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Sri Aurobindos' Savitri
(an Adventure of Consciousness) |
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SAVITRI as an Epic
Introduction
In an age of modernist poetry the possibility of an epic being composed is strongly refuted by critics of poetry. To them an epic poem is solely proper to primitive ages. But mysterious are the ways of the creative spirit; the Muses of poetry when and in what form may effloresce human intellect cannot predict. One should always be prepared for pleasant and unexpected surprises from the creative spirit. On this Sri Aurobindo writes, “It is sometimes asserted that the epic is solely proper to primitive ages when the freshness of life made a story of large and simple action of supreme interest to the youthful mind of humanity, the literary epic an artificial prolongation by an intellectual age and a genuine epic poetry no longer possible now or in the future. This is to mistake form and circumstances for the central reality. The epic, a great poetic story of man or world or the gods, need not necessarily be a vigorous presentation of external action.... The epics of the soul most inwardly seen as they will be by an intuitive poetry, are his greatest possible subject, and it is this supreme kind that we shall expect from some profound and mighty voice of the future. His indeed may be the song of greatest flight that will reveal from the highest pinnacle and with the largest field of vision the destiny of the human spirit and the presence and ways and purpose of the Divinity in man and the universe.”1 In these lines, written sometimes between 1916-20, Sri Aurobindo sets aside the contention of critics that composition of an epic in modern times is not only a possibility but how truly he anticipates his own composition of an epic.
An epic, particularly the primitive or primary epic, deals with a story from the heroic age concerning some great war or exploits of the hero. An objective story is the dominant feature of this epic. Ancient epics belong to this category. The literary or secondary epics do not have a strong and pure story element. Dante’s The Divine Comedy has neither a mythological nor a historical story. It is allegorical in nature. In Milton’s Paradise Lost, too, a strong and pure story element is missing. It seems that as the epic moves away from expressing the outer life, the objective story element has been dwindling. From Milton to Sri Aurobindo, a span of about three centuries, and the epic tradition has completely revolutionised. A total reversal of the epic method now enters into English poetry; from objectivity of the past the epic writing moves to pure subjectivism in Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri. To quote the poet himself: “Savitri is the record of a seeing, of an experience which is not of the common kind and is often far from what the general human mind sees and experiences. You must not expect appreciation or understanding from the general public or even from many at the first touch; as I have pointed out, there must be a new extension of consciousness and aesthesis to appreciate a new kind of mystic poetry”.2
The age of adventures, we are told, is over and writing an epic in the 20th century is unthinkable. On this earth landlocked by gloomy adversities, dark passages, tyranny of the machine age, man is ‘pushed to the wall’ to partake of he joy of adventure. “There is no longer any space on the swarming beaches, no space on the crushing roads, no space in the growing termitaries of our cities. We must open out elsewhere”.3 And Sri Aurobindo does so,
Adventuring across enormous realms,
He broke into another Space and Time.
— Savitri : 91
What are these ‘enormous realms’, ‘another Space and Time’ into which Sri Aurobindo’s epic intends to adventure. Following the ascending stages of his amazing yogic exploration, “we are led to the greatest discovery of all times, to the door of the Great Secret which must change the face of the world, namely, that consciousness is a power.”4 The ‘enormous realms’ across which the poet adventures are his yogic explorations in the field of consciousness and it is this adventure of consciousness which Sri Aurobindo chants in blissful mantric utterance,
— such as arose from the Infinite
When the first whisperings of a strange delight
Imagined in its deep the joy to seek,
The passion to discover and to touch,
The enamoured laugh which rhymed the chanting worlds.
— Savitri : 697-8
If we seek for an adventure in Savitri as we must in an epic, then that adventure is not exploring new continents, not participating in a Trojan war; the poet has shifted his epic adventure within to explore enormous realms of consciousness.
A greater world Time’s traveller must explore.
— Savitri : 71
It is not to fight the enemy in the battle-field of Troy, but the struggle is within:
But though to the outward eye no sign appears
And peace is given to our torn human hearts,
The struggle is there and paid the unseen price;
The fire, the strife, the wrestle are within
— Savitri : 446
The epic describes the battle of the human soul against the omnipotent powers of the Inconscient, the descent of the soul into abysses of the Night, and finally the battle royal against Death itself. Can there be braver adventures than the ones that Savitri narrates? Besides, there can be no more authentic epic adventures than the ones narrated in Savitri. For these are ‘the record of a seeing, of an experience which is not of the common kind’. The narrations of the epic are not based on any objective story element; they are the poet’s experience — spiritual and occult. It is this pure subjective element which enters the epic for the first time and here lies the newness of Savitri, bringing a new method in epic tradition. It may even be said that Savitri is Sri Aurobindo’s spiritual autobiography.
SAVITRI : As an Eipic
Its Plan and Design
Speaking about the plan and design of Savitri, Sri Aurobindo writes, “It has been planned not on the scale of Lycidas or Comus or some brief narrative poem, but of the longer epical narrative, almost a minor, though a very minor, Ramayana; it aims not at a minimum but at an exhaustive exposition of its world – vision or world – interpretation. One artistic method is to select a limited subject and even on that to say only what is indispensable, what is centrally suggestive and leave the rest to the imagination and understanding of the reader. Another method which I hold to be equally artistic or, if you like, architectural is to give a large and even a vast, a complete interpretation, omitting nothing that is necessary, fundamental to the completeness; that is the method I have chosen in Savitri”.5 It is this architectonic feature of the epic that holds the reader’s attention with awe and wonder. Each sentence fits in the para, the para in the canto and the cantos in the book, as stone after stone is laid upon each other to construct a huge superstructure. The architectural structure and design of the epic where the cantos and the books roll and wheel harmoniously like the spheres in the cosmos with no jarring motion.
As the Mahabharata ‘embodies not only the whole national tradition of India but is an expression of the religious and the ethical mind and social and political ideals of India’, so Savitri is the expression not only of all the past spiritual traditions of mankind but also it opens the wide gate to the vision of the supreme Truth – Consciousness so as ‘to hew the ways of Immortality’. In its vast design the poem deals with the unfathomable Inconscient, origin of world’s ignorance, ‘wide world – failure’s cause’, Falsehood and suffering and Death that stalk the creatures at every step. The poem deals equally with the unknowable Superconscient that is the source as well as the goal of creation. All the ranges of consciousness with their worlds and beings come within the purview of this epic. Milton only wished to soar ‘beyond the Aonian mount’ or ‘above the Olympian hill I soar’, but Savitri is of a different stuff:
“It hoped to soar into the Ineffable’s reign” (Savitri : 98)
To quote a contemporary poet and critic of repute : “Philosophical statement lending logical plausibility to facts of the Spirit is necessary in a time like ours when the intellect is acutely in the forefront and Sri Aurobindo has answered the need by writing that expository masterpiece, The Life Divine.... To create a poetic mould equally massive and multiform as the Life Divine for transmitting the living Reality to the furthest bound of speech — such a task is incumbent on one who stands as a maker of a new spiritual epoch. Without it he would not establish on earth in a fully effective shape the influence brought by him.... But scattered and short pieces of poetry cannot build the sustained and organised weltanschauung required for putting a permanent stamp upon the times”.6 So Sri Aurobindo gives us Savitri.
