We are discussing the following three lines about
Night’s mind lying lonely upon the marge of Silence in eternity’s temple:
The huge foreboding mind of Night, alone
In her unlit temple of eternity,
Lay stretched immobile upon Silence’ marge.
These bring to my mind the three that come much later
in the third canto of the Book:
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)
The lying immobile and silent and lonely recur, though
the ultimate mood is different—the all-freeing tranquillity of an unnameable
Nirvana instead of the ominous profundity of a hushed emptiness. What from the
standpoint of literary psycho-phonetics, links the two passages is the end-term
“alone” in the first line of the one and in the closing line of the other. We
encounter this effect elsewhere too in Savitri,
but not so impressively as here, nor does it confront us with such a
self-contained poetic generality—except once, as we shall soon see. No doubt,
“foreboding actually points to a particular object—the divine Event of the
Gods’ awaking—yet it can stand on its own as the expression of a psychological
movement typical of and natural to the mind of Night, a movement fraught with a
formless fear of the future. Again, in the other line the “And” at the start
points to a special context and is necessary to the progressive revelation, yet
metrically it is a superfluous conjunction, ,aking the initial foot a
glide-anapaest when the line could be a perfect pentameter without it and have
the first foot an iamb.
Comparable self-contained small-scale masterpiece with
the same termination to various descriptive, reflective or suggestive phrases
may be cited. There is Housman’s delightfully atmospheric snatch from Nature:
The cuckoo shouts all day at nothing
In leafy dells, alone.
There is the deeply poignant religious conviction of an
early Sonneteer:
All love is lost except on God alone.
Wordsworth’s greatest moment is that unfathomable
phrase about
a mind for ever
Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone.
John Chadwick, “Arjava” to the inmates of Sri
Aurobindo’s Ashram, matches the Upanishadic mystery and magnificence of
Wordsworth by his lines:
This patter of Time’s marring steps across the solitude
Of Truth’e abidingness, Self-blissful and alone.
A mixture of the descriptive, reflective and suggestive
in four verses of terrific power, with cosmic sweep of imagination, meet us in Savitri’s Book of Fate (p. 460)
As a star, uncompanioned, moves in heaven
Unastonished by the immensities of space,
Travelling infinity by its own light,
The great are strongest when they stand alone.
These verses have a special interest and importance for
us because they are some of the absolutely last that Sri Aurobindo dictated to
Nirodbaran a little before 5 December, the day when not Satyavan but Sri
Aurobindo himself was to “die” and when, as a result of his passing into the
inner planes, his co-worker and companion, the Mother, would undergo the fact
of loneliness on the visible earth-stage—although
God-given her strength can battle against the doom.
Reference:
This set of articles by Amal Kiran (KD Sethna) is from
his book The Sun and the Rainbow published in 1981.