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Sri Aurobindos' Savitri
(an Adventure of Consciousness) |
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SAVITRI as an Epic
Introduction
In an age of modernist poetry the possibility of an epic being composed is strongly refuted by critics of poetry. To them an epic poem is solely proper to primitive ages. But mysterious are the ways of the creative spirit; the Muses of poetry when and in what form may effloresce human intellect cannot predict. One should always be prepared for pleasant and unexpected surprises from the creative spirit. On this Sri Aurobindo writes, “It is sometimes asserted that the epic is solely proper to primitive ages when the freshness of life made a story of large and simple action of supreme interest to the youthful mind of humanity, the literary epic an artificial prolongation by an intellectual age and a genuine epic poetry no longer possible now or in the future. This is to mistake form and circumstances for the central reality. The epic, a great poetic story of man or world or the gods, need not necessarily be a vigorous presentation of external action.... The epics of the soul most inwardly seen as they will be by an intuitive poetry, are his greatest possible subject, and it is this supreme kind that we shall expect from some profound and mighty voice of the future. His indeed may be the song of greatest flight that will reveal from the highest pinnacle and with the largest field of vision the destiny of the human spirit and the presence and ways and purpose of the Divinity in man and the universe.”1 In these lines, written sometimes between 1916-20, Sri Aurobindo sets aside the contention of critics that composition of an epic in modern times is not only a possibility but how truly he anticipates his own composition of an epic.
An epic, particularly the primitive or primary epic, deals with a story from the heroic age concerning some great war or exploits of the hero. An objective story is the dominant feature of this epic. Ancient epics belong to this category. The literary or secondary epics do not have a strong and pure story element. Dante’s The Divine Comedy has neither a mythological nor a historical story. It is allegorical in nature. In Milton’s Paradise Lost, too, a strong and pure story element is missing. It seems that as the epic moves away from expressing the outer life, the objective story element has been dwindling. From Milton to Sri Aurobindo, a span of about three centuries, and the epic tradition has completely revolutionised. A total reversal of the epic method now enters into English poetry; from objectivity of the past the epic writing moves to pure subjectivism in Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri. To quote the poet himself: “Savitri is the record of a seeing, of an experience which is not of the common kind and is often far from what the general human mind sees and experiences. You must not expect appreciation or understanding from the general public or even from many at the first touch; as I have pointed out, there must be a new extension of consciousness and aesthesis to appreciate a new kind of mystic poetry”.2
The age of adventures, we are told, is over and writing an epic in the 20th century is unthinkable. On this earth landlocked by gloomy adversities, dark passages, tyranny of the machine age, man is ‘pushed to the wall’ to partake of he joy of adventure. “There is no longer any space on the swarming beaches, no space on the crushing roads, no space in the growing termitaries of our cities. We must open out elsewhere”.3 And Sri Aurobindo does so,
Adventuring across enormous realms,
He broke into another Space and Time.
— Savitri : 91
What are these ‘enormous realms’, ‘another Space and Time’ into which Sri Aurobindo’s epic intends to adventure. Following the ascending stages of his amazing yogic exploration, “we are led to the greatest discovery of all times, to the door of the Great Secret which must change the face of the world, namely, that consciousness is a power.”4 The ‘enormous realms’ across which the poet adventures are his yogic explorations in the field of consciousness and it is this adventure of consciousness which Sri Aurobindo chants in blissful mantric utterance,
— such as arose from the Infinite
When the first whisperings of a strange delight
Imagined in its deep the joy to seek,
The passion to discover and to touch,
The enamoured laugh which rhymed the chanting worlds.
— Savitri : 697-8
If we seek for an adventure in Savitri as we must in an epic, then that adventure is not exploring new continents, not participating in a Trojan war; the poet has shifted his epic adventure within to explore enormous realms of consciousness.
A greater world Time’s traveller must explore.
— Savitri : 71
It is not to fight the enemy in the battle-field of Troy, but the struggle is within:
But though to the outward eye no sign appears
And peace is given to our torn human hearts,
The struggle is there and paid the unseen price;
The fire, the strife, the wrestle are within
— Savitri : 446
The epic describes the battle of the human soul against the omnipotent powers of the Inconscient, the descent of the soul into abysses of the Night, and finally the battle royal against Death itself. Can there be braver adventures than the ones that Savitri narrates? Besides, there can be no more authentic epic adventures than the ones narrated in Savitri. For these are ‘the record of a seeing, of an experience which is not of the common kind’. The narrations of the epic are not based on any objective story element; they are the poet’s experience — spiritual and occult. It is this pure subjective element which enters the epic for the first time and here lies the newness of Savitri, bringing a new method in epic tradition. It may even be said that Savitri is Sri Aurobindo’s spiritual autobiography.
SAVITRI : As an Eipic
Its Plan and Design
Speaking about the plan and design of Savitri, Sri Aurobindo writes, “It has been planned not on the scale of Lycidas or Comus or some brief narrative poem, but of the longer epical narrative, almost a minor, though a very minor, Ramayana; it aims not at a minimum but at an exhaustive exposition of its world – vision or world – interpretation. One artistic method is to select a limited subject and even on that to say only what is indispensable, what is centrally suggestive and leave the rest to the imagination and understanding of the reader. Another method which I hold to be equally artistic or, if you like, architectural is to give a large and even a vast, a complete interpretation, omitting nothing that is necessary, fundamental to the completeness; that is the method I have chosen in Savitri”.5 It is this architectonic feature of the epic that holds the reader’s attention with awe and wonder. Each sentence fits in the para, the para in the canto and the cantos in the book, as stone after stone is laid upon each other to construct a huge superstructure. The architectural structure and design of the epic where the cantos and the books roll and wheel harmoniously like the spheres in the cosmos with no jarring motion.
As the Mahabharata ‘embodies not only the whole national tradition of India but is an expression of the religious and the ethical mind and social and political ideals of India’, so Savitri is the expression not only of all the past spiritual traditions of mankind but also it opens the wide gate to the vision of the supreme Truth – Consciousness so as ‘to hew the ways of Immortality’. In its vast design the poem deals with the unfathomable Inconscient, origin of world’s ignorance, ‘wide world – failure’s cause’, Falsehood and suffering and Death that stalk the creatures at every step. The poem deals equally with the unknowable Superconscient that is the source as well as the goal of creation. All the ranges of consciousness with their worlds and beings come within the purview of this epic. Milton only wished to soar ‘beyond the Aonian mount’ or ‘above the Olympian hill I soar’, but Savitri is of a different stuff:
“It hoped to soar into the Ineffable’s reign” (Savitri : 98)
To quote a contemporary poet and critic of repute : “Philosophical statement lending logical plausibility to facts of the Spirit is necessary in a time like ours when the intellect is acutely in the forefront and Sri Aurobindo has answered the need by writing that expository masterpiece, The Life Divine.... To create a poetic mould equally massive and multiform as the Life Divine for transmitting the living Reality to the furthest bound of speech — such a task is incumbent on one who stands as a maker of a new spiritual epoch. Without it he would not establish on earth in a fully effective shape the influence brought by him.... But scattered and short pieces of poetry cannot build the sustained and organised weltanschauung required for putting a permanent stamp upon the times”.6 So Sri Aurobindo gives us Savitri.
Its Structure:
In a letter written in 1936 Sri Aurobindo tells us of the genesis of Savitri and the earlier draft of its structure: “Savitri was originally written many years ago before the Mother came, as a narrative in two parts, Part I Earth and Part II Beyond (these two parts are still extant in the scheme, each of four books — or rather Part II consisted of three books and an epilogue). Twelve Books to an epic is a classical superstition, but the new Savitri may extend to ten Books — if much is added in the final revision it may be even twelve”.7 In the final version, there are twelve Books in three parts:
Part One (Books One to Three) : Book One :
‘The Book of Beginnings’ : (Five Cantos)
Book Two :
‘The book of the Traveller of the Worlds’ (Fifteen Cantos)
Book Three
“The Book of the Divine Mother” Four Cantos
Part Two (Books Four To Eight) : Book Four :
‘The Book of Birth and Quest’. (Four Cantos)
Book Five :
‘The Book of Love’. (Three Cantos)
Book Six :
‘The Book of Fate’. (Two Cantos)
Book Seven
‘The Book of Yoga’. (Seven Cantos)
Book Eight :
‘The Book of Death’ (One Canto)
Part Three (Books Nine to Twelve): Book Nine :
‘The Book of Eternal Night’. (Two Cantos)
Book Ten :
‘The Book of the Double Twilight’.
(Four Cantos)
Book Eleven :
‘The Book of Everlasting Day’ : (One Canto)
Book Twelve :
‘The Return to Earth’ (Epilogue)
Part I of Savitri comprises the first three Books of the poem with a total of 24 cantos. This part of the epic deals almost entirely with the Yoga of King Aswapati, Savitri’s human father. It is his aspiration that compels the Divine Mother incarnate herself in the form of Savitri : “A world’s desire compelled her mortal birth.” ( Savitri : 22)
It is his yogic sadhana, ‘the concentrated energy of spiritual endeavour’ that helps us to rise from the mortal to the immortal planes. The Yoga of the King is described from Book I, canto 3 and covers the rest of Part One. In the Yoga of Aswapati Sri Aurobindo describes the yogic sadhana of his Integral Yoga and also ‘the scheme of its psychology and its working’. This Yoga aims at a ‘total and integral change of the consciousness and nature’. The method is not “anything like it professed or realised in the old yogas. If I had, I should not have wasted my time in hewing out a road and in thirty years of search and inner creation when I could have hastened home safely to my goal in an easy canter over paths already blazed out, laid down, perfectly mapped, macadamised, made secure and public. Our yoga is not a retreading of old walks, but a spiritual adventure.”8 This is the objective Aswapati aims to achieve for earth and man and that is narrated in this part.
The opening canto of the poem provides an equally vast, though a contrasting background and brings to the fore the need of a yoga like the Integral Yoga which can raise the whole of creation grovelling in Inconscience and Ignorance to its divine fulfilment. Therefore the poet introduces Savitri ‘in this holocaust of the soul’:
The dubious godhead with his torch of pain
Lit up the chasm of the unfinished world
And called her to fill with her vast self the abyss.
— Savitri : 17
The poet by the technique of recapitulation of the future scene brings the divine heroine in the opening canto itself, though she is to appear much later in Book Four (Part II) of the poem. The object is to make the opening canto the key note of the poem wherein lies compacted the entire thematic design of the epic. Soon after the Symbol Dawn which is a prophecy and
The prescience of a marvellous birth to come. (Savitri : 5)
the poet introduces to the reader this ‘marvellous birth to come’ who is none else than Savitri herself. The purpose of introducing Savitri in this canto is to maintain a close bond between the Dawn divine and divine Savitri; this bond would have been much diluted had the poet followed a normal narration of a story and brought Savitri at the usual place and time of her birth in Book Four. There should not be any confusion in the reader’s understanding that Savitri’s birth takes place in this canto or Satyavan must die on that day of the primordial Dawn. Perhaps billions and trillions of years separated the two momentous events, and in between.