Its Structure:
In a letter written in 1936 Sri Aurobindo tells us of the genesis of Savitri and the earlier draft of its structure: “Savitri was originally written many years ago before the Mother came, as a narrative in two parts, Part I Earth and Part II Beyond (these two parts are still extant in the scheme, each of four books — or rather Part II consisted of three books and an epilogue). Twelve Books to an epic is a classical superstition, but the new Savitri may extend to ten Books — if much is added in the final revision it may be even twelve”.7 In the final version, there are twelve Books in three parts:
Part One (Books One to Three) : Book One :
‘The Book of Beginnings’ : (Five Cantos)
Book Two :
‘The book of the Traveller of the Worlds’ (Fifteen Cantos)
Book Three
“The Book of the Divine Mother” Four Cantos
Part Two (Books Four To Eight) : Book Four :
‘The Book of Birth and Quest’. (Four Cantos)
Book Five :
‘The Book of Love’. (Three Cantos)
Book Six :
‘The Book of Fate’. (Two Cantos)
Book Seven
‘The Book of Yoga’. (Seven Cantos)
Book Eight :
‘The Book of Death’ (One Canto)
Part Three (Books Nine to Twelve): Book Nine :
‘The Book of Eternal Night’. (Two Cantos)
Book Ten :
‘The Book of the Double Twilight’.
(Four Cantos)
Book Eleven :
‘The Book of Everlasting Day’ : (One Canto)
Book Twelve :
‘The Return to Earth’ (Epilogue)
Part I of Savitri comprises the first three Books of the poem with a total of 24 cantos. This part of the epic deals almost entirely with the Yoga of King Aswapati, Savitri’s human father. It is his aspiration that compels the Divine Mother incarnate herself in the form of Savitri : “A world’s desire compelled her mortal birth.” ( Savitri : 22)
It is his yogic sadhana, ‘the concentrated energy of spiritual endeavour’ that helps us to rise from the mortal to the immortal planes. The Yoga of the King is described from Book I, canto 3 and covers the rest of Part One. In the Yoga of Aswapati Sri Aurobindo describes the yogic sadhana of his Integral Yoga and also ‘the scheme of its psychology and its working’. This Yoga aims at a ‘total and integral change of the consciousness and nature’. The method is not “anything like it professed or realised in the old yogas. If I had, I should not have wasted my time in hewing out a road and in thirty years of search and inner creation when I could have hastened home safely to my goal in an easy canter over paths already blazed out, laid down, perfectly mapped, macadamised, made secure and public. Our yoga is not a retreading of old walks, but a spiritual adventure.”8 This is the objective Aswapati aims to achieve for earth and man and that is narrated in this part.
The opening canto of the poem provides an equally vast, though a contrasting background and brings to the fore the need of a yoga like the Integral Yoga which can raise the whole of creation grovelling in Inconscience and Ignorance to its divine fulfilment. Therefore the poet introduces Savitri ‘in this holocaust of the soul’:
The dubious godhead with his torch of pain
Lit up the chasm of the unfinished world
And called her to fill with her vast self the abyss.
— Savitri : 17
The poet by the technique of recapitulation of the future scene brings the divine heroine in the opening canto itself, though she is to appear much later in Book Four (Part II) of the poem. The object is to make the opening canto the key note of the poem wherein lies compacted the entire thematic design of the epic. Soon after the Symbol Dawn which is a prophecy and
The prescience of a marvellous birth to come. (Savitri : 5)
the poet introduces to the reader this ‘marvellous birth to come’ who is none else than Savitri herself. The purpose of introducing Savitri in this canto is to maintain a close bond between the Dawn divine and divine Savitri; this bond would have been much diluted had the poet followed a normal narration of a story and brought Savitri at the usual place and time of her birth in Book Four. There should not be any confusion in the reader’s understanding that Savitri’s birth takes place in this canto or Satyavan must die on that day of the primordial Dawn. Perhaps billions and trillions of years separated the two momentous events, and in between.
Once more the rumour of the speed of Life
Pursued the cycles of her blinded quest.
— Savitri : 6
and
Man lifted up the burden of his fate.
— Savitri : 6
Once the poet introduces Savitri in canto one, he goes on to describe the being, nature and mission of this divine protagonist in canto 2; she is no ordinary heroine, but fit ‘to fill with her vast self the abyss’.
All in her pointed to a nobler kind.
— Savitri : 14
In passage of 51 lines of superb and rare poetic beauty Sri Aurobindo describes the divinity of her being and her nature. Lastly, he brings before the reader her mission; two are the options before her
Whether to bear with Ignorance and death
Or hew the ways of Immortality,
To win or lose the godlike game for man
Was her soul’s issue thrown with Destiny’s dice.
— Savitri : 17
But ‘not to submit and suffer was she born’,
To wrestle with the Shadow she had come
And must confront the riddle of man’s birth
And life’s brief struggle in dumb Matter’s night.
— Savitri : 17
or,
To stay the wheels of Doom this greatness rose.
— Savitri : 19
The reader at this stage gets well prepared to witness the battle royal, and how it will be waged and with what result.
Rest of Part I of the epic Book I (cantos 3,4,5), Book II and Book III covers the Yoga of the King, and the epic comes to its regular and normal track. The Yoga of Aswapati may be classified into three stages. In Book I he strives for individual perfection and victory through yoga. In Book II again it is individual victory and perfection by attaining all the planes of consciousness, though as a typical representative of the race. In Book III he seeks for universal realisation and a new creation on earth, says. Sri Aurobindo.
In Part II of the poem (Books Four to Eight) the poet brings the story of Savitri and her yoga, whom he introduces in the opening canto, into the mainstream of the epic. This part of the poem covers Savitri’s birth, her quest for and meeting with Satyavan, her foreknowledge of the death of Satyavan after one year of their marriage and finally her yoga sadhana to empower herself with the Transcendent’s Force to vanquish Death.
Part III of the epic (Books Nine to Twelve) describes the battle royal between Savitri and the God of Death after Satyavan dies, and how Death is vanquished. Both Savitri and Satyavan ‘return to earth after the triumph of Love over Death’.
Awakened to the meaning of my heart
That to feel love and oneness is to live
And this the magic of our golden change
Is all the truth I know or seek
— Savitri : 724
With the return to earth of Satyavan and Savitri
The united two began a greater age.
— Savitri : 411
The epic begins with the primordial symbol Dawn and ends with ‘a greater dawn’ for the future:
She brooded through her stillness on a thought
Deep – guarded by her mystic folds of light,
And in her bosom nursed a greater dawn.
