The new creation
Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri: that marvellous prophetic poem which will be humanity’s guide towards its future realisation — the Mother
Savitri began as a narrative poem of moderate length based on a legend told in the Mahabharata. Bringing out the legend’s symbolism and charging it progressively with his own spiritual vision, Sri Aurobindo turned Savitri into the epic it is today, totaling 23,837 lines. By the time it was published, some passages had gone through dozens of drafts. Sri Aurobindo explained how he wrote the poem:
I used Savitri as a means of ascension. I began with it on a certain mental level, each time I could reach a higher level [of consciousness] I rewrote from that level.... In fact, Savitri has not been regarded by me as a poem to be written and finished, but as a field of experimentation to see how far poetry could be written from one’s own Yogic consciousness and how that could be made creative. [29 March 1936]
About Savitri in particular and mystic/spiritual poetry in general he wrote:
Savitri is an experiment in mystic poetry, spiritual poetry cast into a symbolic figure. Done on this scale, it is really a new attempt and cannot be hampered by old ideas of technique except when they are assimilable.... The attempt at mystic spiritual poetry of the kind I am at demands above all a spiritual objectivity, an intense psycho-physical concreteness. [31 October 1936]
This is the real stumbling-block of mystic poetry.... 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....
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. To me, for instance, consciousness is the very stuff of existence and I can feel it everywhere enveloping and penetrating the stone as much as man or the animal. A movement, a flow of consciousness is not to me an image but a fact. If I wrote “His anger climbed against me in a stream”, it would be to the general reader a mere image, not something that was felt by me in a sensible experience; yet I would only be describing in exact terms what actually happened once, a stream of anger, a sensible and violent current of it rising up from downstairs and rushing upon me as I sat in the veranda of the guest-house, the truth of it being confirmed afterwards by the confession of the person who had the movement. This is only one instance, but all that is spiritual or psychological in Savitri is of that character....
[Savitri’s] expression aims at a certain force, directness and spiritual clarity and reality. When it is not understood, it is because the truths it expresses are unfamiliar to the ordinary mind or belong to an untrodden domain or domains or enter into a field of occult experience; it is not because there is any attempt at a dark or vague profundity or at an escape from thought. The thinking is not intellectual but intuitive or more than intuitive, always expressing a vision, a spiritual contact or a knowledge which has come by entering into the thing itself, by identity....
The philosophy of Savitri ... 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. Whatever language, whatever terms are necessary to convey this truth of vision and experience it uses without scruple, not admitting any mental rule of what is or is not poetic.... I am justifying a poet’s right to think as well as to see and feel.... [19 March 1946]
Savitri is written in blank verse, which according to Sri Aurobindo
is the most difficult of all English metres; it has to be very skilfully and strongly done to make up for the absence of rhyme, and if not very well done, it is better not done at all.... You have to vary your metre by a skilful play of pauses or by an always changing distribution of caesura and of stresses and supple combinations of long and short vowels and by much weaving of vowel or consonant variation and assonance.... [28 April 1931]
The following passages are from Canto 3 (“The House of the Spirit and the New Creation”) and Canto 4 (“The Vision and the Boon”) of Book III (“The Book of the Divine Mother”). In the Author’s Note, Sri Aurobindo describes the character of Savitri as “the Divine Word, daughter of the Sun, goddess of the supreme Truth who comes down and is born to save,” and that of Aswapati, her human father, as “the Lord of Tapasya, the concentrated energy of spiritual endeavour that helps us to rise from the mortal to the immortal planes.” The protagonist of these two cantos is Aswapati, who implores the Divine Mother to
Incarnate the white passion of thy force,
Mission to earth some living form of thee.
This incarnation will be Savitri, his daughter, whose birth and childhood is the subject of the first canto of the next book (Book IV).
