

Hewn from the silence of the Ineffable.⁵²

Sri Aurobindo wrote the following lines about the epic as a poetical form and its possibilities in modem times:

The epic is only the narrative presentation on its largest canvas and, at its highest elevation, greatness and amplitude of spirit and speech and movement. It is sometimes asserted that the epic is solely proper to primitive ages when the freshness of life made a story of large and simple action of supreme interest to the youthful mind of humanity, the literary epic an artificial prolongation by an intellectual age and a genuine epic poetry no longer possible now or in the future. This is to mistake form and circumstance for the central reality. The

⁵² Savitri, p. 41. (N.B.: The quotation here is as the text stood in 1947.)

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epic, a great poetic story of man or world or gods, need not necessarily be a vigorous presentation of external action: the divinely appointed creation of Rome, the struggles of the principles of good and evil as presented in the great Indian poems, the pageant of the centuries or the journey of the seer through the three worlds beyond us are as fit themes as primitive war and adventure for the imagination of the epic creator. The epics of the soul most inwardly seen as they will be by an intuitive poetry, are his greatest possible subject, and it is this supreme kind that we shall expect from some profound and mighty voice of the future. His indeed may be the song of greatest flight that will reveal from the highest pinnacle and with the largest field of vision the destiny of the human spirit and the presence and ways and purpose of the Divinity in man and the universe.⁵³

Now in the light of Savitri that is before us it is clear he was anticipating his own work in the forecast. And who can say that he has not amply fulfilled those anticipations? For, he has given us "the song of the greatest flight" that has revealed "from the highest pinncale and with the largest field of vision the destiny of the human spirit and the presence and the ways and purpose of the Divinity in man and the universe."

A. B. PURANI

⁵³The Future Poetry, SABCL, Vol. 9, p. 267.

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The Message of Savitri

There is an idea abroad that a Yogi or mystic is of a piece with the anchorite and as such has no message to deliver to humanity at large. What is contended in this view is something interesting because there is a modicum of truth, as Sri Aurobindo wrote to me once, in every intellectual conviction seriously cherished. What is true in this indictment against the mystic is that his contribution to human culture its not conterminous with that of the social man in his various, more or less, social moods, Art, poetry, music, the crafts, philosophy, — in fact every walk of life hitherto trod by men the world over — all fall more or less under the category of our social moods. It has indeed, been claimed by some poets, artists and thinkers that since their handiworks are inspired by their daemons and matured by their faculties in silence, therefore what they create cannot be counted, strictly speaking, as a social product. This contention is valid but only up to a point, since what the man in his creative impulse produces is usually a resultant of forces which sway him in his solitude, countered by those that sway him in his social setting. Even the argument of the highbrow, world-aloof scientist, living for his laboratory, cannot be fully valid when he claims that his findings have nothing to do with humanity and its aspirations. For man being bom from others, nurtured by others, living with others, sustained by others and, last though not least, often killed by others, cannot claim to be a perfect solitary in any of his moods on earth. That is why we are confronted almost daily with a paradox, namely, that the most abstract and even seemingly impossible of scientific theories (theories which once upon a time men could only gape at) have been fruitful in inventions which have profoundly modified not only the outer life of man but his thoughts and aspirations as well. Tout se tient (things lean upon one another and hold together,) Romain Rolland wrote to me once.

Consequently, we do somewhat look askance at mystics and Yogis even when something within us is impressed by something about them which defies our analysis and therefore offends us. It hurts our self-respect: Why must a rational man be led to kowtow to what his reason cannot label or docket? I recall a remark Tagore made years ago. He and Bertrand Russell had once gone out for a stroll in Cambridge. As they passed by King's College Chapel

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they heard a choral hymn being sung by the boys: lovely music! Tagore suggested to Russell that they step inside the Chapel. "Nothing doing," replied the rationalist mathematician, "I can't let myself be influenced by music and incense and coloured gleams trickling through the stained-glass windows and be made to feel what my reason holds suspect." And how Tagore laughed!

But it is not a laughing matter — not to the much-maligned mystic, anyway. For whatever the scientist and rationalist in man may say, the mystic knows what he feels not because he wishes to feel but because he cannot live without feeling it, because life becomes for him a blind alley without the lead of the mystic light, or, to put it in the words of Sri Aurobindo:

Impenetrable, a mystery recondite

Is the vast plan of which we are a part;

Its harmonies are discords to our view,

Because we know not the great theme they serve.¹

Those who hold, with the rationalist, that such themes are "suspect" must, in their turn, be held suspect from the mystic's point of view. For the mystic knows that the sum total of spiritual emoluments are not all made up of the reason's findings any more than what the anatomist's eye sees by dissecting a dead body is the sum total of all that the body is in its full vital functioning. He knows this because he has peeped into something behind the veil and is not only delighted but overawed by what he has glimpsed. He is in fact profoundly impressed because he realises, from what little he has visioned, that

Inscrutable work the cosmic agencies.

Only the fringe of a wide surge we see;

Our instruments have not that greater light,

Our will tunes not with the eternal Will,

Our heart's sight is too blind and passionate.²

From the mystic's point of view — who knows that he has seen what most people have not — there can at best be a deep regret that what has been granted to him has been withheld from the rank and file, but never any question of agreeing with the verdict of those who have not seen what they might have if they had accepted to develop their powers of supraphysical perception. But this does

¹ Savitri, p. 160. ² Ibid., pp. 160-61.

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not mean that what he has seen is against reason. Dean Inge has put the mystic's case rather tellingly when he writes that "... at every step we can only see what we deserve to see. The world that we know changes for us, just as a landscape changes as we climb the mountain. It seems to follow that we have no right to dispute what the mystics tell us that they have seen, unless we have been there ourselves and not seen it."³

But here Dean Inge only touches the surface of the validity of mystic seeing. It is not only that the "landscape changes" as one rises higher and higher in the mystic knowledge of reality, but that something else happens simultaneously — at least with the greatest among them — namely, what they see imposes on them a corresponding responsibility if not obligation which Sri Aurobindo has described in his noble language as a "divine self-interest to bear the burden of others." This makes them plunge into ceaseless activity, not indeed of the blind or the semi-blind kind hailed by the merely restless activist but of a pure and selfless brand which they undertake because of a mandate they have received from on high to do what has to be done without an eye to the fruit of their action. "Today we all exist in a divided if not anarchic world society of men," says a thoughtful writer. "To follow the example of mystics would mean healing and orderliness, fratemalism and freedom and peace."⁴ Or, to put it in the language of Sri Aurobindo: "The greatest of the mystics have always given a luminous lead to men and never acquiesced in a mere passive enjoyment of their bliss, steeped in their solitary contemplation." Because, he asserts, accepting life "he... has to bear not only his own burden, but a great part of the world's burden too along with it, as a continuation of his own sufficiently heavy load. Therefore his Yoga has much more of the nature of a battle than others'; but this is not only an individual battle, it is a collective war waged over a considerable country. He has not only to conquer in himself the forces of egoistic falsehood and disorder, but to conquer them as representatives of the same adverse and inexhaustible forces in the world."⁵

It is obvious, that if what is claimed here is valid — that to win through to the Light is not to turn one's back on those who live in darkness but to help them come out into the sunshine, the sunshine

³ Mysticism in Religion, Chapter XI.

⁴Men Who Walked with God, Sheldon Cheney (p. 384).

⁵The Synthesis of Yoga, SABCL, Vol. 20, p. 71.

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invoked by the true vision — then the mystic's world cannot be dismissed as a world of selfish inaction, euphemistically called "contemplation". Anyone who has ever had the supreme good fortune of living under the aegis of a really great mystic must testify that the latter wants nothing so much as to share the boons he has earned with others, and who will dare deny that this aspiration itself is a living message of Light to the lacklustre?

For the sake of clarity one may perhaps be justified in admitting, provisionally, that the two exist side by side: the social man and the spiritual aspirant. But one must add, to make matters complete, that these are naturally interdependent: the social man needs the spiritual aspirant to enable him progressively to work in the Light the latter cannot help shedding, while the spiritual aspirant needs the other to promote in him the urge and vision to realise himself completely. The great Sage of the Upanishad did not mouth a mere platitude when he said: "One loves one's kin — one's children, consorts and parents — not because they are they but because they are indistinguishable from one's inmost self; he only uttered something the greatest mystics in all climes have proclaimed with one voice: that one must utilise whatever one is given to serve others. Or, to put it in the mantric words of the great Messiah of divine life, the mystic wins God not to rocket up to him leaving the earth to her fate, but to invoke His light here below for all.

But this does not mean that the lure is an imaginary one: the lure of escapism. It would be idle to deny that, human nature being what it is, man generally prefers to travel light. Also, the knot of egoism is fastened so tight in him that he cannot possibly cut it at one trenchant stroke even when he does aspire to Godliness. The anchorite is a real and impressive figure in spite of his unsatisfying gospel of a swift personal salvation because he does help the soul's evolution at a certain stage in life, when the answering Light that comes down seems too all-fulfilling to be missed; but as the soul wants to mount higher still, even the gods themselves, as legend has it, come to deflect him from the path of his highest fulfilment and Supreme Goal. Thus, to put it in the language of exhortation of the Master:⁶

Imagine not the way is easy; the way is long, arduous,

⁶ Words of the Master, Bulletin of Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Physical Education, Vol. Ill, No. 2.

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dangerous, difficult. At every step is an ambush, at every turn a pitfall. A thousand seen or unseen enemies will start up against thee, terrible in subtlety against thy ignorance, formidable in power against thy weakness. And when with pain thou hast destroyed them, other thousands will surge up and take their place. Hell will vomit its hordes to oppose and enring and wound and menace; Heaven will meet thee with its pitiless tests and its cold luminous denials.

Thou shalt find thyself alone in thy anguish, the demons furious in thy path, the Gods unwilling above thee. Ancient and powerful, cruel, unvanquished and close and innumerable are the dark and dreadful Powers that profit by the reign of Night and Ignorance and would have no change and are hostile. Aloof, slow to arrive, far-off and few and brief in their visits are the Bright Ones who are willing or permitted to succour. Each step forward is a battle. There are precipitous descents, there are unending ascensions and ever higher peaks upon peaks to conquer. Each plateau climbed is but a stage on the way and reveals endless heights beyond it. Each victory thou thinkest the last triumphant struggle proves to be but a prelude to a hundred fierce and perilous battles....

Sri Aurobindo chose the legend of Savitri to bring out not only the "fierceness" of these "perilous battles" but through these the "beautiful face of the Divine Mother" in Savitri, the "Daughter of Infinity" and Symbol of Light bom to be established in this our world of shadows and limitations.

But the Daughter is also the Mother of Mothers who comes to us, weaklings, to show that "Immortality" is not "a plaything to be given lightly to a child," nor "the divine life a prize without effort or the crown for a weakling."⁷

The legend is an old one, even older in age than the Ramayana since in this first epic of India Sita makes mention of Savitri and says to Rama: "Know me as flawlessly faithful to you even as Savitri was to Satyavan, the son of Dyumatsen."⁸

The famous legend as it has come down to us is as beautiful in its simplicity as it is pregnant in its implications. Princess Savitri,

⁷ Ibid.

⁸ Dyunuilsenusuiam viram satyavantum anuvratām.

Sāviirimiva mām viddhi twamāma vashavurtinim. (Ramayana: 2.30)

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the lovely daughter of King Aswapati, wants to marry Satyavan, the son of King Dyumatsen, who having lost his kingdom has been forced to live in a forest, a blind exile. But the Sage Narada tells her that Satyavan is fated to expire within a year, whereupon Savitri reaffirms her pledge to Satyavan saying that her die is cast since she can choose no other for her consort. So the marriage takes place and Savitri leaves her palace and luxury to do her duty by her lonely husband and his helpless parents living as exiles in the forest. The fateful day, however, cannot be stayed and Satyavan dies resting his head on the lap of Savitri. Yama, the Lord of Death, then comes to carry back with him Satyavan's life but Savitri, refusing to admit defeat to Death, follows him. A duologue, or rather an altercation, ensues on the way between the frail victim of Fate and the mighty all-powerful Lord of Destiny till, in the end, Savitri prevails upon the dread Dispenser of Doom to reverse the verdict of Time: Satyavan is at last restored to her.

This is the story. Sri Aurobindo has metamorphosed it into what may be fittingly called a marvellous epic, luminous with the message of Immortality. The argument, in brief, is as follows:

The advent of Savitri cannot be an accident. The earth has to aspire for her Descent. So Aswapati has to pave the way through his lordly aspiration — Aswapati, the "colonist form immortality" and the "treasurer of superhuman dreams" whose "soul lived as eternity's delegate."⁹

But the heart of flame of this doughty aspirant cannot rest content with a mere realisation. So when he meets the World-Mother face to face the first question he asks her is:

How long shall our spirits battle with the Night

And bear defeat and the brute yoke of Death,

We who are vessels of a deathless Force

And builders of the godhead of the race?¹⁰

He cannot help asking such a challenging question of the Great Mother because his mighty heart finds little consolation in the current philosophy that a human being must accept his human limitations. So he asks:

Or if it is thy work I do below

Amid the error and waste of human life

In the vague light of man's half-conscious mind,

⁹Savitri, p. 23. ¹⁰ Ibid., P. 341

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Why breaks not in some distant gleam of thee?

Ever the centuries and millenniums pass... .

All we have done is ever still to do.

All breaks and all renews and is the same.¹¹

Not that he is a defeatist. How can he be after having seen

... the Omnipotent's flaming pioneers

Over the heavenly verge which turns towards life

Come crowding down the amber stairs of birth....

The massive barrier-breakers of the world....

The sun-eyed children of a marvellous dawn....

The architects of immortality...?¹²

Therefore even though he is eager to see the Kingdom of Heaven established on earth, here and now, and feels restless to have to stay a passive witness to human suffering, he says:

I know that thy creation cannot fail... .¹³

Because man as he is today — ruling at best by his mind and intellect — is not the final term of the Ascending Consciousness:

This strange irrational product of the mire,

This compromise between the beast and God,

Is not the crown of thy miraculous world....

Even as of old man came behind the beast

This high divine successor surely shall come

Behind man's inefficient mortal pace,

Behind his vain labour, sweat and blood and tears....¹⁴

And as a destined

Inheritor of the toil of human time

He shall take on him the burden of the gods.¹⁵

He knows all that. Yet the human mind's supine acceptance of the world makes the Divine in the human impatient — inevitably, because without his impatience the impossible cannot be translated into the possible. Burning aspiration orvyfkulatf: of the dauntless heart is necessary if the heart is to serve for a foothold of the Divine. So he cries out as it were frantic with the tardy pace of the ascent of Consciousness:

¹¹ Ibid., pp. 341-42. ¹² Ibid., pp. 343-44. ¹³ Ibid., p. 342.

¹⁴Ibid., pp. 343-44. ¹⁵ Ibid.

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Heavy unchanged weighs still the imperfect world;

The splendid youth of Time has passed and failed;

Heavy and long are the years our labour counts

And still the seals are firm upon man's soul

And weary is the ancient Mother's heart.¹⁶

So he appeals passionately:

O Truth defended in thy secret sun...

O radiant fountain of the world's delight....

O Bliss who ever dwellst deep hid within

While men seek thee outside and never find....

Mission to earth some living form of thee.

One moment fill with thy eternity,

Let thy infinity in one body live,

All-Knowledge wrap one mind in seas of light,

All-Love throb single in one human heart.

Immortal, treading the earth with mortal feet

All heaven's beauty crowd in earthly limbs!

Omnipotence, girdle with the power of God

Movements and moments of a mortal will,

Pack with the eternal might one human hour

And with one gesture change all future time.

Let a great word be spoken from the heights

And one great act unlock the doors of Fate.¹⁷

Then at long last, his Divine Interlocutor answers assuring him that she, Savitri, will be bom:

O strong forerunner, I have heard thy cry.

One shall descend and break the iron Law,

Change Nature's doom by the lone Spirit's power.

A limitless Mind that can contain the world,

A sweet and violent heart of ardent calms

Moved by the passions of the gods shall come.

All mights and greatnesses shall join in her;

Beauty shall walk celestial on the earth,

Delightrshall sleep in the cloud-net of her hair

And in her body as on his homing tree

Immortal Love shall beat his glorious wings.

A music of griefless things shall weave her charm;

¹⁶ Ibid., pp. 344-45. ¹⁷ Ibid., p. 345.

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The harps of the Perfect shall attune her voice,

The streams of Heaven shall murmur in her laugh,

Her lips shall be the honeycombs of God,

Her limbs his golden jars of ecstasy,

Her breasts the rapture-flowers of Paradise.

She shall bear Wisdom in her voiceless bosom,

Strength shall be with her like a conqueror's sword

And from her eyes the Eternal's bliss shall gaze.

A seed shall be sown in Death's tremendous hour,

A branch of heaven transplant to human soil;

Nature shall overleap her mortal step;

Fate shall be changed by an unchanging will.¹⁸

So the Great Sphinx reveals her secret: The incredible comes to pass: the unhoped for incarnation comes down to earth as Aswapati's daughter though none can guess her essential divinity because, although

Even her humanity was half divine,¹⁹

and

Apart, living within, all lives she bore,²⁰

she is, intrinsically,

Too unlike the world she came to help and save.²¹

But all the same,

All in her pointed to a nobler kind....

Her mind, a sea of white sincerity,

Passionate in flow, had not one turbid wave...²²

For the Vila of the Divine to be consummated, her human face has, perforce, to be a mask, but even so,

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 deep of compassion, a hushed sanctuary,

Her inward help unbarred a gate in heaven;

Love in her was wider than the universe,

¹⁸ Ibid., p. 346. ¹⁹ Ibid., p. 8. ²⁰ Ibid. ²¹ Ibid., p. 7. ²² Ibid., pp. 14-15.

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The whole world could take refuge in her single heart.²³

Never was a woman bom of flesh limned with hues so ethereal — so incredible yet convincing, so all-embracing yet lonely, so powerful yet tender. It almost seems too dazzling to be true. That is why earthlings now fail to recognise the Incognito and so reject all that She comes to give to earth:

The proud and conscious wideness and the bliss...

The calm delight that weds one soul to all,

The key to the flaming doors of ecstasy.²⁴

We call for the Divine but on our own terms: we know no better. That is why the light-bringers of the world are not accepted as they deserve to be. No wonder Savitri has to realise little by little, to her sorrow, that

There is a darkness in terrestrial things

That will not suffer long too glad a note.²⁵

Consequently,

On her too closed the inescapable Hand:

The armed Immortal bore the snare of Time.²⁶

She had to, because unless she accepts the cross of mortality she cannot induce cave-dwellers to welcome her crown of the Everliving. But though she has to accede to this compromise to start with — because otherwise she cannot prepare the ground — she knows that it is but a divine strategy — reculer pour mieux sauter—a drawing back to be able to invade the more effectively, because

To wrestle with the Shadow she had come,²⁷

and

To lead, to deliver was her glorious part.²⁸

But the nature of man as it is today cannot succeed even in imagining what supemature is like — not to mention welcoming the superhuman. So when Savitri chooses to forsake the protection and plenitude of her father's royal palace, a hue and cry arises. Her mother cannot possibly consent to such "madness" and essays

²¹ Ibid., p. 15. ²⁴ Ibid., p. 6. ²⁵Ibid., p. 17. ²⁶ Ibid. ²⁷ Ibid. ²⁸ Ibid.

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frantically to dissuade her from marrying a poor exile, a nonentity who, besides, is going to die in twelve months. Were it not for exigencies of space, I would give long excerpts from the Book of Fate where Sri Aurobindo brings out forcefully this dramatic situation: Savitri is resolved to stake everything for her ideal; her mother, the queen, is afraid of disaster, fear making her pessimistic in the extreme; Narada admonishes the queen and, siding with Savitri, counsels her parents to let her marry Satyavan and, lastly, winds up with a revealing prophecy. But as all that is impossible to cite in full, I shall only quote a few lines from his oracular peroration:

Queen, strive no more to change the secret will;

Time's accidents are steps in its vast scheme.

Bring not thy brief and helpless human tears

Across the fathomless moments of a heart

That knows its single will and God's as one.²⁹

For, Savitri is not human in the ordinary acceptation of the term but, being "an ambassadress twixt eternity and change," she can "sit apart with grief and facing death" front "adverse fate, armed and alone," because

Sometimes one life is charged with earth's destiny.³⁰

Therefore, the Sage enjoins on the Queen Mother:

Intervene not in a strife too great for thee...

The great are strongest when they stand alone.³¹

Consequently, he proclaims prophetically, the day will come when she must stand unhelped —

On a dangerous brink of the world's doom and hers,

Carrying the world's future in her lonely breast,

Carrying the human hope in a heart left sole...

She must cross alone a perilous bridge in Time

And reach an apex of world-destiny

Where all is won or all is lost for man.³²

In a word, her destiny of loneliness is meant to forge the last link which will complete the circuit. That is why

In that tremendous silence lone and lost

²⁹ Ibid., p. 460. ³⁰ Ibid. ³¹ Ibid., ³²Ibid., p. 461.

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Of a deciding hour in the world's fate...

Alone she must conquer or alone must fall,³³

because

No human aid can reach her in that hour,

No armoured God stand shining at her side.³⁴

Therefore the Queen is told:

Cry not to heaven, for she alone can save.

For this the silent Force came missioned down,³⁵

inasmuch as it is preordained about Savitri that

She only can save herself and save the world.³⁶

A tremendous prophecy, indeed! But then is not Savitri "missioned" to make the impossible possible?

Here was no fabric of terrestrial make...

An image fluttering on the screen of fate...

And tossed along the gulfs of Circumstance.³⁷

That is why she has been destined to dare what no human could even contemplate:

Her single will opposed the cosmic rule.³⁸

And she was justified in flinging this challenge because

The great World-Mother now in her arose.³⁹

This is the stuff of which dramas are made. But Savitri's life, being the enactment of a divine drama, starts from scratch, that is, the human and culminates in the super-human. And this deepening drama (of lesser loves calling to the Soul but failing to grip because her lesser loves have, progressively, to give place to the higher and higher through an ascending aspiration — till she has to sacrifice everything to the highest call) has been achieved by the Seer-Poet in his epic drama in six movements of her Soul-evolution:

First, the human in Savitri seeks the Divine.

Second, she weds Satyavan in order to realise through their

³³ Ibid. ³⁴ Ibid. ³⁵Ibid. ³⁶ Ibid. ³⁷ Ibid. p. 17. ³⁸ Ibid., p. 19.

³⁹Ibid., p. 21.

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mutual adoration the Presence of the Divine in every heart of love.

Third, Satyavan dies and she prays to the Lord to give him back to her in order that they may now fulfil their joint mission together, — of uplifting the Earth to Heaven, counting no cost.

Fourth, the Divine tempts Savitri to leave such a futile endeavour and invites her to desert earthlings (as the earth is not yet ready for His light and bliss) to merge back in His primal Truth-Consciousness.

Fifth, Savitri declines and asks His boon for Earth and Humanity.

Sixth, the Divine is pleased and grants the Boon of Boons. This supreme message of Savitri to humanity (or rather of Dawn to Night) has been brought out in three progressive stages through the personality of Savitri who is the Incarnation of the All-transcendent Mother-Shakti, the Creative Dynamis of the Divine.

First, she wants to realise her highest self through a sense of kinship with all earthlings whom she embraces in her inmost being accepting unflinchingly their "load of Fate".

Secondly, she wants to induce in them as it were the Godhead that is born in her by the miracle-touch of her will which has achieved unison with the Divine Will.

And lastly, she insists on transforming their humanity into utter Divinity by the alchemy of her soul-force overriding Fate, staking her all for the All-in-All.

The whole history and drama of this evolution in and through her is the Leitmotif of this epic poem — the mighty theme, the vibrant symphony. I would have liked to quote copiously from the earlier cantos to trace the evolution of this mighty diapason. But as that is not possible I shall have to be content with quoting only a few cogent extracts from the Book of Everlasting Day to illustrate how Sri Aurobindo has depicted in his mantric epic the movement to which I have referred.

Savitri comes first to petition the Divine that Satyavan to whom death has come prematurely be restored to her:

I know that I can lift man's soul to God,

I know that he can bring the Immortal down... .

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.⁴⁰

⁴⁰ Ibid., p. 687.

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His first answer comes almost as an admonition:

How shall earth-nature and man's nature rise

To the celestial levels, yet the earth abide?⁴¹

Then after telling her that the gulf between Heaven and Earth cannot be bridged here and now (because Earth is still too far from the Consciousness of Heaven) the Lord says that though Earth may indeed espy a few stray gleams from Heaven's starland,

They are a Light that fails, a Word soon hushed

And nothing they mean can stay for long on earth.

There are high glimpses, not the lasting sight.⁴²

For though He admits that

A few can climb to an unperishing sun,

Or live on the edges of the mystic moon,⁴³

yet it is a stark fact borne out by history that

The heroes and the demigods are few

To whom the close immortal voices speak.⁴⁴

True, the Divine Voice is heard through silence, but then

Few are the silences in which Truth is heard,

Unveiling the timeless utterance in her deeps.⁴⁵

And though the great seers can and do win through to something of the Light Divine which means so much to earth, yet

Few are the splendid moments of the seers.

Heaven's call is rare, rarer the heart that heeds;

The doors of light are sealed to common mind.⁴⁶

And if

Men answer to the touch of greater things,⁴⁷

quickly enough

They slide back to the mud from which they climbed.⁴⁸

Thus after damping her widowed ardour with such unanswerable arguments, He enjoins on her:

⁴¹ Ibid., p. 688. ⁴² Ibid., p. 689. ⁴³ Ibid. ⁴⁴ Ibid. ⁴⁵ Ibid.

⁴⁶ Ibid. ⁴⁷ Ibid. ⁴⁸Ibid.

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Leave to its imperfect light the earthly race:

All shall be done by the long act of Time....

Break into eternity thy mortal mould;

Melt, Lightning, into thy invisible flame.

Clasp, Ocean, deep into thyself thy wave,

Happy for ever in the embosoming surge.⁴⁹

This was the Divine lilf of testing her as it is to come out directly — in the denouement. But as Savitri does not know this yet, she has to follow the lead of the highest light in her and so answers the "radiant God", a sunbeam answering the Sun:

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.

I keep my will to save the world and man;

Even the charm of thy alluring voice,

oblissful godhead, cannot seize and snare.

Isacrifice not earth to happier worlds.⁵⁰

A great answer of a great soul which has definitely turned its back on defeatism even against desperate odds. For Sri Aurobindo is not earth-averse. Has he not heard Earth's moving song so vibrant in his marvellous poem, The Life Heavens:

I, Earth, have a deeper power than Heaven;

My lonely sorrow surpasses its rose-joys,

A red and bitter seed of the raptures seven; —

My dumbness fills with echoes of a far Voice.⁵¹

Whether those who have not heard this her great message believe him or not he does not care for he has heard it as he wrote to me in an explanatory letter (when I asked him in despair how could such an inglorious, disharmonious and creaturely thing as our earth be redeemed):

All the non-evolutionary worlds are worlds limited to their

⁴⁹ Ibid., p. 691-92. ⁵⁰ Ibid., p. 692. ⁵¹ Collected Poems, SABCL, Vol. 5, p.

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own harmony like the "life heavens". The Earth, on the other hand, is an evolutionary world, not at all glorious or harmonious even as a material world (except in certain appearances) but rather most sorrowful, disharmonious, imperfect. Yet in that imperfection is the urge towards a higher and more many-sided perfection. It contains the last finite which yet yearns to the Supreme Infinite, it is not satisfied by sense joys precisely because in the conditions of the earth it is able to see their limitations. God is pent in the mire — mire is not glorious, so there is no claim to glory or beauty here — but the very fact imposes a necessity to break through that prison to a consciousness which is ever rising towards the heights.⁵²

It is true, as he admitted in the same letter, that at present, so long as the earth remains as supine as she is, there can be "no question of a divine life". Nevertheless, as he indicates in his poem A God's Labour,

Heaven's fire is lit in the breast of the earth

And the undying suns here bum;

Through a wonder cleft in the bounds of birth

The incarnate spirits yeam

Like flames to the kingdoms of Truth and Bliss:

Down a gold-red stair-way wend

The radiant children of Paradise

Clarioning darkness's end.⁵³

No one can possibly understand Sri Aurobindo until he has learnt to take full account of his appreciation of the glorious divine potentiality lying latent in what he terms "the earth-consciousness." This we find in his Ideal of Human Unity, in his The Life Divine and lastly, in the constant emphasis in his The Synthesis of Yoga on the nature of the Divine that is sought, who is "not a remote extra-cosmic reality, but a half-veiled Manifestation present and near us here in the universe." And it is because he has known this through the sanction of the Supreme in his missioned soul that he asseverates again and again that it is "here, in life, on earth in the body that we have to unveil the Godhead."

⁵² From a letter to the author.

⁵³ Collected Poems, SABCL, Vol. 5, p. 102.

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He has stressed this tirelessly to us in his various letters and messages till in Savitri he repeats it with the luminous accent of the inspired Word that is Poetry. So Savitri posits that the earth-life must translate a Divine Purpose, because —

If earth can look up to the light of heaven

And hear an answer to her lonely cry,

Not vain their meeting, nor heaven's touch a snare.⁵⁴

And here is her reason dictated not by her brain but her heart:

If thou and I are true, the world is true;

Although thou hide thyself behind thy works,

To be is not a senseless paradox;

Since God has made earth, earth must make in her God;

What hides within her breast she must reveal.

I claim thee for the world that thou hast made.⁵⁵

To which the propitiated Godhead answers, beginning to relent:

Thou art my vision and my will and voice... .⁵⁶

But impatience is still to be deprecated:

Lead not the spirit in an ignorant world

To dare too soon the adventure of the Light.⁵⁷

The same note of warning was sounded, in a previous Book, to Savitri's father, Aswapati:

Awake not the immeasurable descent,

Let not the impatient Titan drive thy heart... .⁵⁸

because

Truth bom too soon might break the imperfect earth.⁵⁹

But what Aswapati could not afford to disobey, Savitri can, because her soul is the last perfection of the aspiring Incarnation:

Bearing the burden of universal love,

A wonderful mother of unnumbered souls.⁶⁰

Therefore when she is invited — or rather tempted — for the last

⁵⁴ Savitri, pp. 692-93. ⁵⁵ Ibid., p. 693. ⁵⁶Ibid., p. 693. ⁵⁷ Ibid.

⁵⁸ Ibid., p. 335-41. ⁵⁹ Ibid., p. 335. ⁶⁰ Ibid., p. 695.

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time by the assaying Godhead who offers her a quick exit out of the dismal world still unready for "the Immeasurable Descent":

Choose, spirit, thy supreme choice not given again,⁶¹

as there is still time to choose Nirvana bringing in its train an

End of the trouble of thy wandering thoughts,

Close of the journeying of thy pilgrim soul.

Accept, O music, weariness of thy notes,

O stream, wide breaking of thy channel banks.⁶²

But the indomitable spirit of Savitri obstinately declines to accept a merely "personal salvation". She, indeed, craves His boon but for the whole world:

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...

Thy oneness, Lord, in many approaching hearts.⁶³

But — as Sri Aurobindo wrote to me once in a letter — the Divine subjects His Incarnations to the fieriest of ordeals; so He asks her once again to reconsider her refusal to comply with His invitation:

A third time swelled the great admonishing call:

"I spread abroad the refuge of my wings."⁶⁴

In other words, He asks her to seek final asylum under His wings where there is only peace and silence.

But Savitri is not to be deflected from the Goal: what is offered to her must be offered to all. So

... 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."⁶⁵

Still God insists, for the last time:

A last great time the warning sound was heard:

"I open the wide eye of solitude

⁶¹Ibid., p. 696. ⁶²Ibid. ⁶³ Ibid., 696-97. ⁶⁴ Ibid., p. 697. ⁶⁵ Ibid.

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To uncover the voiceless rapture of my bliss...

Motionless in its slumber of ecstasy,

Resting from the sweet madness of the dance

Out of whose beat the throb of hearts was bom."⁶⁶

But Savitri declines again and appeals to Him to deliver all, as against the elect, from the pain of life — to vouchsafe to all

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.⁶⁷

Every authentic mystic knows that the Godhead's injunction to his devotee evolves with the latter's inner evolution. Everyone receives but in the measure of his receptivity. That is why Dhruva was first offered a kingdom and only when he refused it was he deemed eligible for the Boon of Vaikuntha. The lesser mystics are often content with inferior boons but, as they evolve, their aspiration too becomes greatened. That is, the lesser boons are offered to comparatively lesser hungers. Sri Aurobindo himself, as he said to us explicitly, had come to the Yoga to liberate his country but as he delved deeper, his lesser loves gave place to greater till he wanted the Divine Bliss and Light for all, not for himself and his countrymen only. That is why he heard the Voice also ascending in pitch and deepening in timbre as he progressed more and more in his Sadhana, till he compelled as it were the last sanction of the Supreme to his summit prayer voiced through Savitri:

Thy sweetness give to me for earth and men.⁶⁸

"Seek and thou shalt find." He sought and found and, as he turned progressively deaf to the lesser appeals, he heard the answering Music also mount higher and higher in harmony and grandeur. This he has expressed in the final answer of the Godhead given to Savitri who is at long last granted the one boon she has sought:

O beautiful body of the incarnate Word,

Thy thoughts are mine, I have spoken with thy voice.

My will is thine, what thou hast chosen I choose.

All thou hast asked I give to earth and men... .

⁶⁶Ibid. ⁶⁷Ibid. ⁶⁸Ibid.

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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.⁶⁹

And this He concedes because He has assayed Savitri and not found her wanting —

Because thou hast obeyed my timeless will,

Because thou hast chosen to share earth's struggle and fate

And leaned in pity over earth-bound men

And turned aside to help and yearned to save,

I bind by thy heart's passion thy heart to mine

And lay my splendid yoke upon thy soul.⁷⁰

And not content with a mere reassurance, He cries out apocalyptically:

oSun-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.

When all thy work in human time is done,

The mind of earth shall be a home of light,

The life of earth a tree growing towards heaven,

The body of earth a tabernacle of God.⁷¹

And therefore she acting as the divine intermediary, will bring to the earth the Boon of boons — the Divine Grace and Love acting in its native power of bliss and light. For this to be possible the Divine must use her as His radiant Representative, the Avatar:

I will pour delight from thee as from ajar,

I will whirl thee as my chariot through the ways,

I will use thee as my sword and as my lyre,

I will play on thee my minstrelsies of thought.⁷²

And then she with Satyavan will be doing His Will:

You shall reveal to them the hidden eternities,

The breath of infinitudes not yet revealed,

Some rapture of the bliss that made the world,

Some rush of the force of God's omnipotence,

⁶⁹Ibid., p. 698. ⁷⁰ Ibid. ⁷¹ Ibid., p. 699. ⁷² Ibid., p. 701.

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Some beam of the omniscient Mystery.⁷³

And at that fateful hour

The Mighty Mother shall take birth in Time

And God be bom into the human clay

In forms made ready by your human lives.

Then shall the Truth supreme be given to men... .

The superman shall wake in mortal man

And manifest the hidden demigod

Or grow into the God-Light and God-Force

Revealing the secret deity in the cave....

Annulling the decree of death and pain,

Erasing the formulas of the Ignorance....

Ruling earth-nature by Eternity's law... ⁷⁴

When

Life's tops shall flame with the Immortal's thoughts,

Light shall invade the darkness of its base,⁷⁵

because

When superman is bom as Nature's king

His presence shall transfigure Matter's world:

He shall light up Truth's fire in Nature's night,

He shall lay upon the earth Troth's greater law;

Man too shall turn towards the Spirit's call.⁷⁶

And then

A divine force shall flow through tissue and cell

And take the charge of breath and speech and act

And all the thoughts shall be a glow of suns

And every feeling a celestial thrill....

Nature shall live to manifest secret God,

The Spirit shall take up the human play,

This earthly life become the life divine.⁷⁷

DILIP KUMAR ROY

⁷³ Ibid., p. 705. ⁷⁴ Ibid., p. 709. ⁷⁵Ibid., p.707

⁷⁶ Ibid., pp. 705- 06. ⁷⁷ Ibid., p. 707. ¹¹

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The Symbol Dawn

Before we commence our study of Savitri, let us be clear to ourselves that we are not reading it as a poem, even as a literary masterpiece, noting the diction, the similies and metaphors and other details. Our purpose in studying it is to enter into the spirit behind it, and in the measure in which we identify ourselves with that inspiration, we shall grow in our understanding. And this understanding is not an understanding of the mind, though that also is possible, but as the Mother puts it, it is more an understanding of the heart.

With these preliminary observations, we take the first canto, The Symbol Dawn. In this canto there is a certain parallelism. The Dawn that is spoken of is not only the dawn of that fateful day when Satyavan must die, but it is also the beginning of the present cycle of Creation. In Sanskrit we call hdhvani, very poorly rendered in English by the word 'suggestion'. In the earlier portions of the canto at any rate, the context of the dawn of creation is more preponderant than the dawn of the physical day. That is why it is entitled the symbol dawn — the dawn as a symbol: not merely the dawn before sunrise but the symbol of something else.

Symbol of what? Symbol of a new creation. This is not a thing that is created one day and another day absorbed, but it is a matter of cycles of creation. Each cycle of creation has its beginning, duration and end, the end leading to another beginning. The dawn of which the poet speaks is the dawn before this universe starts, before the present cycle of creation is initiated.

It was the hour before the Gods awake.

The Gods: there is God and there are gods. God is the supreme Reality turned towards manifestation, making Itself accessible as a Person, as a Being while the Impersonal aspect is always behind. The gods are the emanations, formations put out from the Being of God for a special purpose, — to fulfil his intention in this creation. Each emanation from the Being of God is charged with a particular function. Each god is both a power and a personality. These gods, known by different names in different climes, are the cosmic functionaries, making possible the growth of this creation in the mould of the original intention of the Creator.

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Before the Gods awake: it is not that they are awaking from sleep. Gods do not sleep; asvapnāh devāh, says the Veda; the gods go about without ever sleeping. The gods do not even blink, their eyes are always open. Just as they do not cast a shadow, the gods do not sleep. Then from what state do they awake? From their state of self-absorption, trance. When the creation is withdrawn, their operations are suspended and they are self-absorbed. When the hour approaches, they come out of it to discharge their functions. Now that pregnant moment has arrived.

Note that it is blank verse in pentametre, five feet to a line.

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,

Lay stretched immobile upon Silence' marge.

The creation is to come: the divine Event — note the capital E. The Event to be is the manifestation to come. But before that event takes place there lies across its path the huge foreboding mind of Night. Night is in capitals to indicate that it is not our physical night, but the inconscient Darkness. The mind of that Night is huge, all-occupying; it forebodes, prognosticates; it has some indication of what is going to be in the future, and that is not very welcome to it. Foreboding always hints at something ominous. It is immobile, without movement. Where? "In her unlit temple of eternity." It is a state of eternity: unlit; there is no light, it is obscure and dark. Temple, he uses this word on purpose to indicate something spiritual, something sacred, about that eternity. The mind of Night lies upon Silence' marge. Marge is not margin, marge is edge, the edge of Silence. Capital S shows that it is a spiritual Silence, and not just the absence of sound. Spiritual silence is different from physical silence. Physical silence can be oppressive, but spiritual silence is invigorating, life-giving. So, there is immobility, there is eternity, there is silence. All these prevail before the hour of the Event.

Almost one felt, opaque, impenetrable,

In the sombre symbol of her eyeless muse

The abysm of the unbodied Infinite;

One feels something opaque, not transparent, not allowing light to

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pass through; impenetrable, one cannot get through; impenetrable, one cannot get through it. Here her means Night; muse is meditative thinking, contemplation by the mind of Night; eyeless, it is blind, shut in itself. This muse is a symbol, as it were; it is sombre, gloomy. In that symbol of her muse, one feels the bottomless chasm of the Infinite without form, the Infinite which has not yet taken a body. This abysm is opaque, impenetrable. And then the poet sums up:

A fathomless zero occupied the world.

It is always Sri Aurobindo's style in epic: he describes something, narrates an event, and then he sums up in one line the entire purport. Also, at times, he states something in one line, something profound, and there follows a long passage developing that point.

The world has not yet come. Where the world is to be, there is a zero, śūnya. But it is not an empty zero, it is a fathomless zero, one can't fathom what it is; if it were empty, there would be nothing to be fathomed. It is a pregnant zero, full of content. This contentful zero is a perception, special to Sri Aurobindo's philosophy. The Shunya or the Nihil of which the Illusionist philosophies or the Buddha speaks is an empty zero. This zero is different: out of this zero come the million universes, they are all there in its bosom potentially. The zero indicates that it can't be defined, can't be determined. It exceeds all mental formulations. Such a fathomless zero is occupying everything.

It was in August 1947, I believe, that this Canto was first published and my guide and teacher Sri Kapali Sastriar, translated it into Sanskrit. As he was working upon it, each day he would send up to Sri Aurobindo, through Purani, the verses he had done. Sri Aurobindo would go through the translation with interest.' He would send word appreciating certain renderings. He is a poet, — was one of his spontaneous remarks. He would also point out where his intended meaning had not been fully brought out. It was at that time that we got an inkling into Sri Aurobindo's mind here. The verse would be revised or recast, where necessary, in the light of his observations. Thus it went on until Sastriar translated the entire first Canto, the most difficult Canto of the Book, into Sanskrit.²(See pages 507-521.)

¹Perhaps these were read out to Sri Aurobindo.

²See Collected Works of Kapali Sastry, Vol. 9, pp. 523-69.

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And I, personally, began to understand Savitri only through the Sanskrit version. When I read it in English, I felt it was mystic and beyond me. But when Sastriar was translating it, he would read it out, and when I read it afterwards, it made meaning to me. It is a pity that he didn't continue with the translation.

-2-

To recapitulate first: the gods have not yet moved into activity. The divine Event, a new creation is about to commerce, that is, the present cycle of creation is about to open. And as if to prevent it, the large mind of Night, of Darkness, lies stretched immobile in its way. It is musing, one feels as if here is the formless infinite. What this earth is today was then occupied by the fathomless zero, a pregnant Shunya.

Now, you will need a background to read and understand the next sentence. When one cycle of creation is over, everything is withdrawn. It is pralaya, dissolution. But all is not extinct. Something that centrally evolves in creation is still alive. A power of the unbounded self of the universe is still lying there half-awake. In that darkness, in that Night, it is awake between two nothingnesses — the Inconscient around and the Superconscient above. It looks around and sees before it the prospect of once again taking birth, evolving and going through this slow cycle of mortality. It feels: No, I don't want it. I have had enough. And it wants to end itself in the vacant Night or Nought around. It is a tired power which does not relish the prospect of another round. It would rather diminish and extinguish itself in the Nescience:

A power of fallen boundless self awake

Between the first and the last Nothingness,

Recalling the tenebrous womb from which it came,

Turned from the insoluble mystery of birth

And the tardy process of mortality

And longed to reach its end in vacant Nought.

It remembers; it recalls that dark inconscience, that tenebrous womb, that source from which it came. It faces another birth, in itself a mystery. There is a mystery of birth and a mystery of death. But before the mystery of death, one has to face the mystery of birth. And that is insoluble; one can't really clear this mystery of

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birth. This power turns away from that mystery of birth and the subsequent process of slow evolution. It intensely desires to end itself in the vacancy around. This is the imagery. There is the Night, there is the Zero, and in that this soul-power awakes, remembers the dark inconscient from which it has come; it sees that it is shut up between two nothingnesses; it looks at the prospect of the mysterious birth and the inevitable lengthy tortuous process of evolution through births and deaths. And in its tired mood it says: "Let me end myself in this vacant Nought." So that there is no toil of coming into manifestation again and again.

As in a dark beginning of all things,

A mute featureless semblance of the Unknown

Repeating for ever the unconscious act,

Prolonging for ever the unseeing will,

Cradled the cosmic drowse of ignorant Force

Whose moved creative slumber kindles the suns

And carries our lives in its somnambulist whirl.

Some movement is going on. Something is there which we cannot describe, cannot define, it is featureless. It looks mute: it cannot express itself; in appearance it is like the Unknown. And what is it doing? Before things emerge, before they begin, there is a movement. An unconscious act goes on repeating itself. There is a mechanical activity with apparently no meaning, it is not conscious. The act goes on, because there is some will wanting it to go on. But it is not a wakeful conscious will. It is an unseeing will — it is not a blind will; only it does not choose to see, it has closed its eyes. This unconscious activity goes on and on, prolonging the unseeing will. This movement cradles, there is a swinging action as of a cradle, it cradles a force which is ignorant; it does not know what it is. doing and why. It is not individual, it is cosmic. It is an universal force that is moving, acting, in sleep, as it were. Drowse 1s a state between waking and sleep; it is not complete sleep. But the drowse of that ignorant force is creative. It is not a sinking sleep, but a creative sleep. And this slumber is moved by something else. This action m drowse of that ignorant force kindles the suns. There is not one sun alone; in the universe there are many suns. All those suns are first lighted by this mechanical movement in drowse. Even after the kindling of the suns, all is carried in this ' whirl, the circling movement. That is, this material Force, to which we deny intelligence and which physical science describes as the

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father of all things, creates mechanically in a somnambulist manner. It is moved by a creative slumber. The movement and the activity of this force have a meaning.

Athwart the vain enormous trance of Space,

Its formless stupor without mind or life,

A shadow spinning through a soulless Void,

Thrown back once more into unthinking dreams,

Earth wheeled abandoned in the hollow gulfs

Forgetful of her spirit and her fate.

There is vast space. But it is in trance. There is no life in it; there is no mind either. It is in an enormous but vain trance. A trance is productive, but here it does not seem to bear any fruit. All is in a stupor, a kind of suspension. Space is there but there is no form. In that soulless void, like a shadow, spinning round and round, our earth is wheeling. The earth is thrown back into unthinking dreams because there is no mind activity, it is half-asleep; once more, as it must have happened at the commencement of every earlier cycle.

In the hollow gulfs of space, the earth is wheeling as if abandoned to herself. She has completely forgotten what is moving her and where she is to go, her destiny and her goal.

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We have come upto the stage of earth's wheeling in the hollow gulfs, forgetful of her spirit and her fate.

The impassive skies were neutral, empty, still.

The skies are absolutely impassive; they are not reacting to anything. They are neutral, neither pleasant nor unpleasant, neither giving rise to joyous sensations nor to unhappy ones. They are empty, there are no clouds, there are no patterns. And all is still, there are no winds, nothing is moving.

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.

In such a state something moves, there is a stir. In that inscrutable

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darkness, a darkness which cannot be analysed, fathomed, something moves. And what is it? A nameless movement: it is a movement, but it cannot be called by any name. It is an unthought Idea; it is a self-existent Idea, not a product of thinking. Insistent, repeating itself, demanding. Dissatisfied, it is obvious that there is some dissatisfaction of seeking; and yet it is without an aim, it wants, but what it wants is not clear. This something wishes to come into being but it does not know how to do so. And it goes on exerting pressure on the Inconscient. There is no consciousness yet. That Inconscient is teased, urged by this insistent movement to wake Ignorance. Sri Aurobindo explains that this is not to be taken merely as a metaphor; for him the Inconscient is very real, as concrete as anything else. This Inconscient has to be disturbed, goaded, prodded into action, into some awareness. There has to emerge some consciousness before there can be Ignorance, maybe a partial consciousness, a semi-consciousness, some kind of awareness, before Ignorance can appear.

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.

As soon as the nameless movement stirs there is a throe, a moving wave in the atmosphere, and that leaves a vibrating trace. And in leaving that trace, it gives room for an old tired want unfilled. There is some want somewhere which is not satisfied and it is an old want. When the throb appears, this hidden unsatisfied want gets room to emerge. Where was it till now?

The hidden want was lying in the subconscient levels in a dark moonless cave. From that cavern, its hiding place, this want raises its head. Since it is coming from a dark cave, naturally it is looking and straining for light which is not there in that cave. This want has had a past and some memory of it. It has seen light at one time, but that memory has faded; yet something of it remains and that is why it is straining its closed eyes, trying to remember. The poet brings in a striking simile from life.

It is an experience, I suppose, of most of us that often we look for something which had moved us before. At times an old memory revives

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and we want to have that fulfilment again. We want to be what once we were, maybe for a while. It may be to indulge an old desire. But when the situation is recreated, we find that it no more yields the same satisfaction and we are disappointed. The old thrill is missing. We meet only a dead corpse of our old desire that has departed.

Like one who searches for a bygone self

And only meets the corpse of his desire.

I suppose these lines apply to everyone at some time or other in life. We think that our desires which are intense today will be so always. A year hence, when the object fulfilling that same desire turns up, we find we have no more the old liking for it. Our desire is dead. Desires are fleeting, transient, and they die quickly, leaving only phantoms behind.

Now, from where has this old tired want come up?

It was as though even in this Nought's profound,

Even in this ultimate dissolution's core

There lurked an unremembering entity,

Survivor of a slain and buried past

Condemned to resume the effort and the page,

Reviving in another frustrate world.

Nought is zero, negation. Everything of the previous creation has been dissolved. Only a small core is left. And in that core something lurks; it is an entity. It doesn't quite remember the past that has been slain and buried. Only this little entity seems to have survived. The poet doesn't say exactly an entity, but 'as though,' as if it is there. This little entity finds itself condemned forced against its will, to resume the effort, and the pang, the effort of the last cycle of evolution and the pang of that effort. It had hoped it was all over, but now it is condemned to resume all of it. The previous round was sufficiently frustrating, and this is another frustrate world ahead.

An unshaped consciousness desired light

And a blank prescience yearned towards distant change.

The unshaped, unformulated consciousness that is spread everywhere desires and seeks for light. In that vast expanse there is a prescience, a feeling of something to come, though nothing definite is known. It is a blank prescience, a kind of vague presentiment. There is some foreknowledge of a distant change that is to come

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and replace the present state of negation. And there is a yearning for that change.

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As if a childlike finger laid on a cheek

Reminded of the endless need in things

The heedless Mother of the universe,

An infant longing clutched the sombre

Vast. Insensibly somewhere a breach began.

Earlier we read that a vague unformulated consciousness desired light. Also, there was a kind of foreseeing and a yearning towards some change to come. This desire for light, this yearning for change, produces an effect. The effect is an infant longing, a child-longing that is not very strong, nevertheless articulate. This longing clutches the sombre Vast, the gloomy Vast around.

Here the poet gives the simile of the mother and the child. The mother is not very attentive to the child; and to remind the mother, the child places its finger on her cheek, calling attention to its need. The mother of the universe is heedless, not attentive, and needs to be reminded of the endless need in things.

The desire and yearning act as a kind of clutch on this sombre Vast. There is a suggestion here that behind this Vast of nature is the Face of the Mother of the Universe. The clutch on nature is like the finger of a child laid on the cheek of that Mother. Immediately something takes place and what is that?

Insensibly somewhere a breach began.

Something begins to open insensibly, not outwardly but imperceptibly; a breach begins somewhere. And what happens thereafter?

A long lone line of hesitating hue

Like a vague smile tempting a desert heart

Troubled the far rim of life's obscure sleep.

Hue: a ray of light of a particular hue. It is long; it is hesitating, it is not sure that it will not be extinguished, because the whole environment is hostile to light; it is all darkness. Suppose someone's heart is like a desert where everything is dried up — no emotions,

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no sentiments. Now to bring that person to life you smile, hoping that he would respond. Your smile is a bit vague because you are not sure of its effect. The hesitating hue is like this tentative smile troubling the sleeping life. It is not welcome to the obscure sleep of life. Its far rim, the farthest edge is bothered by the arrival of this line of light. He describes further:

Arrived from the other side of boundlessness

An eye of deity pierced through the dumb deeps;

A scout in a reconnaissance from the sun,

It seemed amid a heavy cosmic rest,

The torpor of a sick and weary world.

There is this whole Vast around. From the other side of boundlessness arrives the ray.

An eye of deity pierces through the dumb deeps; that ray of light is really the eye of a deity, devatā. This glance pierces through the dumb deeps of darkness and inconscience. These layers are mute; they do not react, do not respond. They are now pierced by the single glance of the deity from above. It is a scout in reconnaissance from the sun, a messenger on duty, to look round, find out and report. 'Reconnaissance' is a word that came very much into currency during the Second World War. A poet of an epic of this type always incorporates expressions and phrases which reflect the temper, the culture of his times. Each side sends it planes or agents on reconnaissance, to look at the terrain, observe what is going on and report. That is the implication of the word 'reconnaissance' from the sun. Here is a heavy night, all dark. The sun, the source of light, is elsewhere; an advance scout comes to see what is the state of affairs, what is required in the situation. There is not only a heavy rest, but a torpor, sluggishness, dullness, disinclination to move of a sick and weary world. It is a tired world, tired from its earlier rounds, sick of change, sick of trouble, sick of movement. So there is a torpor, a reluctance to move. In such an environment the scout has come

To seek for a spirit sole and desolate.

Those who have sent the scout know that there is a spirit somewhere here, sole and desolate, orphaned, without support, without cheer, forlorn. And that spirit is

Too fallen to recollect forgotten bliss.

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In this dull and heavy setting, this spirit which is lying, fallen, has completely forgotten its past bliss. The scout from the sun has arrived seeking and searching for this spirit.

Intervening in a mindless universe,

Its message crept through the reluctant hush

Calling the adventure of consciousness and joy

And, conquering Nature's disillusioned breast,

Compelled renewed consent to see and feel.

There is no mind, there is no light. The ray of light intervenes, its message breaks through that condition. There is a hush, silence, everywhere; it is a reluctant hush, it does not want to admit anything of that light. In spite of it, the message of the scout, the message of light creeps through, calling everything to wake up and have the adventure of joy and consciousness; it prods and calls all that is around to the adventure ahead. The message is the coming adventure of consciousness and joy. It spreads and it conquers all reluctance.

Nature is not in a very co-operative mood, because earlier it had been disillusioned. Its earlier expectation of Glory, Immortality and Light had been shattered. But this message conquers even that Nature's disillusioned breast. It compels consent once again, consent to see and feel. Seeing is connected with consciousness, feeling with joy. A consent has been forced and extracted from Nature.

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The call of adventure of consciousness and joy has gone all around, compelling the renewed consent to see and feel:

A thought was sown in the unsounded Void,

A sense was born within the darkness' depths,

A memory quivered in the heart of Time

As if a soul long dead were moved to live.

As a result, so many things take place. First, in that void which was unfathomed, unplumbed, a thought is sown. It will bear fruit later on. In what was insensible, a sense is bom. All had been forgotten; now a memory quivers, stirs, in the heart of time. It is in relation to time that one forgets. Now there is a thought, there is a sense, there is a memory. It is as if a soul that had been dead for long has again come to life.

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But the oblivion that succeeds the fall,

Had blotted the crowded tablets of the past,

And all that was destroyed must be rebuilt

And old experience laboured out once more.

The previous cycle has been blotted out. In that oblivion the crowded records of the past have been completely lost. All that old experience has to be gained once again. The sense may have awakened, the thought may have arisen, but all of that old achievement has been wiped out. To revive it is a formidable task, but not impossible, For,

All can be done if the God-touch is there.

However impossible, however challenging a task may appear, it is so only to the human eye, only to human effort. If the will of God is there, Grace is there, all can be achieved.

This line is what we would call an epigram. There are hundreds of epigrams in Savitri, single-line epigrams. An epigram is a pithy saying in a sentence or a line summing up a profound message, a deep wisdom.

A hope stole in that hardly dared to be

Amid the Night's forlorn indifference.

In such a situation a hope slowly enters the scene for the first time. But that hope hardly dares to be. The environment is so indifferent and negative that it is not sure that it can survive.

As if solicited in an alien world

With timid and hazardous instinctive grace,

Orphaned and driven out to seek a home,

An errant marvel with no place to live,

Into a far-off nook of heaven there came

A slow miraculous gesture's dim appeal.

Here is an important sentence which at a first glance baffles the reader by its construction. Sri Aurobindo explains it at length.³Something from above comes searching, with a look of appeal, hoping of live in what is to it an alien world. The appeal is from elsewhere; it is an appeal for life, for hope, for change. It comes into that alien world, soliciting, wanting an acceptance. There is a

³ Savitri, p. 748.

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feeling of timidity, it is aware of the risk of its embassy. But there is an instinctive grace about it. It does not cringe, it comes with a natural grace. It comes as if it is orphaned, driven out to seek a home on this earth. It is a marvel on the move. It slowly appears in some distant comer of the sky. It is a miraculous gesture, not something natural to this Night. It is miraculous that there can be some hope at all. As a result of all this

The persistent thrill of a transfiguring touch

Persuaded the inert black quietude

And beauty and wonder disturbed the fields of God.

There is a constant play of that ray of light, ray of consciousness. Its very touch is thrilling and transfiguring. This touch persuades the black inert quietude, the inconscient, to respond. Sri Aurobindo explains that he uses the word 'quietude' deliberately to indicate something spiritual about this black inertness. The fields of God are stirred with beauty and wonder. Till now there was no beauty, there was nothing to wonder at. But as a result of this transfiguring touch, there is once again beauty, once again wonder. At that moment in the sky

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.

There is a moving hand, shining with an enchanted: wonder, pale, not very bright, light on the edge of that passing moment. And what does it do? It opens a door, a window on the verge of that mystery, and fixes it with its gold panel, a gold bright frame whose hinge is opalescent, translucent. The hand moves and fixes a door opening on the dreams and visions of the Mystery.

One lucent corner windowing hidden things

Forced the world's blind immensity to sight.

When light breaks through that window which opens the hidden things to sight, the immense darkness that is around is seen in its mass. The ray of light shows up the vast extent of the world's blind darkness.

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The darkness failed and slipped like a falling cloak

From the reclining body of a god.

Imagine that there is a god with a cloak loosely thrown over his body. When he is reclining, naturally that cloak slips. Similarly, here the darkness slips like a cloak from the body of that god. Where there was darkness, where there was the night, there is the outbreak of light. So the night fails, revealing the body of god. There is a suggestion that the body of god is there behind the darkness.

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The darkness has failed, like the falling cloak of a god. And through that tiny opening, which is made by a luminous hand, light rushes towards the earth.

Then through the pallid rift that seemed at first

Hardly enough for a trickle from the suns,

Outpoured the revelation and the flame.

That rift looks hardly enough for a trickle. But through it passes a revelation, a flame.

The brief perpetual sign recurred above.

This is a summing up of what has happened. The outpouring of the light is the break of dawn. Dawn is a perpetual sign. It presages a fresh creation, at the commencement of a cycle or at the beginning of the day. It is the perpetual promise of God that is affirmed again and again. It now recurs; it had taken place earlier as well. The poet then describes the action of the dawn:

A glamour from the unreached transcendences

Iridescent with the glory of the Unseen,

A message from the unknown immortal Light

Ablaze upon creation's quivering edge,

Dawn built her aura of magnificent hues

And buried its seed of grandeur in the hours.

Transcendences are the regions that are beyond our reach. From those unreached regions comes a glamour, something attractively

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brilliant, shining with the glory of that which is unseen; it is a message not only from the Unseen, but also from the Unknown. There is somewhere a Light that never fades, that is not known to the mortal eye. From that immortal Light, a message arrives in the form of the dawn. This dawn is ablaze, afire, on the border of the quivering edge of the earth. Thus she builds her aura of magnificent colours that outpour from her. They create an aura, a kind of a hazy belt. The dawn is a promise, she comes to assure that the light is coming. Dawn herself is not the grandeur; dawn plants the seed of grandeur in the hours, in time. For us, time unrolls itself in the succession of moment, hours, days. And though the dawn recedes, the day takes over; as the day progresses the grandeur manifests, — the fruit of the seed.

An instant's visitor the godhead shone.

Dawn is described as the godhead; it is an instant's visitor, does not stay for long.

On life's thin border awhile the Vision stood

And bent over earth's pondering forehead curve.

When the Vision stands there on the border of the earth, it is as it were bending over the curve of the forehead of the earth. That forehead is pondering, wondering at what is to come. In the process, it does many things:

Interpreting a recondite beauty and bliss

In colour's hieroglyphs of mystic sense,

It wrote the lines of a significant myth

Telling of a greatness of spiritual dawns,

A brilliant code penned with the sky for page.

It interprets here to earth some mysterious beauty and bliss that are somewhere else. The interpretation is in hieroglyphs, in undecipherable letters, in figures which have certain significances. These figures are drawn in colour. The meaning of those hieroglyphs is something mystic. Myth is a legend, a story in which there is a supernatural element. The greatness is of spiritual dawns, not of the physical dawns. Their grandeur is written upon the page of the sky in a brilliant code, splendid language.

Almost that day the epiphany was disclosed

Of which our thoughts and hopes are signal flares;

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A lonely splendour from the invisible goal

Atmost was flung on the opaque Inane.

Epiphany is a manifestation of God; originally the word signified the day when the Magi saw Christ; it is, I believe, January 6th. Now at the moment when the first dawn breaks, the manifestation to come is also disclosed, glimpsed. This is the herald of manifestation of which our human hopes and thoughts are signals, flares testifying to the fact of the epiphany. We think high thoughts, entertain high hopes, because of this certainty of manifestation. Our thoughts and hopes are the witnesses, advance signals of an epiphany that is preparing.

Our earth was without life, without sensation, without mind, an Inane. Now a solitary splendour, from a destination which is yet invisible, in flung upon this vast emptiness through which light could hardly pass.

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.

Once again the stir and the longing for a change became articulate, there was a tread. Now, with the arrival of the light, the dawn, there is a tread that vibrates. After the phenomenon of dawn, the Face of a Deity appears. She is the mother of light, Usha as she is called in the Veda. When her eyelids open, they open the heavens; her face is the centre of Infinity. Infinity has no circumference, no form, but it has a centre. It is a Face of rapturous calm. It is very difficult to conceive of a 'rapturous calm'. Normally, if there is rapture, there is no calm; and where there is calm, there is no rapture. But with the Divine both go together. Sri Aurobindo describes later on⁴

A heart of silence in the hands of joy.

The Deity opens her eyes. It is a form that seems to be approaching from far regions of bliss.

Ambassadress twixt eternity and change,

The omniscient Goddess leaned across the breadths

That wrap the fated journeyings of the stars

⁴ Savitri, p. ] 5.

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And saw the spaces ready for her feet.

She is the ambassador between eternity that is changeless and the field of change that is here. The stars are not journeying on their own, they are part of a system; there is a law that governs their course. The breadths of the sky wrap these courses of the stars. The Deity looks across those breadths and sees that earth-spaces below are ready to receive her.

So first, there is the impersonal Dawn, then there is a tread of something coming; then appears this Face of rapturous calm, Infinity's centre, that parts the lids that open the heavens to sight. This is the Form that has come to earth from far beatitudes. Omniscient Goddess, Usha, the Dawn leans across the breadths of the skies and sees that the spaces below are ready for her footsteps.

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We came to the point where the Divine Dawn looks down and sees that the spaces are ready for her feet. And what the poet describes is so human.

Once she half looked behind for her veiled sun,

Then, thoughtful, went to her immortal work.

She is the ambassadress going to manifest the light of the Sun of Truth. Before doing so, she half-looks behind, at the Sun who is still under a veil. Then, pensive, thoughtful, she goes ahead for the work that she has come to do, the immortal work of manifesting the Divine Consciousness. As she came

Earth felt the Imperishable's passage close.

Even as she approaches, the earth feels the passage of the Imperishable, the Impersonal, the Undecaying, coming forward. The earth feels it close by

The waking ear of Nature heard her steps

And wideness turned to her its limitless eye,

And, scattered on sealed depths, her luminous smile

Kindled to fire the silence of the worlds.

Till now, Nature was asleep. Waking as a result of this movement,

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its ear hears her footsteps. The wideness, the vastness, turns its large gaze to her who is coming. As she looks, as she steps forward, her smile which is luminous is scattered, thrown around liberally, on the depths of creation, which are not yet open; they are still sealed. The moment her smile falls upon those depths, the silence of the worlds is set ablaze, aflame with aspiration. The aspiration is lit up. Where there was silence, there is articulation.

All grew a consecration and a rite.

Consecration: something sacred, something holy. As a result of the smile and the lighting up of the flame by the smile, everything becomes a consecration, a rite, a movement of worship. Every moment becomes holy.

Air was a vibrant link between earth and heaven;

The wide-winged hymn of a great priestly wind

Arose and failed upon the altar hills;

The high boughs prayed in a revealing sky.

Air is not just an extension but a living vibrant link joining earth and heaven; air comes to life. The wind in blowing; it is likened to a priest who utters a mantra, a prayer. When a great wind blows, it is as if a wide-winged hymn is intoned. That hymn rises and falls upon the hills. The hills themselves become the altar. Altar is what is called in Sanskrit vedi, the platform on which the sacred fire is lit and the rites of worship are conducted. So the wind turns into a priest, the hills turn into an altar. And the high boughs, the branches of the trees pointing upwards, are as if praying. The clusters of branches are praying in a sky that is showing something. The sky reveals the Beyond. Sri Aurobindo explains that all these describe different parts of Nature flowing in adoration towards the Creator.

The picture is that of a conscious adoration offered by Nature and in that each element in conscious in its own way, the wind and its hymn, the hills, the trees. The wind is a great priest of this sacrifice of worship, his voice rises in a conscious hymn of aspiration, the hills offer themselves with the feeling of being an altar of the worship, the trees lift their high boughs towards heaven as the worshippers, silent figures of prayer, and the light of the sky into which their boughs rise reveals the Beyond towards which all aspires.⁵

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And Nature moves in this manner.

Here where our half-lit ignorance skirts the gulfs

On the dumb bosom of the amibiguous earth,

Here where one knows not even the step in front

And Truth has her throne on the shadowy back of doubt,

On this anguished and precarious field of toil,

Outspread beneath some large indifferent gaze,

Impartial witness to our joy and bale,

Our prostrate soil bore the awakening ray.

The gulfs below the depths are skirted, surrounded by a half-lit ignorance. It is only half-lighted, that is why it is ignorance. If it were fully lit there would not be ignorance, there would be only knowledge. Ignorance is incomplete knowledge; ignorance is not to be confused as something opposed or contrary to knowledge. What is contrary to knowledge is falsehood. Ignorance is knowledge in the making. This is by the way.

Here on earth where we live, it is all ambiguous; we can never be sure what is leading and where. On this mute surface of the earth, man does not know what the next step is going to be; he puts his step alright but he does not know where it will lead and how it is going to be. Man's knowledge and vision are so limited that he does not really know the next step. He puts the step mechanically.

Whatever we believe to be true, whatever is accepted as truth, there is always a doubt around it. Truth is seated on the shadowy back of doubt; further on he speaks of the face of knowledge turbaned with doubt. As long as it is a mental knowledge, there is always the possibility of its not being true and some part of the mind questions it. At times it may be a wrong doubt, but it can also prove to be a legitimate doubt, making possible a revision of the truth. This is the characteristic of life on earth.

This earth is a field of toil, kuruksetra; precarious, because we can never be sure whether it will be completed or whether the work will yield its results. It is anguished, because there is always some kind of anxiety; there is no certainty and security. This field of toil that is earth is outspread beneath, below. Some Eye of Heaven, some gaze, say of a god, is looking at it. That gaze is not overconcemed with the moment-to-moment changes and movements on earth. The gaze of supernature is an impartial witness; it

⁵ Savitri, p. 790.

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does not interfere, it only watches all our joys and our miseries, happiness and unhappiness; it is a sāksi. The ray of light, the ray of dawn is received here on such a field, on a prostrate soil. Till now the soil was lifeless, asleep, not active. The action of the ray awakens this arid, helpless soil. Not only that,

Here too the vision and prophetic gleam

Lit into miracles common meaningless shapes;

Then the divine afflatus, spent, withdrew,

Unwanted, fading from the mortal's range.

The vision that stands on the pondering forehead curve of the earth and the gleam that promises something of the future, light up what were common and meaningless shapes; all are lit into miracles and spring to life. Then, 'afflatus' is the divine Inspiration, Revelation; it is spent and withdraws, it does not stay a moment longer. And why does it withdraw? The mortal's range, his range of feeling, sight and experience is limited. So it withdraws from this small range, feeling unwanted. There is not enough aspiration, not enough want for the light to stay. So the afflatus withdraws after its all-too-brief appearance.

A sacred yearning lingered in its trace,

The worship of a Presence and a Power

Too perfect to be held by death-bound hearts.

The prescience of a marvellous birth to come.

It withdraws but in its trace something is left, a yearning, a poignant desire. Not desire of an ordinary vital type, but a sacred seeking. A Presence has come, a Power has visited and Nature continues her worship. In the air there is worship of that Power and Presence.

That Presence cannot be held by our imperfect, mortal hearts, because it is too perfect. Human beings are death-bound and so imperfect that they cannot hold very well this too perfect presence and power. Also continues the prescience, that advance feeling and presentiment of a marvellous birth to come. Even though the ray withdraws the yearning continues, the worship goes on, and so too the premonition, the sure feeling of something marvellous that is to come — all these linger.

The earth, the mortal range is too imperfect, too impure to hold and sustain the light of God, except for a little while. This is the second epigram that we have come across. It is only by repeated visitations, self-affirmations of the God-light that a habit is created

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in the earth-being to hold it naturally. Till then these can be only brief experiences. And a series of experiences ultimately build themselves into a realisation.

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Only a little the God-light can stay.

The conditions in our world are such that the light of God cannot say unadulterated, undeflected for more than a little while. It is obliged to withdraw. But the little that it stays, makes all the difference to our life.

Spiritual beauty illumining human sight

Lines with its passion and mystery Matter's mask

And squanders eternity on a beat of Time.

Beauty is of many kinds: physical beauty of form, vital beauty of life, aesthetic beauty. Here the poet speaks of spiritual beauty. Matter is a mask that has an outside and an inside. This mask of Matter is lined inside with spiritual beauty. The mystery element in Matter which our reasoning cannot explain and the intensity of movement that articulates dead inert Matter into life and activity are due to this spiritual element. This supernatural beauty squanders, throws out eternity on a beat of time. A single beat of time, a moment, a second, contains in itself the whole eternity. To us it looks like a passing moment, but it is a throb of eternity in a moment of time.

As when a soul draws near the sill of birth,

Adjoining mortal time to Timelessness,

A spark of deity lost in Matter's crypt

Its lustre vanishes in the inconscient planes,

That transitory glow of magic fire

So now dissolved in bright accustomed air.

There is a threshold, standing between this world and the other world, eternity on one side and this domain of time on the other. When a soul crosses this sill to take birth in this world, the divine spark that it is, it is lost in the crypt, the vault of Matter; it loses its awareness. The lustre of that spark vanishes in these inconscient planes. Similarly the momentary glow of the fiery ray of Dawn

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dissolves in the earth's accustomed air which is getting brighter. That means, with the spread of common daylight beauty and glow of the dawn recede.

The message ceased and waned the messenger.

The thrilling message of the advent of light, the birth of consciousness is no more articulate. It fades away.

The single Call, the uncompanioned Power,

Drew back into some far-off secret world

The hue and marvel of the supernal beam.

The divine call to light and life, the lone power of consciousness that had come down, draws back its colorful and wondrous spiritual beam of light from this hackneyed atmosphere into its own far away secret home.

She looked no more on our mortality.

The Goddess, the Deity, looks no more on our world of mortality. Mortality is a state of being bound by death. The earth-life is death-bound. That is why it is called mortal.

The excess of beauty natural to God-kind

Could not uphold its claim on time-bom eyes;

Too mystic-real for space-tenancy

Her body of glory was expunged from heaven.

There is an attenuated beauty that is natural to earth-life. Very different is the luxuriant beauty which is natural to God-kind and cannot be held by mortal eyes. It is too dazzling for the human time-born sight to behold. The Mother used to say that the supramental sun looks black to human sight. It so bright, so dazzling that it is beyond the range of our physical sight. Thus the body of glory of Goddess Dawn gets expunged, expelled, cleared from heaven, from the sky. It was too mystic, at the same time real. Mystic is visionary, not substantial, and yet it is real — too unusual to be a tenant of this earth-space.

The rarity and wonder lived no more.

And

There was the common light of earthly day.

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In that common light,

Affranchised from the respite of fatigue

Once more the rumour of the speed of Life

Pursued the cycles of her blinded quest.

Till this outbreak of light, of the Dawn, the movement of life had a spell of rest. The journey of life had been suspended. But now that respite is over. Affranchised, freed from that respite of fatigue, the report of the speed of life gathers momentum; it goes on in its usual blind way. Life is in quest of something but it pursues it blindly, cycle after cycle. Now once more that quest is resumed.

All sprang to their unvarying daily acts;

The thousand peoples of the soil and tree

Obeyed the unforeseeing instant's urge,

And, leader here with his uncertain mind,

Alone who stares at the future's covered face,

Man lifted up the burden of his fate.

Now everyone resumes mechanically the unchanging routine. The countless creatures of land and air, animals, birds, start once again following blindly the impulse of the moment, — the moment that is hardly aware of the next step. And man, too, who is the leader of all creatures on this evolving earth, despite his unsure mental direction, who alone among all the living beings on earth looks up and gazes at the veiled face of the future, lifts up the burden of his destiny which has been temporarily laid down during the respite of fatigue. Man is unique inasmuch as he is not content to live in the present, as do other creatures; he dares to look ahead and peer into the future which is in the womb of time. Though he lives mostly in the present, there is something in man which looks beyond. The face, the eyes of all the animals are turned earthward. Man is the only one whose eyes are turned upward. That is why Sri Aurobindo speaks elsewhere of man "who looks at his companion stars."

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And Savitri too awoke among these tribes

That hastened to join the brilliant Summoner's chant

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And, lured by the beauty of the apparent ways,

Acclaimed their portion of ephemeral joy.

With the onset of day everything springs into activity; all wake up — the creatures of land, the creatures of air, and man also takes up again the load of his destiny. And among all these groups of different kinds, Savitri too wakes up. This is where her narrative starts.

All resume their labour, each one hurries to respond to the call of life. The brilliant Summoner is the sun who is rising and calling everyone to move into activity. The surface appearances of life have their own attraction and all creatures are lured by the seeming beauty of the ways of life; they seek to participate in it. Each welcomes with pleasure his portion of life's joy, though it is ephemeral. Each one snatches his pleasure however fleeting it may prove to be. But among them all there is one who does not mingle in the mad rush. It is Savitri. And why does she not?

Akin to the eternity whence she came,

No part she took in this small happiness;

A mighty stranger in the human field,

The embodied Guest within made no response.

Following the nature of eternity from where she came, she does not feel drawn to this petty happiness and joy. The divine Inhabitant who is housed in her body is a stranger, and is too great for this little field of human beings, and makes no response to the excitations here. So she is naturally indifferent. The Guest within is an ancient Vedic figure. The Rig Veda speaks of "the Guest in house and house, the Immortal in the mortals." This Guest is there in all of us. Only most are not conscious of this Presence. Savitri is.

The call that wakes the leap of human mind,

Its chequered eager motion of pursuit,

Its fluttering-hued illusion of desire,

Visited her heart like a sweet alien note.

The call of life, with its excitement and joy, always evokes a response in the human mind which leaps up at every attraction and pursues it eagerly, howsoever it may get checkmated in the process. It is driven by the force of desire which creates a colourful illusion, howsoever unsteady. This impulse never strikes a chord

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in Savitri. Despite its sweetness it is felt as an alien note, a foreign vibration.

Time's message of brief light was not for her.

Not for Savitri is the appeal of fleeting time, its passing brightness. She is made differently. Her consciousness is altogether different.

In her there was the anguish of the gods

Imprisoned in our transient human mould,

The deathless conquered by the death of things.

In Savitri there is an anguish, an inner pain such as of the gods kept in prison of the human body. It is anguish of the immortal subjected to the rule of mortality, death. Moreover,

A vaster Nature's joy had once been hers,

But long could keep not its gold heavenly hue

Or stand upon this brittle earthly base.

Once in her early days, before she grew up, she fully shared the joy of the vaster Nature. She was in tune with the universal Nature and was full of felicities. But that joy could not maintain its bright heavenly tinge of excellence. Gold, in the ancient symbolism, denotes Truth. After all, the human body made of earth is brittle, whoever may occupy it. Hence the vaster joy could not hold itself in her fragile physical frame. She had brought with her a great power, imperious wideness and bliss. But

A narrow movement on Time's deep abysm,

Life's fragile littleness denied the power,

The proud and conscious wideness and the bliss

She had brought with her into the human form,

The calm delight that weds one soul to all,

The key to the flaming doors of ecstasy.

The littleness, the scantiness of life precariously poised on the deep gulfs of Time questioned and refused to accept what Savitri had brought with her in human form, viz. power, vastness, bliss, calm delight that unifies soul with soul, the calm-based delight that is the key to the fiery doors of divine ecstasy. Note that this delight is described as calm: it is not an effervescent joy, but is a self-sufficient, self-contented poised delight that is the beginning and foundation of the burning ecstasy that is the culmination to be.

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Earth's grain that needs the sap of pleasure and tears

Rejected the undying rapture's boon.

Every bit of earth that springs into life needs the sap, the life-giving essence of pleasure and tears. This duality is the way of earth-life. Life maintains itself on this mixture. Only joy would be boring, only sorrow would be smothering. When both are there earth gets enough excitement. Such an earth refuses what Savitri had brought with her, the boon of undying rapture. This rapture is not pleasure. It is an intense delight. It may or may not be caused by outer circumstances. On the other hand, pleasure is always the result of excitation. This rejection of the higher boon by the earth-grain is not all.

Offered to the daughter of infinity

Her passion-flower of love and doom she gave.

Savitri is verily the Daughter of Infinity. In exchange for her boon of power and delight, earth gives to her the passion-flower of love and doom. Passion-flower is the flower resembling the crown of thorns placed on the head of Christ. As you know, his love for God expressed in pain and tears is called the passion-play. The love on earth, the human love is a veritable passion-flower. It has always thorns around it. Earth gives this love, and in its sequel doom, death.

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The central idea here is of the divine sacrifice. The earliest mention of sacrifice in our tradition occurs in the Veda which speaks of the cosmic Person, the thousand-headed Purusha, sacrificing himself so that this creation might come into existence. The Bhagavad-Gita also speaks of sacrifice: after creating the gods, creating the peoples, the Supreme God created Yajna as a means for their interchange. He charged the gods and the peoples to promote each other by means of sacrifice, Yajna. We do not need to say that this understanding has not been honoured from our side. The sacrifice continues from above, but from below we are not doing our part of the sacrifice; we appropriate everything to ourselves, what properly belongs to the Divine.

Sri Aurobindo speaks in a memorable passage in the book The

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Mother of the supreme holocaust of the divine Mother. She sacrifices herself, comes down into this world of suffering and darkness in order that it may be uplifted.⁶ In several other passages of his writings, particularly in this epic, he refers to the sacrifice of God as an Avatar; he speaks of all the hardship and struggle that are implied in the birth of an Avatar, and the reluctance of the world to receive the message that the Avatar brings.

With this background we can now proceed to study what he says regarding Savitri who is the Divine Grace incarnate; she came to battle with Death and win immortality for humanity.

In vain now seemed the splendid sacrifice.

She left her celestial home, left her glory, eternity and infinity, and chose to don the human robe, — a great sacrifice. But now it seems to have been done in vain.