— Savitri : 724
Its Nature:
Sri Aurobindo entitles his epic as ‘A Legend and a Symbol’. Most of the readers are aware of its legend. The story forms a very small part of a book of the Indian epic The Mahabharata. This story from The Mahabharata, however, occupies only the surface of Sri Aurobindo’s epic; not much of that objective story is to be found in his epic. In fact Savitri is a ‘mystic symbolic poem although cast into a different form and raised to a different pitch’. Without any mystic experience or temperament or even a ‘sympathetic’ understanding with openness of the mind, without its rigidity towards a new poetic creation, appraisal of a mystical poem like Savitri would be inadequate; such a poem may appear to the ‘uninitiate and the unsensitive’ as something ‘too large and vague’. Anticipating a lack of understanding on the part of the readers as well as the critics, Sri Aurobindo cautions: “Savitri stands as a new mystical poetry with a new vision and expression of things, we should expect, at least at first, a widespread, perhaps, a general failure even in lovers of poetry to understand it or appreciate; even those who have some mystical turn or spiritual experience are likely to pass it by if it is a different turn from theirs or outside their range of experience.. For in India at least some understanding or feeling and an audience few and fit may be possible”.9 Anything ‘unfamiliar to his mind and psychic sense and foreign to his experience’, the critic is not willing to accept; and ‘Savitri is the record of an experience which is not of the common kind and is often very far from what the general human mind sees and experiences’. So a critic or a reader may not see anything of ‘the spiritual meaning and the spiritual appeal’ in Savitri.
Every great poet is in essence a mystic. To be a mystic poet does not depend on his religious faith or attitude, nor on his intellectual argument for God or against it. Even the unreligious and the atheists like Lucretius may in their inspired moments leap up to express a sense of the mysterious Unknown. It is an inner urge, like Myer’s to
Leap from the universe and plunge in Thee
Mystic poetry is like unmasking the Divine, unveiling the great Mystery or part of it, either in clear transparency or in a transluency or still in a vague and hazy manner. The higher the plane of consciousness from where the inspiration comes, the more transparent becomes the unveiling of the face of the mysterious Unknown.
Sri Aurobindo broadly classifies mystical planes as occult, psychic and spiritual. The occult speech is not instinct with the Divine; it has the impress of a Celtic mystery that is at once weird and magically supernatural, as in the poetry of Coleridge and Yeats. This poetic speech transmits ‘baffling buried heavens of Beauty’. The psychic speech of the mystical poetry has “a deeply delicate radiance moving the heart to some far sweetness or suffusing it with an exquisite ecstasy of God’s love”.10
A lonely soul passions for the Alone
— Savitri : 632
Or,
In every shrine it cries for the clasp of God.
— Savitri : 631
There is a psychic yearning for the love of the unknow Beloved which characterises mystic poetry from the psychic plane:
A mystic happiness trembled in the breast
As if the invisible Beloved had come
Assuming the sudden loveliness of a face
And close glad hands could seize his fugitive feet
— Savitri : 290
In the mystical poetry from the spiritual plane, the inspiration, according to Sri Aurobindo, comes from the Overhead planes of consciousness. Here the poetic speech is the direct and naked experience of the seer poet, a thing actually seen and felt and even experienced, as Vaughan expresses:
I saw Eternity the other night
Like a great ring of pure and endless light,
All calm as it was bright
Or,
Across a void retreating sky he glimpsed
Through a last glimmer and drift of vanishing stars
The superconscient realms of motionless Peace
Where judgment ceases and the word is mute
And the Unconceived lies pathless and alone
— Savitri : 33-4
Or,
Infinity’s centre, a Face of rapturous calm.
Parted the eternal lids that open heaven
— Savitri : 4
Or,
Eternity prepared to fade and seemed
A hue and imposition on the Void
— Savitri : 308
The whole of the epic, in fact every verse of it, is filled with spiritual significances and expressions of one kind or the other.
Its Characteristics as Mystical Poem
Savitri is mystical poetry and “it expresses or tries to express a total and many – sided vision and experience of all the planes of being and their action upon each other”.11 The visions may appear as ‘technical jargon’ or ‘intellectual abstractions or metaphysical speculations’. These would appear so, writes Sri Aurobindo. “if one has not come into collision with them or plunged into their dark and bottomless reality. But to me they are realities, concrete powers”12 Again he explains, “This is the real stumbling – block of mystic poetry and specially mystic poetry of this kind. The mystic feels real and present, even ever present to his experience, intimate to his being, truths which to the ordinary reader are intellectual abstractions or metaphysical speculations. He is writing of experiences that are foreign to the ordinary mentality.”13 Again he writes, “To the mystic there is no such thing as an abstraction. Everything which to the intellectual mind is abstract has a concreteness, substantiality which is more real than the sensible form of an object or of a physical event”.14 Thus
The black Inconscient swung its dragon tail
Lashing a slumbrous Infinite by its force.
— Savitri : 79
is to the mystic poet a concrete experience and actually seen and felt.
Savitri as a mystical poem brings readers in touch and closeness with the presence of the Divine by a consciousness directly aware of the supreme Spirit. Here is no conceptual notion; the poet lets “spiritual facts seen in dimensions other than our universe take shape in poetry, and the poetry springs from those dimensions, throbbing with the strange tangibilities there...”15 All the visions and vibrations of the consciousness pervading those worlds are transmitted by the poet with entire poetic faithfulness. That is why the shapes and scenes are so incalculable, so bewildering. Only ‘a receptive hush’ in our being and nature can make us understand ‘the strangely worded and strangely rhythmed lines’. Speaking of mystical poem and the mystic poet’s role, Sri Aurobindo explains, “The door that has been shut to all but a few may open; the kingdom of the Spirit may be established not only in man’s inner being but in his life and his works. Poetry also may have its share in that revolution and become part of the spiritual empire”.16 Savitri “seeks to enlarge the field of poetic creation and find for the inner spiritual life of man and his now occult or mystical knowledge and experience of the whole hidden range of his and the world’s being, not a corner and a limited expression... but a wide space and as manifold and integral an expression of the boundless and innumerable riches that lie hidden and unexplored as if kept apart under the direct gaze of the Infinite.”16
The second characteristic of Savitri as a mystical poem is its style; “The style is of a direct knowledge, direct feeling, direct rhythm from an inner or upper poise,... from a consciousness aware directly of the supreme Spirit.”17 The style is that of ‘a seizing directness’. “The substantiality, the harmony and consistency, the massed grandeur of the many – sided mystical vision and experience disclose themselves with a seizing directness”17 Take the line
The strength, the silence of the gods were hers.
— Savitri : 16
The line “expressed with a bare but sufficient power what I always regarded as a great reality and a great experience”,18 says Sri Aurobindo. Here is no poetic diction, no verbosity, no ornamentation of language, just the bare monosyllabic words expressing a vision and an experience from the height; this gives to the line a grandeur in bare and direct utterance. Take another line:
All in her pointed to a nobler kind.
