Aurobindo 132 Savitri Book 9 Poem by Indira Renganathan

'As thoughts stand mute on a despairing verge
Where the last depths plunge into nothingness
And the last dreams must end, they paused; '
'The Woman first affronted the Abyss
Daring to journey through the eternal Night.
Armoured with light she advanced her foot to plunge
Into the dread and hueless vacancy; '
On par with Savitri's beautiful venture Thou words...

'A mystery of terror's boundlessness,
Gathering its hungry strength the huge pitiless void
Surrounded slowly with its soundless depths,
And monstrous, cavernous, a shapeless throat
Devoured her into its shadowy strangling mass,
The fierce spiritual agony of a dream.'
'A curtain of impenetrable dread,
The darkness hung around her cage of sense'

'As disappears a golden lamp in gloom
Borne into distance from the eyes' desire,
Into the shadows vanished Savitri.
There was no course, no path, no end or goal: '
'She saw no more the vague tremendous god,
Her eyes had lost their luminous Satyavan.'
'Yet not for this her spirit failed, but held
More deeply than the bounded senses can'

'Solitary in the anguish of the void
She lived in spite of death, she conquered still;
In vain her puissant being was oppressed:
Her heavy long monotony of pain
Tardily of its fierce self-torture tired.'
Yet of 'let not loose' was mindful Savitri

My consciousness this moment,
O'Guru, I'm in awe in invincible heights
Ineffable Thee embellishing poetic creation
My inquisitive apprehension, erring Thee may opine
May there so, let Savitri in my self arise
Aroused there so be knowledge and fortune

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Note; Some more inspiring descriptive and
informative lines from Book 9 Canto 2


Page 582

Heaven leaned towards them like a cloudy brow
Of menace through the dim and voiceless hush.


in their front
Were glooms like shadowy wings, behind them, pale,
The lifeless evening was a dead man's gaze.

But still in its lone niche of templed strength
Motionless, her flame-bright spirit, mute, erect,
Burned like a torch-fire from a windowed room
Pointing against the darkness' sombre breast.

Immortal, unappalled, her spirit faced
The danger of the ruthless eyeless waste.

Page 583

A curtain of impenetrable dread,
The darkness hung around her cage of sense
As, when the trees have turned to blotted shades
And the last friendly glimmer fades away,
Around a bullock in the forest tied
By hunters closes in no empty night.

it seemed
A hollow gulf of sterile emptiness,
A zero oblivious of the sum it closed,
An abnegation of the Maker's joy
Saved by no wide repose, no depth of peace.


Long hours, since long it seems when sluggish time
Is measured by the throbs of the soul's pain,
In an unreal darkness empty and drear
She travelled treading on the corpse of life,
Lost in a blindness of extinguished souls.

Page 585

Serpentine in the gleam the darkness lolled,
Its black hoods jewelled with the mystic glow;
Its dull sleek folds shrank back and coiled and slid,
As though they felt all light a cruel pain
And suffered from the pale approach of hope.