A prodigal of her rich divinity,

Her self and all she was she had lent to men,

Hoping her greater being to implant

That heaven might native grow on mortal soil.

She is very generous, almost prodigal, spendthrift, in the giving of her divinity. She gives, and gives largely. She gives herself and all she has, her power, light, wisdom — everything that she carries with her. She has lent these to men, the world of men, in order to plant her greater Being here on earth. Her larger being comes down to the human level hoping that thereby heaven, the habitation of the immortals, may grow here naturally. In other words, she does this sacrifice in order to establish heaven on earth. Here Sri Aurobindo makes an observation. That is his style: as he narrates the story, he pauses at certain points and gives a higher insight. Here he states the reason why her sacrifice failed:

Hard is it to persuade earth-nature's change;

Mortality bears ill the eternal's touch.

To persuade the earth-nature to change is very difficult, hard. Our normal state of existence, mortality, does not welcome it, but reacts badly to the touch of the eternal, the immortal. Why does it do so?

⁶SABCL, Vol. 25, p. 25. See also Savitri, p. 99.

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It fears the pure divine intolerance

Of that assault of ether and of fire;

It murmurs at its sorrowless happiness,

Almost with hate repels the light it brings;

It trembles at its naked power of Truth

And the might and sweetness of its absolute Voice.

The divine purity insists on everything being equally pure, it does not tolerate any impurity. The earth-nature fears its rarefied air and the flame of intensity. This nature complains that the higher happiness is absolutely sorrowless and it is bored with it; if you are continuously happy, you forget that you are happy and at some stage you begin to get bored: there is no excitement of adventure, no prospect of change. The light that the Eternal brings from above is repelled, rejected, thrown back almost with hate, not just an indifference, but an active antipathy. The divine truth has a power which is irresistible in its unveiled form; and when it nears does the earth-nature tremble. Apart from the power of truth, the voice of truth too is feared: it is absolute, it does not admit any denial. And yet, it is sweet and warm. These negative reactions are not all: the earth-nature does not stop with trembling and fearing; it indeed does something positive by way of repulsion.

Inflicting on the heights the abysm's law,

It sullies with its mire heaven's messengers.

The gulf, the pit below has its own law — the law of limitation, ignorance, death. This law is inflicted on the heights from where the truth tries to descend. The messengers of heaven come down, but the earth-nature soils them with its mud.

Its thorns of fallen nature are the defence

It turns against the saviour hands of Grace;

It meets the sons of God with death and pain.

Against the hands of Grace that come to save, mortality turns its thorns of fallen nature in its own defence. This is how the messengers of Heaven, Sons of God, have been repelled with pain and death thrown in their face. All that remains of their mission is but little.

A glory of lightnings traversing the earth-scene,

Their sun-thoughts fading, darkened by ignorant minds,

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Their work betrayed, their good to evil turned,

The cross their payment for the crown they gave,

Only they leave behind a splendid Name.

The earth-scene is traversed by a blaze of glory during the ministry of these saviours. Each thought of theirs is like a sun, bright, luminous; but these thoughts begin to fade, — because they are darkened by ignorant minds. All the great work that they have done is found to be betrayed. The good they have done is turned to evil by this ignorant humanity. The messengers bring the crown for man, but in return they are given the cross — an allusion to Christ, his crucifixion. Their great name is all that lasts. Men succeed in pulling down everything else. What then is the net result?

A fire has come and touched men's hearts and gone;

A few have caught flame and risen to greater life.

A great fire has descended, touched the hearts of men, and retired. A few have indeed benefitted; they have caught that flame of aspiration for God, for the higher nature, for immortality. The texture of their life has changed; from their common lower life they have risen to a greater life. But such are few. The narrative is resumed after this observation:

Too unlike the world she came to help and save,

Her greatness weighed upon its ignorant breast,

And from its deep chasms welled a dire return,

A portion of its sorrow, struggle, fall.

Savitri came to help and save this world, but she is too much unlike this world. Her weight has been too much upon the ignorant breast of earth. A cruel return shoots up from its deep chasm, part of its lot of sorrow, struggle, and fall.

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To live with grief, to confront death on her road, —

The mortal's lot became the Immortal's share.

We have seen how, despite all the greatness that Savitri has brought to the earth, she is rewarded with sorrow, struggle, fall. As a result, though she has come from the land of the Immortals, she has to

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share what is normally the lot of the mortal: to live with grief. Grief is inseparable from our human life. She has also to encounter death.

Thus trapped in the gin of earthly destinies,

Awaiting her ordeal's hour abode,

Outcast from her inborn felicity,

Accepting life's obscure terrestrial robe,

Hiding herself even from those she loved,

The godhead greater by a human fate.

Abode is the past tense of abide. Thus lived Savitri, caught in the net of earthly destinies. In the circumstances prevailing, the natural happiness and joy which she brought with her could not be very active. She is outcast from the felicity which is inborn with her. She consents to wear the dark earthly robe. Her real self is not revealed even to those whom she loves. Normally we do not hide things, we reveal ourselves to those whom we love, those who are near. But Savitri does not. Thus does she wait for the moment of supreme trial. Nobody else is let into her secret. Though she is of the Gods, she has accepted a human fate. Normally we would think that she has diminished her stature by taking on human nature. But she is greater for that very reason. This is an important concept of Sri Aurobindo. Elsewhere also he speaks of how a god descended on earth, taking on himself the load of human Karma, is greater than his compeer who is content to stay in his paradise. He has all the consciousness of heaven, plus something special to the earth-experience. So when the god returns to his home, he is richer than the gods who have never left it. That is also Sri Aurobindo's explanation as to why God should have bothered at all to put forth this manifestation when he could very well have rested content in his glory. Why all this toil, suffering and danger? He points out that in creating this world, going through the round, taking the challenge of opposites, God's consciousness itself grows richer. The labour and effort of the adventure increase the stature of God. He is richer for having come down and participated in the labour of the earth's evolution. Earth is the field of progress. There is no progress of our kind on the higher planes. Sri Aurobindo cites the passage from Vishnu Purana where it is said that even the gods, if they want to rise higher, have to come down to the earth and take a human birth. That is the purport of "the godhead greater by a human fate."

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A dark foreknowledge separated her

From all of whom she was the star and stay;

Too great to impart the peril and the pain,

In her torn depths she kept the grief to come.

Savitri has been the hope and support of a large number of people. Even from them she is separated by the dark foreknowledge of the coming down which she alone has. It is always a characteristic of great persons that they do not speak of their grief or pain to others. They don't share, they keep the pain to themselves; they loftily endure it by themselves. It is common people who rush to speak of their miseries and difficulties to others; they feel somewhat lightened when they do that. But the great ones don't impose their burden on others. Savitri keeps the grief in her own depths which are indeed torn because she suffers inside. It is gnawing at her vitals. In spite of it, she is composed and aloof.

As one who watching over men left blind

Takes up the load of an unwitting race,

Harbouring a foe whom with her heart she must feed,

Unknown her act, unknown the doom she faced,

Unhelped she must foresee and dread and dare.

Savitri takes up the load of humanity which is not conscious of that fact. She is compared to one who is charged with looking after blind people. She has to attend to everything concerning them, but they are not aware of it. They are blissfully unaware of all the worry and trouble that the person is undergoing on their account. She has to hold in herself an enemy whom she must feed with her best. None knows of this, her heroism, of the doom of death that she is facing. And none is there to come forward and help. She has to do all single-handed — to foresee, watch in dread and dare to oppose.

The long-foreknown and fatal morn was here

Bringing a noon that seemed like every noon.

This day when she wakes up, she knows that twelve months have passed and death is about to take place. Outwardly it is a day like any other day, it is a morning that is being followed by a noon like any other noon. Here Sri Aurobindo makes an observation:

For Nature walks upon her mighty way

Unheeding when she breaks a soul, a life;

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Leaving her slain behind she travels on;

Man only marks and God's all-seeing eyes.

Nature has large mighty movements and when she unrolls herself, maybe one person is dead here, one life stamped out elsewhere; but she does not pause to see what has happened; she goes on. There is a storm, there is an earthquake; countless creatures die. Nature goes on unconcernedly. Only man who is involved takes note. Also, it does not escape the all-seeing eyes of God.

Even in this moment of her soul's despair,

In its grim rendezvous with death and fear,

No cry broke from her lips, no call for aid;

She told the secret of her woe to none.

The hour of confrontation with death has arrived. Yet, despite all the fear and despair of the moment, she does not cry out; she does not call for any help. She does not share her woe with anyone.

Calm was her face and courage kept her mute.

Her appearance is calm. She is silent. Only the courageous can be silent. Those who are afraid need to speak, to articulate their fear and thereby seek support.

Yet only her outward self suffered and strove;

Even her humanity was half divine:

Even in this crisis her suffering is confined only to her external self which is struggling from moment to moment. Within, she is divine; even her apparent humanity is half divine.

Her spirit opened to the Spirit in all,

Her nature felt all Nature as its own.

Both at the level of the Self and at the level of Nature, she is one with all. It is more difficult to be united in nature than in the soul. But Savitri is one with all in both the states.

Apart, living within, all lives she bore;

Aloof, she carried in herself the world.

She lives within herself; but she is not self-centered, lost in her ownself. From that vantage ground she bears all that lives, carries all the world. That is, Savitri identifies herself, supportively, with all, though living within. Truth to tell, it is only by living within

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that we can feel one with all. By living on the surface we live in division. In her solitude Savitri carries the whole world in her being.

Her dread was one with the great cosmic dread,

Her strength was founded on the cosmic mights;

The universal Mother's love was hers.

There is an uncertainty, there is a fear in the cosmos, the dread of disintegration, decay, death. Savitri's dread reflects this pervading dread in the universe. Similarly, her strength bases itself on the cosmic strength. Her force is one with the cosmic force. All this is possible, because she embodies love which is the sure basis of identity and oneness. This love is the all-embracing love of the universal Mother.

Against the evil at life's afflicted roots,

Her own calamity its private sign,

Of her pangs she made a mystic poignant sword.

She is not overcome by the evil that is staring at her in a personal way. She faces it as an individual sign of the Evil that has struck generally at the roots of life. With this awareness she converts her own crisis, her own pain into a sharp mystic sword to cut the knot.

A solitary mind, a world-wide heart,

To the lone Immortal's unshared work she rose.

In the mind she may be aloof, but in the heart she is wide, world-embracing. This is a key to every spiritual seeker: one must be detached in the mind, but the heart must spread itself, become universal.

Thus does she arise to do that work of God, all alone. The task is unique and she who takes it up is also unique.

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The poet now describes the various stages of her waking up on the fateful morning.

At first life grieved not in her burdened breast:

On the lap of earth's original somnolence

Inert, released into forgetfulness

Prone it reposed, unconscious on mind's verge,

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Obtuse and tranquil like the stone and star.

At first Savitri is still restful in the sleepy hours of the earth; life in her is still inert, forgetful, stretched out in full repose. Life has not yet come into the mental awareness. It is dull of sensation like the stone and serene like the star. Grief is not yet felt on the surface, though her breast carries the load of the impending doom.

In a deep cleft of silence twixt two realms

She lay remote from grief, unsawn by care,

Nothing recalling of the sorrow here.

She is still in the deep belt of silence between the two states, of sleep and wakefulness, lying untouched by grief, unscratched by care, unaware of all the sorrow in the world.

Then a slow faint remembrance shadowlike moved,

And sighing she laid her hand upon her bosom

And recognised the close and lingering ache,

Deep, quiet, old, made natural to its place,

But knew not why it was there nor whence it came.

Then a vague memory, an indistinct remembrance appears and flits across, like a shadow; there is some slight recollection and with a sigh her hand moves to her bosom where she feels some movement. She recognises there an ache, intimate and prolonging itself. It is not superficial, it is deep; it is not a passing ache, it persists; it is not loud, it is quiet; she recognises that it is not anything new, that has come all of a sudden; it has been there for so long that it has become natural to where she feels it. Only, till that moment, she was not aware of it. Still she does not know why it is there or from where it has come.

The Power that kindles mind was still withdrawn:

Heavy, unwilling were life's servitors

Like workers with no wages of delight;

Sullen, the torch of sense refused to bum;

The unassisted brain found not its past.

Even though she has started feeling the ache, she is not able to explain what it is, because her mind is not yet active. Nature has still withheld that power which activises the mind and enables it to analyse and understand. Moreover, sense-faculties which are the servants of life are still dull, reluctant to move into activity.

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Like workers to whom wages of joy are not paid, her senses are unwilling to exert themselves. They have not yet reached the state where they can draw the pleasure of life; so they are indifferent. The sense-torch is not burning. Her brain, which is not yet fully awake, is not helped by nature to remember its past.

Only a vague earth-nature held the frame.

Her bodily frame is held together by an indistinct earth-nature. The full force of that nature is not yet.⁷

But now she stirred, her life shared the cosmic load.

By now she wakes up fully. Her life-spirit moves into action to participate in the cosmic purpose.

At the summons of her body's voiceless call Her strong far-winging spirit travelled back, Back to the yoke of ignorance and fate, Back to the labour and stress of mortal days, Lighting a pathway through strange symbol dreams Across the ebbing of the seas of sleep.

As she wakes up, the body calls up other faculties. Her spirit which had travelled far elsewhere during the sleep of the night returns and takes up the burden of life, its ignorance and its fate, ready for the labour and stress of this mortal world. Her spirit comes back through the dreamland — full of symbols — lighting its pathway across the receding waters of sleep.

Her house of Nature felt an unseen sway,

Illumined swiftly were life's darkened rooms.

And memory's casements opened on the hours

And the tired feet of thought approached her doors.

She feels a new pulsation from an unseen source; all the nooks and comers of her life that were obscure are quickly lighted up and the windows of her memory get fully opened. Even the thought-activity that had slowed down comes back gradually into its own.

⁷ For another interpretation, see Readings in Savitri by M.P. Pandit.

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Savitri is slowly waking up on this fatal morning. At first she is not actively aware of the life around and then at her body's call her spirit comes winging back and sensations, thoughts, become active.

All came back to her: Earth\in the night.

As she becomes more and more awake, she becomes conscious of the three antagonists around her: the Earth signifying Matter, the rule of Matter; Doom, death is the other — material existence is irresistibly dominated by death as things stand. In between there is Love which is divine at its source and which alone can resolve this conflict between Earth and Death. These are the ancient disputants. They have been at conflict between Earth and Death. These are the ancient disputants. They have been at conflict from the beginning of time to possess this creation. All of them now ^v encircle her like giant figures wrestling in the night. She is in the midst of their fight for supremacy.

The godheads from the dim Inconscient bom

Awoke to struggle and the pang divine,

And in the shadow of her flaming heart,

At the sombre centre of the dire debate,

A guardian of the unconsoled abyss

Inheriting the long agony of the globe,

A stone-still figure of high and godlike Pain

Stared into space with fixed regardless eyes

That saw griefs timeless depths but not life's goal.

Arisen from the dim inconscient, these disputants awake to their age-old struggle and pang — a pang that is divine because it is the pang of the immanent Divine. The terrible contest goes on in the shadow of the flaming heart of Savitri. At this centre of gloom is seated Pain, the figure of pain personified. He is the guardian of the unreconciled bottomless deeps. The universe has a long history of agony and the God of Pain is the inheritor of this agony. He is stone-like, stoic, calmly and loftily bearing the pain. He stares into space, looking at nothing in particular with a fixed gaze which sees the eternal depths of grief, but is unable to see the goal of life.

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Afflicted by his harsh divinity,

Bound to his throne, he waited unappeased

The daily oblation of her unwept tears.

Pain is divine in its aspect of hardness, for by sheer endurance it is leading the issue to a resolution in the Divine. Further, this deity of pain is fixed to his seat, though it is a royal seat befitting his divine status. He receives daily the oblation of Savitri's unshed tears, yet he is not satisfied; he waits for more. Tears that are wept are common enough, they spend out the grief; but tears that are unwept, that are controlled, suppressed, are more painful. Savitri is not given to lamenting and weeping; hence her pain is all the greater.

All the fierce question of man's hours relived.

Savitri becomes acutely aware of the very question of man's life — its purpose, its goal, if any.

The sacrifice of suffering and desire

Earth offers to the immortal Ecstasy

Began again beneath the eternal Hand.

A perpetual sacrifice is going on in which the earth offers its desire and suffering to God, to the immortal Ecstasy. Now once again, through the agency of Savitri, under the auspices of the Divine, that sacrifice commences.

Awake she endured the moments' serried march

And looked on this green smiling dangerous world.

And heard the ignorant cry of living things.

Savitri does not start up all of a sudden. As she awakes, she becomes aware of all the movements around. She bears the march of time, moment by moment; the moments pass in their battalions. She looks on this world which is green, fresh of life, attractive but at the same time dangerous. The smile, the attraction, of this world proves to be dangerous. She not only watches but hears the ignorant cries of the living creatures on earth.

Amid the trivial sounds, the unchanging scene

Her soul arose confronting Time and Fate.

All these sounds are indeed trivial in the long run. Everyday it is the same scene, people rushing to participate in this dangerous

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enticing world, full of cries of joy and pain. In this background Savitri's soul arises challenging Time and Destiny. Everyone has to face the compulsions of Time and Fate, without escape. But Savitri stands up to them defiantly.

Immobile in herself, she gathered force.

This was the day when Satyavan must die.

Her nature, her external being is immobile, though her soul is active. The soul has arisen, but the rest of her is immobile, not restless, not agitated, but silent, collected. It is only when one is silent and poised that one can really gather oneself, master one's force. She summons her in-built force to meet the immediate crisis. For

This was the day when Satyavan must die.

This is the hour when she has to conquer Time and Fate. For this is the day when Satyavan, her husband, is destined to die. In a humorous context Sri Aurobindo cites this line '

This was the day when Satyavan must die

as an example of poetic excellence and says that he would not change it even if offered the crown and income of a kavi-samrāt, the emperor of poets!⁸

M.P. PANDIT

⁸ Savitri, p. 772.

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PART III

Savitri — Some Glimpses and Reflections

On 15 August 1954, the eighty-second birthday of Sri Aurobindo, a most splendid offering to the Master was the one-volume edition brought out by the Ashram of his greatest poetic achievement — Savitri, a Legend and a Symbol — over which he had worked for, we may say, almost his lifetime. It is on record that Virgil devoted approximately ten years to his Aeneid, Dante sixteen intermittently and six wholly to his Divina Commedia, Milton at least eight to Paradise Lost and Goethe spread the writing of his Faust, with long intervals, over nearly fifty years of crowded life. Sri Aurobindo's occupation with his masterpiece is comparable in time-span to Goethe's — and his too was a life variously crowded, at the beginning with political events, afterwards with mystical realisations and inner discoveries and partly with the writing of a dozen books philosophical or literary on a large scale. But it was not merely lack of spare time, or even a desire to put the maximum of available life-experience into the poem, that made it cover fifty years or so. Unlike any of the other epic poets Sri Aurobindo made recast after recast, not merely addition on addition — and it was rarely because the early versions wanted in pure poetic merit that he did this: his aim was primarily to lift the work to the highest and most comprehensive expression possible of spiritual realities within the scheme set up by him of character, incident and plot.

This aim and the artistic method employed for achieving it were to be explained in a long introduction which he intended to write to the complete Savitri. Mostly, Savitri was meant to create in massive proportions the kind of poetry that, in his published literary criticisms, he used to designate as hailing from "Overhead" planes — the ranges of consciousness broadly envisaged by ancient Indian scriptures as lying hidden above the human and possessing an inherent light of knowledge and a natural experience of the infinite. He distinguished in general a progression of four levels as having found rare voice in the world's literature and art: Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition, Overmind. A fifth and highest plane, which he named Supermind and whose realisation above on its own peaks and ultimate descent below into the physical being are the aim of his own Integral Yoga, was regarded by him as not having directly manifested yet.

The absence cannot help being regretted of what would have been a unique expository and elucidative document on the unusual poetic afflatus — unusual in both message and music — that blows through the nearly twenty-four thousand lines of this Legend of the past that he has presented as a Symbol of the future. Luckily, however, we have a substantial number of letters by him on his epic. Out of them an informal commentary has been compiled and put after the text with the object of throwing in the poet's own precious words some light on the poem's conception and development and on its qualities of inspiration, vision, style and technique. This commentary, which is now longer by a further sheaf of letters than when first published separately and follows a scheme of grouping differing in several respects from the one adopted then, serves also to add to the description of the Overhead planes given by Sri Aurobindo in Savitri itself as well as in his philosophical work The Life Divine and to clarify certain aspects of their role in poetic creation. It etches memorably on our minds what the author calls the metaphysical psychology of the new art inspired by the extraordinary experiences and significances that have gone to the making of his poem and, in seeking affinities for this art, it ranges over a wide terrain of world-poetry and gives us vivid illustration, penetrating analysis, suggestive evocation — aesthetic sensitiveness, intellectual grasp and spiritual insight moving harmoniously together.

Of course the letters, extending over eighteen years and often touching on various subjects at a time or dealing with the same subject at different times, could not always be arranged chronologically and in a regular series to make a continuous exposition. They have been sorted into sections, each section determined mostly by similarity of theme in its contents or by their broad subsumableness under a common head. One section has been specially devoted to comments on individual lines, phrases and words given as far as possible in the order of their occurrence in the poem. The order of the sections as well as of their contents has been dictated in the main by the consideration of either logical or textual sequence.

A short note prefacing the wonderful letters gives us some valuable information on the way the poem was actually composed and finished. Not the least interesting and meaningful part of this Note is the quotation of some of the very last lines dictated by Sri Aurobindo — lines which strike one as being pregnant with a

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foreknowledge of the end at a time when there were no physical pointers to it and with a symbolic prefiguring of the spiritual situation that his departure from his own body would face his comrade and co-worker in the Integral Yoga — the Mother.

Both in quality and quantity Savitri must be counted as remarkable even among the world's remarkable achievements. With its 23,813 lines,* it is the longest poem in the English language, beating The Ring and the Book of Browning with its 21,116 to the place of runner-up: in fact it is the longest in any European language old or new, with the exception of Nicos Kazantzakis's recently published Odyssey: A Modern Sequel, written originally in present-day Greek and running into 33,333 lines. Among epics which can be compared with it in general poetic quality, only the Shah Nameh, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata exceed it in length — three works which, like it, are products of the East. And indeed Savitri stands with the masterpieces of Valmiki and Vyasa in more than one respect. It has been conceived with something of the ancient Indian temperament which not only rejoiced in massive structures but took all human life and human thought into the spacious scope of its poetic creations and blended the workings of the hidden worlds of Gods and Titans and Demons with the activities of earth. A cosmic sweep is Savitri's and Sri Aurobindo wanted his poem to be a many-sided multi-coloured carving out, in word-music, of the gigantic secrets of his supramental Yoga.

With the Mahabharata it has a direct link too. For, it is based on a story, in that epic, of a victorious fight by love against death. Such a fight is a theme that haunted Sri Aurobindo from his very youth, as is proved by his early narrative Love and Death which is somewhat similar in outward intention as well as based on an episode in the same ancient Indian epos. That other narrative of his twenties — Urvasie — is also a variant of the identical theme, since, though there is no death in it, it poetises a triumphant struggle against the fate which circumscribes mundane life and snatches away the beloved. As we know, Savitri itself was first drafted quite early in Sri Aurobindo's poetic career and, in it, the recurrent theme takes a form that clearly shows it to be bound up with Sri Aurobindo's own work in the world. The poem's heroine grew in detailed depth with each of the nearly twelve recasts he made in order to lift the meaning and music ever higher until they should

' Now adjudged to be 23,837 in the Revised Edition of Savitri, 1993.

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press everywhere towards what the old Rishis had called the Mantra and arrive again and again at this speech that Sri Aurobindo has distinguished as one in which the vision, the word, the rhythm are bom with an intense wideness and unfathomable massiveness from the Overmind. Here Savitri of the Mahabharata fighting the God of Death who had taken away her consort Satyavan became more and more an Avatar of the eternal Beauty and Love plunging into the trials of terrestrial life and seeking to overcome them not only in herself but also in the world she had embraced as her own: she was sworn to put an end to earth's ignorant estrangement from God — estrangement whose most physical symbol is Death, the bodily opposite of the luminous inherent immortality of the Divine. Her story constitutes now a poetic structure in which Sri Aurobindo houses his special search and discovery, his uttermost exploration of hidden worlds, his ascent into the top ranges of the Spirit, his bringing down of their power to divinise man's total nature. And the figure of Savitri suggests in general his own companion in the field of Yoga, the Mother, who is at present carrying on the great task set by the Master.

The technique of Savitri is attuned to the scriptural conception at work. The iambic five-foot line of blank verse is adopted as the most apt and plastic for harmonies like those of the Vedas and the Upanishads. The blank verse, however, is given certain special characteristics affming it still further to them. It moves in a series of blocks formed by a changing distribution of correctly proportioned sentence-lengths. Scarcely any block breaks off in the middle of a line and each thus forms, in spite of linkage with the others, a kind of self-sufficient structure like a stanza, but in general no two such "stanzas" are equally long. The units also of each block tell markedly in their own individual mass and force of word and rhythm, though a concordant continuity is maintained in the sense. Enjambment, which was used to impetuous effect in Urvasie and Love and Death, is not altogether avoided, yet end-stopping is the rule as serving better the graver more contained movement demanded by the scriptural mood.

Savitri begins with a picture of darkness passing into day. This transitional hour has a particular appeal for Sri Aurobindo: several of his poems, short as well as long, are a-quiver with auroral suggestions. Among contemporary poets, we may point to Valery as also responding very sensitively to the dawn-moment, but the glimmering obscurities of La Feune Parque or the elusive lucidities

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of some other poems of his are "a sunrise upon ideas", as Thibaudet puts it, which, though penetrating, have little" of Sri Aurobindo's spiritual evocativeness, least of all the largeness of it that is in Savitri.

In Savitri the passage of darkness into day is the last dawn in Satyavan's life, a dawn packed with the significance of the immortal light which Savitri has to win for earth by challenging the age-old decree of death. "The huge foreboding mind of Night" is first figured with a fathomless effectivity:

Almost one felt, opaque, impenetrable,

In the sombre symbol of her eyeless muse

The abysm of the unbodied Infinite.¹

But

A long lone line of hesitating hue²

troubles at last the depths of the darkness in which consciousness seems sepulchred and we have poetry of an intense visionary loveliness:

A wandering hand of pale enchanted light

That glowed along a fading moment's brink

Fixed with gold panel and opalescent hinge

A gate of dreams ajar on mystery's verge.³

Then the "pallid rift" widens and "the revelation and the flame" pour out — the poetry richly reflecting them:

The brief perpetual sign recurred above.

A glamour from the unreached transcendences

Iridescent with the glory of the Unseen,

A message from the unknown immortal Light

Ablaze upon creation's quivering edge,

Dawn built her aura of magnificant hues

And buried its seed of grandeur in the hours.⁴

Almost the epiphany appears to be disclosed, the goal of all our mortal groupings, and two lines at once simple and subtle in their sovereign spiritual suggestion afford us a glimpse of it:

Infinity's centre, a Face of rapturous calm

¹ Savitri, p. 1. ²lbid., p. 2. ³Ibid., p. 3. ⁴Ibid., pp. 3-4.

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Parted the eternal lids that open heaven.⁵

But

Only a little the God-light can stay⁶

and the intensity of the wonderful Presence fades into accustomed sunshine.

In the soul of Savitri, however, the sense of her mission never disappears. Hedged in though she is by mortality, her life's movement keeps the measure of the Gods. Painting her being and its human-divine beauty Sri Aurobindo achieves some of his supreme effects. Perhaps his grandest capture of the Mantra are the nine verses which form the centre of a long passage, variously mantric, in which Savitri's avatarhood is characterised:

As in a mystic and dynamic dance

A priestess of immaculate ecstasies

Inspired and ruled from Truth's revealing vault

Moves in some prophet cavern of the gods,

A heart of silence in the hands of joy

Inhabited with rich creative beats

A body like a parable of dawn

That seemed a niche for veiled divinity

Or golden temple door to things beyond.⁷

A hieratic poetry, demanding a keen sense of the occult and spiritual to compass both its subjective and objective values, is in this audacious and multi-dimensioned picture of a highly Yogic state of embodied being. Not all might respond to it and Sri Aurobindo knew that such moments in Savitri would have to wait long for general appreciation. But he could not be loyal to his mission without giving wide scope to the occult and spiritual and seeking to poetise them as much as possible with the vision and rhythm proper to the summits of reality. Of course, that vision and that rhythm are not restricted to the posture and contour of the summits, either the domains of divine dynamism or

The superconscient realms of motionless peace

Where judgment ceases and the word is mute

And the Unconceived lies pathless and alone⁸

⁵lbid., p. 4. ⁶Ibid., p. 5. ⁷Ibid., p. 15. ⁸Ibid., pp. 33-34.

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or the mid-worlds, obscure or luminous, fearsome or marvellous, of which Savitri's father, King Aswapati, carried out a long exploration which is one of the finest and most fascinating parts of the poem. They extend to the earth-drama too and set living amongst us the mysteries and travails of cosmic evolution, like that dreadful commerce of Savitri with one whom Sri Aurobindo gives no name:

One dealt with her two meets the burdened great.

Assigner of the ordeal and the path

Who chooses in this holocaust of the soul

Death, fall and sorrow as the spirit's goads,

The dubious godhead with his torch of pain

Lit up the chasm of the unfinished world

And called her to fill with her vast self the abyss.⁹

Savitri would hardly be the unique poem that it is if it did not try to bring home to us the Unknown as it is in itself. However, it is a poem of many layers and no mean part of its excellence lies in its deploying its imponderables of sight and sound and remaining intensely spiritual even when its innumerable ranges and changes are not ostensibly concerned with spirituality. It is Legend as well as Symbol, a story with many scenes and levels of development at the same time that it is instinct with a mystical light. That light itself plays over many regions and does not fail to cover most aspects of world-thought. It is therefore not possible for it to confine itself straightforwardly to mystical substance. What it must do in order to be, despite its complex plan, a direct poetising of the Divine is to sustain everywhere the Overhead afflatus with the help principally of the sound-thrill shaking up hidden tracts of our being even while the outer attention is engaged with apparently non-mystical subjects. Thus a direct poetising of the Divine is achieved without a rejection of human interest or of the teeming motives and currents of man's mind.

A few quotations will indicate the variety of matter as well as of style, that is yet infused with the typical Aurobindonian quality. Glimpses of Nature's moods come again and again, exquisitely evocative as in

The colonnade's dream grey in the quiet eve,

The slow moonrise gliding in front of Night,¹⁰

⁹Ibid., p. 17. ¹⁰Ibid., p. 466.

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or with a powerful haunting suggestion as in that transference into English of a phrase of Vyasa's:

... some lone tremendous wood

Ringing for ever with the crickets' cry.

Glimpses of the human situation mix often with those of natural objects as in that simile cosmically sublime in its sweep:

As a star, uncompanioned, moves in heaven

Unastonished by the immensities of space,

Travelling infinity by its own light,

The great are strongest when they stand alone.¹¹

The inner strength of the great is also brought vividly home in that gesture of Savitri when, confronting Death's subtle arguments and refusing to employ the frail artifices of Reason, which are vain because always open to doubt, she chooses to match all fate with the nude dynamism of her heart and soul in a terrific line which we may term, in a phraseology popular today, super-existentialist:

I am, I love, I see, I act, I will.¹²

Here is an expression deriving its force and resolution from deeper layers of being than the famous close in Tennyson's poem about Ulysses and his comrades:

Made weak by fate and time, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Those deeper layers render Sri Aurobindo's line more effective art also than Shelley's memorable words put into the mouth of Rousseau's ghost in his Triumph of Life:

Before thy memory,

I feared, loved, hated, suffered, did and died.

The insufficiency of the mere Reason as compared either to the inner soul's moved perception or to the puissant supra-intellectual sight is pictured with an inspired conceit the Elizabethans or the Metaphysicals would have welcomed with a whoop:

A million faces wears her knowledge here

And every face is turbaned with a doubt.¹³

¹¹ Ibid., p. 460. ¹² Ibid., p. 594. ¹³ Ibid., p. 251.

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As unexpectedly striking and happy, though in a different key of inspiration, is the simile {Savitri, p. 327) applied to the truth-direct ways of the higher harmonies of consciousness to which Savitri's father Aswapati climbed:

There was no gulf between the thought and fact;

Ever they replied like bird to calling bird.

The felicity and the novelty that are prominent features of Sri Auro-bindo's style in Savitri come at times in weirdly surprising figurations, as when Aswapati passes through an occult infernal region:

A dragon power of reptile energies

And strange epiphanies of grovelling Force

And serpent grandeurs couching in the mire

Drew adoration to a gleam of slime.¹⁴

Here the surprising has a complex character shot with imagery. It can have a complexity without being imaged, yet with the same living vibrancy. An example is the suggestion of a sacred secrecy wtihin us:

This dark knew dumbly, immensely the Unknown.¹⁵

The surprising can be in Sri Aurobindo's hands the most simple also, with but a minimum of image-glimmer. Perfect in their noble finality as in the hands of a Dante are the instances:

None can reach heaven who has not passed through hell.¹⁶

All can be done if the God-touch is there.¹⁷

His failure is not failure whom God leads.¹⁸

Our life's repose is in the Infinite.¹⁹

A certain type of effect, however, occurs often in Savitri, which escapes all comparison. One facet of it is that epigrammatic flash:

Earth's winged chimeras are Truth's steeds in Heaven.²⁰

This line is not only the pure Overhead style: it is also a sheer depth of Yogic insight conveyed with concentrated richness and

¹⁴ Ibid., p. 213. ¹⁵ Ibid., p. 522. ¹⁶ Ibid., p. 227. ¹⁷ Ibid., p. 3.

¹⁸ Ibid., p. 339. ¹⁹Ibid., p. 197. ²⁰ Ibid., p. 52.

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audacity — the unique Aurobindonian effect. Less densely shaped yet with a body as bold and brilliant is the vision developed by the Yogi's eye in the phrases:

All things hang here between God's yes and no...

The white head and black tail of the mystic drake,

The swift and the lame foot, wing strong, wing broken

Sustaining the body of the uncertain world,

A great surreal dragon in the skies.²¹

A single sentence can be made by Sri Aurobindo the Yogi to sum up the whole Angst of the idealist whose feeling of the supramundane is confronted not only by the world's enigmatic opposites lit up in the above lines but also by the impersonal indifference under which the Numinous appears to a certain philosophic mood:

An awful Silence watches tragic Time.²²

Or look at the Overhead verbal alchemisation for the state which in the language of the poetic intelligence Sri Aurobindo at one place in Savitri puts thus:

My mind transfigures to a rapturous seer —²³

and which, with the same language lifted closer to that of rapturous seerhood, he phrases elsewhere in the epic:

Splendours of insight filled the blank of thought.²⁴

In the Overhead style at a high pitch and in the unique Aurobindonian tone we have:

Our minds hush to a bright Omniscient.²⁵

And, when the spiritual profundity has been realised, the entire knowledge-process is shown, in the same style, as altered:

Idea rotated symphonies of sight,

Sight was a flame-throw from identity.²⁶

And here, in a similar manner though with a more outward turn, is the dynamic reason of the change and of the possibilities of world-

²¹ Ibid., pp. 654-55. ²² Ibid., p. 444. ²³ Ibid., p. 408. ²⁴ Ibid., p. 37.

²⁵Ibid., p. 48. ²⁶ Ibid., p. 301.

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divinisation, the concrete movement of the Yogic seeker undaunted by the world's doubts or denials:

I cherish God the Fire, not God the Dream.²⁷

Something of this penetrating insight, at once mystical and clear-cut, comes into play at rare moments in Iqbal, flashing up his religious and philosophical passion, as in those vehement verses Englished by A.G. Arberry where the poet exemplifies the knowledge which Sufi love gives him of the world's kinship with his being:

I have seen the movement of the sinews of the sky,

And the blood coursing in the veins of the moon.

But this is more related to the adventurously imaginative style of Francis Thompson and we feel that for all its magnificence the knowledge is not directly Yogic. A similar impression we get vis-à-vis Tagore's lyrical soars, high and intense though they are, as in the lines of a somewhat Overhead breath he has translated thus into English prose-poetry: "There, where spreads the infinite sky for the soul to take her flight in, reigns the stainless white radiance. There is no day or night, nor form nor colour, and never, never a word." An affinity with Shelley in his less aching moments is here, an instinctive sense of the Spirit's ether and a moved felicity of articulation. Sri Aurobindo comes also at times recognisably with turns that have been admirably practised by the Thompsons and Iqbals, the Shelleys and Tagores of man's aspiration; but every now and then come effects of the direct Yogi, tranquilly amazing, as in

There looked out from the shadow of the Unknown

The bodiless Namelessness that saw God bom

And tries to gain from the mortal's mind and soul

A deathless body and a divine name.²⁸

Or amazing with a graphic boldness, as in the disclosure suffered by "the occult Force... guardian of the earth-scene's Beyond":

Her gulfs stood nude, her far transcendences

Flamed in transparencies of crowded light.²⁹

²⁷ Ibid., p. 614. ²⁸Ibid., p. 40. ²⁹ Ibid., p. 88.

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Yes, Savitri is full of diverse excellences woven together. And it does not reject any strand of life, it includes and absorbs every theme of import in man's evolution towards deity. Ancient motifs and motifs of our own day are equally caught up. Even modem totalitarianism is seized in its essence in the occult figure of it that from demoniac planes behind earth precipitates amongst us the Hitlerite power and propaganda:

A bull-throat bellowed with its brazen tongue;

Its hard and shameless clamour filing space

And threatening all who dared to listen to truth

Claimed the monopoly of the battered ear;

A deafened acquiescence gave its vote,

And braggart dogmas shouted in the night

Kept for the fallen soul once deemed a god

The pride of its abysmal absolute.³⁰

Even the new physics that has replaced the classical concepts in which "all was precise, rigid, indubitable" enters the poetry:

Once more the world was made a wonder-web,

A magic's process in a magical space,

An unintelligible miracle's depths

Whose source is lost in the Ineffable...

A quantum dance remained, a sprawl of chance

In Energy's stupendous tripping whirl...

The rare-point sparse substratum Universe

On which floats a solid world's phenomenal face.

Alone a process of events was there

And Nature's plastic and protean change

And, strong by death to slay or to create,

The riven invisible atom's omnipotent force.³¹

But here too the accent is recognisably Aurobindonian. The Overhead breath blows everywhere and in the last line we have its art at top pitch. The craftsmanship of that line is superb, with its dense humming sound dextrously mixed with other expressive vibrations, and all moving in a metre packing fourteen syllables and a predominantly anapaestic run into a scheme of five strong stresses which are helped by massed consonants in several places

³⁰ Ibid., p. 216. ³¹ Ibid., p. 254-55.

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to beat out clearly as well as to contain the overflowing music. The four "i" 's and the four "o" 's suggest at once penetration and expansion, the latter as if from an all-round fastness. The "v" in "riven", pronounced as it is with the upper teeth touching the lower lip, aids the sense of cutting that is in the word, while the "v" in "invisible" not only supports and increases the cutting suggestion but also hints by occurring is that particular word and in the midst of several syllables successively short in quantity the marvellous carrying of the power of fission into the mystery of the infinitesimal that constitutes the unseen atomic nucleus. Then there are the two "m" 's with their movements of lip-closure corresponding to the closed secrecy that is being spoken of and they are preceded and followed by the labials "b" and "p" respectively which correspond to the initial motive of breaking open and closed secrecy and to the final accomplishment of that explosion. The hard strokes of the three "t" 's mingle a further nuance of breaking. The "f" of "force" picks up again the fission-power of the "v" 's and completes it with its own acute out-loosening sound accompanied by the somewhat rolled sibilance at the end. The sibilance itself, giving clear body to the softer sound of the pair of "s" 's earlier in the line, achieves the idea of a full escape of the power that was so far not sweeping out of the charmed circle, as it were, of the atom's vibrant energy.

Indeed, the craftsmanship of the line is superb, but its success is different from what most poets might have attained, for it is due to the choice and collocation of particular words so as to create a particular rhythm embodying the vision-thrill of an Overhead consciousness. A Homer could be grandly resonant, a Milton make majestic thunder, a Shakespeare deploy a crowded colourful strength, and all be perfect poets thereby, but they could not charge their utterances, except in rare self-exceeding moments, with that vision-thrill, for the simple reason that the psychological levels on which they were accustomed to draw inspiration were specifically neither Overhead nor even orientated towards Yoga. And least of all without being a Yogi in a direct sense and having easy access to the planes above the mind would a poet, however great, be able to infuse into a verse about atomic energy or about some other apparently non-mystical subject the very enthousiasmos of the Mantra.

However, it is in the frequently mantric expression of reality's occult dimensions rather than of familiar or terrestrial objects that

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the major virtue of Savitri resides. For mainly by that expression, endowing with concrete intimacy what is usually a remote Wonder, it seizes our minds with the ideal of the spiritual Superman that we have to become through inward growth into and outward manifestation of the unexplored intensities and magnitudes of our subliminal and supraliminal being. Only, we must remember that no narrowly esoteric aim animates this poetry. The intensities and magnitudes of the Unknown that are expressed are not meant to be mysteries to which a mere handful can have the key. Although they may not be immediately comprehended by the major bulk of readers, they are voiced with a luminous faithfulness, not with a recondite or recherché ambiguity, and are brought into commerce with the familiar, the terrestrial. Their poet is never unaware of his mission to help by his calm

the swaying wheels of life

And the long restlessness of transient things.³²

No less do his pulses throb with earth's in Savitri, where the utmost heavens are spanned by

The lines that tear the veil from Deity's face,³³

than in Urvasie and Love and Death and Baji Prabhou with their more directly human interest and — to adapt slightly a Savitri-phrase to characterise them — their

Words winged with the red splendour of thy heart.³⁴

Indeed, just as they touch the skies with hands of clay, Savitri touches the poor dust with "the high Transcendent's sunlike hands". Man's earth-bom heart is never forsaken by it. And perhaps the intensest throb of that heart is heard in those four long colloquies — first, the dialogue between King Aswapati and the Divine Mother who grants him the boon he so passionately craves:

O radiant fountain of the world's delight

World-free and unattainable above,

O Bliss who ever dwellst deep hid within

While men seek thee outside and never find,

Mystery and Muse with hieratic tongue,

³²lbid., p. 427. ³³Ibid., p. 677. ³⁴Ibid., p. 615.

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Incarnate the white passion of thy force,

Mission to earth some living form of thee...

Let thy infinity in one body live,

All-Knowledge wrap one mind in seas of light,

All-Love throb single in one human heart...

Omnipotence, girdle with the power of God

Movements and moments of a mortal will,

Pack with the eternal might one human hour

And with one gesture change all future time.³⁵

Then the sage Narad's talk with King Aswapati and his Queen-wife about the fate chosen by their daughter Savitri and the pain involved by it:

Pain is the hand of Nature sculpturing men

To greatness: an inspired labour chisels

With heavenly cruelty an unwilling mould.

Implacable in the passion of their will,

Lifting the hammers of titanic toil

The demurrages of the universe work;

They shape with giant strokes their own; their sons

Are marked with their enormous stamp of fire.³⁶

Then the debate of the God of Death and the incarnate Love that is Savitri, in which Savitri affirms:

Love must not cease to live upon the earth;

For Love is the bright link twixt earth and heaven,

Love is the far Transcendent's angel here;

Love is man's lien on the Absolute.³⁷

That defines against the lure of the Death-god towards escape beyond earth into pure peace the meaning of true freedom:

Freedom is this with ever seated soul,

Large in life's limits, strong in Matter's knots,

Building great stuff of action from the worlds

To make fine wisdom from coarse scattered strands

And love and beauty out of war and night,

The wager wonderful, the game divine.

What liberty has the soul which feels not free

Unless stripped bare and cannot kiss the bonds

³⁵Ibid., p. 345. ³⁶ Ibid., p. 444. ³⁷ Ibid., p. 633.

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The Lover winds around his playmate's limbs,

Choosing his tyranny, crushed in his embrace?

To seize him better with her boundless heart

She accepts the limiting circle of his arms,

Bows full of bliss beneath his mastering hands

And laughs in his rich constraints, most bound, most free.

This is my answer to thy lures, O Death.³⁸

Lastly the passage of ecstatic words between the Godhead of the supramental glories and Savitri the conqueror of Satyavan's mortality facing now the test and temptation of heaven's bountiful wonders and still holding out the claim of earth-life as the field of the divine Spirit:

O life, the life beneath the wheeling stars

For victory in the tournament with death,

For bending of the fierce and difficult bow,

For flashing of the splendid sword of God!

O thou who soundest the trumpet in the lists,

Part not the handle from the untried steel,

Take not the warrior with his blow unstruck.

Are there not still a million fights to wage?

O King-smith, clang on still thy toil begun,

Weld us to one in thy strong smithy of life.

Thy fine-curved jewelled hilt call Savitri,

Thy blade's exultant smile name Satyavan.³⁹

Savitri is granted her prayer by the Supreme and allowed to be the centre of His manifestation among the cosmic myriads:

O lasso of my rapture's widening noose,

Become my cord of universal love.⁴⁰

Thus the earth-bom heart of man is shown in the poem not only in its finiteness aching for the infinite but also in an apocalyptic fulfilment. And this fulfilment, though dense with the mystical light, is again and again depicted in terms which go home to us and which set forth in a colossal clarity the Eternal in the movements of Time. For, Sri Aurobindo did not write his epic with the disposition of either a sworn Surrealist wedded to the obscurely entangled or a strict symbolist cherishing a cult of the glimmeringly

³⁸ Ibid.,p.653. ³⁹Ibid., p. 687. ⁴⁰1bid., p. 702.

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elusive. Behind the poet in him is the Master of Yoga whose work was to enlighten and not to puzzle and who, with all his roots in India's hoary past of spirituality, was yet a modem among modems and the seer of a new mystical progression, a collective advance in consciousness from mind to Supermind, a whole world evolving Godwards and breaking the fetters not only of political or social tyranny but also of mortal ignorance. A democracy of the Divine liberating the human was his goal, as in those words he puts into the mouth of his Savitri:

A lonely freedom cannot satisfy

A heart that has grown one with every heart:

I am a deputy of the aspiring world,

My spirit's liberty I ask for all.⁴¹

AMAL KIRAN

(K. D. Sethna)

⁴¹Ibid., p. 649.

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Lights from Passages in Savitri

We have said a good deal about Sri Aurobindo the Poet. And We have looked upon Savitri as the peak — or rather the many-peaked Himalaya — of Aurobindonian poetry. Also, in dealing with the supreme altitude as well as the inferior heights we have given glimpses of the Poet's view of the poetic phenomenon both in its essence and in its progression. It may not be amiss to dwell at a little more length on some of the fundamentals involved.

The easiest way to do so would be to string together or else paraphrase a number of passages from Sri Aurobindo's literary criticism. But I should think a mode more relevant to the poet Sri Aurobindo would be to pick out lines from his greatest poem Savitri and lay bare with their help his view on being a poet and, wherever necessary, use the literary criticism for confirmation. Academics may frown but the poetry-reader is'likely to appreciate the novelty of the treatment.

We may launch on our venture with a verse from The Book of Love, where Sri Aurobindo narrates the early life of Satyavan. Satyavan is called

A wanderer communing with marge and depth.¹

This semi-Wordsworthian turn is a suggestive summary of the poet's mood in its basic orientation. The poet moves among a diversity of things but everywhere he gets into living touch with what seems to overpass the limits of life, he is in his mood always at the edge of things, communing with their ultimate aspects and looking over the edge to commune with the beyond and to experience profundities in all with which he establishes a contact of consciousness. And we may include, in "communing", the poet's relationship with marge and depth in his reader's being by means of revealing words that draw a response from it. Communion would thus cover communication.

Yes, this line is a good hint of the poetic process. But it is not specifically what I wish to put forth. The verses I want to quote are two groups, each consisting of six lines — and, incidentally though far from superfluously, four passages relevant to one group.

¹Savitri, p. 393.

The sextet with which the passages are linked is a straight run, the other's components do not occur immediately in sequence but are made an ensemble by me. I shall take up first the second group and try to elicit from it a many-shaded picture of poetic psychology and metaphysics according to Sri Aurobindo.

The ensemble is from The Book of Love. As in the line about the "wanderer", Sri Aurobindo is not exclusively describing here the ' poetic mood and process. I am adapting to my own purpose some phrases of his that can be taken to describe them because they are portions of a context where the inward development of Satyavan is described in connection with his experience and exploration of Nature, a development on a broad scale that does issue also in art-activity on Satyavan's part. Here are the lines:

As if to a deeper country of the soul

Transposing the vivid imagery of earth,

Through an inner seeing and sense a wakening came...

I caught for some eternal eye the sudden

Kingfisher flashing to a darkling pool...

And metred the rhythm-beats of infinity.²

In the first three lines we have the indication of a new awareness which is not on the surface but in the recesses of our being, the recesses that are called "soul". On a hasty reading, we may be inclined to think that the word "soul" is here employed in a general way for our self and that several countries are ascribed to it, some shallow and some deep, and that the reference is not so much to the soul in a special connotation as to "a deeper country". Such an interpretation would be a mistake. The soul is not here a generalisation, it is acutely contrasted to "earth": the two turns — "of the soul" and "of the earth" — are balanced against each other: there are only two countries implied, the country of earth and the country of the soul, the former a surface region, the latter a "deeper" domain. And by "earth" with its "vivid imagery" is meant the contents of our normal waking consciousness packed with thousands of observations, whereas the "soul" stands for a consciousness other than the life-force and mind operating in conjunction with a material body and brain. This consciousness is ordinarily like a dream-region, but the poet undergoes a novel "wakening" there by which he reinterprets in a different and deeper

² Ibid., pp. 404-05.

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light the earth-experience. Nor is that all. His reinterpretation involves the experience of new things in the soul's depths, things which are as if earthly objects "transposed" into them but which in reality exist in their own right, native to those depths and constituting the originals whose copies or representatives are earthly objects. The specific quality of the experience of these originals is to be gauged from the use of the word "soul" and no other. Poetry is primarily not the exclamation of the mind and its concepts, not the cry of the life-force and its desires, not the appeal of the body and its instincts. All of them are audible in it, but in tune with a central note beyond them which — as Longinus recognised centuries ago — strangely transports us, a note charged with some ecstatic ideality, a magical intimacy, a mysterious presence, which we can specify only as the Divine.

When we say this we should not lay ourselves open to the objection: "All fine poets do not offer us spiritual matter. They talk of a multitude of earthly things and some of them are even disbelievers. The Roman Lucretius scoffed at religion and said that the gods were created by human fear: he was materialist and atheist by intellectual persuasion." It is true that a lot of excellent poetry is ostensibly unconcerned with any divine reality. But need that prove it non-spiritual whether in its origin or in its process? Its spirituality lies basically in the exercise in it of a rare power which goes beyond the human consciousness's well-established modes of functioning and which we may designate, for want of a proper term "intuition", an intensity of immediate response penetrating the "within" of all appearances by a lightning-like enraptured plumbing of one's own "within". Poetry is spiritual, in the first place, by the intuitive manner in which any theme is diversely treated by the imagination, the intuitive activity. The imagination's treatment is reflected in a word-gesture, the heart's thrill is echoed in a word-movement, that carry a certain absoluteness about them. There is an inevitable phrase-pattern, there is an unimpeachable rhythm-design — in short, a form of perfect beauty inwardly created, not built up by mere outward skill. Through such form poetry, whatever its subject, comes with the face and gait of a godhead. How even materialism and atheism could come like this is well hit off by a paradoxical turn of Elizabeth Browning's about Lucretius: she writes in a poem that he "denied divinely the Divine."

It is the intrinsic divineness of the intuition-packed creative style of poetry that is the soul's note in it. And it is because the soul

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finds tongue through the poet that we have a light in poetry, a delight in poetry. Light and delight are the soul's very stuff, we might say, and by virtue of them the soul's "inner seeing and sense" is not just a fanciful entertainment but a kind of revelation. Of course, it is not directly a spiritual, a mystic gesture and movement: it is only indirectly so and even when its subject is spiritual or mystic the poet does not necessarily become a Yogi or a Rishi. In most instances he is no more than an "inspired" medium. But the soul-quality ensures, as Sri Aurobindo puts it, that the genuine poetic utterance is not merely a pastime, not even a godlike one: "It is a great formative and illuminative power."³

The psychological instrument of this power is defined by the phrase: "inner seeing and sense." Here the stress is not only on the inwardness: it is also on sight. The poet is fundamentally occupied with the activity of the eye. When he turns to the phenomena of earth, what he busies himself with is their "vivid imagery". An image is something visual. A keen experience of shapes and colours is the poet's speciality and it is this that is connoted by the word: "seeing and sense." "Sense" is a term suggesting at once perception and feeling and understanding, a contact of consciousness with an object; but the main channel of the contact here is the sight. The perceiving, feeling, understanding consciousness of the poet comes to an active point, an effective focus, through the function of seeing: his the concentration and merging of all sense in vision. "Vision," says Sri Aurobindo, "is the characteristic power of the poet, as is discriminative thought the essential gift of the philosopher and analytic observation the natural genius of the scientist."⁴ A very acute and felicitous statement, this. Note first the noun "power" in connection with the poet. It recalls to us De Quincey's division of literature into the literature of knowledge and the literature of power. Philosophy and science are the literature of knowledge while all prose and poetry that are pieces of art fall under the category of literature of power, — because they affect the emotions and change attitudes and remould character. Note next the adjective "essential" in relation to the philosopher's gift. Philosophy is supposed to make clear the basic principle of reality, the essence of things. Then note the epithet "natural" apropos of the scientist's work. The scientist cuts into the physical universe and reaches down to

²The Future Poetry, SABCL, Vol. 9, p. 10.

⁴Ibid., p. 29.

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its system of laws — his field is what commonly passes as Nature. A bom master of words has made the statement, instinctively using the most expressive turns. But we are not at the moment concerned so much with the art of statement as with its isolation of the poet's function from the functions of the philosopher and the scientist: this function is primarily neither to think out reality nor to dissect phenomena but to experience the play of light and shadow, fixity and flux, individual form and multiple pattern: the poet may have a philosophic or a scientific bent (Lucretius had both), but he must exercise it in a glory of sight, set forth everything with intimate image, evocative symbol or at least general suggestive figurativeness.

To make a broad resume in Sri Aurobindo's words: "...the native power of poetry is in its sight" and "the poetic vision of life is not a critical or intellectual or philosophic view of its, but a soul-view, a seizing by the inner sense," and the poetic climax is, in its substance and form, "the rhythmic revelation or intuition arising out of the soul's sight."⁵

The ancient Indian word for poet is kavi which means one who sees and discloses. Of course the disclosing, the making manifest, the showing out is an integral part of the poet's function, and it is this part that is stressed in the Latin term poet from the Greek poetes, which stands for "maker", "fashioner", "creator". But the whole labour of formation lies in rendering visible, in leading us to see, what has been seen by the one who forms. The vision is the first factor, the embodiment and communication of it is the second. The Indian name goes to the root of the matter in speaking of the seer who discloses instead of the discloser who has seen. Shakespeare bears out the Greek and Latin, by the famous passage which describes what the poet does. In picturing the poet's activity he speaks of

The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,

Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven,

And as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen

Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothings

A local habitation and a name.

Yes, the poet is primarily a seer, we may remember that he does

⁵ Ibid., pp. 33-34.

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not stop with mere sight of the surface of reality: his is not sight so much as in-sight: he sees through, behind, within: his fundamental glancing is, as Shakespeare puts it, "from heaven to earth" and, only after that, it is "from earth to heaven." The poet's "fine frenzy" transports his eye to some paradisal Yonder before bringing it into touch with the terrestrial Here. Even when the latter is touched, there is no resting there: the former is once again reached, the reader is carried finally where the writer started from. And the forms which the poet bodies forth are of things unknown, there is always something unfathomable about his vision — a distance beyond distance, a depth beyond depth: this constitutes the transcendence of the intellectual meaning by poetry.

Ultimately the transcendence derives from the Supreme Spirit, the Poet Creator whose words are worlds. The human poet's vision has a contact, remote or close, with "some eternal eye", as the phrase runs in the fourth line of our quotation from Savitri. Sri Aurobindo has written: "The intellectual, vital, sensible truths are subordinate things; the breath of poetry should give us along with them or it may be apart from them, some more essential truth of the being of things, their very power which springs in the last resort from something eternal in their heart and secrecy, hṛdaye guhāyām, expressive even in the moments and transiences of life."⁶ Mark the words: "something eternal." In another place we read that the poet may start from anything: "... he may start from the colour of a rose, or the power or beauty of a character, or the splendour of an action, or go away from all these into his own secret soul and its most hidden movements. The one thing needful is that he should be able to go beyond the word or image he uses into the light of that which they have the power to reveal and flood them with it until they overflow with its suggestions or seem even to lose themselves and disappear into the revelation. At the highest he himself disappears into sight: the personality of the seer is lost in the eternity of the vision, and the Spirit of all seems alone to be there speaking out sovereignly its own secrets."⁷ Mark again the turn "the eternity of the vision." The Eternal Eye is at the back of all poetic perfection, and what this Eye visions is the Divine Presence taking flawless shape in a super-cosmos. To that shape the poet, in one way or another, converts the objects or events he depicts.

⁶ Ibid., pp 219-20. ⁷ Ibid ., p. 35.

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The conversion is the act put before us in the fourth and fifth lines of our ensemble. Every word and turn in them is worth pondering. "I caught," Sri Aurobindo makes Satyavan say. There is implied no mere touching, no mere pulling, not even mere holding. Nothing tentative is here: we have an absolute seizure, a capturing that is precise and complete. The poet gathers and grips a thing unerringly and for good. Such a gathering and gripping suggests to us a shade in the adjective "eternal", which is not directly mystical but still very pertinent to the artistic process. Sri Aurobindo in The Life Divine talks of Timeless Eternity and Time-eternity — an eternity which is outside or beyond the time-movement and an eternity which is constituted by Time itself going on and on without end. This latter kind — indefinitely continuing world-existence — poetry achieves for whatever it catches. The perfection of phrase in which it embodies its vision makes that vision memorable for ever: it confers immortality on its themes by expressing them in such a way that the expression gets imprinted indelibly on the human mind: it eternises for all future a happening or an object of the present or the past. As Landor says:

Past ruin'd Ilion, Helen lives,

Alcestis rises from the shades;

Verse calls them forth: 'tis verse that gives

Immortal youth to mortal maids.

Shakespeare in several places in his sonnets declares that his powerful verse shall outlive marble and the gilded monuments of Princes. In one sonnet he asks: Who or what can save you, my lover, from being destroyed or forgotten? And he gives an answer paradoxically pointed:

O none unless this miracle have might,

That in black ink my love may still shine bright.

Now from the poet who is the vision-catcher and from the eternal eye for which he acts the visionary we may come to what is caught, the thing visualised. It is "the sudden kingfisher". Technically we cannot help being struck by the way the adjective stands — at the end of the line. In poetry lines are either end-stopped or enjambed. Enjambment (a French word) connoted originally the continuing of the sentence of one couplet into the next instead of stopping short. In general it connotes the running on of the phrase of one line into another instead of ending with the line's end or at least

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pausing there as a sort of self-sufficient unit. "Sudden" makes an enjambment and it makes it with what is termed a feminine ending, a close on a syllable unstressed and extra to the standard metrical length. What it thereby achieves are a host of effects. The first effect is to startle us by the occurrence of an adjective without is noun, an occurrence besides at so marked a place in the line as its very termination. Technically the meaning of the adjective is reinforced by its unexpected terminal place. But there are still other effects. One is in relation to the verb "caught". Suddenness suggests a quick movement which takes one by surprise and which may be thought to be uncatchable. So we have the phenomenon as of the uncatchable being caught, a tribute to the catcher, a hint of the mobile miracle that is the artist mind, a mind that can overtake anything and make an imaginative capture of it. How sudden the bird was is told in the next line where it is said to be "flashing". Even something as fast and fleeting and momentary as flashing and momentary as a flash can be seized by the poet's pursuing eye. And a further shade of the miracle comes out with the word "eternal". We took this word to mean both the unforgettable everlasting value poetry gives to a mortal thing and the value which a Divine Consciousness holds as the everlasting archetype of a thing that happens in the temporal world. The poet seizes flash-like objects for ever; once seized they are never submerged — if we may cite an unforgettable Shakespearean phrase —

In the dark backward and abysm of time.

Also, the contrast between the Divine Consciousness and the Time-process is brought out by "sudden". The character of time is transitoriness, momentariness: nothing stands still, all life is a succession of infinitesimal rapidities, a series of suddennesses. This constant evanescence is vividly counterposed to Eternity by the concrete figure of the sudden kingfisher. The kingfisher in its incredibly swift flight is a symbol of all time. A slower-moving object would have failed to drive home both the perpetuation that the poet achieves and the archetypal divinity he serves, and his service of that eternity is struck out most clear for us by the marked closing position of "sudden".

We may add that if "sudden" had come in the next line, the poetic stroke would have been diminished. Suppose Sri Aurobindo had written:

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I caught for some deep eye that is eternal

The sudden kingfisher's flash to a darkling pool.⁸

Here we have eternity in one line and time in another. Do we not blur their contrast a little by this sheer division? Have we not heard of Kohles's experiments to ascertain the psychology of apes? One experiment puts a banana outside a chimpanzee's cage, exactly in front of the animal but beyond his arm's reach. To the right of the chimpanzee, outside the cage, a stick is put. The ape looks straight at the banana and then turns his head to look at the stick... . The means of getting at the banana and pulling it into the cage is there but it needs another look than the one which takes in the banana. The animal is found unable to co-ordinate the two looks and arrive at a logical procedure for getting hold of the fruit, as it would if the stick were in a line with the banana. We feel rather like the chimpanzee if "eternal" is in line one and the expression suggesting the temporal is in line two. The needed contrast which would kindle the significance of the poetic vision gets a trifle weakened: there is a slight loss of immediacy, a slight failure in the meaningful fusion of the objects presented: the revelation by a bit of thought-effort: the technique is not fully co-operative with the vision.

We may draw attention to some other defects also. At first sight one may feel that whole phenomenon of the kingfisher is shown in its completeness in a single line, the second, and that this is a poetic gain. But consider the metrical rhythm of the line. Too many syllables — twelve in fact — are crowded together, creating a dancing wavering rhythm which serves ill the simple straight swift motion of the bird. Again, what stands in central focus now is the flash and not the kingfisher. Many different things may be said to give a flash: a sort of generality is grasped through the flashing, a less distinct less individualised and hence less concrete symbol is conjured up. The mention of the kingfisher seems hardly significant and inevitable: this particular bird with its special shape, colour, gesture appears somewhat wasted and correspondingly wasted is the pool which can have vital importance only if not the flash but the kingfisher with its habit of food-hunting in watery spots holds the chief place.

This point, as well as to some extent the point in regard to the metre, would be valid even if Sri Aurobindo wrote:

⁸ Check Savitri, p. 405.

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I caught for some eternal eye the flashing

Of the sudden kingfisher to a darkling pool.

The sole advantage over the other version would be that the contrast between Eternity and Time would be more forceful by the retention of a word charged with momentariness in the very line where "some eternal eye" figures. But then force would be lessened in the intended contrast between "flashing" and "darkling". Besides, to put the "flashing" before the "sudden kingfisher" is not so logical or so artistic as the other way round. The adjective for the kingfisher becomes unimpressive and almost superfluous after intensity of ¹ flashing": also the act of flashing and the quality of suddenness grow two separate things instead of the former emerging from the latter and being the latter itself in an intense manifestation. The alliteration of the /-sounds and the i/i-sounds in the two words "flashing" and "kingfisher" loses its expressive inevitability. In the phrase "kingfisher flashing" the alliteration in the second word brings out, as it were, a power already there in the bird so that the act of flashing is the natural and spontaneous flow of the kingfisher's being and is prepared, rendered unavoidable, made the true gesture of it. If "flashing" precedes "kingfisher" we have something blurted out before its time, and if the precedence is too far ahead the alliteration itself runs to waste.

Perhaps one may urge that the first rewriting supposed by us could have a slight change in its second line and put the kingfisher itself and not its flash in the chief place:

The sudden kingfisher flashing to a darkling pool.

But then the metre will grow still more dancing and wavering and the technique would break apart from the vision all the more

No, Sri Aurobindo's arrangement of all the words remains the most felicitous and the sort of enjambment he achieves is also happier than any other; for no other can be so marked as an adjective divorced from its noun —"sudden" poised for the fraction of a second aloof from "kingfisher" — but carrying us on imperatively to what it qualifies. The enjambment suggests that, though momentariness is here, there is no cessation of the movement itself: we are hurried onward, pressed forward to the next line, so that we have a continuous movement of momentarinesses. Such a movement serves Sri Aurobindo's subject very appropriately, since the subject is not the kingfisher sitting out on a tree with its series

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of movements that follow one another, but the kingfisher in motion in the time-flux, the kingfisher flashing. The suggestion of "flashing" is anticipated and prepared by the enjambed technique working through "sudden". Further, the whole last foot in which the adjective stands is what is called an amphibrach: the foot consists of three syllables — "the sudden" — with only the central syllable stressed. Metrically it is like the last foot of the Shakespearean verse already quoted:

The poet's eye in a fine frenzy rolling....

Sri Aurobindo has called Shakespeare's last foot "a spacious amphibrach like a long plunge of a wave"⁹ and remarked about the entire line's structure of four stressed intrinsically long vowels and one stressed vowel that is intrinsically short, all of them forming a run of two iambs, a pyrrhic, a spondee and an amphibrach: "No more expressive rhythm could have been contrived to convey potently the power, the excitement and the amplitude of the poet's vision." Our amphibrach is not spacious: its vowel is not quantitatively long like the o of "rolling": the vowel here is a short u and even the final syllable "en" is almost a half-syllable. The amphibrach is a rather compressed one, but there is enough of the unstressed third syllable to make with the stressed one preceding it a falling movement. Here too is a plunge, though not of a high-risen wave: it is a packed rather than a spacious plunge and as such it is quite in conformity with the small bird that the kingfisher is, and the falling movement is in perfect tune with the kingfisher's act of flying down from a tree to a pool. "Flashing" here implies not only a swift movement but also a downward one and, just as the enjambment anticipates and prepares the former, the feminine ending anticipates and prepares the latter. However, the swift downward movement of the small kingfisher would hardly be hinted so well by the amphibrach-enjambment if the last two syllables of the foot were not that significant word "sudden".

Now we reach the kingfisher itself. We shall not dwell on the metrical technique of the line given to its activity — except to make two remarks. The word "kingfisher" at the start of the line has its stress on the first syllable, initiating by the trochaic foot formed by its two opening syllables a falling movement in continuation of the same "cadence" at the end of the previous line,

⁹ Collected Poems, SABCL, Vol. 5, p. 351.

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and the stressed syllable is an i intrinsically short, though just a little lengthened by the consonantal sounds after it. So we have a suggestion not only of the darting from above but also of brevity-cum-force and insignificance-cum-insistence drawing itself out, as it were, by its darting — in sum, the diminutive diver and hunter with the little body and long beak and bright plumage and proud crest. At the close of the line we have the word "pool", a stressed word with an intrinsically long vowel-sound which especially evokes a sense of something significant deep down to which the kingfisher dives. So much for the purely metrical technique. Now for a few aspects of the verbal technique.

"Darkling" after "flashing" and before "pool" is an interesting effect in the picture of the kingfisher. It literally means being in the dark, being in a hidden state, but it cannot help bearing the sense of growing dark, of holding hiddennesses, and its function here is to tell us that the pool was a place of shadows, that it was a sort of secrecy. The very sound of the word, the combination of r and k and /, calls up the vision of a liquid glimmer-gloom and makes the word the most apt adjective for a thing like a pool which is a small mass of still water in which light goes diminishing as it is drawn deeper and deeper towards an invisible bottom. And then there is the play it makes with the preceding present participle "flashing". "Flashing" in itself blends the impression of lightning with the impression of a sweep and swish of wings through the air — again the aptest term for the rapid leap of colourful bird-life. But its connection with "darkling" presents our thought simultaneously with two facts that go beyond the mere account of a bird diving for its food. We see something intensely luminous dropping into something increasingly mysterious. It is a vision of keen beauty disappearing — but not to be swallowed up and lost. We get a sense as of a masterful plunge of brightness into a dark profundity. There is not exactly the exquisite casualty of Nashe's

Brightness falls from the air

but a kind of dangerous adventure in which life laughingly dares darkness and plucks its prey from it. There is evanescence, no doubt, the time-touch, yet within the evanescence beats a triumph. The vision of life arises as though we were being shown what the phenomena of ordinary existence would look like when they are caught by the poet for some eternal eye and given their ultimate

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interpretation — or rather we have at once those phenomena ana the deeper version of them that is truth in eternity.

Further, we may notice that the whole event described here is so much like the essential poetic experience itself. An airy colourfulness drops with a winged burst of revelatory light into a hidden depth in order to bring up from the depth some life-nourishing secret. We have the poetic intuition falling into the poet's inner being and capturing its contents for the poet's self-expression. And just remember that a darkling pool closely resembles an eye waiting with in-drawn expectant stillness for a shining disclosure from above which will lay bare to that receptivity what lies within the dreamer's own vigilant soul, what hides there to feed with its mysterious life the light that fell from on high.

Indeed a many-aspected statement is present in Sri Aurobindo's picture, and its relevance to the poetic process is completed by the next line which I have joined on to these two:

And metred the rhythm-beats of infinity.¹⁰

The poet is primarily a seer, but his instrument for seizing his vision and communicating it is the word: it is by the inspired sound that he creates a form for his intuitive sight. The inspired sound is implicit in the poetic act — and, just as the poet's vision must ultimately have behind it the working of some eternal eye, the poet's word must ultimately have behind it the working of some eternal ear. The ultimate home of the poetic process is the spiritual Akash, the Self-space of the Spirit, the Divine Consciousness's infinity of self-extension. And this infinity has its creative vibrations that are at the basis of all cosmos. These vibrations are to be caught, however distantly or indirectly, by the sound of poetry. In terms of our own quotation, what the poet metricises when he captures in his verse the kingfisher's beat of pinions, is the rhythm-beats of the spacious ether of the Eternal Being who is the secret substance, one of whose vibrant materialisations is the kingfisher Some may, however, question the verb "metred". Modernists believe that metre is an artificial shackle on poetry from which they want to escape into what they call "free verse". But actually no verse can be free without ceasing to be verse: if there is no regulating principle of a distinguishable sort, however subtle be its regulation, we have the laxer movement of prose. If that laxer

¹⁰ Ibid., p. 405.

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movement tries to pass off as poetry by some device like cutting itself up into long and short lines and sprinkling a few out-of-the-way locutions on a run of commonly turned words, then we do not have real verse but a pretentious and ineffectual falsity, about whose relation to prose we shall have to say, even at the risk of an atrocious and well-worn pun., that it is not prose but worse! Poetry must have not only intensity of vision and intensity of word; it must have also intensity of rhythm. That is the demand of the Aurobindonian poetics. And how is rhythm to be intense without having a central! motif in the midst of variations, a base of harmonic recurrences over which modulations play, a base which is never overlaid with too much modulation but rings out its uniformity through the diversity? In the older literatures, metre tended to be of a set form. But to be of a set form is not the essence of metre. It was so because thus alone something in the older consciousness, the strong sense of order, of its dharma, got represented in art. When (he consciousness changes and becomes more individualised, more complex, as in modem times, the metre may follow suit. Every age can make its own metrical designs and our age may devise or discover less apparent regularities and complicate or subtilise its schemes of sound. There is no harm in that, though in an epoch of individuality we cannot insist that an individual who still finds something of the older metres a natural mould for his mood-movements should mechanically conform to the new nonconformity! All must have aright to be individual — and if people want to be boldly experimental in prosody they may do so, but the soul of metre must not be lost — or else poetry in the truest connotation will get lost with it. Even "free verse" is, when is still true poetry, a broad pattern of returning effects, a pattern rounded off and swaying under a dextrous disguise as a single whole — and it is true poetry precisely by being not really free but just differently bound than the older poetic creation.

My own penchant is for metre and I grant some point to an amusing exaggeration by George Gissing. Gissing expressed horror of "miserable men who do not know — who have never even heard of.....the minute differences between Dochmiacs and Antispasts." If there happen to be those miserable men I may tell them that a Dochmiac is a five-syllabled Greek foot composed of short-long-long-short-long and an Antispast is a four-syllabled Greek foot consisting of short-long-long-short. But I am afraid I cannot tell more minute differences than that the former has one final long in

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excess of the latter, and if there is a yet minute difference I myself shall have to live in the misery of ignorance. What, however, I do know I may concretely impart to them by illustrating a Dochmiac and an Antispast, in English prosodic terms, through a compliment to our horror-stricken ecstastic of metre:

An all-wise delight is George Gissing's.

Perhaps the compliment seems too high-pitched. But that there is an essence of truth in it will be conceded if we track metre to its origin in the Divine Ananda, the Delight of the All-wise. Sri Aurobindo has stated very strikingly the truth about metre. "All creation," he writes in his essay On Quantitative Metre, "proceeds on a basis of oneness and sameness with a superstructure of diversity, and there is the highest creation where is the intensest power of basic unity and sameness and on that supporting basis the intensest power of appropriate and governed diversity. ... Metre was in the thought of the Vedic poets the reproduction in speech of great creative world-rhythms; it is not a mere formal construction, though it may be made by the mind into even such a lifeless form: but even that lifeless form or convention, when genius and inspiration breathe the force of life into it, becomes again what it was meant to be, it becomes itself and serves its own true and great purpose. There is an intonation of poetry which is different from the flatter and looser intonation of prose, and with it a heightened or gathered intensity of language, a deepened vibrating intensity of rhythm, an intense inspiration in the thought substance. One leaps up with this rhythmic spring or flies upon these wings of rhythmic exaltation to a higher scale of consciousness which expresses things common with an uncommon power both of vision and of utterance and things uncommon with their own native and revealing accent; it expresses them, as no mere prose speech can do, with a certain kind of deep appealing intimacy of truth which poetic rhythm alone gives to expressive form and power of language: the greater this element, the greater is the poetry. The essence of this power can be there without metre, but metre is its spontaneous form, raises it to its acme. The tradition of metre is not a vain and foolish convention followed by the great poets of the past in a primitive ignorance unconscious of their own bondage; it is in

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spite of its appearance of human convention a law of Nature, an innermost mind-nature, a highest speech-nature."¹¹

The verb "metred", therefore, in the last line of our quotation may be held to be perfectly in order, especially in a context where infinity is implied to be harmoniously dynamic, eternity is said to be the visioner of the temporal and both together emerge as the creator of poetry through the human soul.

Our second group of six lines picturing Sri Aurobindo's poetic psychology and metaphysics are part of an account of Savitri's long quest for her soul's mate Satyavan. Savitri encounters various types of spiritual seekers retired from the noisy world into woods and hills. One band of them, pressing with a motionless mind beyond the confines of thought to sheer spiritual Light, comes back from there with the native word of the supreme Consciousness, the Mantra such as we find in the Vedas, the Upanishads and the Gita:

Intuitive knowledge leaping into speech,

Hearing the subtle voice that clothes the heavens,

Carrying the splendour that has lit the suns,

They sang Infinity's names and deathless powers

In metres that reflect the moving worlds,

Sight's sound-waves breaking from the soul's great deeps.¹²

This is a description of the poetic process at its highest spiritual pitch and it is itself a-thrill with the vibrations of what is spoken of and compasses in the closing verse the full breath of the Mantra while concentrating in one brief expression the ultimate nature of the mantric utterance.

Yes, the whole subject is a special hieratic one, but the treatment of it sheds light on the nature of poetic inspiration in general. For, if the Mantra is the ideal poetry, all poetry that is genuine must represent or shadow forth in its own way the mantric essence.

In our first group of six lines we listed as the divine element in all poetry the inner intuitive cast of imaginative and emotional excitement taking shape in the outer rhythmic word-gesture and word-movement and thereby creating a perfect beauty. It is the creative intuition that is now pictured as it operates on the level of a most directly spiritual poetry. In such poetry the original power

¹²Collected Poems, SABCL, Vol. 5, pp. 368-69.

¹³ Savitri, Ibid., p. 383.

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channelled by the poet comes into its own, getting its fullest scope; for has not Sri Aurobindo the defining phrase: "A direct spiritual perception and vision called by us intuition"?¹³

We begin with the basic act of "intuitive knowledge" and its stirred seizures of truth get moulded into language: the leap upon the heart of reality's significances is at the same time a leap into words answering to them. The intuitive knowledge has two sides: the revelatory rhythm and the revelatory vision. The former is a subtlety of vibration in tune with the measureless mystery of the absolute Bliss and bringing into manifestation the unknown silences: it is in the form of a "voice" which gives the secret body of the heavenly existence a vesture woven of meaningful sound — sound that follows like a wonderfully responsive clothing the ever-indrawn identity of the Supreme. And this clothing of sound, with its rhythmic ripples, is a "splendour" at the same time that it is a "voice". The simile of a garment for sound is of high import: it shows that what is heard and what is seen are a single reality. Thus our passage's transition from revelatory rhythm to revelatory vision is natural and inevitable. A cloth of gold, as it were, is the theme — and the gold is the Light of lights, the creative fire that goes forth in a million modes and materialises and the suns with which our heavens are bespangled. An elemental incandescence projecting the contents of the Inscrutable in symbol-shapes is at work in the ecstatic heat of poetic production. The Mantra holds it in a white state, so to speak, but something of it persists everywhere, and each poet has in him the sense of a supra-intellectual illumination no less than a sense of some primal rapture which affines his heartbeat to what the old tradition designated the music of the spheres, the concord of the universal om. With that illumination he becomes the seer of truth just as with that rapture he becomes the hearer of it — the truth concerned being the sight achieved of any aspect of reality by means of the faculty of intuition, with its thrilled flash into the depth of any part of the world through the depth of some part of one's self.

A gloss on the triple operation sketched by the lines —- intuitive knowledge that is a voice, a voice that is a splendour — may be derived from four verses elsewhere in Savitri:

Even now great thoughts are here that walk alone:

¹³ The Future Poetry,. SABCL. Vol. 9, p 220.

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Armed they have come with the infallible word

In an investiture of intuitive light

That is a sanction from the eyes of God.¹⁴

Even the cloth-symbol is present and it directly serves to merge the elements of our three lines.

With these elements unified in his consciousness, the poet at his highest raises up an art-form of flawless loveliness, a Song, in which Infinity's own self disclosing articulation is at play: the godheads pronounce each his being's central note, his inherent name-image in which the power of his immortal creative bliss resides. The master-poet, by letting the Illimitable formulate its myriad magic of deific motion through his singing, echoes in the dominant rhythms of his poetry the primal measures of the Supreme's self-expression in the multitudinous cosmos: the metres of the starry revolutions, their set accords of majestic journey through endless space and time, are caught in his designs of long and short sounds, vowel-flows and consonant-curbs, overtones and undertones, stresses and slacks, line-units and verse-paragraphs — the macrocosmic regularities find their reflection in a microcosm of poetic cadences, the moving worlds make themselves felt in the harmonious words. As in our first group of verses, we have Infinity's rhythm-beats metricised.