— Savitri : 14
On this line Sri Aurobindo comments; “I refuse entirely to admit that that is poor poetry. It is not only just the line that is needed to introduce what follows but it is very good poetry with the strength and pointed directness, not intellectualised like Pope’s but intuitive....”19 It is a ‘connecting’ line which prepares the reader for what follows, the grand description of Savitri’s divinity. Such ‘connecting’ lines in Savitri are similar to Marlowes ‘mighty lines’ and they ‘give the intellect the foothold of a clear unadorned statement of the gist of what is coming, before taking a higher flight’. Such a technique is suitable for epics only. Or,
Veiled by the Ray no mortal eye can bear
— Savitri : 57
This is a straight and direct presentation of a truth that needs no explaining; ‘the attribute is concretely offered and an atmosphere of the spiritual brought up’. The opening line of the epic.
It was the hour before the Gods awake.
is presentation of a mystical truth in its nakedness. The bare monosyllabic word without the ‘trailing of luminous robes’ yet with grandeur and sublimity, a majesty in bareness and simplicity, announces as does the gong of some vast temple of the universe, the beginning of some primordial ‘divine Event’ which the epic is to unveil. Or, take the line,
This was the day when Satyavan must die. (Savitri : 10)
The line does not express bareness for bareness’ sake. “It was bareness for expression’s sake, which is a different matter... It was ‘juste’ for expressing what I had to say then in a certain context”20, explains the poet.
Savitri is a mystical poem created from many planes of consciousness (the poem was originally written from ‘a mixture perhaps of the inner mind, psychic, poetic intelligence, sublimised vital, afterwards with the Higher Mind, often illumined and intuitivised, intervening....’) there is bound to be ‘a free diversity of style’ in it, as one particular style cannot be used for all ‘spiritual moods’ and temper and planes of inspiration. A variety of stylistic tone is perhaps ‘necessary for the richness and completeness of the treatment’. The poet, therefore, does not restrict himself to any one style’ to do that would be to limit the richness of his poetic vision and the vastness of his spiritual experience. Sethna has analysed four kinds of stylistic temper in Savitri, “while a fifth eludes all analysis and is the inmost circle of style, the magic of inevitability at its diamond point”21, the very quintessence of style, the purest and most perfect of its kind.
1. “The visioning word doing no more than equate itself to a mood and a situation; it accepts the mood, acknowledges the situation and gives them a just expression with any style – texture the poet is moved to adopt:
Something that wished but knew not how to be
— Savitri : 2
Or,
All can be done if the God-touch is there
— Savitri : 3
2. “This stylistic temper is mixed with a second type in the lines about ‘an old tired want’ being given room
To raise its head and look for absent light,
Straining closed eyes of vanished memory
Like one who searches for a bygone self
And only meets the corpse of his desire
— Savitri : 2
Now the visioning word is not merely just, not merely equated to its contents: it has pressed out of them a vigorous subtlety: it does not stop with a felicitous possession of their appearance, it goes under the skin, so to speak, and startles them into throwing up effective suggestions of their inner vitality.
3. “A third temper of style is shown us, infused into the second, when Sri Aurobindo comes with
A long lone line of hesitating hue
Like a vague smile tempting a desert heart
Troubled the far rim of life’s obscure sleep
— Savitri : 2
4. “The visioning word has begun to quicken with an inside glow — there is, besides the vividness and the subtlety from under the skin of mood and situation, a kindling in which many nuances from within arise and play and merge, the pulse of things becomes a gleaming varied flow of intense significances and not only in a strong suggestive leap. This process arrives at its acme in a passage like —
A glamour from the unreached transcendences
Iridescent with the glory of the Unseen,
A message from the unknown immortal Light
Ablaze upon creation’s quivering edge,
Dawn built her aura of magnificent hues
And buried its seed of grandeur in the hours.
— Savitri : 3-4
5. “Joined with it is another which bears the visioning word in a spelled exaltation of deep discovery, a fourth temper of style instilling into the theme a rapt self-transparency of meaningful design and vital inwardness. It is not easy to disengage this temper: more than the rest it must be felt by an instinct, for it is nearest the absolute style which refuses to be analysed. That absolute style is in the exquisite lines:
Fixed with gold panel and opalescent hinge
A gate of dreams ajar on mystery’s verge.
— Savitri : 3
There it comes into being with a kinship to the third temper, white it confronts us with a kinship to the fourth in the poignant wizardry of:
Air was a vibrant link between earth and heaven;
The wide winged hymn of great priestly wind
Arose and failed upon the altar hills;
The high boughs prayed in a revealing sky,....
— Savitri : 4
Or, the august enchantment of:
Infinity’s centre, a Face of rapturous calm
Parted the eternal lids that open heaven.
— Savitri : 4
And the very plan of Savitri demands for the richness and completeness of the treatment variation of style-temper no less than of style texture and inspiring plane”.22 This ‘indefinable super-inevitable style’, the inmost circle of style as Sethna calls it, is the ultima thule of poetic creation and its speech.
Its Technique :
A very significant technique of Savitri is its rhythmic sound. As the poem has its source of creation in regions far beyond the mind consciousness, to understand the poem’s many-sided vision and experience by the intellect alone is bound to prove baffling and a futile exercise. “A direct poetising of the Divine runs through Savitri from end to end”,23 says Sethna. Brilliant and all-revealing Overhead inspiration of the poet raises the poem to mantric height, ‘a concrete contact with Divine’s presence’. And the ‘revelation of secret presences and experiences straight from the hidden planes which are charged with the Superhuman and the Divine’ is to be a Mantra. The effective way to read Savitri is as one chants a Mantra, to read the poem audibly and let the rhythmic sound penetrate our consciousness and ‘vibrate within us so as to liberate the divinity held within the poetic words’. The ‘main gate of entry’ for the truths of the Overhead planes is not through the intellect but the rhythm, “the sound reflex of their hidden life throb, their inner force of existence. Once the rhythm has transmitted to us that throb and that force, the eye will open wider and wider and our thought begin to shape itself according to the truth of the Spirit”.24 The significance of rhythmic sound in mantric poetry has been beautifully expressed in the following verse of Savitri.
As when the mantra sinks in Yoga’s ear,
Its message enters stirring the blind brain
And keeps in the dim ignorant cells its sound;
The hearer understands a form of words
And, musing on the index thought it holds,
He strives to read it with the labouring mind,
But finds bright hints, not the embodied truth:
— Savitri : 375
Not by ‘the labouring mind’ can the mantric effect be achieved. Only by ‘falling silent in himself’.
