Aurobindo-4-Savitri-Book -1 Poem by Indira Renganathan

An appreciation on Savitri-
Book IThe Book of Beginnings-canto-2-The Issue
Words within inverted commas are Aurobindo's


The approaching end, who but Savitri could dare..
'Dying, it lived imperishably in her'
Future stood on the reviewing spectral Time
But rewinds were no wonder simultaneous
On childhood, youth and love and merry and all
Like any doomed mortal transient regardless of age
'Twelve passionate months led in a day of fate.'
Only'her will must cancel her body's destiny.'

'Our present fate, child of past energies..'
So was Savitri's'past, a block on the Immortal's road'
A mighty force as helping to settle karma's crops
Don't our selves all so battle for a new dawn
Alike must 'make a rased ground and shape anew her fate.
'She must plead her case upon extinction's verge'
To revive Satyavan and his body from lightless nought
To fasten their two selves onto one soul

Now must Savitri 'measure the Infinite's night.'
A moment so many weak hearts these days but fail,
A moment frail souls wail on the dead-verge of courage..
An exemplary bravery but did, thence started conquering
That 'the great and dolorous moment now was close'
'The world unknowing, for the world she stood:
No helper had she save the Strength within'
In 'titanic silence''her drama's radiant prologue lived.'

'A priestess of immaculate ecstasies
Inspired and ruled from Truth's revealing vault'
'Her inward help unbarred a gate in heaven'
'Her single will opposed the cosmic rule.'
'The great World-Mother now in her arose:
A living choice reversed fate's cold dead turn'

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

=====================

Note: Some more inspiring descriptive linesfrom
Book-1 canto-2


page 11

All that she once had hoped and dreamed and been,
Flew past her eagle-winged through memory's skies.

As in a many-hued flaming inner dawn,
Her life's broad highways and its sweet bypaths
Lay mapped to her sun-clear recording view,
From the bright country of her childhood's days
And the blue mountains of her soaring youth
And the paradise groves and peacock wings of Love
To joy clutched under the silent shadow of doom
In a last turn where heaven raced with hell.
Twelve passionate months led in a day of fate.

- - - - - - - -

An absolute supernatural darkness falls
On man sometimes when he draws near to God:
An hour arrives when fail all Nature's means;
Forced out from the protecting Ignorance
And flung back on his naked primal need,
He at length must cast from him his surface soul
And be the ungarbed entity within:

- - - - - - - - -
page12
Only the Self that builds this figure of self
Can rase the fixed interminable line
That joins these changing names, these numberless lives,
These new oblivious personalities
And keeps still lurking in our conscious acts
- - - - - - - - -

A once living story has prepared and made
Our present fate, child of past energies.
- - - - - - - - -

A colloquy of the original Gods
Meeting upon the borders of the unknown,
Her soul's debate with embodied Nothingness
Must be wrestled out on a dangerous dim background:

Her being must confront its formless Cause,
Against the universe weigh its single self.

On the bare peak where Self is alone with Nought
And life has no sense and love no place to stand,
She must plead her case upon extinction's verge,
In the world's death-cave uphold life's helpless claim
And vindicate her right to be and love.
Altered must be Nature's harsh economy;
- - - - - - - - -

page13
Acquittance she must win from her past's bond,
An old account of suffering exhaust,
Strike out from Time the soul's long compound debt
And the heavy servitudes of the Karmic Gods,
The slow revenge of unforgiving Law
And the deep need of universal pain
And hard sacrifice and tragic consequence.

- - - - - - - - -

Around her were the austere sky-pointing hills,
And the green murmurous broad deep-thoughted woods
Muttered incessantly their muffled spell.
A dense magnificent coloured self-wrapped life
Draped in the leaves' vivid emerald monotone
And set with chequered sunbeams and blithe flowers
Immured her destiny's secluded scene.
- - - - - - - - -
page15
Her mind, a sea of white sincerity,
Passionate in flow, had not one turbid wave.

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.

- - - - - - - - -

Her kindly care was a sweet temperate sun,
Her high passion a blue heaven's equipoise.
As might a soul fly like a hunted bird,
Escaping with tired wings from a world of storms,
And a quiet reach like a remembered breast,
In a haven of safety and splendid soft repose
One could drink life back in streams of honey-fire,
Recover the lost habit of happiness,
Feel her bright nature's glorious ambience,
And preen joy in her warmth and colour's rule.

- - - - - - - - - -

page 15&16

The great unsatisfied godhead here could dwell:
Vacant of the dwarf self's imprisoned air,
Her mood could harbour his sublimer breath
Spiritual that can make all things divine.
For even her gulfs were secrecies of light.
At once she was the stillness and the word,
A continent of self-diffusing peace,
An ocean of untrembling virgin fire;
- - - - - - - - - - -

Almost they saw who lived within her light
Her playmate in the sempiternal spheres
Descended from its unattainable realms
In her attracting advent's luminous wake,
The white-fire dragon-bird of endless bliss
Drifting with burning wings above her days:
- - - - - - - - - - -

A glowing orbit was her early term,
Years like gold raiment of the gods that pass;
Her youth sat throned in calm felicity.
- - - - - - - - - - -

page17&18

Here was no fabric of terrestrial make
Fit for a day's use by busy careless Powers.
An image fluttering on the screen of Fate,
Half-animated for a passing show,
Or a castaway on the ocean of Desire
Flung to the eddies in a ruthless sport
And tossed along the gulfs of Circumstance,
A creature born to bend beneath the yoke,
A chattel and a plaything of Time's lords,
Or one more pawn who comes destined to be pushed
One slow move forward on a measureless board
In the chess-play of the earth-soul with Doom,
Such is the human figure drawn by Time.
- - - - - - - - - - -

page18

In this enigma of the dusk of God,
This slow and strange uneasy compromise
Of limiting Nature with a limitless Soul,
Where all must move between an ordered Chance
And an uncaring blind Necessity,
Too high the fire spiritual dare not blaze.
If once it met the intense original Flame,
An answering touch might shatter all measures made
And earth sink down with the weight of the Infinite.

A gaol is this immense material world:

A grey tribunal of the Ignorance,
An Inquisition of the priests of Night
In judgment sit on the adventurer soul,
And the dual tables and the Karmic norm
Restrain the Titan in us and the God:

Pain with its lash, joy with its silver bribe
Guard the Wheel's circling immobility.

A bond is put on the high-climbing mind,
A seal on the too large wide-open heart;
Death stays the journeying discoverer, Life.


page20

A prayer, a master act, a king idea
Can link man's strength to a transcendent Force.
Then miracle is made the common rule,
One mighty deed can change the course of things;
A lonely thought becomes omnipotent.
All now seems Nature's massed machinery;

page20&21


A piston brain pumps out the shapes of thought,
A beating heart cuts out emotion's modes;
An insentient energy fabricates a soul.
Or the figure of the world reveals the signs
Of a tied Chance repeating her old steps
In circles around Matter's binding-posts.

End of Book 1-Canto 2