Once more the rumour of the speed of Life
Pursued the cycles of her blinded quest.
— Savitri : 6
and
Man lifted up the burden of his fate.
— Savitri : 6
Once the poet introduces Savitri in canto one, he goes on to describe the being, nature and mission of this divine protagonist in canto 2; she is no ordinary heroine, but fit ‘to fill with her vast self the abyss’.
All in her pointed to a nobler kind.
— Savitri : 14
In passage of 51 lines of superb and rare poetic beauty Sri Aurobindo describes the divinity of her being and her nature. Lastly, he brings before the reader her mission; two are the options before her
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 : 17
But ‘not to submit and suffer was she born’,
To wrestle with the Shadow she had come
And must confront the riddle of man’s birth
And life’s brief struggle in dumb Matter’s night.
— Savitri : 17
or,
To stay the wheels of Doom this greatness rose.
— Savitri : 19
The reader at this stage gets well prepared to witness the battle royal, and how it will be waged and with what result.
Rest of Part I of the epic Book I (cantos 3,4,5), Book II and Book III covers the Yoga of the King, and the epic comes to its regular and normal track. The Yoga of Aswapati may be classified into three stages. In Book I he strives for individual perfection and victory through yoga. In Book II again it is individual victory and perfection by attaining all the planes of consciousness, though as a typical representative of the race. In Book III he seeks for universal realisation and a new creation on earth, says. Sri Aurobindo.
In Part II of the poem (Books Four to Eight) the poet brings the story of Savitri and her yoga, whom he introduces in the opening canto, into the mainstream of the epic. This part of the poem covers Savitri’s birth, her quest for and meeting with Satyavan, her foreknowledge of the death of Satyavan after one year of their marriage and finally her yoga sadhana to empower herself with the Transcendent’s Force to vanquish Death.
Part III of the epic (Books Nine to Twelve) describes the battle royal between Savitri and the God of Death after Satyavan dies, and how Death is vanquished. Both Savitri and Satyavan ‘return to earth after the triumph of Love over Death’.
Awakened to the meaning of my heart
That to feel love and oneness is to live
And this the magic of our golden change
Is all the truth I know or seek
— Savitri : 724
With the return to earth of Satyavan and Savitri
The united two began a greater age.
— Savitri : 411
The epic begins with the primordial symbol Dawn and ends with ‘a greater dawn’ for the future:
She brooded through her stillness on a thought
Deep – guarded by her mystic folds of light,
And in her bosom nursed a greater dawn.
— Savitri : 724
Its Nature:
Sri Aurobindo entitles his epic as ‘A Legend and a Symbol’. Most of the readers are aware of its legend. The story forms a very small part of a book of the Indian epic The Mahabharata. This story from The Mahabharata, however, occupies only the surface of Sri Aurobindo’s epic; not much of that objective story is to be found in his epic. In fact Savitri is a ‘mystic symbolic poem although cast into a different form and raised to a different pitch’. Without any mystic experience or temperament or even a ‘sympathetic’ understanding with openness of the mind, without its rigidity towards a new poetic creation, appraisal of a mystical poem like Savitri would be inadequate; such a poem may appear to the ‘uninitiate and the unsensitive’ as something ‘too large and vague’. Anticipating a lack of understanding on the part of the readers as well as the critics, Sri Aurobindo cautions: “Savitri stands as a new mystical poetry with a new vision and expression of things, we should expect, at least at first, a widespread, perhaps, a general failure even in lovers of poetry to understand it or appreciate; even those who have some mystical turn or spiritual experience are likely to pass it by if it is a different turn from theirs or outside their range of experience.. For in India at least some understanding or feeling and an audience few and fit may be possible”.9 Anything ‘unfamiliar to his mind and psychic sense and foreign to his experience’, the critic is not willing to accept; and ‘Savitri is the record of an experience which is not of the common kind and is often very far from what the general human mind sees and experiences’. So a critic or a reader may not see anything of ‘the spiritual meaning and the spiritual appeal’ in Savitri.
Every great poet is in essence a mystic. To be a mystic poet does not depend on his religious faith or attitude, nor on his intellectual argument for God or against it. Even the unreligious and the atheists like Lucretius may in their inspired moments leap up to express a sense of the mysterious Unknown. It is an inner urge, like Myer’s to
Leap from the universe and plunge in Thee
Mystic poetry is like unmasking the Divine, unveiling the great Mystery or part of it, either in clear transparency or in a transluency or still in a vague and hazy manner. The higher the plane of consciousness from where the inspiration comes, the more transparent becomes the unveiling of the face of the mysterious Unknown.
Sri Aurobindo broadly classifies mystical planes as occult, psychic and spiritual. The occult speech is not instinct with the Divine; it has the impress of a Celtic mystery that is at once weird and magically supernatural, as in the poetry of Coleridge and Yeats. This poetic speech transmits ‘baffling buried heavens of Beauty’. The psychic speech of the mystical poetry has “a deeply delicate radiance moving the heart to some far sweetness or suffusing it with an exquisite ecstasy of God’s love”.10
A lonely soul passions for the Alone
— Savitri : 632
Or,
In every shrine it cries for the clasp of God.
— Savitri : 631
There is a psychic yearning for the love of the unknow Beloved which characterises mystic poetry from the psychic plane:
A mystic happiness trembled in the breast
As if the invisible Beloved had come
Assuming the sudden loveliness of a face
And close glad hands could seize his fugitive feet
— Savitri : 290
In the mystical poetry from the spiritual plane, the inspiration, according to Sri Aurobindo, comes from the Overhead planes of consciousness. Here the poetic speech is the direct and naked experience of the seer poet, a thing actually seen and felt and even experienced, as Vaughan expresses:
I saw Eternity the other night
Like a great ring of pure and endless light,
All calm as it was bright
Or,
Across a void retreating sky he glimpsed
Through a last glimmer and drift of vanishing stars
The superconscient realms of motionless Peace
Where judgment ceases and the word is mute
And the Unconceived lies pathless and alone
— Savitri : 33-4
Or,
Infinity’s centre, a Face of rapturous calm.
Parted the eternal lids that open heaven
— Savitri : 4
Or,
Eternity prepared to fade and seemed
A hue and imposition on the Void
— Savitri : 308
The whole of the epic, in fact every verse of it, is filled with spiritual significances and expressions of one kind or the other.
Its Characteristics as Mystical Poem
Savitri is mystical poetry and “it expresses or tries to express a total and many – sided vision and experience of all the planes of being and their action upon each other”.11 The visions may appear as ‘technical jargon’ or ‘intellectual abstractions or metaphysical speculations’. These would appear so, writes Sri Aurobindo. “if one has not come into collision with them or plunged into their dark and bottomless reality. But to me they are realities, concrete powers”12 Again he explains, “This is the real stumbling – block of mystic poetry and specially mystic poetry of this kind. The mystic feels real and present, even ever present to his experience, intimate to his being, truths which to the ordinary reader are intellectual abstractions or metaphysical speculations. He is writing of experiences that are foreign to the ordinary mentality.”13 Again he writes, “To the mystic there is no such thing as an abstraction. Everything which to the intellectual mind is abstract has a concreteness, substantiality which is more real than the sensible form of an object or of a physical event”.14 Thus
The black Inconscient swung its dragon tail
Lashing a slumbrous Infinite by its force.
— Savitri : 79
is to the mystic poet a concrete experience and actually seen and felt.
Savitri as a mystical poem brings readers in touch and closeness with the presence of the Divine by a consciousness directly aware of the supreme Spirit. Here is no conceptual notion; the poet lets “spiritual facts seen in dimensions other than our universe take shape in poetry, and the poetry springs from those dimensions, throbbing with the strange tangibilities there...”15 All the visions and vibrations of the consciousness pervading those worlds are transmitted by the poet with entire poetic faithfulness. That is why the shapes and scenes are so incalculable, so bewildering. Only ‘a receptive hush’ in our being and nature can make us understand ‘the strangely worded and strangely rhythmed lines’. Speaking of mystical poem and the mystic poet’s role, Sri Aurobindo explains, “The door that has been shut to all but a few may open; the kingdom of the Spirit may be established not only in man’s inner being but in his life and his works. Poetry also may have its share in that revolution and become part of the spiritual empire”.16 Savitri “seeks to enlarge the field of poetic creation and find for the inner spiritual life of man and his now occult or mystical knowledge and experience of the whole hidden range of his and the world’s being, not a corner and a limited expression... but a wide space and as manifold and integral an expression of the boundless and innumerable riches that lie hidden and unexplored as if kept apart under the direct gaze of the Infinite.”16
The second characteristic of Savitri as a mystical poem is its style; “The style is of a direct knowledge, direct feeling, direct rhythm from an inner or upper poise,... from a consciousness aware directly of the supreme Spirit.”17 The style is that of ‘a seizing directness’. “The substantiality, the harmony and consistency, the massed grandeur of the many – sided mystical vision and experience disclose themselves with a seizing directness”17 Take the line
The strength, the silence of the gods were hers.
— Savitri : 16
The line “expressed with a bare but sufficient power what I always regarded as a great reality and a great experience”,18 says Sri Aurobindo. Here is no poetic diction, no verbosity, no ornamentation of language, just the bare monosyllabic words expressing a vision and an experience from the height; this gives to the line a grandeur in bare and direct utterance. Take another line:
All in her pointed to a nobler kind.
— Savitri : 14
On this line Sri Aurobindo comments; “I refuse entirely to admit that that is poor poetry. It is not only just the line that is needed to introduce what follows but it is very good poetry with the strength and pointed directness, not intellectualised like Pope’s but intuitive....”19 It is a ‘connecting’ line which prepares the reader for what follows, the grand description of Savitri’s divinity. Such ‘connecting’ lines in Savitri are similar to Marlowes ‘mighty lines’ and they ‘give the intellect the foothold of a clear unadorned statement of the gist of what is coming, before taking a higher flight’. Such a technique is suitable for epics only. Or,
Veiled by the Ray no mortal eye can bear
— Savitri : 57
This is a straight and direct presentation of a truth that needs no explaining; ‘the attribute is concretely offered and an atmosphere of the spiritual brought up’. The opening line of the epic.