He meets the deeper listening of his soul:
The word repeats itself in rhythmic strains...
and he endures
An ecstasy and an immortal change;
— Savitri : 375
These verses from Savitri give the main attributes of mantric poetry. In his epic Sri Aurobindo time and again brings ‘the accent and vibration of the Mantra and a general mantirc atmosphere’ so as to convey through sound rhythms the high goal unenvisaged and unattained by any poet before him. If anyone wishes to know what ‘Mantra of the Real’ be like in English language, let him chant some verses such as these beginning with :
(a) Near to earth’s wideness, intimate with heaven
— Savitri : 14
(b) The Absolute, the Perfect, the Alone
— Savitri : 67
(c) At the head she stands of birth and toil and fate
— Savitri : 314
(d) Choose, spirit, thy supreme choice not given again;
— Savitri : 696
“Savitri is an experiment in mystic poetry, spiritual poetry cast into a symbolic figure. Done on this rule, it is really a new attempt and cannot be hampered by old ideas of technique except when they are assimilable. Least of all by a standard proper to a mere intellectual and abstract poetry which makes ‘reason and taste’ the supreme arbiters, aims at a harmonised poetic intellectual balanced expression of the sense, elegance in language, a sober and subtle use of imaginative decoration, a restrained emotive element etc... The attempt at mystic spiritual poetry of the kind I am at demands above all a spiritual objectivity, an intense psychophysical concreteness”25, writes Sri Aurobindo about the principles of poetic technique in Savitri in answer to certain criticism. He further elaborates, “the mere critical intellect is likely to feel a distaste or an incomprehension with regard to mystical poetry even if that poetry is quite coherent in its ideas and well-appointed in its language. It is bound to stumble over all sorts of things that are contrary to its reason and offensive to its taste: association of contraries, excess or abruptness or crowding of images, disregard of intellectual limitations in the thought, concretisation of abstractions, the treating of things and forces as if there were a consciousness and a personality in them and a hundred other aberrations from the straight intellectual line. It is not likely either to tolerate departures in technique which disregard the canons of an established order. Fortunately here the modernists with all their errors have broken old bounds and the mystic poet may be more free to invent his own technique”.26 Two significant attributes of mystical poetry come to light from the above statement of Sri Aurobindo. First, the critical intellect is inapt to comprehend and appreciate mystical poetry as it is contrary to its reason and offensive to its taste. Secondly, as the modernist poets have broken old bound of technique specially by breaking the lines into irregular length without any underlying rhythm and calling that poetry, so the mystic poet too must have the freedom to invent his own technique.
Some other technical characteristics of mystical poetry like Savitri :
Use of Repetitions:
Some critics have objected to frequent repetitions in Savitri’s technique. Sri Aurobindo’s answer to the law prohibiting repetition is, “This rule aims at a certain kind of intellectual elegance which comes into poetry when the poetic intelligence and the call for a refined and classical taste begin to predominate. It regards poetry as a cultural entertainment and amusement of the highly civilised mind; it interests by a faultless art of words... An unfailing variety or the outward appearance of it is one of the elegances of this art. But all poetry is not of this kind; its rule does not apply to poets like Homer or Valmiki or other early writers. The Veda might almost be described as a mass of repetitions;”.27 Yet Anrold, the poet and critic, held that ‘there is nothing objectionable in the close repetition of the same word in the Homeric way of writing’. Shakespeare and Milton too were given to much repetitions.
In mystic poetry also repetition is not objectionable, asserts Sri Aurobindo. To such a class of poetry repetition ‘does not weaken the poem, it gives it a singular power and beauty’. Regarding the principle of repetition used in Savitri he says, “The repetition of the same key ideas, key images and symbols, key words or phrases, key epithets, sometimes key lines or half-lines is a constant feature. They give an atmosphere, a significant structure, a sort of psychological frame, an architecture. The object here is not to amuse or entertain but the self-expression of an inner truth, a seeing of things and ideas not familiar to the common mind, a bringing out of inner experience. It is the true more than the new that the poet is after. He uses avritti, repetition, as one of the most powerful means of carrying home what has been thought or seen and fixing it in the mind in an atmosphere of light and beauty.... Moreover, the object is not only to present a secret truth in its true form and true vision but to drive it home by the finding of the true... if possible the inevitable word; if that is there, nothing else, repetition included, matters much”.28 This is the principle of repetition and the poetic intention behind its use. Sri Aurobindo strongly favours repetition of word, phrase, image in this kind of poetry ‘provided each is the right thing and rightly worded in its place’. Only ‘clumsy or awkward, too burdensomely insistent, at once unneeded and inexpressive’ must be rejected. However, a poet and more so a mystic poet is not expected ‘to give a logical account to the critical intellect’ of his purpose behind use of repetition. “He does not himself deliberately choose or arrange word and rhythm but only sees it as it comes in the very act of inspiration”.29 Of course where ‘repetition amounts to a mistake’, it must be ‘acknowledged and corrected’.
Use of Double Adjectives and Epithets:
Another characteristic of the poem’s technique is abundant use of double adjectives and epithets. Sri Aurobindo does not see ‘the validity of any prohibition of double adjectives in abundance’. Their usage rather shows ‘a vivid richness or vehemence, forcing language to its utmost power of expression’ as is often found in Shakespeare and Milton:
Wilt thou upon the high and giddy mast
Seal up the shipboy’s eyes and rock his brains
In cradle of the rude imperious surge
— Shakespeare
Or,
With hideous ruin and cumbustion, down
To bottomless perdition, there to dwell
In adamantine chains and penal fire
— Milton
Compare the above with Sri Aurobindo’s use of double adjectives in Savitri:
Into a far – off nook of heaven there came
A slow miraculous gesture’s dim appeal.
— Savitri : 3
All these examples give ‘a vivid richness or vehemence, forcing language to its utmost power of expression’. And the example from Savitri gives ‘an intense psychophysical concreteness’ to the mystic — spiritual vision of the poet. Commenting on the objection to the use of double epithets here, Sri Aurobindo says, “The double epithets are indispensable here and in the exact order in which they are arranged by me”.30 The double adjectives are admirably suited to give ‘a slow wealth-burdened movement’ to the verse. Of course a ‘rich burdened movement’ can be secured by other means but a movement of any kind will not serve the poet’s purpose and that would not be ‘my primary object’. It is the combined effect of ‘slow miraculous’ that renders ‘the exact nature of the mystic movement’, a thing actually done and not a metaphor. The expression gives “the effect which is necessary for the dawn’s inner significance. Moreover, what becomes of the slow lingering rhythm of my line which is absolutely indispensable?”31 The poet does not see ‘the validity of any prohibition of double adjectives in abundance’. “That has to be done still more in this kind of mystic poetry. I cannot bring out the spiritual objectivity if I have to be miserly about epithets, images, or deny myself the use of all available resources of sound – significance”30 In the technique of mystic poetry the poet cannot be bound by the ‘laws’ prohibiting repetitions and abundant use of double epithets. The mystic poet has to impress upon the mind of the reader the Truth seen and experienced by him and
To pour delight on the heart of toil and want
And press perfection on life’s stumbling powers.