A neutral helpless void oppressed the years. In the texture of our bound humanity He felt the stark resistance huge and dumb Of our inconscient and unseeing base, The stubborn mute rejection in life’s depths, The ignorant No in the origin of things. A veiled collaboration with the Night Even in himself survived and hid from his view: Still something in his earthly being kept Its kinship with the Inconscient whence it came.... Its treacherous elements spread like slippery grains Hoping the incoming Truth might stumble and fall, And old ideal voices wandering moaned And pleaded for a heavenly leniency To the gracious imperfections of our earth And the sweet weaknesses of our mortal state. This now he willed to discover and exile, The element in him betraying God. All Nature’s recondite spaces were stripped bare, All her dim crypts and corners searched with fire Where refugee instincts and unshaped revolts Could shelter find in darkness’ sanctuary Against the white purity of heaven’s cleansing flame. All seemed to have perished that was undivine: Yet some minutest dissident might escape And still a centre lurk of the blind force. For the Inconscient too is infinite; The more its abysses we insist to sound, The more it stretches, stretches endlessly. Then lest a human cry should spoil the Truth He tore desire up from its bleeding roots And offered to the gods the vacant place. Thus could he bear the touch immaculate. A last and mightiest transformation came. His soul was all in front like a great sea Flooding the mind and body with its waves; His being, spread to embrace the universe, United the within and the without To make of life a cosmic harmony, An empire of the immanent Divine.... He felt the joy of others as his joy, He bore the grief of others as his grief.... The one Consciousness that made the world was seen.... The circle of the little self was gone; The separate being could no more be felt; It disappeared and knew itself no more, Lost in the spirit’s wide identity.... Transcended was the human formula; Man’s heart that had obscured the Inviolable Assumed the mighty beating of a god’s; His seeking mind ceased in the Truth that knows; His life was a flow of the universal life. He stood fulfilled on the world’s highest line Awaiting the ascent beyond the world, Awaiting the descent the world to save.... The robes of mortal thinking were cast down Leaving his knowledge bare to absolute sight.... Infinity swallowed him into shoreless trance. A Mind too mighty to be bound by Thought, A Life too boundless for the play in Space, A Soul without borders unconvinced of Time, He felt the extinction of the world’s long pain, He became the unborn Self that never dies, He joined the sessions of Infinity.... A stillness of cessation reigned, the wide Immortal hush before the gods are born; A universal Force awaited, mute, The veiled Transcendent’s ultimate decree.
Then suddenly there came a downward look. As if a sea exploring its own depths, A living Oneness widened at its core And joined him to unnumbered multitudes. A Bliss, a Light, a Power, a flame-white Love Caught all into a sole immense embrace; Existence found its truth on Oneness’ breast And each became the self and space of all. The great world-rhythms were heart-beats of one Soul, To feel was a flame-discovery of God, All mind was a single harp of many strings, All life a song of many meeting lives; For worlds were many, but the Self was one.... Then from the trance of that tremendous clasp And from the throbbings of that single Heart And from the naked Spirit’s victory A new and marvellous creation rose. Incalculable outflowing infinitudes Laughing out an unmeasured happiness Lived their innumerable unity.... Appearance looked back to its hidden truth And made of difference oneness’ smiling play.... All struggle was turned to a sweet strife of love In the harmonised circle of a sure embrace.... On a meeting line of hazardous extremes The game of games was played to its breaking-point, Where through self-finding by divine self-loss There leaps out unity’s supreme delight Whose blissful undivided sweetness feels A communality of the Absolute. There was no sob of suffering anywhere; Experience ran from point to point of joy: Bliss was the pure undying truth of things. All Nature was a conscious front of God: A wisdom worked in all, self-moved, self-sure, A plenitude of illimitable Light, An authenticity of intuitive Truth, A glory and passion of creative Force.... All turned to all without reserve’s recoil: A single ecstasy without a break, Love was a close and thrilled identity In the throbbing heart of all that luminous life.... In these new worlds