The obstinacy of the past is a strong force to pull
things back and if an advance has to be made, it should be with the full
recognition of this aspect; its role cannot be taken lightly, least can it be
underplayed. Therefore when a breach does occur in this world of nullifying
obstinacy, there is a glad and contented hope. With it also comes from the
far-off boundless realms the sure answering gesture. A vision makes an entry
and it pierces the dark and dumb deeps of existence. A message is delivered to
the universe that has yet not the formed mind, and suggestion made to awake to
the forgotten bliss. But there is great reluctance in receiving the message,
perhaps because of the past experience, the disillusionment of the earlier
attempts in the divine manifestation. Yet insistence makes things take a
farther step, and there is the appearance of thought in that mindless universe,
a sense is born,
As if a soul long dead were moved to live:
But the oblivion that succeeds the fall,
Had blotted the crowded tablets of the past,
And all that was destroyed must be rebuilt
And old experience laboured out once.
Cycles of creation have repeated, and the question is
if it is going to happen again in the same way it had happened earlier. What
did the earlier pralayas or
dissolutions achieve? Yet perhaps nothing was in vain. The old experience
cannot be dismissed and things must be rebuilt, built up on a diviner
foundation. Frustration cannot rescind or nullify the will that is there at the
root of the effort. Indeed,
All can be done if the God-touch is there.
That is the true assessment of the higher involvement
in this manifesting reality of the real. This God-touch is at once a supreme
act of Grace and the firming up of the Will with its necessary force of
inevitability to force the intractable issue. Notwithstanding the indifference
of the reluctant Nature and the suspicion of the Night, hope springs up with
its dynamism to work out the possibility; indeed, there begins to appear a
prized change. There is the slow miraculous gesture’s dim appeal, and the
miracle is on the verge of taking shape in the glory of the Splendour that is
behind it:
As if solicited in an alien world
With timid and hazardous instinctive grace,
Orphaned and driven out to seek a home,
An errant marvel with no place to live,
Into a far-off nook of heaven there came
A slow miraculous gesture’s dim appeal.
(Savitri, p.
3)
It looks as though a marvel that had somehow gone
astray is looking for a place to live, a home,—it makes an appeal, indeed
solicits for a change. Will a house be found for the marvel, will it be welcome
in the midst of this antagonism instituted on the past? Will the earth be
receptive to it, or will it be repelled again? But there is the assurance also
in the God-touch.
There is an interesting point in the grammatical
construction in the “errant-marvel” passage. The use of ‘solicited’ as a transitive
verb—an errant marvel solicited a home—was missed by Amal Kiran when he
commented on it and got confused about its meaning. Sri Aurobindo writes to
him:
You took the word "solicited" as a past
participle passive and this error seems to have remained fixed in your mind so
as to distort the whole building and sense of the passage. The word
"solicited" is the past tense and the subject of this verb is
"an errant marvel" delayed to the fourth line by the parenthesis
"Orphaned etc." This kind of inversion, though longer than usual, is
common enough in poetical style and the object is to throw a strong emphasis
and prominence upon the line, "An errant marvel with no place to
live." That being explained, the rest about the gesture should be clear
enough.
I see no sufficient reason to alter the passage;
certainly, I could not alter the line beginning "Orphaned..."; it is
indispensable to the total idea and its omission would leave an unfilled gap.
If I may not expect a complete alertness from the reader,—but how without it
can he grasp the subtleties of a mystical and symbolic poem?—he surely ought
to be alert enough when he reads the second line to see that it is somebody who
is soliciting with a timid grace and it can't be somebody who is being
grace-fully solicited; also the line "Orphaned etc." ought to suggest
to him at once that it is some orphan who is soliciting and not the other way
round: the delusion of the past participle passive ought to be dissipated long
before he reaches the subject of the verb in the fourth line. The obscurity
through-out, if there is any, is in the mind of the hasty reader and not in the
grammatical construction of the passage.
Sri Aurobindo can be pretty forthright and devastating
as a critic!
A slow miraculous gesture dimly came.
The emendations suggested of the original line belonged to the 1936 version but apropos of which the comments by Sri Aurobindo
are very pertinent in general to his art:
Miraculous and dim a gesture came.
Miraculously dim a gesture came.
Dimly miraculous a gesture came.
Miraculous and slow a gesture came.
The emendations were not suggested as improvements in
any way on the line which was splendid (though Sri Aurobindo himself
subsequently altered it to
A slow miraculous gesture's dim appeal
because of a new interrelation in the final expanded
recast of his poem). They were only a hypothetical desperate resort in the
interests of a point which is made clear in the footnote at the end of the next
item. The object was to see if a certain change in the manner of adjective-use
was possible so that a technical variety might be introduced in the passage of
which the line in question was a part. The emendations unfortunately involved,
among other things, the omission of one or another of the descriptive terms
used by Sri Aurobindo. But variants not involving this were also offered for
discussion, as the footnote already referred to will show. This pertained
to the early draft of 1936.
Sri Aurobindo wrote back:
Man alive, your proposed emendations1 are an admirable
exposition of the art of bringing a line down the steps till my poor "slow
miraculous" above-mind line meant to give or begin the concrete portrayal
of an act of some hidden Godhead finally becomes a mere metaphor thrown out
from its more facile mint by a brilliantly imaginative poetic intelligence.
First of all, you shift my "dimly" out of the way and transfer it to
some-thing to which it does not inwardly belong, make it an epithet of the gesture
or an adverb qualifying its epithet instead of something that qualifies the
atmosphere in which the act of the Godhead takes place. That is a preliminary
havoc which destroys what is very important to the action, its atmosphere. I
never intended the gesture to be dim, it is a luminous gesture, but forcing its
way through the black quietude it comes dimly. Then again the bald phrase
"a gesture came" without anything to psychicise it becomes simply
something that "happened", "came" being a poetic equivalent
for "happened", instead of the expression of the slow coming of the
gesture. The words "slow" and "dimly" assure this sense of
motion and this concreteness to the word's sense here. Remove one or both
whether entirely or elsewhere and you ruin the vision and change altogether its
character. That is at least what happens wholly in your penultimate version and
as for the last its "came" gets another meaning and one feels that
some-body very slowly decided to let out the gesture from himself and it was
quite a miracle that it came out at all! "Dimly miraculous" means
what precisely or what "miraculously dim"—it was miraculous that it
managed to be so dim or there was something vaguely miraculous about it after
all?
No doubt they try to mean something else—but these
interpretations come in their way and trip them over. The only thing that can
stand is the first version which is no doubt fine poetry, but the trouble is
that it does not give the effect I wanted to give, the effect which is
necessary for the dawn's inner significance. Moreover, what becomes of the slow
lingering rhythm of my line which is absolutely indispensable?