Savitri begins with a picture of darkness passing into day. This transitional hour has a particular appeal for Sri Aurobindo: several of his poems, short as well as long, are a-quiver with auroral suggestions. Among the contemporary poets, we may point Valéry as also responding very sensitively to the dawn-moment, but the glimmering obscurities of La Feune Parque or the elusive lucidities of some other poems of his are “a sunrise upon ideas”, as Thibaudet puts it, which, though penetrating, have little of Sri Aurobindo’s spiritual evocativeness, least of all the largeness of it that is in Savitri.

 

In Savitri the passage of darkness into day is the last dawn in Satyavan’s life, a dawn packed with the significance of the immortal light which Savitri has to win for earth by challenging the age-old decree of death. “The huge foreboding mind of Night” is first figured with a fathomless effectivity:

 

Almost one felt, opaque, impenetrable,

In the sombre symbol of her eyeless muse

The abysm of the unbodied Infinite.

(Savitri, p. 1)

but

 

A long lone line of hesitating hue

(Savitri, p. 2)

 

Troubles at last the depths of the darkness in which consciousness seems sepulchred and we have poetry of an intense visionary loveliness:

That glowed along a fading moment's brink,

Fixed with gold panel and opalescent hinge

A gate of dreams ajar on mystery's verge.

(Savitri, p. 3)

 

Then the “pallid rift” widens and “the revelation and the flame” pour out—the poetry richly reflecting them:

 

The brief perpetual sign recurred above.

A glamour from the unreached transcendences

Iridescent with the glory of the Unseen,

A message from the unknown immortal Light

Ablaze upon creation's quivering edge,

Dawn built her aura of magnificent hues

And buried its seed of grandeur in the hours.

(Savitri, pp. 3-4)

 

Almost the epiphany appears to be disclosed, the goal of all our mortal gropings, and two lines at once simple and subtle in their sovereign and spiritual suggestion afford a glimpse of it:

 

Infinity's centre, a Face of rapturous calm

Parted the eternal lids that open heaven.

(Savitri, p. 4)

 

But

 

Only a little the God-light can stay

(Savitri, p. 5)

 

and the intensity of the wonderful Presence fades into accustomed sunshine.

 

In the soul of Savitri, however, the sense of her mission never disappears. Hedged in though she is by mortality, her life’s movement keeps the measure of the Gods. Painting her being and its human-divine beauty Sri Aurobindo achieves some of his supreme effects. Perhaps this grandest capture of the Mantra are the nine verses which form the centre of a long passage, variously mantric, in which Savitri’s avatarhood is characterised:

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.

(Savitri, p. 15)

 

A hieratic poetry, demanding a keen sense of the occult and spiritual to compass both its subjective and objective values, is in this audacious and multi-dimensional picture of a highly yogic state of embodied being. Not all might respond to it and Sri Aurobindo knew that such moments in Savitri would have to wait long for general appreciation. But he could not be loyal to his mission without giving wide scope to the occult and spiritual and seeking to poetise them as much as possible with the vision and rhythm proper to the summits of reality. Of course, that vision and that rhythm are not restricted to the posture and contour of the summits, either the domains of the divine dynamism or

 

The superconscient realms of motionless peace

Where judgment ceases and the word is mute

And the Unconceived lies pathless and alone

(Savitri, pp. 33-34)

 

or the mid-worlds, obscure and luminous, fearsome or marvellous, of which Savitri’s father, King Aswapati, carried out a long exploration which is one of the finest and most fascinating parts of the poem. They extend to earth-drama too and set living amongst us the mysteries and travails of cosmic evolution, like the dreadful commerce of Savitri with one whom Sri Aurobindo gives no name: 

 

One dealt with her who meets the burdened great.

Assigner of the ordeal and the path

Who chooses in this holocaust of the soul

Death, fall and sorrow as the spirit's goads,

The dubious godhead with his torch of pain

Lit up the chasm of the unfinished world

And called her to fill with her vast self the abyss.

(Savitri, p. 17)

 

Sri Aurobindo—the Poet, by Amal Kiran (KD Sethna) pp. 141-43

See also Perspectives of Savitri, edited by RY Deshpande, Vol. I pp. 186-89