Then we have the grand finale— the last line which seems to bear in itself both qualitatively and quantitatively all the rest in quintessence:

Sight's sound-waves breaking from the soul's great deeps.

It is a really lengthy line because of eight step-by-step monosyllables and eight intrinsically long vowels and four consecutive stresses at the start and three at the end. The slow weighty stretched movement conveys the sense of a massive flood drawn towards earth from the distance of a divine existence — the profound secrecy of the Soul. Here again, as before, we have the Soul as the source of poetry and this source is not only deep within us but also itself a great depth, holding as it were a vast concealed ocean of experience-movements in which the Divine Consciousness is hidden and in which there is an occuit oneness of our individuality with the whole world. Sensation, emotion, idea are here involved

¹⁴Savitri, p. 258.

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or contained in a thrilled awareness focused for poetic purposes in a luminous vision which is at the same time a subtle vibration taking the form of rhythmic words.

"Sight's sound-waves": a marvellous turn condensing an entire system of poetics. Seeing and hearing are shown as fused faculties -yet each is given its proper role. Poetry brings the soul's vastnessinto our common life by means of "sound-waves" - it is a superversion of Homer's "many-rumoured ocean". But the mighty billows drive home to us a burden of sight: the ocean is not only many-rumoured, it is also many-glimmered, many-figured. Thepoet's work is principally to set himself astir with the shine, the hue, the contour, the posture of things. Significances start within him as vivid pictures, imaginative conjurations, symbolic hints: through them he enjoys the subjective and the objective worlds and by them he traces the beauty and truth of things and attains to a comprehension of details, interrelations, totalities. However, the poet's seeings are of such an intensity and come projected from such an ecstasy-vibrant fount that they burst upon us with a verbal declaration of their intents. Each sight has its own manifesting sound which is not just "transmissive" but "incarnative", embodying with a living intimacy and piercing directness the gleaming stuff and stir of the Soul's revelatory contact with reality.

And this sound is best compared, as by Sri Aurobindo, to waves. For, it is a sustained march with a rise and fall, its rhythms variously modulating on a basic recurrent tone and breaking upon the receptive mind and heart and sensation not only with happy spontaneities like the changing dance of spume and spray but also with powerful profundities like the sweep of unremitting rollers and persisting undercurrents and now and then a mysterious ground-swell.

We may remark how the image of the sea springs up time and again in Sri Aurobindo's poetry about the poetic phenomenon. It · is particularly there when he refers to that phenomenon's highest resolution in the mystic and spiritual key. But it has a vital role elsewhere too. In the course of recounting Savitri's girlhood and its inclusion of an experience of all the arts, he tells us:

Poems in largeness cast like moving worlds

And metres surging with the ocean's voice

Translated by grandeurs locked in Nature's heart

But thrown now into a crowded glory of speech

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The beauty and sublimity of her forms,

The passion of her moments and her moods

Lifting the human word near to the god's.¹⁵

The unsealing of grandeurs from subtle dimensions of Nature to cast an interpretative light on the world-pageant through a rich packed poetry could very well be true of ancient epics like Valmiki's Ramayana and Vyasa's Mahabharataor mediaeval ones like Kalidasa's Kumarasambhava and Raghuvamsha. The last phrase about man's word being upraised to neighbour a divine utterance, rather than itself becoming such, is a pointer to the secular character of the poems concerned. This character is recognised all the more when we have a clear description of spiritual poetry, a use of the word in a different fashion and for a different goal:

Invested with a rhythm of higher spheres

The word was used as a hieratic means

For the release of the imprisoned spirit

Into communion with its comrade gods.

Or it helped to beat out new expressive forms

Of that which labours in the heart of life,

Some immemorial Soul in men and things,

Seeker of the Unknown and the Unborn

Carrying a light from the Ineffable

To rend the veil of the last mysteries.¹⁶

Those other poems had their regard on Nature's forms, moments, moods and set free in the visible world deeper meanings, greater dynamisms that are like presences of hidden lords of Nature, living puissances that are secret cosmic agents. Now we are told of an attempt with the help of inspiration from "higher spheres" and not merely inner ones ("Nature's heart"), to liberate the soul of man, the "spirit" encased in the sensing, feeling, thinking body, and enable it to grow one with divine entities, share in the very being of secret cosmic agents, Nature's bidden lords, and even in that of transcendental powers, godheads beyond the universe and not only behind it. Further, side by side with the spirit's linkage with divinity through poetic rhythms brought straight from "above," hieratic or sacred poetry endeavours for a manifestation of divinity "below". It gets into touch with "the heart of life" where a World-Soul toils at evolution within man's physical mould and Nature's matter.

¹⁵ Ibid., p. 361. ¹⁶Ibid., p. 360.

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Charged with the drive of this evolutionaly Dreamer, it aims to infuse his idealistic dynamism into the stuff of outward existence, so that novel modes of thought and desire and perception may be realised, expressing openly through the activities of this stuff the fulfilment of the World-Soul's venture across the ages to revel here and now the arcade Eternal, the masked Absolute. Yes, the poems spoken of in our earlier quotation are like the masterpiece; of Valmiki, Vyasa and Kalidasa rather than like the Vedic hymns, the Upanishadic slokas or that super-Vyasan rarity — the Gita — in the midst of the Mahabharata. But these too, in Sri Aurobindo's imagination, have their own sound-waves of sight: through their metrical movement "the ocean's voice" is heard in them no less than in the mighty compositions that move from everlasting to everlasting in the worlds of the gods and whose imitations on earth are the Rishis' songs of "Infinity's names and deathless powers,'' — mighty compositions pictured by Sri Aurobindo in the eleventh Book of Savitri:

The odes that shape the universal thought,

The lines that tear the veil from Deity's face,

The rhythms that bring the sounds of wisdom's sea.¹⁷

Large structured chants bearing the formative force of the Ideas on which the cosmic plan is founded, intensely lyrical phrases capturing with visionary power the secrets of the Supreme Beauty, patterns of sustained sonorities conveying fathomless suggestions and ultimate significances that escape all defining speech, — this progression of poetic elements in the supernal modes concludes deliberately on the image of wide waters. That image makes the right climax. For most in the Mantra, even as mainly in every species of poetry, it is the rhythmic vibration which holds the keenest sense of the life-throb, so to speak, of the Infinite and carries the greatest potentiality of re-creating the human existence in the mould of the divine. This vibration serves as the strongest instrument to stir the deepest recesses of our being and awake in them an answer of sympathetic vision to the sight of the Eternal which in one shape or another all poetry fundamentally strives to lay bare.

Keeping "sight" and its "sound-waves" in mind we may surnup in the words of Sri Aurobindo our whole exposition: sight is

¹⁷ Ibid., p. 677.

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the essential poetic gift. The archetypal poet in a world of original ideas is, we may say, a Soul that sees in itself intimately this world and all the others and God and Nature and the life of beings and sets flowing from its centre a surge of creative rhythm and word-images which become the expressive body of the vision, and the great poets are those who repeat in some measure this ideal creation, kavayah satyaśrutāḥ, seers and hearers of the poetic truth and poetic word."¹⁸

Amal Kiran

(K. D. Sethna)

¹⁸The Future Poetry, SABCL, Vol. 9, p. 30.

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Diction of Savitri

In his introduction to Modern Indo-Anglian Poetry, P. Lai announces the adherence of the Unofficial Poets Workshop to certain basic "principles of language, method and intention." His statement raises a number of issues. I shall only deal here with one or two of them that refer to style and diction. For example, he says that he considers expressions like "the sunlight sweet" and "deep booming voice" to be ridiculous. I quite see what that statement implies. Nevertheless, I think that the verdict of "ridicule" may be passed only after examining the context in which such a phrase occurs. I look up a poem in the very anthology that P. Lai has edited and read on page 30 "wondrous subtlety", "rising sun", "taunting moon", "calm translucence", "wheeling planet" and "mutual flame", used in the course of 11 lines. But I should like to examine these phrases in their context before condemning them roundly. Double adjectives are not a rare phenomenon and inversion is a poetic device not infrequently patronised even by so sophisticated a poet as Dylan Thomas.

P. Lai goes on to say: "We claim that the phase of Indo-Anglian romanticism ended with Sarojini Naidu: 'I bring for you aglint with dew a little lovely dream.' Now, waking up, we must more and more aim at a realistic poetry reflecting, poetically and pleasingly, the din and hubbub, the confusion and indecision, the flashes of beauty and goodness, of our age. And leave the fireflies to dance through the neem." In a succeeding paragraph, he says that poetry must appeal "to that personality of man which is distinct, curious, unique and idealistic." Does this mean that we must aim at a realistic poetry in order to appeal to idealistic minds?

Why bring in "realism" and "idealism" into the discussion in this unhelpful fashion? We know that Sarojini Naidu was influenced considerably by the Decadent Poetry of the late nineteenth century, especially in her style and diction. The jewelled phrases and the preciosity were peculiar to her age and there is hardly any other Indo-Anglian, except probably Manmohan Ghose, who competes with her in this regard. Even he, in a poem like London, reveals a certain masculinity of diction which is wedded to a robustness of outlook. Indo-Anglian poetry had already entered the Decadent phase during the last quarter of the 19th century, the

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Georgian phase about the third decade of this century and the modernist phase in the late thirties. Is there any point, then, in saying that romanticism ended with Sarojini Naidu? Did it end with her death or the publication of her last collection of poems during her lifetime? There is a considerable gap of time between these two events.

Quite apart from Sarojini Naidu, what do we mean by saying that romanticism "ended" with Sarojini Naidu? A particular verbal mode of expressing romantic sensibility may have ended with her. But it does not mean that romantic sensibility itself came to an end with her. The fireflies will continue to dance, not only through the neem but also through the "din and hubbub", the confusion and indecision, precisely because the din and hubbub as well as the fireflies have been a part of our life and will continue to be so. Given a certain comprehensiveness of soul, every poet is bound to respond to the din as well as to the fireflies. P. Lai's own Because Her Speech Is Excellent is more romantic than many Romantic lyrics. It only means that we require a different kind of emotional precision in the use of words than what Sarojini Naidu was accustomed to.

I must say how untenable it is to speak of "nebulosity of form and substance", "clutches of soul-stuff, "greasy", "weak-spined and purple-adjectived 'spiritual' poetry", "a spasmodic burst of a spasmodic emotion" and "a flutter of pretty epithets" in connection with the poetry of Sri Aurobindo. We do not have the patience either to read a poem in the spirit in which it is conceived or to interpret it against the background of a system of thought in terms of which it is couched. And we think we have "punctured" a passage when all that we have punctured are our own toy balloons.

I think that one of the great achievements of Sri Aurobindo in Savitri is the creation of a great epic diction which is commensurate with the lordliness of the theme. I should like to touch on one or two aspects of it.

Speaking of the diction of a passage in Savitri, P. Lai says: "The entire game is reminiscent of Roget's Thesaurus, where redundant familiars like 'soul', 'spiritual', 'subtle', 'deeps', and 'deathless' enjoy a private tea-party."* But even a cursory glance at the vocabulary of Savitri will show that the choice of words here is one of the most comprehensive and varied and that it is not

* P. Lal, Modem Indo-Anglian Poetry, p. 11.

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restricted to "poetic" words as in Tennyson, Swinburne and the Decadent poets. There is daring originality in such choice, as in:

We must fill the immense lacuna we have made,

Re-wed the closed finite's lonely consonant

With the open vowels of Infinity,

A hyphen must connect Matter and Mind,

The narrow isthmus of the ascending soul.¹

Or in:

A growing volume of the will to be,

A text of living and a graph of force,

A script of acts, a song of conscious forms

Burdened with meanings fugitive from thought's grasp

And crowded with undertones of life's rhythmic cry,

Could write itself on the hearts of living things.²

In the following lines we have a daring use of the particular words connected with the printing trade:

Then in Illusion's occult factory

And in the Inconscient's magic printing house

Tom were the formats of the primal Night

And shattered the stereotypes of Ignorance.

Alive, breathing a deep spiritual breath,

Nature expunged her stiff mechanical code

And the articles of the bound soul's contract,

Falsehood gave back to Truth her tortured shape.

Annulled were the tables of the law of pain

And in their place grew luminous characters.³

Sri Aurobindo's verse touches occasionally the polar opposite of poetic words in lines like the following:

Imposing schemes of knowledge on the Vast

They clamped to syllogisms of finite thought

The free logic of an infinite consciousness,

Grammared the hidden rhythms of Nature's dance,

Critiqued the plot of the drama of the worlds,

Made figure and number a key to all that is:

The psycho-analysis of cosmic Self

¹ Savitri, p. 56. ² Ibid., p. 175. ' Ibid., pp. 231 -32.

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Was traced, its secrets hunted down, and read

The unknown pathology of the Unique.⁴

Here is another passage in which military terms are employed to typify the spirit's battle till the goal is reached:

Across the dust and mire of the earthly plain,

On many-guarded lines and dangerous fronts,

In dire assaults, in wounded slow retreats,

Or holding the ideal's battered fort

Or fighting against odds in lonely posts,

Or camped in night around the bivouac's fires

Awaiting the tardy trumpets of the dawn,

In hunger and in plenty and in pain,

Through peril and through triumph and through fall,

Through life's green lanes and over her desert sands,

Up the bald moor, along the sunlit ridge

In serried columns with a straggling rear

Led by its nomad vanguard's signal fires,

Marches the army of the waylost god.⁵

Far from being an ineffectual angel in the void, which Shelley was supposed to be, Sri Aurobindo resembles Browning in his assimilation of unusual words, as in the following:

The tree of evolution I have sketched,

Each branch and twig and leaf in its own place,

In the embryo tracked the history of forms,

And the genealogy framed of all that lives.

I have detected plasm and cell and gene,

the protozoa traced, man's ancestors,

The humble originals from whom he rose.⁶

At times he can use an archaism with telling effect:

Man harbours dangerous forces in his house.

The Titan and the Fury and the Djinn

Lie bound in the subconscient's cavern pit

And the Beast grovels in his antre den.⁷

As for Sri Aurobindo's "poetic" words, we have to note, in the first place, that quite a few of them have a technical rather than a

⁴Ibid., p. 269. ⁵ Ibid., p. 459. ⁶ Ibid., p. 518. ⁷ Ibid., p. 480.

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poetic import. Words like soul, spiritual, Inconscient, subliminal, Overmind, Supermind, All-Vision, the Deep, the Void, Nescience, Oversoul, World-Force, Self of Mind, World-Soul, Mother Might, Supemature, The Supreme, All-Truth, Sun-word, are no more poetic than words like pole, centre, diurnal, etc. are poetic in Milton. Like the astronomical terms of Milton and the theological terms of Dante, they yield to us their meaning only when we set out to study them.

The impression of what P. Lai calls the vague "luminosity" of form is therefore a nebulous charge. There is remarkable imaginative as well as emotional precision in the diction developed by Sri Aurobindo in Savitri. The diction is neo-classical, metaphysical and modernistic even as it is Romantic. It changes its colour and contour according to the context and theme and Savitri is rich in its themes and contexts.

At the same time, there is a special reason why the Romantic phraseology has a unique place in Savitri. Sri Aurobindo endeavours in this epic to express the Inexpressible, to convey with the accuracy of a scientist, the clarity of a philosopher and the imaginative and emotional vividness of a poet, certain states of intuitive and spiritual experience which used to be expressed by the ancients in myths and parables. In other words, he is trying to carry the intellectual structure of the modem consciousness into mystical levels and planes of experience. The English language is not accustomed to being used for this purpose. Except in Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Earth, which is in prose, the language could not retain its intelligibility when Blake used it for a similar purpose in his mystical poems. Sri Aurobindo used the English language to convey his total vision of the modem world. The English language is used to reflecting some aspects of this vision in the manner of a prism, — by splitting it or fragmenting it. It shows the yellow of the intellect, the infra-red of the instinctive life, the rosy glow of delicate emotion and the ultra-violet of intuitive perception. It does not give us the dense blue of spiritual experience, nor does it fuse all these colours into a white radiance. Sri Aurobindo's synthetic vision could not rest satisfied with anything less than a precise and colourful expression of the subtlest possible spiritual states as well as an integrated expression of all this variety of his experience. He had therefore to evolve a poetic diction for this purpose. He needed to do this in English, not only because that was the only language in which he could best express

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himself but also because he wished to communicate his vision in a language which had a world status.

Let us note that the problem before Sri Aurobindo was not the construction of a dramatic diction, a diction like that of "myriad-minded" Shakespeare, but a diction suited to a substance that was epic, lyric and dramatic in its inspiration. He desired that his diction should have an Upanishadic charm and depth and a Kalidasian richness and concreteness. He therefore tried to see what quarry the English poetic tradition afforded him in this respect. He drew upon the Elizabethan predilection for old and learned and "romantic" words though he did not go to the length of Spenser, Sir Thomas Browne or the "sugary" sonneteers of the period. He resorted to the use of technical terms and unusual turns of speech, like the Metaphysicals, and to the use of Latinisms and involved syntax ("periods") like Milton. In his satirical and reflective passages, he instinctively goes back to the vigour of Dryden and Pope, their epigrammatic and antithetical manner, as in the following lines:

There is no miracle I shall not achieve.

What God imperfect left, I will complete,

Out of a tangled mind and half-made soul

His sin and error I will eliminate;

What he invented not, I shall invent:

He was the first creator, I am the last.⁸

Similarly, in passages which express subtle states of the soul, he hews his quarry from the Romantic tradition in poetry from the time of Spenser and Shakespeare to that of Swinburne and Yeats.

But this does not mean that Savitri is a mosaic in its design and fragmentary in its execution. It has a flexible diction, a diction that manages these transitions naturally and with ease and dignity and maintains, at the same time, a general air of depth and loftiness, clarity and grace and colour and picturesqueness.

We may now concentrate on some of the Romantic methods which Sri Aurobindo followed in designing his manifold diction. In the first place, he can employ the so-called 'poetic' words with authentic effect in his poetry:

Ambassadress twixt eternity and change,

⁸ibid., p. 512.

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The omniscient Goddess leaned across the breadths

That wrap the fated joumeyings of the stars

And saw the spaces ready for her feet...

The waking ear of Nature heard her steps

And wideness turned to her its limitless eye,

And, scattered on sealed depths, her luminous smile

Kindled to fire the silence of the worlds.

All grew a consecration and a rite.

Air was a vibrant link between earth and heaven;

The wide-winged hymn of a great priestly wind

Arose and failed upon the altar hills;

The high boughs prayed in a revealing sky.⁹

Here is an abundance of 'poetic' words like eternity, change, lean, wrap, fated, journeying, star, spaces, waking, limitless, scattered, sealed, depths, luminous, fire, silence, consecration, vibrant, fail, altar, hill, wind, pray, revealing and sky. We then have a romantically significant use of adjectives as in "fated joumeyings", "limitless eye" and "revealing sky". There is the Keatsian use of double adjectives which are not separated even by a comma: "a great priestly wind"; "wide-winged" in "wide-winged hymn" is a compound word coined by Sri Aurobindo and most will agree that it qualifies "wind" with marvellous propriety. Then, "altar hills" is a collection modelled after the manner of Keats and other Romantics who themselves took it over from the Elizabethans. Sri Aurobindo is very fond of such combinations of substantives and they are to be found in profusion in Savitri.

Lastly, there is something to be said about the element of literary allusiveness in his poetic diction. T.S. Eliot has shown how quotations from other poets can be fitted into new contexts in a manner which endows them with the novelty that distinguishes original writing itself. Sri Aurobindo does not quote. But he has oblique and indirect references to famous phrases and lines of poetry. These help him to gather together the revelatory hints and flashes and phrases in the poetic diction of great predecessors and to evolve in the English language, which does not have much of a tradition in this regard, a poetic diction that can build up the atmosphere and the imagery for interpreting the subtle soul-states that Sri Aurobindo wishes to communicate. For instance, the line

⁹ Ibid., p. 9.

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"All grew a consecration and a rite" reminds one of Wordsworth's great line: "The consecration and the poet's dream." The structural similarity that lies in the repetition of a word or phrase that has some affinity with "consecration" is too obvious to be missed. It is my view that in this and in many other more obvious references, Sri Aurobindo knew that the allusion would not be missed by the reader. If he had thought it objectionable, he would have easily given up the references. But he introduced them on purpose so. that the borrowed flash might help his readers to feel the original flame and the visitation and the gleam reveal to them the quality of sustained experience on the same level. This is an effective way of leading the aspiring reader to the heart of the poet's vision. This "air" or atmosphere of allusiveness gave to his diction the power to be a "vibrant link between earth and heaven". The other features of Romantic diction mentioned above help to conjure up this very atmosphere of interpretation and imaginative sympathy.

The last three lines of the passage quoted above are another example of allusive diction. They strike us as a peculiarly oriental piece of description. They are an unmistakable part of the general atmosphere of holiness that Sri Aurobindo is trying to create around the advent of Dawn. The "hymn" of the wind, the "altar hills", the "praying" of the boughs — all these details are not so un-English as they seem to use at first sight. The word "priest" helps us and we remember Keats's famous lines:

The moving waters at their priestlike task

Of pure ablution round earth's human shores.¹⁰

Keats' s cosmic image enables us to capture the heightened beauty of a similar cosmicity in Sri Aurobindo's imagery.

We have referred to Sri Aurobindo's allusive style here only to throw some light on the many quarries in which he searched for rearing the foundations and walls of his great edifice. He constructed for himself a style of many dimensions, for this was what the epic substance of Savitri asked for. He searched far and wide. What he accepted he made his own by bending it to the expression of the unique context of Savitri.

The allusive is only one of the many kinds of style of which Sri Aurobindo is master. Here is an example of his narrative style employed when he has either to present a character or a situation.

¹⁰ Bright Star, (last sonnet.)

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In these lines which close Yoga of the King, he describes the life of the seer, Aswapati:

Apart he lived in his mind's solitude,

A demigod shaping the lives of men:

The universal strengths were linked with his;

Feeling earth's smallness with their boundless breadths.

He drew the energies that transmute an age.

Immeasurable by the common look,

He made great dreams a mould for coming things

And cast his deeds like bronze to front the years.

His walk through Time outstripped the human stride.

Lonely his days and splendid like the sun's.¹¹

These lines have hardly any involved sentences. They are brief, like hammer-strokes. The vocabulary consists mainly of familiar and 'poetic' words, though some of the familiar words are high-sounding. A few metaphors and similes uplift the style from the level of mere narration and show that this kind of style can result in great poetry:

Lonely his days and splendid like the sun's.¹²

Here is an example of the narrative style when it deals with situations, — the marriage of Savitri and Satyavan:

Allured to her lashes by his passionate words

Her fathomless soul looked at him from her eyes;

Passing her lips in liquid sounds it spoke.

This word alone she uttered and said all:

"O Satyavan, I have heard thee and I know;

I know that thou and only thou art he."

Then down she came from her high carven car

Descending with a soft and faltering haste;

Her many-hued raiment glistening in the light

Hovered a moment over the wind-stirred grass,

Mixed with a glimmer of her body's ray

Like lovely plumage of a settling bird.

Her gleaming feet upon the green gold sward

Scattered a memory of wandering beams

And lightly pressed the unspoken desire of earth

¹¹ Savitri, pp. 44-45. ¹² Ibid.

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Cherished in her too brief passing by the soil.

Then flitting like pale brilliant moths her hands

Took from the sylvan verge's sunlit arms

A load of their jewel faces' clustering swarms,

Companions of the spring-time and the breeze.

A candid garland set with simple forms

Her rapid fingers taught a flower song

The stanzaed movement of a marriage hymn.

Profound in perfume and immersed in hue

They mixed their yearning's coloured signs and made

The bloom of their purity and passion one.

A sacrament of joy in treasuring palms

She brought, flower-symbol of her offered life,

Then with raised hands that trembled a little now

At the very closeness that her soul desired,

This bond of sweetness, this bright union's sign,

She laid on the bosom coveted by her love.

As if inclined before some gracious god

Who has out of his mist of greatness shone

To fill with beauty his adorer's hours,

She bowed and touched his feet with worshipping hands;

She made her life his world for him to tread,

And made her body the room of his delight

Her beating heart a remembrancer of bliss.¹³

The same features of style are discernible in this passage, except in the middle, from "her many-hued raiment" to "a sacrament of joy in treasuring palms" where the style is descriptive. We notice in connection with this descriptive style, that it is marked by a profusion of imagery, a Kalidasian richness which strikes us as un-English at time, dominated as we are by current notions of "English"-ness. But a world language has to be hospitable to diverse kinds of style.

There is a more lyrical and currently acceptable variety of this style in the description of Spring:

A godlike packed intensity of sense Made it a passionate pleasure even to breathe; All sights and voices wove a single charm. The life of the enchanted globe became

¹³Ibid., pp. 409-10.

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A storm of sweetness and of light and song,

A revel of colour and of ecstasy,

A hymn of rays, a litany of cries:

A strain of choral priestly music sang

And, swung on the swaying censer of the trees,

A sacrifice of perfume filled the hours.

Asocas burned in crimson spots of flame,

Pure like the breath of an unstained desire

White jasmines haunted the enamoured air,

Pale mango-blossoms fed the liquid voice

Of the love-maddened coil, and the brown bee

Muttered in fragrance mid the honey-buds.

The sunlight was a great god's golden smile.

All Nature was at beauty's festival.¹⁴

The dramatic style of Sri Aurobindo centres around situations like Aswapati's colloquy with the Divine Mother, the debate of Savitri and Death and the loving exchange of words between Savitri and Satyavan. It also extends to characters like the triple soul-forces and their mouthpieces. The speeches are, no doubt, often long. But they are punctuated by questions and exclamations which help to make them animated. And many of them rise to the highest level of poetry. The Divine Mother opens her address to Aswapati with the following words:

OSon of Strength who climbst creation's peaks,

No soul is thy companion in the light;

Alone thou standest at the eternal doors.

What thou hast won is thine, but ask no more.¹⁵

Aswapati's reply begins with the lines:

How shall I rest content with mortal days

And the dull measure of terrestrial things,

1who have seen behind the cosmic mask

The glory and the beauty of thy face?

Hard is the doom to which thou bindst thy sons!¹⁶

The colloquy between Savitri and Death begins in a highly dramatic manner:

Vast like the surge in a tired swimmer's ears,

¹⁴ Ibid., p. 352. ¹⁵ Ibid., p. 335. ¹⁶ Ibid., p. 341.

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Clamouring, a fatal iron-hearted roar,

Death missioned to the might his lethal call.

This is my silent dark immensity

This is the home of everlasting Night,

This is the secrecy of Nothingness

Entombing the vanity of life's desires.

Hast thou beheld thy source, O transient heart,

And known from what the dream thou art was made?

In this stark sincerity of nude emptiness

Hopest thou still always to last and love?¹⁷

Savitri's reply begins with the powerful line:

I bow not to thee, O huge mask of Death.¹⁸

Later to the long-winded arguments of Death she replies, saying

ODeath, who reasonest, I reason not,

Reason that scans and breaks, but cannot build

Or builds in vain because she doubts her work.

I am, I love, I see, I act, I will.¹⁹

When Savitri herself, in her capacity as Divine Mother, commands Death to stand aside "And leave the path of my incarnate Force"(p. 666), Death vanishes into thin air:

The two opposed each other face to face.

His being like a huge fort of darkness towered;

Around it her life grew, an ocean's siege.²⁰

The colloquy between Savitri and the Supreme also centres round an intensely dramatic situation. This has been discussed while commenting on Sri Aurobindo's metaphysical poetry. There are some tense pauses in it during which the face of the whole of creation seems to hang in the balance.

There are quite a few varieties to be found in Sri Aurobindo's reflective style. Where the matter is familiar to the reader and it can therefore be spicily presented, we have the balanced and antithetical style developed in the manner of Dryden and Pope:

What God imperfect left, I will complete,

Out of a tangled mind and half-made soul

His sin and error I will eliminate;

¹⁷ Ibid., p. 586. ¹⁸ Ibid., p. 588. ¹⁹ Ibid., p. 594. ²⁰ Ibid., p. 667.

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What he invented not, I shall invent:

He was the first creator, I am the last.

I have found the atoms from which he built the worlds:

The first tremendous cosmic energy

Missioned shall leap to slay my enemy kin,

Expunge a nation or abolish a race,

Death's silence leave where there was laughter and joy.

Or the fissured invisible shall spend God's force

To extend my comforts and expand my wealth,

To speed my car which now the lightnings drive

And turn the engines of my miracles.²¹

At a more intense level this style develops into a series of paradoxes as in the Debate of Love and Death:

Thou has used words to shutter out the Light

And called in Truth to vindicate a lie.

A lying reality is falsehood's crown

And a perverted truth her richest gem.

ODeath, thou speakest Truth but Truth that slays,

Ianswer to thee with the Truth that saves.

A traveller new-discovering himself,

One made of Matter's world his starting-point,

He made of Nothingness his living-room

And Night a process of the eternal light

And death a spur towards immortality.

God wrapped his head from sight in Matter's cowl,

His consciousness dived into inconscient depths,

All-knowledge seemed a huge dark Nescience;

Infinity wore a boundless zero's form.

His abysms of bliss became insensible deeps,

Eternity a blank spiritual Vast.²²

Another variety of the reflective style is marked by the use of learned words or technical terms. It is difficult, flowing like a stream on rocky ground. But it flows on triumphantly. Here is a description of the subtle archangel race that lives in the mind and knows truth from within:

Imposing schemes of knowledge on the

Vast They clamped to syllogisms of finite thought

²¹ Ibid., pp. 512-13. ²² Ibid., p. 621.

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The free logic of an infinite consciousness,

Grammared the hidden rhythms of Nature's dance,

Critiqued the plot of the drama of the worlds,

Made figure and number a key to all that is:

The psycho-analysis of cosmic Self

Was traced, its secret hunted down, and read

The unknown pathology of the Unique.

Assessed was the system of the probable,

The hazard of fleeing possibilities,

To account for the Actual's unaccountable sum,

Necessity's logarithmic tables drawn,

Cast into a scheme the triple act of the One.²³

A fourth variety of this style is seen in Book I Canto 4 (The Secret Knowledge) where Sri Aurobindo describes the play of the Two in One, of Purusha and Prakriti, Being and Becoming. Here the difficulty is not one of language, but of the thought itself which is paradoxical and subtly metaphysical:

There are Two who are One and play in many worlds;

In Knowledge and Ignorance they have spoken and met

And light and darkness are their eyes' interchange.

Our pleasure and pain are their wrestle and embrace,

Our deeds, our hopes are intimate to their tale;

They are married secretly in our thought and life....

Author and actor with himself as scene,

He moves there as the Soul, as Nature she....

His soul, silent, supports the world and her,

His acts are her commandment's registers.

Happy, inert he lies beneath her feet:

His breast he offers for her cosmic dance

Of which our lives are the quivering theatre,

And none could bear but for his strength within,

Yet none would leave because of his delight....

She through his witness sight and motion of might

Unrolls the material of her cosmic Act...

Her empire is the cosmos she has built,

He is governed by her subtle and mighty laws.

His consciousness is a babe upon her knees,

Her endless space is the playground of his thoughts,

His being a field of her vast experiment.²⁴

²³Ibid.,p.269. ²⁴ Ibid., pp. 61-64.

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A fifth variety of reflective style is seen in the allegorical presentation of the three serfs of Mind: Physical Mind, Vital Mind and Reason.

Then there is the expository or analytical style which communicates facts or states of the higher or lower consciousness: superconscience or inconscience. This is a piece of work fraught with many difficulties. A soul-state or superconsciousness can be experienced. But it is not easily communicable, for it is only through figures of speech and images of earthly life that some idea of it can be conveyed to the reader. If precision is insisted upon in the presentation of what is a new experience altogether, the poet is likely to be confronted with an almost insoluble problem. But this is what Sri Aurobindo faces in a number of places in Savitri. We see the adequate level of the expository style in the following passage:

All there was soul or made or sheer soul-stuff:

A sky of soul covered a deep soul-ground.

All here was known by a spiritual sense:

Thought was not there but a knowledge near and one

Seized on all things by a moved identity,

A sympathy of self with other selves,

The touch of consciousness on consciousness

And being's look on being with inmost gaze

And heart laid bare to heart without walls of speech

And the unanimity of seeing minds

In myriad forms luminous with the one God.

Life was not there, but an impassioned force,

Finer than fineness, deeper than the deeps

Felt as a subtle and spiritual power,

A quivering out from soul to answering soul,

A mystic movement, a close influence,

A free and happy and intense approach

Of being to being with no screen or check,

Without which life and love could never have been.

Body was not there, for bodies were needed not,

The soul itself was its own deathless form

And met at once the touch of other souls

Close, blissful, concrete, wonderfully true.²⁵

²⁵ Ibid., pp. 291-92.

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P. Lai fails to appreciate this passage; for he takes it as a lyrical outburst, missing its expository character altogether. It is a miracle of exactitude, considering the region of intangible experience in which it moves.

I have so far considered that varieties of style as they arise and are mostly determined by the exigencies of subject-matter. But there is another way of looking at style. Sri Aurobindo has himself mentioned four different kinds of style, — the adequate, the dynamically effective or rhetorical poetic manner, the metaphorical or illuminative style and the more purely intuitive, inspired or revelatory and inevitable utterance. These four levels of poetic style or 'seeing speech' are "different grades of its power of vision and expression of vision."²⁶ It follows that these levels can be detected in each one of the styles we have listed — narrative, dramatic, descriptive, reflective and expository.

We have discussed an example of the adequate level in expository style. Let us see what the other three levels are like under this very head, the rhetorical poetic manner or the dynamically effective level can be illustrated by the following passage:

In the Witness's occult rooms with mind-built walls

On hidden interiors, lurking passages

Opened the windows of the inner sight.

He owned the house of undivided Time.

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.²⁷

Sri Aurobindo describes the gradual opening of Aswapati's soul in this passage.

One sees exposition moving into the illuminative level in a

²⁶The Future Poetry, SABCL, Vol. 9, p. 271.

²⁷ Savitri, p. 28.

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passage like the following which describes the Goddess of Night:

A strong and fallen goddess without hope,

Obscured, deformed by some dire Gorgon spell,

As might a harlot empress in a bouge,

Nude, unashamed, exulting she upraised

Her evil face of perilous beauty and charm

And, drawing panic to a shuddering kiss

Twixt the magnificence of her fatal breasts,

Allured to their abyss the spirit's fall.²⁸

We see this dynamically effective style in another passage in which Sri Aurobindo speaks of the Immortals that guide the world:

Above the illusion of the hopes that pass,

Behind the appearance and the over act,

Behind the clock-work chance and vague surmise,

Amid the wrestle of force, the trampling feet,

Across the triumph, fighting and despair,

They watch the Bliss for which earth's heart has cried,

On the long road which cannot see its end

Winding undetected through the sceptic days

And to meet it guide the unheedful moving world....

In Matter shall be lit the spirit's glow,

In body and body kindled the sacred birth;

Night shall awake to the anthem of the stars,

The days become a happy pilgrim march,

Our will a force of the Eternal's power,

And thought the rays of a spiritual sun.

A few shall see what none yet understands;

God shall grow up while the wise men talk and sleep;

For man shall not know the coming till its hour

And belief shall be not till the work is done.²⁹

The illuminative level is found in the following lines which describe the play of eternal children in the worlds of griefless life:

Of storm and sun they made companions,

Sported with the white mane of tossing seas,

Slew distance trampled to death under their wheels

And wrestled in the arenas of their force.

³⁸ Ibid., p. 212. ²⁹ Ibid., pp. 54-55.

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Imperious in their radiance like the sun

They kindled heaven with the glory of their limbs

Flung like a divine largesse to the world.³⁰

Another example of the same level is found where the Heavens of the Ideal are described:

What here is in the bud has blossomed there.

There is the secrecy of the House of Flame,

The blaze of Godlike thought and golden bliss,

The rapt idealism of heavenly sense;

There are the wonderful voices, the sun-laugh,

A gurgling eddy in rivers of God's joy,

And the mysteried vine-yards of the gold moon-wine....

There are the imperishable beatitudes.

A million lotuses swaying on one stem,

World after coloured and ecstatic world

Climbs towards some far unseen epiphany.³¹

As for the inspired or revelatory utterance, Savitri's reply to the Supreme after her conquest of Death is a good example.

Earth is the chosen place of mightiest souls;

Earth is the heroic spirit's battlefield,

The forge where the Archmason shapes his works.

Thy servitudes on earth are greater, king,

Than all the glorious liberties of heaven.

The heavens were once to me my natural home,

I too have wandered in star-jewelled groves,

Paced sun-gold pastures and moon-silver swards

And heard the harping laughter of their streams

And lingered under branches dropping myrrh;

I too have revelled in the fields of light

Touched by the ethereal raiment of the winds,

Thy wonder-rounds of music I have trod,

Lived in the rhyme of bright unlabouring thoughts,

I have beat swift harmonies of rapture vast,

Danced in spontaneous measures of the soul

The great and easy dances of the gods.

Oh, fragrant are the lanes thy children walk

And lovely is the memory of their feet

³⁰ Ibid., p. 126. ¹¹ Ibid., p. 279.

Page 239

Amid the wonder-flowers of Paradise....

Too far thy heaven for me from suffering men

Imperfect is the joy not shared by all....

O life, the life beneath the wheeling stars

For victory in the toumement with death,

For bending of the fierce and difficult bow,

For flashing of the splendid sword of God !

O thou who soundest the trumpets in the lists,

Part not the handle from the untried steel,

Take not the warrior with his blow unstruck.

Are there not still a million fights to wage?

O King-smith clang on still thy toil begun,

Weld us to one in thy strong smithy of life.

Thy fine-curved jewelled hilt call Savitri,

Thy blade's exultant smile name Satyavan.

Fashion to beauty, point us through the world.³²

I have hardly touched here the fringe of my subject. This is inevitable because a whole book could be written about Sri Aurobindo's style and diction in Savitri. I have only indicated the lines on which such a study can be planned.

V. K. Gokak

³² Ibid., pp. 686-87.

Page 240

A Study of Similes in Savitri

-l-

Every great poet or artist is an explorer who discovers new lands and oceans in his imaginative vision, reveals new truths and beauties and hidden routes and pathways quite unfamiliar and unknown to the workaday humanity, and his word acts, what Keats would say, as

... the leaven That,

spreading in this dull and clodded earth,

Gives it a touch ethereal — a new birth.

Thus Mayakovsky, the modem Russian poet, who was "bombarding with verses the horror of every day" and "Everything ossifying and assifying living", observed:

One must snatch gladness from the days that are

In this life it's not difficult to die

To make life is more difficult by far.

And to this humanity aimlessly pursuing a daily humdrum existence which T.S. Eliot describes in his poem The Waste Land —

Unreal City,

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

I had not thought death had undone so many —

are addressed these terse but powerful lines of Mayakovsky:

The word of a poet — is your resurrection

Your immortality — citizen clerk!

How does the poet achieve this miraculous power? Is it not by revealing heaven in earth and earth in heaven, the inner world of the soul in the brute, blind and senseless world of objective reality, that he makes us live and breathe in a purer and finer air? I have said, a great poet is an explorer who either discloses to us some new realm of experience on a higher plane or reveals a new

Page 241

splendour in something that custom had made stale and void of savour. Newton, absorbed in his arid mathematical problems, must have been a sight without any colour and beauty but in Wordsworth's imagination he is transformed into a sailor:

Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone.

A similar experience of perusing a book has again been transformed by Keats in his famous sonnet On First Looking into Chapman's Homer. Here a book becomes a realm of gold, a state and kingdom

Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.

Spelling his way through this duty and musty volume, he felt the exhilaration of breathing in "pure serene of a wide expanse" and the two magnificent similes in the sestet of his sonnet have superbly articulated the thrill that possesses us when we follow the trail blazed by the poet:

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

When a new planet swims into his ken;

Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes

He started at the Pacific — and all his men

Look'd at each other with a wild surmise

Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

We are transported from poet's study to the majesty of the star-strewn sky, the endless stretch of the watery wastes by the heavenly chariot of the poet's imagination. Sri Aurobindo has himself described this transporting power in these lines:

Imagination called her shining squads

That venture into undiscovered scenes

Where all the marvels lurk none yet has known.¹

In Keats's sonnet Cortez and his followers perfectly symbolise the great poet and his readers or other lesser geniuses who follow in his footsteps and body forth with often even more minute care and detailed perfection what he has revealed in a wide sweep. Herein perhaps lies the difference between a poet and a versifier, an artist and a craftsman — a Shakespeare and a Dryden.

It would be, perhaps, more correct to say that the poet is a revealer of greater but hidden splendours than that he is a creator

¹ Savitri, p. 242.

Page 242

of new things. His creative imagination only shadows out what has flashed on his inner sight. Now this work of transcription calls forth the faculty of the formative imagination. He has to render the unknown in terms of the known as the Classical poet does, or the known in terms of the unknown as the visionary Romantic poet alone does, making

...sense a road to reach the intangible.²

He has, in a way, to be like the skylark of Wordsworth:

Type of the wise, who soar, but never roam —

True to the kindred points of Heaven and Home!

If he lives only in the visionary world and has no contact with the earth, he will be like Arnold's Shelley beating his wings in the void. And if he is of the earth earthy, then he will not be able to

add the gleam,

The Light that never was on sea or land,

The consecration and the poet's dream, —

and thus shall fail to achieve the one great end of poetry—"to make this much loved earth more lovely" — so that we see it

Apparelled in celestial light,

The glory and the freshness of a dream.

The essence of poetry then is "the fusion of observation and imagination, of sight and insight."

The poet turns out to be a discoverer in another sense. By his keen observation and awakened sensibility he is able to reveal to us invisible connections and relations existing between events of the inner world and material objects. All of us have passed long spells of anguish and, passed by a ringing bell but only Shakespeare could through, observe that

Sorrow's like a heavy-hanging bell

Once set on ringing with his own weight goes....

Hounds relentlessly chasing a quarry, unfoiled by its dodges, is a well-known spectacle amusing and revolting—especially the sight of the terror-stricken hunted beast seeking shelter in bush and

²Ibid., p. 236.

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thicket, ultimately succumbing to its inevitable Fate. Yet it was to Francis Thompson alone that the privilege was vouchsafed to see in it the whole enigma of human life with its agonies and torments seeking refuge in temporary joys and supports, ultimately recognising the Divine pursuer in the fearsome mask of the eternal Hound of Heaven. We suffer because we flee

From those strong Feet that followed, followed after.

But with unhurrying chase,

And unperturbed pace,

Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,

They beat — and a voice beat

More instant than the Feet —

"All things betray thee, who betrayest Me."

This one metaphor sustained with vigour and unflagging imaginative flight reveals to us the whole meaning of the chequered drama of human life —

Up vistaed hopes I sped;

And shot, precipitated,

Adown Titanic glooms of chasmèd fears....

and the reason for the failure of all our frantic efforts to protect ourselves against "this tremendous lover."

-2-

Simile and metaphor have often been considered as serving a decorative and ornamental function in poetry though often they are quite burdensome and dispensable accessories. But their true purpose is illustrative and revelatory, they aim at communicating the poet's experience in all its power and glory. We can see the difference in the above quoted sonnet of Keats, on reading Chapman's Homer. Keats first wrote:

Yet could I never judge what men could mean

Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold;

but then he changed the first line to

Yet did I never breathe its pure serene.

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And we can see the vividness and freshness with which the experience comes home to us. Thus we find that metaphors and similes are inherent in the poet's work of exploration of experience and its interpretation. Poets with their wide and universal power of love and sympathy are able to detect those subtle gossamer-like links lurking between the hidden and the visible reality which make the subjective and objective universe a continuous, a delicately woven web and they also see the universal spirit of love and beauty that animates and informs even those creatures and objects which appear grotesque and bizarre to the ordinary sight. Shelley the pantheist saw everywhere

that sustaining love

Which through the web of being blindly wove

By man and beast and earth and air and sea

Bums bright or dim, as each are mirrors of

The fire for which all thirst.

When Shakespeare tells us that

Love's feeling is more soft and sensible

Than are the tender homs of cockled snail,

we are not only made aware of the delicate sensitivity of the lover's feeling but also made to see a verminous creature enhaloedTjy the warm radiance of love. After this we can no longer look disdainfully at that slowly creeping worm. The ennobling and enhaloing of the earth by a wide spiritual love is the essence of the poetic image so that watching a bird we ring out in ecastasy, like Blake:

Arise you little flashing wings and sing your infant joy!

Arise and drink your bliss, for everything that lives is holy.

And we have not to

ask of the stars in motion

If they have rumour of thee there.

Because, as Francis Thompson perceives,

Not where the wheeling systems darken,

And our benumbed conceiving soars!

The drift of pinions would we hearken,

Beats at our own clay-shuttered doors.

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The angels keep their ancient places;

Turn but a stone, and start a wing!

'Tis ye,'tis your estranged faces,

That miss the many-splendoured thing.

Thus in Yeats's vision, "the sudden thunder of the mounting swan" is

Another emblem there! that stormy white

But seems a concentration of the sky;

And, like the soul, it sails into the sight

And in the morning's gone, no man knows why;

And is so lovely that it sets to right

What knowledge or its lack had set awry,

So arrogantly pure, a child might think

It can be murdered with a spot of ink.

Thus "To one who has been long in City pent" a day spent in the open country might, as Keats would say, seem to have glided by

E'en like the passage of an angel's tear

That falls through the clear ether silently.

In summing up we can say that the function of simile is not merely to illustrate and explain the subject, but to ennoble and enrich it and make it more impressive and vivid and also to reveal the hidden correspondences and kinships that exist between earth and heaven so that even though

... all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil,

yet we with Hopkins feel thrilled by the truth that

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

To put otherwise in Keats's words: "The poetry of earth is ceasing never," and in summer

a voice will run

From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead,

That is the Grasshopper's,

and

On a lone winter evening, when the frost

Has wrought a silence, from the stone there shrills

The Cricket's song, in warmth increasing ever,

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And seems to one in drowsiness half lost,

The grasshopper's among some grassy hills.

-3-

Sri Aurobindo, who was a poet first and then the divine master of Integral Yoga, is therefore not only an explorer and a discoverer but a conquistador and

A colonist from immortality³

and his spiritual poetry, especially the epic Savitri, is charged with mantric power which at every step overwhelms us with

Sunbelts of knowledge, moonbelts of delight⁴

revealing ever

Homelands of beauty shut to human eyes⁵

and telling us earth-bound mortals that

Our souls can visit in great lonely hours

Still regions of imperishable Light,

All-seeing eagle-peaks of silent Power

And moon-flame oceans of swift fathomless Bliss

And calm immensities of spirit Space.⁶

In another poem, The Life Heavens, he describes his ascent:

Dissolving the kingdoms of happy ease

Rocked and split and faded their dream-chime.

All vanished; ungrasped eternities

Sole survived and Timelessness seized Time.

Earth's heart was felt beating below me still,

Veiled, immense, unthinkable above

My consciousness climbed like a topless hill,

rossed seas of Light to epiphanies of Love.⁷

Who would not feel a wistful longing kindled in his imagination on reading the following description of the ascent of Thought in

³Savitri, p. 22. ⁴ Ibid., p. 91. ⁵ Ibid., p. 91. Ibid. , p. 47.

⁷ Collected Poems SABCL, Vol. 5, p. 575.

Thought the Paraclete?

...Sun-realms of supernal seeing,

Crimson-white mooned oceans of pauseless bliss

Drew its vague heart-yearnings with voices sweet...

Crossing power-swept silences rapture-stunned,

Climbing high far ethers eternal sunned...⁸

It will be seen from the few lines quoted above how spiritual experiences have been rendered vivid, concrete and intimate by the imagery employed by Sri Aurobindo, so that our souls run of themselves like his Aswapati:

As one drawn to his lost spiritual home

Feels now the closeness of a waiting love,

Into a passage dim and tremulous

That clasped him in from day and night's pursuit

He travelled led by a mysterious sound.⁹

For we hardly feel the sense of strain and labour when we are drawn by the charm of something supremely beautiful. Thus he has

Made sense a road to reach the intangible.¹⁰

Now, we can launch on the subject of similes and metaphors in Sri Aurobindo's Savitri. An epic is a narrative poem with a wide sweep dealing with high and noble actions. Therefore, it demands from the poet an equally noble and elevated treatment. Sri Aurobindo also takes up very commonplace events and happenings and by the device of simile invests them with a spiritual glory. I will now pick out two instances of an identical event — a chariot speeding towards its goal. The first instance is from his epic Ilion written in majestic, rolling, melodious hexameters. Talthibius is the messenger chosen by Achilles to carry his peace offer to the Trojans. "Worn with his decades," "one and alone he arrived, insignificant, feeblest of mortals," driving the car of the errand. This is the scene as it must have appeared to the ordinary passers-by. But who knows that this shrunken man is

Carrying Fate in his helpless hands and the doom of an empire.¹¹

Not only that but this is rider in the chariot is the focal point which will let "loose vast agencies" radiating through the millenniums

⁸Ibid., p. 582. ⁹ Savitri, p. 289. ¹⁰ Ibid., p. 236.

¹¹ Collected Poem, SABCL, Vol. 5, p. 392.

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down to the present day. Troy will turn down the offer; Achilles will join the fray, reduce the city to rack and ruin; Aeneas, the man of destiny, will set sail from Troy to found Latium and the Latin race and thus lay the foundations of the Roman Empire and the modem European civilisation. All this chain of events will be touched off by this charioteer. And this is how Sri Aurobindo presents it:

Even as fleets on a chariot divine through the gold streets of ether,

Swiftly when life fleets, invisibly changing the arc of the soul-drift,

And, with the choice that has chanced or the fate man has called and now suffers

Weighted the moment travels driving the past towards the future.

Only its face and its feet are seen, not the burden it carries.

Weight of the event and its surface we bear, but the meaning is hidden.

Thus, a chariot hurtling down earthly pathways serves as a ringing echo of the divine chariots speeding down gold streets of ether unretarded by any friction of matter. Notice how in the fourth line, driving as a metaphor is invigorated by the fact that a chariot is actually being driven.

The second instance comes from Savitri. Savitri the heroine has set out in quest of her companion soul after a night's rest:

But mom broke in reminding her of her quest

And from low rustic couch or mat she rose

And went impelled on her unfinished way

And followed the fateful orbit of her life.

How?

Like a desire that questions silent gods,

Then passes starlike to some bright Beyond.¹²

What an infinite vista of suggestions breaks upon out speculative imagination! What can be the nature of that desire which leaves the high gods dumb and speechless? Is it the same boon about which Sri Aurobindo has elsewhere hinted:

The boon that we have asked from the Supreme is the greatest that the Earth can ask from the Highest, the change that is most difficult to realise, the most exacting in its conditions. It is nothing less than the descent of the supreme Truth and

¹² Savitri, pp. 384-85.

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Power into Matter, the supramental established in the material plane and consciousness and the material world and an integral transformation down to the very principle of Matter. Only a supreme Grace can effect this miracle.¹³

We make this conjecture because of the image of the star in the last line. The star-image makes it clear that this desire is not just a dim, muddy phosphorescence on the surface of life but something luminous, following its orbit in the unmapped immensities of the soul.

The star-image recalls to the mind another magnificent simile. The point to be illustrated is that the great are strongest when they are alone:

As a star, uncompanioned, moves in heaven

Unastonished by the immensities of space,

Travelling infinity by its own light,

The great are strongest when they stand alone.¹⁴

A host of unspoken things are suggested by this simple image. A great man is directed to his goal by his own light and not by the pressures of time and environment; he is not deterred by the vast Time-barrier that has to be traversed before he reaches his ideal and he is strongest when alone because then he is most sustained by his inner divinity. The same idea is expressed by Sri Aurobindo in his sonnet The Divine Worker with greater austerity and less picturesqueness:

In this rude combat with the fate of man

Thy smile within my heart makes all my strength;

Thy Force in me labours at its grandiose plan,

Indifferent to the Time-snake's crawling length.¹⁵

Keats once wrote of poetry and its reader: "The rise, the progress, the setting of imagery should like the sun come natural to him — shine over him and set soberly, although in magnificence leaving him in the luxury of twilight." Nowhere does this apply with such appositeness as in many passages of Savitri. Here are two instances. Aswapati is shown ascending from plane to plane in the second book, The Book of the Traveller of the Worlds. Coming out of The

¹³The Hour of God, SABCL, Vol.17, p. 46.

¹⁴Savitri, p. 460. ¹⁵Collected Poems, SABCL, Vol. 5, p. 143.

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World of Falsehood, The Mother of Evil and the Sons of Darkness he enters The Paradise of the Life-Gods:

Apart stood high Elysian nameless hills,

Burning like sunsets in a trance of eve.¹⁶

In the next Canto his passage is further described:

A memory soft as grass and faint as sleep,

The beauty and call receding sank behind

Like a sweet song heard fading far away

Upon the long high road to Timelessness.¹⁷

In The Book of Love, Satyavan is telling Savitri how the visionary power began to grow in him:

As if to a deeper country of the soul

Transposing the vivid imagery of earth,

Through an inner seeing and sense awakening came.

A visioned spell pursued by boyhood's hours,

All things the eye had caught in coloured lines

Were seen anew through the interpreting mind

And in the shape it sought to seize the soul.¹⁸

And then follows a concrete instance of this transmuting power:

...trooping spotted deer

Against the vesper sky became a song

Of evening to the silence of the soul.¹⁹

Trooping spotted deer against the vesper sky is a visual image but the alchemic touch of the poet's imagination has transformed it into an auditory image, — a song of evening to the silence of the soul.

In the very opening Canto of the epic, in which is described in sublime symbolism the passage from night to twilight and from twilight to daybreak, we meet his simile:

The darkness failed and slipped like a falling cloak

From the reclining body of a god.²⁰

For a while we shut the book and unleash our imagination to soar in the celestial worlds where gods are seen reclining draped in

¹⁶ Savitri, p. 234. ¹⁷ Ibid., p. 239. ¹⁸ Ibid., p. 404.

¹⁹ Ibid., pp. 404-05. ²⁰ Ibid., p. 3.

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cloaks of some ethereal fabric which with a swish slips from the body and dazzles us with the vision of a radiant form . But there are vestures and vestures of divinity. In the second Canto a different epiphany meets us. Till the approach of the hour of Satyavan's death, fated to strike one year after their marriage, Savitri had not tasted the bitter cup of grief. A soul of universal love and sun like purity, how could she know of the thousand torments that afflict this "Force-compelled, Fate-driven earth-born race" of

... petty adventurers in an infinite world

And prisoners of a dwarf humanity?²¹

How had her childhood and early youth flowed on?

A glowing orbit was her early term,

Years like gold raiment of the gods that pass.²²

And from now on we know that gods flash past the seer's vision draped in gold raiment leaving him in an ecstasy tranquil and calm and the impression of those timeless moments of unalloyed bliss and happiness. And we have confirmation of this in Book IV Canto I where all the seasons of the year have been described with a supreme graphic freshness and visionary power. Monsoon is

A traveller from unquiet neighbouring seas23

burning

A surge and hiss and onset of huge rain,

The long straight sleet-drift, clamours of winged storm-charge,

Throngs of wind-faces, rushing of wind-feet

Hurrying swept through the prone afflicted plains.²⁴

But this is a titanic onslaught, not the way of the divine beings. They come gently and bring peace and calm and bliss and warm sunshine. So we await the mellowing touch of Autumn:

Earth's mood now changed; she lay in lulled repose,

The hours went by with slow contented tread:

A wide and tranquil air remembered peace,

Earth was the comrade of a happy sun.

A calmness neared as of the approach of God,

A light of musing trance lit soil and sky,

²¹Ibid., p. 370. ²² Ibid., p. 16. ²³Ibid., p. 350. ²⁴Ibid.

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And an identity and ecstasy

Filled meditation's solitary heart.²⁵

In this passage of rare verbal music echoing the harmony of Autumn we are again shown the hidden passages that make "sense a road to reach the intangible." This earth with its beauty appealing to our physical senses is no longer a snare to lure us away from heaven but a pathway to

...luminous tracts and heavens serene

And Eldoradoes of splendour and ecstasy.²⁶

Later in the year follows Spring, the season of joy and festivity when everywhere there is freshness and bloom and flowers splash their colours against the brown earth. Here is a description packed with sensuous richness:

Then Spring, an ardent lover, leaped through leaves

And caught the earth-bride in his eager clasp;

His advent was a fire of irised hues,

His arms were a circle of the arrival of joy.²⁷

But this Springtime is neither a harbinger of the merry ring time, nor is that "ardent lover" a wakener of our dormant passions. On the contrary, his is a clarion call to arise and awake and set forth on the upward journey:

His voice was a call to the Transcendent's sphere

Whose secret touch upon our mortal lives

Keeps ever new the thrill that made the world,

Remoulds an ancient sweetness to new shapes

And guards intact unchanged by death and Time

The answer of our hearts to Nature's charm

And keeps for ever new, yet still the same,

The throb that ever wakes to the old delight

And beauty and rapture and the joy to live.²⁸

The Spring, too, gives us a faint foretaste of the rapture that seizes the human soul when it meets the divine beings:

His grasp was a young god's upon earth's limbs,

Changed by the passion of his divine outbreak

²⁵Ibid., p. 351. ²⁶ lbid., p. 46. ²⁷ Ibid., p. 351. ²⁸ Ibid., pp. 351-52.

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He made her body beautiful with his kiss.²⁹

And

The sunlight was a great god's golden smile.³⁰

For a short while heaven and earth met together and

Immortal movements touched the fleeting hours³¹

-4-

Savitri with its 23, 837 lines is a vast epic, unique in its sustained grandeur and sublimity revealing to us plane after plane of spiritual illumination and each plane a tier-terraced mountain:

The unfallen planes, the thought-created worlds

Where Knowledge is the leader of the act

And Matter is of thinking substance made,

Feeling, a heaven-bird poised on dreaming wings,

Answers Truth's call as to a parent's voice,

Form luminous leaps from the all-shaping beam

And Will is a conscious chariot of the Gods,

And Life, a splendour-stream of musing Force,

Carries the voices of the mystic Suns.³²

And yet this is only a description of the Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Mind. The great vistas of the Overmind and still higher regions

Await discovery in our summit selves.³³

But the road is narrow, precipitous and full of perils. Sri Aurobindo has himself hinted at its ruggedness in a smile in the poem. The Bird of Fire. The Bird in the poem "is the symbol of an inner Power that rises from the sacrifice, i.e., the Yoga... it has the power of going beyond mind and life to that which is beyond mind and life... It reaches the Eternal and brings back to the material world that which*is beyond mind and life." And here is a description of its red breast.

²⁹ Ibid., p. 352. ³⁰ Ibid.

³¹ Ibid. ³²Ibid., p. 263-64. ³³ Ibid., p. 46.

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Rich and red is thy breast, O bird, like blood of a soul

climbing the hard crag-teeth world, wounded and nude.³⁴

Such is the nature of the path but there is one solace and that springs from the fact that these pilgrim feet are so much loved by the Gods that even they might offer their bodies for being trodden upon. Here is a passage describing the Heavens of the Ideal:

At each pace of the journey marvellous

A new degree of wonder and of bliss,

A new rung formed in Being's mighty stair,

A great wide step trembling with jewelled fire

As if a burning spirit quivered there

Upholding with his flame the immortal hope,

As if a radiant God had given his soul

That he might feel the tread of pilgrim feet

Mounting in haste to the Eternal's house.³⁵

Such is Savitri —

Invested with a rhythm of higher spheres

The word was used as a hieratic means

For the release of the imprisoned spirit

Into communion with its comrade gods.³⁶

This is the meaning of that time-hallowed word Mantra, of which Savitri is, in Keats's lines,

An endless fountain of immortal drink

Pouring unto us from the heaven's brink.

But how to derive the fullest benefit from this nectar? He has himself spelled out in a long, elaborate simile the whole process by which the Mantra opens for us the floodgates of the spiritual Ganges:

As when the mantra sinks in Yoga's ear,

Its message enters stirring the blind brain

And keeps in the dim ignorant cells its sound;

The hearer understands a form of words

And, musing on the index thought it holds,

He strives to read it with the labouring mind,

But finds bright hints, not the embodied truth:

³⁴ Collected Poem, SABCL, Vol. 5, p. 571.

¹⁵ Savitri, p. 277., ³⁶ Ibid., p. 360.

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Then, falling silent in himself to know

He meets the deeper listening of his soul:

The Word repeats itself in rhythmic strains,

Thought, vision, feeling, sense, the body's self

Are seized unalterably and he endures

An ecstasy and an immortal change;

He feels a wideness and becomes a Power,

All knowledge rushes on him like a sea;

Transmuted by the white spiritual ray

He walks in naked heavens of joy and calm,

Sees the God-face and hears transcendent speech.³⁷

The Future Poetry was written as a series of essays in the Arya (from 15 December 1917 to 15 July 1920). In these essays Sri Aurobindo had traced the course of the English muse and shown how it is destined to culminate in spiritual poetry of the greatest depth and height. There we were given a foretaste of the nature of this epic in these prophetic words:

The epic, a great poetic story of man or world or the gods, need not necessarily be a vigorous presentation of external action; the divinely appointed creation of Rome, the struggle of the principles of good and evil as presented in the great Indian poems, the pageant of the centuries or the journey of the seer through the three worlds beyond us are as fit themes as primitive war and adventure for the imagination of the epic creator. The epics of the soul most inwardly seen as they will be by an intuitive poetry, are his greatest possible subject, and it is this supreme kind that we shall expect from some profound and mighty voice of the future. His indeed may be the song of greatest flight that will reveal from the highest pinnacle and with the largest field of vision the destiny of the human spirit and the presence and ways and purpose of the Divinity in man and the universe.³⁸

The expectation and the prophecy have been amply fulfilled and the profoundest and mightiest voice has spoken and the Destiny of Man has been revealed to him in the most luminous rhythmic speech.

RAVINDRA KHANNA

³⁷ Ibid., p. 375. ³⁸ The Future Poetry, SABCL, Vol. 9, p. 267.

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Savitri — A Subjective Poem

-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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A Survey of Savitri

-l-

The Savitri story is of great antiquity. It was already ancient at the time of the Mahabharata events, for it was one of the stories that Rishi Markandeya narrated to Yuddhishtira during the year of his exile to console him and fortify his spirits. Several of Sri Aurobindo's narrative poems or fragments — Love and Death, Vidula, Chitrangada, Uloupy, Nala — were based on, or translated from, the Mahabharata, yet the fascination was inexhaustible, and in particular the Savitri story, like the Nala story, had a special attraction for Sri Aurobindo as embodying the early morning glory of Rishi Vyasa's poetic genius:

The Savitri is a maturer and nobler work Ithan the Nalai, perfect and restrained in detail, but it has still some glow of the same youth and grace over it. This then is the rare charm of these two poems that we find there the soul of the pale and marble Rishi.... Young, a Brahmacharin and a student, Vyasa dwelt with the green silences of earth, felt the fascination and loneliness of the forests... in the Savitri, what a tremendous figure a romantic poet would have made of Death, what a passionate struggle between the human being and the master of tears and partings! But Vyasa would have none of this; he had one object, to paint the power of a woman's silent love... . There have been plenty of poets who could have given us imaginative and passionate pictures of Love struggling with Death, but there has been only one who could give us a Savitri.¹

Sri Aurobindo commenced a blank verse translation of the Tale of Nala, but only about 150 lines have survived. The Savitri story, however, gripped him even more, and he seems to have planned an epyllion, a companion-piece to Urvasie and Love and Death. In Urvasie, when the heroine returns to heaven, Pururavas has to follow and be united with her there, abandoning his kingdom on earth. In Love and Death, when Priyumvada dies stung by a snake,

¹The Harmony of Virtue, SABCL, Vol. 3, pp. 154-55.

Ruru seeks her out in Patala (Hades), makes a deal with the Lord of Death and returns with her to the earth. The theme is love, and separation, and the power of Love to achieve reunion.

But in the Savitri story, the protagonist is the heroine, not the hero, and hence among love stories it is altogether unique. It is rumoured that Sri Aurobindo started on his version of Savitri in the Baroda period, perhaps as early as the turn of the century, but presently laid it aside on account of other preoccupations. Although possibly some passages were then composed, the sole running draft in our hands is dated 1916. It is not quite complete. It was planned to be a poem in two Parts — Part I: Earth, and Part II: Beyond — with four Books in Part I and three Books and an Epilogue in Part II.² all this was years before the Mother finally arrived in 1920 for permanent stay, and the Supramental world does not enter into its scheme. As was his habit, Sri Aurobindo no doubt returned to the poem from time to time; but it was only in the early thirties that the work of revision was taken up earnestly. He had retired into complete seclusion on 24 November 1926 having won a new height of realisation, and perhaps he wished to make the revised Savitri a channel for the communication of some ambrosial new insights or of some new power of consciousness. Sri Aurobindo seems to have told the Mother at the time he took up Savitri again:

I am impelled to launch on a new adventure.... I was hesitant in the beginning, but now I am decided. Still I do not know how far I shall succeed... . I have launched myself in a rudderless boat upon the vastness of the Infinite.³

After The Life Divine, after The Synthesis of Yoga, after The Secret of the Veda and Essays on the Gita, after The Mother and The Riddle of This World, — what was there to say? Those who came to know vaguely about Sri Aurobindo's new experiment in poetic creation were duly intrigued. One or two ventured to make inquiries. Was the new Savitri no more than a revision of the earlier draft? Sri Aurobindo wrote to a discipline in 1931:

There is a previous draft, the result of the many retouchings.... but in that form... it would have been a legend and not a symbol. I therefore started recasting the whole thing; only

²Savitri, p. 728. ³Sri Aurobindo Circle, XXXII, 1976. See Mona Sarkar's report of the Mother's talk to him; Perspectives of Savitri, pp. 43-44.

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the best passages and lines of the old draft will remain, altered so as to fit into the new frame.⁴

He was then at "the new form of the first Book", coming to it "once a month perhaps", making such changes as inspiration dictated. And so the revision, the recasting, continued at a leisurely pace. In a letter written in 1932, he explained that the blank verse of Savitri was "an attempt to catch something of the Upanishadic and Kalidasian movement" in English, but his success could be known only when two or three Books were finished. Even in 1934, he was still at Book I, "working on it over and over again with the hope that every line may be of a perfect perfection." Two years later he wrote: "The first Book has been lengthening out"; and most of it was new. The direction of revision was towards the "Overhead" levels, and the general movement was towards "a possible Overmind poetry".⁵ On the other hand, it was not a matter of mere technical progression. Technical mastery had come to him incidentally, but still it was the force of the inspiration that decided things, the mind as such hardly intervening in the composition of the lines. Of what use, after all, was deliberate contrivance in something so unpredictable as poetry? "The two agents are sight and call," Sri Aurobindo wrote, "Also feeling — the solar plexus has to be satisfied.⁶

In the forties it became Sri Aurobindo's habit — and more and more as the years passed—to dictate rather than write, the unfailing Nirod being the Vinayaka for this modem Vyasa. Savitri was now a major preoccupation with Sri Aurobindo, and once he dictated four to five hundred lines without a break, "whose beauty and flow," says Nirodbaran, "were a delight for their sweep of cosmic vision and their magical language." By 1950, it was as though a sense of urgency had seized even the unhurried imperturbable Sri Aurobindo. "I want to finish Savitri soon," he told Nirod, and the dictations continued as if there was now a race with time. Towards the end of 1950, Sri Aurobindo dictated the long second Canto (The Way of Fate and the Problem of Pain) of The Book of Fate. Only The Book of Death and The Epilogue (The Return to Earth) remained to be revised and amplified in consonance with the rest of the work. Once, on being reminded of these unfinished Books, Sri Aurobindo merely said: "Oh, that? We shall see about that afterwards." But this was not be. Left apparently unfinalised, these

⁴ Savitri, p. 727. ⁵ Ibid., pp. 728-29. ⁶1bid., p. 730.

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Books along with the others that had been fully revised or recast, were published as the second volume (Parts II and III) of Savitri in 1951, and the entire work came out in 1954 in a one-volume edition, followed by Sri Aurobindo's elucidatory letters on the poem. It had been almost fifty years a-growing, not in bulk alone, but even more through its conquest of ever-rising heights of Consciousness, — a phenomenon in poetic creation that has been compared by K. D. Sethna with Goethe's Faust.¹ When the whole epic of nearly 24,000 lines was at last revealed to the gaze, many at first felt frightened and turned away, but a few — and more and more as the months and years passed — came to feel that here was the greatest epic after Dante and Milton, perhaps the greatest epic of all time. Thus a Western philosopher-critic, Raymond Frank Piper:⁸

We know 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.... During a period of nearly fifty years... I Sri AurobindoT created what is probably the greatest epic in the English language... . I venture the judgement that it is the most comprehensive, integrated, beautiful and perfect cosmic poem ever composed. It ranges symbolically from a primordial cosmic void, through earth's darkness and struggles, to the highest realms of Supramental 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 towards the Absolute.

-2-

The doubt returns: After the stupendous Arya sequences, where was the necessity for yet another massive effort of literary creation? Sri Aurobindo had written poems and plays enough, and it couldn't therefore have been any desire for fresh poetic laurels that led to

⁷K. D. Sethna, The Poetic Genius of Sri Aurobindo, p. 114.

⁸Raymond F. Piper, The Hungry Eye, pp. 131-32. See Mother India, November 1958.

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the embarkation on the Savitri adventure. In The Life Divine he had structured his Supramental Manifesto; in 77ie Human Cycle and The Ideal of Human Unity he had indicated the contours of the future society and the future humanity; and in The Synthesis of Yoga he had set forth the dynamics of the Integral Yoga that were to be the means of self-perfection and world-transformation. What, then, remained?

It was decreed indeed that man should change, and his world should change, and that the Superman or the Supramentalised man of tomorrow, inhabiting a transformed world or supemature, should render earth and heaven equal, transfiguring our life mundane with its blots of "death, desire and incapacity" into the life divine with its immaculate intensities, life-movements and realisations. The life divine was the goal and Supramental Yoga the means, and the New Man should, as it were, break out of the shell of existing humanity. Sri Aurobindo could see it all very clearly, and he had explained everything in a manner that should carry conviction. And yet, — perhaps something more could be done; the thing decreed could be shown as happening! The drama of man's and earth's transcendence into the splendours and imperatives of the Life Divine could be enacted in terms of stem causality, involving the reader too in the dynamics of the transformation. The truths of philosophy are abstractions to be cognised by the ratiocinative mind, but the truths of poetry are to be experienced. And this is equally true of mystic poetry, which is verily of the stuff of spirituality. For Sri Aurobindo, spirituality meant no escape from reality, from the demands of life here and now; spirituality was but a creative force by means of which flawed reality could be seized and purified and transformed, and this world of division and darkness and importance and death transfigured into the Life Divine with its soul-marks of Love and Light and Power and Immortality.

We might, on a superficial view, look upon Savitri as the account of something that happened long ago — "in far past times when the whole thing had to be opened." In the Mahabharata, it is the story of an individual victory over death; or rather, the story of Yama's boon of her husband's life to a chaste and noble wife. Surely, Sri Aurobindo's Savitri is much more than that. Is it the forecast of something that is to happen in the future? Alas, Death still stalks in our midst, his misrule is as rampant as ever! Should Savitri, then, be read only as a fantasy, or as fantasy fused with

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racial memory, — perhaps as a Vision, perhaps a prophecy? Perhaps, Savitri is a recordation of something actually happening right now! The fight against Death is going on — Death with its negations, corruptions, perversions; and the battle has been joined — it is now being waged before us, and we could see it had we eyes to see, or if we didn't turn them away in fear or disgust. And the whole battle is being fought to open ways to Immortality, and Love — Love armed with Power — has to fight this battle of renewal, of purification, and of glorification. Truth or the Abyss? The Life Divine — or Annihilation? The issue is joined indeed, and the struggle and the possibility are projected before us. Will Satyavan — the soul of the world that is Satyavan — be redeemed at last and will the world be made safe for the future man? Perhaps, again, Savitri is the report, not so much of a witness-poet, but of a participant! It is recordation, prophecy, report, and the unfolding action itself; and in its deepest sense, it is Sri Aurobindo's own life, and the Mother's too, in progressive unravelment.

And for the student of Savitri, isn't the very reading of the poem a kind of participation in its spiritual action? Savitri is about Satyavan and Savitri, and on a different level about Sri Aurobindo and the Mother; and it is about us too — it does something to us, it does involve us in the action that is only superficially about a husband and a wife, but has really a terrestrial, even acosmic, significance. A dialectic is projected, a drama is played before us — it is apparently concluded, but the real confusion is yet to be concluded in the fulness of time. Once we are surrendered, the currents of the poem carry us onward, and we become sharers in the action or participants in the play. Savitri is thus a new kind of poem, a poem whose making was Yoga Sadhana and whose reading too should be such Sadhana. "To read Savitri is indeed to practise Yoga," the Mother is reported to have told a disciple, "one can find there all that is needed to realise the Divine. Each step in Yoga is noted here, including the secret of other Yogas also."⁹ It is thus an advance on The Life Divine which is the Groundwork of Knowledge and The Synthesis of Yoga Which is the Manual of Integral Yoga. In Savitri, theory teams with practice, Truth is wedded to Shakti, and both career towards the goals of Realisation. We proceed from the "what may we hope for?" — tattva, hita and puruṣārtha

⁹ Sri Aurobindo Circle, XXXII, 1976. See reference 3 above.

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being all fused in Savitri into a veritable Life Tree Ygdrasil of spiritual poetry.

After the Overmental realisation of 24 November 1926, Sri Aurobindo probably felt that the preordained spiritual revolution and supramental transformation were likely to come about rather sooner than had seemed possible before. This was partly the reason he went into complete seclusion and concentrated on his Yoga; and the writing of Savitri became one of the means — perhaps the principal means — of accomplishing his aim. As he once wrote to Nirod:

... I used Savitri means of ascension. I began with it on a certain mental level, each time I could reach a higher level I rewrote from that level... . In fact, Savitri has not been regarded by me as a poem to be written and finished, but as a field of experimentation to see how far poetry could be written from one's own yogic consciousness and how that could be made creative.¹⁰

Savitri was thus Sadhana and recordation in one, and was to be the means of Sadhana: for others. It was still a fresh recital of the old legend, but a recital so charged with power by the symbol-godheads who are the protagonists in the drama that the poem itself could progressively enact in the theatre of our souls the great victory and transformation that are the theme of the poem.

There is one other circumstance, too. In The Future Poetry, which had serially appeared in the Arya from 1917 to 1920, Sri Aurobindo had speculated on the future of the epic in the age of Overhead Poetry:

The epic, a great poetic story of man or world or the gods, need not necessarily be a vigorous presentation of external action: the divinely appointed creation of Rome, the struggle of the principles of good and evil as presented in the great Indian poems, the pageant of the centuries or the journey of the seer through the three words beyond us are as fit themes as primitive was and adventure for the imagination of the epic creator. The epics of the soul most inwardly seen as they will be by an intuitive poetry are his greatest possible subject, and it is this supreme kind that we shall expect from

¹⁰ Nirodbaran's Correspondence , pp. 543-44. Also Savitri, pp. 727-28.

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some profound and mighty voice of the future. His indeed may be the song of greatest flight that will reveal from the highest pinnacle and with the largest field of vision the destiny of the human spirit and the presence and ways and purpose of the Divinity in the man and the universe.¹¹

This was written in 1920. Did Sri Aurobindo feel in the years of his complete retirement that it was up to him to attempt this "song of greatest flight"?

The hand-picking of the Savitri legend out of the ocean of stories that is the Mahabharata is no less significant. The Mahabharata is about the sanguinary strife between the Kauravas and the Pandavas. This 'brother against brother' theme appears with numberless variations in the course of the epic. In the Adi Parva itself, the warring Devas and Asuras — both offspring of Prajapati — chum the ocean to secure amṛta or the elixir of immortality. The snakes and Garuda — natural enemies — are the offspring respectively of the sisters, Kadru and Vinata; and Garuda is asked to get amṛta from heaven to secure the freedom of his mother, Vinata. During his journey, he is advised to feast upon the fighting animals, a tortoise and an elephant, who had been in their earlier birth the brothers, Vibhavasu and Supratika. The wages of discord, of egoism, of sin — is death, always death. Where is the armour against death? How shall we make Death itself die? Anything external like amṛta could prove to be a mockery, as it became to the Asuras and the snakes. All boons for self-preservation, all mechanical paraphernalia of security, all cunning contrivances and edifices of self-deception, all must fail — as fail they did with Hiranyakasipu, Parikshit of Jayadratha. Fear and terror and hate and violence and vindictiveness — like lechery — only hasten the end. But love — the power of love — has an utter sovereignty. The Asuras and the snakes seek amrta out of fear, — the fear of death. Even after quaffing amrta, the Devas are constantly "afraid". Parikshit desperately tries to keep out the emissary of Death. Jayadratha seeks refuge in the false sundown. But Savitri — alone among the apocalyptic heroes and heroines of the Mahabharata — relies on the power within, the invincible power of love:

On the bare peak where Self is alone with Nought

And life has no sense and love no place to stand,

¹¹ The Future Poetry, SABCL, Vol. 9, p. 267.

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She must plead her case upon extinction's verge,

In the world's death-cave uphold life's helpless claim

And vindicate her right to be and love...

Love in her was wider than the universe,

The whole world could take refuge in her single heart...

She matched with the iron law her sovereign right:

Her single will opposed the cosmic rule.¹²

Armed with the power of her love, she will face any threat, any adverse force, whatsoever: she will defy and defeat Death himself.

In the original Mahabharata story, as in Sri Aurobindo's, the heroine doesn't flinch at the prospect of Satyavan's foretold death, nor even in the face of death or the sight of Yama the Lord of Death. She has prepared for the event, not by securing external aids, but by going within herself and forging the links with her secret self. She doesn't falter at any time, she doesn't indulge in self-pity, and she doesn't weep when the crisis is upon her. In the course of a conversation on 19 January 1940, Sri Aurobindo remarked that, although in his English version Romesh Chunder Dutt makes Savitri weep, "in the Mahabharata there is no trace of it. Even when her heart was being sawed in two, not a single tear appeared in her eye. By making her weep he took away the very strength of which Savitri is built."¹³ It was Savitri's divine solitariness and strength, her propensity to incarnate in herself the will to triumph in a world surrendered to resignation and defeat, and her consciousness of mission and might to rectify the very engines of our incapacity and anguish — it was this radiant vision and experience of Savitri's personality and power that started Sri Aurobindo on this giant undertaking and sustained his inspiration during the long years of the thirties and forties when the supreme cosmic epic was being architectured into its many-splendoured form.

Savitri, as we now have it, is in twelve Books of forty-nine Cantos. One of the Cantos in Book VII (The Book of Yoga) carries no title,* in Book VIII (The Book of Death) the solitary Canto is

* The Discovery of the Cosmic Spirit and the Cosmic Consciousness (Revised Edition in 1993).

¹² Ibid., pp. 12-19. ¹³ A.B. Purani, Evening Talks, First Series, p. 294.

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marked Three, and Book XII (Epilogue: The Return to Earth) was apparently not given the final touches of revision. The twelve Books nevertheless as they stood in the 1954 edition account for over 23,813 lines, though the Mother on being told of this, at once remarked to K. D. Sethna: "There should have been 24,000 lines."¹⁴ And Sethna has noted the interesting fact that together the title and subtitle — Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol — make twenty-four letters!