projected he became A portion of the universal gaze, A station of the all-inhabiting light, A ripple on a single sea of peace.... He felt the footsteps of a million wills Moving in unison to a single goal. The eternal Goddess moved in her cosmic house Sporting with God as a Mother with her child: To him the universe was her bosom of love, His toys were the immortal verities. All here self-lost had there its divine place. The Powers that here betray our hearts and err, Were there sovereign in truth, perfect in joy, Masters in a creation without flaw, Possessors of their own infinitude. There Mind, a splendid sun of vision’s rays, Shaped substance by the glory of its thoughts And moved amidst the grandeur of its dreams. Imagination’s great ensorcelling rod Summoned the unknown and gave to it a home, Outspread luxuriantly in golden air Truth’s iris-coloured wings of fantasy, Or sang to the intuitive heart of joy Wonder’s dream-notes that bring the Real close.... There was no gulf between the thought and fact, Ever they replied like bird to calling bird; The will obeyed the thought, the act the will. There was a harmony woven twixt soul and soul. A marriage with eternity divinised Time. There Life pursued, unwearied of her sport, Joy in her heart and laughter on her lips, The bright adventure of God’s game of chance. In her ingenious ardour of caprice, In her transfiguring mirth she mapped on Time A fascinating puzzle of events, Lured at each turn by new vicissitudes To self-discovery that could never cease. Ever she framed stark bonds for the will to break, Brought new creations for the thought’s surprise And passionate ventures for the heart to dare, Where Truth recurred with an unexpected face Or else repeated old familiar joy Like the return of a delightful rhyme.... Untired of sameness and untired of change, Endlessly she unrolled her moving act, A mystery drama of divine delight, A living poem of world-ecstasy, A kakemono of significant forms, A coiled perspective of developing scenes, A brilliant chase of self-revealing shapes, An ardent hunt of soul looking for soul, A seeking and a finding as of gods. There Matter is the Spirit’s firm density, An artistry of glad outwardness of self, A treasure-house of lasting images Where sense can build a world of pure delight.... There substance was a resonant harp of self, A net for the constant lightnings of the spirit, A magnet power of love’s intensity Whose yearning throb and adoration’s cry Drew God’s approaches close, sweet, wonderful.... Time was Eternity’s transparent robe. An architect hewing out self’s living rock, Phenomenon built Reality’s summer-house On the beaches of the sea of Infinity.
Against this glory of spiritual states, Their parallels and yet their opposites, Floated and swayed, eclipsed and shadowlike As if a doubt made substance, flickering, pale, This other scheme two vast negations found. A world that knows not its inhabiting Self Labours to find its cause and need to be; A spirit ignorant of the world it made, Obscured by Matter, travestied by Life, Struggles to emerge, to be free, to know and reign; These were close-tied in one disharmony, Yet the divergent lines met not at all. Three Powers governed its irrational course, In the beginning an unknowing Force, In the middle an embodied striving soul, In its end a silent spirit denying life.... This darkness hides our nobler destiny. A chrysalis of a great and glorious truth, It stifles the winged marvel in its sheath Lest from the prison of Matter it escape And, wasting its beauty on the formless Vast, Merged into the Unknowable’s mystery, Leave unfulfilled the world’s miraculous fate. As yet thought only some high spirit’s dream Or a vexed illusion in man’s toiling mind, A new creation from the old shall rise, A Knowledge inarticulate find speech, Beauty suppressed burst into paradise bloom, Pleasure and pain dive into absolute bliss. A tongueless oracle shall speak at last, The Superconscient conscious grow on earth, The Eternal’s wonders join the dance of Time.... He saw a world that is from a world to be. There he divined rather than saw or felt, Far off upon the rim of consciousness, Transient and frail this little whirling globe And on it left like a lost dream’s vain mould, A fragile copy of the spirit’s shell, His body gathered into mystic sleep. A foreign shape it seemed, a mythic shade. Alien now seemed that dim far universe, Self and eternity alone were true. Then memory climbed to him from the striving planes Bringing a cry from once-loved cherished things, And to the cry as to its own lost call A ray replied from the occult Supreme. For even there the boundless Oneness dwells. To