Aurobindo 41-Savitri-Book -2 Poem by Indira Renganathan

An appreciation on Savitri
Book II The Book of the Traveller of the Worlds
Canto VI The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Life
Words within inverted commas are Aurobindo's


'Being felt being even when afar
And consciousness replied to consciousness.
And yet the ultimate oneness was not there.
There was a separateness of soul from soul: '
'All was imperfect still, half-known, half-done: '
'As forms they came of the formless Infinite,
As names lived of a nameless Eternity.'
Uncertain they lived in a great climbing Space;

'A riddling answer met the riddle of things.'
'As he moved in this ether of ambiguous life,
Himself was soon a riddle to himself; '
A thousand baffling faces of the Truth
Looked at him from her forms with unknown eyes..'
'Embodied was there what we but think and feel,
Self-framed what here takes outward borrowed shapes.'
'He stood with her on meditating peaks'

'Life's secret sense is written within, above.'
'The thought that gives it sense lives far beyond; '
'It is not seen in its half-finished design.
In vain we hope to read the baffling signs
Or find the word of the half-played charade.'
'Only in that greater life a cryptic thought
Is found, is hinted some interpreting word
That makes the earth-myth a tale intelligible.'

'Here is the gap, here stops or sinks life's force; '
'This greater life wavers twixt earth and sky.'
'Death is a passage, not the goal of our walk:
Some ancient deep impulsion labours on: '
'nothing has been achieved of infinite worth: '
'A greatness yet unreached by the halting world.'


............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 6


Page 187

The beginning and the end were there occult;
A middle term worked unexplained, abrupt:
They were words that spoke to a vast wordless Truth,
They were figures crowding an unfinished sum.

Page188

Across the leaping springs of death and birth
And over shifting borders of soul-change,
A hunter on the spirit's creative track,
He followed in life's fine and mighty trails

Page 188&189

As one who spells illumined characters,
The key-book of a crabbed magician text,
He scanned her subtle tangled weird designs
And the screened difficult theorem of her clues,
Traced in the monstrous sands of desert Time
The thread beginnings of her titan works,
Watched her charade of action for some hint,
Read the No-gestures of her silhouettes,
And strove to capture in their burdened drift
The dance-fantasia of her sequences
Escaping into rhythmic mystery,
A glimmer of fugitive feet on fleeing soil.

Page 189

A sun that dazzled its own eye of sight,
A luminous enigma's brilliant hood
Lit the dense purple barrier of thought's sky:
A dim large trance showed to the night her stars.

The strange significant forms woven on her robe,
Her meaningful outlines of the souls of things
He saw, her false transparencies of thought-hue,
Her rich brocades with imaged fancies sewn
And mutable masks and broideries of disguise.

Page 190

In her green wildernesses and lurking depths,
In her thickets of joy where danger clasps delight,
He glimpsed the hidden wings of her songster hopes,
A glimmer of blue and gold and scarlet fire.

In her covert lanes, bordering her chance field-paths
And by her singing rivulets and calm lakes
He found the glow of her golden fruits of bliss
And the beauty of her flowers of dream and muse.

As if a miracle of heart's change by joy
He watched in the alchemist radiance of her suns
The crimson outburst of one secular flower
On the tree-of-sacrifice of spiritual love.

In the sleepy splendour of her noons he saw,
A perpetual repetition through the hours,
Thought's dance of dragonflies on mystery's stream
That skim but never test its murmurs' race,
And heard the laughter of her rose desires
Running as if to escape from longed-for hands,
Jingling sweet anklet-bells of fantasy.

Page 191

Impassioned he bore the sorceries of her might,
Felt laid on him her abrupt mysterious will,

Always he met a veiled and seeking Force,
An exiled goddess building mimic heavens,
A Sphinx whose eyes look up to a hidden Sun.

Page 192

As in a fragmentary half-lost design
Life's meanings fled from the pursuing eye.
Life's visage hides life's real self from sight;


Page 193

Unseen, a captive in a house of sound,
The spirit lost in the splendour of a dream
Listens to a thousand-voiced illusion's ode.


Page 194

Turned are her tears to gems of diamond pain,
Her sorrow into a magic crown of song.

A lost remembrance echoes in her depths,
A deathless longing is hers, a veiled self's call;

Astray in the echo caverns of Desire,
It guards the phantoms of a soul's dead hopes
And keeps alive the voice of perished things
Or lingers upon sweet and errant notes
Hunting for pleasure in the heart of pain.

Page 195

An evanescent music it repeats
Wasting on transience Time's eternity.
A tremolo of the voices of the hours
Oblivious screens the high intended theme
The self-embodying spirit came to play
On the vast clavichord of Nature-Force.


Here is the gap, here stops or sinks life's force;
This deficit paupers the magician's skill:

Her depths remember what she came to do,
But the mind has forgotten or the heart mistakes:
In Nature's endless lines is lost the God.

Page 196

A demigod emerging from an ape
Is all she can in our mortal element.
Here the half-god, the half-titan are her peak:
This greater life wavers twixt earth and sky.

A sense of limit haunts her masteries
And nowhere is assured content or peace:

Page 197

Our being must move eternally through Time;
Death helps us not, vain is the hope to cease;
A secret Will compels us to endure.


Page 197&198

A hundred ways to live were tried in vain:

A different picture that was still the same
Appeared upon the cosmic vague background.
Only another labyrinthine house
Of creatures and their doings and events,
A city of the traffic of bound souls,
A market of creation and her wares,
Was offered to the labouring mind and heart.
A circuit ending where it first began
Is dubbed the forward and eternal march
Of progress on perfection's unknown road.

End of Book 2-Canto 6