There are passages where spiritual experiences of
exceptional intensity have found expression unequalled in world's literature.
Of several such,—the one on page 81 can be taken as typical. As Aswapati's soul
was released from the bonds of Ignorance and rose to the heights of pure
Spiritual Being he was suddenly surprised by a powerful Descent from above the
mind. This is how it came:
…to meet him bare and pure
A strong Descent leaped down. A Might, a Flame,
A Beauty half-visible with deathless eyes,
A violent Ecstasy, a Sweetness dire,
Enveloped him with its stupendous limbs
And penetrated nerve and heart and brain
That thrilled and fainted with the epiphany:
His nature shuddered in the Unknown's grasp.
(p. 81)
The description that follows up to page 82
In a moment shorter than death, longer than Time,
By a Power more ruthless than Love, happier than
Heaven,
Taken sovereignly into eternal arms,
Haled and coerced by a stark absolute bliss,
In a whirlwind circuit of delight and force
Hurried into unimaginable depths,
Upborne into immeasurable heights,
It was torn out from its mortality
And underwent a new and bourneless change.
An Omniscient knowing without sight or thought,
An indecipherable Omnipotence,
A mystic Form that could contain the worlds,
Yet make one human breast its passionate shrine,
Drew him out of his seeking loneliness
Into the magnitudes of God's embrace.
As when a timeless Eye annuls the hours
Abolishing the agent and the act,
So now his spirit shone out wide, blank, pure:
His wakened mind became an empty slate
On which the Universal and Sole could write.
All that represses our fallen consciousness
Was taken from him like a forgotten load:
A fire that seemed the body of a god
Consumed the limiting figures of the past
And made large room for a new self to live.
Eternity's contact broke the moulds of sense.
A greater Force than the earthly held his limbs,
Huge workings bared his undiscovered sheaths,
Strange energies wrought and screened tremendous hands
Unwound the triple cord of mind and freed
The heavenly wideness of a Godhead's gaze.
(pp. 81-82)
gives one an intense word-picture which is inseparable
from the experience described.
In Book III, Canto 4, we have Aswapati's vision of the
Supreme Creatrix and her granting of the boon in answer to his passionate plea
which is in fact the concentrated and intense expression of the whole of
humanity's aspiration for the Divine's descent on earth. And the Voice that
arises in response, though contained in 24 lines only, yet is among the most
sublime, stirring, gripping and yet consoling utterances in world's poetry.
They carry in them the dynamic power of the prophetic vision.
In more than one sense, Sāvitrī can be said to
be a poem which "justifies the ways of God to man." It would take us
long—because the whole poem is full of them—to try to give a detailed
enumeration of this justification. We will only give one or two illustrations.
In Book II, Canto 10 dealing with "The Kingdoms of Godheads of the Little
Mind" he enumerates various mental faculties and not only their
limitations but their possibilities and the service they render to the growing
soul of humanity. "Logic" and "inventiveness" have their
place; then he brings only "imagination" and gives us a picture of
its service to man's mental growth. Among the products of imagination is
included myth. Now see how myth which has been generally regarded by modern
positivist reason as something not only childish and superstitious but even
harmful to the growth of man finds its justification on the Master's vision:
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.
Thus worked the Power upon the growing world;
Its subtle craft withheld the full-orbed blaze,
Cherished the soul's childhood and on fictions fed
Far richer in their sweet and nectarous sap
Nourishing its immature divinity
Than the staple or dry straw of Reason's tilth,
Its heaped fodder of innumerable facts,
Plebeian fare on which today we thrive.
Thus streamed down from the realm of early Light
Ethereal thinkings into Matter's world;
Its gold-horned herds trooped into earth's cave-heart.
Its morning rays illume our twilight's eyes,
Its young formations move the mind of earth
To labour and to dream and new-create,
To feel beauty's touch and know the world and self:
The Golden Child began to think and see.
(pp. 242-43)
The reader will see here how myth, if at all an error,
is a bright Error; its very darkness nurses the growth of spiritual wisdom in
man. And the vision brings before us the infant human being—a symbol of infant
humanity,—who is being suckled by this dark nurse so that when it grows it will
pass—to the radiant realms,—radiant breasts of true spiritual knowledge. And
also see how in the lines that follow, we find a true value given to the myths
by the divine power that works for the growth of man. There is also a contrast
of the value of reason which has been overestimated by the modem mind:
Thus worked the Power upon the growing world;
Its subtle craft withheld the full-orbed blaze,
Cherished the soul's childhood and on fictions fed
Far richer in their sweet and nectarous sap
Nourishing its immature divinity
Than the staple or dry straw of Reason's tilth,
Its heaped fodder of innumerable facts,
Plebeian fare on which today we thrive.
Thus streamed down from the realm of early Light
Ethereal thinkings into Matter's world;
Its gold-horned herds trooped into earth's cave-heart.
Its morning rays illume our twilight's eyes,
Its young formations move the mind of earth
To labour and to dream and new-create,
To feel beauty's touch and know the world and self:
The Golden Child began to think and see.
(p. 243)
There is here not only an explanation of why the divine
power at work in the cosmos does not give the full blaze of spiritual knowledge
to the infant soul of humanity, but there is also here a true appraisement
of reason and its service to the growth of knowledge in man. If poetry is
criticism of life, here we find indirectly the criticism of the modem mind's
insistence on reason as the only and reliable faculty of knowledge in man.
Reason depending upon innumerable accumulation of facts is like grass, while
myth and fancy are like milk indispensable to the growing soul, while the dry
grass of reason would never nourish the growing, infant man. This and much more
is included in the thought-content which accompanies the penetrating vision
embodied in these lines.
When he gives us a vision of the mind of man, he makes
us see it as an instrument of the Divine Spirit in man. So to him, all the
attainments of mind are "on an infant's scale". Mind and life, says
the author, are the playthings of this Divine Child. The great divine wisdom
that is working behind the cosmos uses this mind in order to "teach the
Ignorance". Mind "looked within itself but saw not God".
Naturally one is surprised,—Why? Because if it is the Divine Spirit that is
using the mind as an instrument, the mind should immediately and spontaneously
be able to see God. See how the poet justifies the divine wisdom which permits
the ignorance to the mind:
A material interim diplomacy
Denied the Truth that transient truths might live
And hid the Deity in creed and guess
That the World-Ignorance might grow slowly wise.
This was the imbroglio made by sovereign Mind
Looking from a gleam-ridge into the Night
In her first tamperings with Inconscience:
Its alien dusk baffles her luminous eyes;
Her rapid hands must learn a cautious zeal;
Only a slow advance the earth can bear.
Yet was her strength unlike the unseeing earth's
Compelled to handle makeshift instruments
Invented by the life-force and the flesh.
Earth all perceives through doubtful images,
All she conceives in hazardous jets of sight,
Small lights kindled by touches of groping thought.
Incapable of the soul's direct inlook
She sees by spasms and solders knowledge-scrap,
Makes Truth the slave-girl of her indigence,
Expelling Nature's mystic unity
Cuts into quantum and mass the moving All;
She takes for measuring-rod her ignorance.
In her own domain a pontiff and a seer,
That greater Power with her half-risen sun
Wrought within limits but possessed her field;
She knew by a privilege of thinking force
And claimed an infant sovereignty of sight.
In her eyes however darkly fringed was lit
The
And shapes a world in its far-seeing flame.
In her own realm she stumbles not nor fails,
But moves in boundaries of subtle power
Across which mind can step towards the sun.
(pp. 244-45)