On the first approach, Savitri is apt to scare away the modem reader who is generally too much in a hurry. Not only its sheer mass and its unconventional structure, but even more its unfamiliar content made up largely of the occult and the incomprehensible, must raise barriers between the poem and its potential readers. The main narrative takes up no more than fourteen Cantos (I: 1 and 2; IV: 1-4; V: 1-3; VI: 1-2; VII: 1; VIII: 3; and XII), while the remaining thirty-five Cantos are about Aswapati's Yoga, Savitri's Yoga, and Savitri's redeemer's progress through the occult worlds of Eternal Night, Double Twilight and Everlasting Day. And yet such a mechanical attempt to separate the narrative from the non-narrative part could be misleading in the extreme. The poem has to be seen as a unity, an organic wholeness and fullness of revelation.

The "action" of the poem opens in the "hour before the Gods awake" — the hour presaging the "dawn", and the "dawn" itself heralding the "day when Satyavan must die". The opening Canto — The Symbol Dawn — is, in Sri Aurobindo's words, "a key beginning and an announcement", for the cosmic symbol dawn signifying the waking up from the swoon of Inconscience, the physical dawn over the cluster of forest hermitages, and the awakening of Savitri or her descent into earth-consciousness from the ineffable altitudes of the Spirit, all fuse into the dawn of the day "when Satyavan must die":

An unshaped consciousness desired light

And a blank prescience yearned towards distant change...

Arrived from the other side of boundlessness

An eye of deity pierced through the dumb deeps...

Then through the pallid rift that seemed at first

Hardly enough for a trickle from the suns,

¹⁴ Mother India, June 1971, p. 328.

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Outpoured the revelation and the flame...

At the summons of her body's voiceless call

Her strong far-winging spirit travelled back,

Back to the yoke of ignorance and fate.

Back to the labour and stress of mortal days,

Lighting a pathway through strange symbol dreams

Across the ebbing of the seas of sleep.¹⁵

And the poem ends, at the end of the day, in the silent night that is to precede another Dawn:

Night, splendid with the moon dreaming in heaven

In silver peace, possessed her luminous reign.

She brooded through her stillness on a thought

Deep-guarded by her mystic folds of light,

And in her bosom nursed a greater dawn.¹⁶

From "dawn" to a "greater dawn" is the whole arc of the poem's "action", and a momentous something that happens during the day will transform the next dawn and make it a "greater dawn" — not a dawn that sees the Gods alone awake and gives the fleeting hint of a fairer future but a dawn that finds earth the kin-soil of heaven and men who are one with the Gods. The "something" that happens during the day — why it happens and how, and who makes it happen — is the theme of the poem.

What happens is the defeat — or rather the transmutation, transfiguration — of Death. Yama is not mentioned by name; always the sinister and dark Power figures as Death. Life and love and the soul's freedom are in utter jeopardy because of the seeming omnipotence of Death. It is the classic theme, the one fundamental theme, of all great poetry. We are afraid, — afraid of the dark, of defeat, of death. We are born but to die, we reason but to err, and we are daunted at every turn. Thus the first verse of The Divine Comedy:

In the middle of my life, I found myself in a dark wood, and lost my way.

Dante is afraid, and fear is the precursor of death. He has to traverse the three worlds of Hell, Purgatory and Heaven before he can find an answer to this fear and this terror — he finds the answer in Beatrice and Love, "the love that moves the Sun and the other

¹⁵ Savitri, p. 2-9. Ibid., p. 724.

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stars." In the opening lines of Paradise Lost, again, there is reference both of the awesome phenomenon of Death and the answer provided by the Son of Man who is also the Son of God:

Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit

Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste

Brought death into the world, and all our woe,

With loss of Eden, till one greater Man

Restore us, and regain the blissful seat,

Sing, heavenly Muse.

There is a fall, and there is a rise again; there is death, the death is exceeded by the power of the Redeemer's love. In the Mahabharata, it is fear, fear, all the time — and the other passions too: kāma, krodha, lobha, madha, matsara and moha — and, above all, the failure of compassion and love. In Sri Aurobindo's Savitri, the Evil — not its endless manifestations — the Evil itself is confronted and checkmated, and not so much destroyed as radically changed in its character: Death the Lord of Darkness becomes the Lord of Light, and death gives place of Everlasting Life!

Death, Love, Truth — Yama, Savitri, Satyavan — the symbols and the legendary characters simultaneously fill the expanse of the epic, and it is not easy, it is not wise, to separate the symbol from the legend. In the course of a conversation, Sri Aurobindo said in 1939 that, even in the Mahabharata, the Savitri story was symbolic, although the popular view was to take it merely as a tale of conjugal fidelity. Asked to spell out the symbolism, he went on:

Well, Satyavan whom Savitri marries, is the symbol of the Soul descended into the Kingdom of Death; and Savitri... the Goddess of Divine Light and Knowledge comes down to redeem Satyavan from Death's grasp.¹⁷

In a more detailed note on the subject, Sri Aurobindo further underlines the symbolic intention and implications:

... this legends is... one of the many symbolic myths of the Vedic cycle. Satyavan is the soul carrying the divine truth of being within itself but descended into the grip of death and ignorance; Savitri is the Divine Word, daughter of the sun, goddess of the supreme Truth who comes down and is born

¹⁷ Nirodbaran, Talks with Sri Aurobindo, Vol. 1, p. 118 (1986).

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to save; Aswapati, the Lord of the Horse, her human father, is the Lord of Tapasya, the concentrated energy of spiritual endeavour that helps us to rise from the mortal to the immortal planes; Dyumatsena, Lord of the Shining Hosts, father of Satyavan is the Divine Mind here fallen blind, losing its celestial kingdom of vision, and through that loss its kingdom of glory. Still this is not a mere allegory, the characters are not personified qualities, but incarnations for emanations of living and conscious Forces with whom we can enter into concrete touch and they take human bodies in order to help man and show him the way from his mortal state to a divine consciousness and immortal life.¹⁸

The characters, then, are at once symbol-powers and real human beings. They didn't figure in the mythic past alone, but are also constituents of the current climate of striving, pressing towards the future. And what — or who — is Narad, the other important character in the drama? Isn't he the necessary catalytic agent that prods the "action" towards the desired consummation? Narad in Aswapati's Court affects King, Queen and Savitri differently yet the diverse reactions coalesce towards the same end: the crystallisation of Savitri's shining purpose to stake all for the Soul of Truth and win all through the Power of Love:

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 seen God smile at me in Satyavan;

I have seen the Eternal in a human face.¹⁹

nd the poet adds: "Then none could answer to her words."

Dyumatsena, the fallen King caged in the mind, sees if at all as through a fog dimly, but Aswapati the King-Forerunner breaks out of the mental cage, explores the "vasts of God", confronts the Divine Mother, and secures the boon of Her descent to earth. It may be asked: Why should the Infinite, the omnipotent, thus agree to limit itself? Omnipotence, however, includes also the power of self-limitation, and the power of uniting the finite and the infinite. The Avatar both brings the heavens down and raises the earth to

¹³SABCL, Vol. 26, p. 265. ¹⁹ Savitri, pp. 435-36.

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heaven; he (or she) is a living example for humanity, the average in appearance who is a positive ideal as well, the normal by birth and upbringing who grows supernormal dimensions of consciousness — the bringer of light and love and power, and above all the advanced Scout for the race as a whole. As The Advent wrote editorially in its April 1948 issue:

The personality that incarnates it The Avatari belongs at the same time to two apparently incompatible and contrary worlds and possesses a dual character. Within, it harbours the Divine, is the Divine, fully conscious of its sovereign potency above the laws of a mortal life of ignorance; without, it embraces this world too, this play of inconscience and limitation. The two confront each other in the Incarnation with equal potency and in magic interaction.

So it is with Savitri. On the fateful day "Twelve passionate months led in a day of fate." Savitri wakes up too like the rest of the forest folk, wakes up from her withdrawn divinity to conscious humanity, and slowly her double role becomes clear to her:

To live with grief, to confront death on her road, —

The mortal's lot became the Immortal's share.

Thus trapped in the gin of earthly destinies,

Awaiting her ordeal's hour abode,

Outcast from her inborn felicity,

Accepting life's obscure terrestrial robe,

Hiding herself even from those she loved.

The godhead greater by a human fate.²⁰

The familiar Mahabharata story of Savitri and Satyavan certainly brings out the compelling power of a wife's chastity to effect a change of heart even in the obdurate Lord of Death. That tale itself, with its clear bold outlines, partakes of the sublime, and Wintemitz has aptly called it "the wonderful poem of faithful Savitri."²¹ The incommensurable power of love was constantly in Sri Aurobindo's mind, as may be inferred from the role given to it in Sri Aurobindo's earlier poems and plays. For example, these words are put into the mouth of Eric, King of Norway:

²⁰Ibid., pp. 7-8. ²¹ Wintemitz, A History of Indian Literature.

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Some day surely

The world too shall be saved from death by Love. ²²

But in Sri Aurobindo's epic, Savitri is the Avatar of the Divine Mother and not alone Satyavan's wife. The aim of her great endeavour would be, not just to fulfil a personal need or to resist a personal danger, but primarily to hasten the cosmic evolution and to promote a global human realisation. On the day of days, she is in readiness, certainly to fight the danger to Satyavan's life, but even more to get at the Evil itself, and purify and change it altogether:

To wrestle with the Shadow she had come

And must confront the riddle of man's birth

And life's brief struggle in dumb Matter's night.²³

-4-

The background infinities and cosmic significances notwithstanding, the splendour of the eternal feminine that is Savitri is not ignored either. She is divine, she is human; and she is all the more divine because she is human too, and she is the more adorably human because she is also radiantly divine:

Near to earth's wideness intimate with heaven,

Exalted and swift her young large-visioned spirit

Voyaging through worlds of splendour and of calm

²² SABCL, Vol. 6, p. 534. ²³ Savitri, p. 17.

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Overflew the ways of Thought to unborn things.

Ardent was her self-poised unstumbling will;

Her mind, a sea of white sincerity,

Passionate in flow, had not one turbid wave.

As in a mystic and dynamic dance

A priestess of immaculate ecstasies

Inspired and ruled from Truth's revealing vault

Moves in some prophet cavern of the gods,

A heart of silence in the hands of joy

Inhabited with rich creative beats

A body like a parable of dawn

That seemed a niche for veiled divinity

Or golden temple door to things beyond.

Immortal rhythms swayed in her time-born steps;

Her look, her smile awoke celestial sense

Even in earth-stuff, and their intense delight

Poured a supernal beauty on men's lives.²⁴

The predestined "day", the imminent trial of strength between the cosmic protagonists, and Savitri's self-poised sublime alertness for the event: the "exposition" of the drama to be played in the symbol theatre of evolutionary possibilities is now almost complete. There is now a halt in the action. Time suddenly takes a leap backwards, and we are permitted to peer into the origins or the aetiology of the threatened confrontation: "A world's desire compelled her mortal birth."²⁵ And so we are winged back to the days of Aswapati's first awakening — his perception of the heavy and weary weight of this unintelligible world, his soul's breakthrough to freedom, his crystal-gazing into the "Secret Knowledge", his exploration of the occult stairway of the worlds.

The main bulk of Savitri is made up of three hard blocks: Aswapati's Yoga (I: 3-5, II and III), Savitri's Yoga (VII: 2-7), and the Savitri-Yama confrontation (IX, X and XI). In between, there is the story of Savitri's birth and blossoming into womanhood, of her choice of Satyavan as her spouse, of Narad's peep into predestination, of the year of holy wedded life, and of Satyavan's death in the forest (IV, V, VI, VII: 1 and VIII). The Epilogue describes Savitri's return to earth with Satyavan.

Aswapati's Yoga is the Yoga of self-knowledge and world-

²⁴ Ibid., pp. 14-15. ²⁵ Ibid.,p.22.

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knowledge, the Yoga of Aspiration, the Yoga of the Forerunner who makes Savitri's advent possible. Starting with unease and uncertainty, Aswapati achieves his soul's release through a psychic opening and spiritual change. He is able to break through the shell of egoistic separativity:

He felt the beating life in other men

Invade him with their happiness and their grief;

Their love, their anger, their unspoken hopes

Entered in currents or in pouring waves

Into the immobile ocean of his calm.²⁶

Beyond this universal or cosmic experience there is the Nirvanic absolute silence, and Aswapati wins his way to its supernal calm:

There only were Silence and the Absolute...

He plunged his roots into the Infinite,

He based his life upon Eternity.²⁷

And when he returns to the outer consciousness after this baptism in the waters of transcendence, he has won "his soul's release from Ignorance":

A wide God-knowledge poured down from above,

A new world-knowledge broadened from within...

A genius heightened in his body's cells

That knew the meaning of his fate-hedged works.²⁸

His body's cells have themselves grown conscious of their divine affiliations. From this high plane of spiritual change, Aswapati seeks corroboration in the Secret Knowledge or the received perennial philosophy, and he proceeds from the ground of such knowledge to a heightened spiritual power of penetration into all the continents of cosmic life and experience. But

He climbed to meet the infinite more above...

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:

²⁶ Ibid., p. 27. ²⁷ Ibid., p. 34. ²⁸ Ibid., p. 44.

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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.

To a few is given that godlike rare release.²⁹

As he rises thus, shaking off the Inconscient, he is met by "a Might, a Flame, a Beauty half-visible with deathless eyes," which envelops him "with its stupendous limbs," and he is now able to invade the occult Invisible:

A voyager upon uncharted routes

Fronting the viewless danger of the Unknown,

Adventuring across enormous realms,

He broke into another Space and Time.³⁰

After a Divina-Commedia-like journey covering the world-stair —

Ascending and descending twixt life's poles

The seried kingdoms of the graded Law —³¹

Aswapati dares yet another ascent of aspiration as leader and representative of the race. The world-stair is not one world but all possible worlds, all the worlds together, and beyond our notions of space and time; the centre is everywhere, the circumference is nowhere. Dante's triple worlds, although superficially geographical, are actually psychological states. Where Dante is religious, theological and mediaeval, Sri Aurobindo is spiritual, scientific and modem; what Dante did with such superb psychological and clinical precision for his time, Sri Aurobindo has done for all time.

For Aswapati himself, the whole arc of occult experience between the poles of superconscience and inconscience has already been covered in its entirely, and he is beyond all knowledges, all experiences:

He had reached the top of all that can be known:

His sight surpassed creation's head and base;

Ablaze the triple heavens revealed their suns,

The obscure Abyss exposed its monstrous rule.³²

But how about the rest of mankind? What he aspires for is not a personal solution but a universal realisation and a new creation.

²⁹Ibid., pp. 79-80. ³⁰Ibid., p. 91. ³¹ Ibid., p. 88. ³² Ibid., p. 300.

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And so he continues his search for this ultimate solution, and his efforts are rewarded at last:

The Presence he yearned for suddenly drew close...

The undying Truth appeared, the enduring Power

Of all that here is made and then destroyed,

The Mother of all godheads and all strengths

Who, mediatrix, binds earth to the Supreme...

She is the golden bridge, the wonderful fire.

The luminous heart of the Unknown is she.³³

He is advised to content with what he has won and ask no more for the earth or the race as a whole. But Aswapati will not be so easily put off, and he makes reply to the Divine Mother:

How shall I rest content with mortal days

And the dull measure of terrestrial things,

I who have seen behind the cosmic mask

The glory and the beauty of thy face? ...

Let thy infinity in one body live,

All-Knowledge wrap one mind in seas of light,

All-Love throb single in one human heart...

Let a great word be spoken from the heights

And one great act unlock the doors of Fate.³⁴

And the Mother gives her consenting voice:

O Strong forerunner, I have heard thy cry.

One shall descend and break the iron Law,

Change Nature's doom by the lone Spirit's power...

A seed shall be sown in Death's tremendous hour,

A branch of heaven transplant to human soil;

Nature shall overleap her mortal step;

Fate shall be changed by an unchanging will.³⁵

Thus Savitri comes into the world, not simply to satisfy a childless King's desire for issue, but truly to fulfil Aswapati's great aspiration and prayer on behalf of long-suffering earth.

There is now Nature's preparation for the Advent, and the seasons begin with summer and end with spring. The seasons are symbolic too, summer of aspiration by earth, the field of manifestation, a looking-up to the Sun-God for fulfilment; the rainly season, of the boon from heaven; the intermediate seasons, of

³³ Ibid., p. 312-14. ³⁴ Ibid., pp. 341-45. ³⁵Ibid., p. 346.

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gestation and growth; and spring, of a fruit or the new-born Child;

Answering earth's yearning and her cry for bliss

A greatness from our other countries came...

The seasons drew in linked significant dance

They symbol pageant of the changing year...

Rain-tide burst in upon torn wings of heat,

Startled with lightings air's unquiet drowse,

Lashed with life-giving streams the torpid soil...

Three thoughtful seasons passed with shining tread

And scanning one by one the pregnant hours

Watched for a flame that lurked in luminous depths,

The vigil of some mighty birth to come...

The seed grew into a delicate marvellous bud,

The bud disclosed a great and heavenly bloom.³⁶

From the very moment of her birth, Savitri seems a Child apart, dwelling in a "strong separate air":

An invisible sunlight ran within her veins

And flooded her brain with heavenly brilliancies

That woke a wider sight than earth could know.³⁷

Albeit she is his dearly-loved daughter, Aswapati (though not his Queen) is well aware of her divine mission on earth, but not the exact moment in time and of time when time shall be beyonded; nor the manner and place of confrontation of the Shadow; and Savitri knows too, but as yet only obscurely, for the godhead is yet veiled within, her avatar-role among the other protagonists is still a closed book to her. As the years pass and she grows into the perfection of woman's beauty, she no doubt compels admiration, but awes even more; "all worshipped marvellingly, none dared to claim." And once, when she approaches her father, he suddenly sees her with newly-opened eyes:

There came the gift of a revealing hour...

Transformed the delicate image-face became

A deeper Nature's self-revealing sign,

A gold-leaf palimpsest of sacred births,

A grave world-symbol chiselled out of life...

A deathless meaning filled her mortal limbs;

³⁶ Ibid., pp. 349-55. ³⁷ Ibid., p. 356.

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As in a golden vase's poignant line

They seemed to carry the rhythmic sob of bliss

Of earth's mute adoration towards heaven

Released in beauty's cry of living form

Towards the perfection of eternal things.³⁸

Recognising "the great and unknown spirit bom his child," he asks her to go out into the wide world all alone and choose by her soul's light her partner for life. Her quest is a feast of experience enough:

Her carven chariot with its fretted wheels

Threaded through clamorous marts and sentinel towers

Past figured gates and high dream-sculptured fronts

And gardens hung in the sapphire of the skies,

Pillared assembly halls with armoured guards,

Small fanes where one calm Image watched man's life

And temples hewn as if by exiled gods

To imitate their lost eternity.³⁹

But it is among "meditation seats" that she met the "one for whom her heart had come so far":

A tablet of young wisdom was his brow,

Freedom's imperious beauty curved his limbs,

The joy of life was on his open face.

His look was a wide daybreak of the gods.⁴⁰

It is the re-enactment of the ancient miracle of the dawn and sunrise of Love's marvellous hour. "The meeting and union of Satyavan and Savitri," writes M.V. Seetaraman, "blend all the qualities of Romantic, Platonic and Christian lovers."⁴' Like the marriage of heaven and earth at dawn ("All grew a consecration and a rite") in the opening Canto, here too the destined meeting of Savitri and Satyavan grows into a mutual consecration and a rite:

Then down she came from her high carven car

Descending with a soft and faltering haste...

A candid garland set with simple forms

Her rapid fingers taught a flower song,

The stanzaed movement of a marriage hymn.

Profound in perfume and immersed in hue

³⁸ Ibid., pp. 372-73. ³⁹lbid., p. 379. ⁴⁰ Ibid., p. 393.

⁴¹ The Advent, August 1964, p. 50.

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They mixed their yearning's coloured signs and made

The bloom of their purity and passion one.

A sacrament of joy in treasuring palms

She brought, flower-symbol of her offered life...

On the high glowing cupola of the day

Fate tied a knot with mornings' halo threads

While by the ministry of an auspice-hour

Heart-bound before the sun, their marriage fire,

The wedding of the eternal Lord and Spouse

Took place again on earth in human forms.⁴²

On her return to Madra to report her choice, it is Narad's intervention that opens Aswapati's eyes — and Savitri's own — to the precise nature of the encounter ahead. Narad's warning is thus no warning at all, but merely the adroit opening of the drama of the Act of Fate that is to be played. The long speech that Narad makes, while it fails to carry conviction to the Queen, lights up Aswapathi's eyes with recognition of the unfolding Moment and also helps Savitri to grow aware of her larger role and the direction of the future course of her action. She is already the perfect human wife to Satyavan, and she will presently get ready to confront and confound the Shadow when, as preordained, it chooses to make its appearance. The twelve months of wedded life pass serenely enough, and nobody — not even Satyavan — knows anything about her invisible burden of terrible expectancy. But shortly before the appointed day, Savitri is almost all-human, and feels like giving up the fight. When a Voice summons her to her mission in life ("Arise, O soul, and vanquish Time and Death," p. 474), Savitri poses the tell-tale question:

Why should I strive with earth's unyielding laws

Or stave off death's inevitable hour?

This surely is best to practise with my fate

And follow close behind my lover's steps.⁴³

The Voice almost admonishes Savitri:

Is this enough, O Spirit?

And what shall thy soul say when it wakes and knows

The work was left undone for which it came?...

Find out thy soul, recover thy hid self,

⁴² Savitri, pp. 409-11. ⁴³ Ibid., p. 475.

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In silence seek God's meaning in thy depths,

Then mortal nature change to the divine.⁴⁴

It is then that Savitri commences her interiorised Yoga of self-knowledge and preparation for her ordeal. What is she? Surely, not just the immaculate girl-wife of Satyavan apprehensive of the approaching Hour of Fate! Then what is she? She now traverses the "inner countries" of matter, life and mind — encounters the triple soul-forces (Madonna of Suffering, Mother of Might, Mother of Light) — door after door opens, veil after is pierced, impersonation after impersonation is exposed — and last of all comes the recognition of her sea-green oneness with the Whole:

She was the godhead hid in the heart of man,

She was the climbing of his soul to God.

The cosmos flowered in her, she was its bed...

Eternity looked out from her on Time.⁴⁵

After all these backward glances that take a sweeping view of Savitri's antecedents, Aswapathi's Yoga, the whole architecture and inner substance of the stairway of the worlds, after these long backward leaps into personal history and cosmic evolutionary geography, the main action springs forward in Book VIII (The Book of Death), and Savitri follows Satyavan to the forest in the morning of the fateful day, and there is sudden darkness at noon:

Near her she felt a silent shade immense

Chilling the noon with darkness for its back...

She knew that visible Death was standing there

And Satyavan had passed from her embrace.⁴⁶

Left alone in the huge wood, despair doesn't assail her, and tears do not dim her eyes; on the other hand, all in her is taut to face "that mighty hour". Leaving Satyavan's body to rest on the forest soil, she raises her noble head:

Something stood there, unearthly, sombre, grand,

A limitless denial of all being

That wore the terror and wonder of a shape.

In its appalling eyes the tenebrous Form

Bore the deep pity of destroying gods.⁴⁷

⁴⁴ ibid., pp. 475-76. ⁴⁵ Ibid., p. 557. ⁴⁶ Ibid., p. 565. ⁴⁷ Ibid., p. 574.

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Now follows the occult Kurukshetra where Savitri and Death are the arch-antagonists. It is a journey and a struggle, a debate and a dialectic, marked by the steady progression in Death's discomfiture. This Kurukshetra is, indeed, a battlefield on divers fronts: Eternal Night, Double Twilight, Everlasting Day. These symbol worlds signify varieties of temptation, challenge and victory for Savitri. Death tells her that Love is expendable — it is but a foolish sentiment — it is impermanent — it is too much of the earthly! But Savitri has the right answers for all Death's sinister and seductive sophistries. Negations and sophistries failing, Death challenges Savitri at last to reveal the true Power hiding behind her deceptive human guise: let her lay bare the Truth, then he will yield Satyavan back. And Savitri takes Death at his word and

A mighty transformation came on her.

A halo of the indwelling Deity,

The Immortal's lustre that had lit her face

And tented its radiance in her body's house,

Overflowing made the air a luminous sea.

In a flaming moment of apocalypse

The Incarnation thrust aside its veil...

Eternity looked into the eyes of Death,

And Darkness saw God's living Reality.⁴⁸

She asks Death to free the "soul of the world called Satyavan" from the "clutch of pain and ignorance," but the Shadow resists Light a little longer:

The two opposed each other face to face.

His being like a huge fort of darkness towered;

Around it her life grew, an ocean's siege... .

Light like a burning tongue licked up his thoughts,

Light was a luminous torture licked in his heart,

His darkness muttered perishing in her blaze.

Her mastering Word commanded every limb

And left no room for his enormous will...

He called to Night but she fell shuddering back,

He called to Hell but sullenly it retired:

He turned to the Inconscient for support,

From which he was bom, his vast sustaining self:

⁴⁸ Ibid., pp. 664-65.

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It drew him back towards boundless vacancy

As if by himself to swallow up himself:

He called to his strength, but it refused his call.

His body was eaten by light, his spirit devoured.

At last he knew defeat inevitable...

Afar he fled...

The dire universal Shadow disappeared

Vanishing into the Void from which it came.⁴⁹

His last defiance has been but a show of desperation, he is baffled, he loses his dark armour, the soul's Light eats up the outer body of Death, and the prophecy foretold is at last fulfilled: (p. 708)

Even there shall come as a high crown of all

The end of Death, the death of Ignorance.

Eternal Night and Double Twilight have thus both been beyonded, but Savitri has yet to cross some more hurdles in the field of Everlasting Day before she can return to earth with Satyavan. First the Power, who had died in the flames of Savitri's blaze of viśvarūpa, reappears phoenix-like as a Lord of Light:

Transfigured was the formidable shape...

Night the dim mask had grown a wonderful face.⁵⁰

He changes his tactics, and now offers the ultimate bliss in heaven to Savitri. But she will not be tempted:

I climb not to thy everlasting Day,

Even as I have shunned thy eternal Night...

Earth is the chosen place of mightiest souls;

Earth is the heroic spirit's battlefield...

In vain thou tempest 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 of God in deathless Light,

To bring God down to the world on earth we came,

To change the earthly life to life divine.⁵¹

The God has no option but to submit to Savitri's adamantine resolution:

⁴⁹ Ibid., pp. 667-68. ⁵⁰ Ibid., p. 679. ⁵¹ Ibid., pp. 686-92.

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As I have taken from thee my load of night

And taken from thee my twilight's doubts and dreams,

So now I take my light of utter Day.⁵²

He withdraws into his triple symbol-worlds, and Savitri presently grows aware of the primordial invisible Mother-Spirit, who poses four times the choice between the fourfold beatitudes of Peace, Oneness, Power, Joy and the infinite uncertainties of life upon earth. But Savitri is still a rock of adamant; she is only for "earth and men", and she must share the heavenly felicities with men on earth. Then breaks forth from the Silence the blissful sanction and decree:

O beautiful body of the incarnate Word,

Thy thoughts are mine, I have spoken with thy voice...

All thou hast asked I give to earth and men...

O Sun-Word, thou shall raise the earth-soul to Light

And bring down God into the lives to men...

When all thy work in human time is done,

The mind of earth shall be a home of light,

The life of earth a tree growing towards heaven,

The body of earth a tabernacle of God.⁵³

Benediction is doubled with prophecy, and as Savitri and Satyavan re-awaken on the bosom of the earth they are surprised with joy and they are deeply content, and "over wide earth brooded the infinite bliss". The last Book (The Epilogue) describes their return to Dyumatsena's place — a Dyumatsena restored to his sight and throne —and they retire for the night full of expectancy of "a greater dawn".

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Savitri, a poem like no other, is based on vision and experience that do not come in everybody's way, and is sustained by an aesthesis that is geared to the quality of this vision and the nature of this experience. Large tracts of the poem raise difficulties for the 'common reader' as much by the unfamiliarity of the subject-matter as by the knotted pregnancy of the poetic utterance. Sri Aurobindo himself has admitted that the poem deals with "so many

⁵²Ibid., p. 694. ⁵³Ibid., pp. 698-99.

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various heights and degrees and so much varying substance of thought and feeling and descriptive matter and narrative,"⁵⁴ that any attempt to apply stereotyped criteria of evaluation must prove infructuous. Nor can we expect a uniform level of articulation in a poem of nearly 24,000 lines. Also exercises in commentary or elucidation would be in vain, unless the critic too has had the same range of mystic experience, or is at least conditioned by his psychic and intellectual training to enter into the spirit of such experience. In this predicament it is hardly surprising that Sri Aurobindo should be his own best annotator and interpreter, as may be seen from his numerous letters on Savitri, many of which are now appended to the one-volume edition of the poem. Touching on the essential character of the poem, Sri Aurobindo wrote in 1947:

Savitri is the record of a seeing, of an experience which is not of the common kind and is often very far from what the general human mind sees and experiences... there must be a new extension of consciousness and aesthesis to appreciate a new kind of mystic poetry.⁵⁵

For example, when objection was taken to Sri Aurobindo's impressionistic description of the earth

Athwart the vain enormous trance of Space,

Its formless stupor without mind or life,

A shadow spinning through a soulless Void,

Thrown back once more into unthinking dreams,

Earth wheeled abandoned in the hollow gulfs...⁵⁶

because, after all, only half the earth is dark at any time, Sri Aurobindo answered:

I am not writing a scientific treatise, I am selecting certain ideas and impressions to form a symbol of a partial and temporary darkness of the soul and Nature which seems to a temporary feeling of that which is caught in the Night as if it were universal and eternal. One who is lost in that Night does not think of the other half of the earth as full of light; to him all is Night and the earth a foresaken wanderer in an enduring darkness. If I sacrifice his impressionism and abandon the image of the earth wheeling through dark space

⁵⁴Ibid., p. 759. ⁵⁵Ibid., p. 794. ⁵⁶ Ibid., p. 1.

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I might as well abandon the symbol altogether...⁵⁷*

Again, the criticism of the expression "teased the Inconscient to wake Ignorance," called forth these comments:

The Inconscient and the Ignorance... to me they are realities, concrete powers whose resistance is present everywhere and at all times in its tremendous and boundless mass...

Men have not learnt yet to recognise the Inconscient on which the whole material world they see is built, or the Ignorance of which their whole nature including their knowledge is built...

The mystical poet can only describe what he has felt, seen in himself or others or in the world just as he has felt or seen it or experienced through exact vision, close contact or identity and leave it to the general reader to understand or not understand or misunderstand according to his capacity.⁵⁸

When a later passage in the same Canto

All grew a consecration and a rite.

Air was a vibrant link between earth and heaven;

The wide-winged hymn of a great priestly wind

Arose and failed upon the altar hills;

The high boughs prayed in a revealing sky⁵⁹

was adversely commented upon by a critic, Sri Aurobindo remarked almost disarmingly:

I was not seeking for originality but for truth and the effective poetical expression of my vision. He finds no vision there, and that may be because I could not express myself with any power; but it may also be because of his temperamental failure to feel and see what I felt and saw.... The picture is that of a conscious adoration offered by Nature and in that each element is conscious in its own way, the wind and its hymn, the hills, the trees.... The last line ("The high boughs...") is

* In terms of Copemican astronomy, of course, 'dawn' is not really the "rise" of the sun; it is only the earth getting into a position when the Sun can illuminate the exposed part. The earth continues to revolve, and the exposed hemisphere changes too; the Gods are, after all, always awake. And all 'dawn' is self-unfolding, all knowledge is self-discovery!

⁵⁷ Ibid., pp. 733-34. ⁵⁸ Ibid., pp. 734-35, 753, 736. ⁵⁹Ibid., p. 4.

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an expression of an experience which I often had whether in the mountains or on the plains of Gujarat or looking from my window in Pondicherry... and I am unable to find any feebleness either in the experience or in the words that express it.⁶⁰

One reason why parts of Savitri, especially those that try to project spiritual experiences, cause puzzlement to the average reader, why lines and sometimes whole passages strike him as "unpoetic" or not particularly poetic, is the nature of the Overhead aesthesis, its tantalising knot of power and limitation. Even the followers of Sri Aurobindo's Yoga or committed Aurobindonians, unless happily endowed, have experienced this difficulty, and hence Sri Aurobindo has been at pains to explain what they should look for in Savitri. Poetry no doubt is concerned with beauty, and aesthetics — when it does not degenerate into aestheticism of the Art-for-Art's-sake variety — looks for the rasa or taste of beauty. But poetry should be for Truth's sake too, not only for Beauty's sake, though of course — at the highest level of apprehension — the two may be indistinguishable. Sri Aurobindo adds:

Aesthetics belongs to the mental range and all that depends upon it... . The Overmind is essentially a spiritual power. Mind in it surpasses its ordinary self and rises and takes its stand on a spiritual foundation. It embraces beauty and sublimates it; it has an essential aesthesis which is not limited by rules and canons; it sees a universal and eternal beauty while it takes up and transforms all that it limited and particular... . Overmind in all its dealings puts truth first; it brings out the essential truth (and truths) in things and also its infinite possibilities; it brings out even the truth that lies behind falsehood and error.⁶¹

Poetic appreciation cannot be mechanically cultivated; and some kinds of poetry are bound to prove caviare to the general. To be able to appreciate Savitri, one has to be "open to this kind of poetry, able to see the spiritual vision it conveys, capable too of feeling the Overhead touch when it comes."⁶² The Overmind touch, even the touch of anything else Overhead (which comprises all the above-mind states of consciousness: Higher Mind, Illumined Mind,

⁶⁰Ibid., pp. 788-90. ⁶¹Ibid., p. 743. ⁶²lbid., p. 759.

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Intuition) must involve, in some measure at least, a "cosmic consciousness", a background consciousness to which the million particulars of phenomenal life perceived by the mind or the vital emotion or the physical seeing are ultimately related: "In the direct Overmind transmission this something behind is usually forced to the front or close to the front or close to the front."⁶³ But, then, as with Arnold's "Grand Style" or the Longinian "Sublime", the Overhead touch or note too "has to be felt and cannot be explained or accounted for."⁶⁴

Sri Aurobindo is, however, careful to add that "Overhead poetry is not necessarily greater or more perfect than any other kind of poetry." And yet, although perfection is perfection — whether it be perfection of the language, or of the word-music and rhythm, or of the feeling or thought communicated— "there is also the quality of the thing said which counts for something."⁶⁵

A pebble has its beauty, and snow-clad Himalayas are beautiful too bordering on the mystical sublime. How do we "grade" perfection and greatness in poetry? Sri Aurobindo ventures to formulate some criteria, giving importance to the inrush of the higher Overhead consciousness that heightens or greatens what it touches and illumines. But how about a poet's greatest possible effort?

...Sometimes a felicitous turn or an unusual force of language or a deeper note of feeling brings in the Overhead touch. More often it is the power of the rhythm that lifts up language that is simple and common or a feeling or idea that has often been expressed and awakes something which is not ordinarily there.... But sometimes there comes down a supreme voice, the Overmind voice and the Overmind music.... But its greatest work will be to express adequately and constantly what is now only occasionally and inadequately some kind of utterance of the things above, the things beyond, the things behind the apparent world and its external and superficial happenings and phenomena. It would not only bring in the occult in its larger and deeper ranges but the truths of the spiritual heights, the spiritual depths, the spiritual intimacies and vastnesses as also the truths of the inner mind, the inner life, an inner or subtle physical beauty

⁶³ Ibid., p. 804. ⁶⁴Ibid., p. 802. ⁶⁵ Ibid., pp. 813-14.

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and reality... It might even enter into the domain of the infinite and inexhaustible, catch some word of the Ineffable, show us revealing images which bring us near to the Reality that is secret in us and in all.⁶⁶

There is no infallible Geiger counter to detect perfect perfection that is also supreme utterance. Recognition could come as in a blinding lightning flash; or it could steal over and fill the consciousness like rare unforgettable perfume; or course through the bloodstreams causing a sudden splendid exhilaration and ecstasy. All over Savitri are scattered lines that seem to be charged with this drive of power and grace of Grace:

A fathomless zero occupied the world...

Dawn built her aura of magnificent hues

And buried its seed of grandeur in the hours...

A body like a parable of dawn

That seemed a niche for veiled divinity...

He found the occult cave, the mystic door

Near to the well of vision in the soul,

And entered where the Wings of Glory brood...

A nebula of the splendours of the gods

Made from the musings of eternity.⁶⁷

Sometimes a cosmic simile or the evocation of a deathless moment of the mythic past, which is also the living eternal present, — many lines in sequence or a whole passage, — may cumulatively carry the sovereign Overmind ambience. Thus of Aswapati:

As shines a solitary witness star

That bums apart, Light's lonely sentinel,

In the drift and teeming of a mindless Night,

A single thinker in an aimless world

Awaiting some tremendous dawn of God,

He saw the purpose in the works of Time.⁶⁸

Thus of Savitri, as seen by Narad:

...Who is this that comes, the bride,

The flame-bom, and round her illumined head

Pouring their lights her hymeneal pomps

⁶⁶ Ibid., pp. 814-16. ⁶⁷ Ibid., pp. 1,4, 15, 74, 119. ⁶⁸ Ibid., p. 137.

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Move flashing about her? From what green glimmer of glades

Retreating into dewy silences

Or half-seen verge of waters moon-betrayed

Bringst thou this glory of enchanted eyes?⁶⁹

And thus of the tremendous event of Christ's incarnation and crucifixion:

The Son of God bom as the Son of man

Has drunk the bitter cup, owned Godhead's debt...

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.⁷⁰

In this cosmic epic that aims at projecting "a total and many-sided vision and experience of all the planes of being and their action upon each other." Sri Aurobindo has used language with freedom, not admitting "any mental rule of what is or is not poetic." Fidelity to the vision and experience has been the only governing consideration. There are clarities of vision and varieties of experience — covering the whole arc from the Inconscient to the Superconscient — not all of which are within the average reader's range of comprehension. Where our vision or experience coincides with the poet's, recognition is immediate, as with the description of our own sordid and sullied world of follies, falsities, fatuities and futilities — an evil house of many mansions:

It was a no man's land of evil air,

A crowded neighbourhood without one home,

A borderland between the world and hell....

The Fiend was visible, but cloaked in light;

He seemed a helping angel from the skies:

He armed untruth with Scripture and the Law;

He deceived with wisdom, with virtue slew the soul

And led to perdition by the heavenward path.⁷¹

This might be the description of a Ministry of Truth in Big Brother's

⁶⁹Ibid., p. 418. ⁷⁰ Ibid., p. 445. ⁷¹ Ibid., p. 206-07.

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Government Somewhere (that's almost Everywhere). Again, these images of the modem city, poised on perilous uncertainty and anxiety, and enacting unending lechery, greed and hate:

A capital was there without a State:

It had no ruler, only groups that strove.

He saw a city of ancient Ignorance

Founded upon a soil that knew not Light.

There each in his own darkness walked alone...⁷²

Around him crowded grey and squalid huts

Neighbouring proud palaces of perverted Power,

Inhuman quarters and demoniac wards...

A glut of hideous forms and hideous forms and hideous deeds

Paralysed pity in the hardened breast.

In booths of sin and night-repairs of vice

Styled infamies of the body's concupiscence

And sordid imaginations etched in flesh,

Turned lust into a decorative art...⁷³

A barriered autarchy excluded light...

Flaunting its cross of servitude like a crown,

It clung to its dismal harsh autonomy.

A bull-throat bellowed with its brazen tongue...

A deafened acquiescence gave its vote,

And braggart dogmas shouted in the night

Kept for the fallen soul once deemed a god

The pride of its abysmal absolute.⁷⁴

On the other hand, there are also harmonies and intensities and fulfilments not less real than the discords and frivolities and falsities; yet these are not within our everyday range of experience. And when Sri Aurobindo — because he has visioned them and experienced them as clearly and as vividly as we experience the sights and movements on our earthly inferno — when Sri Aurobindo describes these higher and purer altitudes, we are merely dazed, as in a dream or by a fantasy. It is not something, we feel, that touches us on the raw. Words, words, words, we say; mysticism, perhaps, but not something to hold on to — like a bedpost! Accustomed to the dark, light itself becomes an intruding impertinence. Attuned to falsehood's syllogisms, Truth's axioms

⁷² Ibid., p. 208. ⁷³ Ibid., pp. 211-12. ⁷⁴ Ibid., p. 216.

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sound like unrealities. At best there is but a willing suspension of disbelief:

All there was soul or made of sheer soul-stuff:

A sky of soul covered a deep soul-ground.

All here was known by a spiritual sense-

Body was not there, for bodies were needed not,

The soul itself was its own deathless form

And met at once the touch of other souls

Close, blissful, concrete, wonderfully true...

He met and communed without bar of speech

With beings unveiled by a material frame.

There was a strange spiritual scenery,

A loveliness of lakes and streams and hills,

A flow, a fixity in a soul-space,

And plains and valleys, stretches of soul-joy,

And gardens that were flower-tracts of the spirit,

Its meditations of tinged reverie.⁷⁵

Aswapati (or Sri Aurobindo) has seen something, it is as living a thing to him as is the table on which I write, it becomes as much a part of his treasured experience as a city we have lived in, a memorable face that we had once seen in a crowd, or a deathless moment — whether of joy or pain — in our otherwise humdrum lives. All the same, Sri Aurobindo's words may leave us cold because we haven't seen what he has seen, we haven't the beatific certitudes that had come to him as the crown of his Yoga. If we had a feeling for words but no sympathy — or aptitude — for arduous climbs of Yoga, we might find in the descriptions some power of observation, some word-embroidery, some colouring of the imagination, but no more. But unless the reader at least concedes the reality of spiritual values unless the reader has felt a psychic opening to the intuitions of the spirit — large areas of Savitri must remain opaque or without positive relevance to him; and the poem as a whole, too, will fail to make the intended total effect. Certainly, any reader almost can get something — something of profound significance — out of Savitri or some sections of the poem. But for it to yield all its secrets and to effect the cathartic alchemic change in our consciousness, Savitri should be approached, not alone as great poetry, but equally as a means of Yoga discipline—

⁷⁵ Ibid., pp. 291-92.

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as a body of Mantra to be read and pondered and translated into realisation.

-6-

In a long spiritual epic like Savitri, in which the subjective element is more dominant than the merely narrative, in which psychological states and occult realities take far more space than descriptions of physical actualities, it is inevitable that the poet should put more of himself into the poem than in the traditional heroic epic. Commenting on the animadversions of a critic, Sri Aurobindo wrote in 1947:

...the poet writes for his own satisfaction, his own delight in poetical creation or to express himself and he leaves his work for the world, and rather for posterity than for the contemporary world, to recognise or to ignore, to judge and value according to its perception or its pleasure.⁷⁶

But a great poet, although he may write for his own satisfaction, writes also for the future. He is not just recording something that is past and done with, but is presenting the permanent essence of his experience, and this only gains in significance with the passage of time. The completion of a poem or its first publication marks no more than the beginning of its unpredictable life. Dante' sDivina Commedia, Shakespeare's King Lear, Milton's Paradise Lost, Goethe's Faust, not to mention works like the Gita: have we yet come to the end of our 'understanding' of these constituents of the human heritage? This applies even more, perhaps, to a cosmic epic like Savitri, which Sri Aurobindo himself once described as "an experiment in mystic poetry, spiritual poetry cast into a symbolic figure."⁷⁷

Attentive readers of Savitri who were reasonably familiar with the principal landmarks of Sri Aurobindo's life could no doubt see that the poem was in some measure — perhaps in substantial measure — his own spiritual autobiography. In an epic pronouncedly psychological, the poet must necessarily draw upon the reserves of his inner life. Aswapati's Yoga takes up 22 Cantos or about 370 pages (out of a total of 714). There is the Yoga of the

⁷⁶ Ibid., p. 785. ⁷⁷ ibid., p. 750.

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King (itself divided into three stages), there is the exhaustive exploration of the occult world-stair, there is the adoration of the Divine Mother, and there is the boon of her promised incarnation in a human form. According to the Mahabharata story, the childless king, Aswapati, did tapsaya for eighteen years till the Goddess Savitri appeared and promised a daughter to him. It is on this that Sri Aurobindo has built the whole many-chambered edifice of Aswapati's Yoga, very largely drawing upon his own experiences and realisations at Baroda, Alipur, Chandemagore and Pondicherry. The scientist with a microscope in a laboratory, the astronomer with a telescope in an observatory, these specially equipped men are able to see the infinitely small or the infinitely distant: the particles, the constellations, the speeds, the orbits are photographed or calculated, and these photographs and calculations are ready for our scrutiny. Don't we believe them? The secrets of the occult world are likewise revealed to us by Sri Aurobindo, for with his special gift of double vision or universal sight he had seen them and been them, and he has brought us news from the Invisible — from zero and from infinity! The identification of Aswapati's Yoga with Sri Aurobindo's should not, however, mean equating Aswapati's with Sri Aurobindo's life at all points or in every particular.

There is, then, Savitri and her Yoga. In the Mahabharata, when the first year of wedded life is about to draw to a close, Savitri undertakes a three nights' vow (trirātra), fasting, praying and keeping vigil throughout. This is transformed in Sri Aurobindo's poem into Savitri's Yoga — her journey into the "inner countries", her search for her soul, and her coalescement of herself with the Infinite. To readers of these Cantos, it seemed a plausible identification to see Savitri's Yoga as the Mother's own. Again, it would be wrong to make the Savitri-Mirra parallel go all the way. It is also necessary to remember that, although Aswapati's is superficially an exteriorised Yoga and Savitri's an interiorised Yoga, the spiritual realities affirmed or experienced by them are the same. The individual, universal and transcendent realisations are common features, but there is no repetition; there is seeming variation and there is also oneness behind the play of variation. Quintessentially, it is the same consciousness, although it may seem to divide itself into two: the two complementary halves of the once cosmic or supramental consciousness. Aswapati is the Forerunner, Savitri is the Avatar; and they are both necessary for

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the manifestation, and the dual act of redemption and new creation.

With repeated re-readings of Savitri and a greater intimacy with Sri Aurobindo and the Mother's writings, these early surmises seem to gain only further corroboration. The Mother and Huta began a truly unique tapasya of collaboration: rendering Savitri in painting. As the Mother later wrote:

Savitri, this prophetic vision of the world's history, including the announcement of the earth's future. — Who can ever dare to put it in pictures?

Yet, the Mother and Huta have tried it, this way.

We simply mediate together on the lines chosen, and when the image becomes clear, I describe it with the help of a few strokes, then Huta goes to her studio and brushes the painting.

It is in a meditative mood that these 'meditations' must be looked at to find the feeling they contain behind their appearance.⁷⁸

A selection of twenty-three of these paintings, illustrating Canto I, appeared as a superb publication, Meditations on Savitri, on 15 August 1962; the second volume with thirty-five paintings on Cantos 2 and 3, came out in 1963; the third volume with forty-nine paintings, in 1965; and the fourth with twenty on Canto 5, in 1966 — in all 127 plates illustrating Book One. On 10 February 1967, an Exhibition of 460 paintings was held in Sri Aurobindo Ashram at Pondicherry, with the Mother's brief announcement: Here is Savitri. And Huta's succinct comment was in the poet's own words: "All can be done if the God-touch is there."

... it is the "God-touch" alone that determines everything: the coming of avatar alter avatar, the emergence of newer and newer cones of light, the growth of wider and wider wings of consciousness. The story of the Earth, the stir of awakening life, the repeated coming and rejection of the Ray, the surge and sweep of the evolutionary adventure, the culminating definitive divine-action of Savitri — all somehow mix and mingle and merge marvellously in the impressionistic Revelation of The Symbol Dawn.

"It is a symbolic work," says the Mother, "not the telling of a story of something that happened; it is the illustration in a condensed and imaged form of this effort of the Divine to divinise

⁷⁸ Huta, Meditations on Savitri.

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the material creation." And she adds, underlining the deeper implications of the Legend and the Symbol:

It is this terrible story of the creation of earth and man as the means to save the world from suffering and destruction.

The death of Satyavan becomes the symbol of the misery of the earth's creation, of its fate and, through Savitri, of its liberation. She faces the doom in order to give the solution.

The creation is plunged in misery, suffering and death. But it can and will be saved through Her intervention.

An ambrosial assurance, this "will be saved"! Poetry, meditation, exegesis: these are movements of the same Consciousness, efflorescence of the same Revelation. The Divine Zenith, the Inconscient Nadir, the whole realm between: the way down, the way up, the whole stairway: the linking up of the extremities, the One Consciousness dividing only to unite again: the Mystery and Miracle of Creation, the Fall, the Ascension — all, all are suggested, all are invoked, all are shown in action in this unique and wonderful poem.

-7-

About the 'matter' of Savitri, and of its author's mantric mode of communication the Mother to Mona Sarkar:

He has crammed the whole universe into a single book. It is a marvellous work, magnificent, and of an incomparable perfection...

My child, yes, everything is there, mysticism, occultism, philosophy, the history of evolution, the history of man, of the gods, of creation, of nature — why, for what purpose, what destiny? All is there...

Each verse of Savitri is like a revealed Mantra... the rhythm leads you to the origin of sound which is om... It gives out vibrations for him who can receive them, the true vibrations of each stage of consciousness.

About Savitri as Sri Aurobindo's (and her own) spiritual autobiography, the Mother was equally explicit:

These are experiences lived by him, — realities, cosmic truths. He experienced all this, as one experiences joys or sorrows physically. He walked in the darkness of inconscience,

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even in the neighbourhood of death, endured the sufferings of perdition and emerged from the mud, the earth's misery, to breathe the sovereign plenitude and enter the supreme Ananda....

He accepted suffering to transform suffering with the joy of union with the Supreme...

All this is his own experience, and what is most surprising is that it is my own experience also... It is the picture of our joint adventure into the Unknown, or rather into the Supermind... .

And, finally, about the way Savitri should be read, and about what one might hope for through the Sadhana of such reading:

Savitri is the whole Yoga of transformation, and this Yoga now comes for the first time in the earth consciousness...

Whoever is willing to practise Yoga, tries sincerely, and finds the necessity for it, will be able to climb with the help of Savitri to the highest step of the ladder of Yoga, will be able to find the secret that Savitri represents...

But you must not read it as you read other books, or newspapers. You must read with an empty head, a blank and vacant mind, without there being any other thought, you must concentrate much, remain empty, calm and open: then the words, rhythms, vibrations will penetrate directly...

The direct method is by the heart... if you try to concentrate really with this aspiration, you can light a flame, the psychic flame, the flame of purification.

The great German poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, once said that the meaning and purpose of his Malte Laurids Brigge amounted to this:

this, how is it possible to live, when the very elements of this life are unintelligible to us? When we're everlastingly inadequate in love, uncertain in resolve, and incapable in the presence of death, how is it possible to exist?

But Rilke himself had no final answer to give in terms of poetic art.

The completely satisfying answer is Savitri, which makes intelligible man's life in the cosmos, shows Love as Power wedded to Grace, demonstrates the possibility of the death of

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Death, and projects man's future in a changed and transformed Earth.

Might we not, then, salute the author of Savitri — as the poets salute Virgil in Dante's poem — Onorate I' altissimo poeta: Honour the Poet of Highest Eminence, honour the Ultimate Poet!⁷⁹

K.R. SRINIVASA IYENGAR

⁷⁹ Cf. the American poet D.R. Cameron's tribute to Savitri:

...the mantra's bard

Silvers a way over almighty abysms

To epic a world behind the soul's paroxysms.

The words are stars shooting across a mind

More vast than galaxies of the blind

Who may touch one day after time's long famine

The rare and occult flesh of Savitri and Satyavan.

(Mother India, August 1966, p. 76.)

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Savitri and Paradise Lost-A Comparative Study in Method and Style

Milton marks an august and robust departure from the past in poeticcai form, expression and diction. He marks a new era in poetical style, method, the use of the language with a new synthetical approach. All this is due to his genius, his masterful personality and his extraordinary control over the languages both English and continental. Whatever did not agree with his views, his method, he rejected. Whatever advanced his concepts, ran along his egoistic lines, expressed his vital personality that he accepted freely. Thus his style is closely linked with his character, his way of looking at things and his singular approach to problems. The reason why he did not copy the past poetical examples is twofold. First, his individualism stood against any servile following of the past, which would have meant the obliteration of his original style; and, secondly, his incapacity to bend, submit and learn as a pupil where he thought he was a master. In both cases his intellectual growth and stout egoism came in the way.

But the style he produced was not faulty. It reflects his intellectual maturity. It also shows a great preparation, for he could not, in a matter of a few months, create this epoch-making style. And he did not venture to write until his style stood apart as a striking factor.

Sri Aurobindo's method and style reflect the inner perfection. But his was not so much a studied attempt at perfection as a spontaneous outflowering of his genius, and this in its wake created the needed style. Savitri is separated from his Love and Death and Baji Prabhou by an enormous gulf. While the earlier work shows a poet who has already found his footing in English and is not influenced by the late Victorian age of poetry, the latter shows a poetical genius turning into a seer, whose utterances were symbolic and prophetic. The style in consequence changes and makes room for the inwardly growing prophet. Milton had, by his intellectual vigour, to get rid of the contemporary influence. But in Sri Aurobindo this evasion is easy and spontaneous, because the Victorian tradition was too ornate, shallow and being studied to become the vehicle of his expression, too artificial to house his

genius, and unnaturalness ran against his very being. Yet the maturity of both Milton and Sri Aurobindo derived from a classical training, which gives the necessary self-control, restraint and mastery. But in Milton the ego reveals itself most clearly, while in Sri Aurobindo there is an aloofness and largeness from the very outset which allows the style to remain unmutilated.

Style in poetry is the expression, the manifestation of the thing within. It is the vehicle of the inner inspiration, vision, thought, mood. It could easily be compared to style in painting. If we could conceive Milton to be analogous to an Ingres or a Delacroix, Sri Aurobindo would be seen as similar to a Chinese master: one is bold, grand, having large ideas, heroic concepts, with a method full of vigour; while the other is subtle, mystic, wonderfully soft, having hidden depths of music. One needs the punctilious artistry of a craftsman to achieve an effect which the other attains by a single significant stroke. There is, in Milton, colour, light and shade, the poignancy of sudden and surprising effects, but the whole process is a studied one. In Sri Aurobindo the colour, light or shade comes as a natural phenomenon.

Austerity is the first characteristic of Milton. He exercises masterly self-restraint where he could easily have been flamboyantly effusive in details.

Heaven opened wide

Her ever-during gates, harmonious sounds

On golden hinges moving, to let forth

The king of Glory, in his powerful Word.

And Spirit coming to create new worlds.

Whatever detail is here is inevitable. A lesser poet would have used a more voluminous expression. But Milton is content with "King of Glory" without any amplifying adjectives. With just a few and suggestive words he describes here the process of creation.

Or describing hell, he writes:

Hell, their fit habitation, fraught with fire,

Unquenchable, the house of woe and pain.

Here too we get a vivid, but compact description. It at once evokes the image of the pang, the loneliness, the ceaseless thirst, the vastness of Hell with its unending despair. Listen to this majestic roll:

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One spirit in them ruled, and every eye

Glared lightning, and shot forth pernicious fire

Among the accursed, that withered all their strength,

And of their wonted vigour left them drained,

Exhausted, spiritless, afflicted, fallen.

Here Milton reveals the wrath of God. The energetic yet controlled expression speaks more than a volume of emotional verbiage. Each word has a place and a significance; each image is unomate; each adjective is inevitable. It is due to this packed austerity that he achieves a great eminence in tone and poetical structure. Also it limits repetitions to the minimum and adds to the grandeur and dignity and does not allow the fullness of poetical intensity to be vitiated by futile effervescence. This is one of the reasons for which Milton stands among the supreme in spite of his semi-failure as a whole.

The second characteristic is his nobility. He never becomes vulgar, nor does he allow himself to be drawn to a lesser pitch. Even when the inspirational surge has become weakened, he does not cease to be chaste. He had ample occasion to be of low taste or sensuous or even vulgar in the description of the primal couple, in the account of the outbreak of lust in Adam, in the picture of the Hellish hosts. But nowhere does he weaken the verse by striking a baser chord or suggesting some low sentiment. Here is the description of Adam and Eve: they,

God-like erect, with natural honour clad,

In naked majesty, seem lords of all.

For contemplation he and valour formed,

For softness she and sweet attractive grace.

Nor does Milton become vulgar to describe things of which he has no direct knowledge, like God or the angels. He gives a general description, but never rises to speak in detail. By this he exercises both rectitude and chastity. Take

From the pure Empyrean where he sits

High throned above all heights.

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This shows his fidelity to the Christian faith where God is never described except as a distant unapproachable presence. Milton does not transgress this tradition. We can compare this with Kalidasa's description of Shiva in Kumārasatnbhavam, where he makes of this godhead almost an earthly being. Also it stands against the Homeric tradition of anthropomorphism. Or read

Meanwhile at table Eve

Ministered naked and their flowing cups

With pleasant liquours crowned.

Things of sense Milton speaks of with aloofness, but he does not disdain them as futile:

Of elements:

The grosser feeds the purer: Earth the sea;

Earth and the sea feed air; the air those fires

Ethereal, and, as lowest, first the moon.

A few lines later he speaks of the healthy appetite of the Angel and this account, or the description Eve's nudity, or the dissertation on food does not become vulgar or sound a contrary note and is in keeping with the total Miltonic concept of perfection. On the contrary, to the whole he gives a philosophical turn, and sees all with a nobility of vision, that excludes vulgarity. We shall examine one example:

flowers were the couch,

Pansies and violets and asphodel

And hyacinth, — Earth's freshest softest lap.

There they their fill of love and love's disport

Took largely, of their mutual guilt the seal,

The solace of their sin, till dewy sleep

Oppressed them, wearied with their amorous play.

Adam and Eve, after their fall, lapse into animal ways. But Milton is chaste in his description: he does not amplify, but with reserve and aloofness depicts the scene. Of animal enjoyment he makes a poetical use. He does not vitiate the animality by going down to its vulgar abyss, rather uplifts it by his poetical reticence and nobleness to a domain of pure poetry. Thus he converts the base metal of low sexuality to the pure gold of poetical beauty, but he is

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aware of the baseness. He does this consciously; also not to lower his poetry he makes this phase a phase of first fall — not a violent break from the original note of harmony, but a slow and gradual decline starting with the love-play.

The third characteristic that he gives us is that of boldness. He never stoops to effeminate lyricism, romanticism or vagueness. His tender moments have their strength. His finenesses have their vitality. His lyrical moods are replete with energy. Power is the mainstay of his existence. And each line of his epic reflects this singular aspect. But boldness devoid of austerity or nobility would be stark and ugly, it could jar on the ear of the finer sentiments. This does not happen with Milton.

His boldness does not deafen one's ear, the deeper musical hearing, nor does it clash and sweep away all before its vigorous impetuosity. Rather his strength is like a God "indifferent in might". He does not impose it, but it, but it comes as a natural expression of his character. He needs no external effort to make it apparent. It is there with all he writes, as the very breath, the very soul of his existence.

His boldness never slackens. He never gives way to sentimental emotions betraying weakness of character. He considers Reason to be the highest status: this he amply reveals in his poetry. In fact, because he has this singular characteristic, he is in a position to look down on emotionalism and make Reason the supreme Godhead. Standing behind this is his will, the strength that builds and creates, that forms and stands out as the sole reality amid the chaos of a pell-mell human existence.

Books I and II are packed with power. Listen:

All is not lost — the unconquerable will,

And study of revenge, immortal hate,

And courage never to submit or yield:

And what is else not to be overcome?

That glory never shall his wrath or might

Extort from me.

There is expressed here an indomitable courage, like Milton's own, and it reflects the dire opposition he had to face in his own life. Or read:

For the mind and spirit remains

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Invincible, and vigour soon returns,

Though all our glory extinct, and happy state

Here swallowed up in endless misery.

There we have the heart of his being speak out against the tyranny of fate, the wrong of all the gods. Again hear this description:

...but his face

Deep scars of thunder had entrenched, and care

Sat on his faded cheek, but under brows

Of dauntless courage and considerate pride

Waiting revenge.

The note of strength is unmistakable. Behind, as an undertone, we hear the notes of an unfallen passion. This heightens Milton's character of strength and greaten his side of unfallen reason. Splendid too are these lines:

Sad cure! for who would lose,

Though full of pain, this intellectual being,

Those thoughts that wander through Eternity,

To perish rather, swallowed up and lost

In the wide womb of uncreated Night.

Here boldness stands up, revolts and permits no influence to curb it. It defies all; its power is a living presence, an organic reality. It has deeper roots than a common rational mind. It is vibrant, intense; it strikes and awakes. There is grandeur, a sweep, a rich uncurbed energy.

But his boldness never overshoots its mark or becomes ugly or discordant. Study the Satanic council in Book II and you will find no ugliness in this power, no distorting clumsiness that mars by its impudent and disharmonic puissance the texture and drama of the epic. Rather there is a control in all his passionate utterances. There is nobility in all his power. Further, Milton is conscious of his strength and uses it with skill and subtlety. Instead of becoming a boorish manipulation in an arrogant and self-conceited poet, it becomes an instrument of great variety. In this sphere he does not allow his ego or his dominant mentality to rule him. He is conscious that a note of single unchanging boldness results in monotony. He therefore introduces lesser vibrant notes, with a louder diapason, with a soft monolinear melody — as here:

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Long is the way

And hard, that out of Hell leads up to light.

Such effects are possible only when the poet has an ear for music and is conscious of the musical tonal values. In fact Milton's music is almost unsurpassed in English and this imbues even his dull and awkward lines with a grace which makes them felicitous reading. This leads us to forget his defects in theme and ideology, his views, beliefs and theological dogmas. But this music is bold, a heroic chant; it has the grace of a well-built muscular man. It is vital, strong, aware of the strength yet not displaying all its power and using it at rare moments to give a special tonal effect, a special value in rhythm and cadence. There are large paragraphs overflowing with energy while there are short well-defined rhythmic lines. Grace, strength, energy and word-pattern are the mainstay of his music. Here is energy:

I fled, and cried out 'Death'.

Hell trembled at the hideous name and sighed

From all her caves, and back resounded 'Death'.

Note the repetition of 'Death' coming like a recurrent theme of musical phrase to balance and harmonise another phrase. The alternate use of liquid and hard consonants, the alternate and skilful use of long and short vowels turn the music to dramatic effect of a strange and sweeping energy. Here is grace:

And o'er the Celtic roamed the utmost isles,

Scout far and wide into the realm of Night;

again

Covers his throne, from where deep thunder roars;

also

And found no end, in wandering mazes lost.

The first line's beauty of music lies in its superb varied vowellation plus contrasted consonants — all producing together a magical grace and softness. The second example is unusual, beginning with a hard consonant followed by a long vowel and ending with a

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clipping consonant. The beginning and ending consonants balance each other with internal vowels following up like a recurring beat in a musical composition. The whole pattern is not so much graceful as bold. In the third there is break after 'throne', like a pause in a musical composition within a pattern where a new tonal movement starts ending with the two hammer-beats of 'thunder' and 'roars'. Here we have the notes of power, but of a latent and not an exuberant puissance. The last example's beauty lies in its recurring n's and d's with a sonant balanced by a short and well-defined word 'lost'. If we examine these examples closely, we shall discover a unity of pattern of word-movement, tonal harmony and the total effect caused by these. There is a conscious artistry, a living idea of musical design displayed in verse. This design and music become apparent when we read him aloud; Milton's beauty and rhythm and word-magic are then alone fully revealed.

Sri Aurobindo is no less a stylist than Milton. As there is character and personality in Milton's verse, there is a definite style in Sri Aurobindo's which is a departure from all contemporary poetry. This is all the more true because of the peculiar approach he makes. In Milton the verse becomes an expression of his dominant mind; in Sri Aurobindo it is the expression of his soul, the deepest and highest achieved by man's inner being. Milton manipulates consciously the word-patterns, the paragraph-settings, the tonal inflexions. But Sri Aurobindo allows a higher power, which has become a resident of his being, to dominate and do the work of creation. His mind stands aside. His life-parts enjoy the thrill of creativity. Thus he approaches poetry not so much for self-expression as for God-expression. The style and method are formed by this constructive superior power. He uses poetry as a vehicle for the highest Truth; he approaches it, as one approaches the presence of a deity, all still and calm to receive the inspirational outpour. He has no need to invoke the daimon of inspiration as Milton does. His silent opening works miracles.

If we study Savitri we can trace five characteristic elements, which are: height, serenity, wideness, grandeur, and delight. A greater scrutiny can elucidate others. But these are almost general. We shall examine each in turn.

Height is one of the chief characteristics of Sri Aurobindo's poetry. Listen:

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To marry all in God's immense delight,

Bearing the eternity of every spirit,

Bearing the burden of universal love,

A wonderful mother of unnumbered souls.¹

There is a sweep, a fulfilling vision, a height of spiritual experience. There is a spontaneous winging beyond the normal mode of existence. Or:

A great Illusion then has built the stars.²

Man in the world's life works out the dreams of God.³

In both these examples there seems a breaking of bonds, there is a release and an escape, a large and living height is here. Again:

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

We feel in these lines a vibrant and intense altitude, a movement of supernatural wings, as it were.

Let us take a few more examples:

Midst those encircling lives her spirit dwelt,

Apart in herself until her hour of fate.⁵

Thy spirit's strength shall make thee one with God,

Thy agony shall change to ecstasy,

Indifference deepen into infinity's calm

And joy laugh nude on the peaks of the Absolute.⁶

Both these reveal some prophecy, some flight that throws open the doors of unforeseen heights by their word-rhythm, word-suggestion and symbols. Sri Aurobindo strikes keys that are seldom heard in English, those of rare and poignant visitations of the Muse. These lines convey a sense of height; we feel as if we were listening to enchanted echoes from the empyrean.

¹ Savitri, p. 695. ² Ibid., p. 442. ³ Ibid., p. 479, ⁴ Ibid., p. 21. ⁵ Ibid., p. 368. ⁶ Ibid., p. 454.

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In Milton this prophetic element is absent. He has a breadth and a sweep. He rises by the strength of his austere force, but that cannot match the height to which Sri Aurobindo rises most spontaneously. This is because he cannot usher in that intensity, that freedom, that revelatory wonder with which we meet at every step in Sri Aurobindo. Milton's approach and method are too mental to allow such an act.

As there is sweep and breadth in Milton, there is a breadth and roll in Sri Aurobindo as well. For example:

A vision came of higher realms than ours,

A consciousness of brighter fields and skies,

Of beings less circumscribed than brief-lived men

And subtler bodies than these passing frames,

Objects too fine for our material grasp,

Acts vibrant with a superhuman light

And movements pushed by a superconscient force,

And joys that never flowed through mortal limbs,

And lovelier scenes than earth's and happier lives.⁷

Here the sweep and breadth are magnificent. Sri Aurobindo pours out scenes of beauty, light, force and joy with ease, heaping joy on joy, revelation over revelation, bringing a greater and greater influx of magic word-images that are like bright and cadenced enchantments. And before we have time to feel and absorb the beauty and the intensity, out comes another image and yet another in quick and revealing succession, till one feels intoxicated with the flow and breadth, the span and the sweep that carry us along, surprised and panting with the unceasing glory. And we have a sense that all this would never stop. In contrast here are a few lines from Milton:

Meanwhile, upon the firm opacous globe

Of this round world, whose first convex divides

The luminous inferior Orbs, enclosed

From Chaos and the inroads of Darkness old,

Satan alighted walks.

There is a flow; but the whole rendering is mental, and we miss the winging cadence that gives us the idea of breadth. There are longer passages, especially those of similes where there is a great sweep; but that sweep is tied to material objects and to sense, hence

¹ Ibid., p. 28.

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they lack the overwhelming rhapsody of movement we meet with in Sri Aurobindo. In the latter the breadth is subjective, of the consciousness that thrills to inner touches, feels the impact of aerial substances and lives and moves in the spirit's pure air. That is why there is so much felicity, richness and intensity in his span. Let us hear him again:

He has learnt the Inconscient's workings and its law,

Its incoherent thoughts and rigid acts,

Its hazard wastes of impulse and idea,

The chaos of its mechanic frequencies,

Its random calls, its whispers falsely true,

Misleaders of the hooded listening soul.⁸

This is the regard of the awakened man on the turbulent, eerie and mechanic device of the Inconscience. Here too we see the expanse of vision that grasps the totality of the inconscient world in one look. Such span of vision and penetration, such stretch of universal experience are only possible on that level of consciousness where one sees all things in their totality, yet not missing the differentiation, the different constituting factors, the different facets, possibilities, moods and patterns of existence. But Milton sees with the mind's eyes; he marks only the difference but misses the inherent unity which is known only by rising beyond the stature of reason. Whatever breadth he achieves is due to his mind's withdrawing from momentary things, his preoccupation with greater objects than merely those of sense and those closer to the soil than mind's native height. But he fails to go further beyond the impenetrable dome of ethical thinking. Hence we get clipped utterances; we feel that he attempts to rise, but the magnet-pull of the ethico-religious sentiment and thought drags him down.

As Milton is noble, so Sri Aurobindo is serene. This harmonious serenity seems to be omnipresent in Savitri. Whether he rises to great power or intensity or sweetness or breadth or grandeur, the serenity is never lost. It runs through the epic like a magic harmonious stream flowing across the peaks of power, the spans of magnificence, rising into waves of beauty, deepening into seas of felicity. Felicity seems to be the connecting link, the very condition under which he writes. Here for example:

⁸ Ibid., pp. 449-50.

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He builds on her largesses his proud fortunate days

And trails his peacock-plumaged joy of life

And suns in the glory of her passing smile.⁹

Repose in a framework of established fate,¹⁰

and again:

Return sheer joy to joy, pure light to light.¹¹

We notice the note of serenity pervading these lines. There is an inevitable ease, a natural sense of harmony, a consciousness that is steeped in the sun of spirit. Nothing seems to disturb its unmoving poise, its smile and its gladness. This joy is joy of existence, the joy of creativity and the joy of self-manifestation. Sri Aurobindo has it even while describing the Void:

This is my silent dark immensity,

This is the home of everlasting Night,

This is the secrecy of Nothingness

Entombing the vanity of life's desires,¹²

or while expressing Nirvana

Empty of thought, incapable of bliss,

That felt life blank and nowhere found a soul...

That made unreal the world and all life meant, ¹³

or while picturing the sense of darkness

Vast minds and lives without a spirit within:

Impatient architects of error's house,

Leaders of the cosmic ignorance and unrest

And sponsors of sorrow and mortality

Embodied the dark Ideas of the Abyss.¹⁴

All these lines show that Sri Aurobindo never leaves his native altitude of serenity. Calmness seems to be the very basis of his poetical creation. All are panoramas before him, all are aspects of the same unchanging Reality. He is not ruffled by error or sin, nor overjoyed with rapture, nor heart-stricken with fate. Yet he does

⁹ Ibid., p. 63. ¹⁰ Ibid., p. 103. ¹¹ Ibid., p. 128. ¹² Ibid., p. 586.

¹³ Ibid., p. 534. ¹⁴ Ibid., p. 220.

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not forget to be one with his subject. He feels calmly the inner substance of all he describes or portrays. His serenity is not a withdrawal, that is, indifferent to the impact of the different facets of reality presented to him. Rather, he calmly enjoys all that comes before him and his soul relishes the variations, the contraries, the struggle, the harmony, the moods, the surprises, the invasions of light and felicity, the descent or ascent as conditions, facets, masks of the one unique consciousness. His serenity comes from his total detachment from things or their modes. He has seen the single unalterable Reality. It is on that background of his experience that he sees and feels things and that too is the background of his expression. This in turn modulates his style. Perhaps this aspect cannot be readily grasped on a cursory vision. If one went deep enough and penetrated sufficiently, the serenity and poise would become apparent.

The fourth characteristic of Savitri is grandeur. Grandeur in power, grandeur in height, grandeur in joy and beatitude, grandeur in intensity. These are some of the aspects. Grandeur as we see it in Sri Aurobindo is the intensification, heightening, raising up of his native mood to its utmost fullness when it acquires a majesty of its own. It no longer remains an isolated facet of expression but becomes an almost cosmic entity reaching its loftiest status. Such intense passages in Milton are rare in this peculiar sense in which we are using the term. But in Sri Aurobindo there are numerous lines, passages, sometimes whole pages which are electrified with grandeur and nobility. For example:

A long lone line of hesitating hue

Like a vague smile tempting a desert heart

Troubled the far rim of life's obscure sleep.¹⁵

Here we hear the strains of grandeur in solemnity. The whole passage breathes of a measureless solemn vastness that seems to roll itself to eternity. Or

A Voice calls from the chambers of the soul;

We meet the ecstasy of the Godhead's touch

In golden privacies of immortal fire.¹⁶

An occult grandeur is here. We seem to hear something that is intangible and ineffable. Not heights but depths seem to unveil

¹⁵ Ibid., p. 2, ¹⁶Ibid. p. 48.

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themselves here. Again

A paean swelled from the lost musing deeps;

An anthem pealed to the triune ecstasies,

A cry of the moments to the Immortals' bliss.¹⁷

A highland world of free and green delight.¹⁸

Again

And the delight when every barrier falls,

And the transfiguration and the ecstasy.¹⁹

In all these lines we hear the intense and occult rhythms of felicity and sweetness. But what about power?

I bow not to thee, O huge mask of Death,

Black lie of night to the cowed soul of man,

Unreal, inescapable end of things,

Thou grim jest played with the immortal spirit.²⁰

Another example:

I am the living body of his light,

I am the thinking instrument of his power.²¹

Yet another:

Eternity looked into the eyes of Death,

And Darkness saw God's living Reality.²²

There is an unmatched greatness of rhythm, of substance, a grandeur of theme and inspiration, a wide outbreak of power in these examples. The words themselves seem to become the vehicles of unforeseen energy and passion; the rhythm and work-pattern seem to bear the load of strange and living waves of splendour. Each syllable resounds with vitality quite opposed to what we have listened to in our earlier examples. Yet this splendour is not outward or physical-vital; this force or beauty or joy or felicity is subjective; they are manifestations of some mystical and hidden sweetness and rapture and power. Nor is this subjectiveness something vague or ethereal or too frail to endure the impact of physicality. Rather

¹⁷ Ibid., pp. 90-91. ¹⁸lbid., p. 389. ^l9 Ibid., pp. 416-17. ²⁰ Ibid., p. 588.

²³ Ibid., p. 634. ²² Ibid, p. 665.

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is seems living, true, self-existent and more enduring than the objective reality to which Milton's poetry ever recalled us.

There is a uniform height throughout Savitri. But sometimes there come at frequent or infrequent intervals superb lines replete with sudden, vibrant grandeur. Sometimes it is one single line: at other times it is a passage or else it is only a few syllables at the close.

Now we come to the fifth and the last of Sri Aurobindo's poetical characteristics: that of delight. What we feel is his delight of self-expression. It has no cause to be or seeks nothing as an exchange. This is one aspect which is almost totally absent in Milton, for his ethical attitude veils all joy to be and he shuns delight because he is there to speak of man's awe of his disobedience and also because joy is something profane and sacriligeous to the pious grimness of his Protestant spirit. Such a sentiment is absent in Sri Aurobindo. He takes delight as the cardinal principle of all existence and specially in a great poetical endeavour this comes as the foremost underlying basis, for creation born of sorrow is the creation of Ignorance. This delight is not extravagant or licentious. Neither is it shallow. These two qualities were the causes of Milton's not accepting delight as the basic creative principle. For he associated delight with sensuous joy, or joy born from a cause or as an effect and not as in Sri Aurobindo something which is causeless and eternally existing for itself. And had there been no music, austerity, nobility and chasteness, Milton's poem would have been the dullest in the English language. The case is the reverse in Sri Aurobindo. Had there been no other element, delight alone would have carried along the sweep of his epic.

Awaiting the Voice that spoke and built the worlds...²³

The voice that chants to the creator Fire...²⁴

And large immune entangled silences

Absorbed her into emerald secrecy

And slow hushed wizard nets of faery bloom.²⁵

Compare these with Milton's

The golden sun, in splendour likest heaven.

²³Ibid., p. 297. ²⁴ Ibid., p. 310. ²⁵ Ibid., p. 380.

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Now gentle gales

Fanning their odoriferous wings, dispense

Nature perfumes and whisper whence they stole

Those balmy spoils.

If we read the examples of the two poets, one thing becomes apparent. While the one flows on lucidly, on the stream of delight, the other moves amid physical realities devoid of the roll in the first. There is no joy or delight to lend its wings. Milton is afraid lest he should cross into the fairyland of delight and imperil his poetical doctrine. Whereas Sri Aurobindo has so made his lines and words infused with delight that, instead of feeling the outer inflexions and linguistic modulations caused by seemingly ignorant speech, we feel the cadence of Elysium, the wave-roll of the river of paradise. This transformation is caused by the presence of delight which is the true poetical creator.

He foundered drowned in sweet and burning vasts:

The dire delight that could shatter mortal flesh,

The rapture that the gods sustain he bore.²⁶

On the single spirit's bare and infinite ground.²⁷

Here each vowel and consonant represent the inevitability of a mood, a phase, a condition. This inevitability gives delight, the delight of poetic creation, the delight to be amid the perfection of tones, the harmony of colour or picturisation, of music and self-existence. This perfection and this harmony can come only when the source is felicity and the end is joy.

So far we have traced the general and basic principles of the style and method of Milton and Sri Aurobindo without going into any elaborate details. But these principles are vital in the understanding of their styles. With them as the background, we shall attempt to discuss some of the main features of style and method of the two poets. The first and foremost is the blank verse form. This is the basis of the structure of these epics.

We know that Milton discarded rhyme deliberately considering

²⁶ Ibid., p. 237. ²⁷ Ibid., p. 297.

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that an impediment to the heroic style. First, it has a tendency to end-stopping and hence to a monotony which is absolutely essential to avoid in a larger poem. Secondly, it has the tendency to make the lines weak and distract too much the attention of the reader to the recurring and identical syllables. Thirdly, it may hamper the freedom of the poet in his use of verse, making him a slave to the habit of sound-echo, which affects the poetical flow, the sweep, the sense and the largeness of strength and generous outbursts of energy, and thus he cannot divert his poetical skill to other metrical subtleties which can enrich the poem. We may say further: rhyme adds to the sweetness and English, a natural language of vigour, can use this for lyrical purposes; but when strength is needed, sweep and grandeur are aimed at, we can dispense with it, provided we substitute this loss by other technical devices like enjambement, verse-paragraph, stress-modulation and inflexion. Chaucer and Spenser, prior to Milton, had retained rhyme, obviously because they had not outgrown the French influence. Also the language had not grown virile enough for the load of blank verse. It is not that Milton was incapable of using rhyme or even a stanza form like Spenser's; his earlier poems are studies in metrical perfection; but he rejected rhyme because he found it unnecessary. Still, he did not follow Shakespeare's dramatic blank verse. Most probably, he had before him the verses of Homer and Virgil — these served as his models. But what is possible in Greek or Latin is impossible in English. The reasons are often repeated, so I refrain from stating them.

