Aurobindo 27-Savitri-Book -2 Poem by Indira Renganathan

An appreciation on Savitri
Book II The Book of the Traveller of the Worlds
Canto V The Godheads of the Little Life
Words within inverted commas are Aurobindo's

'A fixed and narrow power with rigid forms,
He saw the empire of the little life,
An unhappy corner in eternity.'
'Then, hoping to learn the secret of this world
He peered across its scanty fringe of sight, '
'A busy restless uncouth populace
Teemed in their dusky unnoted thousands there.'
I bow, what an expression wonderful on 'uncouth populace'!

'In a mist of secrecy wrapping the world-scene
The little deities of Time's nether act
Who work remote from Heaven's controlling eye,
Plotted, unknown to the creatures whom they move,
The small conspiracies of this petty reign
Amused with the small contrivings, the brief hopes
And little eager steps and little ways'
' And the crouch and ignominy of creeping life.'

'Astonished by the unaccustomed glow,
As if immanent in the shadows started up
Imps with wry limbs and carved beast visages,
Sprite-prompters goblin-wizened or faery-small,
And genii fairer but unsouled and poor
And fallen beings, their heavenly portion lost,
And errant divinities trapped in Time's dust.'
Ignorant and dangerous wills but armed with power..'

'Out of the greyness of a dim background
Their whispers come, an inarticulate force,
Awake in mind an echoing thought or word,
To their sting of impulse the heart's sanction draw,
And in that little Nature do their work
And fill its powers and creatures with unease.'


............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 2 Canto 4

Page 151

It lived upon the margin of the Idea
Protected by Ignorance as in a shell.

He plunged his gaze into the siege of mist
That held this ill-lit straitened continent
Ringed with the skies and seas of ignorance
And kept it safe from Truth and Self and Light.

As when a searchlight stabs the Night's blind breast
And dwellings and trees and figures of men appear
As if revealed to an eye in Nothingness,
All lurking things were torn out of their veils
And held up in his vision's sun-white blaze.

Page 152

A trepidant and motley multitude,
A strange pell-mell of magic artisans,
Was seen moulding the plastic clay of life,
An elfin brood, an elemental kind.

Its seed of joy they curse with sorrow's fruit,
Put out with error's breath its scanty lights
And turn its surface truths to falsehood's ends,