— Savitri : 353-4
Use of Inversions:
This is a characteristic of the epic technique and in Savitri too there is profuse use of inversions. An inversion literally means reversal or change of normal position, order or relation of words or phrases in a line or a sentence. It is a syntactic licence enjoyed by the poets, specially the epic poets. Poets have been making use of this technique in every language and clime. Milton used this method often in Paradise Lost to make the meaning of his poem more unfamiliar and distant to the reader. This added to his epic an element of grandeur and majesty. With Milton the use of inversions was deliberate so as to keep the reader alert. Reading the epic thus becomes a mental gymnastic. Use of inversions is a familiar and common technique with epic poets.
Savitri too is rich and plentiful with inversion. Inversions may be in a single line or sentence, or it may be delayed to several lines after by some long or short parenthesis. Take the very well known verse:
As if solicited in an alien world
With timid and hazardous instinctive grace,
Orphaned and driven out to seek a home,
An errant marvel with no place to live...
— Savitri : 3
If the reader is not alert, he may miss the whole construction of the sentence and take ‘solicited’ as past participle passive when in fact it is past tense of the verb and its subject is ‘an errant marvel’ delayed to the fourth line and separated by long parenthesis. About this inversion the poet says, “This kind of inversion though longer than usual, is common enough in poetical style”.32 Not to achieve a majesty and sublimity of style is Sri Aurobindo’s aim as is usually with Milton. Here “the object is to throw a strong emphasis and prominence upon the line, ‘An errant marvel with no place to live”.32 Take another example:
Then through the pallid rift that seemed at first
Hardly enough for a trickle from the suns
Outpoured the revelation and the flame
— Savitri : 3
Here also the poet’s aim is to throw a strong emphasis and prominence to the principal event of the image i.e. ‘Outpoured the revelation and the flame’. Savitri abounds in such inversions. The technique of long delayed inversions adds to the beauty of sound – rhythm like music long drawn – out which is so essential for mantric poetry.
Its Symbolism :
As the sub-title of the epic ‘A Leged and a Symbol’ reveals, the poem is ‘an attempt to render into poetry a symbol of things occult and spiritual’, and ‘is supposed to have taken place in far past times when the whole thing had to be opened so as to hew the ways of immortality’. But the symbolic images in Savitri do not find expression for the sake of mere picturesqueness as ‘detachable ornaments’ that we find in many poets. In Savitri the symbolic images and expressions form a larger, vaster and a central epical design to express the Truth vision of the poet and which forms the impelling force behind the epic movements. The symbols fit in perfectly well in their own places so as to give to the movements of the poem a total and unitary design. Each symbol denotes some meaningful stage or step in the poet’s adventure of consciousness; to dislodge them would make the vast edifice of the poem collapse or make the experiences of the poet ill expressed. Hence the use of symbols for the sake of mere picturesqueness or as ‘detachable ornaments’ especially in a mystic spiritual poem like Savitri cannot be accepted, even is unimaginable. Sri Aurobindo categorically asserts, “I have not anywhere in Savitri written anything for the sake of picturesqueness or merely to produce a rhetorical effect,..”33
But what after all is a symbol? A symbolic image is not an allegory. An allegory is narration of a subject under the guise of another suggestively similar. A symbol, according to Sri Aurobindo, is, on the other hand, a form in one plane that represents a truth of another. It expresses not the play of abstract things or ideas put into imaged form but a living Truth or inward vision or experience of things, so inward, so subtle, so little belonging to the domain of intellectual abstraction, and precision that it cannot be brought out except through symbolic images — the more these images have a living truth of their own which corresponds intimately to the living experience they symbolise, suggest the vibration of the experience itself, the greater becomes the art of symbolic expression, explains Sri Aurobindo. “Savitri is the record of a seeing, of an experience which is not of the common kind and is often very far from what the general human mind sees and experiences.”2 Such uncommon subjective experiences in spiritual field can have no ‘verifiable proofs’ as an intellectual critic would like to have. The poet embodies the truth of his vision or experience in a formal image for its onward transmission to the reader. Such an image expressing the Truth, vision or experience of another plane (of the mystic spiritual plane) is to be a symbol. And the symbol can best suggest or convey the vibrations of the poet’s experience by an intense rhythmic movement of the poetic speech. Besides, the greatness of the art of symbol making depends on the closeness of the Truth vision of the poet with its expression through the image. Such is the art of symbol making in Savitri.
Savitri is “a mystic and symbolic poem although cast into a different form and raised to a different pitch”34 Mystic poetry is like unmasking the Divine, unveiling the great Mystery or part of it. Not to unveil part of the Mystery, but integral and total unmasking of the Divine is his yogic aim and the epic gives expression to that. To achieve this Sri Aurobindo climbs realm after higher realm of consciousness into the highest Truth-Consciousness. Thus he
Enters Truth’s inmost cabin of privacy
And tears away the veil from God and life.
— Savitri : 660
All the realms reveal their secret Godhead and the poet in his creative and unmoved joy gives symbolic expressions to ‘something seen, something felt or experienced’. Symbolism to Sri Aurobindo is, therefore, not an attempt at picturesqueness but revelatory in nature. The poet transmits his experience and vision of the hidden and unexplored worlds as he sees them ‘that are charged with the very vision and vibration of the consciousness pervading those worlds’. That is the reason why the shapes and scenes of his symbolic images are so ‘incalculable and bewildering’.
The visions of the poet as conveyed by the symbols of a mystic poem may appear as ‘intellectual abstractions or metaphysical speculations’ to one who has not come face to face with or plunged into their realities. The real stumbling block of mystic poetry of this kind (as Savitri) is that the “mystic feels real and present, even ever present to his experience, intimate to his being, truths which to the ordinary reader are intellectual abstractions or metaphysical speculations. He is writing of experiences that are foreign to the ordinary mentality.”13 But everything which appears as abstract to the intellectual mind is to the mystic concrete and ‘more real than the sensible form of an object or of a physical event’. Thus the symbol
The black Inconscient swung its dragon tail
Lashing a slumbrous Infinite by its force
— Savitri : 79
is to Sri Aurobindo a concrete experience and actually seen and felt as he says.
In his symbol making Sri Aurobindo lets “spiritual facts seen in dimensions other than our universe take shape in poetry, and the poetry springs from those dimensions, throbbing with the strange tangibilities there and not throughout aided by an interpretative glow from our experience of material objects.”35 The poet of Savitri, a great mystic that he is, gives constantly rapturous expressions to things beyond, the things behind the apparent world. These symbolic expressions not only “bring in the occult in its larger and deeper ranges but the truths of the spiritual heights, the spiritual depths, the spiritual intimacies and vastnesses as also the truths of the inner mind, inner life, an inner or subtle physical beauty and reality.”36 Besides these realms, the Inconscience, subconscience, the various planes of consciousness beyond the mind, even the transcendent Truth — consciousness, the Supermind go to form the vast symbolic canvas of the poem. Listen to the following;
In the deep subconscient glowed her jewel – lamp;
Lifted, it showed the riches of the cave
Where, by the miser traffickers of sense
Unused, guarded beneath Night’s dragon paws,
In folds of velvet darkness draped they sleep
Whose priceless value could have saved the world
— Savitri : 41-2
The poet’s purpose is ever the same, unmasking the divinity, unveiling the hidden and unexplored realms right from the Inconscient abyss to the Superconscient height.
