The Savitri-bird brings to us on its rich musical and colourful wings
altogether new possibilities, including the possibility of the lilt of the
Romantic and the chant of the Classical, they joining together in a soaring or
plunging or widening flight in a wide blue horizontal sky. New occult depths
full of splendour open out, or wondrous realms of gold start arriving to us, or
the deathless Rose and the deathless Flame begin to bring their gifts to our
creations. Its aerodynamics takes care of the deep load of the superconscient
voice, as much as it provides to the poetic utterance psychic and sweet spiritual
verities. In the process, one expression enters into the worlds of love and charm
and joy, and the other climbs to luminous transcendences of truth and light and
power and delight. Has it not happened for the first time in poetry on such a
sustained level? Kalidasa would have both, but rarely in their continued
intensities, and the Vedic poetry would go by the charge of the
mystic-spiritual than the psychic-lyrical.
The presentation of the transcendental Savitri is undoubtedly unparalleled in
any depiction. We have great classical invocations of the divine Shakti as in the
Chandi Mahatmya, or in the
enchantment of Dante’s Vision of Beatrice, or in the Bhakti or Sufi utterances
in another genre of portrayal, or invitations to the Muse at the beginning of
some of the epics. But fusion, or at least a combination, of the psycho-lyrical
and the mystico-spiritual is absent in them. Let us have a few examples.
Shelley’s Epipsychidion presenting
Emilia Viviani is practically a passionate rush of the emotional, though
sometimes touched or uplifted by the mystical; it has no luminosity of the
dense spiritual. For the poet she is no mere symbol; “her womanhood and her
beauty are real; but beauty more universal and enduring than her own is
gathered up in her, as light in the sun, and this ideal value, though the
emphasis fluctuates, is never absent from Shelley’s thought.”
Seraph of Heaven! Too gentle to be
human,
Veiling beneath that radiant form
of Woman
All that is insupportable in thee
Of light, and love, and
immortality!
Sweet Benediction in the eternal
Curse!
Veiled Glory of this lampless
Universe!
Thou Moon beyond the clouds! Thou
living Form
Among the Dead! Thou Star above the
Storm!
Thou Wonder, and thou Beauty, and
thou Terror!
Thou Harmony of Nature's art! Thou
Mirror
In whom, as in the splendour of the
Sun
All shapes look glorious which thou
gazest on!
Aye, even the dim words which
obscure thee now
Flash, lightning-like, with
unaccustomed glow;
I pray thee that thou blot from
this sad song
All of its much mortality and
wrong,
With those clear drops, which start
like sacred dew
From the twin lights thy sweet soul
darkens through,
Weeping, till sorrow becomes
ecstasy:
Then smile on it, so that it may
not die.
…the brightness
Of her divinest presence trembles
through
Her limbs, as underneath a cloud of
dew
Embodied in the windless Heaven of
June
Amid the splendour-winged stars,
the Moon
Burns, inextinguishably beautiful:
And from her lips, as from a
hyacinth full
Of honey-dew, a liquid murmur
drops,
Killing the sense with passion;
sweet as stops
Of planetary music heard in trance.
There is much beauty in the lines:
Veiled Glory of this lampless
Universe!
Thou Moon beyond the clouds!...
But “Weeping, till sorrow becomes
ecstasy” has an intensity of feeling which belongs to another order of
expression, giving to that expression almost a mantric poignancy. It becomes pretty
nearly mystic-spiritual.
The third line in the following is quintessentially occult with its bright
contents:
Embodied in the windless Heaven of
June
Amid the splendour-winged stars,
the Moon
Burns, inextinguishably beautiful.
Shelley’s translation of Dante's
sonnet for Guido Cavalcanti shows to what heights pure Romantic poetry can soar,
and soar with plumes of fire:
There was a being who my spirit oft
Met on its visioned wanderings far
aloft
As one sandalled with plumes of
fire
Sprang towards the lodestar of my
desire
There was a being who my spirit oft
Met on its visioned wanderings far
aloft
Amongst enchanted islands of sunlit
lawn
In the clear golden prime of my
youth's dawn
Dante’s own description of
In Paradiso—Canto XXXIII we meet St Bernard whose prayer to the Virgin Mother
is incomparable:
Virgin Mother, you are the one who
lifted human nature to such nobility that its own Maker did not disdain to be
made of its making. Within your womb was lit once more the flame of that love
through whose warmth this flower opened to its full bloom in everlasting peace…
In you is found whatever good exists in any creature… I pray you also, Queen,
for you can do whatever you will, that after he has seen this vision, you keep
his affections wholesome. Watch and restrain his human impulses: See Beatrice
with so many blessed spirits clasping their hands to join me in this prayer.
The saint tells Dante: “It’s the essence of this existence to hold ourselves
within the will of God through which our own wills are made one with His… For
in His will is our peace. It is the sea to which all things existing flow, both
those His will creates and those that nature makes.”
The conclusion is that “the divine light through the universe so penetrates in
measure to its worth that there is nothing to stand in the way.”
In these utterances there is great vision, but the poetry of Savitri has the greatness of rhythm and
substance that belong to the vision of the sheer transcendent, they all coming
from the home of truth to which the yogi-poet has free access, he in fact being
a resident of that home, an impression which one does not get in the other
examples,