In this Canto Savitri is seen reviewing her past mapped on the canvas of her memory. She saw her childhood, and youth and her love and the doom that was pronounced. She sees the whole course of her evolution: as the poet puts it, "Her witness spirit stood reviewing Time." In her consciousness she especially went through the twelve passionate months she had lived with Satyavan that seemed to have passed almost like a day. This review of her past was necessitated by the impending crisis which created sufficient psychic pressure to awaken and call out to the surface the hidden Spirit in herself. But before she was able to do it she passed through a "Supernatural darkness",—which intervenes before man's soul draws nearer to God. "An hour comes when fail all Nature's means" and man's soul is thrown upon the help of God. Savitri was now passing through such an hour. She knew that only the power of the Spirit “can lift the yoke imposed by birth in time” and that her Nature's means comprising of the mind and the vital were impotent against the inexorable law of Death and Fate.

She had to break up her past by her soul's force because it would only be "a block on the immortal's road". The outer personality of man which is the result of evolution of his soul in ignorance, and which is only a representative of his true Self should be dissolved in order to allow the Self to come forward and act. The Self, being Timeless, is able to act on time and snap the chain of the Law of Karma. The true Self being Eternal and Infinite has power to weigh itself against the whole universe. Savitri has to face the doom: on one side there is the Law of Karma working in Ignorance, and against it the sovereign right of her Self. This issue in reality, is a world-issue. In trying to solve it Savitri was really solving a world-issue. Thus, "the world unknowing, for the world she stood". She has to meet and challenge "embodied Nothingness", and "Look into the lonely eyes of immortal Death".

The hours of the days during "these twelve months passed like mailed armies going to meet their doom. Savitri felt utterly alone in Spirit. The hills and the forest that surrounded her gave her "deep room for thought and God." It was here that "Love came to her hiding the shadow, Death". The God of Love found the inner make of Savitri's consciousness so pure and so sincere that "in her he met a vastness like his own", "and moved in her as in his natural home". Her nature was not narrow like that of other human beings whose love is egoistic and selfish. "A wide self-giving was her native act", she had a universal "kindly care" and a "deep compassion".

So deep was her embrace of inmost help,

The whole world could take refuge in her single heart,

 because, "Love in her was wider than the universe". She had "a magnanimity as of sea or sky". She was "a continent of self-diffusing peace". The element of sympathy and universal helpfulness proceeded not so much from the human part of her nature as from the Godlike element which she brought with her:

Although she leaned to bear the human load,

Her walk kept still the measure of the gods.

Ordinarily, such a sympathy takes the outer forms of altruism or, service, etc. But such efforts hardly succeed in removing or curing human suffering or ills. For that, a more radical and a more spiritual remedy is needed. Savitri wants to bring about a radical inner change in man's consciousness in order to cure his ills. She went to the root of man's malady. For her the question was:

Whether to bear with Ignorance and Death

Or hew the ways of Immortality,

To win or lose the godlike game for man,

Was her soul's issue thrown with Destiny's dice.

Savitri's childhood was divinely protected and when she attained to age felicity was natural to her. But

There is a darkness in terrestrial things,

That will not suffer long too glad a note.

Soon she found herself face to face with the problem of Satyavan's death. She was eminently fitted for the task because she was not like other men

...one more pawn who comes destined to be pushed

One slow move forward on a measureless board

In the chess-play of the earth-soul with Doom.

In this material world man seems to be only a pawn in Nature's game, the cosmos appears like a vast prison wherein Ignorance rules with the karmic laws and pain and joy seem to be the inevitable results of its working. Death seems an inevitability and life seems to be under its sway. Thus we see in the world the working of an iron law. This law equally restrains "the Titan in us and the God". Savitri, conscious of her Divinity, defies the authority of this law of Ignorance and wants to assert the sovereign right of the Spirit. She neither brooked any compromise with the earth-law nor did she give way to despair. She would not allow the divine Light in her to be quenched nor would she consent to cancel her commerce with eternity. She felt in her not only the presence of the divine Light but also the drive of the evolutionary force from the earth consciousness towards the Supreme. She felt and knew that she had come to do a work, to give a message and the divine Fire that had entered the inconscience was the force with which she was equipped by nature to fulfil her mission.

The idea of a single individual will challenging the cosmic rule of Ignorance seems difficult to grasp. The mind naturally doubts if it is at all possible. How can the feeble individual stand against and overcome the operations of the gigantic cosmic machinery where enormous powers, irresistible forces seem to be working to their decreed ends? And yet, says the Master, it is possible. Even in this dark cosmic prison-house which seems to be hermetically sealed, wherein man seems to be fumbling in vain for a door, or seeking for some mysterious source of help without success, there

A magic leverage suddenly is caught

That moves the veiled Ineffable's timeless will:

A prayer, a master act, a king idea

Can link man's strength to a transcendent Force.

Then miracle is made the common rule,

One mighty deed can change the course of things;

A lonely thought becomes omnipotent.

Even though externally man seems to be a helpless part of this great cosmic machine and a mere product of the inconscience, yet there is within him something that can change him from a mere instrument, a mere puppet into the Master, into the King. That something is the presence of the Divine in man. Then, the poet says,

A Godhead stands behind the brute machine.

In the case of Savitri the World-Mother from whom she had descended arose in her and the whole working of the cosmic machine was reversed. She became "a flaming warrior" who

Smote from Death's visage its dumb absolute

And burst the bounds of consciousness and Time.