It was the hour before the Gods awake.
is presentation of a mystical truth in its nakedness. The bare monosyllabic word without the ‘trailing of luminous robes’ yet with grandeur and sublimity, a majesty in bareness and simplicity, announces as does the gong of some vast temple of the universe, the beginning of some primordial ‘divine Event’ which the epic is to unveil. Or, take the line,
This was the day when Satyavan must die. (Savitri : 10)
The line does not express bareness for bareness’ sake. “It was bareness for expression’s sake, which is a different matter... It was ‘juste’ for expressing what I had to say then in a certain context”20, explains the poet.
Savitri is a mystical poem created from many planes of consciousness (the poem was originally written from ‘a mixture perhaps of the inner mind, psychic, poetic intelligence, sublimised vital, afterwards with the Higher Mind, often illumined and intuitivised, intervening....’) there is bound to be ‘a free diversity of style’ in it, as one particular style cannot be used for all ‘spiritual moods’ and temper and planes of inspiration. A variety of stylistic tone is perhaps ‘necessary for the richness and completeness of the treatment’. The poet, therefore, does not restrict himself to any one style’ to do that would be to limit the richness of his poetic vision and the vastness of his spiritual experience. Sethna has analysed four kinds of stylistic temper in Savitri, “while a fifth eludes all analysis and is the inmost circle of style, the magic of inevitability at its diamond point”21, the very quintessence of style, the purest and most perfect of its kind.
1. “The visioning word doing no more than equate itself to a mood and a situation; it accepts the mood, acknowledges the situation and gives them a just expression with any style – texture the poet is moved to adopt:
Something that wished but knew not how to be
— Savitri : 2
Or,
All can be done if the God-touch is there
— Savitri : 3
2. “This stylistic temper is mixed with a second type in the lines about ‘an old tired want’ being given room
To raise its head and look for absent light,
Straining closed eyes of vanished memory
Like one who searches for a bygone self
And only meets the corpse of his desire
— Savitri : 2
Now the visioning word is not merely just, not merely equated to its contents: it has pressed out of them a vigorous subtlety: it does not stop with a felicitous possession of their appearance, it goes under the skin, so to speak, and startles them into throwing up effective suggestions of their inner vitality.
3. “A third temper of style is shown us, infused into the second, when Sri Aurobindo comes with
A long lone line of hesitating hue
Like a vague smile tempting a desert heart
Troubled the far rim of life’s obscure sleep
— Savitri : 2
4. “The visioning word has begun to quicken with an inside glow — there is, besides the vividness and the subtlety from under the skin of mood and situation, a kindling in which many nuances from within arise and play and merge, the pulse of things becomes a gleaming varied flow of intense significances and not only in a strong suggestive leap. This process arrives at its acme in a passage like —
A glamour from the unreached transcendences
Iridescent with the glory of the Unseen,
A message from the unknown immortal Light
Ablaze upon creation’s quivering edge,
Dawn built her aura of magnificent hues
And buried its seed of grandeur in the hours.
— Savitri : 3-4
5. “Joined with it is another which bears the visioning word in a spelled exaltation of deep discovery, a fourth temper of style instilling into the theme a rapt self-transparency of meaningful design and vital inwardness. It is not easy to disengage this temper: more than the rest it must be felt by an instinct, for it is nearest the absolute style which refuses to be analysed. That absolute style is in the exquisite lines:
Fixed with gold panel and opalescent hinge
A gate of dreams ajar on mystery’s verge.
— Savitri : 3
There it comes into being with a kinship to the third temper, white it confronts us with a kinship to the fourth in the poignant wizardry of:
Air was a vibrant link between earth and heaven;
The wide winged hymn of great priestly wind
Arose and failed upon the altar hills;
The high boughs prayed in a revealing sky,....
— Savitri : 4
Or, the august enchantment of:
Infinity’s centre, a Face of rapturous calm
Parted the eternal lids that open heaven.
— Savitri : 4
And the very plan of Savitri demands for the richness and completeness of the treatment variation of style-temper no less than of style texture and inspiring plane”.22 This ‘indefinable super-inevitable style’, the inmost circle of style as Sethna calls it, is the ultima thule of poetic creation and its speech.
Its Technique :
A very significant technique of Savitri is its rhythmic sound. As the poem has its source of creation in regions far beyond the mind consciousness, to understand the poem’s many-sided vision and experience by the intellect alone is bound to prove baffling and a futile exercise. “A direct poetising of the Divine runs through Savitri from end to end”,23 says Sethna. Brilliant and all-revealing Overhead inspiration of the poet raises the poem to mantric height, ‘a concrete contact with Divine’s presence’. And the ‘revelation of secret presences and experiences straight from the hidden planes which are charged with the Superhuman and the Divine’ is to be a Mantra. The effective way to read Savitri is as one chants a Mantra, to read the poem audibly and let the rhythmic sound penetrate our consciousness and ‘vibrate within us so as to liberate the divinity held within the poetic words’. The ‘main gate of entry’ for the truths of the Overhead planes is not through the intellect but the rhythm, “the sound reflex of their hidden life throb, their inner force of existence. Once the rhythm has transmitted to us that throb and that force, the eye will open wider and wider and our thought begin to shape itself according to the truth of the Spirit”.24 The significance of rhythmic sound in mantric poetry has been beautifully expressed in the following verse of Savitri.
As when the mantra sinks in Yoga’s ear,
Its message enters stirring the blind brain
And keeps in the dim ignorant cells its sound;
The hearer understands a form of words
And, musing on the index thought it holds,
He strives to read it with the labouring mind,
But finds bright hints, not the embodied truth:
— Savitri : 375
Not by ‘the labouring mind’ can the mantric effect be achieved. Only by ‘falling silent in himself’.
He meets the deeper listening of his soul:
The word repeats itself in rhythmic strains...
and he endures
An ecstasy and an immortal change;
— Savitri : 375
These verses from Savitri give the main attributes of mantric poetry. In his epic Sri Aurobindo time and again brings ‘the accent and vibration of the Mantra and a general mantirc atmosphere’ so as to convey through sound rhythms the high goal unenvisaged and unattained by any poet before him. If anyone wishes to know what ‘Mantra of the Real’ be like in English language, let him chant some verses such as these beginning with :
(a) Near to earth’s wideness, intimate with heaven
— Savitri : 14
(b) The Absolute, the Perfect, the Alone
— Savitri : 67
(c) At the head she stands of birth and toil and fate
— Savitri : 314
(d) Choose, spirit, thy supreme choice not given again;
— Savitri : 696
“Savitri is an experiment in mystic poetry, spiritual poetry cast into a symbolic figure. Done on this rule, it is really a new attempt and cannot be hampered by old ideas of technique except when they are assimilable. Least of all by a standard proper to a mere intellectual and abstract poetry which makes ‘reason and taste’ the supreme arbiters, aims at a harmonised poetic intellectual balanced expression of the sense, elegance in language, a sober and subtle use of imaginative decoration, a restrained emotive element etc... The attempt at mystic spiritual poetry of the kind I am at demands above all a spiritual objectivity, an intense psychophysical concreteness”25, writes Sri Aurobindo about the principles of poetic technique in Savitri in answer to certain criticism. He further elaborates, “the mere critical intellect is likely to feel a distaste or an incomprehension with regard to mystical poetry even if that poetry is quite coherent in its ideas and well-appointed in its language. It is bound to stumble over all sorts of things that are contrary to its reason and offensive to its taste: association of contraries, excess or abruptness or crowding of images, disregard of intellectual limitations in the thought, concretisation of abstractions, the treating of things and forces as if there were a consciousness and a personality in them and a hundred other aberrations from the straight intellectual line. It is not likely either to tolerate departures in technique which disregard the canons of an established order. Fortunately here the modernists with all their errors have broken old bounds and the mystic poet may be more free to invent his own technique”.26 Two significant attributes of mystical poetry come to light from the above statement of Sri Aurobindo. First, the critical intellect is inapt to comprehend and appreciate mystical poetry as it is contrary to its reason and offensive to its taste. Secondly, as the modernist poets have broken old bound of technique specially by breaking the lines into irregular length without any underlying rhythm and calling that poetry, so the mystic poet too must have the freedom to invent his own technique.
Some other technical characteristics of mystical poetry like Savitri :
Use of Repetitions:
Some critics have objected to frequent repetitions in Savitri’s technique. Sri Aurobindo’s answer to the law prohibiting repetition is, “This rule aims at a certain kind of intellectual elegance which comes into poetry when the poetic intelligence and the call for a refined and classical taste begin to predominate. It regards poetry as a cultural entertainment and amusement of the highly civilised mind; it interests by a faultless art of words... An unfailing variety or the outward appearance of it is one of the elegances of this art. But all poetry is not of this kind; its rule does not apply to poets like Homer or Valmiki or other early writers. The Veda might almost be described as a mass of repetitions;”.27 Yet Anrold, the poet and critic, held that ‘there is nothing objectionable in the close repetition of the same word in the Homeric way of writing’. Shakespeare and Milton too were given to much repetitions.
In mystic poetry also repetition is not objectionable, asserts Sri Aurobindo. To such a class of poetry repetition ‘does not weaken the poem, it gives it a singular power and beauty’. Regarding the principle of repetition used in Savitri he says, “The repetition of the same key ideas, key images and symbols, key words or phrases, key epithets, sometimes key lines or half-lines is a constant feature. They give an atmosphere, a significant structure, a sort of psychological frame, an architecture. The object here is not to amuse or entertain but the self-expression of an inner truth, a seeing of things and ideas not familiar to the common mind, a bringing out of inner experience. It is the true more than the new that the poet is after. He uses avritti, repetition, as one of the most powerful means of carrying home what has been thought or seen and fixing it in the mind in an atmosphere of light and beauty.... Moreover, the object is not only to present a secret truth in its true form and true vision but to drive it home by the finding of the true... if possible the inevitable word; if that is there, nothing else, repetition included, matters much”.28 This is the principle of repetition and the poetic intention behind its use. Sri Aurobindo strongly favours repetition of word, phrase, image in this kind of poetry ‘provided each is the right thing and rightly worded in its place’. Only ‘clumsy or awkward, too burdensomely insistent, at once unneeded and inexpressive’ must be rejected. However, a poet and more so a mystic poet is not expected ‘to give a logical account to the critical intellect’ of his purpose behind use of repetition. “He does not himself deliberately choose or arrange word and rhythm but only sees it as it comes in the very act of inspiration”.29 Of course where ‘repetition amounts to a mistake’, it must be ‘acknowledged and corrected’.