Sri Aurobindo's blank verse is different from Milton's by its end-stopped lines. He makes each line complete and perfect and the lines seem to flow and form a natural paragraph without altering this basic principle. Enjambements are few and to keep variety in such a form calls for a greater skill and a greater technical mastery. Why did Sri Aurobindo choose such a form ? Let us try to analyse the situation.

Blank verse prior to Sri Aurobindo had become perfect as far as it could go with the group of poets that came after Milton: Wordsworth, Keats, Arnold, Tennyson, to name only some. Each gave something to it, some lucidity, grandeur, beauty, sweetness or flow. Sri Aurobindo's earlier attempts, like Love and Death, Urvasie and Baji Prabhou, reveal part influence of these poets. But in Savitri there is a total break from the past. Just as Milton cancelled the past licences which had made blank verse a love or

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lyrical or rhetorical structure, Sri Aurobindo too cancels the enjambement, the elaborate construction that needed several lines to complete the sense; he makes each line a flawless jewel needing neither the push of the previous line nor the pull of the succeeding one. Yet many lines are interlinked, many lines have bearing on other lines without changing the basic structure of the end-stopped scheme. This method gives a greater architectural perfection and calls for great technical grasp. It also adds to the beauty of each line, each verse becoming a faultless unit placed between other such faultless units, like a house of perfect harmony whose each stone, corner, cornice, opening, door or window possesses beauty of its own apart from the beauty of perfection of the whole edifice. But he avoids masterfully the obvious limitations connected with such a scheme.

Also, lines by their end-stopped character can give a rare mantric quality due to their inevitability, precision and their tuning themselves to the highest possible intensity. It needs a greater ear for subtler Overhead rhythms and a consummateness of technique that can endure the strain of their high inspiration.

Further, such lines have a double character. They are both lyrical and epical. They are both sweet and heroic. Sri Aurobindo had seen the blank verse form of the past and he had no intention to repeat its ways, methods or styles. This pattern he chose could be used for all types of mystic poetry, for narrative verse, for all kinds of lyrical or epical forms. We can distinguish, not as in Milton's heroic style, or as in the heroic couplet of Pope or as in the lyrical verse of Keats, a style that was used for one purpose alone, but a style that is universal. Used in one context it is epical, in another it is narrative and in yet another it is lyrical. Such is Sri Aurobindo's style that it can absorb all the main types of poetry. Pope's heroic couplet was suitable for mock-heroic poems only. Shakespeare's blank verse could embody dramatic poetry alone. Milton's blank verse could not be used either for romantic or lyrical poetry. But the blank verse of Sri Aurobindo can be used for any of these forms; in fact he does use it differently. Sometimes it is highly mystical as in the first book. It is descriptive as in the second. The third book is again mystical. Book four is narrative while book five is lyrical, book six is dramatic, and so on. Such variety is only possible in a form that is elastic on one hand and highly exacting on the other.

Now we shall study some typical lines. Milton has pauses or

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ends almost anywhere except in the middle which breaks the line into two, and this he avoids, as here:

And now his heart

Distends with pride, and hardening in his strength,

Glories.

The whole sentence keeps true to the pentametric base except for the fourth foot of the second line. The next line begins with a trochee. These variations eliminate monotony and give richness to the poetical pattern. Here he starts with trochees:

Thrice he assayed, and thrice in spite of scorn

Tears, such as angels weep, burst forth.

The end of the second line — the fifth foot — is a spondee. This, like the initial trochees, gives us a dramatic effect.

No ! let us rather choose

Armed with hell-flames and fury all at once

O'er heaven's high tower to force resistless way,

Turning our tortures into horrid arms

Against the Torturer.

Such a sentence form is typical of Milton. He begins with the third foot and ends in the middle of the line. This not only lends a flow, it also aids variety.

Milton gives full value to weaker words and conjunctions and prepositions except for some words which he shortens for metre's sake, such as 'o'er' 'gav'st' 'e'er', etc. This adds to the roll of his blank verse and gives dignity, as here:

Will he, so wise, let loose at once his ire ?

Say they who counsel war, "we are decreed,

Reserved and destined to eternal woe."

Sometimes he breaks up his sentences into two or three parts. Sometimes he runs at a great length; sometimes there are abrupt pauses in the middle of a line. As a rule he does not use a single line complete in itself; this is because his thought needs expansion and it needs several lines to complete one idea. He uses parentheses

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to break up further his paragraphs. These are more a comment on the main idea or event or situation.

The speeches that are there are not dramatic but there is eloquence and rhetoric in their turn. He does not use these in these in the same way as the dramatists of his period. They are part of the whole poem and he does not intend to change the tonal quality or the blank verse pattern:

Whether of open war or overt guile

We now debate, who can advise may speak,

hat can be worse

Than to dwell here driven out from bliss, condemned In this abhorred deep to utter woe?

There are some breaks in the first two books and there are dramatic effects due to loud outburst of passion. But the later speeches are very sedate and they do not read any dramatic pitch:

Some I have chosen of peculiar grace

Elect above the rest.

Even the eulogy or Jehovan is in the same vein.

Thou, Father, first they sung omnipotent,

Immutable Immortal, Infinite,

Eternal King.

Milton rarely uses such high-key words in such quick succession: unless inevitable, he refrains from using them. This is because the four-syllabic words tend to be a burden instead an aid. Also they break up the pentametric base. But he uses more often two-or three-syllabic words and rarely uses single syllables all in a row. The two-or three-syllabic words are subject to greater modulation by their position. The single syllables are almost invariably too light and can create monotony if not used with care, but in a fit place they heighten the poetical quality by their even tread and quick succeeding beats.

Another element: be never stops a phrase with an uneven syllable or in the middle of a foot. Such variation is too violent or dramatic; for each foot has a definite stop — a right we cannot trespass upon to create an unnatural break in the formation of a foot. For example, hear:

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A pillar of state. Deep on his front engraven.

We mark that he stops his phrase with the second foot and begins a new sentence with the third, and an anapaest modulation at the end of one sentence balances a trochee at the beginning of the next and the line maintains a harmony in this manner.

But Milton rarely uses three-syllabic feet and almost never four-syllabic ones. As we have remarked earlier, such feet tend to become heavy if not used with skill and measures like the paeons can be used only for special effects. Further, these paeonic measures are foreign to the Anglo-Saxon tongue where shorter and clipped definite syllables are in use; such measures need slurring, liquid and gliding consonants and vowels as we find in Sanskrit or Latin. Thus it would be hazardous to use the paeons.

This ends our brief survey of Milton's blank verse. We have not attempted anything original but these remarks will be useful when we study the blank verse of Sri Aurobindo as a means of comparing and contrasting various elements.

Sri Aurobindo, like Milton, avoids the dramatic turn although all the manifest themes of it are present in his lines. This he does deliberately in order not to lessen or dilute the high intensity and the pitch to which he keeps his poem tuned. Milton's dialogues reveal his knowledge of parliamentary procedure; but the dialogues of Sri Aurobindo have no such implications. They reveal the struggle of consciousness against consciousness. While the dialogues in Milton are short, those of Sri Aurobindo are long, some of them covering many Cantos.

The blank verse of Sri Aurobindo is not ornate with rhetoric or Miltonic inversions. He avoids these, because they lend an artificial air. He does use inversions at places but more for tonal effect than anything else. This is one cardinal point in which he differs from Milton.

Although he uses end-stopped lines, and the meaning seems to be complete in each line, the whole paragraph runs on for several lines. The whole is one mass or pattern and yet each line has its perfection. Milton's single lines lack this perfection because what he aims at is the expressive paragraph. Although Sri Aurobindo does not break lines and his enjambment is very rare, yet there is no monotony for lack of a Miltonic pattern. Also, he brings at the

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end of his paragraph an intense, rich and high-pitched line like the finale of an orchestral composition to mark the close of a passage. Further, the thought-content in each line is so intense, that it attracts all attention and one forgets the larger form or paragraph pattern. This too aids the removal of monotony, because we find something new in each verse, something which is in one line but not there in another, something which reveals itself more and more, a new mood, a new thought, a new perception, a new feeling: all these give variety and enrich the blank verse.

Milton on the other hand does not have this variety of subjective moods, these phases of feeling, these bursts of revelation. Hence he must use all rhetorical devices, to bring in freshness and spontaneity. While Sri Aurobindo is keyed to subjective realities, Milton is tuned to outer facts of life. Thus one is simple in his verse form while the other is complex in his poetic execution.

If we analyse Sri Aurobindo's verse, we are struck by its simplicity; and yet such simplicity does express a miraculous mystic poetry. That is because he does not allow a set convention, dogma or heritage to dominate him, while Milton has his fixed code of poetics, his laws of diction and his rhetorical principles. Sri Aurobindo is utterly ruled by inspiration and the form we see is the creation of this and not the result of a mental idea of form. But this does not mean he lacks definite form, and that his method is fluid and amorphous.

The inspiration that comes brings with it the needed form and the form created is definite and possesses a character. Let us see how he builds his paragraph:

The golden issue of mind's labyrinth plots,

The riches unfound or still uncaught by our lives

Unsullied by the attaint of mortal thought

Abide in that pellucid atmosphere.²⁸

The verb for the first line occurs in the fourth and grammatically we have quite a complex construction but the whole seems absolutely natural. The paragraph ends with a line's end and we do not feel any rhetorical effect aimed at. Or listen to this:

A Wisdom governing the mystic world,

A Silence listening to the cry of Life,

It sees the hurrying crowd of moments stream

²⁸ Ibid., p. 103.

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Towards the still greatness of a distant hour.²⁹

There is a pause after the first and second lines, but the third and fourth form one unit and yet, if analysed, both the final lines have completeness. In the next example all lines are complete pictures and have no continuing effect:

A divinising stream possessed his veins,

His body's cells awoke to spirit sense,

Each nerve became a burning thread of joy:

Tissue and flesh partook beatitude.³⁰

There is no great use of any variations here. All is a plain pentameter. Yet we feel the surge of ecstasy; we do not sense any lack of variety. In the first example there are two trisyllabic feet in the second line: The riches unfound or still uncaught by our lives. These, as in Milton, are there deliberately to give a sense of wideness — the last balances the first.

It would be wrong to say that Sri Aurobindo never used enjambment. But it is rare indeed, as here:

A cry of spheres comes with thee and a song

Of flaming gods.³¹

Even here the line seems complete as it is: 'Of flaming gods' heightens the sense. Here is another example:

If our time-vexed affections thou canst feel,

Earth's ease of simple things can satisfy,

If thy glance can dwell content on earthly soil,

And this celestial summary of delight,

Thy golden body, dally with fatigue

Oppressing with its grace our terrain, while

The frail sweet passing taste of earthly food

Delays thee and the torrent's leaping wine,

Descend.³²

The whole is a closely linked phrase. Images of different kinds are knit together, and the last "Descend" comes almost inevitably. Because Sri Aurobindo does not use overflowing lines, these rare uses come as breaks and they are there to heighten the poetical quality. He gets out of them the maximum possible effect.

²⁹ Ibid., pp. 159-60. ³⁰ Ibid., p. 334. ³¹ Ibid., p. 408. ³² Ibid., pp. 401 -02.

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We have an intenser line at the end of a phrase to mark the end of a train of thought — as a great climax:

In a thousand ways he serves her royal needs;

He makes the hours pivot around her will,

Makes all reflect her whims; all is their play:

This whole wide world is only he and she.³³

Or hear:

Then through the pallid rift that seemed at first

Hardly enough for a trickle from the suns,

Outpoured the revelation and the flame.³⁴

Again:

Great, patient, calm it sees the centuries pass,

Awaiting the slow miracle of our change

In the sure deliberate process of world-force

And the long march of all-revealing Time.³⁵

Mark how the last line sums up the content of the previous lines in the first example; it gives the essential meaning, the inner bearing and forms the close of a set of images and thoughts by putting forth one line that is intenser, louder, and yet deeper than the rest. After this he begins a new train of images. In the second example the intensity increases suddenly and we have the climax of the "revelation and the flame" that justifies the "rift" and the "trickle". In the third there is no heightening, but a widening at the close. The last line symbolises in short all that has gone before. There is a dramatic quality in all these final lines. The previous lines are preparatory; they lead up to the close.

Milton is rich in similes. They not only enrich his poem, but lend grace and give a sense of expansiveness by their reference to subjects not related to the poem. Similes also come as refreshing elements and in a tale of pathos, strife, revolt and resulting sin, they for a brief moment make us forget the dreariness and the overshadowing presence of Satan. Sometimes they uplift the act, the image, the gesture by widening the scope. Finally they reveal the vast knowledge Milton had and the great amount of classical tradition he had imbibed.

Similes that we come across here are mostly pictorial or refer

³³Ibid., p. 63. ³⁴ Ibid., p. 3. ³⁵ Ibid, p. 48.

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to sensuous objects. Milton reveals his art of picturisation. Sri Aurobindo's similes refer to subjective experience. They express some inner state, some psychological mood. Rarely does Sri Aurobindo point to some physical act, scene, occurrence, condition, and his similes are not there to enrich the poem. But they are there to make living the subjective experience, by reference to another living vibrant and subjective experience. He has no need to elevate the brooding atmosphere by other non-textual references; for such gloomy states of consciousness or atmosphere are absent in Savitri. Lastly, he has no need to reveal what his mind has imbibed through classical education. He does not want to show how much he has garnered in his mind, or how broad is the scope of his intellectual grasp. Rather he would reveal what states of consciousness he has passed through, what the extent of his inner realisation is. He speaks only of what he himself has realised.

This is the background from which we should see the similes of our two poets. Now we shall examine a few examples. Satan is compared to a vulture which,

To gorge the flesh of lambs or yeanling kids

On hills where flocks are fed, flies towards the springs

Of Ganges or Hydaspes, Indian streams.

The comparison makes vivid the picture, the situation and the purpose. Or this:

As when a scout,

Through dark and desert ways with peril gone

All night, at last by break of cheerful dawn

Obtains the brow of some high climbing hill,

Which to his eye discovers unaware

The goodly prospect of some foreign land.

This is the "gleaming metropolis" with shining "spires". This is Satan's view of Paradise after a difficult journey. This simile is classical and breathes an atmosphere which intensifies the effect of travail and the sudden hope of the end of his ordeal. Let us see how Sri Aurobindo uses a simile:

As a sculptor chisels a deity out of stone

He slowly chipped off the dark envelope,

Line of defence of Nature's ignorance.³⁶

³⁶Ibid., p. 36.

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Sri Aurobindo does not resort, like Milton, to a long-winded simile. He makes a brief reference to a physical fact that leads swiftly to some psychological inference. The reference does not distract the mind from the central theme, the leading idea. Not all of Milton's similes are long, as here:

He, in delight

Both of her beauty and submissive charms,

Smiled with superior love, as Jupiter

On Juno smiles when he impregns the clouds

That shed May showers.

Here the reference is to Greek mythology and the analogy between Jupiter and Adam is a happy one. Again, from Sri Aurobindo as a contrast referring to the same theme of love:

As if a whole rich world suddenly possessed,

Wedded to all he had been, became himself,

An inexhaustible joy made his alone,

He gathered all Savitri into his clasp.³⁷

There is no depth of feeling in the Miltonic simile. We feel as if we were a distant onlooker, a witness to something which did not concern us; while in Sri Aurobindo we feel the sudden surprise, the sudden overwhelming joy to possess and be possessed. Again, from Milton:

A globe far off

It seemed, now seems a boundless continent,

Dark, waste and wild, under the frown of Night,

Starless, exposed to ever-threatening storms.

Mark how successful is Milton in sombre picturisation. The darkness, the desolation come home with matchless power; the feeling of foreboding is intense as opposed to his joyous themes which do not somehow bring that impact of reality and intensity. In contrast:

As if from a Silence without form or name

The Shadow of a remote uncaring god

Doomed to his Nought the illusory universe,

Cancelling its show of idea and act in Time

And its imitation of eternity.³⁸

³⁷Ibid., p. 410. ³⁸ Ibid., p. 565.

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How palpable is the feeling of silence, the formless and nameless god that cancels everything ! We get a double feeling here: one, of intense reality bom from a psychological union with the subject; two of a witnessing regard, an aloofness that does away with fear and awe. Milton's similes possess neither while describing happy scenes, but in his sombre ones there is a sort of union with the subject which makes them so real-toned. Milton is more successful when he refers to classical themes, as here:

To Palès, or Pomona, thus adorned,

Likest she seemed — Pomona when she fled

Vertumnus — or to Ceres in her prime

Yet virgin of Prosperina from Jove.

This reference to Greek mythology and its deities in relation to Eve at once gives another colour and heightens her personality and she sheds some of that ethical sheath in which Milton had originally enwrapped her.

Before we end this topic, we may glance at one more example to show that Sri Aurobindo's similes are not always subjective and that yet he gives a strange turn to a physical image in order to bring home a psychological truth, a thought trying but failing to enter a silent mind:

As smoothly glides a ship nearing its port,

Ignorant of embargo and blockade,

Confident of entrance and the visa's seal,

It came to the silent city of the brain

Towards accustomed and expectant quay,

But met a barring will, a blow of Force

And sank vanishing in the immensity.³⁹

Although he uses a simile, yet to the conscious mind which has got the necessary preparation and training, this picture is not an abstract image but a figure of reality.

A last word about Milton's similes. Generally they are long and we have chosen only the briefest and those that seemed to us to be representative.

Our next topic is the metaphor. Milton is not as rich in this rhetorical

¹⁹Ibid., p. 544.

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device as Sri Aurobindo. Metaphor makes palpable and real all that would otherwise be abstract imagery. It is not so much an analogy as a transference of an alien image to the subject. This device is largely used in Sanskrit. Its purpose is to harness the imagination to untracked fields of figures whereby the subject acquires a different status and personality. It is, to use psychological terms, transference of the personality of one to another which may have no distinct relation or association with it. Such a process is indeed necessary in mystic poetry owing to its very nature that is opposed to the epic or dramatic and needs aids to undo its likely effect of abstraction. Milton employs it as a rare and passing feature but Sri Aurobindo utilises it to strengthen and make clear his experience. The reason why Milton does not employ it is obvious. This transference of quality, personality, character of an object was to him in itself a falsehood. While he found similes stimulating and entertaining, he found metaphors an unpractical and false device that created an unreal impression. A cloud was a cloud, a flower a flower. The character of the one could not be passed on to the other in his view — all the more so because he stood against all falsities in any form of mode, and most of all in poetry.

Further, the physicality and the objectivity that are in Milton oppose this psychological method. It needs imagination and a strong living power of visualisation to conceive the sky as a sea and the stars as its foam. Also, such metaphors have no place in descriptive poetry like Paradise Lost where we find recounted event after event, action after action, one wave of deeds following another wave of deeds. In such poetry metaphors would not only be out of place but hamper the swift progress of incidents. In Savitri, where the subjective has a larger and prominent share, metaphorical devices aid, for they point to something deeper by their transference, and their subjective tone and psychological make-up help create a mystical atmosphere. We feel the passage of parallel realities: the inner and the outer.

Metaphors in themselves are not false, as Milton conceives them. Things and objects, as we see them and sense them, reveal to us one side of their character, the material and the formal. In that formal aspect there is no possible interchange of character or personality. But seen from a subjective point of view, a deeper way of looking at things, these formal natures, these hard crusts of forms are replaced by a fluid interchangeable stuff that permeates all things, and then the sea does not shut out the sky and the hills

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do not hesitate to become the supine body of a god. Then, names do not become impermeable walls of idea but all things grow symbols of one single undivided reality. Because the thing behind is real, is representing symbols too are real; only the hard, unchangeable characters that we impose on objects by our mental idea vanishes. Take the lines:

In tapestried chambers and on crystal floors,

In armoured town or gardened pleasure-walks,

Even in distance closer than her thoughts,

Body to body near, soul near to soul,

Moving as if by a common breath and will,

They were tied in the single circling of their days

Together by love's unseen atmosphere,

Inseparable like the earth and sky.⁴⁰

The whole turn is metaphorical. Or consider:

Her mind, a sea of white sincerity,

Passionate in flow, had not one turbid wave.⁴¹

The metaphor is clear, the image if it were used as a simile would not achieve this directness of expression. Another example:

Her youth sat throned in calm felicity.⁴²

The metaphor is not obvious, but its indication is clear. Further:

His was a spirit that stooped from larger spheres

Into our province of ephemeral sight,

A colonist from immortality.⁴³

This metaphor brings home the truth of the divine descent. How revealing is the following!

Her lifted finger's keen unthinkable tip

Bared with a stab of flame the closed Beyond.⁴⁴

It looks like a simile, but its use is as of a metaphor. Her finger-tip is the dagger of flame that cuts open the veils of the Beyond — such a supernatural labour no far-fetched simile could compass. Materially this phenomenon may appear an impossibility. But, seen from the occult point of view, such an occurrence is a tangible

⁴⁰ Ibid., p. 533. ⁴¹ Ibid., p. 15. ⁴² Ibid, p. 16.

⁴³ Ibid, p. 22. ⁴⁴ Ibid, pp. 38-39.

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reality and Sri Aurobindo is describing it in a most vivid vision which we, in linguistic terms, would call a metaphor. Again, another mystic experience couched in luminous words:

She was all vastness and one measureless point,

She was a height beyond heights, a depth beyond depths,⁴⁵

and

The world was her spirit's wide circumference.⁴⁶

Also:

She was a subconscient life of tree and flower,

The outbreak of the honied huds of spring...

She was Time and the dreams of God in Time.⁴⁷

Such is the scope of the metaphor; its direct transference can result in a spontaneous expression of the mystic truth, from which our language as a medium of expression debars us otherwise. In fact, the whole gamut of spiritual experience is opposed to the physical way of looking at things. Language, bom from mind's pragmatic need to express itself, and syntax, which has its iron-clad rules to aid this expression, are futile restrictions on the spirit's freedom. Metaphors are modes through which the spirit is freed of the encircling rules of syntax and the result may be a chaos to the physical-minded listener, but to one with mystical leanings they open at once vistas of undreamt-of realities.

A whole epic poem cannot be made up of metaphors or similes; the larger body of it consists of descriptive passages. They not only carry the story along by their ever changing panorama of objects and characters and actions and by their texture of ideas, feelings, moods all types; they also give a coherence and stability, an organic concreteness. Into their varied context are woven the jewels of similes, the ornaments of metaphors, the dramatic speeches, and the highlights of tragedy.

In Milton all descriptions are happy even though he may be painting a tragic situation. Nowhere is he more at home than in this — nowhere does his poetical genius stand out better. As a poet of outer action and as an extravert, Milton is at home when describing scenes, people, the struggle of evil, the dramatic gestures of Satanic hordes, and in all descriptions of darkness or light, of

⁴⁵ Ibid., p. 555. ⁴⁶ Ibid., p. 556. ⁴⁷ Ibid., p. 557.

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God or the Devil, or of justice and law. He is a worshipper of the concrete, and abstractness is his bugbear.

But Sri Aurobindo shines equally great in descriptions and in abstractions. In a real sense, even his psychological, occult and mystical experiences are description; they are a different type of description — the description of inner fields of reality, and of phenomena of psychological being. But there are pure abstract reflections which, because they come as experiences, become living. Nevertheless, whether he is describing physical Nature, or an occult event, he is supremely at ease.

The description of Nature is one of the main assets of a poet. Here is one of Milton's:

Betwixt them lawns, or level downs, and flocks,

Grazing the tender herb, were interposed;

Or palmy hillock; or the flowery lap

Of some irriguous valley spread her store,

Flowers of all hue, and without thorn the rose.

Although Milton does not touch the depths of feeling that is Wordsworth's his account though objective is felicitous. Now look at the description of Nature in Sri Aurobindo:

The sylvan solitude was a gorgeous dream,

An altar of the summer's splendour and fire,

A sky-topped flower-hung palace of the gods.⁴⁸

And rain fled sobbing over the dripping leaves

And storm became the forest's titan voice.⁴⁹

The description here is not merely an objective one. There is a deeper note: Nature reveals something greater than her plain exterior aspect. For example:

There was a glory in the least sunbeam;

Night was a chrysoprase on velvet cloth,

A nestling darkness or a moonlit deep;

Day was a purple pageant and a hymn,

A wave of the laughter of light from mom to eve.⁵⁰

⁴⁸ ibid, p. 468. ⁴⁹ ibid. ⁵⁰ ibid.

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This description is neither romantic nor heroic — it is typically Aurobindonian, with its suggestive quality, its revealing of Nature as something divine and superhuman, its intensity of visionary feeling. How does Milton describe an event ? —

Ten paces huge

He back recoiled; the tenth on bended knee

His massy spear upstayed: as if, on earth,

Winds underground, or waters forcing way,

Sidelong had pushed a mountain from its seat

Half sunk with all its pines.

Again:

Light as the lightning-glimpse they ran, they flew;

From their foundations, loosening to and fro,

They plucked the seated hills, with all their load,

Rocks, waters, woods, and by the shaggy tops

Uplifting, bore them in their hands.

The whole is packed with energy and this vigour is typically Miltonic. There is a sense of the dramatic in such impetuous descriptions of events. In contrast is Sri Aurobindo's:

Then trembling with the mystic shock her heart

Moved in her breast and cried out like a bird

Who hears his mate upon a neighbouring bough.

Hooves trampling fast, wheels largely stumbling ceased;

The chariot stood like an arrested wind.⁵¹

This one event changed the life of Savitri — the meeting with Satyavan. The description reveals something that transfigures a life and alters fate. Yet there is no dramatic exuberance, nor any extravagance of feeling. But Sri Aurobindo can be forceful too as when he speaks of Death's defeat:

Assailing in front, oppressing from above,

A concrete mass of conscious power, he bore

The tyranny of her divine desire.⁵²

As a result

His body was eaten by light, his spirit devoured.⁵³

⁵¹ Ibid., p. 396. ⁵² Ibid, p. 667. ⁵³ Ibid

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Power with all its majesty, but without its harshness we feel in these lines. In Milton the power is tangible, something very physical with the image of a crashing hill. There is a vital grandeur in all his energy, while in Sri Aurobindo there is a sublimity and it is subtle as opposed to Milton's physicality. Milton's force is the falling of a cliff; Sri Aurobindo's the sweep of light.

Now we shall examine how Milton and Sri Aurobindo describe a mood. Here is anger in Milton:

So frowned the mighty combatants that Hell

Grew darker at their frown; so matched they stood.

And here is amazement:

Adam, soon as he heard

The fatal trespass done by Eve, amazed,

Astonished stood and blank, while horror chill

Ran through his veins and all his joints relaxed.

Also other passions are depicted:

Nor only tears

Began to rise, high passions — anger, hate,

Mistrust, suspicion, discord — and shook sore

Their inward state of mind, calm regions once

And full of peace, now tosst and turbulent.

The first two examples are vivid but the last lacks vigour and reads like a poetical statement instead of a graphic presentation. Milton excels in describing violent moods; but he is not so successful in finer or subtler ones.

The amazement of delight in Sri Aurobindo runs:

O Thou who com'st to me out of Time's silences,

Yet thy voice has wakened my heart to an unknown bliss —⁵⁴

and love:

She felt her being flow into him as in waves

A river pours into a mighty sea —⁵⁵

and fear:

⁵⁴ Ibid., p. 400. ⁵⁵ Ibid., p. 410.

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She in her dreadful knowledge was alone.⁵⁶

Still another mood:

She like a pantheress leaped upon his words

And carried them into her cavern heart.⁵⁷

And Savitri facing Death:

All grief and fear were dead within her now

And a great calm had fallen. The wish to lessen

His suffering, the impulse that opposes pain

Were the one mortal feeling left. It passed:

Griefless and strong she waited like the gods.⁵⁸

This is not only a mood; it is a state of soul. In fact, all that Sri Aurobindo describes are not fleeting moods; they are expressions of conditions of soul and deeper life, that feel the passing wave of moods like something vibrant and something that can inaugurate a great event. Milton's moods are more linked to the earth and hence they are more gross. He does not penetrate deep enough like Sri Aurobindo to feel the inner core of a mood. He is too preoccupied with the external aspect to have room for subtler vibrations. Had he the Aurobindonian power of penetration, his characters would live like living personalities, having a distinct soul, and he would give a sense of reality far beyond that which a physical or a mental presentation can.

More than description are the words themselves, the very bases of all poetry, the stones of sculpture, the colours of the artist. Upon the choice of them depends the success or the failure of the poet. Words in themselves are neutral; but when used rightly and in their proper place they can wield great power as instruments of expression, as revealing moods, or states of poignancy of feeling or modes of the intensity of poetical creativity. They embody something elemental in their vibrations and can, by their manifestation, call down superhuman vibrations. That is why the Veda calls the word the primal power, a god.

Now we shall examine how words are used by the poets, and the effects they achieve. Take Milton's

Millions of flaming swords, drawn from the thighs Of mighty Cherubim; the sudden blaze

⁵⁶ Ibid., p. 470. ⁵⁷ Ibid., p. 563. ⁵⁸ Ibid., p. 564.

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Far round illumined Hell.

Mark how each word is care fully chosen. Each adjective is most apt; the arrangement of vowels and consonants goes on to express the effect of wonder, power and splendour. If Milton had used "Thousands" in place of "Millions", both the tonal effect and word-suggestion would not have achieved that finality of effect. "Flaming swords" suggests a heavenly origin and any other epithet would not have borne the same vigour. Suppose he wrote:

Unnumbered vigorous blades, drawn from the thighs

Of splendid Cherubim; the titan flare

All round enlightened Hell.

hese lines are not bad; but they do not convey the same effect as Milton's original lines. Here are other four lines:

To sit in hateful office here confined,

Inhabitant of Heaven and heavenly-bom —

Here in perpetual agony and pain,

With terrors and with clamours compassed round.

There is a roll in these. This is due to words that are inevitable in their places and hold the exact shades of sense — all go to create a particular effect of pathos. Here "brood" would not convey the same as "sit"; "hateful" is very suggestive and "distasteful" or "abhorred" would be either too weak or too strong to be in this position; "office" has a peculiar sense which "condition" or "state" cannot give; "confined" conveys a sense of imprisonment, but suggests a state created by the speaker's own will and not as an imposition; "inhabitant", a four-syllabic word coming after shorter words, conveys a sense of difference, a sense of an alien. So too "perpetual" is a very suggestive and apt word and, joined with "agony" and "pain", stands out in contrast to the preceding "heaven" and "heavenly-bom."

Milton is very conscious, as a poet, of the value and power of the words as we see in the examples given above. But he is most effective while speaking of proper names and he uses them with great skill. The proper names assume an exotic beauty, adding a rare charm. He discloses in them a vibration that we ordinarily miss or pass by; we are not drawn to their real beauty of tone. This, Milton by his skilful use, discovers for us. Thus he speaks of all who

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Jousted in Aspramont, or Montalban,

Damasco, or Marocco, or Trebisond,

Or whom Biserta sent from Afric shore

When Charlemain with all his peerage fell

By Fontarabbia.

The roll of sounds and the vibration evoke a strange and remote atmosphere. It makes of historical and legendary hell a living citadel of romance. Here is another example:

Abhorrèd Styx, the flood of deadly hate;

Sad Acheron of sorrow, black and deep;

Cocytus, named of lamentation loud,

Heard on the rueful stream; fierce Phlegeton,

Whose waves of torrent fire inflame with rage.

Milton conjures up the atmosphere by epithets that increase the power and significance of the names. The word "Styx" seems a cruel word, its hard consonants recall hate. "Acheron" appears to be, by its open vowels, reminiscent of sorrow, the choking sound of grief. "Cocytus" carries a sharp yet prolonged burst of suffering breath. "Phlegeton" reminds one simultaneously of fire and water by its fricative and cutting consonants followed by a nasal sound. All these names he had culled from Grecian legend, adding a fresh beauty to the Biblical lore. Now hear:

The unchanging blue reveals its spacious thought.⁵⁹

This example from Sri Aurobindo evokes a different atmosphere. There is a natural felicity in this line. Suppose he had written thus:

The constant sky unveils its measureless thought

We have kept the meaning the same — but the new words do not call down that atmosphere. This proves that no thought-substance alone creates great poetry. It also proves the inevitability of the words; when we get the right ones, the greatest poetry is created. Here again:

He seemed the wideness of a boundless sky,

He seemed the passion of a sorrowless earth,

He seemed the burning of a world-wide sun.

Two looked upon each other, Soul saw Soul.⁶⁰

⁵⁹ Ibid., p. 422. ⁶⁰ Ibid., p. 683.

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Here there is no such exotic beauty as Milton evokes. The whole passage reads like a great spiritual discovery. Each word seems to bear a weight of divine felicity; each word, even in its utter simplicity, opens up a world of undiscovered beauty. If Milton uses his words like a great and conscious craftsman, a connoisseur of tonal values, the value of vibrations, Sri Aurobindo uses them as a prophet; he not only uses the magical tones, but touches the source from where words have their birth, thus getting something primal, something veridical and rare. Yet the simplicity seems magical. The unsophistication is garbed with a heavenly felicity. He does not need any verbiage, any sonorous diction to create a lofty effect.

The words Milton uses are chosen for their tonal content and he masses them together and groups them for their music and effect. But Sri Aurobindo does not choose his words: they come to him packed with the power, the bliss, the grandeur, the richness of another world. He invokes them, and makes silent his vessel for their reception.

How is the style of these two poets a departure form other poets? We shall examine this briefly. Here is Tennyson:

The great band

Made lightnings in the splendour of the moon,

And flashing round and round, and whirl'd in an arch,

Shot like a streamer of the northern mom,

Seen where the moving isles of winter shock

By night, with noises of the Northern sea.

Compared to Milton, these lines lack the grandeur and the severity. They appear facile; Tennyson's poetry does not soar, it lacks the music in which we revel in Milton. With strength and splendour, gone, blank verse loses half its dignity. Even the intense lyricism is lacking which can compensate the loss of grandeur.

In comparison to Sri Aurobindo, Tennyson's example appears lacking in depth and intensity. It seems to skim the surface and not dive deep to give us the pearl of felicity that Sri Aurobindo possesses.

Wordsworth, the godson of Milton, wrote his blank verse thus:

Ocean and earth, the solid frame of earth

And ocean's liquid mass, in gladness lay

Beneath him: — Far and wide the clouds were touched,

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And in their silent faces could he read

Unutterable love.

The beauty of Wordsworth lies in his thought and his description of Nature. Here he is more deep than Tennyson. Compared to Milton, he can stand his ground by his contemplative strength and his love of Nature. He has no power; but he attempts sublimity. As blank-verse form, his poetry lacks the architectural hand of Milton, the conscious hand of the artist. Here he allows the thoughts to lead him and form becomes a secondary matter. But in Milton there is balance of form and substance. Also the physical element that is in Milton is absent in Wordsworth.

Wordsworth stands between the spirituality of Sri Aurobindo and the rationality of Milton. Yet Sri Aurobindo is nearer to Wordsworth than Milton in his subjective approach to things. Wordsworth's style is that of a contemplator, Milton's is that of a conscious artist, Sri Aurobindo's that of a seer. In greatness either of thought or style or form Tennyson does not come near to these three poets. Here is Shelley:

Mother of this unfathomable world!

Favour my solemn song, for I have loved

Thee ever and thee only; I have watched

Thy shadow, and the darkness of thy steps,

And my heart ever gazes on the depth

Of thy deep mysteries.

Shelley comes nearest to Sri Aurobindo and is farthest from Milton. His approach is that of an intuitive poet, a half-way to a seer. Here too he is not conscious of his form and does not employ it as a conscious medium. But he is not so apparently loose like Wordsworth or facile like Tennyson. One example from Matthew Arnold:

But the majestic river floated on

Out of the mist and hum of that low land,

Into the frosty starlight, and there moved

Rejoicing through the hushed Chorasmian waste,

Under the solitary moon.

This is Victorian blank verse at its best. There is felicity of description and a beauty belonging to the romantic order. Arnold too in not so austere as Milton, but nevertheless has a capacity for

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description. But we miss the heroic grandeur which is replaced by a depth of feeling and a happy artistry. Arnold is deeper — and he comes more near in profundity to Sri Aurobindo. As an artist employing the blank-verse form, he is conscious of the form and uses it with care. But the mastery and craftsmanship we find in Milton are absent. Let us pass on to Keats:

Deep in the shady sadness of a vale

Far sunken from the healthy breath of mom,

Far from the fiery noon and eve's one star,

Sat gray-haird Saturn, quiet as a stone,

Still as the silence round about his lair;

Forest on forest hung about his head

Like cloud on cloud.

What strikes one is the difference of approach: if Milton is grand, Keats is entrancing; one has the intensity of power, the other has the intensity of beauty. Both are great; but the greatness of both are poles apart. But while Milton's verse has the breath of a true epic, the poetry of Keats is essentially lyrical. This comment holds true for Shelley and Wordsworth as well. Length does not determine the real characteristic of an epic. It is the approach and the style, the subject treated and the way of treating it. Wordsworth's poems are long — but they are of a contemplative nature and do not encompass a global subject. His approach is personal; this takes away his claim to epic poetry. Tennyson is voluminous, but his style is lax and the narrative quality is too narrow in scope (dealing with English heroes only) and this debars us from calling his Idylls of the King an epic. His verse seems undignified and lacking in self-restraint. Shelley and Keats are too romantic and purely lyrical; they never had the ambition to write an epic. Their approach and method were not suited for this purpose. Matthew Arnold has written admirable long poems but they are mere episodes and not concerned with any that changed fate or created history.

Thus we come back to the two poets we started with. We brought in these poets and their short examples purposely to show the difference of approach, the difference in style and the difference in managing the blank-verse form.

Sri Aurobindo, we have seen, conforms to the standards of the above poets, not to those of Milton, and yet he is the only poet who can be successfully compared with Milton owing to his original blank-verse style, his word-music, his great artistry of

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seeing all things from a subjective viewpoint, his grandeur, his felicity and lastly his world theme that is at once cosmic and intensely personal. He is lyrical on one side and epical on the other but avoids the heroic drumbeats of Milton. This blending of two opposite methods is his special feature. Milton can never be lyrical. His heroic approach debars this. But Sri Aurobindo can be lyrical without losing his epic dignity. Milton is severe as a rule and on this is based his element of strength. But Sri Aurobindo is ever felicitous, and on his felicity are based all other elements: beauty, music, grandeur and power. Both use words for a special end and both differ from other poets in their approach and style. But the chief difference lies in the rationality of Milton and the spirituality of Sri Aurobindo. This rationality is based on physicality, and objectivity is its aim. The spirituality of Sri Aurobindo does not debar physicality as such, but avoids its grossness; also it encompasses in its scope all phases of life, mind and consciousness. This is the fundamental difference of the two. Milton has attempted to be universal; but his universality is limited by the limitation of technical knowledge of his age and the sensuous physicality which, along with Christian scriptural lore, he terms truth. Sri Aurobindo's universality is the universality of consciousness and spirit and he is not limited by any religion or idea, the objective knowledge of the age, the dependence on mental reasoning, or deductive logic. In style he is utterly simple and this simplicity is not monotonous. His effects are not manoeuvred or guided by the law of rhetoric. His inspiration creates the needed effect, creates the necessary variety. In style Milton is sonorous. His mastery of language, metre and his awareness of the tonal value of words create the heroic style — a thing that never has been equalled in its austerity, power and grandeur by any other English poet. Only Sri Aurobindo, at the other pole of felicity, by his sustained role of Overhead poetry equals him and surpasses him in sheer flights of inspiration, in heights of grandeur, in the sweep of his magnificence and delight.

ROMEN

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Poetic Imagery in Savitri

Even a casual reader of Sri Aurobindo's poem Savitri will be struck by its profuse wealth of poetic images. Not a single page passes under his eyes without unloading its rich and varied cargo of imagery before him and it is a cargo from many countries, from many worlds; it is a cargo of dreams, nay, of dreamlike realities and of eternal verities lying beyond our poor limited human vision. Or, perhaps, those images are not a cargo at all, but are themselves the boats, the freighters in which is loaded the divine cargo; for the boats, the freighters are familiar to us since they are our own boats, freighters of our own world that have been sent by Sri Aurobindo, the master poet, to far off little known countries and still less known other-worlds, and they return filled with gems and curios and novelties that dazzle and enchant and surprise our unaccustomed eyes.

These images are the creations of a poet in whose vision even the most prosaic, even the most worldly things are transformed into exquisite or magnificient vehicles of profoundly mystic and at the same time utterly poetic ideas. Of these many gems, we shall here pass in review some of the extremely bright ones.

A throe that came and left a quivering trace,

Gave room for an old tired want unfilled,

At peace in its subconscient moonless cave

To raise its head and look for absent light,

Straining closed eyes of vanished memory,

Like one who searches for a bygone self

And only meets the corpse of his desire.¹

And a little later we find another beautiful image,

A long lone line of hesitating hue

Like a vague smile tempting a desert heart

Troubled the far rim of life's obscure sleep.²

¹ Savitri, p. 2. ² p. 2.

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The dawn that rises in the world of Inconscience is represented in another image,

A wandering hand of pale enchanted light

That glowed along a fading moment's brink,

Fixed with gold panel and opalescent hinge

A gate of dreams ajar on mystery's verge,³

which is followed by

Interpreting a recondite beauty and bliss

In colour's hieroglyphs of mystic sense,

It wrote the lines of a significant myth

Telling of a greatness of spiritual dawns,

A brilliant code penned with the sky for page.⁴

And the same Dawn becomes an

Ambassadress twixt eternity and change.⁵

Priests and religious ceremonies and other churchly things are favorite images deftly chosen and marvellously and sometimes quite unexpectedly introduced. We shall note some of them now:

The wide-winged hymn of a great priestly wind

Arose and failed upon the altar hills;

The high boughs prayed in a revealing sky.⁶

In this image it is the happier side of religion that finds expression; in the following one the other and sorrier spectacle of credal religion is taken as an image:

A servile blinkered silence hushed the mind...

While mitred, holding the good shepherd's staff,

Falsehood enthroned on awed and prostrate hearts

The cults and creeds that organise living death

And slay the soul on the altar of a lie.⁷

The artificers of Nature's fall and pain

³p. 3. ⁴p. 4. ⁵p. 4. ⁶ p. 4. ⁷ pp. 215-16.

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Have built their altars of triumphant Night

In the clay temple of terrestrial life.

In the vacant precincts of the sacred Fire,

In front of the reredos in the mystic rite

Facing the dim velamen none can pierce,

Intones his solemn hymn the mitred priest

Invoking their dreadful presence in his breast:

Attributing to them the awful Name

He chants the syllables of the magic text

And summons the unseen communion's act,

While twixt the incense and the muttered prayer

All the fierce bale with which the world is racked

Is mixed in the foaming chalice of man's heart

And poured to them like sacramental wine.⁸

In another place greed and hate are pictured as the acolytes of Force;⁹ and we find, elsewhere,

An immortality cowled in the cape of death.¹⁰

In the kingdoms of the little life, the Life-Goddess is depicted in a very significant figure, showing the futility of petty vital pleasures

In her obscure cathedral of delight

To dim dwarf gods she offers secret rites.

But vain unending is the sacrifice,

The priest an ignorant mage who only makes

Futile mutations in the altar's plan

And casts blind hopes into a powerless flame.¹¹

In a later Canto, while describing the World of Falsehood and the part played by Thought in that world, a full-fledged image drawn from Mystery-Religion is to be found. It is as follows:

Thought sat, a priestess of Perversity,

On her black tripod of the triune Snake

Reading by opposite signs the eternal script,

A sorceress reversing Life's God-frame.

⁸p. 226. ⁹p. 215. ¹⁰p. 49. ¹¹ p. 134.

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In the darkling aisles with evil eyes for lamps

And fatal voices chanting from the apse,

In strange infernal dim basilicas

Intoning the magic of the unholy Word,

The ominous profound Initiate

Performed the ritual of her Mysteries.¹²

Next, we take up another group of images which are based on geography:

Calm heavens of imperishable Light,

Illumined continents of violet peace,

Oceans and rivers of the mirth of God

And griefless countries under purple suns.¹³

This is the description given of what Sri Aurobindo calls the "Wonderworlds of Life," above which is situated "a breathless summit region, whose boundaries jutted into a sky of Self'.¹⁴ The Traveller of the Worlds finds himself ascending into the kingdom of a griefless life, where

Above him in a new celestial vault

Other than the heavens beheld by mortal eyes,

As on a fretted ceiling of the gods,

An archipelago of laughter and fire,

Swam stars apart in a rippled sea of sky.'⁵

A little later he becomes a traveller in the kingdoms of the little life, in which

A freak of living startled vacant Time...

Islands of living dotted lifeless space

And germs of living formed in formless air.¹⁶

A similar image is found in the description of Man, who is a "nomad of the far mysterious Light," (p. 336) and who is a stranger become awake in an unconscious world:

A traveller in his oft-shifting home

¹² p. 221. ¹³p. 120. ¹⁴p- 120. ¹⁵p. 119. ¹⁶p. 156.

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Amid the tread of many infinitudes,

He has pitched a tent of life in desert Space.¹⁷

And the most daring and charming image in this group is:

The conscious ends of being went rolling back:

The landmarks of the little person fell,

The island ego joined its continent.¹⁸

From this group of geographical images, we now go to images of travel and communication. Aswapati, the Traveller, has become "a pilgrim of the everlasting Truth." (p. 80)

He has turned from the voices of the narrow realm

And left the little lane of human Time.

In the hushed precincts of a vaster plan

He treads the vestibules of the Unseen.¹⁹

And again,

He journeys to meet the Incommunicable,

Hearing the echo of his single steps

In the eternal courts of Solitude.²⁰

The image of travelling appears again in a very unexpected context and in a happy and apt manner in the following lines:

And, traveller on the roads of line and hue,

Pursues the spirit of beauty to its home.

Thus we draw near to the All-Wonderful

Following his rapture in things as sign and guide;

Beauty is his footprint showing as where he has passed,

Love is its heartbeat's rhythm in mortal breasts.²¹

And a weird image of the Traveller Soul coming across dreadful dangers in his journeying is the following:

On his long way through Time and Circumstance

The grey-hued riddling nether shadow-Sphinx,

Her dreadful paws upon the swallowing sands,

Awaits him armed with the soul-slaying word:

Across his path sits the dim camp of Night.²²

¹⁷p. 336. ¹⁸p. 25. ¹⁹. 80. ²⁰p. 80. ²¹p. 112. ²²P. 336.

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This "Circumstance" finds an equally weird apparel of an image elsewhere:

We hear the crash of the wheels of Circumstance²³

and also,

The galloping hooves of the unforeseen event²⁴

and again,

In a gallop of thunder-hooved vicissitudes

She swept through the race-fields of Circumstance.²⁵

In this last image it is Life that is pictured as the rider. The next one is a mixed image of many hues, describing the journey of the Traveller through the kingdoms of the greater life

Around crowded the forest of her signs:

At hazard he read by arrow-leaps of Thought

That hit the mark by guess or luminous chance,

Her changing coloured road-lights of idea

And her signals of uncertain swift event,

The hieroglyphs of her symbol pageantries

And her landmarks in the tangled paths of Time²⁶

And it will not be out of place here to note two occurrences of the image of an inn applied to Time. We do not feel that it is repeated again, for in both cases it is so differently used. The first occurrence is in these lines:

And hardly with his heart's blood he achieves

His transient house of the divine Idea,

His figure of a Time-inn for the Unborn.²⁷

And on the second occasion it occurs in;

The home of a perpetual happiness,

It lodged the hours as in a pleasant inn.²⁸

In the first instance it is Time that is conceived as the inn, while in this second one it is Matter that lodges the hours as in an inn. This shows what a great poet can do, even when he is using the same image.

²³p. 52. ²⁴p. 54. ²⁵p. 117. ²⁶ p. 192-93. ²⁷p. 109. ²⁸ p. 328.

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Next, we take up one of the most fertile sources of images, viz., communications:

Neighbours of Heaven are Nature's altitudes.

To these high-peaked dominions sealed to our search

Too far from surface Nature's postal routes,

Too lofty for our mortal lives to breathe,

Deep in us a forgottens kinship points.²⁹

How wonderfully appropriate and apt this figure of postal routes is! For surface Nature's lines of communication are all restricted within the area of mind-bound and sense-bound consciousness, while these domains of the Self are lying outside and beyond those means of communication. It is not only the postal communications that have obliged by becoming an image, but even the telegraphic transmissions have become a magnificient figure in the hands of this mystic poet:

The troglodytes of the subconscious Mind,

Ill-trained slow stammering interpreters,

Only of their small task's routine aware

And busy with the record in our cells,

Concealed in the subliminal secrecies

Mid an obscure occult machinery,

Capture the mystic Morse whose measured lilt

Transmits the messages of the cosmic Force.³⁰

In passing we may note here that there is a curious and at the same time brilliant mixture of two images, the first being that of troglodytes or cave-dwellers which reminds us of the Vedic figure of Panis who penned in the divine cows in their subconscient cave, and the second is that of the Morse code. But this is not all, for even one of the most prosaic of all persons, the newspaper reporter is not spared. In the hands of an ordinary poet such an image, especially when applied to such a sublime thing as Inspiration, would have become grostesque and jarring. But what an apposite figure it becomes in the following lines!

²⁹p. 46. ³⁰pp. 161-62.

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A reporter and scribe of hidden wisdom talk,

Her shining minutes of celestial speech,

Passed through the masked office of the occult mind,

Transmitting gave to prophet and to seer

The inspired body of the mystic Truth.³¹

After post, telegraph and reporter, comes television:

Impure, sadistic, with grimacing mouths,

Grey foul inventions gruesome and macabre

Came televisioned from the gulfs of Night.³²

From mathematics come images in a very great number. We will note the charm of some of them.

Only was missing the sole timeless Word...

The integer of the Spirit's perfect sum

That equates the unequal All to the equal One.³³

This, indeed, is the strange arithmetic of the Spirit. Another instance of the same arithmetic:

At first was laid a strange anomalous base,

A void, a cipher of some secret Whole,

Where zero held infinity in its sum

And All and Nothing were a single term.³⁴

And still another instance:

A Chance that chose a strange arithmetic

But could not bind with it the forms it made,

A multitude that could not guard its sum

Which less than zero grew and more than one.³⁵

This is a charming idea expressed in an equally charming figure. The recurring decimals have become an oft-recurring image. This first refers to life:

^3lp-39. ³²p. 212. ³²p. 97. ³⁴p. 100. 35p. 173.

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But now a termless labour is her fate:

In its recurrent decimal of events

Birth, death appear as its vibrating points;

The old question-mark margins each finished page,

Each volume of her effort's history.³⁶

The following is a lofty image applied to the supreme Oneness:

It took up tirelessly into its scope

Persons and figures of the Impersonal,

As if prolonging in a celestial count,

In a rapturous multiplication's sum,

The recurring decimals of eternity...

It made all persons fractions of the Unique,

Yet all were being's secret integers.³⁷

And here is a crowded imagery, a procession of images rising one above the other:

Existence seemed a vain necessity's act,

A wrestle of eternal opposites

In a clasped antagonism's close-locked embrace,

A play without denouement or idea,

A hunger march of lives without a goal,

Or, written on a bare blackboard of Space,

A futile and recurring sum of souls.³⁸

Then there is another beautiful image in

Assessed was the system of the probable,

The hazard of fleeing possibilities,

To account for the Actual's unaccountable sum,

Necessity's logarithmic tables drawn,

Cast into a scheme the triple act of the One.³⁹

And the next one which follows almost immediately after this last, is also an excellent one:

Out of the chaos of the Invisible's moods

Derived the calculus of Destiny.⁴⁰

³⁶p. 201. ³⁷pp. 323-24. ³⁸p. 198. ³⁹p. 269. ⁴⁰p. 270.

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How much is suggested by this single simple-looking image! All the problems of Destiny and Freewill, of Destiny and the Divine's Will, of Destiny and Divine Grace seem to be lurking behind this magnificient figure and trying invisibly to draw the reader's attention to them. And then,

The diameter of Infinity was drawn,

Measured the distant arc of the unseen heights.⁴¹

Leaving mathematics we now come to the most prosaic of things, from where one would least expect images could be drawn. They are business, commerce, economics, banking, etc.

For all we have acquired soon loses worth,

An old disvalued credit in Time's bank,

Imperfection's cheque drawn on the Inconscient.⁴²

A similar idea but expressed in an entirely different form and in an entirely different context is to be found in:

... in Thought's broad impalpable Exchange

A speculator in tenuous vast ideas,

Abstractions in the void her currency

We know not with what firm values for its base.

Only religion in this bankruptcy

Presents its dubious riches to our hearts

Or signs unprovisioned cheques on the Beyond.⁴³

This is a full-fledged image showing us the futility of thought and also of religion in our ordinary life. That life is pictured as a speculator in Thought's Exchange is a very forceful and significant image. A similar image is presented to us in the following lines?

She accepted not to close the luminous page,

Cancel her commerce with eternity,

Or set a signature of weak assent

To the brute balance of the world's exchange.⁴⁴

Here it is Savitri who is referred to. The luminous page is of

^41,p. 270. ⁴²p. 78. ^43,p. 167. ⁴⁴p. 19.

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"the unfinished story of her soul graved in Nature's book." (p. 19) Here she refuses to set her signature to the brute balance, but in another place she is shown to be exhausting an old account:

Altered must be Nature's harsh economy;

Acquittance she must win from her past's bond,

An old account of suffering exhaust,

Strike out from Time the soul's long compound debt.⁴⁵

The idea of Time's bank is repeated once again in

A doubt corroded even the means to think,

Distrust was thrown upon Mind's instruments;

All that it takes for reality's shining coin,

Proved fact, fixed inference, deduction clear,

Firm theory, assured significance,

Appeared as frauds upon Time's credit bank

Or assets valueless in Truth's treasury.⁴⁶

Here we can see that even when a figure is repeated, it is so very different and so uniquely lovely, that we hardly feel or even become aware of its repetition. The frustration that the human being feels in this world is brought out in the following lines:

Cheated by counterfeits sold to us in life's mart,

Our hearts clutch at a forfeited heavenly bliss.⁴⁷

A somewhat similar image appears in

A city of the traffic of bound souls,

A market of creation and her wares

Was offered to the labouring mind and heart.⁴⁸

This image of city-life comes in a different form in

...the ego's factories and marts

Surround the beautiful temple of the soul.⁴⁹

⁴⁵pp. 12-13. ⁴⁶pp. 284-85. ⁴⁷p. 77. ⁴⁸pp. 197-98. ⁴⁹p. 163.

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Next we take up images drawn from grammar, language, logic, etc.

We must fill the immense lacuna we have made,

Re-wed the closed finite's lonely consonant

With the open vowels of Infinity,

A hyphen must connect Matter and Mind,

The narrow isthmus of the ascending soul.⁵⁰

Here there is a fusion of three images. The first is that of a consonant and vowels. The second is a very daring and fascinating image, viz., that of a hyphen, which is followed by the third still more daring and fascinating image taken from geography, that of an isthmus. The hyphen that connects Matter and Mind becomes in its turn the isthmus; thus there is an image upon an image. The three images coming in succession, one after another, raise the idea of linking, — which is the common quality of all the three, — to a climax in the last.

From the image of a hyphen we go to the image of punctuation:

His little pleasures punctuate frequent griefs:

Hardship and toil are the heavy price he pays

For the right to live and his last wages death.⁵¹

Even in the following lines there is a mixed image:

Love's adoration like a mystic seer

Through vision looks at the invisible,

In earth's alphabet finds a Godlike sense.⁵²

And here is another image suggested by the double meaning of a word:

United were Time's creative mood and tense

To the style and syntax of Identity.⁵³

It is the word "mood" and its association with grammar that has given rise to the whole image. Even a schoolboy is not spared

^sop. 56. ^51,p. 164. ⁵²p. 398. ⁵³p. 90.

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from becoming an image: our circumscribed little being becomes in it

A backward scholar on logic's rickety bench.⁵⁴

There is a bunch of images pertaining to writing and printing, coming one after another within a short passage.

The skilful Penman's unseen finger wrote

His swift intuitive calligraphy;

Earth's forms were made his divine documents.⁵⁵

He imposed upon dark atom and dumb mass

The diamond script of the Imperishable,

Inscribed on the dim heart of fallen things

A paean-song of the free Infinite

And the Name, foundation of eternity,

And traced on the awake exultant cells

In the ideographs of the Ineffable

The lyric of the love that waits through Time

And the mystic volume of the Book of Bliss

And the message of the superconscient Fire.⁵⁶

But before these things are written,

...in Illusion's occult factory

And in the Inconscient's magic printing house

Tom were the formats of the primal Night

And shattered the stereotypes of Ignorance.⁵⁷

This is an amazingly bold and daring metaphor and is expressed in a perfectly deft manner.

This brings us to another image of the Book of Being, equally marvellous and apt; although long drawn out, it does not become cumbrous or unwieldy or dull.

There in a hidden chamber closed and mute

Are kept the record graphs of the cosmic scribe,

And there the tables of the sacred Law,

There is the Book of Being's index page,

The text and glossary of the Vedic truth

⁵⁴p. 149. ⁵⁵p. 232. ⁵⁶p.232. ⁵⁷p. 231.

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Are there; the rhythms and metres of the stars

Significant of the movements of our fate:

The symbol powers of number and of form,

And the secret code of the history of the world

And Nature's correspondence with the soul

Are written in the mystic heart of life.

In the glow of the Spirit's room of memories

He could recover the luminous marginal notes

Dotting with light the crabbed ambiguous scroll,

Rescue the preamble and the saving clause

Of the dark Agreement by which all is ruled

That rises from material Nature's sleep.⁵⁸

And a little latter we find how the great Mother works out

By a miraculous birth in plasm and gas

The mystery of God's convenant with the Night.⁵⁹

And still further:

He read the original ukase kept back

In the locked archives of the spirit's crypt,

And saw the signature and fiery seal

Of Wisdom on the dim Power's hooded work

Who builds in Ignorance the steps of Light.⁶⁰

And lastly,

Its earthly dialect to God-language change.⁶¹

The idea of "the dark Agreement" and that of "God's convenant with the Night" are similar to another one appearing in

Abolished were conception's covenants

And, striking off subjection's rigorous clause,

Annulled the soul's treaty with Nature's nescience.⁶²

As we have taken up this group of images which are based on writings and treaties and agreements, the following two images will be found to be in their proper place here. The first one is in

⁵⁸pp.74-75. ⁵⁹p. 75. ⁶⁰p. 76. ⁶¹p. 76. ⁶² p. 25.

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connection with "A hostile and perverting Mind at work"⁶³ in the dark world of Night.

It captured the oracles of the occult gods,

Effaced the signposts of Life's pilgrimage,

Cancelled the firm rock-edicts graved by Time,

And on the foundations of the cosmic Law

Erected its bronze pylons of misrule.⁶⁴

And the second image is a very similar one:

An iron decree in crooked uncials written

Imposed a law of sin and adverse fate.⁶⁵

In another place there is still one more image that resembles the foregoing two. This is only one image in a series of dozens of superb images applied to human Reason:

On the huge bare walls of human nescience

Written round Nature's deep dumb hieroglyphs

She pens in clear demotic characters

The vast encyclopaedia of her thoughts.⁶⁶

This brings us to two images drawn from the legal profession. Both are found applied to Reason. The first is a mixed image and the second one is as it were a continuation of the first from where the legal portion in the first is left unfinished:

The eternal Advocate seated as judge

Armours in logic's invulnerable mail

A thousand combatants for Truth's veiled throne

And sets on a high horseback of argument

To tilt for ever with a wordy lance

In a mock tournament where none can win

Assaying thought's values with her rigid tests

Balanced she sits on wide and empty air,

Aloof and pure in her impartial poise.

Absolute her judgments seem but none is sure;

⁶³p. 203. ⁶⁴p. 203. ⁶⁵p. 204. ⁶⁶p. 251.

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Time cancels all her verdicts in appeal.⁶⁷

The next one is in reference to the destiny of the Earth:

An immortal godhead's perishable parts

She must reconstitute from fragments lost,

Re-word from a document complete elsewhere

Her doubtful title to her divine Name.⁶⁸

This also is an image clothed in legal phraseology and is a very suggestive one, pointing out to us the relation of the Earth with the Divine. Most unexpected and surprising in the context is the use of the following image, which too is in semi-legal terminology. It is applied to the Earth-Goddess:

Heaven's privilege she claims as her own right.

Just is her claim the all-witnessing Gods approve,

Clear in a greater light than reason owns:

Our intuitions are its title-deeds.⁶⁹

Even when we have read the first three lines we are not in the least able to anticipate the most amazing metaphor that comes crashingly upon us in the fourth line; for, the words "privilege", "right" and "claim" are as much ordinary terms as they are legal technical terms and the phrase "all-witnessing", although followed by the verb "approve", is not sufficient to bring to our mind the technical legal sense attached to it, as we usually take the phrase to mean "all-seeing". That is why the image of title-deeds as applied to intuitions comes as a complete surprise, and it is only after rereading the first three lines in the light of the surprise given to us by the fourth line that we awake to the legal sense of the various terms used in them.

Here is another image taken from the canto dealing with the descent of Aswapati into the kingdom of Night:

Injustice justified by firm decrees

The sovereign weights of Error's legalised trade,

But all the weights were false and none the same;

Even she watched with her balance and a sword

⁶⁷ 252. ⁶⁸p. 107. ⁶⁹p. 52.

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Lest any sacrilegious word expose

The sanctified formulas of her old misrule.⁷⁰

The whole description of Aswapati's sojourn through that nocturnal kingdom is simply marvellous, showing us how even the best things in life become perverted and are put to use by the dark forces to achieve their fiendish ends.

This last image of trade leads us to mention another image used in another setting. This time it is a grotesque figure that is applied to Reason to show what hampered and puny a place she occupies in this world.

bullock yoked in the cart of proven fact,

She drags huge knowledge-bales through Matter's dust

To reach utility's immense bazaar.⁷¹

This is another of the dozens of images applied to Reason, that we referred to just a little earlier.

Now we come to a group of images which might have been inspired by the World War.

A cowled fifth-columnist is now thought's guide;

His subtle defeatist murmer slays the faith

And, lodged in the breast or whispering from outside,

A lying inspiration fell and dark

A new order substitutes for the divine.⁷²

The next one also is from the same canto, and is clearly taken from war-conditions:

So might one fall on the Eternal's road Forfeiting the spirit's lonely chance in Time And no news of him reach the waiting gods, Marked "missing" in the register of souls, His name the index of a failing hope, The position of a dead remembered star.⁷³

Another image is that of flares:

⁷⁰p. 209. ^7lp. 252. ^,2p. 224-25. "pp. 210-11.

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And like a sky-flare showing all the ground

A swift intuitive discernment shone.⁷⁴

The following image is more fully developed:

As far as its self-winged airplanes could fly,

Visiting the future in great brilliant raids,.

It reconnoitered vistas of dream-fate.⁷⁵

This image refers to the "high-winged Life-Thought" (p. 258) which is above the human Mind and Reason and overshadows them. The next image is a mixed one:

A specialist of logic's hard machine

Imposed its rigid artifice on the soul;

An aide of the inventor intellect,

It cut Truth into manageable bits

That each might have his ration of thought-food.⁷⁶

This image of food is found once before in The Decent into Night, but in a quite different context and as forming part of another bigger image:

Progress became a purveyor of Death.

A world that clung to the law of a slain Light

Cherished the putrid corpses of dead truths,

Hailed twisted forms as things free, new and true,

Beauty from ugliness and evil drank

Feeling themselves guests at a banquet of the gods

And tasted corruption like a high-spiced food.⁷⁷

The images derived from business, trade, mathematics, language, law and even modem warfare show how even the most modem things can become, in the hands of a great poet and mystic, beautiful and at the same time apt figures in a poetry dealing with little known spiritual and mystic topics. And here lies also the difference between that group of modem English poets headed by T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and others on one side and Sri Aurobindo on the other. Those English poets as well as Sri Aurobindo use

⁷⁴p. 37. ⁷⁵p. 259. ⁷⁶p. 242. ⁷⁷p. 204.

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modem images and still what a difference! Not that the former use ineffective images; far from it: an image such as

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherised upon the table,

suggests much more than what it bears upon its face; and we cannot say that such images are ineffective or insipid. But all the same our soul and even our deeper aesthetic sense always remain dissatisfied, always feel that something is wrong somewhere in these kinds of images. At any rate, we never feel that we are reading some soul-uplifting poetry when we peruse the works of those modernist authors. The images that are inspired in their minds have got their source somewhere no doubt in the deeper layers of our consciousness, but they are the layers that had better be left untapped rather than be made the founts of our poetic inspiration. For they are not the sublime domains of Saraswati, the Goddess-Muse of real divine poetry. On the other hand, Sri Aurobindo's images are equally modem, sometimes even too modem, but at the same time they are not fed by the underworld beings inhabiting our subconscient. Their food is the ambrosia of the gods, their drink the nectar dripping from the Superconscient.

But it would be a mistake to call Sri Aurobindo modem even as it would be incorrect to call him ancient either. For he is beyond Time: he accepts whatever is good from the past equally as whatever is good in the present. But pre-eminently he is a poet of the future. The poetry he has given in Savitri, especially while dealing with Aswapati's Yoga and his travelling in the other worlds, is as yet unfathomable for the average human mind of today. The knowledge he has utilised as the basis of that poetry is the Yogic knowledge which has yet not become the common possession of human consciousness. That poetry will be appreciated better when, some time in future, humanity — or at least a part of it — has received glimpses of those invisible yet very real occult worlds.

But let us return once again to our subject from this little digression. So far we have on the whole seen the images that are so much liked by the modem mind. But there are perhaps an equal number of other images given by Sri Aurobindo, which are conventional and found used throughout the length and breadth of the literature of the world. But in Sri Aurobindo's hands they cease to be conventional or stereotyped; they are infused by him with a

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new breath and a new spirit. We shall consider here only some of them, for they are literally in hundreds, perhaps even in thousands.

The well-known image of the mother suckling her child is used by Sri Aurobindo in various places; but in each use of it, there is a unique force and significance gushing forth from it.

The calm indulgence and maternal breasts

Of Wisdom suckling the child-laughter of Chance.⁷⁸

The amazing originality in the application of this image needs no comment.

A spirit dreamed in the crude cosmic whirl,

Mind flowed unknowing in the sap of life

And Matter's breasts suckled the divine Idea.⁷⁹

This is still more daring than the above. And here is a third instance, which is quite different from the above two.

A bright Error fringed the mystery-altar's frieze;

Darkness grew nurse to wisdom's occult sun,

Myth suckled knowledge with her lustrous milk;

The infant passed from dim to radiant breasts.⁸⁰

From the mother-child relation we shall pass on to images drawn from other human relations. But before doing that, here is a curious image drawn from midwifery. It is curious because one least expects a figure could be drawn from that profession; and it is curious because of its strange application:

Caught in a blind stone-grip Force worked its plan

And made in sleep this huge mechanical world,

That Matter might grow conscious of its soul

And like a busy midwife the life-power

Deliver the zero carrier of the All.⁸¹

Now we turn our attention to images based on other human relations, especially love, marriage, etc. It would appear queer that such figures should be woven into a poetry that is purely spiritual;

⁷⁸p. 41. ⁷⁹p. 101. ⁸⁰p. 242-43. ⁸¹p. 101.

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for it is usually supposed that spirituality is something that should remain alove all such human relations, especially marriage and love between the opposite sexes. But we shall see that it is never the vital or grossly sexual love that is pictured in the images. Love has got many aspects and spirituality cannot reject such love in toto. In Sri Aurobindo's Yoga and Yogic spirituality everything that can be transformed into spiritual values is accepted and only that which cannot be so transformed is to be dropped. There are many things in love between the opposite sexes which can be so spiritualised and raised towards the Divine that they cease to be what they were and get transformed; all such things are taken up, without the least care for the conventional notions of what spirituality should be.

Occult behind this grosser Nature's walls,

A gossamer marriage-hall of Mind with Form

Is hidden by a tapestry of dreams...

A carnival of beauty crowds the heights

In that magic kingdom of ideal sight.

In its antechambers of splendid privacy

Matter and soul in conscious union meet

Like lovers in a lonely secret place:

In the clasp of a passion not yet unfortunate

They join their strength and sweetness and delight.⁸²

And here is another one:

Power laid its head upon the breasts of Bliss.⁸³

And yet another,

She has lured the Eternal into the arms of Time.⁸⁴

And the following is a wonderful picture:

As if sitting near an open window's gap,

He read by lightning-flash on crowding flash

Chapters of her metaphysical romance

Of the soul's search for lost Reality...

The magnificent wrappings of her secrecy

That fold her desirable body out of sight...

⁸²p. 104-05. ⁸³p. 124. ⁸⁴p. 178.

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In her green wildernesses and lurking depths,

In her thickets of joy where danger clasps delight,

He glimpsed the hidden wings of her songster hopes,

A glimmer of blue and gold and scarlet fire...

In the sleepy splendour of her noons he saw,

A perpetual repetition through the hours,

Thought's dance of dragon-flies on mystery's stream

That skim but never test its murmurs' race,

And heard the laughter of her rose desires

Running as if to escape from longed-for hands.⁸⁵

Not only such human relations of love and marriage, but even the criminal side of human nature, such as is displayed by plunderers and smugglers, becomes the source of beautiful images for the Spirit's poetry. In the following lines the image is applied to Inspiration that comes from the higher planes of our being:

Overleaping with a sole and perilous bound

The high black wall hiding superconscience,

She broke in with inspired speech for scythe

And plundered the Unknowable's vast estate.⁸⁶

The following is a very peculiar figure:

His body glimmered like a skyey shell;

His gates to the world were swept with seas of light.

His earth, dowered with celestial competence,

Harboured a power that needed now no more

To cross the closed customs-line of mind and flesh

And smuggle godhead into humanity.⁸⁷

Here is one image drawn from a social gathering where guests are invited:

In moments when the inner lamps are lit

And the life's cherished guests are left outside,

Our spirit sits alone and speaks to its gulfs.⁸⁸

⁸⁵p. 189-90. ⁸⁶p. 39. ⁸⁷p. 236. ⁸⁸p. 47.

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Then, there is a somewhat similar image emphasising the vanity and futility of human happiness:

Here even the highest rapture Time can give

Is a mimicry of ungrasped beatitudes,

A mutilated statue of ecstasy...

Or a simulacrum of enforced delight

In the seraglios of Ignorance.⁸⁹

Now we come to images drawn from Nature. Animals, birds, trees, ocean, sky, moon, are all taken by Sri Aurobindo and woven into images of lovely form and hue. Nature is usually the source from which almost all the poets draw their inspiration, but we see that in Sri Aurobindo she occupies a place quite unique; she breaks through all the conventional figures that have become so boring to us or have lost their significance because of over-use. In his hands the field of Nature becomes as it were a virgin piece of land ploughed for the first time and yielding a wonderful harvest:

A highland world of free and green delight

Where spring and summer lay together and strove

In indolent and amicable debate,

Inarmed, disputing with laughter who should rule.⁹⁰

An insect hedonism fluttered and crawled

And basked in the sunlit Nature's surface thrills,

And dragon raptures, python agonies

Crawled in the marsh and mire and licked the sun.⁹¹

This is a wonderful series of figures drawn from insect and animal life in Nature. Here we may remind ourselves of another image from the same world, already quoted:

Thought's dance of dragon-flies on mystery's stream

That skim but never test its murmurs' race.⁹²

Images drawn from bird-life are also equally fresh and beautiful. Here is one from a long passage:

In her thickets of joy where danger clasps delight,

⁸⁹p. 78. ⁹⁰p. 389. ⁹¹p. 142. ⁹² p. 190.

Page 376

He glimpsed the hidden wings of her songster hopes.⁹³

The following is the image of a bird tired of ceaselessly remaining on the wing:

A prototypal deft Intelligence

Half-poised on equal wings of thought and doubt

Toiled ceaselessly twixt being's hidden ends.⁹⁴

These are strange wings indeed for any bird. The next one is applied to the spirit of Savitri following Satyavan's soul:

Then flaming from her body's nest, alarmed,

Her violent spirit soared at Satyavan.⁹⁵

And finally, there is a gorgeous image from bird-life:

Delight shall sleep in the cloud-net of her hair

And in her body as on his homing tree

Immortal Love shall beat his glorious wings.⁹⁶

Then there are images drawn from animal-life.

The neighing pride of rapid life that roams

Wind-maned through our pastures, on my seeing mood

Cast shapes of swiftness...⁹⁷

This image of a horse applied to life reminds us of the same image frequently used in the Veda. The next two images are both applied to the Desire-Mind of man. Sri Aurobindo also calls it, "A hunchback rider of the red Wild-Ass, A rash Intelligence... lionmaned."

A huge chameleon gold and blue and red

Turning to black and grey and lurid brown,

Hungry it stared from a mottled bough of life

To snap up insect joys, its favourite food,

The dingy sustenance of a sumptuous frame

Nursing the splendid passion of its hues.⁹⁸

⁹¹p. 190. ⁹⁴p. 241. ⁹⁵p. 578. ⁹⁶p. 346. ⁹⁷p. 404. ⁹⁸p. 247.

Page 377

What an apt and splendid image it is for the Desire-Mind wearing a thousand shapes and taking numberless names! The next one too is very appropriate:

A snake of flame with a dark cloud for tail,

Followed by a dream-brood of glittering thoughts,

A lifted head with many-tinged flickering crests,

It licked at knowledge with a smoky tongue.⁹⁹

If this Desire-Mind is a chameleon and a snake, "pigmy thought", which is a "rivetter of Life of habit's grooves", is a watch-dog of the spirit's house; while human Reason is a bullock. We give here the image of the watch-dog in full:

Or in an ancient Night's dim environs

It dozes on a little courtyard's stones

And barks at every unfamiliar light

As at a foe who would break up its home,

A watch-dog of the spirit's sense-railed house

Against intruders from the Invisible,

Nourished on scraps of life and Matter's bones

In its kennel of objective certitude.¹⁰⁰

This is an image marvellously conceived and superbly executed in its details. Reason is not simply a bullock dragging knowledge-bales, but is comparable to another animal as well:

By the power of sense and the idea and word

She ferrets out Nature's process, substance, cause.¹⁰¹

The image of horses is suggested in another place, where the subject is Life:

...she has stabled her dreams in Matter's courts.¹⁰²

And another image from horse-racing is this:

Our minds are starters in the race to God.¹⁰³

Next we have some images drawn from plant-life and flowers and gardening. The first one is applied to Life:

⁹⁹pp. 247-48. ^l00pp. 246-47. ¹⁰¹ p. 250. ¹⁰²p. 123. ¹⁰³p. 169.

Page 378

Only she clung with her roots to the safe earth,

Thrilled dumbly to the shocks of ray and breeze

And put out tendril fingers of desire.¹⁰⁴

The next one is a fine image pertaining to the lotus:

In gleaming clarities of amethyst air

The chainless and omnipotent Spirit of Mind

Brooded on the blue lotus of the Idea.^l05

Then there is a lovely image following upon another lovely image (p. 405):

Mountains and trees stood there like thoughts from God.

Pranked butterflies, the conscious flowers of air.

And here is an equally vivid picture drawn in a single line:

He tore desire up from its bleeding roots.¹⁰⁶

The following one is taken from gardening and is applied to the world of Falsehood:

There Good, a faithless gardener of God,

Watered with virtue the world's upas-tree

And, careful of the outward word and act,

Engrafted his hypocrite blooms on native ill.¹⁰⁷

Then we take images drawn from natural scenery like mountains, sea, sky, moon, etc.

There walled apart by its own innemess

In a mystical barrage of dynamic light

He saw a lone immense high-curved world-pile

Erect like a mountain chariot of the Gods

Motionless under an inscrutable sky.

As if from Matter's plinth and viewless base

To a top as viewless, a carved sea of worlds

Climbing with foam-maned waves to the Supreme

Ascended towards breadths immeasurable.¹⁰⁸

¹⁰⁴p. 157. ^I05p. 264. ¹⁰⁶p. 318. ¹⁰⁷pp. 221-_|22. ¹⁰⁸pp- 97-98.

Page 379

Another bunch of related images we have already noted and we shall not repeat them here. The following is a conventional image but used with a charm all its own:

Her body of beauty mooned the seas of bliss.¹⁰⁹

Then there is a lovely mixed image:

An architect hewing out self s living rock,

Phenomenon built Reality's summer-house

On the beaches of the sea of Infinity."¹¹⁰

And the next one is a picture conjured up in a single line

A foam-leap travelling from the waves of bliss.'¹¹¹

And another one:

Deep glens of joy ad crooning waterfalls.¹¹²

And still another:

... imagination's comet trail of dream.¹¹³

The following is an image partly drawn from Nature and partly human life, and somewhat reminiscent of Shelley and Francis Thompson:

The nude God-children in their play-fields ran

Smiting the winds with splendour and with speed;

Of storm and sun they made companions,

Sported with the white mane of tossing seas.¹¹⁴

This image of playfields occurs elsewhere in a different context:

The little plot of our mortality

Touched by this tenant from the heights became

A playground of the living Infinite.¹¹⁵

¹⁰⁹p.314. ¹¹⁰P. 329. ¹¹¹ p. 408. ¹¹² p.234. ¹¹³p.120. ¹¹⁴p.126

Page 380

There are two beautiful images taken from agriculture. The first is applied to Inspiration, in which she is called.

A gleaner of infinitesimal grains of Truth,

A sheaf-binder of infinite experience.¹¹⁶

The second is applied to man:

A lightning from the heights that think and plan,

Ploughing the air of life with vanishing trails,

Man, sole awake in an unconscious world,

Aspires in vain to change the cosmic dream.¹¹⁷

In the image of grains we have "grains of Truth" (p. 39), while quite in opposite is the case of the "early being" described in the following thus:

Its treacherous elements spread like slippery grains

Hoping the incoming Truth might stumble and fall.¹¹⁸

There are two images of passport, which are quite different from each other:

Assigned to meet the cosmic mystery

In the dumb figure of material world,

His passport of entry false and his personage,

He is compelled to be what he is not.¹¹⁹

This is the description of the plight of man and so is the next:

Our spirits depart discarding a futile life

Into the black unknown or with them take

Death's passport into immortality.¹²⁰

There are two images which somewhat resemble each other:

A mounting endless possibility

Climbs high upon a topless ladder of dream.¹²¹

¹¹⁶p. 39. ^Il7p. 336. ¹¹⁸pp. 317-18. ^Il9p. 337. ¹²⁰p. 167. ^I2lp. 176.

Page 381

The second one shows the stair of Time:

And things long known and actions always done

Are to its clinging hold a balustrade

Of safety on the perilous stair of Time.¹²²

This figure is applied to the "pigmy habitual Thought" we have referred to before. The next image relates to the greater life.

Across a luminous dream of spirit-space

She builds creation like a rainbow bridge

Between the original Silence and the Void.¹²³

This idea of creation becoming a bridge between the Silence and the Void is a lovely idea. The double image of bridge and rainbow is extremely happy and full of significance.

There is another pair or ideas which also is equally beautiful and equally apt:

The Immobile's ocean-silence saw him pass,

An arrow leaping through eternity

Suddenly shot from the tense bow of Time.¹²⁴

This refers to the Traveller of the Worlds, King Aswapati. The originality of the image of the arrow shot from the bow of Time is very striking. A very similar image is to be found in the following line:

In every hour loosed from the quiver of Time

There rose a song of new discovery,

A bow-twang's hum of young experiment.¹²⁵

In the first it is the image of bow that is applied to Time, while in this second it is the image of quiver. But there all the resemblance stops. For the arrow in the first case is Aswapati himself and he is shown to be leaping out of Time into the Timeless Eternity, while in the second case it is the hour that is the arrow. In the next image also there is wonderful freshness:

¹²²p. 246. ¹²³p.l82. ^I24p. 79. ^l25p.30.

