Sāvitrī as a
poem has many cantos of sustained height of inspiration and the reader should
prepare himself to breathe in the rare and high atmosphere on which Sāvitrī
moves. There are even in those inspired long passages portions that rise to the
heights of the Overmind where the vision and the word fuse. The reader has to
make some effort to allow the expression to sink into him instead of trying to
understand it with too much mental effort. Take for instance the description of
Savitri in the very first canto where we see that "even her humanity was
half divine" and to her "her own calamity" was "the private
sign" of the evil that is at the root of life. After this, when we come to
the second canto, the author again gives us a more detailed description of her
personality. The first canto reminds us of her transcendent origin and her
contact with the life-situation, but here in the second we have a more detailed
and intimate description:
Near to earth's wideness, intimate with heaven,
Exalted and swift her young large-visioned spirit
Voyaging through worlds of splendour and of calm
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.
A wide self-giving was her native act;
A magnanimity as of sea or sky
Enveloped with its greatness all that came
And gave a sense as of a greatened world:
Her kindly care was a sweet temperate sun,
Her high passion a blue heaven's equipoise.
As might a soul fly like a hunted bird,
Escaping with tired wings from a world of storms,
And a quiet reach like a remembered breast,
In a haven of safety and splendid soft repose
One could drink life back in streams of honey-fire,
Recover the lost habit of happiness,
Feel her bright nature's glorious ambience,
And preen joy in her warmth and colour's rule.
A deep of compassion, a hushed sanctuary,
Her inward help unbarred a gate in heaven;
Love in her was wider than the universe,
The whole world could take refuge in her single heart.
The great unsatisfied godhead here could dwell:
Vacant of the dwarf self's imprisoned air
Her mood could harbour his sublimer breath
Spiritual that can make all things divine.
For even her gulfs were secrecies of light.
At once she was the stillness and the word,
A continent of self-diffusing peace,
An ocean of untrembling virgin fire:
The strength, the silence of the gods were hers.
In her he found a vastness like his own,
His high warm subtle ether he refound
And moved in her as in his natural home.
In her he met his own eternity. (pp. 14-16)
A quotation from KD Sethna will help the reader in
forming a correct idea of the character of Savitri:
The rhythm has an overpowering fidelity to the inner
thrill of the experience suggested and symbolised. Here are the figures and
values of a superhuman state of consciousness at the very top, breaking upon us
in their own stuff and vibrancy through the medium of language. This is not the
mind imagining the highest it can beyond itself. This is an overmind actually
holding all the magnitudes that are pictured; its vision is from within,
composed of its own substance and lit up with its own vast vitality. As a
result, the pictures are at once extra-immediate and extra-remote: they make,
as A. B. Housman would have said, an impact upon our solar plexus as no mental
reflection of mystical realities can, but while convincing us of their living
concreteness they dodge our mental apprehension by refusing to yield their meanings
easily and to affine themselves to what our thought can size up. To adopt Sri
Aurobindo's own turn, the ways of thought are overflown, worlds of splendour
and calm above the human level are crossed and unborn things reached. Not that
everything is difficult to conceive: Sāvitrī's 'magnanimity', 'kindly
care' and 'inmost help' reach us through emblems that are not resistant to
analysis, though we shall be deprived of a considerable amount of their
stimulus unless we use the Eye behind the eye and the Bar behind the ear to
sense that the elemental or cosmic analogies and metaphors with their
supporting breadth of phrase and sonance are no eloquent exaggerations but are
accurately intrinsic to the special nature of Sāvitrī's 'self-giving'.
The 'sea of white sincerity' too is within our imaginative grasp and so, again,
in this. era of the psycho- analysed subconscious are the gulfs which are
'secrecies of light'. No less steeped in the overmind run the language and
rhythm of the lines where they are mentioned and it will be poor justice to
them if we did not thrill to the rapturous wideness drowning all thought in the
one case and in the other the ecstatic opening of depth beyond depth unsounded
by the Freudian intellect, but we are able to adapt ourselves without much
strain to the general vision.
