Aurobindo 143 Savitri Book 10 Poem by Indira Renganathan

An appreciation on Savitri-
Book Ten:The Book of the Double Twilight
Canto Three - The Debate of Love and Death
Words within inverted commas are Aurobindo's

'O dark-browed sophist of the universeLine 5 to
Love is man's lien on the Absolute.' Line 461
Who veilst the Real with its own Idea, '
'Thou hast used words to shutter out the Light
And called in Truth to vindicate a lie.'
'O Death, thou speakest truth but truth that slays,
I answer to thee with the Truth that saves.'
So was Savitri's determined reply

'O Death, thou lookst on an unfinished world
Assailed by thee and of its road unsure,
Peopled by imperfect minds and ignorant lives,
And sayest God is not and all is vain.
How shall the child already be the man?
Because he is infant, shall he never grow?
Because he is ignorant, shall he never learn? '
A spiritual metamorphosis through a cosmic journey

'A miracle structure of the eternal Mage,
Matter its mystery hides from its own eyes,
A scripture written out in cryptic signs,
An occult document of the All-Wonderful's art.
All here bears witness to his secret might,
In all we feel his presence and his power.'
'He has built a world in the unknowing Void.
His forms he has massed from infinitesimal dust; '

'Immortality assured itself by death;
The Eternal's face was seen through drifts of Time.'
'His knowledge he disguised as Ignorance,
His Good he sowed in Evil's monstrous bed, '
'Made error a door by which Truth could enter in,
His plant of bliss watered with Sorrow's tears.'..

............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 10 Canto 3

Page 621

Hiding with brute objects Nature's living face,
Masking eternity with thy dance of death,
Thou hast woven the ignorant mind into a screen
And made of Thought error's purveyor and scribe,
And a false witness of mind's servant sense.

A lying reality is falsehood's crown
And a perverted truth her richest gem.

A traveller new-discovering himself,
One made of Matter's world his starting-point,
He made of Nothingness his living-room
And Night a process of the eternal light
And death a spur towards immortality.

God wrapped his head from sight in Matter's cowl,
His consciousness dived into inconscient depths,
All-Knowledge seemed a huge dark Nescience;
Infinity wore a boundless zero's form.
His abysms of bliss became insensible deeps,
Eternity a blank spiritual Vast.

Page 622

In inert Matter breathed a slumbering Life,
In a subconscient Life Mind lay asleep;
In waking Life it stretched its giant limbs
To shake from it the torpor of its drowse;

In waking Mind, the Thinker built his house.
A reasoning animal willed and planned and sought;

Page 623

In a small fragile seed a great tree lurks,
In a tiny gene a thinking being is shut;

A little element in a little sperm,
It grows and is a conqueror and a sage.

In God concealed the world began to be,
Tardily it travels towards manifest God:

Our imperfection towards perfection toils,
The body is the chrysalis of a soul:

The infinite holds the finite in its arms,
Time travels towards revealed eternity.

Page 623&624

A blaze of his sovereign glory is the sun,
A glory is the gold and glimmering moon,
A glory is his dream of purple sky.

Page 624

A march of his greatness are the wheeling stars.
His laughter of beauty breaks out in green trees,
His moments of beauty triumph in a flower;

The blue sea's chant, the rivulet's wandering voice
Are murmurs falling from the Eternal's harp.
This world is God fulfilled in outwardness.

If mind is crippled, life untaught and crude,
If brutal masks are there and evil acts,
They are incidents of his vast and varied plot,
His great and dangerous drama's needed steps;

A play and yet no play but the deep scheme
Of a transcendent Wisdom finding ways
To meet her Lord in the shadow and the Night:
Above her is the vigil of the stars;

Page 624&625

The Mighty Mother her creation wrought,
A huge caprice self-bound by iron laws,
And shut God into an enigmatic world:
She lulled the Omniscient into nescient sleep,
Omnipotence on Inertia's back she drove,
Trod perfectly with divine unconscious steps
The enormous circle of her wonder-works.

A thousand aspects point back to the One;
A dual Nature covered the Unique.
In this meeting of the Eternal's mingling masques,
This tangle-dance of passionate contraries
Locking like lovers in a forbidden embrace
The quarrel of their lost identity,
Through this wrestle and wrangle of the extremes of Power
Earth's million roads struggled towards deity.