Page 382

Alone he moved watched by the infinity

Around him and the Unknowable above.¹²⁶

And the sense of immensity it suggests stirs the profoundest depths of our being. A similar feeling is stirred within us when we read:

The dire velamen and the bottomless crypt

Between which life and thought for ever move,

Forbidden still to cross the dim dread bounds,

The guardian darknesses mute and formidable,

Empowered to cricumscribe the wingless spirit

In the boundaries of Mind and Ignorance,

Vanished rescinding their enormous role:

Once figure of creation's vain ellipse,

The expanding zero lost its giant curve...

A boundless being in a measureless Time

Invaded Nature with the infinite;

He saw unpathed, unwalled his titan scope.¹²⁷

The image of two fires joining with each other is seen in two places, but in quite different moods and contexts:

Emotion clasped emotion in two hearts,

They felt each other's thrill in the flesh and nerves

Or melted each in each and grew immense

As when two houses burn and fire joins fire.¹²⁸

Yet were there regions where these absolutes met

And made a circle of bliss with married hands;

Light stood embraced by light, fire wedded fire.¹²⁹

Now we shall take some other images which could not be taken in groups, but are exceedingly beautiful. The first one is a mixed figure:

The black Inconscient swung its dragon tail

Lashing a slumberous Infinite by its force

Into the deep obscurities of form:

Death lay beneath him like a gate of sleep.¹³⁰

¹²⁶p. 95. ^I27pp. 82-83. ¹²⁸p. 186. ¹²⁹p. 281. ¹³⁰p. 79.

Page 383

This is a very daring picture and a very suggestive one too.

A finer substance in a subtler mould

Embodies the divinity earth but dreams;

Its strength can overtake joy's running feet;

Overleaping the fixed hurdles set by Time,

The rapid net of an intuitive clasp

Captures the fugitive happiness we desire.¹³¹

In these six lines or, rather, in the last four of them, there are more than one image huddled together. Time receives many images, each lovelier than the other. Here are some:

Out of that formless like stuff Time mints his shapes.¹³²

Like a song of pleasure on the lips of Time.¹³³

Talking of Time, we may mention two images applied to days:

This brilliant courtyard of the House of Days.¹³⁴

A fortunate gait of days in tranquil air.¹³⁵

The image of a ship foundering occurs in two places:

A fruitful world-wide Ignorance foundered there.¹³⁶

In the second place where it is used there is a double image:

His self-bound nature foundered as in fire.¹³⁷

The image of a house also is used twice. Once in the following lines, where it is a mixed image:

Our mind is a house haunted by the slain past,

Ideas soon mummified, ghosts of old truths,

God's spontaneities tied with formal strings

And packed into drawers of reason's trim bureau,

A grave of great lost opportunities,

Or an office for misuse of soul and life.¹³⁸

¹³¹pp. 111-12. ¹³²p. 120. ¹³³p. 127. ¹³⁴p. 115. ¹³⁵p. 127.

¹³⁶p. 307.¹³⁷p. 396. ¹³⁸p- 285-86.

Page 384

And again in:

He saw in Night the Eternal's shadowy veil,

Knew death for a cellar of the house of life.

In destruction felt creation's hasty pace.¹³⁹

The following lines refer to the "agents of shadowy Force" of evil:

The doors of God they have locked with keys of creed

And shut out by the Law his tireless Grace.

Along all Nature's lines they have set their posts

And intercept the caravans of Light.¹⁴⁰

Then there is a beautiful image drawn from colonisation:

Ourselves are citizens of that mother State,

Adventurers, we have colonised Matter's night.

But now our rights are barred, our passports void;

We live self-exiled from our heavenlier home.¹⁴¹

The mother State referred to here is the Kingdom of the Greater or Ideal Mind. We may note, in passing, the image of passport given here and compare it with the two already given earlier.

And here is a modernist image of exquisite beauty utilised for spiritual ends; it is applied to 'a subtle archangel race', 'theoricians of unknowable truths', on one of the levels of the Greater Mind:

Imposing schemes of knowledge on the Vast

They clamped to syllogisms of finite thought

The free logic of an infinite consciousness,

Grammared the hidden rhythms of Nature's dance,

Critiqued the plot of the drama of the worlds,

Made figure and number a key to all that is:

The psycho-analysis of cosmic Self

Was traced, its secrets hunted down, and read

The unknown pathology of the Unique.¹⁴²

In the fourth line in the above quotation we get an image which is

¹³⁹p. 231. ¹⁴⁰ 225. ¹⁴¹ p. 262. ¹⁴²p. 269.

Page 385

a miracle one for Nature's dance. There is another strangely mixed image drawn from the art of dancing, this time the combination being made of Eastern and Western imagery:

Creation and destruction waltzed inarmed

On the bosom of a torn and quaking earth;

All reeled into a world of Kali's dance.¹⁴³

From these images taken from dancing, we go to an image drawn from drama and stage:

No wandering ray of Heaven can enter there.

Armoured, protected by their lethal masks,

As in a studio of creative Death

The giant sons of Darkness sit and plan The drama

of the earth, their tragic stage.¹⁴⁴

We have already seen some images applied to human Reason. Here is one more taken from science:

Arriving late from a far plane of thought...

Came Reason, the squat godhead artisan,

To her narrow house upon a ridge in Time-

Armed with her lens and measuring-rod and probe,

She looked upon an object universe

And the multitudes that in it live and die

And the body of Space and the fleeing soul of Time,

And took the earth and stars into her hands

To try what she could make of these strange things.¹⁴⁵

And another image also applied to Reason, is the following:

At will she spaces in thin air of mind

like maps in the school-house of intellect hung,

Forcing wide Truth into a narrow scheme,

Her numberless warring strict philosphies.¹⁴⁶

An effective image is:

¹⁴³ p. 255. ¹⁴⁴p. 226-27. ¹⁴⁵ p. 249. ¹⁴⁶ p. 251.

Page 386

A piston brain pumps out the shapes of thought.¹⁴⁷

And a quite unexpected image and a daring one at that, is:

A million faces wears her knowledge here

And every face is turbaned with a doubt.¹⁴⁸

Our world's comparison to a gaol is beautifully given in the following lines:

A gaol is this immense material world.

Across each road stands armed a stone-eyed law,

At every gate the huge dim sentinels pace.

A grey tribunal of the Ignorance,

An Inquisition of the priests of Night

In judgment sit on the adventurer soul,

And the dual tables and the Karmic norm

Restrain the Titan in us and the God.¹⁴⁹

The next image is applied to life:

Chance she has chosen and danger for playfellows;

Fate's dreadful swing she has taken for cradle and seat.¹⁵⁰

Fate becomes a cradle, mind becomes a nursery in which Nature and soul carry on their play:

A blindfold search and wrestle and fumbling clasp

Of a half-seen Nature and a hidden Soul,

A game of hide and seek in twilit rooms,

A play of love and hate and fear and hope

Continues in the nursery of mind

Its hard and heavy romp of self-bom twins.¹⁵¹

Nature and soul play on their game of hide and seek in the nursery of human's mind, but it is equally true that,

His life is a blind-man's-buff, a hide-and-seek.¹⁵²

^I47p. 20. ^I48p. 251. ¹⁴⁹p. 118. ¹⁵⁰p. 118. ^I5lp. 141 ¹⁵²p. 337.

Page 387

Is this play aimless or is there any purpose behind it? There must be some purpose behind all these multitudinous events that happen in the universe, but as yet are

only seen foulness and force,

The secret crawl of consciousness to light

Through a fertile slime of lust and battening sense,

Beneath the body's crust of thickened self

A tardy fervent working in the dark,

The turbid yeast of Nature's passionate change,

Ferment of the soul's creation out of mire.¹⁵³

Fate is taken by life not only for cradle but also for seat. But the seat of Aswapati is very unique;

In the unapproachable stillness of his soul,

Intense, one-pointed, monumental, lone

Patient he sat like an incarnate hope

Motionless on a pedestal of prayer.¹⁵⁴

There is a very fine image in the description of Aswapati's descent into light:

In rejected heaps by a monotonous road

The old simple delights were left to lie

On the wasteland of life's descent to Night.¹⁵⁵

In those "menacing realms" of Night, "guarded like termite cities from the sun" (p. 216),

Assailed by thoughts that swarmed like spectral hordes,

A prey to the staring phantoms of the gloom

And terror approaching with its lethal mouth,

Driven by a strange will down ever down,

The sky above a communiqué of Doom,

He strove to shield his spirit from despair.¹⁵⁶

Before reaching the "large lucent realms of Mind", Aswapati

¹⁵³p. 138. ^I54p. 317. ^155,p. 205 ^l56p. 217.

Page 388

...met a silver-grey expanse,

Where Day and Night had wedded and were one...

A coalition of uncertainties...

On a ground reserved for doubt and reasoned guess,

A rendezvous of Knowledge with Ignorance.¹⁵¹

Quite different is the picture given of Aswapati when he reaches the final part of his Sadhana and feels the presence of the Divine Mother.

Intoxicated as with nectarous rain

His nature's passioning stretches flowed to her

Flashing with lightnings, mad with luminous wine.

All was a limitless sea that heaved to the moon.

A divinising stream possessed his veins,

His body's cells awoke to spirit sense,

Each nerve became a burning thread of joy.¹⁵⁸

But perhaps the most gorgeous description in the whole poem (so far published, May 1951) is that in which Aswapati describes to the Divine Mother what he saw. Figure after figure, image after image, "come crowding down" with the spendour of the "marvellous dawn" mentioned therein. Here is the description:

I saw the Omnipotent's flaming pioneers

Over the heavenly verge which turns towards life

Come crowding down the amber stairs of birth;

Forerunners of a divine multitude

Out of the paths of the morning star they came

Into the little room of mortal life.

I saw them cross the twilight of an age,

The sun-eyed children of a marvellous dawn,

The great creators with wide brows of calm,

The massive barrier-breakers of the world

And wrestlers with destiny in her lists of will,

The labourers in the quarries of the gods,

The messengers of the Incommunicable,

the architects of immortality.

Into the fallen human sphere they came,

¹⁵⁷p. 239. ¹⁵⁸p. 334.

Page 389

Faces that wore the Immortal's glory still,

Voices that communed still with the thoughts of God,

Bodies made beautiful by the Spirit's light,

Carrying the magic word, the mystic fire,

Carrying the Dionysian cup of joy,

Approaching eyes of a diviner man,

Lips chanting an unknown anthem of the soul,

Feet echoing in the corridors of Time.

High priests of wisdom, sweetness, might and bliss,

Discoverers of beauty's sunlit ways

And swimmers of Love's laughing fiery floods

And dancers within raptures golden doors.¹⁵⁹

And here is a gorgeous imagery of Shiva applied to nature, reminding us of similar images of the poet Magha in his great Sanskrit poem:

A matted forest-head invaded heaven

As if a blue-throated ascetic peered

From the stone fastness of his mountain cell

Regarding the brief gladness of the days.¹⁶⁰

And another image is

The morning like a lustrous seer above.¹⁶¹

Which is followed closely by another exquisite image:

As if a wicket-gate to joy were

there Ringed in with voiceless hint and magic sign,

Upon the margin of an unknown world

Reclined the curve of a sun-held recess.¹⁶²

And a little farther:

Life ran to gaze from every gate of sense.¹⁶³

And a crowning one,

¹⁵⁹pp. 343-44. ¹⁶⁰pp. 390-91; cf. Magha's Shishupala-Vadha, IV. 5,7. ¹⁶¹p. 392. ¹⁶²p. 392. ^163,p. 395.

Page 390

...this celestial summary of delight,

Thy golden body...¹⁶⁴

Descriptions of Nature in the forest are teeming with splendour-dripping images:

I witnessed the virgin bridals of the dawn

Behind the glowing curtains of the sky

Or vying in joy with the bright morning's steps

I paced along the slumberous coasts of mom,

Or the gold desert of the sunlight crossed

Traversing great wastes of splendour and of fire...

I have beheld the princes of the Sun

Burning in thousand-pillared homes of light.¹⁶⁵

And another equally lovely description is:

Close is my father's creepered hermitage

Screened by the tall ranks of these silent kings,

Sung to by voices of the hue-robed choirs

Whose chants repeat transcribed in music's notes

The passionate coloured lettering of the boughs.¹⁶⁶

And the last one:

Apparelled are the moms in gold and green,

Sunlight and shadow tapestry the walls

To make a resting chamber fit for thee.¹⁶⁷

And finally,

As if Love's deathless moment had been found,

A pearl within eternity's white shell.¹⁶⁸

Here we end our perusal of Sri Aurobindo's imagery in Savitri. These are only a few among the thousands of images which form

A caravan of the inexhaustible

¹⁶⁴p. 402. ¹⁶⁵p. 401.

¹⁶⁶p. 402. ¹⁶⁷p. 402. ¹⁶⁸p. 579.

Page 391

Formations of a boundless Thought and Force.¹⁶⁹

And we also feel that to Sri Aurobindo,

As if to a deeper country of the soul

Transposing the vivid imagery of earth,

Through an inner seeing and sense a waking came.¹⁷⁰

For Savitri is no composition of an ordinary poet, but that of a Poet and Seer of the Supermind, chosen by the Divine for the fulfilment of the next step in the evolution of mankind.

RAJANIKANT MODY

¹⁶⁹p. 177. ¹⁷⁰p. 404.

Page 392

PART IV

The Rhythm of Savitri

-l-

The rhythms of Savitri are the footsteps heard in the corridors of the soul. The themes of Savitri are each one's deepest secret, one's most private dealings with the Universal and the Transcendent. One has no right to interfere, to come in between, to put words and thoughts where insights and visions are the transforming agents.

One needs an excuse to write on Savitri, to break the silence which underlies every word and line. There may be no excuse, but there sure is the joy of working with, and on, Savitri and of sharing discoveries of beauty and rhythm.

Sri Aurobindo explained and discussed the meaning and poetic beauty and rhythm of many a line. There are similar waves and rhythms in the poem as a whole and in its various parts. Each Canto is a total piece with its own poetic values, its own complex grandeur, its own simple wholeness. In a similar way as the poetic qualities of each line can be studied, we intend to penetrate into the qualities and structures of larger units, the Cantos. They have a personality, a distinctive power, a soul of their own, with which we want to come in contact, in order to meet the Cosmic and the Transcendent in our own depths. The Cantos are like sub-gurus guiding us Mantra by Mantra towards high integration.

We pray to the Master and the Mother for insight growing towards the depths and heights of Savitri. May the little mind be quiet before the wonders of all the worlds, may the soul resound, may the glory and beauty not diminish under an analytic knife and be experienced in their overwhelming splendour by our diving into their streams and floating on their waves.

We shall take Canto I, Book I, The Symbol Dawn, for our present study.

If we accept that Savitri is an inspiration of the highest planes we should not be surprised that it is a perfect work, in which each detail has its proper place, each part is properly related to all other parts, each thought or insight has just the breath it needs. It is not only perfect in the expression of its philosophy, but even in the subtle play of its minor details; each word, each line is put where it belongs according to rhythms which go beyond any mental

planning or calculating. Still, it abounds with accuracies in general layout and positions of detail, some of which we want to trace, just to enjoy the play of subtleties. From each level of consciousness one has to re-read the whole poem and one will find new rhythms, new structures and new subtleties; one will enjoy more and more, discover more and more, and realise accordingly.

In the first Canto both Savitri and Satyavan are mentioned, both only once:

And Savitri too awoke among these tribes.¹

This was the day when Satyavan must die.²

One wonders why Savitri comes in somewhere half-way, in the 186th line and Satyavan at the end, in the 341st and last line. If the work is perfect there must be a reason. And why in this first Canto 341 lines? Why not 360, the full circle, the clock round? Or 365, a full year? Where is the pattern, the over-all design, the rhythm?

The perfect work is perfect into the number of its words and lines. Not because Sri Aurobindo has been counting and calculating, but because this playful perfection is a characteristic of the subtle realms from where the work descends. Sometimes they show their face more clearly, almost shockingly clear, maybe to encourage us. An example we find in the 24 lines at the beginning of the second Canto of Book I (see at the end of the article.). Savitri, just awake, on that last day of the year she spent with Satyavan, looks back over the years of her childhood and over the last year, locating her present position in time:

Twelve passionate months led in a day of fate.³

It is a little poem of 24 lines in the grand total poem. With the 341 lines of the first Canto, this poem brings the number of lines up to 365. "Twelve passionate months," 365 days with Satyavan, line 365! A subtle similarity. And "led in a day of fate." The last day, 24 hours, the 24th line of Canto II!

-2-

Canto I has two parts, demarcated by a break after line 185. The first line of the second part has Savitri in it, the last one Satyavan.

¹ Savitri, p. 6. ² Ibid., p. 10 ³ Ibid., p. 11.

Page 394

Studying the development of images in the first part we see clear breaks in lines 30, 120 and 150:

30: Then something in the inscrutable darkness stirred.

120: Once more a tread perturbed the vacant Vasts.

150: Then the divine afflatus, spent, withdrew.

This makes us wonder about lines 60 and 90. In 60 it is less clear, but surely there is, around line 60, a shift in the presentation of the symbols. In 90 unmistakably a new type of image starts with "A wandering hand of pale enchanted light." Taking for a while line 60 "A scout in a reconnaissance from the sun," as a concretisation of the images presented before, we see an interesting layout in the first half of Canto I:

1.(1): It was the hour before the gods awake. 29 lines

2.(30): Then something in the inscrutable darkness stirred. 30 lines

3.(60): A scout in a reconnaissance from the seen. 30 lines

4.(90): A wandering hand of pale enchanted light. 30 lines

5.(120): Once more a tread perturbed the vacant Vasts. 30 lines

6.(150): Then the divine afflatus, spent, withdrew. 30 lines

Six lines remain, describing the awakening:

All sprang to their unvarying daily acts.

Trying out the same rhythmic movement of thirties on the second half of the Canto we see this pattern:

7.(186): And Savitri too awoke among these tribes. 30 lines

8.(216): A prodigal of her rich divinity. 30 lines

9.(246): Thus trapped in the gin of earthly destinies. 30 lines

10.(276): Apart, living within, all lives she bore. 30 lines

11.(306): At the summons of her body's voiceless call. 29 lines

Again 6 lines remain: 335: "Awake she endured the moments' serried march."

And one more line follows: "This was the day when Satyavan must die."

The pattern of Canto I would look as follows:

29-30-30-30-30-30-6-1

30-30-30-30-29-6-1

The places of Savitri and Satyavan fit into the overall rhythm:

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after six parts plus six lines we hear as the seventh: "And Savitri too awoke among these tribes." And after five more parts plus the same six lines we have as the seventh: "This was the day when Satyavan must die." It almost is the clock round, it almost is a full circle. We find eleven parts of 29/30 lines, and we will consider the 2 x 6 lines as one part, the twelfth, consisting of twelve lines. Twelve parts, comparable to the full poem in twelve Books. The total poem has 24,000 lines minus some, the first Canto has 360 lines minus a few. The twelfth part in both is an "epilogue."

-3-

Before studying the eleven parts of 29/30 lines we will analyse the rhyme structure of the twice 6 + 1 lines:

180.All sprang to their unvarying daily acts;

181.The thousand peoples of the soil and tree

182.Obeyed the unforeseeing instant's urge,

183.And, leader here with his uncertain mind,

184.Alone who stares at the future's covered face,

185.Man lifted up the burden of his fate.

186.And Savitri too awoke among these tribes.

335.Awake she endured the moments' serried march

336.And looked on this green smiling dangerous world,

337.And heard the ignorant cry of living things.

338.Amid the trivial sounds, the unchanging scene

339.Her soul arose confronting Time and Fate.

340.Immobile in herself, she gathered force.

341.This was the day when Satyavan must die.

It is not so much the precise words that form the rhyme, it rathar is the overall feeling of the two parts. It is twice an awakening, first of the world and the peoples, then of Savitri herself. It is twice the same process of awakening, but with Savitri we take distance from it in the second part, looking down on it, witnessing. The first three lines of both parts are similar, except for the "she endured, looked, heard".

The first three lines rhyme with each other:

their unvarying daily acts

— the moments' serried march

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the thousand peoples of the soil and tree

—this green smiling dangerous world

the unforeseeing instant's urge

—the ignorant cry of living things.

The three last lines of both sections are rhyming too. Three key-concepts are described:

—his uncertain mind

—the future's covered face

—the burden of his fate.

The same three concepts enter into Savitri's awakening, but now in a higher octave: not the mind, but "her soul arose". It arose to the same things as man, but now no longer to "stare and lift up the burden" but to "confront" both key-concepts: 'Time and Fate".

-4-

1.The first movement of The Symbol Dawn (1-29) describes the beginning before the beginnings. It is the inconscient, characterised by the key-words "mind of Night" (3), "Zero" (9), "Nothingness" (11), "Nought" (15), "Void" (25).

2.From 30 onwards something begins to stir. A "something" that is given many tentative names:

a nameless movement — 31

an unthought idea — 31

an unremembered entity — 44

an unshaped consciousness — 48

a blank prescience — 49

an infant longing — 53

It is the beginning of Aspiration, as the Mother describes. No longer does the movement take place in the Inconscient, but in the Subconscient, the Ignorance.

3.A third movement starts in 54, becoming more precise in 60. The "something" of the Subconscient reaches higher realms of vital and mental quality. The key-words now are: a thought, a sense, a memory, a hope, an appeal, a touch. We may call this third movement the birth of Mind.

In the first three movements, 90 lines (-1), 90 degrees, a quarter

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of the full circle, we have our earthly base and the material we are to work with. It is the lower hemisphere of existence, on the basis of which the three transformations are to take place. The concepts are vague, undefined, in the grip of the dark night from which they are bom, in which they are sown.

The dialects of the Cosmic Language are many. Numbers speak of the underlying order, stars and planets reflect the larger harmonies, inspired books like Savitri express the Universal and are our grammar books for the Language of the Gods. No wonder the dialects intersect in many ways, shift over into and interpret each other. The first Canto clearly uses as a general pattern some structures similar to the ones we meet in the Zodiac. The first trilogy of the cosmic signs, the first 90° of the wheel of existence has the same movements: first the nothingness in which slumbers the Divine Spark, Aries, a fire sign; then Taurus, the sign of Earth, of Matter, and next Gemini in which Mind originates: "A thought was sown in the unsounded void, a sense was born..." (70-71). The ruling planet of Gemini is Mercury, the Messenger of the Gods, of the Sun. It may be he who is so straightaway introduced in 60: "A scout in a reconnaissance from the sun." He is the divine messenger, never more than 30° off from the sun, whose "message crept through the reluctant hush, calling the adventure of consciousness and joy." (66-7)

-5-

On the basis of our earthly existence three more movements follow; the first one, 90-120, lets a light shine through, which is not of this earth, it is a "gate of dreams", "a lucent comer", careful at first, then "an outpour" of revelation and flame. But this light is an announcement only, not the full epiphany. It is "an instant's visitor" telling of the marvels still to come. When again put in the framework of the Zodiac we can identify this "instant's visitor" as the "gestation of the psychic" which characterises the fourth sign, Cancer, corresponding to the Soul. In short, this fourth movement may be seen as a poetic description of the arrival and breaking through of the psychic being on the terrestrial scene. It is a beginning of light, not the fullness, it announces rather than accomplishes, it tells of "a greatness of spiritual dawns". It is the "almost... almost...". The full Epiphany is still in the making.

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A new and more complete movement starts in 120. The steps taken are more concrete. It now is a Face, a Form, a Goddess. We may consider this movement as a description of the second great transformation, the spiritual, in which are "kindled to fire the silence of the worlds." (134) We are in the sign of Leo, a Fire sign, the sign of the creative force of Spirit. It is ruled by the Sun, so nicely and subtly brought in when the Omniscient Goddess "half looked behind for her veiled sun". While Cancer, the fourth movement, is characterised by Prakriti, here we are in the atmosphere of the Purusha. It is the sign of Sri Aurobindo.

From 150-180 we would expect the description of the third great transformation, the Supramental. However, things — and we — are not ready. It is "too perfect". The divine afflatus withdraws and we are left with a sacred yearning, (152), and the "prescience of a marvellous birth to come", to prepare us for this "excess of beauty". So much still has to happen before we will be able to bear the Supramental light. And first she has to come who will make the earth ready for the great Descent. Right away She awakes among the tribes.

-6-

Now we have reached halfway Canto I and the top of the mountain and are in a position to look up the full sky and to see in one glance the slopes at either side. We have climbed, with the sunrise, with creation, with the Light and with Mankind in six steps, through six planes, though the last one ended as yet in a dissolution, a withdrawal. We have gone through half the circle, 180°, which prepared us for the emergence of Savitri in 186 as the One to fulfil the promise and cancel the dissolution. With her we will go on. Or rather, as it appears from the next 5 movements, with her we are going back, back through the whole cycle the creation passed through, back to the origins of Inconscience and Death, there to meet Satyavan, because that is what it is all about. We may put the full Canto in a diagram as follows:

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In the upper hemisphere, where we put the arrows pointing down, the general feeling is one of Descent, expressed in words like: outpoured (100), visitor (108), epiphany (116), flung (119), parted (122), ray (147), withdrew (150), squanders (159), drew back (168), expunged (174); and in the upper right half of the circle: a mighty stranger (192), imprisoned (200), brought with her (207), the delight (209), the key (210), prodigal (216), implant (218), the eternal's touch (221), heaven's messengers (229), sons of God (232). In the lower hemisphere it is the Ascent movement which determines the general feeling, expressed in words like: spinning (25), wheeled (27), forgetful (28), stirred (30), teased (34), raise its head (38), straining (39), searches (40), lurked (44), reviving (47), prescience (49), yearned (49), reminded (51), a breach (54), troubled (57), was bom (71), quivered (72), stole in (79), and in the lower right quarter of the circle: trapped (244), hiding (250), foresee and dread and dare (260), she rose (285), faint remembrance (294), kindles (299), travelled back (307), bom (319), stared (326).

Interesting it is to note, as one more little play in the great one, how in the Canto, as shown in the diagram, the correspondences all amount to 12: Satyavan and Savitri are both in the movement which we take as the two parts of the 12th, then 5 and 7 correspond,

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amounting to 12,4 + 8 = 12, 3 + 9 = 12, 2 + 10 = 12, 1 + 11 = 12. Only one movement remains, the 6th one, the one of the Supermind which in the first Canto cannot yet break through, but ends in withdrawal and dissolution. Of course, because that is what the whole book is about: the manifestation of the Supermind through Savitri And Satyavan. As the only one not taken up in the series of twelves, the sixth movement stands out as the supreme one, though here one in its early beginnings, as a yearning.

-7-

In the 7th movement, 186 - 215, Savitri appears. Not as a mere human she comes but from Eternity (190), as a mighty stranger down here, full of the anguish of the Gods, of a gold heavenly hue, bringing with her the proud and conscious wideness and the bliss, the calm delight, the key to the flaming doors of ecstasy. She is, in short, the daughter of Infinity (213). This reminds us of the Form, the Face of rapturous calm which appeared in the 5th movement 120-150, which is Infinity's centre, ambassadress twixt eternity and change, a Form from far beatitudes, the omniscient Goddess.

The parallel between 5 and 7 is, however, partial and concerns Her who comes down from eternity. The response of earth and nature seems to differ. In 5 she saw the spaces ready for her feet, 127, in 7 there is a strong tendency of rejection by earth and nature. The "ambassadress twixt eternity and change" (124), has become "a mighty stranger in the human field" (192). It looks as if the two, infinity and change, don't fit together any more. In 5 "earth felt the Imperishable's passage close:/The waking ear of Nature heard her steps"; in 7 "Earth's grain that needs the sap of pleasure and tears/Rejected the undying rapture's boon." In 5 "all grew a consecration and a rite" (135), in 7 "in vain now seemed the splendid sacrifice." (215)

The 7th movement would come under the sign of Libra, which is the sign of Union, of Yoga, of awareness of the origin: "A vaster Nature's joy had once been hers."

-8-

In the 8th movement this element of rejection of the light becomes the main theme. Coming under the 8th sign of Scorpio, death,

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pain, betrayal, evil, the cross, sorrow, struggle, fall are its protagonists. In 4, its counterpart, there is not one negative note. Things remain pure, but there is a difference: in 4 everything is momentary: a fading moment's brink, a brief perpetual sign, an instant's visitor, awhile the Vision stood. In 8 the involvement is much greater, the transcendence of 4 has become immanent in 8; no more temporary light but an effort at implanting it that "heaven might native grow on mortal soil" (219). The story of "a greatness of spiritual dawns" was "penned with the sky for page"; in 8 it looks as if the same story is penned with the earth for page, and that makes it much harder; the splendour gets diluted if not persecuted.

-9-

The 9th movement comes under the sign of Sagittarius. It is the sign of understanding, of prophecy, of vision. Like the third sign in which the mind emerges, this sign of the higher mind is a dual sign, reflected in the movement 246-275: the tension is depicted between Savitri's outer and inner nature, and between her inner self and those with whom she is in contact. The foreknowledge stands out strongly. While in 3 the movement was out of Inconscience and Ignorance, here in 9 it is a plunge into it. Dualities and dichotomies appear again, the original purity and transparency, or rather simplicity is being lost. After the dividing line between 8 and 9 we feel again the lower hemisphere with its pain and sorrow, split depths and torn souls. In 8 there is the fight, the struggle, too, but it is a cosmic struggle; in 9 we are back in the smaller movements. Savitri may still be the Universal Woman, but now she stands with us "outcast from her inborn felicity." (248)

-10-

In the 10th movement the involvement in the original black gets still denser. In the first ten lines she corresponds precisely to the demands made by the tenth sign of the Zodiac, Capricorn. She shares in the great cosmic movements, especially mentioned in this tenth part of the Canto: "Her dread was one with the great cosmic dread, Her strength was founded on the cosmic mights"

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278-9; "Her life shared the cosmic load" 305. But, especially, Capricorn is called the sign of the universal Mother, who is right away introduced in the early lines: "The Universal Mother's love was hers." 280

After establishing Savitri on these cosmic heights the Canto moves far away, back, back to the state creation was in before even Mind was invented, back to the state of the second movement of this Canto I, and we are reminded of that vague some thing that stirred in the inscrutable darkness (30), of the nameless movement, an unthought Idea, (31). Now we are once more "on the lap of earth's original somnolence. Inert, released into forgetfulness" (287-8). It is not all empty; both in 2 and in 10 something stirs, "something that wished but knew not how to be" (33), and "then a slow faint remembrance shadowlike moved" (294). There is in both an effort to come to terms again with some vague past grief: "There lurked an unremembered entity, Survivor of a slain and buried past/Condemned to resume the effort and the pang" (44-6); (she) "recognised the close and lingering ache,/Deep, quiet, old, made natural to its place,/But knew not why it was there nor whence it came." Like in 2 it was the original movement before the birth of mind (which we observed in 3): "The Power that kindles mind was still withdrawn" (299) and "The unassisted brain found not its past." (303)

A beautiful identification takes place between the woman bom here below and the age-old birth of the cosmic values, of the highest and the lowest, the eternal and the creation. Standing on the absolute heights of the universe, her task is no plunge into the absolute depths. The identification with the deepest of depths becomes absolute in the next part.

-11-

Now she moves back, apparently to awake to the duties, sorrows and pleasures of the normal earthly day, her last one with Satyavan, but then another "back, back" appears, the return to the absolute beginnings, and we are back into the first lines of the Canto, the movement of the Inconscience. Here her final meeting takes place, here it is where her task lies, to confront Earth and Love and Doom, the ancient disputants, the giant figures wrestling in the night (316-18). Line 319 clearly calls back the early hours of the day: "It was

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the hour before the Gods awake." Now "The Godheads from the dim Inconscient bom/Awoke to the struggle and the pang divine." (319-20) It is on this battleground of the primal earth that she has to face the final Opponent, the "guardian of the unconsoled abyss". And with this prospect we are back at the very first lines of this first Canto and projected forward to the Final Books of the Poem where she stands up and follows Death into his own realm and slays the last enemy.

-12-

With this the circle is closed, the drama can begin, Savitri is awake, "she gathered force." (340) Now, finally, Satyavan may enter the scene. He enters as a final touch, giving the age-old ever-present and future drama a personal touch. "This was the day when Satyavan must die."

RUUD LOHMAN

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An Approach to Sri Aurobindo's Savitri

1. A Legend and a Symbol

The great epic, the epic of epics, one of the four pillars of the stupendous structure of supramental work, may from a point of view be regarded and studied as an epitome of the unimaginable labour of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. This they undertook for hewing out the path of supramental realisation, for divinising man and heavenising the earth. In particular it epitomises the holocaust of the Mother in her gigantic work of breaking the rocks of the inconscient world, for laying the foundation of physical immortality.

The day will come when poets, philosophers, and neo-scientists yet to be bom, the psycho-scientists, if it is permissible to use the expression, will discover immense interest in this marvel of versification which combines in it all the aspects of the absolute Truth.

Sri Aurobindo has characterised his poem as a legend and a symbol. It is also an epic by being a poem recounting in an elevated style a great event. Some scholars with a literary bent of mind happen to have a hazy idea about the purpose and subject-matter of this great piece. They feel it to be a great piece. They feel it to be a great epic inspired only by the poetic-aesthetic imagination and admire it mostly for the purposes of literary enjoyment. For this reason Sri Aurobindo himself warned one of his disciples, in letters in 1933, when a manuscript of a portion of the book was being discussed; he wrote: "...it is only an attempt to render into poetry a symbol of things occult and spiritual" in a narrative which... "is supposed to have taken place in far past times when the whole thing had to be opened so as to 'hew the ways of immortality'." Again his own words are: "What I am trying to do everywhere in the poem is to express exactly something seen, something felt or experienced... Savitri is the record of a seeing, of an experience which is not of the common kind and is often very far from what the general human mind sees and experiences."

Savitri is divided into three parts. The first part contains three books with as many as twenty-four cantos. This book has been entitled by the author The Book of Beginnings. One who has read

the Mahabharata in its entirely is apt to compare it with its Adi Parva. As in the Adi Parva of the Mahabharata, the subsequent elaboration has been put in a nutshell in this Book of Beginnings.

The background of Savitri is a legend, an ancient story, narrated (in the Mahabharat) by the sage Markandeya to Yudhishthira, when the Pandavas remained in exile in the forest. The story runs thus:

In days of yore there was a virtuous king in Madra, named Aswapati; he had no issue to inherit his throne and kingdom. With the purpose of getting sons bom to him, he propitiated goddess Savitri — the wedded partner of Brahma — and performed tapasya observing brahmacharya, regulated his dietary and took the curtailed food at regular intervals — once in the sixth period of

Sometime after, a daughter was indeed born to Aswapati's Malavya queen, the eldest of the queens, and the daughter was named Savitri after the name of the Goddess.

The daughter Savitri grew in age — her attainments and prowess were so extraordinary that no king or prince dared to accept her as his spouse. The father, King Aswapati, became anxious for the marriage of the daughter, who had already passed marriageable age and, finding no other way, told Savitri to go out herself throughout the length and breadth of the country in search of a husband worthy of her. Savitri, in her journey for the search, was provided with suitable cars and a party conducted by the aged ministers of the court. After touring through important places of the country they came at last on a verge of forest where, by chance, Savitri met Satyavan. The two glanced at each other and at once they were united in love as if such union was preordained. Satyavan was living in the forest as a hermit along with his parents. His father was the king of Shalwa who lost his eyesight and with that his kingdom also; he was presently living in the forest as an exile with his queen and son Satyavan. Both Satyavan and Savitri agreed to the marriage inspite of Satyavan's desolate living in the hermitage.

When Savitri with her retinue returned to her father to report about the matter of her choice, it so happened that Narad, the Sage

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of Paradise, was present there along with the king and queen. Savitri related her choice on being asked. Aswapati then enquired of Narad, who was expected to know everything in heaven and on earth, the antecedents and particulars about the chosen groom. Narad described the virtues and qualities of Satyavan in highly eulogistic terms but with certain reservation; when he was pressed further he gave out from his foreknowledge that Satyavan was to die just on the completion of a full year counting from that day. The father and mother were naturally reluctant to sec the marriage happen and the mother tried to persuade Savitri to abandon the idea of this marriage and to choose a husband elsewhere. Savitri could not, however, be persuaded and the marriage was performed with due rites and ceremonies in the forest. After the marriage, Savitri lived there in the forest with her husband Satyavan along with the blind king and the queen, the father and mother of Satyavan, counting the day of the foretold dire incident known to her only in that company.

On the dawn of that fateful day Savitri, with permission from her in-laws, went along with her husband to the forest in search of fruits and fuel. At about noon, when Satyavan was cutting wood for fuel, he fell ill and immediately succumbed in the lap of Savitri. Yama, the King of Death, came to take Satyavan's life and there was verbal duel between Yama and Savitri. In the end, with the boons granted by Yama, Satyavan's life revived and his father got back his lost eyesight and the lost kingdom too. Savitri did not forget her own father's side and, through a boon from the Lord of Death, there had to be bom a hundred sons to him.

The first Canto of Book I is the Symbol Dawn. Dawn has come every day since creation, but the particular dawn of the day when Savitri conquered Death has been depicted, together with the preceding Night, in this Canto. The last line of the Canto is: "This was the day when Satyavan must die."

Why "must die" is explained by Narad in Book VI.

In the second Canto two issues were raised in the mind of Savitri as she woke and lay reviewing her life. One was to yield to the Cosmic Laws, to bear with Ignorance and Death, the other was to hew the ways of Immortality by conquering Death and Ignorance. Savitri chose the latter.

As noted above, Savitri has been stated by Sri Aurobindo to be a Legend and a Symbol. Legend one can understand, but what is Symbol? " A Symbol is a form in one plane that represents a truth

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to another.'This is Sri Aurobindo's own definition. Several characters of this epic are symbolic. The main purpose of writing this epic is to show us the mission of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother on this earth.

His birth held up a symbol and a sign.¹

A world's desire compelled her mortal birth.²

A soul made ready through a thousand years

Is the living mould of a supreme Descent.³

2. The Sadhana of the Traveller

The details of Sadhana have been given in the 22 cantos from the third Canto of Book I to the end of Book IV. The Sadhana of the Traveller (Aswapati) is over with the boon obtained by him from the supreme Divine Mother.

This Sadhana has been briefly described by Sri Aurobindo himself in a letter; thus:

First, he is achieving his own spiritual self-fulfilment as the Individual in the Yoga of the King (Cantos 3,4 and 5 of Book I).

Next, he makes an ascent as a typical representative of the race to win the possibility of discovery and possession of all the planes of consciousness. This is described in the second Book (consisting of 15 cantos).

Finally, he aspires no longer for himself but for all, for universal realisation and new Creation. This is described in the Book of the Divine Mother (Book III, comprising 4 cantos).

As an Individual, as he was passing through all the stages in his Sadhana, "a many-miracled consciousness unrolled in him."

Sunbelts of knowledge, moonbelts of delight

Stretched out in an ecstasy of widenesses

Beyond our indigent corporeal range.

There he could enter, there awhile abide.

A voyager upon uncharted routes

Fronting the viewless danger of the Unknown,

Adventuring across enormous realms,

He broke in to another Space and Time.⁴

¹Savitri, p. 22. ²Ibid. ³ Ibid., p. 398. ⁴Ibid.,p. 91.

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Thus as an individual he achieved his own spiritual self-fulfilment.

Now, he makes the ascent as a typical representative of the race. He broke into another Space and Time adventuring across enormous realms, alone he moved watched by the Infinity around him and the Unknowable above. He found a lone immense high-curved world-pile erect like a mountain chariot of the gods motionless under an inscrutable sky. This world-pile connects the earth with the screened eternities. In this region the universe of the Unknown arises, where self-creation reveals the grandeurs of the Infinite in a deep oneness. Here,

All could be seen that shuns the mortal eye,

All could be known the mind has never grasped;

All could be done no mortal will can dare...

Here all experience was a single plan,

The thousandfold expression of the One.⁵

In his ascent to this region, being in deep oneness with the Infinite, he could see all that the mortal eye cannot see and mind cannot grasp. From the Kingdom of Subtle Matter he could see the earth-nature's shining origins; the source of life; the descent of life on earth; human life on earth working through the double-faced contraries and contradictories in the Inconscience; this life fallen from the higher region on earth; how it acted with its attendants of little mind and little self — the ego which is a finite movement of the Infinite, an instrument personality. Aswapati could however see the potentiality in man appearing with the prospect of our life being transformed into divine life. This he could find as if in the glimmerings of a dying torch in the darkness — in the Kingdom of the Little Life working in the grey anarchy.

The Traveller, challenging the darkness with his luminous soul, then came into a fierce and dolorous realm peopled by them who never tasted bliss. On his journey onward he arrived at the Paradise of the Life-Gods where "giant drops of the Bliss unknowable overwhelmed his limbs and round his soul became a fiery ocean of felicity." (p. 237) This Paradise of the Life-Gods he is to overpass and leave until the Highest is gained.

Now, the Sadhana of the Traveller in the vital and mental plane ceases and the Soul's seeing commences. In this spirit's realm the

⁵Ibid., pp. 95-96.

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soul finds its source. Here one can feel himself as a citizen of the Mother-state and not as a colonist in the darkness (Night) where one's rights are barred, one's passport becomes void and one lives self-exiled from the heavenlier home. This unfallen plane of the spirit has a triple realm. His soul, a single conscious power, alone between tremendous presences passed on to the source of all things human and divine.

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...

She guards the austere approach to the Alone...

He outstretched to her his folded hands of prayer.

Then in a sovereign answer to this heart

A gesture came as of worlds thrown away...

A light appeared still and imperishable...

He saw the mystic outline of a face...

He fell down at her feet unconscious, prone.⁶

He now reached the highest state — the Parabrahman state.

On the break of his trance he knocked at the doors of the Unknowable. He moved through regions of transcendent Truth above Space and Time.

He had reached the top of all that can be known.⁷

He was a vast that soon became a Sun.⁸

All these things are depicted in detail in the Cantos of Book II. Now for Book III, The Book of the Divine Mother:

The Traveller won the full victory of his ascent as a typical representative of humanity and discovered and possessed all the planes of consciousness and powers, but this too was an individual victory.

The power and knowledge he possessed did not fill his spirit's sacred thirst. His spirit now faced the adventure of the Inane and pursued the Unknowable.

⁶Ibid., pp. 295-96. ⁷Ibid, p. 300. ⁸Ibid., p. 301.

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A stark companionless Reality, a being intimate and unnameable, answered at last to his soul's passionate search; and it faced him with its tremendous calm.

The Traveller's spirit in the utmost ascent of the journey met face to face the Absolute, a being formless, featureless and mute, one and unique, unutterably sole — "the One by whom all live, who lives by none." (p. 309).

Sri Aurobindo has described elsewhere the five stages of Brahman in his philosophy of the Upanishads:

1.Virât

2.Hiranyagarbha

3.Prajnā or Avyakta

4.Parabrahma — the Highest

5.Higher than the Highest — the Unknowable.

The fourth and the fifth stages can hardly be described by words and can hardly be understood in the human consciousness but with Sri Aurobindo it is different.

The Traveller had to pass through all these stages, and finally reach the culmination of this phase.

His soul now reached the boundless silence of the Self and has leaped into a glad divine abyss. It is yet too early for it to rejoice. An absolute Power sleeps in absolute silence that, waking, can make this world a vessel of Spirit's Force and can fashion in the clay (in Matter) God's perfect Shape.

When the Traveller was thus standing on Being's naked edge and all the passion and seeking of his soul faced their extinction in the featureless Vast, the Presence he yearned for suddenly drew close. The Being of Wisdom, Power and Delight took to her breast Nature and world and soul, as a mother draws her child into her arms.

Now the Traveller's aspiration grew wide and immense. He was no longer satisfied with knowledge and bliss for his own self. He wanted to enjoy this with earth and humanity.

He now sought for a Power too great for mortal will and sat motionless on a pedestal of prayer, intense, one-pointed, monumental, lone. Here also he felt something of kinship with the Inconscient, lurking to give resistance. He now stripped himself fully of mind's desire and offered to the Gods the vacant place so that he could bear the immaculate touch. Now a last and mightiest transformation came to him.

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From the Spirit's house he could feel the prospect of New Creation in the material field where exactly the parallel, or rather the opposite, was of what he could feel reigning in the pure Spirit's region.

In this absolute trance-condition the Traveller's heart, alone, was conscious and could know that there was some deliberate Power which tolerated the world's error and grief and* who was waiting to come down. This conscious heart, seeing no relief in merging into the unknowable Mystery, sent a voiceless prayer to that absolute Power.

Then suddenly there rose a sacred stir.

Amid the lifeless silence of the Void...

A sound came quivering like a loved footfall...

A mystic Form enveloped his earthly shape...

The One he worshipped was within him now...

...a Voice

Absolute and wise in the heart's chambers spoke.⁹

This voice, the Mother of Might, now tells him to desist from further aspiration of raising humanity to the God-state by immediately calling down the immeasurable descent; for time was not yet ripe. It wanted him to leave the all-seeing Power to hew its way. Time has not yet reached its fullness to change the cosmic dream of man and will be hostile to the untimely descent of Truth.

The Lord of Life, the Traveller, Aswapati, was equal to the occasion and replied in a prayer in a high strain. In that high-pitched prayer the following lines appear:

In anguish we labour that from us may rise

A larger-seeing man with nobler heart,

A golden vessel of the incarnate Truth,

The executor of the divine attempt

Equipped to wear the earthly body of God,

Communicant and prophet and lover and king.¹⁰

(Is it a hint of the advent of Satyavan from Aswapati?)

The Yogin who is unified with the Divine, when he finds within him the face of the supreme Divine Mother responsing to him, whatever he wills that gets fulfilled. He now raised his voice in prayer, praying that the supreme Divine Mother might incarnate

⁹ Ibid., pp. 334-35. ¹⁰lbid., p. 342.

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the white passion of her Force and Bliss in one body to unlock the doors of Fate. Even this last effort of his soul's will met with so much resistance from the thousand forces of the Inconscience that it had hardly the strength to climb to the Supreme; but the supreme Mother responded and offered him the boon he was yearning for. He now achieved the victory of his toil.

He raised his brow of conquest to the heavens

Establishing the empire of his soul

On Matter...¹¹

3. The Descent of the Supreme Mother

We come to the second part of the epic, describing the birth of Savitri in the spring of the year. (It is on the 21st February?) Sri Aurobindo, the author, has depicted with grandeur and in the most beautiful language the six seasons of the year—Summer, Raintide, Autumn, Winter, Dewtime and Spring. Compare this with Kali-dasa's discription of the seasons of the year in Ritu Samhar. I cannot resist the temptation of quoting a few lines here of Sri Aurobindo's description of Spring when Savitri was bom.

Then Spring, an ardent lover, leaped through leaves

And caught the earth-bride in his eager clasp...

The life of the enchanted globe became

A storm of sweetness and of light and song...

The sunlight was a great god's golden smile.

All Nature was at beauty's festival.

In this high signal moment of the gods

Answering earth's yearning and her cry for bliss

A greatness from our other countries came...

A spirit of its celestial source aware

Descended into earth's imperfect mould.¹²

In this Part (Part II) of Savitri, the Master has dealt with (i) the birth and growth of Savitri, (ii) the quest for her divine collaborator to fulfil her mission, (iii) Narad's intervention foretelling the future but encouraging the destined union of betrothal and explaining also the cause of Pain and Death and Fate, (iv) the development of Divine Love in both Satyavan and Savitri during the one year of

¹¹Ibid., p. 348. ¹²Ibid., p. 351-53.

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their close companionship in the forest Ashram, (v) Savitri getting in trance-condition a Divine Command to fight and conquer Death and to find her soul for strengthening this fight, (vi) how in the search for her soul (in that trance-condition) the triple Soul-Forces (not the real soul) from her inner consciousness appeared one by one, each claiming to be her soul and how along with these Soul-Forces the darker forces in action also appeared to resist her. She however solaced them all, saying that she would come back after finding her soul for giving a fight to Death which the goddesses appearing as her Soul-Forces were not yet capable of doing. Then,

Misery shall pass abolished from the earth;

The world shall be freed from the anger of the Beast,

From the cruelty of the Titan and his pain.

There shall be peace and joy for evermore.¹³

The cry of the ego shall be hushed within.¹⁴

One day I shall return, His hands in mine...

Then shall the divine family be bom.

There shall be light and peace in all the worlds.¹⁵

The Cantos not yet written and the death of Satyavan in the forest in the presence of Savitri follow: I mean Cantos 1 and 2 of the Book of Death just preceding Satyavan's death in the forest.

4. The Great Encounter with the Lord of Inconscience and Death

Here we have Savitri's encounter with Death in its own den or sphere, long discourse of Savitri with Yama — the mighty incarnate Power of Darkness and Ignorance and the Keeper of Cosmic Law. In the last encounter Death Incarnate, Yama, addressed Savitri:

Who then art thou hiding in human guise?

Thy voice carries the sound of infinity,

Knowledge is with thee, Truth speaks through thy words...

O human claimant to immortality,

Reveal thy power, lay bare thy spirit's force,

Then will I give back to thee Satyavan...

And Savitri looked on Death and answered not...

A mighty transformation came on her...

¹³Ibid., pp. 507-08. ¹⁴Ibid., p. 514. ¹⁵Ibid., p. 521. ¹⁶Ibid., pp. 663-64.

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The Incarnation thrust aside its veil.¹⁶

Then the Power and Presence came down and held the centre of her brow opening the third mysterious eye and the eternal Will stirred in the lotus centre of her throat and in her speech throbbed the immortal Word.

Eternity looked into the eyes of Death,

And Darkness saw God's living Reality.¹⁷

Then a voice was heard from the throat of Savitri, addressed to Death:

I hail thee almighty and victorious Death,

Thou grandiose Darkness of the Infinite...

Thou art my shadow and my instrument...

But now, O timeless Mightiness, stand aside...

Release the soul of the world called Satyavan...

That he may stand master of life and fate,

Man's representative in the house of God...

Her mastering Word commanded every limb

And left no room for his enormous will...

He called to Night but she fell shuddering back,

He called to Hell but sullenly it retired:

He turned to the Inconscient for support...

It drew him back towards boundless vacancy

As if by himself to swallow up himself:

He called to his strength, but it refused his call.

His body was eaten by light, his spirit devoured.

At last he knew defeat inevitable

And left crumbling the shape that he had worn...

The dire universal Shadow disappeared

Vanishing into the Void from which it came...

And Satyavan and Savitri were alone.¹⁸

In Book XI, there is only one canto consisting of about 1500 lines "dictated by Sri Aurobindo three months before his passing. And not a single word or punctuation mark was changed after the first draft was dictated." This we learn from The Liberator (Sisir Kumar Mitra, based on Nirodbaran's evidence).

When Death — Yama — the dire universal shadow vanished in the Void and Satyavan and Savitri were left alone, the whole atmos-

¹⁷Ibid., p. 665. ¹⁸Ibid., pp. 666-68.

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phere around completely changed. A marvellous sun looked down from ecstasy's skies on worlds of deathless Bliss. Magical unfoldings of the Eternal's smile captured Satyavan's secret heartbeats of delight. God's everlasting day surrounded Savitri. Domains of sempiternal light invaded all Nature with the Absolute's Joy. Transfigured was the formidable shape of the Lord of Death.

His darkness and his sad destroying might

Abolishing for ever and disclosing

The mystery of his high and violent deeds,

A secret splendour rose revealed to sight

Where once the vast embodied Void had stood...

Death's sombre cowl was cast from Nature's brow.¹⁹

The transfiguration reveals Yama in his true divinity:

There lightened on her the godhead's lurking love.

All grace and glory and all divinity

Were here collected in a single form...

He bore all godheads in his grandiose limbs.²⁰

In him the fourfold Being bore its crown. And he was identified with the four aspects of the Brahman — Virât, Hiranyagarbha, Avyakta, and Parabrahman.

Then like an anthem from the heart's lucent cave

A voice soared up...²¹

and addressed Savitri:

Ascend, O soul, into thy blissful home.

Here in the playground of the eternal Child

Or in domains the wise Immortals tread

Roam with thy comrade splendour under skies

Spiritual lit by an unsetting sun.²²

Savitri refusing, the Voice again spoke:

Receive him into boundless Savitri,

Lose thyself into infinite Satyavan,

O miracle where thou beganst there cease!²³

¹⁹bid., pp. 679-80. ²⁹Ibid., p. 680. ²¹Ibid., p. 683. ²²lbid., p. 685.

²³Ibid., p. 692.

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But Savitri replied to the radiant God:

In vain thou temptst with solitary bliss

Two spirits saved out of a suffering world;

My soul and his indissoiubly 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.²⁴

tussle continuing, Savitri implored:

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.²⁵

With a still blissful cry all that Savitri yearned for was granted, beginning with these words:

Descend to life with him thy heart desires,

O Satyavan, O luminous Savitri,²⁶

and ending with:

Nature shall live to manifest secret God,

The Spirit shall take up the human play,

This earthly life become the life divine.²⁷

And all the manifold changes that would happen on the earth after this Descent were also communicated.

5. The Fulfilment

The Epilogue is the return to earth and the joining with the father and the mother. The blind king Dyumatsena, the father of Satyavan, had in the meantime got back his eyesight and his lost kingdom with the boons from Yama.

An indication of what the transformed Earth shall be, is only hinted here in The Epilogue. The eye of divine vision shall be restored to man. His lost kingdom with the riches of spiritual realms shall be re-established. The suffering humanity shall gain heavenly

²⁴Ibid. ²⁵Ibid., p. 697. ²⁶ Ibid., p. 702. ²⁷ Ibid., p. 711.

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delight and taste the joys of immortal bliss, But before all this transformation can arise, Savitri, prefiguring the Mother,

...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,

Her single greatness in that last dire scene,

She must cross alone a perilous bridge in Time

And reach an apex of world-destiny

Where all is won or all is lost for man...

For this the silent Force came missioned down;

In her the conscious Will took human shape:

She only can save herself and save the world...²⁸

RAKHALDAS BOSU

²⁸Ibid., p. 461.

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The Drama of Integral Self-Realisation

The Spiritual Message of Sri Aurobindo's Savitri

Sri Aurobindo's Savitri is an epic poem of high spiritual challenge in the Yoga or Divine Union or Goal of Self-Realization it presents. Its spiritual conception is so all-encompassing, so integral that it gives birth to a power which transforms life on earth to a life of divine activity rather than leading to an escape from life. The epic is the mantric expression of this great seer-sage's inner findings and conquests, leading to his vision of an age of truth-consciousness and immortality. It portrays in living drama the daring climb within of a king-soul through progressive states of consciousness to Nirvanic heights and beyond to summits never reached before. The poet reveals how at meditation's peak at one with God, where many cease their search, he becomes aware of a Presence, God's Consciousness, Power and Bliss, which he calls the Divine Mother. He relates how this Creatrix of Boundless Love and Wisdom-Splendour comes down to Earth to transform Darkness into Light, the Unreal into the Real, and Death into Immortality.

The famous Mahabharata legend of Savitri and Satyavan, the story of Love Conquers Death is made the basic symbol of this mystic scripture of Divine Life on Earth. The legend tells of the noble and virtuous king Aswapati performing all kinds of austerities in order that God might be pleased and grant him a child to uphold his kingdom. After eighteen years the Goddess Savitri, wife of the Divine Creator, issues forth from the sacrificial flames and promises the king a radiantly spiritual daughter to spring from her own being.

The child is bom and is named Savitri. She grows up like unto the Goddess of Beauty herself in embodied form and is blessed with godlike qualities. When she reaches maturity kings and princes overwhelmed by her divine character dare not ask her hand. So her father sends her forth to seek her own lord. Her heart finds Satyavan, the faithful son of Raja Dyumatsena, a blind and exiled king who lives in a forest hermitage.

When Savitri comes to declare her love to her father, she finds him in conversation with Narad, the great heavenly sage. When Narad hears Savitri's words he warns that Satyavan, though

endowed with all high qualities and with honour constant as the Pole Star, is destined to die in a year. The parents try to persuade their daughter to choose another, but in vain. Narad advises the father, however, to allow Savitri to marry Satyavan. So the princes is married and lives a simple quiet life in the forest. She pleased all with her tender service, self-denial, evenness of temper, her skill and gentle speech and her love for Satyavan.

But night and day Narad's prophetic words are present in her mind; but she speaks of them to no one. When the appointed day for Satyavan's death approaches, Savitri fasts and prays and on the fated day she begs permission to follow her husband into the forest in order to see the blossoming woods through which he passed daily. Never having petitioned anything previous to this day she is granted her request. Satyavan goes ahead to make way for her and soon comes to the place where he stops to cut wood for the home-fire.

After a few strokes Satyavan falls smitten with pain and Savitri, stricken with grief, sits and holds his head in her lap. Suddenly she beholds Yama, the God of Death, standing before her with noose in hand. She rises and asks why he had come himself instead of sending one of his emissaries as is his custom. Yama tells her that this prince is endowed with such a sea of virtue and accomplishment and beauty that he is too worthy to be borne away by anyone but the God of Death himself. Then Yama takes the soul of Satyavan and proceeds southward. Savitri, undaunted, follows him. Time and again Yama turns to stop her; but with wise and appealing words she moves him to grant one boon after another, except the life within his hand. Still she continues to follow him, right into his dark cave, until finally her devotion and unparalleled love and wisdom move Yama to return the soul of Satyavan. Savitri hastens to the woods where her lord's body lay and woos the soul back into consciousness and together they return to their home and all the boons promised by Yama are fulfilled.

Adapting this legend as a symbol for a great living spiritual experience, Sri Aurobindo changes King Aswapati's sacrificial asceticism into the Tapasya or conscious spiritualisation of an aspiring soul of humanity. Savitri is not only the incarnation of a goddess but Divine Grace born in answer to Aswapati's longing for help in bringing some living form of God on earth to relieve it of its burden of inconscience. The marriage of Savitri and Satyavan is the divine linking of their lives for the raising of the world and

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man to God and the bringing of God to earth to transform it into an abode of Divine Delight.

Sri Aurobindo first¹ gives a panoramic vision of the character and mighty events of the momentous day of Divine Conquest. Dramatically he opens the epic with a description of the dawn of the day destined for Satyavan's death and makes it the symbol of the Dawn of the Spiritual Tomorrow which is to usher in an age of Truth-Consciousness and Immortality. How this wondrous dawn appears to humans with "time-bom eyes" and how it affected Savitri awaiting her mighty struggle with Death is compared. Telling verses give the key to the source of Savitri's power to rise above her long grief and the thoughts oppressing her mind. Her godlike character and sensitive nature are set forth and reveal the source of her power and will in the battle with Death.

As the significant day of Death arrives² Savitri is pictured preparing within, struggling with the burdens of her Karmic past, seeking the aid of her Will bom of Self to help her disown the trails and legacy of past selves which were "a block on the immortal road." As she reviews her past we hear the radiant prologue to this day, her twelve months' life in the secluded beauty of the woodlands where there was "deep room for thought and God."

Striking verses tell how when faced with the Death of Satyavan her heart stood "in the way of the driving wheels" of the "engines of the universe," how she kindled her divine strength, how pain assailed her divinest elements and now the truth of her Divinity within "broke in in a triumph of fire," and empowered her to smite Death's "dumb absolute" and "burst the bounds of consciousness and Time."

After this survey of the mighty moments of the epic the poet takes up the sequence³ of events in accordance with the original legend commencing with a description of the spiritual steps taken by Aswapati for his soul's release. We learn how through inner concentration and a steady will he kept his consciousness in his supemature and is helped in turning "his frail mud-engine to heaven-use." To free himself from ego and its finiteness, from mind's limits and "the lines of safety reason draws" are his task. What a conscious sleep brings once one is no more drugged by Matter, what powers develop are part of the spiritual romance related.

¹From the Pativratā Mahātmya, Chapters 291-294 of the Aranyaka or Vana Parva in the Mahabharata.

²Savitri, pp. 1-10. ³Ibid., pp. 11-21.

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Then we are told how "these wide-poised upliftings" whose peace the "restless nether members tire of are made to endure, how the spirit's power gradually transforms the darker parts of man's being, even the body's cells, and makes them feel the need and will to change in order that⁴ this immense creation's purpose may not fail. What he must check crowding through mind's gates under "forged signatures of the gods" what the silences of his being reveal, and what priceless riches he finds in the deep subconscient as his being becomes transfigured, all are here described.

The secret knowledge⁵ follows, giving out the grandiose meaning of our lives, the story of the climb of the god-spark through the kingdoms of the earth to Godhood, how the Spirit-guardians of the Silence of the Truth work in the vicissitudes of our lives, what the true sources of our beings are, who the cosmic managers are, and how the secret God within makes himself felt in our lives. But still unexplained problems made Aswapati plunge into "unplumbed infinitudes" in order to find the key to what could join Spirit and Matter, join what is now parted, "opposed and twain" and fulfil the Oneness that was the stamp of Being.

So Aswapati moves⁶ into the freedom and greatness of his Spirit, dares "to live when breath and thought were still" and steps into that magic place where all is self-known, where the riddle of the world grew plain and "lost its catch obscure." In magnificent poetry we follow him as he rises, leaving earth-nature's summits below his feet. We are made to feel the ecstasy, might and sweetness of God's mystic power, as he is drawn from his loneliness into God's embrace.

As he climbs, his sealless eye uncovers a series of graded kingdoms "twixt life's poles" through whose "organ scale of consciousness" souls move. Up this stairway of worlds he starts and enters into another space and time. With Aswapati we travel⁷and become acquainted with the nature of these spheres and their godheads. Here Sri Aurobindo unveils occult cosmogony in vibrant detail, in a clarity of language that only direct experience can utter. To read of these inner states of ourselves, also the pattern of the universe so be seen within, below, without, above, is to more fully understand ourselves.

Aswapati crosses out of this gross material world into a subtle

⁴ Ibid., pp. 22-45. 'Ibid., pp. 46-73. "Ibid., pp. 74-91. Ibid., pp. 95-302 (Book Two)

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material existence, where the patterns of our forms are found, and then into planes of pure life-force. Here in the lower regions, "an unhappy comer of eternity," the little cravings of earth's beings and a motley mass of lower vital creatures abound; in its higher regions live the higher emotions, desires and aspirations, where unattained ideas are beings and kings. Then lower into the dangerous nether regions of nescience, with its brood of hate and selfishness, we along with this explorer go to find the causes of the failure of the desire-worlds to fulfil themselves. There we see the twists of Nature. Further below into Hell we penetrate with this warrior-adventurer who keeps "a prayer upon his lips and the great Name" to protect him from its terrors and demoniacal creatures. What scenes of horror and yet grim majesty are portrayed! Even to the hidden heart of Night, the absolute denial of Truth and Being, this spirit-soul dives, where the "hypocrite blooms"; there we have a "spiritless hollow", a home of the dark Powers, "a studio of creative Death" and a dire place of torture. Passing through the suffering of its blackest pit, while "treasuring between his hands his flickering soul," Aswapati discovers that the Highest Secrets are locked in these abysmal depths.

Then up into the paradises of the Gods of Life and Hope we are made to feel the sweetness and joys of this state. But this too he quickly leaves, journeying on to find something higher, that which makes all One; for to remain within the limits of Desire's satisfactions delays the discoveries of that Immortal One who gives all one could desire and more. The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Little Mind show him their ceaseless analytical workings and we are introduced to the three dwarfs of mind: habit, desire and reason. Then to the more luminous planes of Greater Mind, where few are guests, he enters and finds them a world which God uses as a bridge to send his forms of Truth to man. Inspiring are the lines outlining what could be ours if we opened the gates leading to this shining corridor of mind.

Next Aswapati ascends to the blissful heavens of the Ideal, the home of the source of our spiritual longings wherefrom we hear "the flutings of the Infinite" which rouse the soul from its depths. From this beautiful realm, where mind's radiant flower-children dwell, he enters into the Silence where the Self of Mind, the Witness Lord of Nature has his secret base. Aswapati watches the motive-thoughts of this Thinker, but this firmament of abstract thought he observes is a Finder only, and not a Knower or a Lover.

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Seeking for an escape from these limits the king-soul goes through a brilliant opening carried by a mysterious sound into the Soul of the World. Here the poet describes the universal harmonies, sympathies and wisdom of this Cosmic Consciousness, home of souls in spiritual sleep between lives on earth. We learn how souls plan there in this "fashioning chamber of the worlds" the adventures of their new lives. The watching eye of this spiritual traveller sees there his own soul and now, soul-conscious, becomes aware of the "Two-in-One", the Cosmic Father-Mother absorbed in deep creative joy, and learns of their works and powers. In awe he falls before this unveiled Goddess, knowing he was nearing the heart of things. Now our hero-soul steps into a realm of boundless silences "where all are different and all are one." The plenitudes of Wisdom found there are spread before us.

Next⁸ on creation's heights this tireless seeker arrives where only a formless Form of self is left. There appears the Godhead of the whole with "his feet firm-based on Life's stupendous wings." The utter aloneness, stillness and inscrutability of this God with diamond gaze rejecting from itself world and soul is powerfully set forth. Still this "Consciousness of unshared bliss" did not satisfy him. He sought in this absolute silence "the Absolute Power", for he knew that a huge extinction is not God's last word, that the escape into this glad divine abyss is not the crown of the self s mission or the self s power, or the meaning of this great mysterious world. Verses of challenge ring forth to the soul who might seek the end of his being in Nirvana.

Passages pregnant with deep meaning then flow forth from the poet as he narrates the drawing near of the Divine Presence behind the Godhead, that Luminous Heart which Aswapati had been yearning for with the passion of his soul. Hers was the Glory of God, the Divine Mother of All. Soul-stirring is his prayer to the Mighty Mother after having torn up "desire from its bleeding roots/ And offered to the gods the vacant place." The poet depicts the transformation that comes over Aswapati as his heart meets the Divine Mother, and describes the vision that comes to him of the New Creation to dawn on earth, bringing with it a harmony of all contraries. Splendid and prophetic passages! Suddenly the Divine Mother rises in him and speaks in his ear's chambers, warning him not to awaken too soon the immeasurable descent, and

⁸Ibid., pp. 305-348, (Book Three).

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revealing her miraculous powers. But Aswapati who has now beheld this Wondrous Mother pleads with a heart grown vibrant with love for all: "Incarnate the white passion of thy Force." The beauteous Immortal's consent and her promise to come down to earth is one of the lofty mantric passages of the epic. So to change Nature's doom Savitri" is born. Exquisite poetry recounts her childhood, and the gradual growth of the Flame within her, and the Call to her divine quest and the meeting of the two young lovers.¹⁰

Then we hear Narad" the heavenly sage not only announcing to Aswapati, the father of Savitri, the fated death of Satyavan but giving out with singular force the laws and ways of Karma, Fate and Pain, and the mystery of why great souls suffer. Like the despondency of Arjuna in the Bhagavad-Gita, the ordeal of the foreknowledge of Satyavan's death and her heart's grief are shown to be the beginning of Savitri's Yoga,¹² her union with God. With the poet we watch her struggles with forces of indifference and inertia, with the senses, desire and the restless brain, against truth mixed with poison, and against weakness of heart. The strong charge of her Soul in response to her command "Speak to my depths, O great and deathless Voice,/For I am here to do thy will,"¹³is the the spiritual charge for every soul seeking to serve the Divine and conquer Darkness.

Next we are given a picture of what Savitri sees when she looks into herself and seeks her soul. Closing the door to the God within are serpents of temptations of all kinds, limitations luring to the easier paths of the all-negating absolute, to escape from the battle with life and to Nirvana. How she answers these and pushes them away is told. In the course of her seeking the occult fire within, three Soul-Forces appear: the Mother of Divine Pity, the Mother of Might, and the Mother of Wisdom. Each relates her various forms and works in the world. Finally the poet chants of Savitri's finding of her Secret Deity.

But soon the portentous yet promising day of Satyavan's death¹⁴arrives and it is portrayed in verses of poetic pathos. At the moment of his death¹⁵ Savitri enters the mystic lotus on her head, "a

⁹ Ibid., pp. 349-386, (Book Four). ¹⁰Ibid., pp. 415-462, (Book Five).

¹¹Ibid., pp. 415-46 (Book Six). ¹²Ibid.,pp.465-557,(Book Seven).

¹³ Ibid., p. 476. ¹⁴Ibid., pp. 561-65,((Book Eight).

¹⁵ Ibid., pp. 571-95, (Book Nine)

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thousand-petal led home of power and light" and rises to meet the dreadful God, the limitless denial of all being. The two oppose each other, Woman and Universal God of Death. The poem shows Satyavan moving with Death into the silence beyond and Savitri casting off her sheaths and entering into the trance of her soul in order to stay with Satyavan. At the brink of the shadow-world Death peals forth his abysmal cry ordering her to go back. But silent, she dares enter into the Eternal Night with them. Death warns her to go no further and depicts his home of dark immensity and the helplessness of all in his power. After his ruthless speech Savitri answers what to her is a Black Lie of Night and declares her spirit's power can resist him and then demands and challenges Death to give what Satyavan desired in his life for his parents. Death smilingly yields but demands her return to earth lest she be destroyed. But Savitri boldly states her powers which like fire can destroy him. Death in mocking verses cries forth that he is the Originator and Destroyer of all. Savitri then meets scorn with scorn and in dynamic poetry proclaims the wondrous might of her God's Will and Love. Death refutes all her statements claiming his Power can deny them all, make all things vain.

Savitri's soul continues to wrestle with Death and to ridicule his words of Reason. Death challenges her to seek to know, for knowledge kills love. Quickly comes her response that the nature of Love gives birth to Knowledge. Drifting along with them as they move into the Land of Nought¹⁶ we hear the debate continue, hear them pit all the contraries of life against each other, and we hear from Savitri the very reason of Death's existence. Death trumpets a long proclamation of how he cancels all life's golden truths. To his dangerous music this warrior-maiden gives a picture of what her God of Love has done and will yet accomplish and dares Death to produce a greater God to captivate her soul. Death sneeringly interprets her words as hallucinations of the mind and gives an oration on the deceptions of mind and raises Unconsciousness as the pinnacle of all. Savitri answers in Death's own words, calling him the dark-browed sophist of the universe masking divinity with his dance of death. She sings forth in glorious poetry the occult spiritual miracle of God's wonders from a tiny seed; and then again in lines of majestic power speaks of her assured triumph, of her Love as stronger than his bonds of death.

¹⁶Ibid., pp. 599-668, (Book Ten).

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The Dark King, still trying to discourage her, ironically speaks of her fantasy of Truth, says that Truth is hard as stone. Back and forth sparkle the words of the debates. Death uses subtle reason and arms himself with all man's faltering searches, his limiting spiritual goals, and exaggerated and imperfect understanding of Truth to prove the futility of God's power; but Savitri, "delivered of all twilight thoughts," with a Heart of Truth answers his lures. Here Savitri chants lyrics of Nature's miracles, of the wonders of the Infinite and of the limitless powers of a soul integrally surrendered to God.

Death, suspecting her to be the Mother of the Gods embodied, challenges her to show the body of living Truth; for has matter ever been able to hold truth? Savitri tells Death who he really is and warns him he will cease to be when he touches the Embodied Truth Supreme, and then reveals her being all one with God. Death, still unconvinced, makes his last stand in support of his blind force and dares Savitri to reveal the Power of the Divine; for many have Truth but who has the Power to radiate it? Then is given a picture of Savitri as she becomes transformed into a divine being with all her Chakras or Lotuses of Power scintillating. The most powerful speech of all follows and Savitri exhibits her living Power of Truth and proves that Death is needed no more. Death is shown gradually vanishing and finally defeated, eaten up by Light.

In the Silences¹⁷ of the beyond Savitri and Satyavan are alone. Into the avenues of the Spirit they roam happily. But even there voices rise enticing them to come to a blissful home away from battles of life; but Savitri again meets the test with strength. With sun-words she replies that she was born on earth to dare the impossible, that imperfect is the joy not shared by all. Then God, knowing Savitri now to be absolutely at one with his Diamond Heart, rings froth the final joyous paean of the Divine Transformation that shall be on earth and sends Savitri as his Power and Satyavan as his Soul back to earth to change this earthly life to a life divine.

Savitri falls like a star to earth¹⁸ and Satyavan invisibly drawn soars past her. They reunite on earth and the epic closes unveiling the age-long secret deep-guarded in the stillness — the Promise of a Greater Dawn.

lti mayah śrutam — Thus have I heard...

¹⁷Ibid., pp. 671-712, (Book Eleven). ¹⁸Ibid„ pp. 715-24, (Book Twelve).

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Thus have I heard the Revelation of Savitri, Sri Aurobindo's epic poem, truly an Apocalypse of the treasuries of spiritual experience and of the Perfect Divine Existence.

JUDITH TYBSRG (Jyotipriya)

Page 428

The Yoga of Savitri The Finding of the Soul

The Finding of the Soul

-1-

After her marriage with Satyavan, Savitri leaves Madra and travels to the hermitage at Shalwa and takes charge of the blind king, Dyumtlsena, and the queen. In the new surroundings, which seemed quite heavenly to her, she commenced a new life in the company of her husband:

At first to her beneath the sapphire heavens

The sylvan solitude was a gorgeous dream-

Two lives were locked within an earthly heaven.¹

But soon with the change of seasons, and setting in of the Monsoon, the dark clouds with the sobbing winds and the cruel storm that came crashing in brought fear and grief to her heart. These reminded her of Narad's date and her lover's doom. She knew that the her golden days of sweetest joys were numbered; yet she continued her daily routine of work with peace and grace. Deep within she prayed for Satyavan's life, without letting even Satyavan know of the prophesied end. She alone saw "the desert of her coming days;" but her need of Satyavan was infinite, not quite knowable to the mortal mind.

As she sat vigilant through sleepless nights of grief, she heard a mighty Voice approaching from inaccessible heights and addressing her:

Why earnest thou to this dumb deathbound earth...

O spirit, O immortal energy,

If 'twas to nurse grief in a helpless heart

Or with hard tearless eyes await thy doom?

Arise, O soul, and vanquish Time and Death.²

Savitri felt within that her strength was taken away from her and given to Death. It was futile to raise her hands in supplication to Heaven and that by those

¹ Savitri, p. 468. ² Ibid., p. 474.

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Who hug their lot and mock the saviour Light.³

Taking the human stance for a while Savitri replied in a desparate vein:

Is there a God whom any cry can move?

He sits in peace and leaves the mortal's strength

Impotent against his calm omnipotent Law

And Inconscience and the almighty hands of Death.

What need have I, what need has Satyavan

To avoid the black meshed net, the dismal door,

Or call a mightier Light into life's closed room.

A greater Law into man's little world?

Why should I strive with earth's unyielding laws

Or stave off death's inevitable hour ?⁴

Surely, this was not the purpose for which Savitri had come upon earth, to forget God or to remain deaf to the earth's and eternity's call. She had come here into the world of space and time with a mandate from the timeless and the spaceless Beyond to substitute the old dusty laws with those of light and immortality. She had come to

... lead man to truth's wide and golden road

That runs through finite things to eternity.⁵

It could not be that this supreme labourer of light would return to her abode beyond, her task undone. Her heart fell mute and power within her answered the still Voice:

I am thy portion here charged with thy work

As thou myself seated for ever above,

Speak to my depths, O great and deathless Voice,

Command, for I am here to do thy will.⁶

To which the Voice replied:

Find out thy soul, recover thy hid self,

In silence seek God's meaning in thy depths.

Then mortal nature change to the divine.⁷

As she sat listening to the Voice, immersed in herself, like

A statue of the fire of the inner sun,⁸

³Ibid., p. 475. ⁴ Ibid. ⁵ Ibid., p. 476. ⁶Ibid. ⁷Ibid. ⁸ Ibid., p. 477.

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were disclosed to her the cosmic past, the mystic origins and the unfoldment of earth's destiny through the aeons. The appearance of creation from formlessness of the supreme Self, the shaping of Matter, the sprouting of the seeds of Life and the chaos of little sensiblities as well as the emergence of Mind were all seen as giant steps of the great energy of God on the road to Eternity. Human nature holds within itself both the forces of darkness and light. Man

Communicates with Heaven, tampers with Hell.⁹

He hisses but Savitri, undaunted, forces her way toward her soul. She first enters the chaotic world of the subconscient where everything is confused, "nothing self-found,"

For all was there but nothing in its place.¹⁰

From there she proceeds further and enters the sense-world where she finds various forms taking shape. Things here are no longer vague and amorphous; they could be grasped by the senses, and yet the soul was not there. It was the ego around which sounds, senses and feelings centred; these created "a chaos of disordered impulses" void of any light or thought. Fixing her thought on the saviour Name, Savitri walked through this world for long hours before she arrived at the country of the of the physical mind. Here a greater danger awaited her, for she confronted giant head of vast and tumultuous life, uncontrolled by mind or soul. Released by the physical mind, a torrent of the blind life-force denuded the stillness of her silent self.

It cried to her listening spirit as it ran,

Demanding God's submission to chainless Force.¹¹

It brought about surgings of the opposite movements of the Life-force — flame-ascensions and steep sinkings, tenderness and hate, joy and fear, ecstasy and despair. This is the Valley of the False Gleam, the nether realm of Life where all its contraries meet. Savitri is not attracted by this Gleam; she wanted to remain its master and not become its agent. She stands unmoved, and allows the current of Life-force pass by:

Through it all she moved not, plunged not in the vain waves,

⁹ Ibid., p. 479. ¹⁰ Ibid., p. 490. ¹¹ Ibid, p. 492.

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Out of the vastness of the silent self

Life's clamour fled; her spirit was mute and free.¹²

Then, journeying further through the wide hush, Savitri came to a world where the Life-force was ordered or rather chained to an inviolable law; this is the beginning of a system.

There Life dwelt parked in an armed tranquillity;

A chain was on her strong insurgent heart.

Tamed to the modesty of a measured pace,

She kept no more her vehement stride and rush.¹³

She had lost all the grandeur of her force, the revels of her play and the majesty of her muse. For, Reason had entered her world, coercing her to live "in adamant walls of law." Even the freedom of Thought "was cut into a system" and was

...rivetted to Matter's solid ground¹⁴

to keep the soul from getting lost in its own vastnesses.

Life was consigned to a safe level path,

It dared not tempt the great and difficult heights

Or climb to be neighbour to a lonely star...

Or set the world ablaze with the inner Fire.¹⁵

This is the world of small ideals, of closed conventional and formal meditation and rational religion — the country of Life-mind.

Savitri advances beyond this too, and comes to the domain of the measured mind, where spirit itself is seen as a form of mind.

Here was a quiet country of fixed mind,

Here life no more was all nor passion's voice;

A cry of sense had sunk into a hush.

Soul was not there nor spirit, but mind alone;

Mind claimed to be the spirit and the soul.¹⁶

It was a world of fixity and stability, firmness and finality.