Some passages, like the following one
The Absolute, the Perfect, the Alone
Has called out of the Silence his mute Force
Where she lay in the featureless and formless hush
Guarding from Time by her immobile sleep
The ineffable puissance of his solitude.
The Absolute, the Perfect, the Alone
Has entered with his silence into space:
He has fashioned these countless persons of one self;
He lives in all, who lived in his Vast alone;
Space is himself and Time is only he.
The Absolute, the Perfect, the Immune,
One who is in us as our secret self,
Our mask of imperfection has assumed,
He has made this tenement of flesh his own,
His image in the human measure cast
That to his divine measure we might rise;
Then in a figure of divinity
The Maker shall recast us and impose
A plan of godhead on the mortal's mould
Lifting our finite minds to his infinite,
Touching the moment with eternity.
This transfiguration is earth's due to heaven:
A mutual debt binds man to the Supreme:
His nature we must put on as he put ours;
We are sons of God and must be even as he:
His human portion, we must grow divine.
Our life is a paradox with God for key. (p. 67)
have to be read more than once to allow the vision of
the poet to sink into our mind. Its flight takes the consciousness to a higher
height than the general level of inspiration of the canto and it would be
advisable that reader should read them as he would try to read a revelatory
passage of the Upanishads, not that the poetic beauty of these parts is
less than the others but the beauty is of a very unusual kind standing on a
higher level of consciousness where men are not accustomed to ascend. This
small passage of 28 lines gives a perfect poetical rendering of the
Transcendent Supreme.
So also the passage
This is the sailor on the flow of Time,
This is World-Matter's slow discoverer,
Who, launched into this small corporeal birth,
Has learnt his craft in tiny bays of self,
But dares at last unplumbed infinitudes,
A voyager upon eternity's seas.
In his world-adventure's crude initial start
Behold him ignorant of his godhead's force,
Timid initiate of its vast design.
An expert captain of a fragile craft,
A trafficker in small impermanent wares,
At first he hugs the shore and shuns the breadths,
Dares not to affront the far-off perilous main.
He in a petty coastal traffic plies,
His pay doled out from port to neighbour port,
Content with his safe round's unchanging course,
He hazards not the new and the unseen.
But now he hears the sound of larger seas.
A widening world calls him to distant scenes
And journeyings in a larger vision's arc
And peoples unknown and still unvisited shores.
On a commissioned keel his merchant hull
Serves the world's commerce in the riches of Time
Severing the foam of a great land-locked sea
To reach unknown harbour lights in distant climes
And open markets for life's opulent arts,
Rich bales, carved statuettes, hued canvases,
And jewelled toys brought for an infant's play
And perishable products of hard toil
And transient splendours won and lost by the days.
Or passing through a gate of pillar-rocks,
Venturing not yet to cross oceans unnamed
And journey into a dream of distances
He travels close to unfamiliar coasts
And finds new haven in storm-troubled isles,
Or, guided by a sure compass in his thought,
He plunges through a bright haze that hides the stars,
Steering on the trade-routes of Ignorance.
His prow pushes towards undiscovered shores,
He chances on unimagined continents:
A seeker of the islands of the Blest,
He leaves the last lands, crosses the ultimate seas,
He turns to eternal things his symbol quest;
Life changes for him its time-constructed scenes,
Its images veiling infinity.
Earth's borders recede and the terrestrial air
Hangs round him no longer its translucent veil.
He has crossed the limit of mortal thought and hope,
He has reached the world's end and stares beyond;
The eyes of mortal body plunge their gaze
Into Eyes that look upon eternity.
A greater world Time's traveller must explore.
At last he hears a chanting on the heights
And the far speaks and the unknown grows near:
He crosses the boundaries of the unseen
And passes over the edge of mortal sight
To a new vision of himself and things.
