A world's desire compelled her mortal birth.
One in the front of the immemorial quest,
Protagonist of the mysterious play
In which the Unknown pursues himself through forms
And limits his eternity by the hours
And the blind Void struggles to live and see,
A thinker and toiler in the ideal's air,
Brought down to earth's dumb need her radiant power.
His was a spirit that stooped from larger spheres
Into our province of ephemeral sight,
A colonist from immortality.
A pointing beam on earth's uncertain roads,
His birth held up a symbol and a sign.
His human self like a translucent cloak
Covered the All-Wise who leads the unseeing world.
Affiliated to cosmic Space and Time
And paying here God's debt to earth and man
A greater sonship was his divine right. …
A power was in him from the Unknowable. …
His soul lived as eternity's delegate,
His mind was a fire assailing heaven,
His will a hunter in the trails of light.
An ocean impulse lifted every breath;
Each action left the footprints of a God,
Each moment was a beat of puissant wings. …
A spirit that is a flame of God abides,
A fiery portion of the Wonderful,
Artist of his own beauty and delight,
Immortal in our mortal poverty. …
A Seer was born, a shining Guest of Time.
For him mind's limiting firmament ceased above,
In the griffin forefront of the Night and Day
A gap was rent in the all-concealing vault;
The conscious ends of being went rolling back:
The landmarks of the little person fell,
The island ego joined its continent:
Overpassed was this world of rigid limiting forms:
Life's barriers opened into the Unknown. …
Freedom and empire called to him from on high;
Above mind's twilight and life's star-led night
There gleamed the dawn of a spiritual day.
Savitri, pp. 22-26
The first two cantos of the opening
Book of Savitri bring to immediate
focus the great problem of this creation, the question and the mystery and the
challenge in the context of what is expected of it. If it is a creation arising
out of the inconscient Void and if there is a divine Will behind it, then in
the unfolding pragmatics of things all that stands in the way of it being worked
out must be removed. All, the evil and the good in their spiritual-occult
contents, all that is there must be taken into full account and the issues
sorted out. In other words, evolution is not a spontaneous process of the
flowering up of the inconscient Void although that possibility might be present
in it, it surging forth with its inherent drive as if there is some aim pushing
it forth. That necessitates the involvement of the Supreme himself. He enters
into the inconscient Void, accepts all its conditions, does yoga-tapasya in it,
and prepares the needed base or ādhāra
for the executive Force to take the charge of things to execute the primordial
Will embedded in it, in the inconscient Void. In the symbolic Legend of Savitri,
he comes here as Aswapati and prepares the ground for the birth of the
transcendental Mahashakti; she must take mortal birth as Savitri to work out
his Will in the growing splendour of the manifesting Spirit. Such is the
prolegomena of Savitri. The Yogi-Poet
is now moving forward with epic speed to narrate the symbolic story of Aswapati
and Savitri. Savitri’s birth is in response to Aswapati’s persuasive plea to
the transcendental divine Shakti to take mortal birth. She does condescend.