To the uninitiate however, and the intellectual critics steeped in the rigidity of a mind consciousness and without any aptitude for things spiritual and mystic, such symbols appear unintelligible, vague, hazy. In the recorded history of spiritualism we do not find such spiritual experiences having ever been realised by anyone and poetised in so much detail. But these cannot be judged by the intellect or by any set poetical rule as such subjective experiences can have no ‘verifiable proofs’. To appreciate and enjoy, a new kind of mystic, occult and spiritual symbolism, “there must be a new extension of consciousness and aesthesis”33, advises Sri Aurobindo.
The most outstanding power of Savitri is its power of Truth, its Light of Knowledge. And as a corollary the most prominent power of its symbols is their truth-revealing power. About Savitri the Mother says, “It is the supreme revelation of Sri Aurobindo’s vision.”37 The revelatory nature of Aurobindonean symbols has raised them to the height with true mantric power and effect. This is the most important characteristic of the symbols. Listen —
Across a void retreating sky he glimpsed
Through a last glimmer and drift of vanishing stars
The superconscient realms of motionless Peace
Where judgment ceases and the word is mute
And the Unconceived lies pathless and alone.
— Savitri : 33-4
Listen to another passage that is indeed a marvel of poetic creation —
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.
— Savitri : 15
The images here, all symbolical, describe the divinity of Savitri, the incarnation of the Divine Mother and heroine of the epic. The source of inspiration of the passage is said to be the Overmind plane, even Sri Aurobindo ascribes the inspiration to the Overmind Intuition in a letter in 1936. See also the footnote 2 to that letter. (For a more detailed study of the above passage, readers are referred to the author’s article – “As in a mystic and dynamic dance” — published in June 2000 issue of The Mother India)
The two passages cited above (for more such passges one has to read the poem itself) very clearly reveal the chief characteristic of Sri Aurobindo’s symbolism. That quality lies in its mantric power and effect. The Aurobindonean symbols are mantric for two main reasons. First, symbols are a truth revelation; their substance is always made of truth stuff. But the poet has to convey, transmit this truth stuff to the hearer’s ‘listening soul’. And this transmission to be mantric must have the following characteristics:
First, the inspiration must come from the very highest plane of consciousness —
Missioned voices drive to me from God’s doorway
Words that live not, save upon Nature’s summits,
Ecstasy’s chariots....
— Descent
‘God’s doorway’ and ‘Nature’s summit’ signify and mean the overmind plane. The Truth vision and the poetic speech, the ‘Words’, come to the poet along with the poetic delight, ‘Ecstasy’s chariots’. Sri Aurobindo very categorically expresses that poetic Truth, poetic speech and poetic delight if come from the overmind plane ‘ready-formed’, then only they can be mantric. Secondly, this alone does not make it a mantra; there is another element which, according to Sri Aurobindo, is of primary importance, ‘a highest intensity of rhythmic movement’. To him “the rhythm, the poetic movement that is of primary importance; for that is the first fundamental and indispensable element without which all the rest, whatever its other value, remains inacceptable to the Muse of Poetry. A perfect rhythm will often even give immortality to work which is slight in vision and very far from the higher intensities of style.”38 By the excellence of poetic movement Sri Aurobindo does not mean a mere metrical rhythm or a perfect technical excellence, yet he is not advocating use of vers libre. On the contrary metre ‘a fixed and balanced system of the measures of sound’ is the ‘right physical basis for the poetic movement’. There are higher harmonies and melodies besides the harmonies of the pure metrical rhythm. Therefore for the symbol to be a mantra, its metrical rhythm has to be taken up and uplifted by the Overmind plane into its own higher harmonies and melodies. This is how the mere metrical is transported to the soul rhythm; and ‘the music fit for the Mantra makes itself audible’ in the symbols :
As if from a golden phial of the All Bliss
A joy of light, a joy of sudden sight,
A rapture of the thrilled undying Word
Poured into his heart as into an empty cup.
— Savitri : 38
Usage of symbols in Savitri forms the most important element of its technique. The poet intends “to keep constantly before the view of the reader, not imaginative but attentive to seize the whole truth of the vision in its totality...”39
It is the tremendous force of the words of the symbol that makes us see as well as hear and feel the picture of the vision. The source of Aurobindonean symbols lie ‘on Nature’s summits’, ‘God’s doorway’, undoubtedly the Overmind inspiration. And the symbols, come to him ready made from such summits.
Savitri abounds in countless symbolic expressions of Sri Aurobindo’s yogic experiences in language and images that have never been used in poetry before. Symbols and symbolic expressions form the very texture of the epic’s poetic speech. Depending on their vastness and depth of the vision all such expressions may be grouped in categories given below:
The first and most commonly used symbolic images or expressions are made up of a group of words. These are interspersed throughout the fabric of the poem and have become an inseparable element of the poetic speech. Though only made of a few words, yet these expressions suggest a world of hidden meanings to the responsive sensibility of the reader. To cite only a few such expressions:
‘a body like a parable of dawn’, ‘a niche for veiled divinity’, ‘golden temple door to things beyond’, ‘the yearning of a lone flute’, ‘a jingling silver laugh of anklet bells’, and so on. Likewise, a riot of colour and light with their symbolic significances pervades the poem. Some of these may be listed here: ‘the white aeonic silences’, ‘a flaming rhapsody of white desire’, ‘the swift fire-heart’s golden liberty’, ‘the crimson outburst of one secular flower’, ‘the white-blue moonbeam air of paradise’, ‘gleaming clarities of amethyst air’, ‘a gold supernal sun of timeless truth’, ‘sapphire heavens’, ‘blue lotus of the idea’, ‘flame-hills assaulting heaven with their peaks’, ‘a luminous sapphire dream’, and so on.
In the second category are many single lines carrying concentrated symbolic expressions of the poet’s vision. Some such are : ‘Truth is wider, greater than her forms’, ‘Lulled by Time’s beats eternity sleeps in us’, ‘Our minds are starters in the race of God’, ‘The pilgrimage of Nature to the unknown’, ‘She has lured the Eternal into the arms of Time’, etc. In such symbolic expressions the poet aims not at any strikingly graphic picture or imagery. The purpose is to convey through bare minimum of words and by direct utterance the truth.