He is a spirit in an unfinished world
That knows him not and cannot know itself:
The surface symbol of his goalless quest
Takes deeper meanings to his inner view;
His is a search of darkness for the light,
Of mortal life for immortality.
In the vessel of an earthly embodiment
Over the narrow rails of limiting sense
He looks out on the magic waves of Time
Where mind like a moon illumines the world's dark.
There is limned ever retreating from the eyes,
As if in a tenuous misty dream-light drawn,
The outline of a dim mysterious shore.
A sailor on the Inconscient's fathomless sea,
He voyages through a starry world of thought
On Matter's deck to a spiritual sun.
Across the noise and multitudinous cry,
Across the rapt unknowable silences,
Through a strange mid-world under supernal skies,
Beyond earth's longitudes and latitudes,
His goal is fixed outside all present maps.
But none learns whither through the unknown he sails
Or what secret mission the great Mother gave.
In the hidden strength of her omnipotent Will,
Driven by her breath across life's tossing deep,
Through the thunder's roar and through the windless
hush,
Through fog and mist where nothing more is seen,
He carries her sealed orders in his breast.
Late will he know, opening the mystic script,
Whether to a blank port in the Unseen
He goes or, armed with her fiat, to discover
A new mind and body in the city of
And enshrine the Immortal in his glory's house
And make the finite one with Infinity.
Across the salt waste of the endless years
Her ocean winds impel his errant boat,
The cosmic waters plashing as he goes,
A rumour around him and danger and a call.
Always he follows in her force's wake.
He sails through life and death and other life,
He travels on through waking and through sleep.
A power is on him from her occult force
That ties him to his own creation's fate,
And never can the mighty traveller rest
And never can the mystic voyage cease,
Till the nescient dusk is lifted from man's soul
And the morns of God have overtaken his night. (pp.
69-72)
consisting of about 104 lines is one of the most
sustained symbolic and at the same time poetical flight in the whole range of
literature. The individual soul here is the sailor and the discoverer. The poet
throughout has maintained marvellously the symbol which is at the same time the
most perfect metaphor of man's journey through the ocean of Time.
There are other flights like the one we find in Book
II, Canto 14 which are difficult at first to grasp because of their sheer
vastness and the unfamiliarity of the nature of experience described therein.
Even if the reader cannot rise to the cosmic vision of the Seer, or rather to
the cosmic hearing of the Rishi, it would be possible for him to enter with the
aid of his imagination into a region where an echo of the cosmic "murmur"
would be audible to him. How rich is the wealth of the cosmic murmur! It is the
subtle spiritual sound that rises from the Universe and reaches the ear of the
Cosmic Being. And because it is cosmic it is so multitudinously various. It is
as if the Master had entered into the heart of the world's soul and listened
from there to this "murmur-multitudinous and alone". To him,
"all sounds it was in turn, yet still the same". It is to him "a
hidden call", "the immortal cry", and it becomes even "a
whisper circling round the soul". It rises from the whole of the cosmos
like "the yearning of a lone flute"; at times it becomes the
crickets' "fiery single note". It is "a jingling silver laugh of
anklet bells" carrying with it to the solitary heart the sobbings of a
"forgotten sweetness". When the Master hears it as the "tinkling
pace of a long caravan" he almost makes us feel the slow march of die
cosmic evolution like a slow moving caravan on the paths of Time. Suddenly the
cosmos becomes a vast forest and he hears "a vast forest's hymn"
rising from it; in another instant, it becomes a "reminder of a temple
gong". It carries to the ear of the world-soul "a bee-croon honey-drunk"
conveying the ardent ecstasy of universal life. It is the far "anthem of a
pilgrim sea". One feels the whole cosmos like the sea moving on a
pilgrimage to the Divine with its unceasing anthem. Here, as in the simile of
the caravan, we not only see the cosmos but hear its sound and feel its
movement. The whole is an inseparable experience.