Aurobindo 13-Savitri-Book -1 Poem by Indira Renganathan

An appreciation on Savitri-
Book I The Book of Beginnings-
Canto V The Yoga of the King:
The Yoga of the Spirit's Freedom and Greatness
Words within inverted commas are Aurobindo's


'The glory he had glimpsed must be his home.
'As through a mist a sovereign peak is seen,
The greatness of the eternal Spirit appeared,
Exiled in a fragmented universe
Amid half-semblances of diviner things.
These now could serve no more his regal turn;
The Immortal's pride refused the doom to live..'
'His height repelled the lowness of earth's state: '

'In each success a seed of failure lurks.
He saw the doubtfulness of all things here,
The incertitude of man's proud confident thought,
The transience of the achievements of his force.'
'And yet a greater destiny may be his,
For the eternal Spirit is his truth.'
'He can re-create himself and all around
'And fashion new the world in which he lives'

'A call was on him from intangible heights;
He dwelt in the wideness of the Eternal's reign.'
'A universal light was in his eyes,
A golden influx flowed through heart and brain;
A Force came down into his mortal limbs,
A current from eternal seas of Bliss;
He felt the invasion and the nameless joy.'
He climbed to meet the infinite more above.

'A lone forerunner of the Godward earth, '
'In the eternal courts of Solitude.'
'His spirit mingles with eternity's heart '
'In a divine retreat from mortal thought'
'His being towered into pathless heights,
Naked of its vesture of humanity.'

............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 linesfrom
Book-1 canto-5

Page 76

A brighter heavenlier sun must soon illume
This dusk room with its dark internal stair,
The infant soul in its small nursery school
Mid objects meant for a lesson hardly learned
Outgrow its early grammar of intellect
And its imitation of Earth-Nature's art,
Its earthly dialect to God-language change,
In living symbols study Reality
And learn the logic of the Infinite.

Page 77

A packed assemblage of crude tentative lives
Are pieced into a tessellated whole.
There is no perfect answer to our hopes;
There are blind voiceless doors that have no key;

Page 78

A thinking being in an unthinking world,
An island in the sea of the Unknown,
He is a smallness trying to be great,
An animal with some instincts of a god,
His life a story too common to be told,
His deeds a number summing up to nought,
His consciousness a torch lit to be quenched,
His hope a star above a cradle and grave.

Page 79

The Silence was his sole companion left.
Impassive he lived immune from earthly hopes,
A figure in the ineffable Witness' shrine
Pacing the vast cathedral of his thoughts
Under its arches dim with infinity
And heavenward brooding of invisible wings.

The Immobile's ocean-silence saw him pass,
An arrow leaping through eternity
Suddenly shot from the tense bow of Time,
A ray returning to its parent sun.

Opponent of that glory of escape,
The black Inconscient swung its dragon tail
Lashing a slumbrous Infinite by its force
Into the deep obscurities of form:
Death lay beneath him like a gate of sleep.

Page 79&80

Questing for God as for a splendid prey,
He mounted burning like a cone of fire.

Page 80

Is chosen by a secret witness Eye
And driven by a pointing hand of Light
Across his soul's unmapped immensitudes.

A pilgrim of the everlasting Truth,
Our measures cannot hold his measureless mind;

A nameless Marvel fills the motionless hours.