At the entrance Savitri meets a commanding personality. Oraclelike, with authority he speaks:

Traveller or pilgrim of the inner world,

¹²Ibid, p. 495. ¹³ Ibid ¹⁴ Ibid., p. 496. ¹⁵Ibid, pp. 496- 97.

¹⁶ Ibid., p. 498.

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Fortunate art thou to reach our brilliant air

Flaming with thoughts supreme finality.

O aspirant to the perfect way of life,

Here find it; rest from search and live at peace.

Ours is home of cosmic certainty.¹⁷

He wanted Savitri to permanently station herself in this kingdom of safety, certainty and mental ultimacy. But Savitri could not have stayed in this world of ordered and cold knowledge and fixed beliefs anymore than in those of the physical and vital minds; for, she had set herself forth in search of her soul. It was her psychic being that held the key to the unfoldment of earth's destiny. She replied:

Here I can stay not, for I seek my soul.¹⁸

In this contented world it was unimaginable for someone to go outside the accustomed round of things and turn to the Beyond. Savitri's reply caused not a little astonishment and amusement to those around her, for they had long written off the soul for a sort of "gland or a secretion's fault." It was more a functional disorder of the brain, or rather an unreal term that made people "cling to living in a sea of death." To others, the soul was merely

A splendid shadow of the name of God,

A formless lustre from the Ideal's realm,

The Spirit is the Holy Ghost of Mind;

But none has touched its limits or seen its face.¹⁹

And to yet others,

Each soul is the great Father's crucified Son,

Mind is that soul's one parent, its conscious cause,

The ground on which trembles a brief passing light,

Mind, sole creator of the apparent world.

All that is here is part of our own self;

Our minds have made the world in which we live.²⁰

That someone could still think of the soul was beyond their comprehension. There were the powers of the mighty mind that seemed to strongly attract Savitri. But gaining control of herself she continued her journey to discover her soul, for she knew

Only who save themselves can others save.²¹

¹⁷Ibid. ¹⁸lbid., p. 499. ¹⁹ Ibid, p. 500. ²⁰ Ibid. ²¹ Ibid., p. 501.

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Strange to her was "life's riddling truth," for all those who desired to help suffering humanity turned to the outer world in search of external means whereas she alone looked for the eternal source of alleviation. She was in search of "the birth-place of the occult Fire," the deep mansion of her saviour soul. Only one from amongst the gathered gods answered her call.

Follow the world's winding highway to its source.

There in the silence few have ever reached,

Thou shalt see the Fire burning on the bare stone

And the deep cavern of thy secret soul.²²

These were the occult powers, the messengers who helped men and brought solace and light into their lives. They knew that Savitri was the incarnation of the Divine Mother.

O human copy and disguise of God

Who seekst the deity thou keepest hid.²³

Following their suggestion, Savitri takes the winding road, the narrow path, trod only by rare wounded pilgrim-feet and soon feels the nearness of her soul.

-2-

It is on this listless, narrow and winding path that Savitri finds a woman in "a pale lustrous robe" sitting in the "rugged and ragged soil" with her feet resting on "sharp and wounding" stones. She was filled with divine pity, and appeared touched by the grief of everyone living around. She owned the pangs of earth and identified herself with the toil of starry heaven;

Her eyes were dim with the ancient stain of tears.

Her heart was riven with the world's agony...²⁴

She is the Mother of Seven Sorrows the divine participant of the suffering of all living creatures, bearing the first brunt of world-pain, and helping the earth to endure the otherwise unbearable agony of existence. She introduces herself:

O Savitri, I am thy secret soul.

²² Ibid., p. 502. ²⁵ Ibid., pp. 501-02. ²⁴ Ibid., p. 503.

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To share the suffering of the world I came,

I draw my children's pangs into my breast...

I am the soul of all who wailing writhe

Under the ruthless harrow of the Gods...

I am in all that suffers and that cries...

I am the spirit in a world of pain.²⁵

She has been a witness to the suffering of humanity through the ages; also she shared the pain and grief of all existence with the steadfast hope that some day the Divine shall rule the earth and transform sorrow into pure delight.

I carry the fire that never can be quenched

And the compassion that supports the suns.

I am the hope that looks towards my God,

My God who never came to me till now;

His voice I hear that ever says 'I come':

I know that one day he shall come at last.²⁶

As she ceased to speak, picking up the refrain an angry voice spoke — the voice of a tortured Titan crouched within man's depths, of one who seemed to enjoy its suffering even as it complained against it.

I am the Man of Sorrows, I am he

Who is nailed on the wide cross of the universe;

To enjoy my agony god built the earth,

My passion he has made his drama's theme.²⁷

It is the voice of a being who toils without success, who ceaselessly labours but is not fated to enjoy the fruit of his toil, who is slated to seek but not find, and forced to fight but not win. It is the wrath of a being who is condemned to live with his evil thoughts and quarrelsome nature against both God and man.

I was made for evil, evil is my lot;

Evil I must be and by evil live...

What Nature made me, that I must remain.²⁸

It is the voice of an angry fatalist, symbolic of the sluggish, tamasic and demoniac nature of humanity in respect of any radical change of consciousness, the voice that grows and protests against the light and is averse to transformation. Savitri sees no reason to

²⁵ Ibid., pp. 503-04. ²⁶ Ibid., p. 505. ²⁷ Ibid. ²⁸ Ibid., p. 507.

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answer him; instead she addresses the Mother of Seven Sorrows,

Madonna of suffering, Mother of grief divine,

Thou art a portion of my soul put forth

To bear the unbearable sorrow of the world.

Because thou art, men yield not to their doom,

But ask for happiness and strive with fate;

Because thou art, the wretched still can hope.

But thine is the power to solace, not to save.

One day I will return, a bringer of strength,

And make thee drink from the Eternal's cup;

His streams of force shall triumph in thy limbs

And Wisdom's calm control thy passionate heart.²⁹

It is only then that misery could be hoped to be finally abolished from the heart of humanity and peace reign upon earth.

As Savitri continued her soul-ward journey, she came upon "a woman whose body was a mass of courage and heavenly strength." She was the Mother of Might:

Armed with the trident and the thunderbolt...

She menaced the triumph of the nether gods.³⁰

She is Durga, goddess of supreme Power; she is Lakshmi, mother of cosmic harmony; she is Kali, destroyer of the demon hordes. She slays the malignant Titan and responds to the cry of the oppressed. But she can save only a few, for

The cosmic evil is too deep to unroot:

The cosmic suffering is too vast to heal.³¹

But she is confident of the eventual fulfilment of her mission even

When God comes out to meet the soul of the world.³²

As she finished, there came a voice — the Asuric antithesis growing ego-like in the mind of the human person that claimed allegiance both of earth and the wide heavens. It was the voice of the dwarf Titan, the cry of

The Ego of this great world of desire.³³

It represents that part of man which makes him believe of his mastery over Nature. In truth, he is

²⁹ Ibid. ³⁰ Ibid., p. 508. ³¹Ibid., p. 510. ³² Ibid. ³³ Ibid., p. 511.

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A tool and slave of his own slave and tool...

Possessor he is possessed and, ruler, ruled.³⁴

Though a "conscious automation" of Nature, he thinks that he is a claimant to the throne of heaven." Although he lives in Time and is "besieged by Death" and, precariously housed "on a little speck amid the stars," he thinks he is the emperor of the universe and that everything was created for his use and enjoyment.

The sun and moon are lights upon my path;

Air was invented for my lungs to breathe...

The sea was made for me to swim and sail...

The earth is my floor, the sky my living's roof.³⁵

Though bom weak and helpless, he thinks he has

...grown greater than Nature, wiser than God.³⁶

His misplaced confidence makes him declare:

There is no miracle I shall not achieve.

What God imperfect left, I will complete...

What he invented not, I shall invent:

He was the first creator, I am the last.³⁷

And thinks

When earth is mastered, I shall conquer heaven.³⁸

Savitri listens to the voice of the mental Ego but does not speak. She turns to the Mother of Might:

Thou art a portion of my soul put forth

To help mankind and help the travail of Time.

Because thou art in him, man hopes and dares...

Thou hast given men strength, wisdom thou couldst not give.

One day I will return, a bringer of light,

Then I will give to thee the mirror of God.³⁹

This, she says would give the Mother of Might the vision to see the self and world as they are seen by the Divine.

Then Savitri moves on in search of her soul and comes across yet another woman. She reached a point from where all could be seen and felt being close to the source of her spirit. The woman's eyes shone with crystal light, her face beamed like the golden sun.

³⁴ Ibid. ³⁵ Ibid., pp. 511-12. ³⁶ Ibid., p. 512. ³⁷ Ibid.

³⁸ Ibid, p. 513. ³⁹ Ibid., pp. 513-4.

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She mused:

OSavitri, I am thy secret soul.

Ihave come down to the wounded desolate earth

To heal her pangs and lull her heart to rest...

I am peace that steals into man's war-worn breast...

I give peace to the humble and the great

And shed my grace on the foolish and the wise.

I shall save earth, if earth consents to be saved.⁴⁰

She is the mother-power "that labours towards the best" and builds a world of consciousness out of the Inconscience. She is the mother-light that leads life to immortality out of the darkness of death. She is Knowledge, she is Charity, she is Peace and Silence and yet cannot entirely succeed in her work because humanity clings to its ignorance and is not ready to be saved.

Close upon the woman's self-description comes a voice, the voice of "the sense-shackled human mind," — the cry of an ignorant energy that "cannot see God's mighty whole." Human being has access only to the surface-nature of Reality and cannot commune "with the throbbing heart of things." Though, not infrequently inspired by the Unknown and visited by intuitions from beyond, he finds security only in reason and sense, and thus is baulked in this splendid effort to help himself and humanity. An immeasurable pathos was reflected in his voice:

I am the mind of God's great ignorant world

Ascending to knowledge by the steps he made;

I am the all-discovering Thought of man.

I am a god fettered by Matter and sense...

A smith tied to his anvil and his forge.⁴¹

Man has succeeded in mapping the heavens and analysing the stars but is ignorant of the secret purpose of life itself. He seems to explain everything, but of himself knows nothing.

I can foresee the acts of Matter's force,

But not the march of the destiny of man...

Human I am, human let me remain

Till in the Inconscient I fall dumb and sleep.⁴²

This particular aspect of human mind is incapable of accepting a

⁴⁰ Ibid., pp. 514-6. ⁴¹ Ibid., pp. 518. ⁴² Ibid., pp. 519-20.

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higher destiny for man. It cannot conceive that man, constituted as he is of clay and inconscience, could ever grow immortal and divine. Savitri heard the voice and turning to the Woman of Light spoke:

Madonna of light, Mother of joy and peace,

Thou art a portion of my self put forth

To raise the spirit to its forgotten heights.⁴³

But the intellect is a self-enclosing and self-limiting phenomenon; it allows only "a bright shadow of God" to enter it, — and not God himself. Savitri exhorts the Madonna of Joy and Peace to continue to nurse and nourish the spiritual hunger in man and fill his "yearning heart with heaven's fire." She promises:

One day I shall return, His hands in mine,

And thou shall see the face of the Absolute.

Then shall the holy marriage be achieved,

Then shall the divine family be bom.

There shall be light and peace in all the worlds.⁴⁴

Savitri moved still onwards and entered the "night of God," a region beyond knowledge and wisdom, outside the pale of any human light and love. Here, she realised that,

Her self was nothing, God alone was all,

Yet God she knew not but only knew he was.

A sacred darkness brooded now within,

The world was a deep darkness great and nude.⁴⁵

She moved through the "fathomless impersonal Night", the "formless, voiceless, infinite,"

As might a shadow walk in a shadowy scene,

A small nought passing through a mightier Nought.⁴⁶

At last she approached the end of her journey and felt the stirring of a luminous world within. It was like the birth of Dawn wearing immortal lustre for her robe, and

She recognised in her prophetic mind...

The mystic cavern in the sacred hill

And knew the dwelling of her secret soul.⁴⁷

⁴³ Ibid., p. 520. ⁴⁴bid, p. 521. ⁴⁵ Ibid., p. 522. ⁴⁶ Ibid, p. 523. ⁴⁷ Ibid

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then enters the rock-temple, — the mystic cave upon the sacred hill, through the great rock-doors carved as it were

...in the massive stone of Matter's trance.⁴⁸

There, inside, she

...found herself amid great figures of gods

Conscious in stone and living without breath...

Executive figures of the cosmic self,

World-symbols of immutable potency.⁴⁹

Deep in her consciousness, through an inner identification,

She felt herself made one with all she saw.⁵⁰

It was a re-realisation of the truth of her inner existence; she was indeed the energy, the being of all the gods.

She knew herself the Beloved of the Supreme:

These Gods and Goddesses were he and she:

The Mother was she of Beauty and Delight,

The Word in Brahma's vast creating clasp.

The World-Puissance on almighty Shiva's lap, —

The Master and the Mother of all lives

Watching the worlds their twin regard had made,

And Krishna and Radha for ever entwined in bliss,

And Adorer and Adored self-lost and one.⁵¹

Savitri then moved into the last and inmost chamber of the rock-temple. There, she saw seated on a golden height a figure of supreme Effulgence, a form of indefinable Splendour,—the fount and force of everything,

A Power of which she was a straying Force,

An invisible Beauty, goal of the world's desire,

A Sun of which all knowledge is a beam,

A Greatness without whom no life could be.⁵²

She realises everything receding into nameless silence of the pure formless Self. Then, passing "through a tunnel dug in the last rock," she comes out into radiant domain of the deathless sun.

And crossing a wall of doorless living fire,⁵³

⁴⁸ Ibid., p. 524. ⁴⁹Ibid. ⁵⁰ Ibid., p. 525. ⁵¹ Ibid. ⁵² Ibid.

⁵³ Ibid., p. 526.

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in a houses of transparent truth and light,

There suddenly she met her secret soul.⁵⁴

It was the immortal being cast in the flow of transience

In whose wide eyes of tranquil happiness...

Infinity turned its gaze on finite shapes.⁵⁵

In the Everlasting's universal play Savitri has been

The Spirit's conscious representative,

God's delegate in our humanity,

Comrade of the universe, the Transcendent's ray,

She had come into the mortal body's room

To play at ball with Time and Circumstance.⁵⁶

Moved by her infinite love for her children, the mother-being of Savitri

puts forth a small portion of herself,

A being no bigger than the thumb of man

Into a hidden region of the heart

To face the pang and to forget the bliss,

To share the suffering and endure earth's wounds

And labour mid the labour of the stars.⁵⁷

It is this immortal soul within us that supports the human scene— our mental, vital and physical life; it "takes on itself their anguish and defect." It is this hidden godhead that uplifts us from light to greater light. It is in the inmost "chamber of light and flame" that

The secret deity and its human part,

The calm immortal and the struggling soul⁵⁸

see each other and, seeing, realise their utter identity.

Then with a magic transformation's speed

They rushed into each other and grew one.⁵⁹

After finding her soul Savitri returns to her human and earthly environment. The subtle world withdraws behind a luminous veil of inner sight and Savitri experiences within her the harmonising oneness of life, mind and soul. She invokes the Supreme Mother to descend into her earthly body and make of it the temple of her

⁵⁴ Ibid., p. 526. ⁵⁵ Ibid. ⁵⁶ Ibid. ⁵⁷Ibid. ⁵⁸ Ibid., p. 527. ⁵⁹ Ibid.

Page 441

transforming love. In response to her call there descends into her heart,

A living image of the original Power.⁶⁰

The very touch of its feet creates a mighty movement that rocks the subtle world and releases from its coiled-up sleep a flaming serpent that rises billowing its coils and stands erect. It touches different chakras in her body "with its flaming mouth." The giant energy thus released "surcharged with light and bliss" joined the thousandfold consciousness above, linking Matter's nether base with the Spirit's summits in the Eternal's space. A stream of nectar flows down the mystic centres bringing about "a high celestial change" in Savitri,

Breaking the black Inconscient's blind mute wall,

Effacing the circles of the Ignorance,

Power and divinities burst flaming forth;

Each part of the being trembling with delight

Lay overwhelmed with tides of happiness

And saw her hand in every circumstance

And felt her touch in every limb and cell.⁶¹

Thus did Savitri succeed in building the strong fortress of the Divine in a loud ignorant world" and make "the body a capital of bliss."

In the brief stade between a death and birth

A first perfection's stage is reached at last;

Out of the wood and stone of our nature's stuff

A temple is shaped where the high gods could live.

Even if the struggling world is left outside

One man's perfection still can save the world.

There is won a new proximity to the skies,

A first betrothal of the Earth to Heaven,

A deep concordat between Truth and Life:

A camp of God is pitched in human time.⁶²

Savitri finds her soul, the soul that is both cosmic and supracosmic. She "passes beyond Time into eternity" and living eternally in consciousness of the supreme Mother, Prepares to meet her Fate.

V. MADHUSUDAN REDDY

⁶⁰Ibid., p. 528. ⁶¹Ibid., p. 529. ⁶²Ibid., p. 531.

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The Eternal Bridegroom

The Bhagavad-Gita says that not even for one moment can man remain without performing action; for, to live is to act. Life is relationship and to be related is to act. But if we examine the nature of our actions, we will find that they are not actions at all; they are only reactions. Such reactions may be in terms of physical movements or of words or of thoughts. There is a fundamental difference between an action and a reaction. A reaction emanates from a fixed centre in one's consciousness. It may be called a centre of habit or of memory. Action, however, arises from no centre at all, and that is why it is always spontaneous and natural. A reaction is habitual, but an action is natural. Thus an action does not arise from a centre of thought. To put it differently: an action always precedes thought. Such an action is not a thoughtless action in the sense that it is impulsive. It remains untouched by thought. In such pure action thought is used only to explain as to how one acted. As we have stated above, an action can be at any level. To look at something is itself an action. But true looking is possible only if thought does not intervene. And so the action of looking must precede thought, if there is to be a true looking. This applies to all categories of action. When thought intervenes then the experience is broken up. True relationship is possible when the action of relationship precedes thought. With regard to Savitri's encounter with Death, Sri Aurobindo says that a sudden change came over her where "the thinker was no more." That is why her meeting with Death was complete, leaving no residue behind. Our so-called actions are incomplete and, therefore, in such actions there is always the looking to the future. The whole process of psychological time is created by our incomplete actions. These incomplete actions are verily the reactions. It is reaction which is the begetter of psychological time with all its frustrations and anxieties. It needs to be understood that Love alone is total action. Love is completely free from all trace of reaction. A reaction arises when an outer challenge stimulates the centre of memory or of habit. But Love needs no stimulation of outer challenge. Its action is free from all compulsions, whether outer or inner. We are either compelled by the factors of outer environment or by the inner factors of ideals and images. An action arising from an ideal is a

reaction. And so all efforts to translate ideals into actions are an exercise in futility; for, they keep one chained to an endless process of reactions. Such efforts to translate generate only incomplete actions and therefore create the need for psychological time. In any effort to translate ideals into actions there comes into existence this factor of psychological time. It is not for nothing that Sri Aurobindo deals with the problem of ideals in a comprehensive manner in the course of Death's dialogue with Savitri. Death calls ideals as the malady of the mind or the bright delirium of thought. We have seen how he ridicules Savitri's idealistic stance. It is in this context that he rules out all sentiments regarding love, calling it only another expression of the same futile idealistic fervour. Death tells Savitri to face the realities of life and not get lost in mere idealistic glamour of love. But Savitri was not a person who could be easily disposed of by Death through such intellectual discussions and moral discourses. Savitri was remarkably quickwitted and so replied almost immediately to the long oration of Death. She said:

O dark-browed sophist of the universe

Who veilst the Real with its own Idea,

Hiding with brute objects Nature's living face,

Masking eternity with thy dance of death,

Thou hast woven the ignorant Mind into a screen

And made of Thought error's purveyor and scribe,

And a false witness of mind's servant sense...

Champion of a harsh and sad philosophy

Thou hast used words to shutter out the Light A

nd called in Truth to vindicate a lie...

ODeath, thou speakest Truth but Truth that slays,

I answer to thee with the Truth that saves.¹

Savitri calls Death a sophist, meaning a mere quibbler. She says that Death tries to veil the Real with his own dark and dismal contrivance. He invokes Truth to vindicate a lie. According Savitri, Death is an adept at distorting things. Out of this distortion he utters a truth that slays. Savitri tells Death that she speaks the Truth that slaves. Death is a past-master at misrepresenting facts. Savitri says:

¹ Savitri, p. 621.

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The Timeless took its ground in emptiness

And drew the figure of a universe,

That the spirit might adventure into Time

And wrestle with adamant Necessity

And the soul pursue a cosmic pilgrimage.²

Savitri gives to Death lessons in evolution and reminds him as to how the universe took its birth and how evolutionary stream moved on. She says that the whole purpose of evolution is to see that spirit adventures in Time and wrestless with Necessity. It was not to submit to Necessity that the spirit took its birth in time. And surely the greatest symbol of Necessity is Death. Savitri says that the spirit is bom not to submit to the dictates of Death. She says:

O Death, thou lookst on an unfinished world

Assailed by thee and of its road unsure,

Peopled by imperfect minds and ignorant lives,

And sayest God is not and all is vain.

How shall the child already be the man?³

Savitri says that Death is looking at the unfinished world. Here Sri Aurobindo has indicated the dynamic concept of Godhead. God did not create a finished world and is now resting on His oars. The creation of the universe is a continuing process and there is none more dissatisfied with his creation than the Creator himself. If Death would only understand the movement of evolutions then he would realise that the child cannot suddenly become a man. The fallacy in Death's reasoning consists in the fact that he is assailing an unfinished universe, regarding it as a finished product. Savitri says to Death that the child cannot suddenly become a man; she tells him further:

Because he is infant, shall he never grow?...

Time travels towards revealed eternity.⁴

From the Unmanifest to the Manifest,—this is the movement of evolution. The Unmanifest is continually establishing new contacts for its manifestation. The expression of the Unmanifest can never be finished. Even a thousand names of God cannot fully describe him, similarly the Unmanifest goes on, age after age, expressing itself in the Manifest. Never will the Creator say: My world is

² Ibid., p. 622. ³Ibid., p. 623. ⁴Ibid.

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over and I have created a finished product as my creation. Savitri says to Death:

He has built a world in the unknowing Void.

His forms he has massed from infinitesimal dust;

His marvels are built from insignificant things.

If mind is crippled, life untaught and crude,

If brutal masks are there and evil acts,

They are incidents of his vast and varied plot,

His great and dangerous drama's needed steps.⁵

The poet says that the entire universe is the Creator's passion-play. Death only looks at isolated incidents, and not at the whole play. He pities the man as he is today, but does not see the tremendous potentiality lying concealed in his nature. Let him not deride the role of man; for, if till now he was a tool in the hands of Death, tomorrow he may rise to his full stature and challenge his might. Savitri indicates that in her challenge Death must see the future of humanity. Savitri says that as evolution proceeds the Creator wishes man, his highest creation, to take a greater and greater initiative and not be a child eternally spoon-fed by the mother. She says:

His knowledge he disguised as Ignorance,

His Good he sowed in Evil's monstrous bed,

Made error a door by which Truth could enter in,

His plant of bliss watered with Sorrow's tears.⁶

The Creator expressed himself in contraries, so that man may make his way with full understanding. Savitri says: "A dual Nature covered the Unique."⁷ The One became the Many so that the Many may return to the One, bringing a rich harvest of a multi-coloured experience. She says:

In this meeting of the Eternal's mingling masques,

This tangle-dance of passionate contraries

Locking like lovers in a forbidden embrace

The quarrel of their lost identity.⁸

In this world the quarrel and the conflict that are visible are indeed due to lost identity. It is a part of the growth of man. A point comes when man moves away from the lost identity to his real nature. When child grows to the stature of man, he passes through

⁵Ibid., p. 624. ⁶Ibid., p. 625. ⁷Ibid. ⁸lbid.

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numerous ways of error and mistake. But thus alone can he grow and come to real maturity. Man stumbles again and again, but thus alone can he acquire strength and vigour. Evolution proceeds from Instinct to Intellect. It is true that instinct is pure and innocent, while intellect displays many a time corruption and vile. But intellect is only an interlude, just a pause of the evolutionary stream before it turns to the glory of Intelligence or Intuition. In the interlude perchance many perversions occur, but they are just passing incidents on the onward journey. Intellect gives to man a sweep and a range of expression which the subhuman creatures do not have in spite of the innocence of their instinctual living. But the possibility of perversion does not invalidate the state of purity. Savitri says:

Our Knowledge walks leaning on Error's staff,

A worshipper of false dogmas and false gods,

Or fanatic of a fierce intolerant creed

Or a seeker doubting every truth he finds,

A sceptic facing Light with adamant No

Or chilling the heart with dry ironic smile,

A cynic stamping out the god in man.⁹

Here the poet describes many perversions and aberrations that are there in the whole phenomenon of Creation. To look at the whole requires a different approach from one that only examines part by part. Savitri says that Death lacks that approach of the Whole and so is unable to see the real significance of things. It is Love alone that can comprehend the Whole, and the meaning of Life is vouchsafed only to one who sees it as a Whole, and not as a synthesis made up of the parts. Savitri says:

There is the mystic realm whence leaps the power

Whose fire bums in the eyes of seer and sage;

A lightning flash of visionary sight,

It plays upon an inward verge of mind:

Thought silenced gazes into a brilliant Void.¹⁰

The experience of mystic communion or Love comes when "thought silenced gazes into the brilliant Void."¹¹ The evolutionary drama is leading man to that state through the labyrinth of mind and its activities. Savitri says to Death that it is only during the

⁹Ibid., p. 626. ¹⁰ Ibid., p. 627. ¹¹Ibid.

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interlude from intellect to intelligence that his reign can last. And during this interlude Death has taken full advantage to confuse man. She says:

Thy mask has covered the Eternal's face,

The Bliss that made the world has fallen asleep.

Abandoned in the Vast she slumbered on:

An evil transmutation overtook

Her members till she knew herself no more.¹²

Sri Aurobindo's philosophy rests on the thesis of Bliss and Joy being the undercurrent of all life on earth. For him, to be a spiritual pilgrim is not to be a candidate for woe. Unfortunately, during the interval between intellect and intelligence, Death has wrought such havoc that "the Bliss that made the world has fallen asleep."¹³ It is this inherent joy of life that has to be awakened; but for this the power of Death must be vanquished. Savitri says:

But now the primal innocence is lost

And Death and Ignorance govern the mortal world.¹⁴

Savitri tells Death that even though he has wrought havoc with the life of the mortal, there are still intimations of the Real to be felt even in the midst of the fallen existence. She says:

Earth still has kept her early charm and grace,

The grandeur and the beauty still are hers,

But veiled is the divine Inhabitant.¹⁵

It is this divine Inhabitant that has to be awakened; for, once he wakes up, no more can Death and Ignorance rule the world. Nature has still kept her charm and grace, but it is the mind of man that has come under the sway of the veil cast by Death. Savitri tells Death:

Although God made the world for his delight,

An ignorant Power took charge and seemed his Will

And Death's deep falsity has mastered Life.

All grew a play of Chance simulating Fate.¹⁶

She says that what has mastered Life is Death's deep falsity. Once this falsity is laid bare the rule of Death will be no more. And Savitri is addressing herself to this great task of laying bare the

¹²lbid., p. 628. ¹³Ibid. ¹⁴Ibid. ¹⁵Ibid. ¹⁶Ibid., p. 629.

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falsity of Death. The first move in this game is to look Death in the face and challenge its might. She says:

A hidden Bliss is at the root of things.

A mute Delight regards Time's countless works:

To house God's joy in things Space gave wide room,

To house God's joy in self our souls were bom...

Indifferent to the threat of karmic law,

Joy dares to grow upon forbidden soil,

Its sap runs through the plant and flowers of Pain:

It thrills with the drama of fate and tragic doom,

It tears its food from sorrow and ecstasy,

On danger and difficulty whets its strength;

It wallows with the reptile and the worm

And lifts its head, an equal of the stars.¹⁷

It is Joy that underlies everything; for, it raises its head even in the midst of doom and destruction. It is this Joy which is the will to live. This will can never be smothered. It lifts its head even under dire circumstances and asserts its equality with the stars. Savitri says that "our earth starts from mud and ends in sky."¹⁸ When this transfiguration comes, then is seen the end of Death as also of the Night. She tells Death an ardent comradeship

Becomes a wide spiritual yearning's space.

A lonely soul passions for the Alone,

The heart that loved man thrills to the love of God.¹⁹

The secret of man's transmutation lies in Love. The poet says here that he alone can respond to love of God who has loved man. He who has never known human love must remain a stranger to the love of God. Savitri says to Death:

A Lover learning from his cloister's door

Gathers the whole world into his single breast...

ODeath, I have triumphed over thee within;

Iquiver no more with the assault of grief,

A mighty calmness seated deep within

Has occupied my body and my sense...

O Death, not for my heart's sweet poignancy

Nor for my happy body's bliss alone

¹⁷Ibid., p. 630. ¹⁸Ibid., p. 632. Ibid.

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I have claimed from thee the living Satyavan,

But for his work and mine, our sacred charge.²⁰

Here once again we see the poet depicting Savitri as human and divine at the same time. Savitri says to Death that "not for my happy body's bliss alone"²¹ she asks for living Satyavan. Here the indication is that her human happiness is certainly involved in her demand. But there is the greater demand for the fulfilment of the work which they together have to accomplish. She says that this work is their sacred charge. But what is this work they together can do? Can not Savitri do it alone? The work obviously is the making of a new world where man can rise to his full spiritual stature. In this great work the masculine and the feminine aspects of consciousness must work together; for, then alone it can lead to the integration of man. Savitri says that he is

...the Eternal's delegate soul in man.

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;

For Love is the bright link twixt earth and heaven...

Love is man's lien on the Absolute.²²

Savitri says she is guarding the seal of the Supreme which the Supreme has put on their love. Her great mission on earth is to see that love does not cease to exist upon this earth. Love is not a mere sentimentality; nor is it just emotionalism. The plant of Love flowers only when the masculine and the feminine co-exist. It is only when there is a simultaneous existence of the Strength symbolising the masculine consciousness, and Grace symbolising the feminine consciousness that Love can be bom. Savitri says: "Love is man's lien on the Absolute." It is only through Love that man can keep this lien. And Love is the only link that exists between Man and God. But Death was a tough customer; he refused to be taken in by these words of Savitri. And so Death replied to Savitri, saying

Thus will thou hire the glorious charlatan Mind,

²⁰Ibid., p. 633. ²¹Ibid. ²²Ibid., p. 633.

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To weave from his Ideal's gossamer air

A fine rainment for thy body's nude desires...?

Daub not the web of life with magic hues...

O human face, put off mind-painted masks...

Accept thy futile birth, thy narrow life.

For truth is bare like stone and hard like death.²³

There can be no more apt description of the mind than the epithet given here by the poet wherein he calls it a "charlatan" meaning a quack or a pretender. Mind is a quack, administering spurious medicines having no relevance to the ailment. Death tells Savitri that he regards all her talk as mere effervescence, a sentimental sob-stuff. He asks her to accept the unpleasant reality; for, "truth is bare like stone and hard like death."²⁴ But Savitri immediately retorts and gives a fitting reply to Death's taunting words. She says:

Yes, I am human. Yet shall man by me,

Since in humanity waits his hour the God,

Trample thee down to reach the immortal heights...

Yes, my humanity is a mask of God:

He dwells in me, the mover of my acts...

In me are the Nameless and the secret Name.²⁵

Here the poet has introduced two seemingly contradictory expressions, the Nameless and the Secret Name. God's name is indeed a secret which He conveys only to him who goes to him, shedding all false names. When the names given by the mind are dropped then the Reality is rendered truly Nameless. It is in the Nameless that the secret Name is conveyed. The Nameless is the Nirguna even as the Name is the Saguna. The poet says that God is Nirguna as well as Saguna, both the Nameless and having a secret Name. But Death continues the dialogue and demolishes argument after argument presented by Savitri. Death tells her:

O priestess in Imagination's house,

Persuade first Nature's fixed immutable laws...

How canst thou force to wed two eternal foes?

Irreconcilable in their embrace

They cancel the glory of their pure extremes:

An unhappy wedlock maims their stunted force.²⁶

²³Ibid., p. 634. ²⁴lbid. ²⁵Ibid., pp. 634-35.

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One may ask: Who are these two eternal foes whom Savitri proposes to join in wedlock? They are Matter and Spirit. Death says that if Matter is all then Spirit is a dream, and if Spirit is all then Matter is a lie. He says: The Real with the unreal cannot mate. Death wants Savitri to make up her mind. If she regards Spirit as supreme, then why does she bother about Matter? Why should the material form of Satyavan mean so much to her? If she believes in Matter then she must obey the laws of matter which are inscrutable. Death indicates to Savitri that she should be consistent in her argument. How can Spirit and Matter be brought together in a wedlock? For, such marriage is bound to prove most unhappy. Savitri replies to God:

My heart is wiser than the Reason's thoughts,

My heart is stronger than thy bonds, O Death...

It sees the cosmic Spirit at its work;

In the dim Night it lies alone with God.

My heart's strength can carry the grief of the universe...

And never lose the white spiritual touch.²⁷

The dialogue between Death and Savitri is most illuminating and tremendously scintillating. They seem to be equals and hence cross their swords freely. Death found in Savitri some one who was proving more than a match for him. The arrows of Death, however sharp they may, fail utterly to hit Savitri.

Death tells Savitri that if she is so strong and powerful then let her show her freedom from the inscrutable laws of fate. She says that surely she will ultimately succeed and that the plans of Death will be foiled. Death the great Nihil contemptuously asked her to prove her strength, and if she does, then,

Then will I give thee all thy soul desires,

All the brief joys earth keeps for mortal hearts.

Only the one dearest wish that outweighs all,

Hard laws forbid and thy ironic Fate.

My will once wrought remains unchanged through Time,

And Satyavan can never again be thine.²⁸

Here we are reminded of the dialogue between Yama and Nachiketa in the Kathopanishad. Yama tells Nachiketa to choose whatever joys and pleasures of life he liked, but not press him to reveal the

²⁶Ibid., p. 635. ²⁷Ibid., pp. 635-36.²⁸Ibid., p. 636.

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secret of Death. In Sri Aurobindo's Savitri, we find Death willing to grant all earthly pleasures to Savitri but Satyavan can never again be hers. But Savitri spurns these flimsy offers of Death and says:

If the eyes of Darkness can look straight at Truth,

Look at my heart and, knowing what I am,

Give what thou wilt or what thou must, O Death.

Nothing I claim but Satyavan alone.²⁹

The poet says that after these words uttered by Savitri there was a hush, a poignant silence. Death had never come across such resoluteness on the part of a mortal being. His threats and explanations, his philosophical reasonings and offers of gifts, having failed, Death still attempts to wean Savitri away from the path she has chosen. And so Death tells Savitri:

I give to thee, saved from death and poignant fate

Whatever once the living Satyavan

Desired in his heart for Savitri.

Bright noons I give thee and unwounded dawns,

Daughters of thy own shape in heart and mind,

Fair hero sons and sweetness undisturbed...

Return, O child, to thy forsaken earth.³⁰

But Savitri is not slow to reply; for, how can these wishes be fulfilled, if Satyavan is not returned to her alive? She says:

Earth cannot flower if lonely I return.³¹

But Death too was not to be weaned away from his path. And so he angrily cries out to Savitri:

What knowest thou of earth's rich and changing life

Who thinkest that, one man dead, all joy must cease?...

Soon other guests the empty chamber fill.³²

Death tells Savitri that everything on earth is in a state of flux. Nothing is permanent, and so she too will soon forget Satyavan and his place will be taken by others. He says that grief dies soon in the tired human heart. Savitri tells Death:

Give me back Satyavan, my only Lord.

Thy thoughts are vacant to my soul that feels

²⁹lbid. ³⁰Ibid., pp. 636-637. ³¹"Ibid., p. 637. ^,32Ihid.

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The deep eternal truth in transient things.³³

Savitri knows that life is in a flux and everything is transient. But she reminds Death that she has the insight to comprehend the Eternal in the midst of the transient. She can fathom the permanent even in the ceaseless flux of life. Her love for Satyavan was bom when she perceived the Eternal in the bosom of Time itself. But Death says that she is pursuing something that is utterly false. If she returns to earth she will soon find other men as loveable as Satyavan. She will feel happy in the company of the other man, and "Satyavan shall glide into the past, a gentle memory pushed away from thee by new love and thy children's tender hands." Death reminds Savitri that after all life is "a constant stream that never is the same."³⁴ In the stream of life, fresh waters come every moment, and so events of the past glide into memory. Satyavan too will be one of those events that will get pushed into the recesses of memory. But Savitri tells Death:

Why dost thou vainly strive with me, O Death,

A mind delivered from all twilight thoughts

To whom the secrets of the gods are plain?...

All shall be seized, transcended; there shall kiss

Casting their veils before the marriage fire The

eternal bridegroom and eternal bride.³⁵

At these words of Savitri, the poet says, the twilight trembled like a bursting veil. There was a deep silence cast over the region where the three stood. Then they moved without any exchange of words, journeying onward through the drifting ways. The poet describes this further journey in the following words:

mortal led, the god and spirit obeyed

And she behind was leader of their march

And they in front were followers of her will.³⁶

In this further journey, Death brings the travellers to a spot where the twilight of the ideal recedes and the twilight of the earthly real comes into view. Death purposely does this so that Savitri may see clearly what the earthly real is. He feels that perhaps in this environment of the earthly real, Savitri will be able to free herself from the illusions of the idealistic world. Standing on this slope

³³ Ibid. ³⁴Ihid., p. 638. ³⁶Ibid. ³⁶lbid.,.p. 639.

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that slowly downward sank, Death once again addresses Savitri and says:

Behold the figures of this symbol realm...

Here thou canst trace the outcome Nature gives

To the sin of being and the error in things

And the desire that compels to live

And man's incurable malady of hope.

Where Nature changes not, man cannot change...

His mind is pent in circling boundaries:

For mind is man, beyond thought he cannot soar.

If he could leave his limits he would be safe:

He sees but cannot mount to his greater heavens;

Even winged, he sinks back to his native soil.

He is a captive in his net of mind

And beats soul-wings against the walls of life.³⁷

The poet says that the limits of man have been set by his mind. He is unable to soar beyond the limits of thought; for, he is a captive in the net of the mind. He fruitlessly beats his soul-wings against the walls of life. But the poet says, somewhat paradoxically, that man would be safe if he could leave his limits. But he appears to feel safe only within his limits. But he appears to feel safe only within his limits. This safety, however, is unreal. His real safety lies in breaking through the supposed safety of the mind. Death tells Savitri that after all she too is the creature of this mind. He asks her that even though she may profess to see the Eternal in the transient, how is she going to bring down that Eternal? He says:

Hope not to call God down into his life:

How shalt thou bring the Everlasting here?

There is no house for him in hurrying Time.³⁸

Death tells Savitri that Truth cannot come down to the transient earth; for, how can the Everlasting live in the house of Time? Time is hurrying fast and so in that flux where will the Everlasting live? He says to her that she is caught in the illusions of the mind. Death wants to impress upon Savitri that Matter alone exists: Mind has no independent existence. Mind may talk big, but all its talk is empty chatter. And so he says to Savitri:

³⁷Ibid., pp. 643-44. ³⁸Ibid., p. 644.

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If Mind is all, renounce the hope of bliss;

If Mind is all, renounce the hope of Truth.

For Mind can never touch the body of Truth

And Mind can never see the soul of God...

Truth comes not there but only the thought of Truth,

God is not there but only the name of God.³⁹

Death tells Savitri: How can she know God with the mere instrument of mind? The Self can never be known by the mind, and if she is the Self then she must remember that it is Unborn. She must then enter the state of the Unborn. For this she must die and enter the realm of the Spirit only through the gateway of Death. Death tells her:

...thou must die to thyself to reach God's height:

I, Death, am the gate of immortality.⁴⁰

Death brings Savitri to the point that even if she wants to live the life of the Spirit, she and all others must pass through his gate. And so Death is supreme. It is supreme in the field of Matter; and it is also supreme for those who desire to enter the world of the Spirit. Without passing through his gate none can reach the realm of God. Thus must Savitri accept the supreme overlordship of Death. What is the use of Savitri crossing swords with this Almighty? Death has now started talking of things that belong to the world of the Spirit. But here Savitri is on a firmer ground:

The world is a spiritual paradox

Invented by a need in the Unseen,

A poor translation to the creature's sense

Of That which for ever exceeds idea and speech,

A symbol of what can never be symbolised,

A language mispronounced, misspelt, yet true.⁴¹

She says that the world by itself makes no meaning; for, it can never speak the language of the Spirit. We may describe the world as a symbol of the Real, but the Real can never be put in a symbol. But even though the world mispronounces and misspels the language of the Spirit, there are hidden in it the intimations of the true and the real. She says that "the world is not cut off from Truth and God."⁴² She tells Death:

³⁹Ibid., pp. 645-46. ⁴⁰Ibid., p. 647. ⁴¹Ibid., p. 648. ⁴²Ibid.

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In vain thou hast dug the dark unbridgeable gulf,

In vain thou hast built the blind and doorless wall:

Man's soul crosses through thee to Paradise,

Heaven's sun forces its way through death and night;

Its light is seen upon our being's verge...

How sayst thou Truth can never light the human mind

And Bliss can never invade the mortal's heart

Or God descend into the world he made?...

I have discovered that the world was He;

I have met Spirit with spirit, Self with self,

But I have loved too the body of my God.

I have pursued him in his earthly form.

A lonely freedom cannot satisfy

A heart that has grown one with every heart:

I am a deputy of the aspiring world,

My spirit's liberty I ask for all.⁴³

Savitri tells Death that however dark may be his night, there is always to be seen a ray of light. Such perception comes to one who can penetrate his veil. To such a one Transcendence is visible even in the Immanence. God is not invisible; he is intangible. He is to be found in the very creation that he has made. Surely one can discover the Creator in the Creation itself; not away from it. Savitri says: "I have discovered that the world was He."⁴⁴ And so one who discovers the Spirit does not reject the Body. Savitri says: "I have loved too the body of my God."⁴⁵

Under the incessant assault of Savitri, Death shows signs of thawing and starts adopting a different line. If persuation and git fail, then what is he to do? He tries to flatter Savitri by saying that, since she is so wise and strong, why should she then waste her precious energies for a cause that is so earthly and mundane? Death tells her:

Because thou knowst the wisdom that transcends

Both veil of forms and the contempt of forms,

Arise delivered by the seeing gods...

Use not thy strength like the wild Titan souls!

Touch not the seated lines, the ancient laws,

Respect the calm of great established things.⁴⁶

⁴³bid., pp. 648-19. ⁴⁴Ibid. p. 649. ⁴⁵Ibid. ⁴⁶Ibid., pp. 650-51.

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Death tells Savitri that her wisdom transcends both the veil of forms and the contempt of forms. She is neither attached to forms, nor is she repulsed by them. It is a wisdom rare among the mortals, and so Death appeals to her not to dissipate her strength for things that are small and petty. He says that she should not use her powers like wild Titan souls. Death speaks an appealing language, showing great respect for the strength and wisdom of Savitri. He tells her not to disturb the calm of established things. If she uses her strength to disturb the functioning of ancient laws, then there would be utter confusion. But Savitri is not taken in by these flattering words of Death and so she says to him:

What is the calm thou vauntst, O Law, O Death?⁴⁷

She says what is this calm about which he seems to be boasting so much? If it is the calm of established law then surely such calm is only an expression of something inert and soulless. She tells Death:

Vain the soul's hope if changeless Law is all:

Ever to the new and the unknown press on

The speeding aeons justifying God.

What were earth's ages if the grey restraint

Were never broken and glories sprang not forth...?

Impose not upon sentient minds and hearts

The dull fixity that binds inanimate things.⁴⁸

Here Savitri speaks of the fundamental urge pressing on the evolutionary stream. If changeless Law is everything then there is no hope for man. If the grey restraint of Law is not broken, how can the new glories spring forth? In Mutations, both biological and psychological, it is these grey restraints of Law that are broken. And it is only thus that new species can be born. The evolutionary movement can never be fully explained in terms of the changeless Law. They can explain variations, but for mutations they have no explanation in the framework of law. Savitri is concerned with spiritual mutation, not with a mere psychological variation. She says to Death:

I trample on thy law with living feet;

For to arise in freedom I was born.

If I am mighty let my force be unveiled

⁴⁷Ibid. p. 651. ⁴⁸Ibid, pp. 651 -52.

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Equal companion of the dateless powers,

Or else let my frustrated soul sink down

Unworthy of Godhead in the original sleep.⁴⁹

Death is indeed overawed by these words, but still tries to hold his own ground, perhaps in vain. He says to Savitri:

Child, hast thou trodden the gods beneath thy feet

Only to win poor shreds of earthly life

For him thou lov'st cancelling the grand release,

Keeping from early rapture of the heavens

His soul the lenient deities have called?

Are thy arms sweeter than the courts of God?⁵⁰

Savitri says to Death that since he has been praising her for her might he should realise that she would like her force to be fully unveiled and seen as an equal companion of the dateless powers. The "dateless powers" are indeed the powers of Death; for, death comes without any prior appointment. Listening to these words, Death tells Savitri why should she deprive her lover, Satyavan, from the joys of heaven? Is she going to use her powers for that, cancelling the grand release of Satyavan? And then Death taunts Savitri by putting the question: "Are thy arms sweeter than the courts of God?"⁵¹ He has placed a very awkward question before Savitri. Does Savitri regard herself as greater than God himself? How can Savitri say "Yes"? But how can Savitri also say "No"? If she says "Yes", then surely she makes God inferior to her, and if she says "No", then she should allow Satyavan to proceed to the courts of God where he will know the rapture of the heaven. Savitri is on the horns of a dilemma.

But Savitri had no hesitation in replying to Death. She said that she was following the path ordained by the Divine and that she was not deviating in the least from the line indicated by God. She said that perhaps Death did not know that God created man not in order that he may be a mere puppet, a toy, in the hand of the Creator. He created man so that he may become a collaborator with God. But for this man has to be completely free. So long as he is not free, he will be afraid of Death and become a mere plaything in the hands of Fate. It is only as a completely free individual that he can co-operate with God in the fulfilment of his great plan. Savitri

⁴⁹Ibid. ⁵⁰lbid, p. 652. ⁵⁰Ibid.

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was working to claim this freedom for man. She had gone thus far, challenging Death, because her mission dictated to her that man's freedom depended upon his release from the clutches of Death. Death has denied freedom to man. Savitri says:

What liberty has the soul which feels not free

Unless stripped bare and cannot kiss the bonds

The Lover winds around his playmate's limbs,

Choosing his tyranny, crushed in his embrace?

To seize him better with her boundless heart

She accepts the limiting circle of his arms,

Bows full of bliss beneath his mastering hands

And laughs in his rich constraints, most bound, most free.

This is my answer to thy lures, O Death.⁵²

Death had taunted Savitri by saying that, although she was so wise, she was frittering away her energies in protecting the demands of earthly love. Savitri refused to be lured by the flattery of Death. She says that she wanted to be free in the arms of Satyavan. She tells Death that in order "to seize him better with her boundless heart she accepts the limiting circle of his arms." She claims for man his right to love and to be loved. It is this fundamental right which Death attempts to take away. But Death tells Savitri:

However mighty, whatever thy secret name

Uttered in hidden conclave of the gods,

Thy heart's ephermeral passion cannot break

The iron rampart of accomplished things

With which the great Gods fence their camp in Space.

Whoever thou art behind thy human mask...

The cosmis Law is greater than thy will.

Even God himself obeys the Laws he made:

The Law abides and never can it change,

The Person is a bubble on Time's sea.⁵³

There is a fundamental conflict in the approaches of Death and of Savitri. Death regards the Person as a mere bubble on the sea of Time, while Savitri regards the Person as a real entity, a traveller from the Timeless into the realms of Time. Death asks Savitri that, if she claims to know Truth, can she then communicate that Truth to him? He asks what is truth

⁵²Ibid., p. 653. ⁵³Ibid., p. 654.

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Amid the specious images of sense,

Amid the crowding guesses of the mind

And the dark ambiguities of a world

Peopled with the incertitudes of Thought?...

Truth has no home in earth's irrational breast:

Yet without reason life is a tangle of dreams,

But reason is poised above a dim abyss

And stands at last upon a plank of doubt.

Eternal truth lives not with mortal men.⁵⁴

Death demolishes Savitri's claim to know Truth and to represent it here on earth. He says that reason after all stands only on the plank of doubt, and without reason man's life is a tangle of mere dreams. Again Death says that truth has no home in man's irrational breast. Thus he indicates that neither by reason nor by unreason can Truth be found. How can Savitri, a mere mortal, know about Truth. But if Savitri still claims to know Truth, then Death tells her:

Show me the body of the living Truth

Or draw for me the outline of her face

That I too may obey and worship her.

Then will I give thee back thy Satyavan.⁵⁵

Death tells Savitri that if she can draw the outline of the face of Truth and show the body of living Truth, then he too will follow that Truth and give back to her Satyavan. Death has laid down an impossible demand; for, how can the body of living Truth be shown. Perhaps Death uses the term "living Truth" purposely; for, one can speak of the body of truth with reference to something that is crystallised and therefore dead. If Savitri is able to show the body of living Truth then Death is ready to follow it and even give back Satyavan to her. Death tells Savitri: "No magic truth can bring the dead to life, no power of earth cancel the thing once done." Once again he asks Savitri to leave the dead Satyavan and rearrange her life accepting that fact. Then Savitri replied; but, as she was speaking, her mortality disappeared and her Goddess self grew visible. She said:

O Death, thou too art God and yet not He,

But only his own black shadow on his path...

⁵⁴ Ibid., pp. 654-55. ⁵⁵ Ibid.

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All contraries are aspects of God's face.

The Many are the innumerable One,

The One carries the multitude in his breast...

Darkness below, a fathomless Light above...

Stand face to face, opposite, inseparable...

Two poles whose currents wake the immense World-Force.⁵⁶

Savitri speaks to Death about the play of the opposites which underlies all movements in the manifested universe. There has to be collapse of logic before one can understand Truth as God himself. Truth and God are not two different things. Death wants to see the face of Truth, but he forgets that Truth defies Reason. By Reason one can never understand the secret of the Universal Drama which the Universe is. The One and the Many are not opposed to each other; for, as the poet says in the above lines: "The Many are the innumerable One." Savitri says to Death:

Our human words can only shadow her.

To thought she is an unthinkable rapture of light,

To speech a marvel inexpressible.

O Death, if thou couldst touch the Truth supreme

Thou wouldst grow suddenly wise and cease to be.⁵⁷

If Death could touch the supreme Truth then he would cease to be — that is what Savitri assures him. She says here that Truth cannot be expressed in words nor can become a subject of thought. Truth has to be directly known and when this direct knowledge comes then the very ground on which Death stands gives way. But Death says that if Truth cannot be expressed, then how is a bridge to be constructed between the Unmanifest and the Manifest? Must this gulf remain unbridgable? If so, how can earth receive the blessing of heaven? Who will bring down the light of heaven on earth? Here now Death poses a direct question to Savitri. He says:

Is thine that strength, O beauty of mortal limbs,

O soul who flutterest to escape my net?

Who then art thou hiding in human guise?

Thy voice carries the sound of infinity,

Knowledge is with thee, Truth speaks through thy words

The light of things beyond shines in thy eyes.

But where is thy strength to conquer Time and Death?⁵⁸

⁵⁶ Ibid., pp. 656-57. ⁵⁷ Ibid.,p.663. ⁵⁸ Ibid.

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There is a challenge to Savitri in these words of Death. He says to her that while she has knowledge and light, where is her strength to conquer Death and Time? Without such strength of what use are Knowledge and Light? Death throws out a more powerful challenge when he addresses her thus:

Hast thou God's force to build heaven's values here?

For truth and knowledge are an idle gleam...

If Might comes not to give to Truth her right....

O human claimant to immortality,

Reveal thy power, lay bare thy spirit's force,

Then will I give back to thee Satyavan...

Let deathless eyes look into the eyes of Death...

Transform earth's death into immortal life.

Then can thy dead return to thee and live.⁵⁹

As these words of Death were spoken Savitri, the poet says, looked on Death and answered not. Then a mighty transformation came in Savitri. The poet says:

A halo of the indwelling Deity,

The Immortal's lustre that had lit her face

And tented its radiance in her body's house...

In a flaming moment of apocalypse

The Incarnation thrust aside its veil.⁶⁰

The transformation in Savitri was such that it was a flaming moment of apocalypse, meaning revelation. It was a supreme moment of revelation where the Incarnation threw aside her veil. Savitri came into her own as the incarnation of the Divine. All human beings are incarnations of the Divine — but we are unable to thrust aside the veil that hides this Divinity. Savitri threw aside the veil and a flaming moment of revelation came. The poet says, she was,

A little figure in infinity

Yet stood and seemed the Eternal's very house,

As if the world's centre was her very soul

And all wide space was but its outer robe.⁶¹

The poet says that such was the transformation that, through her, Eternity looked into the eyes of Death. There was a silence. Even Death must have stood stunned at this transformation of the mere

⁵⁹ Ibid., pp. 664. 60 Ibid .

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mortal. Then the aweful silence was broken and a Voice was heard that seemed the low calm utterence of infinity. It said:

I hail thee almighty and victorious Death,

Thou grandiose Darkness of the Infinite...

Thou art my shadow and my instrument...

But now, O timeless Mightiness, stand aside

And leave the path of my incarnate Force.

Relieve the radiant god from thy black mask;

Release the soul of the world called Satyavan

Free from thy clutch of pain and ignorance

That he may stand master of life and fate,

Man's representative in the house of God,

The mate of Wisdom and the spouse of Light,

The eternal bridegroom of the eternal bride.⁶²

But Death still put up a resistance, even though he knew that he had almost lost the game. As the poet says, "Death unconvinced resisted still, although he knew refusing still to know, although he saw refusing still to see," Even though Death knew that he was refusing to know, and still resisted. Surely there is none so blind as one who refuses to see. Death was utterly blind in his resistence. Seeing the game was lost, he made frantic efforts to call all his colleagues for help, but one by one these friends and associates relented, leaving Death all alone. The poet says:

He called to Night but she fell shuddering back,

He called to Hell but sullenly it retired:

He turned to the Inconscient for support,

From which he was bom, his vast sustaining self:

It drew him back towards boundless vacancy

As if by himself to swallow up himself:

He called to his strength, but it refused his call...

At last he knew defeat inevitable

And left crumbling the shape that he had worn,

Abandoning hope to make man's soul his prey

And force to be mortal the immortal spirit.⁶³

The associates of Death are Night, Hell and Matter; but all these, realising the predicament in which Death was placed, deserted him. They refused to stand by him in his hour of great need. Death

⁶² Ibid, p. 666. ⁶³Ibid.,p.667.

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disappeared and he took refuge in the retreating Night. Death was unable to stand the onslaught of the transformed Savitri. The Voice that had spoken had shaken him up. His frantic efforts to save himself had failed and none of his associates was willing to stand by him. And so taking shelter under the retreating Night, he vanished. The poet says:

The dire universal Shadow disappeared

Vanishing into the Void from which it came.

As if deprived of its original cause,

The twilight realm passed fading from their souls,

And Satyavan and Savitri were alone.⁶⁴

With the disappearance of Death into the Void from where it had come, Satyavan and Savitri were left alone. No more was there the figure of Death to intervene. While the form of Death was not there, there was something else which still kept Satyavan and Savitri apart. The poet says that Satyavan and Savitri were alone,

But neither stirred: between those figures rose

A mute invisible and translucent wall.

In the long blank moment's pause nothing could move:

All waited on the unknown inscrutable Will.⁶⁵

With the disappearance of Death, if Satyavan and Savitri were left alone, why could they not come together? What was it that separated them? The poet says: "A mute invisible and translucent wall" kept them apart even when Death had vanished. What was this wall and why did it not crumble when Death moved away? It has to be remembered that so far what has happened is the disappearance of Death in the moment of his defeat. His moving away in the hour of defeat created a long blank. It was a moment of blankness, not the moment of emptiness. In the blankness, the form of death had gone but his invisible presence was there. The blankness was haunted by this invisible presence of Death. And it was this haunting presence which created a wall so that neither Satyavan nor Savitri could stir. The defeat of Death is not sufficient; for, then he will make his presence felt invisibly. It is not the conquest of Death that will lead man to the realisation of his immortality. The invisible presence of defeated Death will still strike terror in the heart of man. By calling the hidden strength,

⁶⁴ Ibid., p. 668. ⁶⁵ Ibid.

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man may defeat Death and cause his form to disappear. But this does not free man from the fear of Death. Death must be transformed so that he becomes the friend to man, not a disguised foe. Until Death is transformed there is no freedom for man from the fear of Death. When Death is transformed then man can live with him even in the midst of his daily avocations. It is in such transformation that life and death can co-exist. And only in their co-existence, can one find the secret of life as well as death. Savitri's strength had defeated Death — but her Love must still create the miracle of Death's transformation. Only then can she go back to earth with Satyavan and together create a new world where man shall move as an immortal being.

ROHIT MEHTA

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PART V

Savitri in World Literature

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:

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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.

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Savitri as an Epic

This is the age of what is called 'modernist' poetry and the possibility of an epic being written in modem times is strongly discounted. It is supposed that an epic requires a certain primitive atmosphere for its birth and growth, and the modem age is not suitable for it. Although in some of their latest tendencies in painting, sculpture and poetry the modernists are trying hard to reproduce primitivism, it is considered a practical impossibility to attempt a great epic, and succeed, because reason dominates and materialism is a living force today.

But Sri Aurobindo has made the impossible possible. He has written an epic of the New Age. His Savitri is a cosmic epic and concerns all men and women and times. He has shown, by his grand work, the lines along which an epic writer should move today.

Sri Aurobindo utilised his remarkable poetical capacity in writing an epic in the English language in which he embodied his grand vision of the Spirit. It is a well known fact that the poet had devoted himself to the pursuit of spirituality, the foundation of the Indian culture. He is not merely a revivalist and his spirituality is not of the type of a traditional repetition; it is rather a resurgence, a reorientation, which carries the tradition many steps forward by his spiritual discovery of the Supermind. In him the Indian spirit finds its greatest exponent.¹ The maker of "a new spiritual epoch" gives us noble-natured works as The Life Divine and Savitri.

As a form of literary expression, epic has not been static or conventional. On the contrary, it has been continually developing. This is clear in the remark of a critic who observes: "Homer fixes the type and way and artistic purpose; Virgil perfects the type; Milton perfects the purpose."

Taking all epic poetry into consideration, one may divide it into two main classes: the authentic epic generally intended for recitation and the literary epic intended for reading. The first type has usually a simple concrete subject and a sustained splendour. It treats a popular story of the golden "heroic age". Hot racial elements and nascent cultural trends are boldly brought out

¹ A.B. Purani, Sri Aurobindo's Savitri: An Approach and a Study, p. 25.

in it. While in the Iliad we have a great historic fight recounted in simple style, there is no story in Dante's Divina Commedia in that sense. Then, it comes out that the story need not be a historical fact; only it must have a poetic reality. Further, the authentic epic tells the story in a grand manner. One of its purposes consists in creating values in life, and this is what we mean by " a grand manner". If courage in the face of danger, heroism in fighting for a cause portrayed, the significance of life brought out, its value is found. It is to be noted that courage or heroism is not the only value of life; there are other values too, such as love, sacrifice, attainment of perfection, etc.

So the epic purpose, as noted in the case of Dante, does not, of necessity, entail a story. It is, in reality, allegorical. Dante himself distinguishes between the two senses in a poem, literal and allegorical. Even in Milton's Paradise Lost the pure story element is absent. According to Lascelles Abercrombie: "Milton from the knowledge of himself created Satan and Christ." His angels are not like Homer's Gods. To Homer the Gods are close and real, but Milton's angels are far and seem abstract. Milton's story deals with the mystery of the individual will in external opposition to the Divine Will. It seems certain that, after Milton, an epic dealing fully with an objective story is not possible; in modem age it is pushing towards a subjective trend.

After Milton hardly any successful epic in European language has been written. The general feeling among the critics is that at present epic manner and epic content are trying for a divorce. The last effort, on a large scale, was Goethe's Faust, which also falls far short of the epic height and grandeur. Similarly, Shelley' Revolt of Islam, Keats' s incomplete Hyperion have something of the epic accent, but they too do not succeed much. Victor Hugo's La Legende des Siecles, Robert Browning's The Ring and the Book, and Thomas Hardy's Dynasts — all seem to have some element of epic, but they fail to achieve the largeness, the grandeur and the integral vision. So the critics now feel that the authentic epic as a literary form is ever doomed. Guesses have been made about the possible future epic-content and epic-form. But the creative spirit has its own surprises for us. This was exemplified once in the past when the dictum that an epic should be a narrative on a large scale was falsified by Dante. Another such surprise in modem times was sprung by Sri Aurobindo in his Savitri.

Sri Aurobindo held in high esteem the two Indian epics, the

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Mahabharata and the Ramayana. In his Foundations of Indian Culture, he has passed valuable remarks about these two great epics. About the Mahabharata he says: "The Mahabharata especially is not only a story of the Bharatas, the epic of an early event which had become a national tradition, but on a vast scale the epic of the soul and religious and ethical mind and social and political ideals and culture and life of India. It is said popularly of it and with a certain measure of truth that whatever is in India is in the Mahabharata. The Mahabharata is the creation and expression not of a single individual mind but of the mind of a nation." And about the Ramayana he says: "The Ramayana is a work of the same essential kind as the Mahabharata; it differs only by a greater simplicity of plan, a more delicate ideal temperament and a finer glow of poetic warmth and colour. The main bulk of the poem is evidently by a single hand in spite of much accretion — and has a less complex and more obvious unity of structure. There is less of the philosophic, more of the purely poetic mind, more of the artist, less of the builder. .. At the same time, there is a like vastness of vision, and even more wide-winged flight of epic sublimity in the conception and sustained richness of minute execution in the detail."

Sri Aurobindo has said that his Savitri is planned like the Ramayana on a small scale, but it is full-bodied in its subject matter. Though from the standpoint of length Savitri surpasses all European epics, yet critics like Abercrombie hold the opinion that length by itself is not enough for an epic. It is the sustained breath of inspiration, the high tone of poetical expression that are important for it.

It is neither plausible nor proper to trace points of direct comparison between the Ramayana and Mahabharata on the one hand and Savitri on the other. The spirit of the languages, Sanskrit and English, would itself bring in many incommensurate elements. And yet it is possible to consider them as an expression of the Indian spirit in poetry separated by a period of at least two thousand years. Both the Ramayana and Mahabharata are "products of inspired intelligence with a high poetic tone," and both are "ensouled images of a great culture." These epics give us the spiritual significance of individual and collective life from a strong and noble thought-power of a mind that has high social, political and ethical ideals and is artistically delicate and refined. Savitri too offers us a whole world of experience, but it is altogether a

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new world in which the life of man — in fact the whole view of the cosmos — undergoes a radical change. Savitri is a vision of the world in terms of current laws of human evolution as seen by the ideal mind. It opens up a new world of consciousness for mankind. It is concerned with the revelation of the divine life. In it the relation of man with God is direct.

Throughout Savitri one finds the question of Eternity and Time and their interdependence. It is Timeless-Eternity of Absolute that wells out into the flow of Time-Eternity, carrying with it the unrolling of the cosmos. The two ends of Eternity are visible in Savitri. An Eternal below faces man with its unfathomable depth of darkness of the Nescience which may be called the dark Eternity described in the Veda as "darkness covered thickly by darkness" and in which there is neither "being nor non-being." The other is the Eternity of the Divine Absolute, beyond the realms of the three supernals — Sat, Chit and Anand. Many have felt that there is an irreconcilable opposition between Timeless-Eternity of the Absolute and Time-Eternity of the individual which is constantly flowing. But Savitri offers the vision of the true reconciliation of this opposition. Sri Aurobindo constantly speaks of the two ladders, one of the descent of the Supreme into the Nescience and the other of the ascent from Nescience to the Superconscient. Far from Eternity being in opposition to Time-movement, the grand vision of Savitri constantly brings Eternity in moments of Time. This opposition between Time and Eternity is actually a result of our mind's divided consciousness and its inability to reconcile what to it are the opposites. Mind's logic is that of the finite and can't be applied to the logic of the Infinite. Hence mind can give us only a partial view of the Infinite. In any supreme vision of Reality the two, Eternity and Time, are not only reconciled but also become organic and indivisible. Thus, in Savitri, we have the proposition:

That the eyes of the Timeless might look out from Time

And world manifest the unveiled Divine.²

The seer tells us that it is Life that "has lured the Eternal into the arms of Time." (p. 178) The symbol of Dawn gives us "spiritual beauty" which "squanders eternity on a beat of Time." Aswapati, the human king, was conscious, in his inner being, of his origin in

² Savitri, p. 72.

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the Eternal. He could see the relation between Eternity and Time-movement:

Ascending and descending twixt life's poles

The seried kingdoms of the graded Law

Plunged from the Everlasting into Time,

Then glad of a glory of multitudinous mind

And rich with life's adventure and delight

And packed with the beauty of Matter's shapes and hues

Climed back from Time into undying Self,

Up a golden ladder carrying the Soul,

Tying with diamond threads the Spirit's extremes.³

The apparent opposition between Eternity and Time seems to be resolved in human life by the intervention of a power of the Divine. It is she who acts as an "ambassadress" between Eternity and Time. She embodies forth herself in the form of Divine Love, or rather of a being carrying the saving power of the Divine Love within herself. All true human love has this divine element in it. Love, in truth, is that embodiment of the Eternal in Time which carries with it the stamp of immortality.

Eternity drew close disguised as Love

And laid its hand upon the body of Time.⁴

Savitri affirms the necessity of the birth of a new power, the Power of Divine Love, which alone can save man from the reign of Ignorance which is Death.

Sri Aurobindo's Savitri is, in many respects, comparable to the highest spiritual poetry of the world, the Vedas and the Upanishads. It is this that makes the great epic "the most sublime throb of an organic divine creation."⁵ Sri Aurobindo's life-work naturally comes in line with that of the Rishis of the Vedas and the Upanishads. His work surely adds to the rich spiritual treasures of the past by giving to mankind his great vision of the Supermind and by insisting that life must be related to the Divine if man wants to arrive at the true solution of his problems. Further, his mode of poetic creation is akin to that of the ancient seers. When he speaks of "a torrent of rapid lightnings" which represents the irresistible current of illuminating inspiration, he is not, as he himself explains,

³Ibid., pp. 88-89. ⁴ Ibid., p. 237.

⁵ A.B. Purani, op. cit., p. 45.

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using merely a figure of speech but is expressing his own personal experience. Again when he says

Missioned voices drive to me from God's doorway

Words that lived not, save upon Nature's summits,

Ecstasy's chariots,⁶

he is stating his own profound experience.

Vishwarupa, the vision of the Cosmic Divine, expressed so beautifully in the eleventh chapter of the Gita bears a resemblance to the cosmic vision contained in Savitri. One may mark in this respect the utterance of Arjuna in his exultation of the vision, and of Vishwarupa as the Destroyer of the world, with the colloquy of Aswapati and the Divine Mother in the third Book of Savitri.

Savitri is a big work containing the intense directness, vastness and comprehensiveness of the Vedas and the Upanishads. The Vedas and the Upanishads speak of the One, the Divine, the Supreme Ineffable. It is that which finds expression in a myriad forms in the cosmic dance. Savitri also opens us to the realm of the External. But it is not merely a reproduction of the experience of the past, for the poet-seer has discovered new realms of the Spirit.

It is notable that Savitri possesses unity of structure in a remarkable fashion. The legend on which it is founded affords ample story element for such a unity. The opening lines in the first Canto of Book I — the Symbol Dawn — bring us straight to the crisis of the story — the imminent death of Satyavan — and introduce the chief character, Savitri, in divine colours. The nature of the crisis is also revealed at once. The character of Savitri is immediately raised, and she becomes the "saviour" of men. The reader's attention is at once drawn to her and he is anxious to know how she is going to meet Yama, the God of Death. Speaking of Savitri's birth, the seer tells us that "a world's desire compelled her mortal birth."⁷ This brings us to the character of Aswapati, her father, who is no ordinary king but a "colonist from immortality." His attempt of self-perfection and his grand spiritual attainments form a very natural background for the birth of so noble a figure as Savitri. The "epic climb" of human soul really gains an epic grandeur in the vision of the poet-seer and endows this earth with a remarkable significance.

⁶ Collected poems, SABCL, Vol. 5, p. 563. ⁷Savitri, p. 22.

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The canvas of Savitri is as wide as the cosmos and takes into its purview worlds of being that are connected with humanity. These worlds or planes of existence do act upon human consciousness. They also include higher planes of consciousness which have not yet manifested here but which are pressing upon the earth-consciousness for manifestation. The soul of aspiring humanity symbolised in Aswapati, the Lord of manifested Life, first descends from his consciousness into nether regions of unconsciousness and Matter, the regions of Heavens of the Higher Vital, and then crosses over to the Heavens of the Mind. He then goes to the regions above Mind, into the Heavens of the ideal and Illumined Mind and passes beyond the borders of manifested creation to the Centre from which creation proceeds. Here he comes face to face with the World-Soul. He now experiences the presence of the Divine Mother who supports the cosmos. It is She, the Power of the Supreme, supporting the cosmos, who bestows on him the boon that saves mankind from the stark imprisonment of Ignorance and subjection to Death. Being a manifested power of the Truth-Consciousness, Savitri not only liberates man but creates suitable conditions here on earth for the embodiment of the Light Supreme. She shows how man's life here can be fulfilled in a life divine.

Sri Aurobindo, thus, opens up before us planes of existence that have been secret hitherto. He stands as a creator of new Vedic and Upanishadic age of poetry. It is not only the content but the poetic manner, the height of the tone, the inevitability of the word, in fact all the elements that make up the highest manner and technique of poetic creation are visibly present in Savitri. In the words of K. D. Sethna:

"To create a poetic mould equally massive and multiform as The Life Divine for transmitting the living Reality to the furthest bounds of speech — such a task is incumbent on one who stands as the maker of a new spiritual epoch... But scattered and short pieces of poetry cannot build the sustained and organised Weltanschauung required for putting a permanent stamp on the times. Nothing except an epic or a drama can, moving as they do across a wide field and coming charged with inventive vitality, with interplay of characters and events. Nor can an epic which teems with ultra- mental realisations be wholly adequate to its aim if it does not embody these realisations in ultra-mental word and rhythm. Hence, Savitri is from every angle the right correlate to the practical drive towards earth-transformation by India's

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mightiest Master of spirituality in the Ashram at Pondicherry... Out of its projected fifty thousand lines, about twelve thousand only are said to be ready yet in final version, but even that number is enough to give it a central place, for the whole length of Paradise Lost is exceeded and in no other art-creation so continually and cumulating has inspiration, the lightning-footed goddess, 'a sudden messenger from the all-seeing tops', disclosed the Divine's truth and beauty."⁸

This observation, valid to this day, was made by the perceptive critic in 1947. It sums up Sri Aurobindo's position as an epic writer in modem times.

A. N. DWIVEDI

⁸Amal Kiran (K. D. Sethna), The Poetic Genius of Sri Aurobindo, (1947) pp. 155-56.

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PART VI

Pativrata-Mahatmya

(Woman's Love)

True to their word the sons of Pandu went with Draupadi into exile, and passed twelve years in the wilderness; and many were the incidents which checkered their forest life. Krishna, who had stood by Yudhishthir in his prosperity, now came to visit him in his adversity: he consoled Draupati in her distress, and gave good advice to the brothers. Draupadi with a woman's pride and anger still thought of her wrongs and insults and urged Yudhishthir to disregard the conditions of exile and recover his kingdom. Bhima too was of the same mind, but Yudhishthir would not be moved from his plighted word.

The great rishi Vyasa came to visit Yudhishthir, and advised Arjun, great archer as he was, to acquire celestial arms by penance and worship. Arjun followed the advice, met the god Siva in the guise of a hunter, pleased him by his prowess in combat, and obtained his blessings and the pasupata weapon. Arjun then went to Indra's heaven and obtained other celestial arms.

In the meanwhile Duryodhan, not content with sending his cousins to exile, wished to humiliate them still more by appearing before them in all his regal power and splendour. Matters however turned out differently from what he expected, and he became involved in a quarrel with some gandharvas, a class of aerial beings. Duryodhan was taken captive by them and it was the Pandav brothers who released him from his captivity and allowed him to return to his kingdom in peace. This act of generosity rankled in his bosom and deepened his hatred.

Jayadratha, king of the Sindhu or Indus country, and a friend and ally of Duryodhan came to the woods, and in the absence of the Pandav brothers carried off Draupadi. The Pandavs however pursued the king, chastised him for his misconduct, and rescued Draupadi.

Still more interesting than these various incidents are the tales and legends with which this book is replete. Great saints came to see Yudhishthir in his exile, and narrated to him legends of ancient times and of former kings. One of these beautiful episodes, the tale of Nala and Damayanti, has been translated into graceful English verse by Dean Milman, and is known to many English

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readers. The legend of Agastya who drained the ocean dry; of Parasu-Rama a Brahman who killed the Kshatriyas of the earth; of Bhagiratha who brought down the Ganges from the skies to the earth; of Manu and the universal deluge; of Vishnu and various other gods; of Rama and his deeds which form the subject of the Epic Ramayana; — these and various other legends have been interwoven in the account of the forest-life of the Pandavs, and make it a veritable storehouse of ancient Hindu tales and traditions.

Among these various legends and tales I have selected one which is singular and striking. The great truth proclaimed under the thin guise of an eastern allegory is that a True Woman's Love is not conquered by Death. The story is known by Hindu women high and low, rich and poor in all parts of India: and on a certain night in the year millions of Hindu women celebrate a rite in honour of the woman whose love was not conquered by death. Legends like these, though they take away from the unity and conciseness of the Epic, impart a moral instruction to the millions of India the value of which cannot be overestimated.

The portion translated in this work forms Sections ccxcii Ῑ292ȋ and ccxciii Ῑ293ȋ, a part of Section ccxciv Ῑ294ȋ! and Sections ccxcv Ῑ295ȋ and ccxcvi Ῑ296ȋ of Book III of the original text.

Forest Life

In the dark and pathless forest long the Pandav brothers strayed.

In the bosom of the jungle with the fair Draupadi stayed.

And they killed the forest red-deer, hewed the gnarled forest wood.

From the stream she fetched the water, cooked the humble daily food.

In the morn she swept the cottage, lit the cheerful fire at eve.

But at night in lonesome silence oft her woman's heart would grieve,

Insults rankled in her bosom and her tresses were unbound, —

So she vowed, — till fitting vengeance had the base insulters found!

Oft when evening's shades descended, mantling o'er the wood and lea,

When Draupadi by the cottage cooked the food beneath the tree.

Rishis came to good Yudhishthir, sat beside his evening fire,

Many olden tales recited, legends of our ancient sires.

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Markandeya, holy rishi, once unto Yudhishthir came,

When his heart was sorrow-laden with the memories of his shame.

"Pardon, father!" said Yudhishthir, "if unbidden tears will start,

But the woes of fair Draupadi grieve a banished husband's heart.

By her tears the saintly woman broke my bondage worse than death,

By my sins she suffers exile and misfortune's freezing breath!

Does thou, sage and saintly rishi, know of wife or woman born,

By such nameless sorrow smitten, by such strange misfortune tom.

Hast thou in thy ancient legends heard of true and faithful wife,

With a stronger wife's affection, with a sadder woman's life?"

"Listen, monarch!" said the rishi, "to a tale of ancient date,

How Savitri loved and suffered, how she strove and conquered Fate!"

The Tale of Savitri

In the country of fair Madra lived a king in days of old,

Faithful to the holy Brahma, pure in heart and righteous-souled.

He was loved in town and country, in the court and hermit's den,

Sacrificer to the bright gods helper to his brother men.

But the monarch, Aswapati, son or daughter had he none,

Old in years and sunk in anguish and his days were almost done!

Vows he took and holy penance and with pious rules conformed,

Spare in diet as branmachars many sacred rites performed,

Sang the sacred hymn, Savitri to the gods oblations gave,

Through the lifelong day he fasted, uncomplaining, meek and brave!

Year by year he gathered virtue, rose in merit and in might,

Till the goddess of savitri smiled upon his sacred rite.

From the fire upon the altar which a holy radiance flung,

In the form of beauteous maiden, goddess of savitri !

And she spake in gentle accents, blessed the monarch good and brave.

Blessed his rites and holy penance and a boon unto him gave:

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"Penance and thy sacrifices can the Powers Immortal move,

And the pureness of thy conduct doth thy heart's affection prove.

Ask thy boon, king Aswapati from creation's Ancient Sire,

True to virtue's sacred mandate speak thy inmost heart's desire."

"For an offspring brave and kingly," so the saintly king replied,

"Holy rites and sacrifices and this penance I have tried.

If these rites and sacrifices move thy favour and thy grace,

Grant me offspring, Prayer-Maiden, worthy of my noble race."

"Have thy object," spake the maiden, "Madra's pious-hearted king,

From Swaymbhu, Self-created, blessings unto thee I bring.

For He lists to mortal's prayer springing from a heart like thine,

And He wills. — a noble daughter grace thy famed and royal line.

Aswapati, glad and grateful take the blessing which I bring,

Part in joy and part in silence, bow unto Creation's King!"

Vanished then the Prayer-Maiden and the king of noble fame,

Aswapati, Lord of coursers, to his royal city came.

Days of hope and nights of gladness Madra's happy monarch passed,

Till his queen of noble offspring gladsome promise gave at last!

As the moon each night increaseth chasing darksome nightly gloom,

Grew the unborn babe in splendour in its happy mother's womb.

And in fulness of the season came a girl with lotus-eye,

Father's hope and joy of mother, gift of kindly gods on high!

And the king performed its birth-rites with a glad and grateful mind,

And the people blessed the dear one with their wishes good and kind.

As Savitri, Prayer-Maiden, had the beauteous offspring given,

Brahmans named the child Savitri, holy gift of bounteous Heaven!

Grew the child in brighter beauty like a goddess from above,

And each passing season added fresher sweetness, deeper love.

Came with youth its lovelier graces, as the buds their leaves unfold,

Slender waist and rounded bosom, image as of burnished gold.

Deva-Kanya\ born a goddess, so they said in all the land,

Princely suitors struck with splendour ventured not to seek her hand.

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Once upon a time it happened on a bright and festive day,

Fresh from bath the beauteous maiden to the altar came to pray.

And with cakes and pure libations duly fed the Sacred Flame,

Then like Sri in heavenly radiance to her royal father came.

And she bowed to him in silence, sacred flowers beside him laid,

And her hands she folded meekly, sweetly her obeisance made.

With a father's pride, upon her gazed the ruler of the land,

But a strain of sadness lingered, for no suitor claimed her hand.

"Daughter," whispered Aswapati, "now, methinks, the time is come,

Thou shouldst choose a princely suitor, grace a royal husband's home.

Choose thyself a noble husband worthy of thy noble hand,

Choose a true and upright monarch, pride and glory of his land.

As thou choosest, gentle daughter, in thy loving heart's desire,

Blessing and his free permission will bestow thy happy sire.

For our sacred sastras sanction, holy Brahmans oft relate,

That thy duty-loving father sees his girl in wedded state.

