Aurobindo 14-Savitri-Book -1 Poem by Indira Renganathan

An appreciation on Savitri-
Book I The Book of Beginnings-
Canto V The Yoga of the King:
The Yoga of the Spirit's Freedom and Greatness
Words within inverted commas are Aurobindo's

'As thus it rose, to meet him bare and pure
A strong Descent leaped down. A Might, a Flame,
A Beauty half-visible with deathless eyes,
A violent Ecstasy, a Sweetness dire,
Enveloped him with its stupendous limbs
And penetrated nerve and heart and brain
That thrilled and fainted with the epiphany:
His nature shuddered in the Unknown's grasp.'

'His wakened mind became an empty slate
On which the Universal and Sole could write.'
'Eternity's contact broke the moulds of sense.'
'The imprisoned deity rent its magic fence.'
'The python coils of the restricting Law
Could not restrain the swift arisen God:
Abolished were the scripts of destiny.'
'He saw unpathed, unwalled, his titan scope.'

'All once impossible deemed could now become
A natural limb of possibility,
A new domain of normalcy supreme.'
'All's miracle here and can by miracle change.
This is that secret Nature's edge of might.'
'Across the unfolding of the seas of self
Appeared the deathless countries of the One.'
And' He broke into another Space and Time.'

Like a child in primary class I touched this book
My curious eyes as passing through the pages
Bewared my heart my mind 'be wakeful'..
I became an alerted child not to misconstrue
Thou unsurpassable poetic beauty and Thine'reality
I pursued bowing Thee with wonderment that further pursues

............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

End of book-1
===========================

Note: Some more inspiring descriptive linesfrom
Book-1 canto-5

Page 81

In a moment shorter than death, longer than Time,
By a Power more ruthless than Love, happier than Heaven,

An Omniscient knowing without sight or thought,
An indecipherable Omnipotence,
A mystic Form that could contain the worlds,
Yet make one human breast its passionate shrine,
Drew him out of his seeking loneliness
Into the magnitudes of God's embrace.

As when a timeless Eye annuls the hours
Abolishing the agent and the act,
So now his spirit shone out wide, blank, pure:

A fire that seemed the body of a god
Consumed the limiting figures of the past
And made large room for a new self to live.

Page 82

As through a dress the wearer's shape is seen,
There reached through forms to the hidden absolute
A cosmic feeling and transcendent sight.

Illusion lost her aggrandising lens;

As with a sound of thunder and of seas,
Vast barriers crashed around the huge escape.

Immutably coeval with the world,
Circle and end of every hope and toil
Inexorably drawn round thought and act,
The fixed immovable peripheries
Effaced themselves beneath the Incarnate's tread.

Page 83

The great hammer-beats of a pent-up world-heart
Burst open the narrow dams that keep us safe
Against the forces of the universe.

All was uncovered to his sealless eye.
A secret Nature stripped of her defence,
Once in a dreaded half-light formidable,
Overtaken in her mighty privacy
Lay bare to the burning splendour of his will.

In shadowy chambers lit by a strange sun
And opening hardly to hid mystic keys
Her perilous arcanes and hooded Powers
Confessed the advent of a mastering Mind
And bore the compulsion of a time-born gaze.

Page 84

An almighty occultist erects in Space
This seeming outward world which tricks the sense;
He weaves his hidden threads of consciousness,
He builds bodies for his shapeless energy;

Out of the unformed and vacant Vast he has made
His sorcery of solid images,
His magic of formative number and design,
The fixed irrational links none can annul,
This criss-cross tangle of invisible laws;

All she new-fashions by the thought and word,
Compels all substance by her wand of Mind.

Page 84&85

Mind is a mediator divinity:
Its powers can undo all Nature's work:
Mind can suspend or change earth's concrete law.
Affranchised from earth-habit's drowsy seal
The leaden grip of Matter it can break;
Indifferent to the angry stare of Death,
It can immortalise a moment's work:
A simple fiat of its thinking force,
The casual pressure of its slight assent
Can liberate the Energy dumb and pent
Within its chambers of mysterious trance:

It makes the body's sleep a puissant arm,
Holds still the breath, the beatings of the heart,
While the unseen is found, the impossible done,
Communicates without means the unspoken thought;
It moves events by its bare silent will,
Acts at a distance without hands or feet.

This giant Ignorance, this dwarfish Life
It can illumine with a prophet sight,
Invoke the bacchic rapture, the Fury's goad,
In our body arouse the demon or the god,
Call in the Omniscient and Omnipotent,
Awake a forgotten Almightiness within.

In its own plane a shining emperor,
Even in this rigid realm, Mind can be king:

Page 86

A mediatrix with veiled and nameless gods
Whose alien will touches our human life,
Imitating the World-Magician's ways
She invents for her self-bound free-will its grooves
And feigns for magic's freaks a binding cause.

From every source she has taken her cunning means,
She draws from the free-love marriage of the planes
Elements for her creation's tour-de-force:

A wonder-weft of knowledge incalculable,
A compendium of divine invention's feats
She has combined to make the unreal true
Or liberate suppressed reality:

In her unhedged Circean wonderland
Pell-mell she shepherds her occult mightinesses;

Page 88

A magic porch of entry glimmering
Quivered in a penumbra of screened Light,
A court of the mystical traffic of the worlds,
A balcony and miraculous facade.
Above her lightened high immensities;

Her gulfs stood nude, her far transcendences
Flamed in transparencies of crowded light.

Page 89

A last high world was seen where all worlds meet;
In its summit gleam where Night is not nor Sleep,
The light began of the Trinity supreme.

Page 90

A grand solution closed the long impasse
In which the heights of mortal effort end.
A reconciling Wisdom looked on life;

Page 91

As if the strophes of a cosmic ode,
A hierarchy of climbing harmonies
Peopled with voices and with visages
Aspired in a crescendo of the Gods
From Matter's abysses to the Spirit's peaks.

Sunbelts of knowledge, moonbelts of delight
Stretched out in an ecstasy of widenesses
Beyond our indigent corporeal range.
There he could enter, there awhile abide.

End of book-1
Indira Renganathan