Savitri joins the eager crowd that heard the brilliant Summoner’s call. She is here now, amongst us, foregoing her majesty and her great world of happiness; she is here in this small dingy place to pursue her ageless undertaking, the task pertaining to this mortal creation. She has condescended to pass through the portals of the heavy and sullen birth, the birth that is a perpetual death. She is here where death is a mechanism for the progress of life. But this ought to end. She is here to terminate that process and make life grow by the true truth of life, that is, by love. She is here among the tribes of men lifting up the burden of their harsh and toilsome fate, the primordial fate that in fact, if time has come, must undergo a transformative change. Her coming marks the arrival of that moment. She rejects not the human plight and the travail, the ignominy of mortality—and she does it with full understanding of the issues involved, yet succumbing not to the degradation associated with them. ...

It must be appreciated that the entire Exordium of Savitri is set in the Transcendental. The difficulty in the march of this creation, with the mind of Night standing across the path of the divine Event, the aspects of two primordial Nothingnesses, the mystery of the fathomless, the absolute Zero, the repeated appearance of the divine Dawn and her work remaining half done,—everything is happening over there. The appearance of the Dawn is first in the transcendental sky, and therefore what is described here, in the opening canto of Savitri, is the illustrious symbol of that marvellous Dawn; the epic begins with the Symbol Dawn for us in which the symbol is for the reality that is set into truth-movement in that high domain of truth and beauty and joy and awareness and love. Which means that, to introduce the poem to us, it is not quite the technique of the flashback that the poet is using here; it is a description of the beginning of the Beginning occurring elsewhere. It is not Horace’s in media res, into the middle of things, the act of plunging into middle of the story; but it is narrating the story which begins at the beginning, ab initio or ab ovo, from the mature ovule, from the egg. Because it is first happening in the high transcendental, there is in it the certitude, the absoluteness of it being victoriously accomplished here. The breaking out of the Dawn in the transcendental is what is presented to us as the Symbol Dawn.

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