That the duty-loving husband watches over his consort's ways,

That the duty-loving offspring tends his mother's widowed days.

Therefore choose a loving husband, daughter of my house and love,

So the father earn no censure or from men or gods above."

Fair Savitri bowed unto him and for parting blessings prayed

Then she left her father's palace and in distant regions strayed.

With her guard and aged couriers whom her watchful father sent,

Mounted on her golden chariot unto sylvan woodlands went.

Far in pleasant woods and jungle wandered she from day to day,

Unto asrams, ermitages, pious-hearted held her way.

Oft she stayed in holy tirthas washed by sacred limpid streams,

Food she gave unto the hungry, wealth beyond their fondest dreams.

Many days and months are over, and it once did so befall,

When the king and rishi Narad sat within the royal hall.

From her journeys near and distant and from places known to fame,

Fair Savitri with the courtiers to her father's palace came.

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Came and saw her royal father, rishi Narad by his seat,

Bent her head in salutation, bowed unto their holy feet.

III

The Fated Bridgegroom

"Whence comes she," so Narad questioned, "whither was Savitri led,

Wherefore to a happy husband hath Savitri not been wed!"

"Nay, to choose her lord and husband," so the virtuous monarch said,

"Fair Savitri long hath wandered and in holy tirthas stayed

Maiden! speak unto the rishi, and they choice and secret tell."

Then a blush suffused her forehead, soft and slow her accents fell."

"Listen, father! Salwa's monarch was of old a king of might,

Righteous-hearted Dyumat-sena, feeble now and void of sight.

Foemen robbed him of his kingdom when in age he lost his sight,

And from town and spacious empire was the monarch forced to flight.

With his queen and with his infant did the feeble monarch stray,

And the jungle was his palace, darksome was his weary way.

Holy vows assumed the monarch and in penance passed his life,

In the wild woods nursed his infant and with wild fruits fed his wife.

Years have gone in rigid penance, and that child is now a youth,

Him I choose my lord and husband, Satyavan, the Soul of Truth!"

Thoughtful was the rishi Narad, doleful were the words he said:

"Said disaster waits Savitri if this royal youth she wed.

Truth-beloving is his father, truthful is the royal dame,

Truth and virtue rule his actions, Satyavan his sacred name.

Steeds he loved in days of boyhood and to paint them was his joy,

Henc

e they called him young Chitraswa, art-beloving gallant boy,

But O pious-hearted monarch! fair Savitri hath in sooth

Courted Fate and sad disaster in that noble gallant youth!"

"Tell me," questioned Aswapati, "for I may not guess thy thought,

Wherefore is my daughter's action with a sad disaster fraught.

Is the youth of noble lustre, gifted in the gifts of art,

Blest with wisdom and with prowess, patient in his dauntless heart?"

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"Surya's lustre in him shineth," so the rishi Narad Said,

"Brihaspati's wisdom dwelleth in the youthful prince's head,

Like Mahendra in his prowess, and in patience like the Earth,

Yet O king! a sad disaster marks the gentle youth from birth!"

"Tell me, rishi, then thy reason," so the anxious monarch cried,

"Why to youth so great and gifted may this maid be not allied.

Is he princely in his bounty, gentle-hearted in his grace,

Duly versed in sacred knowledge, fair in mind and fair in face?"

"Free in gifts like Rantideva," so the holy rishi said,

"Versed in lore like monarch Sivi who all ancient monarchs led,

Like Yayati open-hearted and like Chandra in his grace,

Like the handsome heavenly Asvins fair and radiant in his face,

Meek and graced with patient virtue he controls his noble mind,

Modest in his kindly actions, true to friends and ever kind,

And the hermits of the forest praise him for his righteous truth,

Nathless, king, thy daughter may not wed this noble-hearted youth!"

'Tell me, rishi," said the monarch, "for thy sense from me is hid,

Has this prince some fatal blemish, wherefore is this match forbid?"

"Fatal fault!" exclaimed the rishi, "fault that wipeth all his grace,

Fault that human power nor effort, rite nor penance can efface.

Fatal fault or destined sorrow! for it is decreed on high,

On this day, a twelve-month later, this ill-fated prince will die!"

Shook the startled king in terror and in fear and trembling cried:

"Unto short-lived, fated bridegroom ne'er my child shall be allied.

Come, Savitri, dear-loved maiden, choose another happier lord,

Rishi Narad speaketh wisdom, list unto his holy word!

Every grace and every virtue is effaced by cruel Fate,

On this day, a twelve-month later, leaves the prince his mortal state!"

"Father!" answered thus the maiden, soft and sad her accents fell,

"I have heard thy honoured mandate, holy Narad counsels well.

Pardon witless maiden's fancy, but beneath the eye of Heaven,

Only once a maiden chooseth; twice her truth may not be given.

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Long his life or be it narrow, and his virtues great or none,

Satyavan is still my husband, he my heart and troth hath won.

What a maiden's heart hath chosen that a maiden's lips confess,

True to him thy poor Savitri goes into the wilderness! "

"Monarch!" uttered then the rishi, "fixed is she in mind and heart,

From her troth the true Savitri never, never will depart.

More than mortal's share of virtue unto Satyavan is given,

Let the true maid wed her chosen, leave the rest to gracious Heaven!"

"Rishi and preceptor holy!" so the weeping monarch prayed,

"Heaven avert all future evils, and thy mandate is obeyed!"

Narad wished him joy and gladness, blessed the loving youth and maid,

Forest hermits on their wedding every fervent blessing laid.

Overtaken by Fate

Twelve-month in the darksome forest by her true and chosen lord,

Sweet Savitri served his parents by her thought and deed and word.

Bark of tree supplied her garments draped upon her bosom fair,

Or the red cloth as in asrams holy women love to wear.

And the aged queen she tended with a fond and filial pride,

Served the old sightless monarch like a daughter by his side.

And with love and gentle sweetness pleased her husband and her lord,

But in secret, night and morning, pondered still on Narad's word!

Nearer came the fatal morning by the holy Narad told,

Fair Savitri reckoned daily and her heart was still and cold.

Three short days remaining only! and she took a vow severe

Of triratra, three nights' penance, holy fasts and vigils drear.

Of Savitri's rigid penance heard the king with anxious woe,

Spake to her in loving accents, so the vow she might forgo:

"Hard the penance, gentle daughter, and thy woman's limbs are frail,

After three nights' fasts and vigils sure thy tender health may fail."

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"Be not anxious, loving father," meekly this Savitri prayed,

"Penance I have undertaken, will unto the gods be made."

Much misdoubting then the monarch gave his sad and slow assent,

Pale with fast and unseen tear-drops, lonesome nights Savitri spent.

Nearer came the fatal morning, and tomorrow he shall die,

Dark, lone hours of nightly silence! Tearless, sleepless is her eye!

"Dawns that dread and fated morning!" said Savitri, bloodless, brave,

Prayed her fervent prayers in silence, to the Fire oblations gave,

Bowed unto the forest Brahmans, to the parents kind and good,

Joined her hands in salutation and in reverent silence stood.

With the usual morning blessing, "Widow may'st thou never be."

Anchorites and aged Brahmans blessed Savitri fervently .

O! that blessing fell upon her like the rain on thirsty air,

Struggling hope inspired her bosom as she drank those accents fair,

But returned the dark remembrance of the rishi Narad's word,

Pale she watched the creeping sun beams, mused upon her fated lord!

"Daughter, now thy fast is over," so the loving parents said,

"Take thy diet after penance, for thy morning prayers are prayed."

"Pardon, father," said Savitri, "let this other day be done.

" Unshed tear-drops filled her eyelids, glistened in the morning sun!

Satyavan, sedate and stately, ponderous axe on shoulder hung,

For the distant darksome jungle issued forth serene and strong.

But unto him came Savitri and in sweetest accents prayed,

As upon his manly bosom gently she her forehead laid:

"Long I wished to see the jungle where steals not the solar ray,

Take me to the darksome forest, husband, let me go to-day!"

"Come not, love," he sweetly answered with a loving husband's care,

"Thou art all unused to labour, forest paths thou may'st not dare,

And with recent fasts and vigils pale and bloodless is thy face,

And thy steps are weak and feeble, jungle paths thou may'st not trace."

"Fasts and vigils make me stronger," said the wife with wifely pride,

"Toil I shall not feel nor languor when my lord is by my side,

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For I feel a woman's longing with my lord to trace the way,

Grant me, husband ever gracious, with thee let me go to-day!"

Answered then the loving husband, as his hands in hers he wove:

"Ask permission from my parents in the trackless woods to rove,"

Then Savitri to the monarch urged her longing strange request,

After duteous salutation thus her humble prayer addrest.

"To the jungle goes my husband, fuel and the fruit to seek,

I would follow if my mother and my loving father speak.

Twelve-month from this narrow asram hath Savitri stepped nor strayed,

In this cottage true and faithful ever hath Savitri stayed.

For the sacrificial fuel wends my lord his lonesome way,

Please my kind and loving parents, I would follow him to-day."

"Never since her wedding morning," so the loving king replied,

"Wish or thought Savitri whispered, for a boon or object sighed.

Daughter, thy request is granted, safely in the forest roam,

Safely with thy lord and husband seek again thy cottage home."

Bowing to her loving parents did the fair Savitri part,

Smile upon her pallid features, anguish in her inmost heart.

Round her sylvan greenwoods blossomed 'neath a cloudless Indian sky.

Flocks of pea-fowls gorgeous plumaged flew before her wondering eye,

Woodland rills and crystal nullahs gently roll'd o'er rocky bed,

Flower-decked hills in dewy brightness towering glittered overhead,

Bird of song and beauteous feather trilled a note in every grove,

Sweeter accents fell upon her, from her husband's lips of love!

Still with thoughtful eye Savitri watched her dear and fated lord,

Flail of grief was in her bosom but her pale lips shaped no word,

And she listened to her husband still on anxious thought intent,

Cleft in two her throbbing bosom as in silence still she went!

Gaily with the gathered wild-fruits did the prince his basket fill,

Hewed the interlaced branches with his might and practised skill,

Till the drops stood on his forehead, weary was his aching head,

Faint he came unto Savitri and in faltering accents said:

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"Cruel ache is on my forehead, fond and ever faithful wife,

And I feel a hundred needless pierce me and torment my life,

And my feeble footsteps falter and my senses seem to reel,

Fain would I beside thee linger for a sleep doth o'er me steal."

With a wild and speechless terror pale Savitri held her lord,

On her lap his head she rested as she laid him on the sward.

Narad's fatal words remembered as she watched her husband's head,

Burning lip and pallid forehead and the dark and creeping shade.

Clapsed him in her beating bosom, kissed his lips with panting breath

Darker grew the lonesome forest, and he slept the sleep of death!

Triumph over Fate

In the bosom of the shadows rose a Vision dark and dread,

Shape of gloom in inky garment and a crown was on his head.

Gleaming Form of sable splendour, blood-red was his sparkling eye,

And a fatal noose he carried, grim and godlike, dark and high!

And he stood in solemn silence, looked in silence on the dead,

And Savitri on the greensward gently placed her husband's head.

And a tremor shook Savitri, but a woman's love is strong,

With her hands upon her bosom thus she spake with quivering tongue:

"More than mortal is thy glory! If a radiant god thou be,

Tell me what bright name thou bearest, what thy message unto me."

"Know me," thus responded Yama, "mighty monarch of the dead,

Mortals leaving earthly mansion to my darksome realms are led.

Since with woman's full affection thou hast loved thy husband dear,

Hence before these, faithful woman, Yama doth in form appear.

But his days and loves are ended, and he leaves his faithful wife,

In this noose I bind and carry spark of his immortal life.

Virtue graced his life and action, spotless was his princely heart,

Hence for him I came in person, princess, let thy husband part."

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Yama from the prince's body, pale and bloodless, cold and dumb,

Drew the vital spark, purusha, smaller thy the human thumb.

In his noose the spark he fastened, silent went his darksome way,

Left the body shorn of lustre to its rigid cold decay.

Southward went the dark-hued Yama with the youth's immortal life,

And, for woman's love abideth, followed still the faithful wife.

"Turn, Savitri," outspake Yama, "for thy husband loved and lost,

Do the rites due unto mortals by their Fate predestined crost.

For thy wifely duty ceases, follow not in fruitless woe,

And no farther living creature may with monarch Yama go!"

"But I may not choose but follow where thou takest my husband's life,

For Eternal Law divides not loving man and faithful wife.

For a woman's true affection, for a woman's sacred woe,

Grant me in thy godlike mercy farther still with him I go!

Fourfold are our human duties: first to study holy lore,

Then to live as good householders, feed the hungry at our door,

Then to pass our days in penance, last to fix our thoughts above,

But the final goal of virtue, it is Truth and deathless Love!"

"True and holy are thy precepts," listening Yama made reply,

"And they fill my heart with gladness and with pious purpose high.

I would bless thee, fair Savitri, but the dead come not to life.

Ask for other boon and blessing, faithful, true and virtuous wife!"

"Since you so permit me, Yama," so the good Savitri said,

"For my husband's banished father let my dearest suit be made.

Sightless in the darksome forest dwells the monarch faint and weak,

Grant him sight and grant him vigour, Yama, in thy mercy speak!"

"Duteous daughter," Yama answered, "be thy pious wishes given,

And his eyes shall be restored to the cheerful light of heaven.

Turn, Savitri, faint and weary, follow not in fruitless woe,

And no farther living creature may with monarch Yama go!"

"Faint nor weary is Savitri," so the noble princess said,

"Since she waits upon her husband, gracious Monarch of the dead.

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What befalls the wedded husband still befalls the faithful wife,

Where he leads she ever follows, be it death or be it life!

And our sacred writ ordaineth and our pious rishis sing,

Transient meeting with the holy dpth its countless blessings bring,

Longer friendship with the holy purifies the mortal birth,

Lasting union with the holy is the bright sky on the earth.

Union with the pure and holy is immortal heavenly life,

For Eternal Law divides not loving man and faithful wife!"

"Blessed are thy words," said Yama, "blessed is thy pious thought,

With a higher purer wisdom are thy holy lessons fraught.

I would bless thee fair Savitri, but the dead come not to life,

Ask for other boon and blessing, faithful, true and virtuous wife!"

"Since you so permit me Yama," so the good Savitri said,

"Once more for my husband's father be my supplication made.

Lost his kingdom in the forest dwells the monarch faint and weak,

Grant him back his wealth and kingdom, Yama, in thy mercy speak!"

"Loving daughter," Yama answered, "wealth and kingdom I bestow,

Turn, Savitri, living mortal may not with King Yama go!"

Still Savitri, meek and faithful, followed her departed lord,

Yama still with higher wisdom listened to her saintly word.

And the Sable King was vanquished, and he turned on her again,

And his words fell on Savitri like the cooling summer rain.

"Noble woman, speak thy wishes, name thy boon and purpose high,

What the pious mortal asketh gods in heaven may not deny!"

"Thou hast," so Savitri answered, "granted father's realm and might,

To his vain and sightless eyeballs hast restored their blessed sight.

Grant him that the line of monarchs may not all untimely end,

Satyavan may see his kingdom to his royal sons descend!"

"Have thy object," answered Yama, "and thy lord shall live again,

He shall live to be a father, and his children too shall reign.

For a woman's troth abideth longer that the fleeting breath,

And a woman's love abideth higher than the doom of Death!"

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Return Home

Vanished then the Sable Monarch, and Savitri held her way

Where in dense and darksome forest still her husband lifeless lay,

And she sat upon the greensward by the cold unconscious dead,

On her lap with deeper kindness placed her consort's lifeless head,

And that touch of true affection thrilled him back to waking life,

As returned from distant regions gazed the prince upon his wife.

"Have I lain too long and slumbered, sweet Savitri, faithful spouse?

But I dreamt a Sable Person took me in a fatal noose!"

"Pillowed on this lap," she answered, "long upon the earth you lay,

And the Sable Person, husband, he hath come and passed away.

Rise and leave this darksome forest if thou feelest light and strong,

For the night is on the jungle and our way is dark and long."

Rising as from happy slumber looked the young prince on all around,

Saw the wide-extending jungle mantling all the darksome ground.

"Yes," he said, "I now remember, ever loving faithful dame,

We in search of fruit and fuel to this lonesome forest came.

As I hewed the gnarled branches, cruel anguish filled my brain,

And I laid me on the greensward with a throbbing piercing pain.

Pillowed on thy gentle bosom, solaced by thy gentle love,

I was soothed, and dorwsy slumber fell on me from skies above.

All was dark and then I witnessed, was it but a fleeting dream,

God or Vision, dark and dreadful, in the deepening shadows gleam?

Was this dream my fair Savitri, dost thou of this Vision know?

Tell me, for before my eyesight still the Vision seems to glow!"

"Darkness thickens," said Savitri, "and the evening waxeth late,

When the morrow's light returneth I shall all these scenes narrate.

Hark the rangers of the forest! how their voices strike the ear,

Prowlers of the darksome jungle! how they fill my breast with fear!

Forest-fire is raging yonder, for I see a distant gleam,

And the rising evening breezes help the red and radiant beam.

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Let me fetch a burning faggot and prepare a friendly light,

With these fallen withered branches chase the shadows of the night,

And if feeble still thy footsteps, — long and weary is our way, —

By the fire repose, my husband, and return by light of day."

"For my parents, fondly anxious," Satyavan thus made reply,

"Pains my heart and yearns my bosom, let us to their cottage hie.

When I "tarried in the jungle or by day or dewy eve,

Searching in the hermitages often did my parents grieve,

And with father's soft reproaches and with mother's loving fears,

Chide me for my tardy footsteps, dewed me with their gentle tears.

Think then of my father's sorrow, of my mother's woeful plight,

If afar in wood and jungle pass we now the livelong night.

Wife beloved, I may not fathom what mishap or load of care,

Unknown dangers, unseen sorrows even now my parents share!"

Gentle drops of filial sorrow trickled down his manly eye,

Fond Savitri sweetly speaking softly wiped the tear-drops dry:

"Trust me, husband, if Savitri hath been faithful in her love,

If she hath with pious offerings served the righteous gods above,

If she hath a sister's kindness unto brother men performed,

If she hath in speech and action unto holy truth conformed,

Unknown blessings, mighty gladness, trust thy ever faithful wife,

And not sorrows or disasters wait this eve our parents' life!"

Then she rose and tied her tresses, gently helped her lord to rise,

Walked with him the pathless jungle, looked with love into his eyes.

On her neck his clasping left arm sweetly winds in soft embrace,

Round his waist Savitri's right arm doth as sweetly interlace.

Thus they walked the darksome jungle, silent stars looked from above,

And the hushed and throbbing midnight watched Savitri's deathless love.

ROMESH CHANDRA DUTT

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Rendering of the Symbol Dawn in Sanskrit

dawn in Sanskrit

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The Legend of Savitri With Some Departures Made by Sri Aurobindo

with Some Departures Made by

Part I: Introduction

The story of Savitri is an ancient story. Perhaps it belongs to the early Vedic times. Perhaps it may go back even to a yet deeper past. It is both myth and pre-history. Its character is occult and its contents are spiritual. Given as a human tale the story has several connotations and is loaded with supernatural significance. In fact, its symbolic nature is quite suggestive of the issue involved in this mortal creation, mrityuloka, the creation to which we belong. The issue is of divine manifestation in an evolutionary way, evolution that has its beginning in Inconscience.

Ours is not a typal world. A typal world is a world of fixed forms and possibilities,— as is, for instance, the world of the gods. The world of the great gods, the Overmind world, is no doubt splendid; but it stays as it is, is tied to its own kind. From it no other aspects of the multifold Transcendent can emerge, no change or progress is possible in it. In fact, if the gods should wish to get out of it and go to higher worlds, make progress, they must be willing and prepared to be bom in the mortal world. In that sense this world of ours, this earth, is unique; it is a place where progress is continuous and interminable.

The story of Savitri has such an occult basis as its background and therefore it distinctly foresees the prospects of enlarging consciousness in the splendour of love, beauty, joy, knowledge, power, sweetness, harmony, the creative working of the Truth-Idea in the richly effulgent and ever-growing dimensions of the Infinite. Though not expressly stated so, the suggestions in the story are unmistakable.

There is a long spiritual tradition which carries in its experience the esoteric sense purported by the story. That it has occult-mystical bearings is pretty obvious from its very tone. Actually this implied meaning is written on its face in bright and bold characters. It is perhaps for this reason that its essential core has endured the long passage of time.

But thick coats of unregenerate times have also accumulated over it. The living spirit of the story has got buried under the dense layers of ethical-moralistic ideas and notions. Sri Aurobindo himself says that originally the Mahabharata story was symbolic, but later it became socio-religious. Now the story is narrated to project Savitri as a role-model of an ideal woman, with fidelity in conjugal relations as its chief and foremost concern.

The Savitri-tale appears early in the Mahabharata, in the third of the 18 parts of the monumental work. It is placed in the Vana Parva and is called Savitri Upakhyana, a Minor Episode in the Book of the Forest. It has also a subtitle, Pativrata Mahatmya, indicating the nature of the story. The Sanskrit word māhātmya means greatness, grandeur, glory, majesty; it also means a narration of heroic or marvellous deeds, a legend, a romance, an epic. We may quite justifiably say that the Upakhyana is both: it is a noble mini-epic. It describes in great and dignified style the marvellous deeds of a married woman who is faithful and chaste, who observes virtuous rites and rituals, performs diligently the acts of ascetic sacrifices and offerings. Indeed, such a pativratā sees the very presence of divinity in her husband. The story is thus significantly charged with the resplendent and creative dynamism of the Dharma, the path of active and living Righteousness. The word dharma has the sense of the inner law of conduct natural to one's soul and one's spiritual build-up, one's swabhāva. It promotes superior and richer values, gracious merits which the soul cherishes and carries with itself from life to life. That is the true basis of the Upakhyana.

When did Vyasa compose his Savitri-story? Sri Aurobindo remarks that it belongs to the poet's early days, still fresh "with the glow of the youth and grace over it". It looks as though the later compilers of the Mahabharata neatly incorporated the tale in the main sequel of the Great Epic. It does certainly fit in very well in one of the story-sessions we have in the Book of the Forest when the Pandavas stayed as exiles in the woods.

The metre in which the poem is composed is mostly Anushtubha and there are exactly 300 shlokas or 600 hemistichs covering the entire story. A shloka is an unrhymed Sanskrit couplet, of 32 syllables in 4 equal divisions, and is the most common form used for a narrative. Vyasa's recitation of Savitri in this metre moves forward with epic grace and swiftness, rushing from event to event with confident ease. Divided in seven sections, the little heroic poem has metrical power to win back

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the Word of Truth from the inconsiderate and suffocating darkness of Death.

Savitri the Princess of Madra is of course the most important character in the story. The other persons present are: Savitri's parents Aswapati and Malawi; then, there is the heavenly sage Narad who pays a purposeful visit to Aswapati at a most crucial juncture in the life of Savitri. This happens when she is about to disclose to her parents her choice of marrying Satyavan; Satyavan, his mother Shaibya and blind father Dyumatsena, once the ruler of the Shalwa country, are staying as exiles in the forest. In the forest there are sages and learned ascetics engaged in holy spiritual practices, one prominent and well-respected among them being the sage Gautama. Yama or the God of Death is at once frightful-dark and kind-gracious in the benignity of the Upholder of the Order of the Worlds. Princess Savitri's own birth was in response to Aswapati's prayer to the goddess Savitri who incarnated herself as his daughter in fulfilment of the exceptional boon granted to him, through her, by the Creator-Father Brahma himself. A cosmic-transcendental dimension is thus already set in the story narrated as a simple human tale belonging to early times.

The Pandavas have lost the game of dice and have been ordered to live for twelve years in a forest. This is to be followed by one year of living incognito. It is towards the end of this twelve-year period that Rishi Markandeya visits the Pandavas again and in response to the query of Yudhishthira narrates to him the story of Savitri.

Yudhishthira's puzzlement is simple. He knows that noble Draupadi, the common wife of the five Pandavas, is chaste and virtuous, — bom as she was in the purity of the sacrificial flame. Yet in life she is seen to face most difficult hardships and suffer humiliation at the hand of the evil-minded. Virtue always seems to be helpless against the harshness of life and is ever afflicted, as if it were incompatible with it. But the Rishi assures the desolate that, in the manner of Savitri, the disgraced shall, by her great womanly power, the power of chastity, prove to be a fortune-bringer to them. Savitri had suffered greatly for her husband's sake and won from Yama, the King-Father Lord himself, noble boons including the exceptional boon of winning back Satyavan's life. Through the Savitri-example which he prefers to give to Yudhishthira, Markandeya is actually holding out a splendid promise for the Pandavas. With this preliminary background begins the remarkable narration.

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But does the story speak of the ideal of womanhood only in the context of building up a healthy society? Is such a woman just a desirable and genial archetype, a beau idéal Has the whole concept been put forward particularly as an ethical self-righteous view to emphasise upon the laity and the common people to adopt and follow a fixed set of rules of conduct, a set of commandments to govern their daily life? In the face of life's severe contradictions, where often virtue not only goes unrewarded but seems to be punished, does it merely try to din into our ears the efficacy of the dharma in spite of these thousand evils which we have to encounter every day? Is the alleviation of grief and suffering the main intention behind the narration? Are the examples of Sita, Savitri, and Damayanti, proclaimed and upheld by Vivekananda even today, any more relevant, appropriate enough in the modern unavoidable circumstances? Are they secular in character?

But if Markandeya is a Rishi with high spiritual attainments and an immortal, chiranjeeva, it is quite inconceivable that he would come down to the level of the ordinary and provide such a superficial consolation to the afflicted who himself is a man of great accomplishments. Nor would the seer-poet indulge in this quick luxury to squander away his poetry on the routine and the common-place. If Savitri and Draupadi were born from the sacrificial flames, we must immediately recognise that in this secular garb we have in fact something deep, something that is luminously mysterious if not profoundly esoteric. The Savitri-tale is not a mere pious holy tale meant for the God-fearing and the credulous, for small minds, for young simple housewives; but it is actually a strong effective symbol charged with the high potency of the supernatural, even that of the transcendental which is pressing forth to establish itself in this world of suffering and grief and death. Savitri herself was a highly proficient and skillful young woman, with the knowledge of both the worldly and the spiritual; she was a tapaswini of exceptional merit. This we ought to remember in understanding the text which is very terse and compact in its presentation. It is a Yogic-spiritual document indeed. It is a revelation.

Therefore looking at the Savitri-tale as a revelation will perhaps be the best way to profit from it. This knowledge in the tradition was always there in its background, but it had got lost in the course of time. Sri Aurobindo has renewed it, putting his own Yogic-

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spiritual power into it: he has put the fire of his own soul in its body and in its spirit.

We must bear in mind, and recognise, that the tale is an occult-spiritual tale involving cosmic powers and personalities with a concern for the evolutionary manifestation upon the earth. We should take the story accordingly, in the know of its occult connotation, which is suggestively clear from the intention and mode of its narration. Hence we may say that the characters in the story are much more than even some exceptional human figures, howsoever these human figures in their glorious proportions may appeal to us in their nobility and stature. They are more than that; they are incarnations.

If so we can well appreciate why Sri Aurobindo treats the Savitri-story both as a legend and as a symbol. No wonder also that his elaborate presentation of the theme in his epic should essentially focus itself on occult-supernatural actions and eventualities.

This may prove to be a great stumbling block to both the modern and the traditional sets of thinking. Modern man very often adjudges it as a narrative in some rarefied abstruse and obscure domain, with one steep rock of abstraction climbing to another; he starts wondering if anything is happening in any definite manner or all is simply a dubious play of words with high-sounding appellatives like Infinity, Eternity, Inconscience, Non-being, Void, Nature, Spirit, Matter, and so on. Frequently his charge is that, apart from the names of some Gods and Goddesses, there are only five proper names in the whole epic which runs to about twenty-four thousand lines: Satyavan, Savitri, Aswapati, Dyumatsena and Narad in Aswapati's palace. The required support for thought and imagination, support in the form of characters of flesh and blood, is not available in this epic. The complaint is that the human framework is too thin for the story to remain even as a legend, the entire thrust being theoretic-metaphysical. Quite knowledgeable critics refuse even to call it a poem. Rut this is patently a limitation of the professionals who ought to come out of their academic preconceptions and allegiances. We have to be in tune at least with the intuitive perception and suggestiveness that the aesthesis of Savitri gives to us in rich and radiant plenty. Take an example. Aswapati the Yogi has explored the eighteen worlds of Consciousness, eighteen universal and transcendental lokas, in eighteen cantos of Sri Aurobindo's Savitri, and found the true meaning of this Creation. He has now discovered the nature of the

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problem and the difficulty that stands in the way of a happy manifestation here in the fulfilment of this great and godly endeavour with which all began in Time. The exceptional Yogi has, after a long and arduous tapasya, gathered in his spirit that strength by which a totally new and effective process can be set into motion. It is then that he becomes the Lord of Life, becomes Aswapati: Ashwa, the Horse, is a Vedic symbol of Life-Energy, the Consciousness-Force in its defeatless dynamism. It is therefore very appropriate that the poet should have identified and named him only after his getting this most remarkable Siddhi, the power by which he can shape the course of events. This takes about ten thousand lines of the epic and even then one at times gets an impression as if the poet was hurrying through.

In contrast to this the traditionalist has a tendency to see the Savitri-tale as a tale of a faithful and chaste woman, without recognising the fact that it is an episode of a very rare and singular spiritual personality who has met and triumphed over the God of Death. Vyasa was fully aware of the profound and mystical contents of the story and what he wrote with the élan of an inspired Rishi has the luminous power to lend to the legend symbolic and supernatural substance and meaning. To an apparently household event taking place in the Vedic times he has given a measure of the cosmic-transcendent. The Savitri-tale is much more than a dharmic illustration of holy and pious living meant for devout and faithful creatures. When Vyasa says that Aswapati engaged himself in the worship of Goddess Savitri for eighteen years, or that his radiant daughter was of gentle birth and virtuous, or was an adept in the Yoga of Meditation, was accomplished in scriptural and secular learning, or that Satyavan was such an ocean of noble qualities that Yama himself had to come to snatch his soul, then he as the narrator of a simple-looking tale has already spoken of many details of the science and philosophy of spiritual practices. His language is compact and pointed, suggestive of every aspect of a deeper life lived in the splendour of the spirit. The traditional religious mind totally misses this aspect.

It is with this background that we should read the ancient tale of Savitri as given to us by Vyasa and adapted by Sri Aurobindo for his epic bearing appropriately the name of its heroine. Doing so, we begin to appreciate its sweet transformative power.

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Part II: The Story

King Aswapati is an ardent follower of the dharma and is firmly established in the truth. He rules over his kingdom with love and has concern for its citizens. He is a performer of Yajnas and keeps the holy company of the learned and the virtuous. But he is issueless. With the passing of time, and with the advancing of his age, this causes him great affliction. Therefore, with the intention of getting a son, he engages himself in arduous tapasya. He retires to a forest and for eighteen years worships goddess Savitri. Observing the strictest rules of conduct and of worship, he offers every day a hundred thousand oblations to her.

Pleased with his sincerity and devotion, the goddess emerges out of the sacrificial flames and grants him the boon of a daughter. She assures him that she had approached Brahma the Creator himself and it is actually he who has bestowed this boon upon him. She adds that a beautiful and effulgent daughter will be soon bom to him, kanyā tejasvini.

Given as she was by Savitri, who was pleased by the Savitri-oblations, the father and the wise ones named her too Savitri. [Note l, p. 541.]

(shlokal:24)

Fair and beautiful like the goddess Fortune, Sri, the adorable princess soon grows into proper maidenhood. She looks like a heavenly damsel, devakanyā, who has taken birth as Aswapati's daughter. And, indeed, because of the beauty and fiery splendour of her youth, no prince dares to approach her, extending his hand in marriage.

Once on an auspicious day, parvani, at the turning of the lunar fortnight, Savitri takes a holy bath, goes to the temple, and offers prayers to the gods, and gives ritual oblations to Agni. The wise ones recite the hymns of benediction, swasti-mantras. Worship done, she takes some flowers and a portion of food-offerings to the deities, prasād, and goes to give them to her father. She touches his feet in obeisance and, after giving him the flowers and prasād, stands respectfully with folded hands by his side.

Seeing his daughter grown to full youth, and beautiful like a goddess, devarupini, and yet unmarried, Aswapati is very much distressed. He tells her that she should go out in search of a young

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man of her choice to espouse, one endowed with qualities like her own. It is quite appropriate for her to do so, he explains, as none has come as a suitor asking for her hand. He also mentions to her that a father becomes open to reproach when, according to the dharma, he fails to give his daughter, of the right age, in marriage. [Note 2, p. 543.]

Savitri sets out on her search and travels to different kingdoms and lands. On her way she visits palaces and holy places, and offers worship to the deities; also, she gives away great wealth to the learned. In the course of her journey, as she passes through the green wooded regions, she makes respectful obeisances to the sages and Rishis staying in the sacred hermitages. [Note 3, p. 543.]

In the meanwhile, on a particular day the revered sage Narad and king Aswapati are in council in the royal palace. [Note 4, p. 544.]

About the same time, as if by coincidence, Savitri returns to her father's house. There she sees her father in the company of the heavenly sage. She, bright and graceful like a bride, bows down to them, touches their feet, and offers worshipping respects. Narad looks at her and immediately makes several inquiries about her. He asks Aswapati on what mission his daughter had gone, and why he has not yet given her in marriage. Aswapati explains to the sage that it was precisely with this intention that he sent her abroad, to find a suitable prince to marry, as none had come seeking her hand. He also surmises that she must be now returning after having successfully accomplished her mission. He asks her to recount the details of her journey and to reveal the name of the one whom she must have chosen for a husband.

Savitri narrates the sequence of her journey. She tells that she had gone to the far Shalwa country, once ruled by the noble and righteous king Dyumatsena. But, then, as fate would have it, he becomes blind. A neighbouring king, his past enemy, takes advantage of this situation and invades his kingdom. Dyumatsena is defeated and driven out. With his wife and child-son he retires to the forest and engages himself in tapasya. The child, named Satyavan, grows in the hermitage under the tutorship of the sages and Rishis of the forest. Savitri discloses that it is Satyavan whom she has chosen as her life's partner.

But Narad at once rings a note of alarm, even of deep regret. He tells Aswapati about the grave nature of the choice made by his

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daughter. It is a matter of serious concern that Savitri should have chosen Satyavan for a husband, he forewarns.

Alas! Savitri has, O King, done something accursed, that forebodes a great evil; unknowingly she has made the choice of Satyavan, taking him to be one of high merit.

(shloka 2:11)

True, bom as he was of noble parents, he was named Satyavan, the Truthful. As a lad he was fond of painting, and drew figures of horses, and therefore he is also often called the Painter of Horses, Chitrashwa. Narad further says that Satyavan is bright like the sun, has a sharp intellect like that of Brihaspati, is munificent like Rantideva, the son of Sanskrit, and like Yayati is exceedingly bounteous; in the manner of Shibi, the son of Ushinar, he is respectful to the learned and always speaks the truth; he is handsome like the moon and people often wonder whether he is one of the Ashwinikumars. He has mastered the senses and subdued passions, is a youth of heroic deeds, and is yet soft-natured and friendly to everybody. The forest sages are endeared to him and speak highly about his qualities. But, at Aswapati's insistence to know also if Satyavan has any defects, Narad tells him that there is one blemish, that one year after the marriage Satyavan is to die on that very day. Savitri's choice of Satyavan therefore becomes accursed.

Aswapati advises his daughter to proceed again on her quest. He tells her how nullified all his virtues and all his noble qualities stand; she should not, counsels he, accept what is blameworthy, particularly when made known well in time.

Savitri is, however, firm in her resolve. She asserts that it is her inner being who has actually made the choice. She further adds that that alone will govern her in every respect. It is the entire judge and authority for her, pramānam me manastatah, as Vyasa puts it. She argues that only once can the family wealth be divided between the brothers and not a second time; only once can a father give his daughter in marriage and not again; and once only does a philanthropist speak the word of charity and abide by it. It matters not for her if Satyavan has a long life or a short one, has virtuous qualities or is without them; because only once will she make her choice and not a second time. She

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elaborates her point by invoking a greater truth of the higher life.

By perception does one first come to a certain conclusion and then one holds it by speech; only afterwards is it put into action. That perception of mine for me is the one single authority here.

(shloka 2:28)

Savitri reiterates that this is exactly what she has done and firmly adheres to her choice.

Narad sees in Savitri's resolve a wholesome as well as profound and elevating sense of perception. He further recognises that she is determinedly treading the path of dharma from which none can take her away. Considering also that the qualities of Satyavan cannot be matched in anybody else, he recommends their marriage. He blesses them and wishes the marriage to proceed unhindered, without any ill-happening. [Note 5, p. 544.]

Then invoking propitious things of life, and good fortune for all, he leaves the Palace for his home in Paradise.

(shloka 2:32)

Aswapati attends to the details of the marriage and proceeds to the forest-hermitage where presently lives Dyumatsena. Following the tradition of proposing a marriage, he requests Dyumatsena to accept Savitri as a bride for his son Satyavan. Dyumatsena is somewhat hesitant in the beginning and also has apprehension whether the young princess would adjust herself to the cloistral life and bear its hardships. But Aswapati assuages his fears. Finally, Dyumatsena accepts the offer and the marriage is duly solemnised.

Satyavan is happy that in Savitri he has a beautiful wife with all the exquisite qualities of a high-bom virgin; Savitri too is joyous that her heart's desire has been so well fulfilled.

{shloka 3:17)

The marriage-party leaves for Madra and Savitri adapts herself to the life of the hermitage. She looks after the physical needs of her parents-in-law, speaking always to them with a sense of humility and reverence. She also performs, with noble composure and grace,

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the various household routines, of attending to the kitchen-fire and using broom and jar. In a like manner, and always remaining calm and contented, employing soft and sweet language, mindful of her husband's wants and desires, in their public life and in their privacy, she keeps Satyavan happy. This way, and absorbed in tapasya, a lot of her time goes by.

But, within, the virtuous woman suffers greatly. With each rising sun, or while sleeping in the night, at every passing moment, she remembers Narad's words and feels the cruel day approaching closer. When she counts that only four days are left, and Satyavan will be living no more afterwards, she resolves to perform the three-night vow, trirātra vrata, of fasting and standing at one single place through the entire period. [Note 6, p. 545.] Dyumatsena dissuades her from carrying out the difficult vow. Savitri, however, tells him that he need not have any apprehension in her fulfilling it. Remaining erect like a stick, without moving from the chosen spot, and without taking any food for three days Savitri, by the power of her strong will and a woman's strength to suffer, completes the vow.

On the fourth day, the destined day of Satyavan's death, she gets ready well before sunrise, and lights a bright fire, and makes offerings to the gods. [Note 7, p. 546.] Then she goes to the parents-in-law and to the various hermitages around and makes obeisances to the Rishis. They all bless her with auspicious things dear to a young devout wife. Savitri, accomplished as she is in the Yoga of Meditation, dhyānayogaparāyanā, wills in her heart for their blessings to come true. On returning to the cottage she sees Satyavan, with his axe on his shoulder, leaving for the forest; she halts him and tells him that, on that particular day, she will accompany him to the forest. But he advises her to get the permission from his father. Dyumatsena, recollecting the past one year, notes that ever since her father had left her in his charge never for anything did Savitri make any request to him. But then counselling Savitri not to be inattentive in duty, he permits her to go with Satyavan to the woods.

The young couple set out happily, hand in hand. Satyavan shows to Savitri the sacred rivers and trees laden with flowers. In the lovely and delightful forests, with the flocks of peacocks dancing there joyously, they hear all around a soft lyrical note of gladness. In that gladness Satyavan speaks to her in honey-sweet words.

And Savitri too, delighted by the beauty of the surroundings,

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and in the company of her lover, responds with equal sweetness. But she is constantly watching her husband in all his movements and does not allow him to go out of her sight. Remembering Narad's words, she knows that his life is now in hours and he will die with the arrival of the Time-Person, kāla-puruṣa. Within, she is in great agony all the while. Yet, accomplished in austerities as she is, and reckoning the swift-approaching fatal moment, she remains calm.

Satyavan, lustrous in his strength, collects a basketful of fruits with the help of Savitri. Then he starts cutting the firewood. He wants to complete the day's task quickly and spend the rest of the time with his beloved. But, due to overwork, he suddenly feels exhausted and begins perspiring profusely. He suffers from a severe headache, a pain in the limbs and an intense burning sensation in the heart. He lies down. Savitri immediately goes closer to him and takes his head in her lap. She knows that the foretold moment has arrived and that the kāla-puruṣa will soon appear.

Presently, Savitri sees a bright Person standing in front of her. He is luminous, is beautiful in his red attire, and is wearing a splendid crown over his head; it seems to her that the Sun-God himself has come there. His body, though dark, is lustrous in hue and through his red eyes he is looking steadily at Satyavan. He is carrying a noose in his hand which inspires great dread.

On seeing him, Savitri lays aside her husband's head and stands up with folded hands. Her heart is trembling but she asks that Person who he is and why he has come. That Person introduces himself as Yama and avers that he could converse with Savitri because she is a devout and chaste woman, a practitioner of difficult austerities. Yama praises the soul of Satyavan; but now as his life here is over he has to take it away with him, the soul that is no bigger than a thumb, angushthamātrah puruṣam. He throws the noose around it, pulls it out and starts moving towards the South. Satyavan's lifeless corpse appears very dull and frightful. Savitri, afflicted with agony, follows Yama.

A little later Yama looks back and notices Savitri following him. He advises her to return, as she has paid the debt to her husband by accompanying him over the permitted distance. He further reminds her that she has to attend to the funeral rites of the deceased. Savitri does not accept Yama's advice. She has walked with the God seven steps and therefore a friendly relationship is established between the two. She tells him so and argues extensively with him on fundamental issues, he being the son of Vivasvan, the Sun-

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God, knower and upholder of the Law of Truth obtaining in the mortal creation.

You are the mighty son of Vivasvan and that is why the learned call you Vaivasvat; to all creatures you are fair and you uphold the dharma. For that reason you are, O Lord, also known as Dharmaraj.

(shloka 5:41)

Her speech is perfect, observing the rules of grammar and syntax, complete in knowledge of etymology, prosodically well-structured; also her reasoning is flawless and logically impeccable. She tells him that her own place lies near her husband and she will not go back without him, firmly fixed as she is in the dharma. By the merit of austerity, devotion to the preceptor, love for the husband, observance of the sacred vows, and by the grace of Yama himself there is nothing, she tells him, which cannot be accomplished by a woman. Further, she asserts that holy people always abide in virtuous conduct, and never have they sorrow, nor are they any time afflicted. Greatly rewarding is indeed the company of such pious ones and therefore one should be ever close to them. In the fellowship of the saints and sages, without a doubt, all fear disappears. For this reason, more than himself does a man trust holy persons, and so does he give more of his love and respect to them. Then, in a tremendous moment of mantric utterance, of revelation, she discloses that

... it is by the Truth that the saints lead the sun; by askesis the saints uphold the earth; in the saints all the three divisions of Time find their refuge; noble persons in the midst of the saints have never any grief.

(shloka 5:48)

The illustrious and the excellent help each other in the conduct of the dharma and do not do hurt to others. Therefore they prove to be the protectors of the entire world.

Immensely pleased with the sublimity of these utterances Yama grants her boon after boon. Indeed, the more she speaks the well-adorned and well-cherished lofty things of the dharma, acceptable always in the conduct of life in every circumstance, to the same extent his admiration for her grows. By the first two boons she

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desires eyesight for her blind father-in-law and his lost kingdom; in the third boon she asks for a hundred sons for her father Aswapati, true and heroic brothers to her. By the fourth boon she would have got a hundred sons for herself, but she argues that this boon is of a different kind than the other three. It cannot be fulfilled without proper matrimony. She therefore reiterates her request for the life of Satyavan. Without him, she tells Yama, she herself would be dead; she would abstain from any pleasure, even that of entering heaven. Without Satyavan the boon would thus lie waste. Then, in a kind of dialectics, she points out the strange anomaly in Yama's words and actions:

You have given me the boon of a hundred sons and you yourself are taking my husband away; for that reason I again ask the boon of life for Satyavan, by which your words shall come true.

(shloka 5:54)

Yama, gladdened by Savitri's Words of Dharma, says 'Let it be so,' and releases the noose from around the soul of the dead. He tells her that Satyavan is now in good health and fit to return with her to the earth. Further, he grants a life of four hundred years for him to live with her and, for the welfare of the world, to perform the holy Yajnas. Then Yama, blessing Savitri and sending her back with the soul of Satyavan, returns to his own Abode deep in the South. [Note 8, p. 546.]

Also, Savitri returns to the earth with the soul of Satyavan.

After the departure of Yama, getting her husband back, as Vyasa puts it, Savitri comes to the place where his dead body has been lying. She again is there with his head in her lap. By now Satyavan regains consciousness and looks affectionately at Savitri; he begins talking to her like one who has returned from a long journey. He feels that he is waking from some deep sleep; but then he also carries a faint recollection of the dark-hued and terrifying figure who had dragged him to some dreadful and unknown world. He asks Savitri whether she knows anything about him. She tells him that it was the great God Yama himself, the Ordainer of the Creatures, who had come there; she, however, quickly adds that it is now all over and that he has left the place. Satyavan wants to know more about the entire episode; but Savitri postpones it by saying that she will narrate it the next day, pointing out that a thick

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darkness is fast enveloping them in the forest.

Satyavan looks around and realises that he has not returned to the hermitage yet. He is quite worried, lest his old and helpless parents get disturbed, not seeing him back in spite of the growing night. But Savitri is somewhat hesitant. She sees that Satyavan is still weak and doubts whether he is in a condition to walk the long distance back to the hermitage. Getting lost in the darkness can also be risky. Besides, she herself is somewhat scared and tells Satyavan to that effect:

Those cruel-voiced prowlers of the night are moving freely now; and listen to the sound in the fallen leaves as the wild beasts go about in the forest. This fearsome howling of the she-jackals in the south, and in the west, is causing my mind and my heart to tremble greatly.

(shlokas 5:75-76)

But Satyavan insists on returning forthwith. He is unable to bear any longer the separation from his loving parents. He tells Savitri that his blind father and the old mother must be frantically looking for them, going from hermitage to hermitage, inquiring about him and about his welfare. He does not wish to delay their going back any further.

Realising how true her husband is as a follower of the dharma, Savitri agrees to return at once. She gets up and knots her loose hair; then, holding both the hands of her husband, she helps him to stand. Then encircling his waist with her right arm, his left on her left shoulder, they start walking slowly. Satyavan chides her that she is a timid woman and assures her that he is quite familiar with all the paths in the forest and can tell the correct one simply by looking at the stars. He points out to her that they are actually on the same path they had taken in the morning while coming to the forest. Indicating that at the bifurcation near the group of palāśa-lrets she should take the path leading to the north, he prompts her to quicken the pace that they may reach home as early as possible.

In the meanwhile Dyumatsena receives his eyesight. But he is very much disturbed, since Satyavan has not yet returned home. His mind begins wandering wildly, thinking of ominous and untoward happenings. A great fear grips him. The worried parents go from cottage to cottage inquiring about their son and daughter-

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in-law. They are concerned to such an extent that they rave almost in madness.

Seeing their distressed plight, tormented as they are by evil suggestions, the sages of the forest gather around them and console them.

Suvarchasa, ever the speaker of the truth, assures them that as Savitri is a woman of exceptionally noble and virtuous qualities, and is fixed in dharma, and has made great progress in her tapasya, nothing injurious can happen to Satyavan. Bharadwaja also expresses the same conviction and holds that Satyavan is hale and living. Gautama asserts that he has studied all the six branches of the Vedas, accumulated great might of askesis, observed strict celibacy since his early age, and pleased his preceptors and the Fire-God well; by that power of austerity and by the concentration of his will, he contends, he knows all the movements of others. Stating so, he affirms that Satyavan is alive. Gautama's disciple vouches that never a word uttered by his Guru has turned out to be untrue or wrong; therefore he feels confident that Satyavan must be living. Dalbhya points out that Dyumatsena's getting his eyesight back in such an unexpected way augurs auspicious happenings; he also says that the way Savitri observed the very difficult three-night vow, and the fact that she accompanied her husband to the forest without breaking the long fast, means complete safety for Satyavan. Apastambha sees in the tranquil benign surrounding, and in the manner and movement of the dumb animals and birds, a secret presence of harmony, indicating that there is nothing which should really perturb them. He too is sure that Satyavan is alive. Dhaumya proclaims that Satyavan has the marks of a long life and hence he must be living.

This way the great Rishis assuage the fears of the worried parents. Then, not too long afterwards, Satyavan and Savitri arrive at the hermitage, immensely happy. There is great jubilation amongst all present. Indeed, in the union of the father and the son, in the blind king's receiving his sight, and in Savitri's presence they see agreeable portents of the future. Kindling a bright fire they all sit around it and throw a volley of questions at Satyavan. They wish to know why Savitri and he are late in returning home when the night has grown dark in the jungles. Quite understandably, they want to know everything in detail to their satisfaction. But Satyavan simply tells them that, while collecting the firewood, he suffered a severe headache and had suddenly become unconscious,

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without awareness of anything around. For the delay there is no other reason, — he informs them. But Gautama is not quite convinced. Moreover, Dyumatsena's regaining his eyesight so unexpectedly still remains a mystery. He therefore turns towards Savitri and expresses his eagerness to know the entire secret from her. He tells her that she alone can unravel it.

O Savitri, I am eager to hear of it from you; you know, 0 Savitri, all that is far and near, that belongs to the past and to the future; you understand it, one like Goddess Savitri herself as you are, with her effulgence. Surely, you have the knowledge of its cause and its purpose, and therefore speak the truth of it; if there is nothing in it to hide from us, tell us all of it.

(shlokas 6: 34-35)

Savitri narrates everything in detail, right from the beginning, how Narad foretold the impending doom of Satyavan's death, and the reason for her undertaking the three-night vow, and of accompanying her husband to the forest on that particular day. She tells them that at the noon hour Yama entered the forest to snatch the soul of Satyavan. As he was carrying it away with him, she too followed him and offered him high eulogies with the utterances of Truth. The mighty God, the Upholder of the Dharma, was immensely pleased, and had become happy with her beyond bound. She then narrates how she received the five boons and how Satyavan regained consciousness.

The Rishis bless the young devout woman and in happiness depart to their cottages, hailing her as the Saviour of the House:

The House of the King was plunging more and more into darkness, assailed by misfortunes; but you of noble birth and a virtuous wife, sweet and amiable in nature, and an observer of the vows, one given to meritorious conduct, redeemed the family from doom.

(shloka 6:43)

But the next day they all, rich in austerities, completing the morning fire-rituals, gather once again around Dyumatsena. They speak of the extreme good fortune, mahābhāgyam, of Savitri, and are not contented even though they repeatedly narrate it.

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While in wonderment they are talking thus, a group of citizens of the Shalwa kingdom unexpectedly arrives at the hermitage. Extending their greetings to Dyumatsena, they inform him that his enemy has been killed by his own minister. They also add that in the capital everyone has resolved that Dyumatsena should occupy the throne again, as he is its worthy and rightful heir. Thus, imploring him to return, they tell him that the army with all its four divisions is ready at his command. They are also happily surprised to see Dyumatsena with his eyesight regained.

Dyumatsena worships the Rishis reverentially and, receiving their blessings, departs for the capital. Shaibya along with Savitri rides a richly decorated gold-panelled car and, escorted by the army, leaves the hermitage. At the capital the priests sprinkle the holy water and perform Dyumatsena's coronation ceremony. Satyavan is also made the Crown-Prince. In the course of time all the boons of Yama given to Savitri get fulfilled. [Note 9, p. 548.]

Part III: The Tale of Satyavan and Savitri

A Letter of Sri Aurobindo

The tale of Satyavan and Savitri is recited in the Mahabharata as a story of conjugal love conquering death. But this legend is, as shown by many features of the human tale, one of the symbolic myths of the Vedic cycle. Satyavan is the soul carrying the divine truth of being within itself but descended into the grip of death and ignorance; Savitri is the Divine Word, daughter of the Sun, goddess of the supreme Truth who comes down and is bom to save; Aswapati, the Lord of the Horse, her human father, is the Lord of Tapasya, the concentrated energy of spiritual endeavour that helps us to rise from the mortal to the immortal plane; Dyumatsena, Lord of the Shining Hosts, father of Satyavan, is the Divine Mind here fallen blind, losing its celestial kingdom of vision, and through that loss its kingdom of glory. Still this is not a mere allegory, the characters are not personified qualities, but incarnations or emanations of living and conscious Forces with whom we can enter into concrete touch and they take human bodies in order to help man and show him the way from his mortal state to a divine consciousness and immortal life.

(Sri Aurobindo on Himself SABCL, Vol. 26, p. 265.)

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Part IV: Notes

Adaptations made by Sri Aurobindo

Note 1 (p.529)

In Vyasa's Savitri the description of Aswapati's entire tapasya and his getting the boon are covered in just about twenty shlokas. The king has no son and in order to get a child he sets himself upon the dharmic path of sacrificial worship, Yajna. The traditional issue is, one may say, the continuation of the ancestral line for the welfare and maintenance of the order of the worlds, the order which is maintained by making to the gods appropriate offerings accompanied by the hymns of solicitation and praise. The gods grow by these offerings and in return give gifts to the devotees. The help of the gods is always for promoting Righteousness. If the society has a certain foundation based on it, then it is obligatory for the righteous to affirm it in everyday conduct and in every respect. One aspect of it is to see that in all its glory it is perpetuated from generation to generation. The Law of the Right, ritam, was the ancient Vedic ideal that prevailed in the dynamic Age of the Truth, Satya Yuga, and of it Aswapati was one ardent and devout votary.

But then Aswapati's tapasya was not just a part of the fulfilment of this social obligation of his. We must also look into the plausibility that the intention behind the narration was to present a deeper and truer issue through the medium of a story. It appears that, in this human tale, Vyasa quite meant it to be so.

In spirituo-metaphysical terms it is the possibility of a divine creation arising out of the inconscience, out of the unman ifest that has come from the nonmanifest. If by the Force of Concentration, Tapas-Shakti, the Supreme created the Void and became inconscient, did the Yoga of Self-Sacrifice, triumphantly chanted in the Veda as the Holocaust of the Supreme, then by another Force of Action he has to emerge out of this state, out of utter forget-fulness, and establish the unfailing and inexhaustible delight of existence everywhere. For this to happen, the Supreme has to do Yoga in the earth-consciousness itself. And this has to happen in the face of his own stubbornness; for he himself has become the Inconscient. One visible sign of this stubbornness of the inconscient Supreme is the presence of Death: the manifesting Supreme surprisingly encounters the obstacle of the antagonist Supreme as Death. In that sense the tale of Savitri also becomes the Epic of

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the Divine Creation. In Sri Aurobindo's epic Aswapati comes to the world of birth and does the Yoga of the Supreme. This is necessary in order to tackle, through birth, the divine issue present in this world of birth, in the mortal creation, mrityuloka. He realises that the issue can be handled victoriously only if the divine Shakti would condescend to come down upon the earth and deal with the otherwise obstinate and intractable problem of mortality, presented in the Figure of Death. She agrees.

Savitri comes down here as an incarnate force and espouses the cause of the evolutionary travail's death-bound life in the fulfilment of the Will of the Supreme himself. But this descending ocean of dynamic consciousness has to be upborne lest it drown the very Void out of which it is intended to emerge, with the awareness of the multiple splendour, a manifestation with the growing richness of the being of delight. Aswapati's tapasya is for this purpose, to prepare a safe base for the fiery power's transforming action. The needed Yogic support for her arrival and for her action is provided by it. Aswapati climbs to the summit of this creation and meets her; he prays to her to take human birth and accomplish the glorious miracle. In response to it she comes down as his own daughter.

Thus Aswapati's eighteen-year tapasya presented in Vyasa's brief narrative, already full of spiritual glow, becomes in Sri Aurobindo a glorious and laurel-crowned Odyssey of mounting the mighty steep World-Stair that rises from Matter's inconscient base to the splendours of the superconscient Spirit. He goes yet beyond, crossing the triple Glory. Even as he approaches the Worlds of the Unknowable, the creative-executive power of the Supreme answers him and grants him the exceptional boon that one shall come and change everything. All shall be done for which this mortal world was created, — he is told.

In the legend of Savitri the issue, albeit briefly and indicatively stated, is yet well focused in the inescapable death of Savitri's lover and husband Satyavan. This death indeed becomes a glorious occasion for the incarnate Power's action to deal with the universal Adversary standing in the way of the intended divine manifestation.

What was brief and suggestively succinct in Vyasa, given to us in just twenty swift shlokas, Sri Aurobindo elaborated in his epic to the great length of about ten-thousand lines. But it is not wholly a poetic or thematic elaboration or expansion to this disproportionate size, merely for the sake of self-blissful indulgence. The existence of the World-Stair is not entirely new to the

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Yogic experience. But Aswapati's exploration of these worlds, his moving through them, putting upon their breast his footsteps is an occult action and has an occult meaning and purpose. It is not just the journey of an indifferent passerby; he leaves behind in them his dynamic and luminous Yogic presence itself. It is the presence of the Avatar left behind in those worlds which is going to prove beneficent to this world of our mortality. It is by this presence that these countless worlds are to participate gloriously in the process of the new creation for which Savitri is about to begin her work. Perhaps it was too early for the tradition to realise this, but it seems that it certainly had a distant intuition of it. In that sense the story is very rich.

Note 2 (p. 530.)

Sri Aurobindo describes the event in a somewhat different manner, with Aswapati as a Yogi in communion with the spiritual planes and forces that constantly exert their influence upon us, which govern and mould all our movements and actions. He has a sure intuition that a greater nobler destiny lies in wait for us though at present we strive only for little gains, though we are unable to receive the celestial gifts, hold them when they are given to us in God's plenty. But Aswapati hears a heavenly voice arid sees in the person of Savitri a bright promise, "a shining answer from the gods" to all these thousand questions that baffle and torment life and belittle it. He tells her to proceed forthwith and put her "conquering foot on Chance and Time." He has a feeling that the heavens guard her soul for some mighty task and that her fate and her work are kept unknown somewhere afar which she must discover and attend to. She is bidden to ascend from Nature and meet a greater God, that together they shall tackle the issue of this mortal creation. The great commanding word from her Yogi-father is received by Savitri and she at once awakes to the mission of her spirit and her soul. Deep in her consciousness it sinks and begins to work with the full power and certainty of the mantric utterance itself.

Note 3 (p. 530.)

At this point Sri Aurobindo brings out explicitly, and with sweet lyrical enthusiasm and enchantment, the meeting of Satyavan and Savitri in the Shalwa woods, of which in Vyasa no hint whatsoever is available. They meet, they fall in love with each other, they

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recognise the purpose of their union and the task they have together to attend to. In the acceptable tradition of the Gandharva marriage, and with Nature and the gods as its witnesses, they get indissolubly united. All this is absent in the upākhyāna. But then what is absent in the Legend and Symbol is the traditional ritualistic marriage which is solemnised later, in spite of Narad's frightful prophecy. Not on socio-religious or occult-dharmic aspect but on spiritual content, with its meaning and its value, is the important thrust put in the latter. Perhaps this emphasis, rather than the departure from the established norm and convention, is quite understandable. The marriage itself is an exceptional marriage, marriage of two exceptional incarnate beings.

Note 4 (p. 530.)

Vyasa does not mention if the queen, Savitri's mother Malawi, was also present during the meeting, although it is presumed that she was there. Even if actually present, she did not participate in the discussion. This seems to be the classical ideal in which the woman left all matters of deliberation and decision to her husband and accepted his word as final in every respect. She always remained in the background with her force of dynamism supporting her husband from behind. On the other hand, in Sri Aurobindo's presentation the queen, though full of human frailty, plays a crucial role in the discussion and raises subtle points of fate and free will in human transactions.

Note 5 (p. 532.)

In Sri Aurobindo's Savitri we see Narad asserting the divine will behind this marriage and, though apparently tragic, makes it firm. There is no doubt that it was for this purpose that he had undertaken the long and arduous journey from his home in Paradise to Aswapati's palace at Madra on the banks of the Alacananda, a difficult process by which the spiritual becomes the earthly substantial. Narad is one of those very few who can move freely in all the worlds and can also take a human form, of flesh and blood. He knows the occult secret by which this can be done and as an aspect of the divine working, and in the imperative of its purpose, he participates whenever such crucial events are about to occur. Sri Aurobindo's Narad has a mission to accomplish, — to deliver the Word of Fate. It is the Word which is going to determine the entire course of the earthly future. On the other hand the

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Mahabharata story looks more like a homely narrative. In it Narad is taken as a household figure intimate to the inmates, with their concern in his heart. His present visit to Aswapati is therefore just a part of that extreme goodwill of his for them.

Note 6 (p. 533.)

In general we may say that the mention of trirātra vrata in Vyasa has been fully utilised by Sri Aurobindo in his epic to describe the Shakti Yoga of Savitri, a description which runs to more than three thousand lines. In the entire Occult-Yogic literature this is undoubtedly unique, the most definite disclosure, indeed a revelation and an application accompanying its practice. We have here the true meaning and purport of the Tantrik sadhana, Shakti Upasana, as a means for the effective transformation of Nature from her inconscient mode of working in the dumb inconscient body into a luminous dynamism of her consciousness-force. It is only when this is carried out in the bodily existence that there is a possibility of conquering death and attaining earthly immortality in the light and splendour of the triple Divine. That would be the genuine and actual resolution of the issue of this mortal world, this mrityuloka. It is on that path Savitri has now set herself, so that this difficult missioned task be done.

The announcement of her husband's death in the story is the immediate occasion or provocation for doing the Yoga of Transformation. Certainly this aspect of earthly immortality is not present in the tradition, nowhere has it been explicitly taken as a part of the spiritual sadhana. From death to immortality, mrityormāmratm gamay, has all along been the ancient prayer. It is again in that context that we see in the

Upakhyana of the Mahabharata Yama granting wonderful boons to Savitri; but then Yama as immortal Death still remains there, yet to carry on the work of upholding the worlds. We cannot therefore say that the trirātra vrata has the power of the Shakti Yoga to bring about a totally radical change in Nature, particularly in the stubborn inconscient aspect of Nature, to altogether displace death from her. And yet the benign figure of Yama has to find its full meaning and appurtenant significance in this mortal creation. The Vedic-Tantrik sadhana did not explore the possibilities of the Shakti Yoga in this transformative endeavour though it may have had an inkling of it. The fact that it was a three-night vow makes it symbolically weighty and consequential, the three nights of the physical, vital

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and mental ignorance that constitutes our existence. But the full implication of it, both Yogically and Occult-operationally, perhaps remained unexplored. Perhaps for good reasons too.

Note 7 (p. 533.)

On the fourth day, the destined day of Satyavan's death, Savitri gets ready well before the sunrise, and lights a bright fire, and makes ritual offerings to the gods. In Sri Aurobindo Savitri worships goddess Durga on the fated day before setting out to the forest with Satyavan. The image of the goddess was carved by him on a stone. In the upākhyāna Satyavan is presented as a painter of the horses whereas Savitri makes him a sculptor. But, more importantly, Durga is the Protectress of the Worlds and worshipping her is praying and asking for her protection in the most dire moment of life, the moment confronting death itself. Arjuna at the suggestion of Krishna had so worshipped her at the very beginning of the Mahabharata war. That was however for winning a victory over the enemy and not to conquer death. Therefore if Savitri is going to worship Durga, that goddess must be more powerful than Yama in order to prevail over him. She is the transcendental Shakti, of the Divine, Savitri herself and hence there is the inevitability of the result in her favour in the deep battle of life that is soon going to be waged against death. That such a living goddess was present in the rock sculpted by Satyavan adds yet another transcendental dimension to the story in the hands of Sri Aurobindo.

Note 8 (p. 536.)

The parts dealing with the colloquy between Yama and Savitri are the most complex, most profound and occult in Sri Aurobindo's epic. In it Yama, rather Death, the embodied Nothingness, is standing as a stubborn antagonist against God's work in this mortal creation and has no mercy to show to anyone or to anything. He is learned, he is powerful, he is relentless and inexorable, and all that he knows is his Law. He sees things and beings as a "pitiful dream" and looks at the delight of Nature with utter disdain. In fact, he is the very incarnation of Inconscience. He derives all his power from the dark Abyss and he cannot accept any trespassing of his edict. Savitri's following him and challenging him to claim the soul of Satyavan is an affront made by her to his sovereignty and he cannot brook it in the least manner. She must pay a heavy price for this transgression. The figure that finally stands in front

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of her is a huge terrifying mask, a "grandiose Darkness of the Infinite." He has embodied in his shadow-self the entire might of God's Nothing and, in the present process of evolution, defeating him is defeating that Nothing itself. Therefore he is standing there in all his formidable strength. But the great incarnate Goddess in the form of Savitri throws aside the veil and the Deity dwelling in her secret depths readies herself for the decisive assault. A mighty transformation comes upon the extraordinary Yogini and the Kundalini-force descends from above into her entire being. The Tantrik World-Yoga of the Divine, the Shakti Yoga of the Supreme, finds its culmination in this most decisive, and marvellous, action of the great incarnate Goddess. But then Yama in the role of Death yet resists. Finally, however, to her mastering Word he succumbs and gets dispossessed of his paled and defeated will. He takes refuge in the "retreating Night" unable as he is to withstand the lustre of the divine Immortal.

But then he reappears as the Tempter of the Worlds and offers easy boons to Savitri. She at once sees the trap and does not fall into it, to live with Satyavan in the heavens of the deathless gods. Her concern is for the soul of man, Satyavan's soul to do God's work in the world of the mortals. Earth is the chosen place and it is this earth which in the splendour of the triple divinity must be fulfilled. Savitri is firm-willed and adheres to the choice of her soul and her spirit. It is then that, in the benignity of her choice, she receives the supreme gift from the Supreme, a gift to celebrate the arrival of the new creation with the soul of Satyavan at its forefront and as its initiator. Even the bright illusion that could have fallen over her sight and distracted her from her single purpose has now been dispelled and there is only the light of the everlasting day. The work of the incarnation has been accomplished and now things will unfold in the process of endless Time.

Can we say that both these aspects, the aspect of the embodied Nothingness and the aspect of the bright Tempter, are present in Yama of the tradition, — because Yama given to us by the tradition is unmistakably at once frightful-dark and kind-gracious? He inspires fear in us and also he is the giver of happy boons to us. We may therefore clearly see both these figures behind him, though perhaps not in their detailed operational bearing and sense. Even if we are to take it that way, it has never been made explicit and functionally meaningful in the ancient writings. It is very likely that they had the intuition of it, that behind this twofold Yama

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there is only one single Supreme, or rather it is the Supreme who himself is present in these two poises. But the point is not about the intuition of it. The Rishis of yore might have had that knowledge and that definite perception which had remained unrecorded in the annals of spirituality. We may even give them the benefit of the doubt that it was not to be inopportunely disclosed, very explicitly stated. Or else, perhaps more appropriately, the completeness of the experience was still very much wanting for it to have become in the evolutionary process operationally decisive.

But for us what is necessary is to recognise the fact that Savitri's entry into the very world of dense ignorance and death is an absolutely unique and unprecedented event. It was as if Satyavan's death became a pretext for it to happen. With her Occult-Yogic might Savitri steps into the inconscient regions and establishes in them the expressive power of the supreme Word, the Word by which things take place and get luminously fixed. If Aswapati's tapasya led him through the different worlds in which he left his presence behind, Savitri's Battle in the field of Darkness is to eliminate the elemental forces from which arise the crookedness and the evil in the evolutionary manifestation. Therefore the Yama-Savitri debate is not a mere verbal duel, a logomachy, a metaphysical ^engagement, a conjuration of one-up-manship. Great powers are released even as they speak, the powers of opposition and negation and the powers of advancement and affirmation. Each utterance lets loose its charge, with occult mights clashing against formidable occult mights. It is in their wake that things have to transpire, events founded in the future and not in the obscurity of the past, to get organised and configured so that the new order of the world is bom. Ultimately the Gnostic Word is established in those very suffocating and terrifying nether depths where lived uncompromising death and suffering and evil. Great is Truth and it does indeed prevail. Savitri has made it greater by making it prevail even in the absolute darkness of Inconscience. What was promised long ago now gets unconditionally, incontingently, fulfilled. Once for all the issue of the mortal creation is resolved and the path of ever-widening and everlasting progress opened out.

Note 9 (p. 540.)

Sri Aurobindo's epilogue does not have these details. Did he intentionally drop them, considering them as irrelevant to the main

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Yogic-spiritual message the epic is to give? Or did he sort of hurriedly round off the story keeping in regard the view that, after receiving the supreme Boon, there is really nothing more that need be wished or willed, need be said? After completing the final revision of the Book of Fate, in the middle of November 1950, just three weeks before his passing away, Sri Aurobindo had asked if something else was still remaining to be taken up for revision. When told that the Book of Death and the Epilogue were still to be attended to, he remarked: "Oh, that? We shall see about that later on." That "later on" was never to be. Would Sri Aurobindo have incorporated in the Epilogue the gathering of the wise and the elders around Satyavan and Savitri when they returned late in the evening from the forest, recreated with his poetic genius the ancient scene of the hermitage and the dwellers gathering at the moment of concern and at the moment of jubilation? Possibly the sages and the Rishis would have told us about the nature of the new creation and about the divine life received as a boon by Savitri from the Supreme, the "life that has opened with divinity." Similarly, the Book of Death, which presently has only Canto Three, entitled Death in the Forest, might have been taken up by him later, perhaps to indicate the difficulty of the cellular transformation, — the difficulty of the inconscient will in the body to change and accept the Truth-Will in it. But these are possibilities about which nobody can say anything and it would be quite improper to even hazard a guess. Besides, it is likely that these are futuristic matters and it would be best to leave the future to determine its own course of progress and action when the future is going to be fully governed by the future and not by dead compulsions and constraints of the past. The story of the mortal world, mrityuloka, is an endless saga, and a glorious saga full of happy surprises, and it must be allowed to unfold in its own creatively glorious way, the Way of the Truth. Sri Aurobindo has set it into motion and the auspices of eternity's Time will take it over to make dynamic divinity its executive in the endless delight of existence.

R.Y. DESHPANDE

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Appendices

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Decended into earth's imperfect mould

And wept not fallen to mortality,

But looked on all with large and tranquil eyes.

One had returned from the transcendent planes

And bore anew the load of mortal breath,

Who had striven of old with our darkness and our pain;

She took again her divine unfinished task:

Survivor of death and the aeonic years,

Once more with her fathomless heart she fronted Time.

Again there was renewed, again revealed

The ancient closeness by earth-vision veiled,

The secret contact broken off in Time,

A consanguinity of earth and heaven,

Between the human portion toiling here

And an as yet unborn and limitless Force.

Again the mystic deep attempt began,

The daring wager of the cosmic game.

For since upon this blind and whirling globe

Earth-plasm first quivered with the illumining mind

And life invaded the material sheath

Afflicting Inconscience with the need to feel,

Since in Infinity's silence woke a word,

A Mother wisdom works in Nature's breast

To pour delight on the heart of toil and want

And press perfection on life's stumbling powers,

Impose heaven-sentience on the obscure abyss

And make dumb Matter conscious of its God.

Although our fallen minds forget to climb,

Although our human stuff resists or breaks,

She keeps her will that hopes to divinise clay;

Failure cannot repress, defeat o'erthrow;

Final manuscript of Book Four, Canto One, with dictated revision. For the printed text see Savitri, SABCL, Vol. 29, pp. 353-54. Refer Mother India, May 2000, p. 351.

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A Short Bibliographical Note

Sri Aurobindo: On the occasion of the birth centenary in 1972 Sri Aurobindo's works were brought out in 30 volumes under the title Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library (SABCL). Since then, however, a number of unpublished writings had been discovered amongst his papers. All these have now been thoroughly scrutinised and reorganised for publication in 35 volumes as Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo. Most of the references to his writings are with resped to the SABCL volumes. The three letters reproduced here (pages 1-43) are from SABCL, Vol. 26, pp. 237-65 and Vol. 29, pp.802-16.

THE MOTHER: The birth centenary edition of the Mother's work comprises 17 volumes entitled Collected Works of the Mother published by the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Pondicherry. There are also 13 volumes of her work called Mother's Agenda brought out by the Institut de Recherches Evolutives Paris. On Savitri-A Talk to a Young Disciple (pages 44-49) has been taken from Sweet Mother-Harmony of Light ( 1978) as reported by Mona Sarkar.

NOLLINI KANTA GUPTA: Collected Works in 8 volumes in English have been published by the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education Pondicherry. The two articles included here, Savitri-The Wont of Sri Aurobindo and The Opening Scene of Savitri (pages 50-67), are from Vol. 4.

NIRODBARAN: Savitri-A Factual Account of its Composition (pages 68- 86) is from Twelve Years with Sri Aurobindo, published by the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in 1972. Besides several other published writings, Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo (2 volumes) and Talks with Sri Aurobindo (3 volumes) are his other important works.

A. B. PURANI: Sri Aurobindo 's Savitri: An Approach and a Study, first published in 1952, is one of the earliest introductions to the epic. Savitri-The Epic of the Spirit (pages 87-123) has been taken from this work. His Evening Talks presents the sessions the disciples used to have with Sri Aurobindo.

DILIP KUMAR ROY: The Message of Savitri (pages 124-44) forms an important chapter in the author's Sri Aurobindo Came to Me, one of the few books bearing the stamp of direct contact with the Master.

He whom Sri Aurobindo "cherished like a friend and a son" had received more than 2000 letters from him.

M. P. Pandit: An author of about 150 books, he has written extensively on Savitri

AMAL KIRAN (K. D. Sethna): Is a polymath knowing many arts and sciences. But he stands tall above everyone as a literary critic, particularly English poetry. The Poetic Genius of Sri Aurobindo

V. K. Gokak: A recognised literary critic and poet, his Sri Aurobindo— Seer and Poet, his Sri Aurobindo Seer and Poet, from which Diction of Savitri (pages 222-40) has been taken, is an excellent presentation of Sri Aurobindo's poetry to the world of literature.

RAVINDRA KHANNA: A Study of Similes in Savitri (pages 241-56) was published in Mother India, September 1968, pp. 605-620. He was professor of English at the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education, Pondicherry.

SISIRKUMAR GHOSE: Poetry of Sri Aurobindo and Sri Aurobindo: Poet are two of his significant literary works connected with Sri Aurobindo. Affiliated with the Department of English in Visva Bharati, Santiniketan, he was an internationally known figure. Savitri-A Subjective Poem (pages 257-73) is taken from Poetry of Sri Aurobindo.

K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar: An eminent prose writer, critic and poet, his two monumental biographies of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother will remain for long time to come as standard reference works. A Survey of Savitri (pages 274-313) is from Sri Aurobindo: a Biography and a History.

ROMEN: A poet, a musician and a painter combined in one; he joined the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in his teens and received guidance from the Master. Savitri and Paradise lost-Method and Style (pages 314-53) was serialised in Mother India during 1965-66.

RAJANIKANT MODY: Poetic Imagery in Savitri (pages 354-392) was one of the earliest works discussing the poetic aspects of Savitri. It was serialised in Mother India during 1950-51 when this review was a fortnightly.

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RUUD LOHMAN: The Rhythm of Savitri (pages 393-404) appeared in Sri Aurobindo Circle thirty-second number, 1979, pp. 118-26. He stayed for some time in Auroville.

RAKHALDAS BOSU: An Approach to Sri Aurobindo's Savitri (pages 405- 418) was published in Mother India, November 1985, pp. 733-43; later it also appeared as an independent booklet. He was an Ashramite.

JUDITH TYBERG (Jyotipriya): Sanskritist and an accomplished scholar, she was the founder of the East-West Cultural Center at Los Angeles. This is one of the first places in the USA where Sri Aurobindo's relics are installed. The Drama of Integral Self-Realisation (pages 419-28) was published in Mother India, August 1976, pp. 664-70. Jyotipriya, meaning a Lover of Light, was the name given to her by Sri Aurobindo.

V.-MADHUSUDAN REDDY: The Yoga of Savitri-The Finding of the Soul (pages 429-442) is taken from Savitri-Epic of the Eternal. His elaborately conceived three-volume Vedic Epiphany is a magnificent piece of interpretative work on the Vedas. He wrote and lectured extensively on Sri Aurobindo's philosophy.

ROHIT MEHTA: The Eternal Bridegroom (pages 443-66) is from the author's Dialogue with Death the cover of which has the Mother's blessings on it. A theosophist and a mystic, he lectured at several places, particularly introducing Savitri to general audiences.

RAMESHWAR GUPTA: Professor of English, he studied Sri Aurobindo and Tagore and has publications both in English and in Hindi. Savitri in World Literature (pages 467-83) has been taken from Eternity in Words: Sri Aurobindo s Savitri.

A. N. Dw1VEDI: Savitri as an Epic (pages 484-91) is from the author's A Study of Savitri. The book also discusses other aspects of Sri Aurobindo's poetry.

ROMESH CHANDRA DUTT: The well-known translator of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata rendered the Savitri-tale, Pativrata Mahatmya (pages 492-506), in the Locksley Hall metre with great vigour and fluency. Sri Aurobindo had dinner with him once.

T.V. KAPALI SASTRY: His I I-volume work on Vedic and Tantrik studies is a remarkable contribution in the light of Sri Aurobindo. The interpretation of Rig Veda in Siddhanjana should pave a new path in these studies. A Sanskrit Rendering of the Symbol Dawn (pages 507-22) is from Sanskrit Writings, Vol. 9.

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R. Y. DESHPANDE: Is professor of physics in Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education and associate editor of Mother India, a monthly review of culture published by the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Pondicherry. The Legend of Savitri with Some Departures Made by Sri Aurobindo (pages 523-49) is from the Golden Jubilee issue of Mother India, February-March 1999.

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ABOUT

THEME

SIMILAR BOOKS

Perspectives of Savitri - Part 1

Table of Contents

Respecting Savitri

Sri Aurobindo's Three Letters on Savitri

The Mother on Savitri — A Talk to a Young Disciple

Savitri — The Word of Sri Aurobindo

The Opening Scene of Savitri

Savitri —- A Factual Account of its Composition

Savitri — the Epic of the Spirit

The Message of Savitri

The Symbol Dawn

Savitri — Some Glimpses and Reflections

Lights from Passages in Savitri

Diction of Savitri

A Study of Similes in Savitri

Savitri — A Subjective Poem

A Survey of Savitri

Savitri and Paradise Lost-A Comparative Study in Method and Style

Poetic Imagery in Savitri

The Rhythm of Savitri

An Approach to Sri Aurobindo's Savitri

The Drama of Integral Self-Realisation

The Yoga of Savitri The Finding of the Soul

The Eternal Bridegroom

Savitri in World Literature

Savitri as an Epic

Pativrata-Mahatmya

Rendering of the Symbol Dawn in Sanskrit

The Legend of Savitri With Some Departures Made by Sri Aurobindo

Appendices

A Short Bibliographical Note

Poems by Sri Aurobindo

Spiritual Significance of Flowers

Disciples / Seekers

Sri Aurobindo's Works

The Mother's Works

Satprem's Books

Works by Disciples / Seekers

Guidance

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