The first Canto is found to be a
very difficult by many genuine lovers of poetry. It is so because Sāvitrī is
not like ordinary poetry, an aesthetic creation either of the higher vital or
refined intellectual being. It is psychic, mystic and spiritual poetry and in
the first Canto the sublime dominates. The very concepts and symbols used by
the seer are so unfamiliar to the ordinary present-day mentality that one has
to acquire a capacity to appreciate this high poetry. It is a question of
cultivating taste. It is advisable that the reader should not try to interpret
this poetry in terms of its intellectual content. It would be better instead to
allow the vision to grow in intensity and clarity in his consciousness. He
might find that with the help of this faculty of vision he is able to enter
into the spirit of the poem much better than through the doors of dry
intellect.
The Symbol-Dawn here is related to the Vedic goddess Dawn—Usha. Some acquaintance with the Vedic Dawn might help the reader to form a correct conception of the Symbol-Dawn of Sāvitrī. The passage quoted here is the translation by Sri Aurobindo of a Vedic hymn.
She follows to the goal of those that are passing on beyond, she is the first in the eternal succession of the dawns that are coming,—Usha widens bringing out that which lives, awakening someone who was dead. What is her scope when she harmonises with the dawns that shone out before and those that now must shine? She desires the ancient mornings and fulfils their light; projecting forwards her illumination she enters into communion with the rest that are to come. (Rig Veda I:113:8-10)
Dawn here symbolises the continuity,—the ever fresh continuity of the process of Time. It is in effect Time-Eternity in contrast to Timeless-Eternity of the Absolute. In his poem In horis Eternum Sri Aurobindo calls the sun—"A blazing eye of Time watching the motionless day". For, in the sight of the sun the day is eternal. Ordinarily Dawn stands for life eternal—life ever fresh, life ever beautiful. In Sāvitrī it symbolises the perpetual awakening of the light of consciousness from the Night of Nescience which gives rise to the cosmos and awakens in man the aspiration for the Spirit from the normal state of ignorance.
The Night described in the beginning of the first Canto is also symbolic. The poet in a letter has written, "The attempt at mystic spiritual poetry of the kind I am at demands above all a spiritual objectivity, an intense psycho-physical concreteness. That darkness itself is described as a quietude which gives it a subjective spiritual character and brings out the thing symbolised, but the double epithet 'inert black' [in
The persistent thrill of a transfiguring touch
Persuaded the inert black quietude
And beauty and wonder disturbed the fields of God.]
gives it the needed concreteness so that the quietude ceases to be something abstract and becomes something concrete, objective but still spiritually subjective."
The Night that prevails before the outbreak of the Dawn is the night of darkness which is subjective and indicates the Nescience that reigned before cosmos was created. The condition of darkness described as Night here has a resemblance to the primordial condition described in the Rig Veda in a hymn generally called the Hymn of Creation.
Then existence was not nor non-existence, the mid world was not nor the ether nor what is beyond. What covered all? Where was it? In whose refuge? What was that ocean dense and deep? Death was not nor immortality nor the knowledge of day and night. That One lived without breath by his self-law, there was nothing else nor aught beyond it. In the beginning Darkness was hidden by darkness, all this was an ocean of inconscience. When universal being was concealed by fragmentation, than by the greatness of its energy That One was born. That moved at first as desire within, which was the primal seed of mind. The seers of Truth discovered the building of being in non-being by will in the heart and by the thought; their ray was extended horizontally; but what was there below, what was there above? There were Casters of the seed, there were Greatnesses: there was self-law below, there was Will above. (Rig Veda X, 129)
The condition described here is
pre-existent to Being as well as Non-being. Nor was there "day and
night" i.e. time. "In the beginning darkness was hidden by
darkness"—all this was an ocean of inconscience. That is the
Night of Sāvitrī, a condition of Nescience in which nothing had yet
emerged—not even matter—and yet everything was there from which the cosmos
could emerge.
These quotations are given just to help the reader to enter into the spirit of the first Canto. There is no question of the symbol-Dawn or the Night being derived from the Vedic symbol. It is quoted here in order to bring something similar in spirit and form to help the reader to appreciate Sāvitrī. The creator of Sāvitrī like the Vedic sages sees his symbols and projects them as realities with as much authenticity as the ancient seers did when they embodied their visions and inspirations in the Mantras that came to them with their vibrations of thought, rhythm and language. There is a thread of correspondence and a correlation between the most ancient poets and their expression and the most modem seer and his expression.
"It was the hour before the
Gods awake." The time when the poem opens is that when Gods who preside
over the various functions of the cosmos had not yet awakened and begun their
work. The universe we are living in is a cosmos. But it is so because the Gods
carrying out the Fiat of the Omnipotent maintain the laws of the material, the
vital and mental worlds. In place of awakened Gods there is seen an
all-pervading figure of Night, a dark woman asleep in her "unlit
Cradled the cosmic drowse of ignorant Force
Whose moved creative slumber kindles the suns
And carries our lives in its somnambulist whirl.
