We have said in the beginning that Sri Aurobindo's Sāvitrī 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 in the Introduction showing the deep spiritual affinity between Sāvitrī 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 Sāvitrī 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 "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 born."—KD Sethna.
Again when he says: (Collected Poems, p. 563)
Missioned voices drive to me from God's doorway
Words that live not, save upon Nature's summits,
Ecstasy's chariot,
—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 Gītā perhaps the eleventh chapter giving the vision of the Viśwarūpa, the Cosmic Divine, bears a resemblance to some portion of Sāvitrī. The student may compare the utterance of Arjuna in his exaltation of the vision, and of Viśwarūpa, as the Destroyer of the world, with the colloquy of Aswapathy and the Divine Mother in the third Book.
Sāvitrī 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 carries with it a very intense sense of concreteness, what Mr. 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, Sāvitrī 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. Sāvitrī , therefore, is charged with a similar inspirational afflatus but is also at the same time, "a springing 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 Kathopanisad, there is a situation which is apparently similar to the one we find in Sāvitrī. 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 Upanishads 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 born hither again,
and when the God of Death dissuades him from seeking knowledge of the Self and offers him temptations instead, he replies:
0 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 Sāvitrī 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,
A chaos waits on every cosmos formed;
In each success a seed of failure lurks.
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.
(Sāvitrī, p. 78)
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.
(Sāvitrī, p. 78)
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 Sāvitrī 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.
(Sāvitrī, p. 278)
Or
The Immanent lives in man as in his house.
(Sāvitrī, p. 66)
The opening verse of the Isopanisad 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 Gītā:
All is Vasudeva,—the Divine Being— vāsudevah sarvam.
Take another passage from the Iśa 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. (Iśa 5)
It is similar to a passage of Katha which says: (Katha, I, 2-27. )
Sitting, He proceeds far; Lying, He goes everywhere.
The Seer of Sāvitrī gives us a similar vision in his own inspired utterance:
Near, it retreated; far, it called him still.
(Sāvitrī, p. 305)
Or
Hidden by its own works it seemed far off.
(Sāvitrī, p. 305)
The Rishi in the Iśa 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, 0 fosterer, for the law of the Truth, sight. (Iśa 15. )
The Master in Sāvitrī speaks in the language of living symbolism. Describing Aswapati's spiritual achievement he says:
And broken the intellect's hard and lustrous lid.
(Sāvitrī, p. 25)
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,
(Sāvitrī, p. 251)
The basic idea both in Iśa and Sāvitrī in these expressions is that 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 Sāvitrī 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 pans of a living process can be seen from a line like the following which describes Aswapathy'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.
(Sāvitrī, p. 230)
This reminds one of the Vedic hymn: (Rig Veda V:105.18)
Once the red-wolf saw me walking on the path.
aruno ma sakrit patha yantam dadarsha hi
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.
(Sāvitrī p. 243)
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:
They drove upwards, the luminous ones,—the good milch-cows, in their stone-pen within the hiding cave. (Rig Veda IV:1.13)
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. (Rig Veda IV:1.15)
One sees in Sāvitrī the process 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.
(Sāvitrī, p. 36)
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. (Rig Veda X:5. 3)
In Sāvitrī 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.
(Sāvitrī, p. 326)
Or, in another context he speaks of:
The seed of Spirit's blind and huge desire
(Sāvitrī, p. 40)
to explain the rise of the many which reminds us of Taittiriya 2.6:
He desired—May I be many.
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.
(Sāvitrī, p. 169)
It is similar to a passage in the Swetāśvatara Upanisad, (IV: 3. 4)
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 Sāvitrī and the Iśa.
Where all is in ourselves, ourselves in all.
(Sāvitrī, p. 112)
The Self in all existences, and all existences in the Self. (Iśa 6)
There is also a similar passage in the Gītā (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 larger self
That lives within us, by ourselves unseen,
(Sāvitrī, p. 48)
There are many passages in the Upanisad 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: (Katha III:12)
This secret self, present in all beings, does not shed its light—is not apparent.
The Gītā describes the condition of the sage (Gītā, 2. 69)
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 Aswapathy as a result of his awakening to the inner Light is 'compactly described in Sāvitrī as—"A grand reversal of Night and Day", which conveys the same idea as the verse of the Gītā, quoted above.
When the secret Presence of the divine in the heart begins to manifest itself it becomes, in the words of the poet, "a living image seated in the heart" (Book I, Canto 4.) 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 Gītā: (XVIII. 61)
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
(Sāvitrī, p. 60)
are similar to one of the Vedic hymn;
That One lived without breath
There was nothing else, nor aught beyond it. (Rig Veda X:120)
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".
(Sāvitrī, p. 61)
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 Bṛhadāraṇyaka expresses it thus: (Bṛhad. IV:3-23)
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 contrary—
His is a search of darkness for the Light,
Of mortal life for immortality.
(Sāvitrī, p. 71)
This vision echoes the well-known aspiration of the Bṛhadāraṇyaka: (I: 3-28)
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 innumerable elements including all subjective experiences which fall into "a single plan" and become "the thousand-fold expression of the One," (p. 88) Swetāśvatara speaks of this as "the One fashions one seed in many ways. (VI:12.)
That Sāvitrī 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.
(Sāvitrī, p. 256)
Or
Where judgment ceases and the word is mute.
(Sāvitrī, p. 33)
Or
But mind too falls back from a nameless peak.
(Sāvitrī, p. 260)
Or
Not by thinking can its knowledge come.
(Sāvitrī, p. 260)
Or
But thought nor word can seize eternal Truth.
(Sāvitrī, p. 276)
This is similar to Katha: (1, 2-9)
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
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.
(Sāvitrī, p. 99)
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.
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 die cosmic suns
She reigns, inspirer of its multiple works…
And all creation is her endless act.
(Savitri, p. 295)
"Alone, she harbours the absolute Power and the ineffable Presence; The Mahāśakti, 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 Mahāśakti of that system of worlds or universe, who is there as the cosmic Soul and Personality of the transcendent Mother....The one original transcendent śakti, the Mother, stands above all the worlds and bears in her eternal consciousness the Supreme Divine.'. (The Mother)
The spiritual truth conveying the logic of the Infinite is contained in the following lines:
Each soleness inexpressibly held the whole.
(Sāvitrī, p. 324)
It made all persons fractions of the Unique,
Yet all were being's secret integers.
(Sāvitrī, p. 324)
Shantipatha of the Iśa 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 world of teeming cosmic life Sāvitrī, 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, revealing the double ladder of divine dynamics, the ladder of Descent of the Divine and the ladder of ascent of the human soul. It points to a culmination in the descent of the Divine into the earth-consciousness and the consequent transformation of the earth-nature into the divine nature. Mr. 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 discloses planes that have been sec- ret hitherto. 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 Sāvitrī, In the words of Mr. 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 Mr. Sethna's Poetic Genius of Sri Aurobindo:
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 put- ting a permanet 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 be wholly adequate to its aim if it
does not embody these realisations in ultra- mental word and rhythm. Hence, Sāvitrī, is
from every angle the right correlate to the practical drive towards
earth-transformation by
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.
(Sāvitrī, p. 41)
Sri Aurobindo in his Future Poetry wrote the following lines about the epic as a poetical form and its possibilities in modem rimes:
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 circum- stance for the central reality. The 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. This indeed may be the song of greatest night 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. (pp. 376-77)
Now in the light of Sāvitrī, 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 pinnacle 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."