Use of Double Adjectives and Epithets:
Another characteristic of the poem’s technique is abundant use of double adjectives and epithets. Sri Aurobindo does not see ‘the validity of any prohibition of double adjectives in abundance’. Their usage rather shows ‘a vivid richness or vehemence, forcing language to its utmost power of expression’ as is often found in Shakespeare and Milton:
Wilt thou upon the high and giddy mast
Seal up the shipboy’s eyes and rock his brains
In cradle of the rude imperious surge
— Shakespeare
Or,
With hideous ruin and cumbustion, down
To bottomless perdition, there to dwell
In adamantine chains and penal fire
— Milton
Compare the above with Sri Aurobindo’s use of double adjectives in Savitri:
Into a far – off nook of heaven there came
A slow miraculous gesture’s dim appeal.
— Savitri : 3
All these examples give ‘a vivid richness or vehemence, forcing language to its utmost power of expression’. And the example from Savitri gives ‘an intense psychophysical concreteness’ to the mystic — spiritual vision of the poet. Commenting on the objection to the use of double epithets here, Sri Aurobindo says, “The double epithets are indispensable here and in the exact order in which they are arranged by me”.30 The double adjectives are admirably suited to give ‘a slow wealth-burdened movement’ to the verse. Of course a ‘rich burdened movement’ can be secured by other means but a movement of any kind will not serve the poet’s purpose and that would not be ‘my primary object’. It is the combined effect of ‘slow miraculous’ that renders ‘the exact nature of the mystic movement’, a thing actually done and not a metaphor. The expression gives “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?”31 The poet does not see ‘the validity of any prohibition of double adjectives in abundance’. “That has to be done still more in this kind of mystic poetry. I cannot bring out the spiritual objectivity if I have to be miserly about epithets, images, or deny myself the use of all available resources of sound – significance”30 In the technique of mystic poetry the poet cannot be bound by the ‘laws’ prohibiting repetitions and abundant use of double epithets. The mystic poet has to impress upon the mind of the reader the Truth seen and experienced by him and
To pour delight on the heart of toil and want
And press perfection on life’s stumbling powers.
— Savitri : 353-4
Use of Inversions:
This is a characteristic of the epic technique and in Savitri too there is profuse use of inversions. An inversion literally means reversal or change of normal position, order or relation of words or phrases in a line or a sentence. It is a syntactic licence enjoyed by the poets, specially the epic poets. Poets have been making use of this technique in every language and clime. Milton used this method often in Paradise Lost to make the meaning of his poem more unfamiliar and distant to the reader. This added to his epic an element of grandeur and majesty. With Milton the use of inversions was deliberate so as to keep the reader alert. Reading the epic thus becomes a mental gymnastic. Use of inversions is a familiar and common technique with epic poets.
Savitri too is rich and plentiful with inversion. Inversions may be in a single line or sentence, or it may be delayed to several lines after by some long or short parenthesis. Take the very well known verse:
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...
— Savitri : 3
If the reader is not alert, he may miss the whole construction of the sentence and take ‘solicited’ as past participle passive when in fact it is past tense of the verb and its subject is ‘an errant marvel’ delayed to the fourth line and separated by long parenthesis. About this inversion the poet says, “This kind of inversion though longer than usual, is common enough in poetical style”.32 Not to achieve a majesty and sublimity of style is Sri Aurobindo’s aim as is usually with Milton. Here “the object is to throw a strong emphasis and prominence upon the line, ‘An errant marvel with no place to live”.32 Take another example:
Then through the pallid rift that seemed at first
Hardly enough for a trickle from the suns
Outpoured the revelation and the flame
— Savitri : 3
Here also the poet’s aim is to throw a strong emphasis and prominence to the principal event of the image i.e. ‘Outpoured the revelation and the flame’. Savitri abounds in such inversions. The technique of long delayed inversions adds to the beauty of sound – rhythm like music long drawn – out which is so essential for mantric poetry.
Its Symbolism :
As the sub-title of the epic ‘A Leged and a Symbol’ reveals, the poem is ‘an attempt to render into poetry a symbol of things occult and spiritual’, and ‘is supposed to have taken place in far past times when the whole thing had to be opened so as to hew the ways of immortality’. But the symbolic images in Savitri do not find expression for the sake of mere picturesqueness as ‘detachable ornaments’ that we find in many poets. In Savitri the symbolic images and expressions form a larger, vaster and a central epical design to express the Truth vision of the poet and which forms the impelling force behind the epic movements. The symbols fit in perfectly well in their own places so as to give to the movements of the poem a total and unitary design. Each symbol denotes some meaningful stage or step in the poet’s adventure of consciousness; to dislodge them would make the vast edifice of the poem collapse or make the experiences of the poet ill expressed. Hence the use of symbols for the sake of mere picturesqueness or as ‘detachable ornaments’ especially in a mystic spiritual poem like Savitri cannot be accepted, even is unimaginable. Sri Aurobindo categorically asserts, “I have not anywhere in Savitri written anything for the sake of picturesqueness or merely to produce a rhetorical effect,..”33
But what after all is a symbol? A symbolic image is not an allegory. An allegory is narration of a subject under the guise of another suggestively similar. A symbol, according to Sri Aurobindo, is, on the other hand, a form in one plane that represents a truth of another. It expresses not the play of abstract things or ideas put into imaged form but a living Truth or inward vision or experience of things, so inward, so subtle, so little belonging to the domain of intellectual abstraction, and precision that it cannot be brought out except through symbolic images — the more these images have a living truth of their own which corresponds intimately to the living experience they symbolise, suggest the vibration of the experience itself, the greater becomes the art of symbolic expression, explains Sri Aurobindo. “Savitri is the record of a seeing, of an experience which is not of the common kind and is often very far from what the general human mind sees and experiences.”2 Such uncommon subjective experiences in spiritual field can have no ‘verifiable proofs’ as an intellectual critic would like to have. The poet embodies the truth of his vision or experience in a formal image for its onward transmission to the reader. Such an image expressing the Truth, vision or experience of another plane (of the mystic spiritual plane) is to be a symbol. And the symbol can best suggest or convey the vibrations of the poet’s experience by an intense rhythmic movement of the poetic speech. Besides, the greatness of the art of symbol making depends on the closeness of the Truth vision of the poet with its expression through the image. Such is the art of symbol making in Savitri.
Savitri is “a mystic and symbolic poem although cast into a different form and raised to a different pitch”34 Mystic poetry is like unmasking the Divine, unveiling the great Mystery or part of it. Not to unveil part of the Mystery, but integral and total unmasking of the Divine is his yogic aim and the epic gives expression to that. To achieve this Sri Aurobindo climbs realm after higher realm of consciousness into the highest Truth-Consciousness. Thus he
Enters Truth’s inmost cabin of privacy
And tears away the veil from God and life.
— Savitri : 660
All the realms reveal their secret Godhead and the poet in his creative and unmoved joy gives symbolic expressions to ‘something seen, something felt or experienced’. Symbolism to Sri Aurobindo is, therefore, not an attempt at picturesqueness but revelatory in nature. The poet transmits his experience and vision of the hidden and unexplored worlds as he sees them ‘that are charged with the very vision and vibration of the consciousness pervading those worlds’. That is the reason why the shapes and scenes of his symbolic images are so ‘incalculable and bewildering’.
The visions of the poet as conveyed by the symbols of a mystic poem may appear as ‘intellectual abstractions or metaphysical speculations’ to one who has not come face to face with or plunged into their realities. The real stumbling block of mystic poetry of this kind (as Savitri) is that the “mystic feels real and present, even ever present to his experience, intimate to his being, truths which to the ordinary reader are intellectual abstractions or metaphysical speculations. He is writing of experiences that are foreign to the ordinary mentality.”13 But everything which appears as abstract to the intellectual mind is to the mystic concrete and ‘more real than the sensible form of an object or of a physical event’. Thus the symbol
The black Inconscient swung its dragon tail
Lashing a slumbrous Infinite by its force
— Savitri : 79
is to Sri Aurobindo a concrete experience and actually seen and felt as he says.
In his symbol making Sri Aurobindo lets “spiritual facts seen in dimensions other than our universe take shape in poetry, and the poetry springs from those dimensions, throbbing with the strange tangibilities there and not throughout aided by an interpretative glow from our experience of material objects.”35 The poet of Savitri, a great mystic that he is, gives constantly rapturous expressions to things beyond, the things behind the apparent world. These symbolic expressions not only “bring in the occult in its larger and deeper ranges but the truths of the spiritual heights, the spiritual depths, the spiritual intimacies and vastnesses as also the truths of the inner mind, inner life, an inner or subtle physical beauty and reality.”36 Besides these realms, the Inconscience, subconscience, the various planes of consciousness beyond the mind, even the transcendent Truth — consciousness, the Supermind go to form the vast symbolic canvas of the poem. Listen to the following;
In the deep subconscient glowed her jewel – lamp;
Lifted, it showed the riches of the cave
Where, by the miser traffickers of sense
Unused, guarded beneath Night’s dragon paws,
In folds of velvet darkness draped they sleep
Whose priceless value could have saved the world
— Savitri : 41-2
The poet’s purpose is ever the same, unmasking the divinity, unveiling the hidden and unexplored realms right from the Inconscient abyss to the Superconscient height.
To the uninitiate however, and the intellectual critics steeped in the rigidity of a mind consciousness and without any aptitude for things spiritual and mystic, such symbols appear unintelligible, vague, hazy. In the recorded history of spiritualism we do not find such spiritual experiences having ever been realised by anyone and poetised in so much detail. But these cannot be judged by the intellect or by any set poetical rule as such subjective experiences can have no ‘verifiable proofs’. To appreciate and enjoy, a new kind of mystic, occult and spiritual symbolism, “there must be a new extension of consciousness and aesthesis”33, advises Sri Aurobindo.
The most outstanding power of Savitri is its power of Truth, its Light of Knowledge. And as a corollary the most prominent power of its symbols is their truth-revealing power. About Savitri the Mother says, “It is the supreme revelation of Sri Aurobindo’s vision.”37 The revelatory nature of Aurobindonean symbols has raised them to the height with true mantric power and effect. This is the most important characteristic of the symbols. Listen —
Across a void retreating sky he glimpsed
Through a last glimmer and drift of vanishing stars
The superconscient realms of motionless Peace
Where judgment ceases and the word is mute
And the Unconceived lies pathless and alone.
— Savitri : 33-4
Listen to another passage that is indeed a marvel of poetic creation —
As in a mystic and dynamic dance
A priestess of immaculate ecstasies
Inspired and ruled from Truth’s revealing vault
Moves in some prophet cavern of the gods,
A heart of silence in the hands of joy
Inhabited with rich creative beats
A body like a parable of dawn
That seemed a niche for veiled divinity
Or golden temple door to things beyond.