Our material universe thus came into being by an 'act of somnambulism on the part of this sleeping Night of nescience. In this vast dark Night where only immobility and silence seem to dominate there is an unlimited extension of the sky and the earth is lost in its 'hollow gulfs'. Then all of a sudden a stir is felt; "A nameless movement, an unthought Idea" succeeds in teasing this inconscience of the Night to "wake Ignorance". As a result of the first stirring the subconscious memory is awakened in the mind of this Night. When the memory returned to her she saw that it was not the first awakening to the Dawn on her part. The impulse to wake to a Dawn amounted in her to a feeling that "something" that wished but knew not "how to be",—was active in her. The great stir did not know itself, nor did it find conditions propitious for its full emergence in the midst of this enormous Night. It only awoke in her mind the memory of her past efforts and when she tried to relate her subconscient memory to the stir she found that "There lurked in her an unremembering entity", that was the "Survivor of a slain and buried past."
This surviving entity added its own aspiration to the stirring that the Night was feeling within her. This past personality—if it can be so called—was almost compelled to renew the effort of Self-realization in the new surroundings. When the vast Night almost consented to the birth of the Dawn she felt compelled to fulfil her role of the mother by being "reminded of endless need in things".
The first thing to emerge was the outbreak of the light, a ray of life-consciousness. This outbreak of the light of life was the coming of a "a scout in a reconnaissance from the sun" "to seek for a spirit sole and desolate". This spirit which the light of life was seeking is the same that is spoken of in the beginning as the "fallen boundless self". In seeking for the fallen spirit the ray of light called upon the Night to take up "the adventure of consciousness and joy" and it "compelled renewed consent to see and feel". So far, the stir in the heart of the Night has succeeded in contacting the light of Life,— some ray from the Sun, which is the promise of the full awakening of the Dawn. This stir, this aspiration is not merely an ignorant wish or desire. It is also not a running after some phantom of unreality, for, there was a prescience that it would be fulfilled. The birth of this infant aspiration converts the unwitting and sleeping Night who at first is a careless mother into a careful mother of the Universe. It had to make the body, create the needs of life and needs of the soul. This was by no means an easy task. It was as it were re-building of the whole past under new conditions. And this could only be done if the superconscient Transcendent Divine would lead his touch: "All can be done if the God-touch is there". It is this "persistent thrill of a transfiguring touch" of the Divine from above that "persuades the inert black quietude" of this Night to manifest beauty and wonder of which it seemed quite incapable. In fact with the constant and persistent stirring from within there was all along "One lucent corner windowing hidden things" from where a constant stream of Light went on acting upon the impenetrable darkness of the Night. And it is the double action of this constant inflow of Light from above and the inner urge from below that ultimately "Forced the worlds' blind immensity to sight". It is then that the darkness like a robe slipped from the body of this unknown entity and revealed "the reclining body of a God". Behind the mask of the Nescience the body of a God is revealed. To an objection that the description was not applicable to the physical phenomenon of day and night Sri Aurobindo replied as follows:
I am not writing a scientific treatise, I am selecting certain ideas and impressions to form a symbol of a partial 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 Might does not think of the other half of the earth as full of light, to him all is Night and the earth a forsaken wanderer in an enduring darkness....In the poem I present constantly one partial view of life or another temporarily as if it were the whole in order to give full value to the experience of those who are bound by that view, but if any one charges me with philosophical inconsistency then it only means that he does not understand the technique of the overmind interpretation of life.
Everything now seems ready for the outbreak of the Dawn. Dawn comes, "a glamour from the unreached transcendences iridescent with the glory of the Unseen". She is "a message from the unknown immortal Light". This passage about Dawn is one of the most vivid, poetically most satisfying and yet symbolically the most revealing passages of Sāvitrī. It is she who brings" the hope of fulfilment, the promise of realisation to the stir, to the struggling aspiration that has been born on earth. It is from the unreached transcendences of the Timeless Eternal that the Light of Dawn breaks through into the darkness of the Night of inconscience. The message is that the un- reached transcendence shall be reached, the glory of the Unseen now unfolded only in the mild ray will one day become the settled splendour of the Supreme, the unknown immortal Light will fulfil its work and establish here on earth the life divine. Dawn here is the beautiful Goddess coming from beyond the realms of darkness and her very first outbreak reveals the nature of the ultimate fulfilment. To a correspondent's criticism that the Dawn was not a continuous picture he wrote:
I am not here building a long sustained single picture of the Dawn with a single continuous image. I am describing a rapid series of transitions, piling one suggestion upon another. There is first a black quietude, then the perisitent touch, then the first 'beauty and wonder' leading to the magical gate and the 'lucent corner'. Then comes the failing of darkness, the simile used suggesting the rapidity of the change. Thus as a result the change of what was once a rift into a wide luminous gap... Then all changes into a brief perpetual sign, the iridescence, then the blaze and the magnificent aura.
