Aurobindo-26-Savitri-Book -2 Poem by Indira Renganathan

Aurobindo-26-Savitri-Book -2



An appreciation on Savitri
Book IIThe Book of the Traveller of the Worlds
Canto IVThe Kingdoms of the Little Life
Words within inverted commas are Aurobindo's

'The spirit in a finite ignorant world
Must rescue so its prisoned consciousness'
'Then slowly it gathers mass, looks up at Light.'
'This Nature lives tied to her origin,
A clutch of nether force is on her still; '
Out of unconscious depths her instincts leap;
A neighbour is her life to insentient Nought.
Under this law an ignorant world was made.'

'In a mysterious dispensation's law
A Wisdom that prepares its far-off ends
Planned so to start her slow aeonic game.'
'Then came a fierier breath of waking Life,
And there arose from the dim gulf of things
The strange creations of a thinking sense,
Existences half-real and half-dream.'
'A life was there that hoped not to survive: '

In a dwarf model of humanity
Nature now launched the extreme experience
And master-point of her design's caprice,
Luminous result of her half-conscious climb
On rungs twixt her sublimities and grotesques
To massive from infinitesimal shapes,
To a subtle balancing of body and soul,
To an order of intelligent littleness.'

'The veiled spectator watching from their depths
Fixed not his inward eye upon himself
Nor turned to find the author of the plot,
He saw the drama only and the stage.'
'A little light in a great darkness born,
Life knew not where it went nor whence it came.'

............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 thereso, let Savitri in my self arise
Aroused thereso be knowledge and fortune
============================================

Note: Some more inspiring, descriptive and informative
lines from Book 2 Canto 4

Page 140

A neighbour is her life to insentient Nought.
Under this law an ignorant world was made.

Page 140&141

In the passion and self-loss of the Infinite
When all was plunged in the negating Void,
Non-Being's night could never have been saved
If Being had not plunged into the dark
Carrying with it its triple mystic cross.

Page 141

A game of hide-and-seek in twilit rooms,
A play of love and hate and fear and hope
Continues in the nursery of mind
Its hard and heavy romp of self-born twins.


Page 142

A seeking Power found out its road to form,
Patterns were built of love and joy and pain
And symbol figures for the moods of Life.


An insect hedonism fluttered and crawled
And basked in a sunlit Nature's surface thrills,
And dragon raptures, python agonies
Crawled in the marsh and mire and licked the sun.

Page 142&143

A body that knew not its own soul within,
There lived and longed, had wrath and joy and grief;
A mind was there that met the objective world
As if a stranger or enemy at its door:
Its thoughts were kneaded by the shocks of sense;

Page 143

Mind looked on Nature with unknowing eyes,
Adored her boons and feared her monstrous strokes.

It pondered not on the magic of her laws,
It thirsted not for the secret wells of Truth,
But made a register of crowding facts
And strung sensations on a vivid thread:

It hunted and it fled and sniffed the winds,
Or slothed inert in sunshine and soft air:
It sought the engrossing contacts of the world,
But only to feed the surface sense with bliss.

Page 144

In walls of stone fenced round they worked and warred,
Did by a banded selfishness a small good
Or wrought a dreadful wrong and cruel pain
On sentient lives and thought they did no ill.

Page 145

Instinct was formed; in memory's crowded sleep
The past lived on as in a bottomless sea:

Page 146

Behind all moved seeking for vessels to hold
A first raw vintage of the grapes of God,
On earth's mud a spilth of the supernal Bliss,
Intoxicating the stupefied soul and mind
A heady wine of rapture dark and crude,
Dim, uncast yet into spiritual form,
Obscure inhabitant of the world's blind core,
An unborn godhead's will, a mute Desire.

Page 1487149

A little joy and knowledge satisfied
This little being tied into a knot
And hung on a bulge of its environment,
A little curve cut off in measureless Space,
A little span of life in all vast Time.


Page 149

In a death-closed passage saw life's start and end
As though a blind alley were creation's sign,
As if for this the soul had coveted birth
In the wonderland of a self-creating world
And the opportunities of cosmic Space.


Page 150

Although for action, not for wisdom made,
Thought was its apex- or its gutter's rim:


Out of a slow confused embroiled self-search
Mind grew to a clarity cut out, precise,
A gleam enclosed in a stone ignorance.

End of Book 2-Canto 4

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