— Savitri : 15
The images here, all symbolical, describe the divinity of Savitri, the incarnation of the Divine Mother and heroine of the epic. The source of inspiration of the passage is said to be the Overmind plane, even Sri Aurobindo ascribes the inspiration to the Overmind Intuition in a letter in 1936. See also the footnote 2 to that letter. (For a more detailed study of the above passage, readers are referred to the author’s article – “As in a mystic and dynamic dance” — published in June 2000 issue of The Mother India)
The two passages cited above (for more such passges one has to read the poem itself) very clearly reveal the chief characteristic of Sri Aurobindo’s symbolism. That quality lies in its mantric power and effect. The Aurobindonean symbols are mantric for two main reasons. First, symbols are a truth revelation; their substance is always made of truth stuff. But the poet has to convey, transmit this truth stuff to the hearer’s ‘listening soul’. And this transmission to be mantric must have the following characteristics:
First, the inspiration must come from the very highest plane of consciousness —
Missioned voices drive to me from God’s doorway
Words that live not, save upon Nature’s summits,
Ecstasy’s chariots....
— Descent
‘God’s doorway’ and ‘Nature’s summit’ signify and mean the overmind plane. The Truth vision and the poetic speech, the ‘Words’, come to the poet along with the poetic delight, ‘Ecstasy’s chariots’. Sri Aurobindo very categorically expresses that poetic Truth, poetic speech and poetic delight if come from the overmind plane ‘ready-formed’, then only they can be mantric. Secondly, this alone does not make it a mantra; there is another element which, according to Sri Aurobindo, is of primary importance, ‘a highest intensity of rhythmic movement’. To him “the rhythm, the poetic movement that is of primary importance; for that is the first fundamental and indispensable element without which all the rest, whatever its other value, remains inacceptable to the Muse of Poetry. A perfect rhythm will often even give immortality to work which is slight in vision and very far from the higher intensities of style.”38 By the excellence of poetic movement Sri Aurobindo does not mean a mere metrical rhythm or a perfect technical excellence, yet he is not advocating use of vers libre. On the contrary metre ‘a fixed and balanced system of the measures of sound’ is the ‘right physical basis for the poetic movement’. There are higher harmonies and melodies besides the harmonies of the pure metrical rhythm. Therefore for the symbol to be a mantra, its metrical rhythm has to be taken up and uplifted by the Overmind plane into its own higher harmonies and melodies. This is how the mere metrical is transported to the soul rhythm; and ‘the music fit for the Mantra makes itself audible’ in the symbols :
As if from a golden phial of the All Bliss
A joy of light, a joy of sudden sight,
A rapture of the thrilled undying Word
Poured into his heart as into an empty cup.
— Savitri : 38
Usage of symbols in Savitri forms the most important element of its technique. The poet intends “to keep constantly before the view of the reader, not imaginative but attentive to seize the whole truth of the vision in its totality...”39
It is the tremendous force of the words of the symbol that makes us see as well as hear and feel the picture of the vision. The source of Aurobindonean symbols lie ‘on Nature’s summits’, ‘God’s doorway’, undoubtedly the Overmind inspiration. And the symbols, come to him ready made from such summits.
Savitri abounds in countless symbolic expressions of Sri Aurobindo’s yogic experiences in language and images that have never been used in poetry before. Symbols and symbolic expressions form the very texture of the epic’s poetic speech. Depending on their vastness and depth of the vision all such expressions may be grouped in categories given below:
The first and most commonly used symbolic images or expressions are made up of a group of words. These are interspersed throughout the fabric of the poem and have become an inseparable element of the poetic speech. Though only made of a few words, yet these expressions suggest a world of hidden meanings to the responsive sensibility of the reader. To cite only a few such expressions:
‘a body like a parable of dawn’, ‘a niche for veiled divinity’, ‘golden temple door to things beyond’, ‘the yearning of a lone flute’, ‘a jingling silver laugh of anklet bells’, and so on. Likewise, a riot of colour and light with their symbolic significances pervades the poem. Some of these may be listed here: ‘the white aeonic silences’, ‘a flaming rhapsody of white desire’, ‘the swift fire-heart’s golden liberty’, ‘the crimson outburst of one secular flower’, ‘the white-blue moonbeam air of paradise’, ‘gleaming clarities of amethyst air’, ‘a gold supernal sun of timeless truth’, ‘sapphire heavens’, ‘blue lotus of the idea’, ‘flame-hills assaulting heaven with their peaks’, ‘a luminous sapphire dream’, and so on.
In the second category are many single lines carrying concentrated symbolic expressions of the poet’s vision. Some such are : ‘Truth is wider, greater than her forms’, ‘Lulled by Time’s beats eternity sleeps in us’, ‘Our minds are starters in the race of God’, ‘The pilgrimage of Nature to the unknown’, ‘She has lured the Eternal into the arms of Time’, etc. In such symbolic expressions the poet aims not at any strikingly graphic picture or imagery. The purpose is to convey through bare minimum of words and by direct utterance the truth.
Yet symbolic pictures, imagery of high poetic beauty are in store for us. These form the third category of symbolic images. These images are perfect paintings in words, or it may even be said, engravings of the figures and forms of Truth and Beauty. Some such images, selected at random, are presented here for readers to see to what extent symbolic images can stretch poetic speech to its utmost expressive power. Listen, —
(1)
Once more a tread perturbed the vacant Vasts;
Infinity’s centre, a Face of rapturous calm
Parted the eternal lids that open heaven;
A Form from far beatitudes seemed to near.
— Savitri : 4
This is the Divine Mother stepping into Space and Time after the epiphany of the Symbol Dawn.
(2)
Disclosed stood up in a gold moment’s blaze
White sun-steppes in the pathless Infinite.
Along a naked curve in bourneless Self
The points that run through the closed heart of things
Shadowed the indeterminable line
That carries the Everlasting through the years.
— Savitri : 40
This is the regal entry of the Everlasting, the timeless Eternity, into Space and Time, the Time eternity. Thus is established the ‘Timeless Eternity and Time eternity’ continuum. Compare with the following lines —
That the eyes of the Timeless might look out from Time
And world manifest the unveiled Divine
— Savitri : 73
(3)
A million lotuses swaying on one stem,
World after coloured and ecstatic world
Climbs towards some far-unseen epiphany.
— Savitri : 279
This is an intuitive revelation of the flowering of all the planes of consciousness on earth, then shall evolution attain its goal.
The fourth category of symbols in Savitri comprises long and sustained metpahors. In these symbols and metaphors Sri Aurobindo’s technique is that he takes up a symbol with a vast universal or even a transcendental canvas that would symbolise the universal or transcendental truth vision of the poet. These symbols are made of a series of images and all the images together give a total effect to the Truth. To this category belong some of the superb symbols in the epic like the Symbol Dawn ‘Sailor Symbol’, ‘the World-Stair.’ Each of these symbols is either a movement or implies a movement. Each decisive stage of the movement conjures up an image, a vignette, to symbolise that stage. In this way a series of images go to form these long and sustained symbols.
Broadly speaking Sri Aurobindo classifies symbols and symbol making into two categories. This classification ‘depends on the nature of the symbolic vision’. On this basis symbols and symbol making may be
(a) merely representative. Such a symbol presents to the inner vision and nature the thing symbolised in its figure. Here the inner mind can receive the effect though ‘the outer mind has not the understanding’.
(b) Or it is dynamic. Dynamic symbols may be of many kinds.
— Some may bring simply the influence of the thing symbolised;
— some indicate what is being done but not yet finished;
— some (indicate) a formative experience that visits the consciousness.
— some a prophecy of something that may or will or is soon about to happen.
— There are others that are not merely symbols but present actualities seen by the vision in a symbolic figure.
It would be a very fruitful and interesting an exercise of the literary faculty of the reader to locate these symbols in Savitri.
Symbolism in Sri Aurobindo and the Veda :
Regarding his Integral Yoga and its indebtedness to old yogas, Sri Aurobindo writes in a letter on 05.10.1935, “Our yoga is not a retreading of old walks, but a spiritual adventure.”40 As in yoga, so in poetry, Sri Aurobindo is not one to walk on a beaten track. It is true that he has great admiration for the Veda, and this admiration should not be the reason to jump to any uncalled for conclusion that Sri Aurobindo for his symbolic creation in Savitri is indebted to the Veda, as some self-styled critic would say. He is not one who follows a beaten track. Admiration for the Veda does not presage of any influence or indebtedness. If Sri Aurobindo has used some forms of vedic symbols in Savitri, it is to convey that they did not achieve, ‘not clearly visualised’ the totality of the Truth.
Let us take up some of the symbols that apparently look similar:
The first symbol, to consider is the Symbol Dawn. In both the Veda and Savitri, Dawn symbolises Divine Grace and Light that comes to awaken the ray of aspiration in the earth consciousness. In both the cases Dawn paves the way for the manifestation of the Divine in Space and Time, of the Lord in the Vedic symbol and of the Divine Mother in Savitri
“Putting forth his impulsions in the foundation of the Truth, in the foundations of the Dawns, their Lord enters the Vastness of the firmaments.”
— Rig – Veda, III. 61(7)
Ambassadress twixt eternity and change,
The omniscient Goddess leaned across the breadths
That wrap the fated journeyings of the stars
And saw the spaces ready for her feet.
— Savitri : 4
The Vedic Dawn is the bringer of ‘the light of Truth, all the beautiful companies of its gods and seers’. She is ‘the bringer of the Truth, the bliss, the heavens of light, remover of the darkness’ etc. So is Savitri’s Dawn. But the similarity ends there. The poet of Savitri extends and enlarges his symbol manifold. He gives in detail the working of this divine epiphany; how step by step the Dawn helps in removing the covering of Ignorance. As the light is not accepted at first, it leaves something of its ‘awakening ray’ in ‘our prostrate soil’ that,
A sacred yearning lingered in its trace,
The worship of a Presence and a Power
Too perfect to be held by death-bound hearts
— Savitri : 5
Vedic symbol does not speak of the consequence if the Light is not accepted by the earth.
And above all what about the execution in a perfect poetic speech straight from the Overhead planes. The canvas of the Dawn in Savitri is far wider and more extensive than that of the Vedic symbol. Yet critics talk of Sri Aurobindo’s indebtedness to the Veda.
Besides, Sri Aurobindo attributes several functions to his Dawn.
(1) it is ‘the prescience of a marvellous birth to come’, and this marvellous birth is the incarnation of the Divine Mother as Savitri;
In colour’s hieroglyphs of mystic sense,
It wrote the lines of a significant myth
Telling of a greatness of spiritual dawns,
A brilliant code penned with the sky for page.
