The range of Sāvitrī is as wide as the cosmos and includes within it conditions pre-existent to the manifestation of the cosmos and ranges of Eternal and Infinite being and Superconscient levels of consciousness that have not yet manifested here on earth. That is to say, it includes unfathomable abyss of darkness of the Nescience mounting gradually to the realms of Eternal Day. There is very often a kind of parallelism between the lower ranges of Darkness and the higher realms of Light. There is, that is to say, what the author calls:

 

Against this glory of spiritual states,

Their parallels and yet their opposites,

Floated and swayed, eclipsed and shadowlike

As if a doubt made substance, flickering, pale,

This other scheme two vast negations found.

A world that knows not its inhabiting Self

Labours to find its cause and need to be;

A spirit ignorant of the world it made,

Obscured by Matter, travestied by Life,

Struggles to emerge, to be free, to know and reign;

These were close-tied in one disharmony,

Yet the divergent lines met not at all.

Three Powers governed its irrational course,

In the beginning an unknowing Force,

In the middle an embodied striving soul,

In its end a silent spirit denying life.

A dull and infelicitous interlude

Unrolls its dubious truth to a questioning Mind

Compelled by the ignorant Power to play its part

And to record her inconclusive tale,

The mystery of her inconscient plan

And the riddle of a being born from Night

By a marriage of Necessity with Chance.

This darkness hides our nobler destiny.

(pp. 329-30)

 

We shall not follow this clue from level to level but just take one only to show how the vision becomes poetically effective in the expression of these opposites; how they move on their own planes, each duplicating something of its opposite. Take Book II, Canto 7, p. 202, "Descent into Night", and Book III, Canto I, "The Pursuit of the Unknowable", p. 305. The first one contains the description of Night, the most intense form of which is the Nescience, what he calls, "an abysmal Absolute". When Aswapati descends into this depth of Darkness, he finds that "nothing was left, not even evil face", it was a "formless void", a "threatening waste", a "a sinister loneliness"; there "he faced a sense of death and conscious void". The reader would do well to read the description of this extreme of darkness in the original to see for himself how everything that is described contributes to the condensation, an intensification of not only darkness, but horror, repulsion, fear and ultimate extinction in the Dark Void. Now let us compare the opposite parallel of the Unknowable. Aswapati had there to march:

 

A giant doubt overshadowed his advance.

Across a neutral all-supporting Void

Whose blankness nursed his lone immortal spirit,

Allured towards some recondite Supreme,

Aided, coerced by enigmatic Powers,

Aspiring and half-sinking and upborne,

Invincibly he ascended without pause.

 

But it was

 

Always a signless vague Immensity

Brooded, without approach, beyond response,

Condemning finite things to nothingness,

Fronting him with the incommensurable.

Then to the ascent there came a mighty term.

 

That is to say,

 

A height was reached where nothing made could live,

A line where every hope and search must cease

Neared some intolerant bare Reality,

A zero formed pregnant with boundless change.

On a dizzy verge where all disguises fail

And human mind must abdicate in Light

Or die like a moth in the naked blaze of Truth,

He stood compelled to a tremendous choice.

All he had been and all towards which he grew

Must now be left behind or else transform

Into a self of That which has no name.

Alone and fronting an intangible Force

Which offered nothing to the grasp of Thought,

His spirit faced the adventure of the Inane.

(pp. 306-07)

 

But this is not the same as "death" or "conscious void". For once our mind asks—"Would not glorious things and things of harmony and beauty and knowledge live there? See what the author says:

 

All glory of outline, sweetness of harmony,

Rejected like a grace of trivial notes,

Expunged from Being's silence nude, austere,

Died into a fine and blissful Nothingness.

The Demiurges lost their names and forms,

The great schemed worlds that they had planned and wrought

Passed, taken and abolished one by one.

The universe removed its coloured veil,

And at the unimaginable end

Of the huge riddle of created things

Appeared the far-seen Godhead of the whole,

His feet firm-based on Life's stupendous wings,

Omnipotent, a lonely seer of Time,

Inward, inscrutable, with diamond gaze.

(p. 307)

 

"It was a stark, companionless reality"—the other was "a sinister loneliness". Increasing still the unutterable aloneness of the Unknowable, the Master rises to the pitch of supreme expression when he says

 

Nothing remained the cosmic Mind conceives.

Eternity prepared to fade and seemed

A hue and imposition on the Void,

Space was the fluttering of a dream that sank

Before its ending into Nothing's deeps.

The spirit that dies not and the Godhead's self

Seemed myths projected from the Unknowable;

From It all sprang, in It is called to cease.

(p. 308)

 

The reader will see a kind of parallel opposites which heightens the contrast even when the same words and adjectives are used. Both are voids, but what a difference!

 

When the whole poem moves on the heights of revelation, inspiration, illumined mind and never comes down to a lower plane than intuitive sight and expression, it is very difficult to make a choice of passages with special poetical merit. But there are single lines, double lines, quartets throughout the poem that have a power of poetic beauty which grips our mind and can go on revealing its wealth like a mine. See how the three lines reach an Upanishadic height and grandeur in the intensity of the Vision in "The Heavens of the Ideal"! Aswapati saw:

 

A million lotuses swaying on one stem,

World after coloured and ecstatic world

Climbs towards some far unseen epiphany.

(p. 279)

 

Or, for its content of knowledge take the following lines:

 

Only the Eternal's strength in us can dare

To attempt the immense adventure of that climb

And the sacrifice of all we cherish here.

Our human knowledge is a candle burnt

On a dim altar to a sun-vast Truth;

Man's virtue, a coarse-spun ill-fitting dress,

Apparels wooden images of Good;

Passionate and blinded, bleeding, stained with mire

His energy stumbles towards a deathless Force.

An imperfection dogs our highest strength;

Portions and pale reflections are our share.

Happy the worlds that have not felt our fall,

Where Will is one with Truth and Good with Power;

Impoverished not by earth-mind's indigence,

They keep God's natural breath of mightiness,

His bare spontaneous swift intensities;

There is his great transparent mirror, Self,

And there his sovereign autarchy of bliss

In which immortal natures have their part,

Heirs and cosharers of divinity.

(pp.280-81)

 

Here we see not only the inadequacy of human knowledge, a candle held out before the sun-light of Truth, but also the insufficiency of man's morality and virtue. What a fine image of virtue as "a coarse and ill-fitting dress" of man's spirit and how the pride of the moralist is crushed when he sees that all his virtue is an apparel of the good which is far from living, for it is only the "wooden image" and not the living Reality to whom it is offered!