For a short while the full glory of the Divinity is manifested:
Almost that day the epiphany was disclosed
and
A lonely splendour from the' invisible goal
Almost was flung on the opaque Inane.
The goddess Dawn stood for a while revealing all the play of light and colours in her first appearance. Almost in the wake of her appearance "A form from far beatitudes seemed to near".
The Omniscient Goddess who is "Ambassadress 'twixt eternity and change" found that the conditions in the cosmos were favourable: She "saw the spaces ready for her feet". This was the first leaning down of the Divine Grace upon earth for even when Dawn made her first appearance "Earth felt the Imperishable's passage close" and even
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.
The expression of delight which all the elements of the earth felt at the approach of the Goddess clearly indicates the goal of earth existence. The poet says that even
On this anguished and precarious field of toil
...the vision and the prophetic gleam
Lit into miracles common meaningless shapes.
The approach of the Divine
Goddess is almost the precursor of her descent on earth as Sāvitrī. of the Divine Grace
in the person of Savitri. As the cosmos came into being by the sacrifice
by the Divine's perfection and His descent into the Nescience so the creation
of divine life on earth would be possible by the descent of the Divine Power in
man helping him to conquer the obstacles and transform his ignorant nature. So,
when the Divine Power withdrew to some far off world of her own, there was only
the common light of earthly day,—the matter of fact life of man. The slow
process of tardy evolution intervened to pursue the great task of preparing man
for receiving the Divine in life.
"The divine afflatus spent, withdrew"—the Omniscient goddess withdrew
her steps because her presence and power was "Too perfect to be held by
death-bound hearts". Just as the Dawn "buried its seed of grandeur in
the hours", so this Divine power of the Imperishable also left behind her
a "Sacred yearning lingering in its trace", and a devotion for her.
These seeds of her presence would grow with the passage of time and when the
conditions would be such that death-bound heart of men would want to be god-bound
then the Divine Power would send down on earth one who would break the iron law
of ignorance. The short- lived vision of the Divine Mother was, in fact,
"the prescience of marvellous birth to come". Finding the conditions
of earth incapable of supporting the full blaze of her Divine Glory the Divine
Power puts on the mask of Matter and so works out the miracle that her eternity
manifests itself "in a beat of time". Beauty, the mystery of the
Divine, appears in life. "The excess of beauty natural to godkind"
"could not uphold its claim on time-born eyes". Mankind would have to
be prepared to look on "the excess of beauty" of god-kind. This slow
and difficult work of preparing man for the reception of the Divine was left to
the passage of time and to the intervention
Even though Savitri was akin to the eternity from which she came and a stranger to the fields of human life she was human enough to feel desire not as ordinary people do, but "as a sweet alien note". All along, her heart was full of "the anguish of the gods". She found herself in human mould like one imprisoned and she wanted to break the limits that kept her in captivity. Besides this deep and powerful aspiration, this feeling of herself being akin to the divinity she had in her the divine love for all, a universal sympathy that went out constantly to help all men. She gave herself freely to men in an act of inner sympathy so "that heaven might native grow on mortal soil". This sympathy and this love were on her part an inner act and did not take a very dominant outer form. With innate sense of her own Divinity, love and sympathy for all men she found that human nature by which she was surrounded not only did not like to realise the divinity but it was averse to the action of the Divine on itself. The fallen human nature murmurs and protests against the operation of anything that savours of the Divine. In the words of the poet
It trembles at its naked power of Truth
and the return it gives to those great souls that try to save it is the mud that it throws on them. "Its thorns of fallen nature" are its defence "against the saviour hands of grace". Humanity is intolerant of Divinity in its normal state. Savitri had thus the full share of her sorrow and her struggle. She hid her grief in the depths of her heart,—she did not allow her inner suffering to be seen outside. Savitri calm, silent, courageous,—"Apart, living within, all lives she bore". And yet "The Universal Mother's love was hers" and so when the determinism of nature proclaimed the doom of Satyavan it was not for the sake of her personal calamity only that she was moved. For "Her own calamity" was only a "private sign" which indicated the apparently unchangeable determinism of Nature. She took up "the load of an unwitting race". The poet quickly traces the growth of Savitri from childhood to young age and her becoming familiar with the great human problems with a constant and intense experience of pain in her heart. The central crisis of the poem is clearly stated in the very first Canto so that die reader gets interested in Savitri and the problem that faced her. The reader sees "her soul confronting Time and Fate" and is anxious to know the result of her struggle with the blind forces of evolution and Nature that wanted to bring about the predicted death of Satyavan. Is the determinism of Nature final, inevitable, absolute? Is it possible for the human being alone to change or modify the apparently inevitable or categorical determination of cosmic nature? The seer not only puts the problem before us but through his great epic works out the conditions under which it becomes possible for the human being not only to change but to overcome this apparent inevitable determinism of Nature. It is in this spirit that she remained outwardly immobile but gathered force for the great struggle because "This was the day when Satyavan must die."