— Savitri : 4
(2) Description of the Dawn in stages signifies that stage by stage, step by step, can the darkness and obscurities be removed. That is why Sri Aurobindo describes the epiphany of the Dawn in stages — ‘the inert black quietude’, ‘a wandering hand of pale enchanted light’, ‘one lucent corner windowing hidden things’; then the darkness failed and slipped like a falling, cloak’ and Dawn manifests her ‘aura of manificent hues’. Sri Aurobindo’s Dawn is a movement and not a static description like a ‘classical monotone’. Vedic Dawn is not like this.
(3) It speaks of many ‘spiritual dawns’ need to come before the darkness of Ignorance can be lifted.
The ‘significant myth’ which Dawn writes ‘in colour’s hieroglyphs of mystic sense’ is the story of Savitri who would come ‘to hew the ways of immortality’.
There are a few other symbols in both the poems that appear similar on apparent and casual reading. These are —
1:
Where the God-child lies on the lap of Night and Dawn.
— Savitri : 4
“Two are joined together, powers of truth, power of Maya.
They have built the child and given him birth
and they nourish his growth.”
— Rig Veda, X, 5-3
In spite of their outward similarity, there is a world of difference between the two symbols. Sri Aurobindo puts his stamp of spiritual and poetic genius when he uses the expression ‘the God-child’ in his symbol. This expression holds in it the infinite and unlimited divine possibilities and potentialities of the human soul, the God-child. The symbol opens vast and unlimited possibilities of man’s evolutionary and spiritual growth which the Vedic symbol fails to express.
2.
Companionless he roamed through desolate ways
Where the red-wolf waits by the fordless stream
— Savitri : 230
“Once the red-wolf saw me walking on the path”
— Rig Veda, V, 105-18
The aim and purpose of both the symbols is to present difficulties and dangers that lie in the pursuit of yoga by a seeker. In both the cases danger is symbolised by the red-wolf which is the symbol of destruction. Let us analyse the symbols In the Vedic symbol the seeker walks on the path. The words ‘walking’ and ‘path’ connote leisurely and unworried action, and ‘path’ is a laid down track. There is described nothing of the difficulties in the way of yoga. Of course, ‘the red-wolf’ is there. The red – wolf saw the seeker. The verb ‘saw’ does not connote any intention of harming the seeker. In Sri Aurobindo’s symbol a world of difficulties, problems and dangers are faced by the seeker, which he has to either overcome or succumb to them. The situation is —
(a) The seeker is companionless, roaming is not an easy walk, but one in quest of his lost way; and ‘desolate’ connotes ‘left alone, helpless and dreary’.
(b) The phrase ‘the red-wolf waits’, the verb ‘waits’ means crouching and ready to pounce upon the seeker, to ambush him.
(c) To these dangers is added ‘the fordless stream’ which means bog and morass and is very difficult to cross. One has to wade slowly through that morass and bog and the red-wolf waiting by the fordless stream finds the seeker an easy prey. In this symbol the seeker is encircled by all sorts of dangers and he must overcome them if he is to succeed in yoga. Will anyone still say that Sri Aurobindo’s symbol is similar and indebted to the Vedic one?
3.
Its gold-horned herds trooped into earth’s cave-heart.
Its morning rays illume our twilight’s eyes,
Its young formations move the mind of earth
To labour and to dream and new-create,
To feel beauty’s touch and know the world and self:
The Golden Child began to think and see.
— Savitri : 243
“They drove upwards, the lumious ones — the good milch cows, in their stone-pen within the hiding cave.”
— Rig Veda, IV, 1-13.
The Vedic symbol speaks of how the luminous rays of Light — ‘the good milch cows’, hidden in the closed heart of Inconscient Matter came out from their hiding place. It does not speak of whence they came and why they came out. Compared to Sri Aruobindo’s symbol, it appears so incomplete. In the Savitri symbol the working of the ‘Divine Power upon the growing world’ finds clear expression. Its (Divine Power’s) Light, ‘the gold horned herds’, first plunges into the Inconscient matter during Devolution, ‘trooped into earth’s cave-heart’, and then only it could come out, for nothing emerges from nothing; first there must be involution of the light through Devolution and then only there can be its emergence. In the process of creation both the movements of involution and emergence must be there. Once the involution is established firmly then begins the evolution. There evolves living bodies, ‘to feel beauty’s touch’, ‘to labour and to dream’. Then the emergent light moves ‘the mind of earth’ and life begins to think and see. These are the early stages of evolution, ‘the young formations’. The symbol then refers to Sri Aurobindo’s new theory of evolution: the Spiritual Evolution. To him it is in truth the evolution of the ‘Golden Child’ who is embedded and imprisoned in the Inconscient ‘earth’s cave-heart’ during the great plunge. Thus the earlier symbolic expression – ‘The God-child lies on the lap of Night and Dawn’, stands explained. The soul as if born from Night grows in the light of Dawn. The vedic symbol is entirely silent on these fundamental truths. It is certainly a greater Truth vision of Sri Aurobindo and his poetic genius that give a deeper and richer meaning and a vaster canvas to his symbol. In a single symbolic expression Sri Aurobindo explains the entire theory of spiritual evolution given by him.
In conclusion it may be said that though to outward eye some of Sri Aurobindo’s symbols seem to embody Vedic ideas, yet they are his own Truth vision, vaster and more integral with Sri Aurobindo’s inexpressible stamp of poetic genius in their execution in a speech the inspirational height of which man has not attained so far. No doubt the symbols mark out Sri Aurobindo as a poet one and unique.
Its Blank Verse
A fit and worthy medium adds much to the greatness of poetry, particularly so of epic poetry. The method of the modernists, — breaking into irregular lines without rhyme and rhythm and calling that poetry in free verse, is unacceptable to Sri Aurobindo. Once free verse reached a poetic height in Whitman who by his sheer vitality, vastness of spirit and ‘breath of a greater life’ could carry poetry to a high pitch inspite of not using metre. Who among the moderns has Whitman’s strength and vitality to use free verse as a poetical medium? Even a successful use of free verse takes away much of the charm and beauty from poetry as it did in the case of Whitman. Sri Aurobindo is of firm opinion that metre is an essential part of poetry, and specially of epic poetry. The principle of metre alone has the power to translate most adequately and effectively into poetic speech ‘Nature’s law of manifestation, the Spirit’s method of self-deployment’.
To Marlowe goes the credit of providing the Elizabethan poets with a strong and magnificent medium of poetic expression, the Blank Verse, the English iambic verse of ten syllables. Some of the greatest poets of the time used blank verse in their poetry – Marlowe and Shakespare used it in their dramatic poetry and later Milton in his epics. In Milton’s Paradise Lost blank verse became a medium of ‘faultless beauty’, ‘the blending of a peculiar kind of greatness and beauty not elsewhere found in English verse’, comments Sri Aurobindo. Leaving aside ‘the richer beauty and promise of his youth’, its ‘delicacies of colour and grace and sweetness’, Milton turned to blank verse ‘to express only in fit greatness of speech and form the conception of Heaven and Hell and man and the universe which his imagination had built out of his beliefs.’ Extolling Milton’s blank verse, Sri Aurobindo writes, “Rhythm and speech have never attained to a mightier amplitude of epic expression and movement; seldom has there been an equal sublimity of flight... There is nowhere any more magnificently successful opening than the conception and execution of his Satan and Hell;.... If the rest of the epic had been equal to its opening books, there would have been no greater poem, few as great in literature”.41 What epic stature and grandeur of expression blank verse could attain at the hand of Milton may be seen from the opening lines of Paradise Lost.
Of Man’s first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world, and all our woe...
Or listen to the grand monosyllabic words that bring the element of heroism even in an abject state.
Is this the region, this the soil, the clime...
Or,
Awake, arise, or be for ever fall’n.
Or,
Fall’n Cherub ! to be weak is miserable.
Such is the epic grandeur blank verse can attain.
Sri Aurobindo too adopts blank verse as the medium of expression for his epic. He finds in blank verse the most pliant and plastic and apt medium to express the varied and complex harmonies of his epic. But ‘a mightier amplitude of epic expression and movement’ as in Milton does not serve Sri Aurobindo’s purpose. He has to use this medium in many other ways. The blank verse, therefore, has attained immense plasticity in his hand and suits extremely well to the poet’s variation of style. The poet of Savitri writes from many planes of Overhead inspiration and the blank verse is admirably suited because of its plasticity to meet the poet’s varied stylistic temper. Analysing the planes of inspiration and the corresponding language and rhythm and the characteristic of the medium in each of these planes of inspiration, Sri Aurobindo writes, “the Overmind thinks in a mass; its thought, feeling, vision is high or deep or wide or all these things together... it goes vast on its way to bring the divine riches, and it has a corresponding language and rhythm. The Higher Thought has a strong tread often with bare unsandlled feet and moves in a clear-cut light: a divine power, measure, dignity is its most frequent character. The outflow of the Illumined Mind comes in a flood brilliant with revealing words or a light of crowding images, sometimes surcharged with its burden of revelations, sometimes with a luminous sweep. The Intuition is usually a lightning flash showing up a single spot or plot of ground or scene with an entire and miraculous completeness of vision to the surprised ecstasy of the inner eye; its rhythm has a decisive inevitable sound which leaves nothing essential unheard, but very commonly is embodied in a single stroke”42 From this statement it becomes clear that the poet brings subtle variations of the medium to give form to his vision from different planes of inspiration. It is the pliancy and plasticity of the Blank verse that alone could give expression to subtle variations of Sri Aurobindo’s poetic vision from many Overhead planes of inspiration. In Milton blank verse ‘attained to a mightier amplitude of epic expression and movement’, a mightier and more majestic voice was never heard in poetry; in Sri Aurobindo blank verse attains its fullest stature and inner perfection charged with the very divinity it gives form to.
Savitri employes “blank verse without enjambment (except rarely) – each line a thing by itself and arranged in paragraphs of one, two, three, four, five lines (rarely a longer series), in an attempt to catch something of the Upanishadic and Kalidasian movement, so far as that is a possibility in English... it is too difficult a rhythm – structure to be a model”43 Rarely any sentence breaks off in the middle of a line; rarely a sentence has a caesura and rarely pauses except when the last line is complete. Such end – stopping has a decided advantage; it gives a graver and a more contained movement, bringing to the fore the mystic truth in direct rhythmic movement. Take, for example, the opening line of Savitri and that of Paradise Lost:
It was the hour before the Gods awake.