its own sight unrecognisable, It lived still sunk in its own tenebrous seas, Upholding the world’s inconscient unity Hidden in Matter’s insentient multitude.... Two beings he was, one wide and free above, One struggling, bound, intense, its portion here.... His heart lay somewhere conscious and alone Far down below him like a lamp in night; Abandoned it lay, alone, imperishable, Immobile with excess of passionate will, His living, sacrificed and offered heart Absorbed in adoration mystical, Turned to its far-off fount of light and love. In the luminous stillness of its mute appeal It looked up to the heights it could not see; It yearned from the longing depths it could not leave. In the centre of his vast and fateful trance Half-way between his free and fallen selves, Interceding twixt God’s day and the mortal’s night, Accepting worship as its single law, Accepting bliss as the sole cause of things, Refusing the austere joy which none can share, Refusing the calm that lives for calm alone, To her it turned for whom it willed to be. In the passion of its solitary dream It lay like a closed soundless oratory Where sleeps a consecrated argent floor Lit by a single and untrembling ray And an invisible Presence kneels in prayer. On some deep breast of liberating peace All else was satisfied with quietude; This only knew there was a truth beyond. All other parts were dumb in centred sleep Consenting to the slow deliberate Power Which tolerates the world’s error and its grief, Consenting to the cosmic long delay, Timelessly waiting through the patient years Her coming they had asked for earth and men; This was the fiery point that called her now. Amid the lifeless silence of the Void In a solitude and an immensity A sound came quivering like a loved footfall Heard in the listening spaces of the soul; A touch perturbed his fibres with delight. An Influence had approached the mortal range, A boundless Heart was near his longing heart, A mystic Form enveloped his earthly shape. All at her contact broke from silence’ seal; Spirit and body thrilled identified, Linked in the grasp of an unspoken joy; Mind, members, life were merged in ecstasy. Intoxicated as with nectarous rain His nature’s passioning stretches flowed to her, Flashing with lightnings, mad with luminous wine.... The One he worshipped was within him now: Flame-pure, ethereal-tressed, a mighty Face Appeared and lips moved by immortal words; Lids, Wisdom’s leaves, drooped over rapture’s orbs.... A Shape was seen on threshold Mind, a Voice Absolute and wise in the heart’s chambers spoke: “O Son of Strength who climbst creation’s peaks, No soul is thy companion in the light; Alone thou standest at the eternal doors. What thou hast won is thine, but ask no more. O Spirit aspiring in an ignorant frame, O Voice arisen from the Inconscient’s world, How shalt thou speak for men whose hearts are dumb, Make purblind earth the soul’s seer-vision’s home Or lighten the burden of the senseless globe? I am the Mystery beyond reach of mind, I am the goal of the travail of the suns; My fire and sweetness are the cause of life. But too immense my danger and my joy. Awake not the immeasurable descent, Speak not my secret name to hostile Time; Man is too weak to bear the Infinite’s weight. Truth born too soon might break the imperfect earth. Leave the all-seeing Power to hew its way: In thy single vast achievement reign apart Helping the world with thy great lonely days.... Traveller upon the bare eternal heights, Tread still the difficult and dateless path Joining the cycles with its austere curve Measured for man by the initiate Gods. My light shall be in thee, my strength thy force. Let not the impatient Titan drive thy heart, Ask not the imperfect fruit, the partial prize. Only one boon, to greaten thy spirit, demand; Only one joy, to raise thy kind, desire. Above blind fate and the antagonist powers Moveless there stands a high unchanging Will; To its omnipotence leave thy work’s result. All things shall change in God’s transfiguring hour.” August and sweet sank hushed that mighty Voice. Nothing now moved in the vast brooding space: A stillness came upon the listening world, A mute immensity of the Eternal’s peace. But Aswapati’s heart replied to her, A cry amid the silence of the Vasts: “How shall I rest content with mortal days And the dull measure of terrestrial things, I who have seen behind the cosmic mask The glory and the beauty of thy face? Hard is the doom to which thou bindst thy sons! How long shall our spirits battle with the Night And bear defeat and the brute yoke of Death, We who are vessels of a deathless Force And builders of the godhead of the race? Or if