Yet symbolic pictures, imagery of high poetic beauty are in store for us. These form the third category of symbolic images. These images are perfect paintings in words, or it may even be said, engravings of the figures and forms of Truth and Beauty. Some such images, selected at random, are presented here for readers to see to what extent symbolic images can stretch poetic speech to its utmost expressive power. Listen, —
(1)
Once more a tread perturbed the vacant Vasts;
Infinity’s centre, a Face of rapturous calm
Parted the eternal lids that open heaven;
A Form from far beatitudes seemed to near.
— Savitri : 4
This is the Divine Mother stepping into Space and Time after the epiphany of the Symbol Dawn.
(2)
Disclosed stood up in a gold moment’s blaze
White sun-steppes in the pathless Infinite.
Along a naked curve in bourneless Self
The points that run through the closed heart of things
Shadowed the indeterminable line
That carries the Everlasting through the years.
— Savitri : 40
This is the regal entry of the Everlasting, the timeless Eternity, into Space and Time, the Time eternity. Thus is established the ‘Timeless Eternity and Time eternity’ continuum. Compare with the following lines —
That the eyes of the Timeless might look out from Time
And world manifest the unveiled Divine
— Savitri : 73
(3)
A million lotuses swaying on one stem,
World after coloured and ecstatic world
Climbs towards some far-unseen epiphany.
— Savitri : 279
This is an intuitive revelation of the flowering of all the planes of consciousness on earth, then shall evolution attain its goal.
The fourth category of symbols in Savitri comprises long and sustained metpahors. In these symbols and metaphors Sri Aurobindo’s technique is that he takes up a symbol with a vast universal or even a transcendental canvas that would symbolise the universal or transcendental truth vision of the poet. These symbols are made of a series of images and all the images together give a total effect to the Truth. To this category belong some of the superb symbols in the epic like the Symbol Dawn ‘Sailor Symbol’, ‘the World-Stair.’ Each of these symbols is either a movement or implies a movement. Each decisive stage of the movement conjures up an image, a vignette, to symbolise that stage. In this way a series of images go to form these long and sustained symbols.
Broadly speaking Sri Aurobindo classifies symbols and symbol making into two categories. This classification ‘depends on the nature of the symbolic vision’. On this basis symbols and symbol making may be
(a) merely representative. Such a symbol presents to the inner vision and nature the thing symbolised in its figure. Here the inner mind can receive the effect though ‘the outer mind has not the understanding’.
(b) Or it is dynamic. Dynamic symbols may be of many kinds.
— Some may bring simply the influence of the thing symbolised;
— some indicate what is being done but not yet finished;
— some (indicate) a formative experience that visits the consciousness.
— some a prophecy of something that may or will or is soon about to happen.
— There are others that are not merely symbols but present actualities seen by the vision in a symbolic figure.
It would be a very fruitful and interesting an exercise of the literary faculty of the reader to locate these symbols in Savitri.
Symbolism in Sri Aurobindo and the Veda :
Regarding his Integral Yoga and its indebtedness to old yogas, Sri Aurobindo writes in a letter on 05.10.1935, “Our yoga is not a retreading of old walks, but a spiritual adventure.”40 As in yoga, so in poetry, Sri Aurobindo is not one to walk on a beaten track. It is true that he has great admiration for the Veda, and this admiration should not be the reason to jump to any uncalled for conclusion that Sri Aurobindo for his symbolic creation in Savitri is indebted to the Veda, as some self-styled critic would say. He is not one who follows a beaten track. Admiration for the Veda does not presage of any influence or indebtedness. If Sri Aurobindo has used some forms of vedic symbols in Savitri, it is to convey that they did not achieve, ‘not clearly visualised’ the totality of the Truth.
Let us take up some of the symbols that apparently look similar:
The first symbol, to consider is the Symbol Dawn. In both the Veda and Savitri, Dawn symbolises Divine Grace and Light that comes to awaken the ray of aspiration in the earth consciousness. In both the cases Dawn paves the way for the manifestation of the Divine in Space and Time, of the Lord in the Vedic symbol and of the Divine Mother in Savitri
“Putting forth his impulsions in the foundation of the Truth, in the foundations of the Dawns, their Lord enters the Vastness of the firmaments.”
— Rig – Veda, III. 61(7)
Ambassadress twixt eternity and change,
The omniscient Goddess leaned across the breadths
That wrap the fated journeyings of the stars
And saw the spaces ready for her feet.
— Savitri : 4
The Vedic Dawn is the bringer of ‘the light of Truth, all the beautiful companies of its gods and seers’. She is ‘the bringer of the Truth, the bliss, the heavens of light, remover of the darkness’ etc. So is Savitri’s Dawn. But the similarity ends there. The poet of Savitri extends and enlarges his symbol manifold. He gives in detail the working of this divine epiphany; how step by step the Dawn helps in removing the covering of Ignorance. As the light is not accepted at first, it leaves something of its ‘awakening ray’ in ‘our prostrate soil’ that,
A sacred yearning lingered in its trace,
The worship of a Presence and a Power
Too perfect to be held by death-bound hearts
— Savitri : 5
Vedic symbol does not speak of the consequence if the Light is not accepted by the earth.
And above all what about the execution in a perfect poetic speech straight from the Overhead planes. The canvas of the Dawn in Savitri is far wider and more extensive than that of the Vedic symbol. Yet critics talk of Sri Aurobindo’s indebtedness to the Veda.
Besides, Sri Aurobindo attributes several functions to his Dawn.
(1) it is ‘the prescience of a marvellous birth to come’, and this marvellous birth is the incarnation of the Divine Mother as Savitri;
In colour’s hieroglyphs of mystic sense,
It wrote the lines of a significant myth
Telling of a greatness of spiritual dawns,
A brilliant code penned with the sky for page.
— Savitri : 4
(2) Description of the Dawn in stages signifies that stage by stage, step by step, can the darkness and obscurities be removed. That is why Sri Aurobindo describes the epiphany of the Dawn in stages — ‘the inert black quietude’, ‘a wandering hand of pale enchanted light’, ‘one lucent corner windowing hidden things’; then the darkness failed and slipped like a falling, cloak’ and Dawn manifests her ‘aura of manificent hues’. Sri Aurobindo’s Dawn is a movement and not a static description like a ‘classical monotone’. Vedic Dawn is not like this.
(3) It speaks of many ‘spiritual dawns’ need to come before the darkness of Ignorance can be lifted.
The ‘significant myth’ which Dawn writes ‘in colour’s hieroglyphs of mystic sense’ is the story of Savitri who would come ‘to hew the ways of immortality’.
There are a few other symbols in both the poems that appear similar on apparent and casual reading. These are —
1:
Where the God-child lies on the lap of Night and Dawn.
— Savitri : 4
“Two are joined together, powers of truth, power of Maya.
They have built the child and given him birth
and they nourish his growth.”
— Rig Veda, X, 5-3
In spite of their outward similarity, there is a world of difference between the two symbols. Sri Aurobindo puts his stamp of spiritual and