— Savitri
and,
Of Man’s first disobedience, and the fruit
— Paradise Lost
In the former there is no enjambment and as a result it conveys a more contained movement; the mystic truth occupies the place of prominence in direct rhythmic movement. In the latter example, the enjambment takes away and dilutes the direct rhythmic movement of the line. The line from Savitri has grandeur in simplicity in its monosyllabic words; no poetic embellishment, no ‘poetic diction’; bare statement of a truth seen.
Take another line
The strength, the silence of the gods were hers.
This is not ‘an ordinary line with a superficial significance’. The poet’s comment on this line: “to me it meant very much and expressed with a bare but sufficient power what I always regarded as a great reality and a great experience.”44
Sri Aurobindo uses his blank verse to another very significant purpose. Whenever a verse or a passage glides into another of a higher plane of inspiration, the poet intersperses a line ‘so as to give the intellect the foothold of a clear unadorned statement of the gist of what is coming, before taking a higher flight. This is of course a technique for long poems and for long descriptions.’ This is Sri Aurobindo’s well known ‘connecting line’ that prepares the reader for what is to follow. The line
All in her pointed to a nobler kind.
prepares the reader for the magnificent, sublime and Overmind flight of the lines to follow where the poet describes Savitri’s divinity and her divine mission. The line earlier quoted
The strength, the silence of the gods were hers
‘has a similar motive of completeness’. These single lines of blank verse form ‘very good poetry with the strength and pointed directness, not intellectualised like Pope’s but intuitive’. Such lines are found in Marlowe ‘supporting adequately and often more than adequately his mighty lines.’
A discussion on Savitri’s blank verse may be concluded in the poet’s own words. “The structure of the pentameter blank verse in Savitri is of its own kind and different in plan from the blank verse that has come to be ordinarily used in English poetry. It dispenses with enjambment or uses it very sparingly and only when a special effect is intended; each line must be strong enough to stand by itself, while at the same time it fits harmoniously into the sentence or paragraph like stone added to stone; the sentence consists usually of one, two, three or four lines, more rarely five or six or seven: a strong close for the line and a strong close for the sentence are almost indispensable except when some kind of inconclusive cadence is desirable; there must be no laxity or diffusiveness in the rhythm or in the metrical flow anywhere, — there must be flow but not a loose flux. This gives an added importance to what comes at the close of the line and this placing is used very often to give emphasis and prominence to a key phrase or a key idea, especially those which have to be often reiterated in the thought and vision of the poem so as to recall attention to things that are universal or fundamental or otherwise of the first consequence – whether for the immediate subject or in the total plan. It is this use that is served here by the reiteration at the end of the line.
“I have not anywhere in Savitri written anything... merely to produce a rhetorical effect; what I am trying to do everywhere in the poem is to express exactly something seen, something felt or experienced; if for instance, I indulge in the wealth – burdened line or passage, it is not merely for the pleasure of the indulgence, but because there is that burden... in the vision or the experience.”45
Inspiration in Savitri and its Aesthetics:
Though Savitri surpasses all European epics as far as its extent and dimensions are concerned, yet length alone does not raise it to its massive epic stature. It is the sustained and high breath of the poet’s inspiration that gives it its greatness. In writing Savitri Sri Aurobindo has resorted to many recastings and rewritings of the draft “as inspiration points out to me — so that nothing shall fall below the minimum height which I have fixed for it”.46 Without those ‘retouchings’ and rewritings, the epic would not have been a magnum opus at all’. The mind does not work at these ‘recastings’. The verse and the passage come as a stream beginning at the first line and ending at the last.’ In such a composition the problem is not making a few changes in individual lines. “The real finality only comes when all is felt as a perfect whole.... though some may rise above it and also all the parts in their proper place making the right harmony. It is an inner feeling that has to decide that... Unfortunately the mind can’t arrange these things, one has to wait till the absolutely right thing comes in a sort of receptive self-opening and calling-down condition.”47 This power is what the poets in all ages have called their inspiration.
Savitri originates from various planes of Overhead inspiration. The poem was originally written from “a mixture perhaps of the inner mind, psychic, poetic intelligence, sublimised vital, afterwards with the Higher Mind, often illumined and intuitivised, intervening... As it now stands there is a general Overmind influence, I believe, sometimes coming fully through, sometimes colouring the poetry of the other higher planes fused together, sometimes lifting any one of these higher planes to its highest...”48 In such a poem created from so many planes of consciousness, ‘there is bound to be a much variation of tone’. As Sri Aurobindo explains, “In the new form it will be a sort of poetic philosophy of the Spirit and of Life much profounder in its substance and vaster in its scope than was intended in the original poem. I am trying of course to keep it at a very high level of inspiration.”49
Oft inspiration with her lightning feet,
A sudden messenger from the all-seeing tops,
Traversed the soundless corridors of his mind
Bringing her rhythmic sense of hidden things.
— Savitri 38
These lines of Sri Aurobindo give in a gist the working of poetic inspiration. First, inspiration arrives with ‘her lightning feet’, all of a sudden, not thought out by the poet. Secondly, it comes from the height of the consciousness in which the poet is stationed; higher the plane of consciousness the more true and revealing shall be the inspiration, ‘the all-seeing tops’. Thirdly, inspiration brings the sense and truth of hidden things clothed in the rhythmic form which is proper to that plane of consciousness.
The quality and intensity of the inspiration depends entirely on the plane of consciousness the poet is in. And once the poet is on the ‘all – seeing tops’ of the Overhead consciousness, ‘the intense creatrix’, inspiration, works from that height and poetry becomes the Mantra of the Real, ‘the undying Word’:
As if from a golden phial of the All-Bliss,
A joy of light, a joy of sudden sight,
A rapture of the thrilled undying Word
Poured into his heart as into an empty cup.
— Ibid.
and
An apocalypse of a world of images
Enters into the kingdom of the seer.
— Ibid.
With her ‘lifted finger’s keen unthinkable tip’ inspiration ‘bares with a stab of flame the closed Beyond’, and with inspired speech ‘plundered the Unknowable’s vast estate’.
Sri Aurobindo combines in his person the dual aspects of a yogi par excellence and a great poet. In his yogic exploration he discovers realm after higher realm of consciousness that lie beyond our mind consciousness. As a new plane of consciousness is discovered and he is established in his new status, a new vision of the Truth is unveiled which clothes itself in a new poetic speech under the inspiration from that plane. This is the reason why there are so many recastings of Savitri. Because the consciousness has been constantly rising, the epic is not at all static but a movement, a passage – way to things beyond. Many are these planes of consciousness that Sri Aurobindo discovers during his yogic exploration. At the highest level of these Overhead planes of consciousness is the Overmind. But the Overmind inspiration, opines Sri Aurobindo, is not strictly from ‘a transcendental consciousness’; this applies to ‘the supramental and to the Sachchidananda consciousness’, though something of the transcendental consciousness may infiltrate into the Overmind. The Overmind is strictly a cosmic consciousness that is behind every particular in the cosmos and is ‘the source of all our mental, vital or physical actualities and possibilities’. All the planes of Overhead levels of consciousness and the inspiration therefrom go to the making of this superb and unique epic.
A splendid achievement of Sri Aurobindo in his poetic writings and specially in Savitri is the perfect unification and harmonisation of Overhead vision with the Overhead word-rhythm. Take the example where the poet by concrete vision and magnificent rhythmic movement of poetic speech describes Aswapati’s climb to high ‘mystical altitudes’. Listen to the mantric rhythm —
Across a void retreating sky he glimpsed
Through a last glimmer and drift of vanishing stars
The superconscient realms of motionless Peace
Where judgment ceases and the word is mute
And the Unconceived lies pathless and alone.
— Savitri : 33-4
In all poetry there must be some kind of poetical aesthesis both in the poet and the recipient; “but aesthetics is of many kinds and the ordinary kind is not sufficient for appreciating the Overhead element in poetry”,50 says Sri Aurobindo. It is not easy to satisfy ‘the intellect’s demand’ for a clear and positive explanation of the Overhead note in poetry, specially of the Overmind poetry. Sri Aurobindo comments “it has to be felt and cannot be explained or accounted for. One has an intuitive feeling, a recognition of something familiar to one’s experience or one’s deeper perception in the substance and the rhythm or in one or the other which rings out and cannot be gainsaid”.51 It is not always a sense of the Infinite and the One that is there in the Overhead poetic expression. On the contrary it can deal with many other things. “It is not any strict adhesion to a transcendental view of things that constitutes this kind of poetry, but something behind not belonging to the mind or the vital and physical consciousness and with that a certain quality or power in the language and the rhythm which helps to bring out that deeper something.”52 There is in this poetry ‘an unusual quality in the rhythm’, in the intonation and the association of the sounds ‘linked together by a sort of inevitable felicity’, an unusual bringing together of words which has ‘a power to force a deep sense on the mind’, and still more on ‘on the subtle nerves’, so as to bring out into the open ‘the very body and soul of the thing seen or felt’. The rhythm is of the same nature, ‘a direct straightforward, lucid and lucent movement welling out limpidly straight’ from the source. (For a more detailed account of Sri Aurobindo’s theory of poetical creation and Overmind Aesthesis found in Savitri, readers are referred to sections under similar titles in chapter One.)
The Overhead creation of Sri Aurobindo and his Overmind aesthesis herald a new age of poetry and poetics. To appreciate and enjoy this poetry, a threefold method of reading approach is to be adopted. For Overhead poetry can never be appreciated or enjoyed by the normal mind consciousness; there is need ‘ to develop our aesthetic sense to a pitch subtler than in our normal response to poetry’. Secondly, there must be a stilling of our mind and vital so that the poet’s overhead vision may not get coloured; to receive the truth of the poet’s vision, a still receptivity of the reader’s mind, ‘a sort of receptive self-opening and calling – down condition’ is required. Thirdly, as the Overhead poetry has its own rhythm of poetic expression, so in ‘the in-drawn stillness’ the reader has to listen to the new rhythm. In other words Savitri has to be read aloud as one chants mantras; the vibrations of the word sound enter the reader’s inner being and create a true mantric effect. Savitri is from beyond the level of human mind and trying to understand it by the mind will baffle our effort or, as Sethna says, we get no more than a ‘run of disconnected flashes’ or still worse ‘a jostle of grandiose abstractions’.
One important characteristic of the Overmind poetry is its perfection and harmony of all its elements. “There is the perfection of the language and there is the perfection of the word-music and the rhythm, beauty of speech and beauty of sound, but there is also the quality of the thing said which counts for something. If we consider only word and sound and what in themselves they evoke, we arrive at the application of the theory of art for art’s sake to poetry.”52 Not only all these have to be perfect in themselves but they have to live together in perfect harmony in the poem. This naturally applies to the poetic medium too, in the case of Savitrii to its blank verse. In this sense it may be said that blank verse has attained in the hand of Sri Aurobindo its fulness, harmony and perfection.