it is thy work I do below Amid the error and waste of human life In the vague light of man’s half-conscious mind, Why breaks not in some distant gleam of thee? Ever the centuries and millenniums pass. Where in the greyness is thy coming’s ray? Where is the thunder of thy victory’s wings?... The aeons ever repeat their changeless round, The cycles all rebuild and ever aspire. All we have done is ever still to do.... In anguish we labour that from us may rise A larger-seeing man with nobler heart, A golden vessel of the incarnate Truth, The executor of the divine attempt Equipped to wear the earthly body of God, Communicant and prophet and lover and king. I know that thy creation cannot fail: For even through the mists of mortal thought Infallible are thy mysterious steps, And, though Necessity dons the garb of Chance, Hidden in the blind shifts of Fate she keeps The slow calm logic of Infinity’s pace And the inviolate sequence of its will.... This strange irrational product of the mire, This compromise between the beast and god, Is not the crown of thy miraculous world. I know there shall inform the inconscient cells, At one with Nature and at height with heaven, A spirit vast as the containing sky And swept with ecstasy from invisible founts, A god come down and greater by the fall. A Power arose out of my slumber’s cell.... It saw from timelessness the works of Time. Overpassed were the leaden formulas of the Mind, Overpowered the obstacle of mortal Space: The unfolding Image showed the things to come. A giant dance of Shiva tore the past; There was a thunder as of worlds that fall; Earth was o’errun with fire and the roar of Death Clamouring to slay a world his hunger had made; There was a clangour of Destruction’s wings: The Titan’s battle-cry was in my ears, Alarm and rumour shook the armoured Night. I saw the Omnipotent’s flaming pioneers Over the heavenly verge which turns towards life Come crowding down the amber stairs of birth; Forerunners of a divine multitude, Out of the paths of the morning star they came Into the little room of mortal life. I saw them cross the twilight of an age, The sun-eyed children of a marvellous dawn, The great creators with wide brows of calm, The massive barrier-breakers of the world And wrestlers with destiny in her lists of will, The labourers in the quarries of the gods, The messengers of the Incommunicable, The architects of immortality.... Their tread one day shall change the suffering earth And justify the light on Nature’s face. Although Fate lingers in the high Beyond And the work seems vain on which our heart’s force was spent, All shall be done for which our pain was borne. Even as of old man came behind the beast This high divine successor surely shall come Behind man’s inefficient mortal pace, Behind his vain labour, sweat and blood and tears: He shall know what mortal mind barely durst think, He shall do what the heart of the mortal could not dare.... O Wisdom-Splendour, Mother of the universe, Creatrix, the Eternal’s artist Bride, Linger not long with thy transmuting hand Pressed vainly on one golden bar of Time, As if Time dare not open its heart to God. O radiant fountain of the world’s delight World-free and unattainable above, O Bliss who ever dwellst deep-hid within While men seek thee outside and never find, Mystery and Muse with hieratic tongue, Incarnate the white passion of thy force, Mission to earth some living form of thee. One moment fill with thy eternity, Let thy infinity in one body live, All-Knowledge wrap one mind in seas of light, All-Love throb single in one human heart.... Let a great word be spoken from the heights And one great act unlock the doors of Fate.” His prayer sank down in the resisting Night Oppressed by the thousand forces that deny, As if too weak to climb to the Supreme. But there arose a wide consenting Voice; The spirit of beauty was revealed in sound: Light floated round the marvellous Vision’s brow And on her lips the Immortal’s joy took shape. “O strong forerunner, I have heard thy cry. One shall descend and break the iron Law, Change Nature’s doom by the lone spirit’s power. A limitless Mind that can contain the world, A sweet and violent heart of ardent calms Moved by the passions of the gods shall come. All mights and greatnesses shall join in her; Beauty shall walk celestial on the earth, Delight shall sleep in the cloud-net of her hair, And in her body as on his homing tree Immortal Love shall beat his glorious wings.... A seed shall be sown in Death’s tremendous hour, A branch of heaven transplant to human soil; Nature shall overleap her mortal step; Fate shall be changed by an unchanging will.”
Happy Holidays!