A general assessment of Savitri
Savitri is not a kind of poem that we are accustomed to read in the world of poetry. It has not been written as poems are usually and commonly written for the general reader. To give any assessment of the poem worth some value, one must examine in depth two very significant comments made by the poet regarding the composition of Savitri:
(1) “But if I had to write for the general reader I could not have written Savitri at all. It is in fact for myself that I have written it and for those who can lend themselves to the subject-matter, images, technique of mystic poetry,”54 and
(2) “Savitri is the record of a seeing, of an experience which is not of the common kind and is often very far from what the general human mind sees and experiences.”55 Combine these two statements and one gets some inkling of the purpose behind the poem’s creation and its nature.
Sri Aurobindo is a yogi; he has to keep for the posterity a record of his exceptional truth seeing and uncommon experiences his new Integral Yoga provides. Sri Aurobindo is a poet too and he makes Savitri ‘a measure and a record of his yogic ascension’. Besides, the poem becomes a field for his poetical experiment, to ‘find out how much poetry can be created from the highest spiritual summit’. In this sense his statement ‘for myself I have written it’ stands justified. Also with every new yogic ascension the poet makes a recast of the poem from that plane “I made some eight or ten recasts of it originally under the old insufficient inspiration. Afterwards I am altogether rewriting it....”56 In other words to call Savitri his spiritual autobiography cannot be a misnomer. According to Sri Aurobindo his life has not been lived on the surface for anyone to see and write his biography, so he leaves for us his spiritual autobiography in the form of Savitri. Here lies the newness of Savitri, an epic of the soul ‘most inwardly seen’. Yet nothing of the earthly life has been left out; its philosophy and religion, literature and poetry, its social and political aspects, its scientific ideas and theories. All that is conceivable and all that is inconceivable, all that is born and not yet born, have a place in the poem.
As such Savitri is revelatory and stands very high among such poems. “It is the supreme revelation of Sri Aurobindo’s vision.” To understand its meaning intellectually, by one’s ‘labouring mind’, may give the meaning of a form of words or at most one finds some ‘bright hints’. But the truth embodied in the revelatory word of the mantra ever eludes him. In such a poem the Word repeats itself in rhythmic music. It is the rhythmic vibrations of the verse that penetrate the silent soul, and bring an ecstasy of some beatific vision of the Divine. The poem is a direct poetising of the Divine, ‘a concrete contact with the Divine’s presence’ as Sethna would express it. Savitri has perfectly achieved its aim at linking our consciousness with the Divine; it unmasks the unmanifest and “tears away the veil from God and life” (Savitri: 660)
Savitri has been written from many planes of the Overhead consciousness, mainly Illumined Mind, Intuitive Mind and as it now stands there is a general Overmind influence.” Let us see how the poem describes the working of and creation from these Overhead planes of inspiration.
1. The Illumined Mind.
There are vasts of vision and eternal suns,
Oceans of an immortal luminousness,
Flame-hills assaulting heaven with their peaks,
There dwelling all becomes a blaze of sight;
A burning head of vision leads the mind,
Thought trails behind it its long comet tail;
The heart glows, an illuminate and seer,
And sense is kindled into identity.
— Savitri : 660
2. The Intuitive Mind
In a wide opening of its native sky
Intuition’s lightnings range in a bright pack
Hunting all hidden truths out of their lairs,
Its fiery edge of seeing absolute
Cleaves into locked unknown retreats of self,
Rummages the sky-recesses of the brain,
Lights up the occult chambers of the heart;
Its spear-point ictus of discovery
Pressed on the cover of name, the screen of form,
Strips bare the secret soul of all that is.
Thought there has revelation’s sun bright eyes;
The Word, a mighty and inspiring voice,
Enters Truth’s inmost cabin of privacy
And tears away the veil from God and Life.
— Savitri : 660
3. The Overmind
Then stretches the boundless finite’s last expanse,
The cosmic empire of the Overmind,
Time’s buffer state bordering Eternity,
Too vast for the experience of man’s soul:
All here gathers beneath one golden sky:
The Powers that build the cosmos station take
In its house of infinite possibility;
Each god from their builds his own nature’s world;
Ideas are phalanxed like a group of suns,
Each marhsalling his company of rays.
Thought crowds in masses seized by one regard;
All Time is one body, Space a single look:
There is the Godhead’s universal gaze
And there the boundaries of Immortal Mind:
The line that parts and joins the hemispheres
— Savitri : 660 – 1
Savitri is a creation mostly from these three planes of overhead consciousness.
What is Savitri?
This section of the chapter forms the most important part from the point of view of actual reading of this grand poem. No one else is a greater authority on Savitri than the Divine Mother, beside, of course, its poet. The content of this section is entirely based on a Talk of the Mother dated 05.11.1967. The talk has been published in the book Perspectives of Savitri (ed.2000) under the title ‘The Mother on Savitri – a talk’.
The Mother exhorts the disciple to read Savitri everyday and says: “It does not matter if you do not understand it – Savitri, read it always. You will see that every time you read it, something new will be revealed to you. Each time you will get a new glimpse, each time a new experience, things which were not there, things you did not understand arise and suddenly become clear. Always an unexpected vision comes up through the words and lines... This is what happens invariably. Always your experience is enriched, it is a revelation at each step.” (page 44)
Giving a genesis of the poem, she says : “You know, before writing Savitri Sri Aurobindo said to me: ‘I am impelled to launch on a new adventure; I was hesitant in the beginning, but now I am decided...’ And the day He actually began it, He told me : ‘ I have launched myself in a rudderless boat upon the vastness of the Infinite’.” (page 44-45)
The Mother continues her talk: “It may then be said that Savitri is a revelation, it is a meditation, it is a quest of the Infinite, the Eternal. To read Savitri is indeed to practise Yoga, spiritual concentration; one can find there all that is needed to realise the Divine. Each step of Yoga is noted here, including the secret of all other yogas. Surely, if one sincerely follows what is revealed here in each line one will reach finally the transformation of the Supramental Yoga. It is truly the infallible guide who never abandons you; its support is always there for him who wants to follow the path. Each verse of Savitri is like a revealed Mantra which surpasses all that man possessed by way of knowledge and, I repeat this, the words are expressed and arranged in such a way that the sonority of the rhythm leads you to the origin of sound, which is OM.” (p. 45-46)
Regarding the authenticities of the revelations she says: “These are experiences lived by Him, realities, supracosmic truths. He experienced all these as one experiences joy or sorrow, physically. He walked into the darkness of inconscience, even in the neighbourhood of death, endured the sufferings of perdition, and emerged from the mud, the world-misery to breathe the sovereign plenitude and enter the supreme Ananda. He crossed all these realms, went through the consequences, suffered and endured physically what one cannot imagine. Nobody till today has suffered like Him. He accepted suffering to transform suffering into the joy of union with the Supreme. It is something unique and incomparable in the history of the world. He is the first to have traced the path in the Unknown, so that we may be able to walk with certitude towards the Supermind. He has made the work easy for us. Savitri is his whole Yoga of Transformation, and this Yoga appears now for the first time in the earth consciousness.” (page 47)
“And I think that man is not yet ready to receive it. It is too high and too vast for him. He cannot understand it, grasp it; for it is not by the mind that one can understand Savitri. One needs spiritual experiences in order to understand and assimilate it. The farther one advances on the path of Yoga, the more does one assimilate and the better. No, it is something which will be appreciated only in the future, it is the poetry of tomorrow of which He has spoken in The Future Poetry. It is too subtle, too refined, — it is not in the mind or through the mind, it is in meditation that Savitri is revealed.” (page 47)
“....All the secrets that man possesses, He has revealed, — as well as all that awaits him in the future; all this is found in the depth of Savitri. But one must have the knowledge to discover it all, the experience of the planes of consciousness, the experience of the Supermind, even the experience of the conquest of Death. He has noted all the stages, marked each step in order to advance integrally in the Integral Yoga.” (page 46)
How to read Savitri?
In the same talk the Mother speaks on the subject of how one should read Savitri. She says “But you must not read it as you read other books or newspapers. You must read with an empty head, a blank and vacant mind, without there being any other thought; you must concentrate much, remain empty, calm and open; then the words, rhythms, vibrations will penetrate directly to this white page, will put their stamp upon the brain, will explain themselves without your making any effort.
Savitri alone is sufficient to make you climb to the highest peaks. If truly one knows how to meditate on Savitri, one will receive all the help one needs. For him who wishes to follow this path, it is a concrete help as though the Lord himself were taking you by the hand and leading you to the destined goal. And then, every question, however personal it may be, has its answer here, every difficulty finds its solution herein; indeed there is everything that is necessary for doing the Yoga.
My child, everyday you are going to read Savitri, read properly, with the right attitude, concentrating a little before opening the pages and trying to keep the mind as empty as possible, absolutely without a thought. The direct road is through the heart. I tell you, if you try to really concentrate with this aspiration you can light the flame, the psychic flame, the flame of purification in a very short time, perhaps in a few days. What you cannot do normally, you can do with the help of Savitri. Try and you will see how very different it is, how new; read with this attitude, with this something at the back of your consciousness, as though it were an offering to Sri Aurobindo. You know it is charged, fully charged with consciousness, — as if Savitri were a being, a real guide. I tell you, whoever wanting to practise Yoga tries sincerely and feels the necessity for it, will be able to climb with the help of Savitri to the highest rung of the ladder of Yoga, will be able to find the secret that Savitri represents. And this without the help of a Guru. And he will be able to practise it anywhere. For him Savitri alone will be the guide; for, all that he needs he will find in Savitri. If he remains very quiet while facing a difficulty, or when he does not know where to turn to go forward and how to overcome obstacles, for all these hesitations and incertitudes which overwhelm us at every moment, he will have the necessary indications, and the necessary concrete help. If he remains very calm, open, if he aspires sincerely, always he will be as if led by the hand. If he has faith, the will to give himself and essential sincerity he will reach the final goal.
“Indeed, Savitri is something concrete, living, it is all replete, packed with consciousness, it is the supreme knowledge above all human philosophies and religions. It is the spiritual path, it is Yoga, Tapasya, Sadhana, everything, in its single body. Savitri has an extraordinary power, it gives out vibrations for him who can receive them, the true vibrations of each stage of consciousness. It is incomparable, it is truth in its plenitude, the Truth Sri Aurobindo brought down on the earth. My child, one must try to find the secret that Savitri represents, the prophetic message Sri Aurobindo reveals there for us. This the work before you, it is hard but it is worth the trouble.” (page 48-49)
This is Savitrii and this the way to read it.
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