Aurobindo 154 Savitri Book 10 Poem by Indira Renganathan

An appreciation on Savitri-
Book Ten:The Book of the Double Twilight
Canto Four:The Dream Twilight of the Earthly Real
Words within inverted commas are Aurobindo's

A dolorous moment in chasmal depths
Yet Hope would not let down Savitri
'The dim-heart marvel of the ideal was lost; '
'A straining taut and dire besieged her heart;
Heavy her sense grew with a dangerous load,
And sadder, greater sounds were in her ears, '
'A foiled cinema of lit shadowy shapes
Enveloped in the grey mantle of a dream.'

'As if lost remnants of forgotten light,
Before her mind there fled with trailing wings
Dimmed revelations and delivering words,
Emptied of their mission and their strength to save,
The messages of the evangelist gods,
Voices of prophets, scripts of vanishing creeds.'
'The rolling cycles passed and came again,
Brought the same toils and the same barren end, '

'Once more arose the great destroying Voice: '
''Behold the figures of this symbol realm, Line 87 to
'I, Death, am the gate of immortality.'Line 233
'In its motion-parable of human life
Here thou canst trace the outcome Nature gives
To the sin of being and the error in things'
'In an immutable order's hierarchy
Where Nature changes not, man cannot change: '

'For mind is man, beyond thought he cannot soar.'
'He is a captive in his net of mind
And beats soul-wings against the walls of life.'
'In vain his heart lifts up its yearning prayer,
Peopling with brilliant Gods the formless Void; '
Wonderful study of human mind in Thou words....

............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 4

Page 641

There came a slope that slowly downward sank;
It slipped towards a stumbling grey descent.

The dim-heart marvel of the ideal was lost;
Its crowding wonder of bright delicate dreams
And vague half-limned sublimities she had left:
Thought fell towards lower levels; hard and tense
It passioned for some crude reality.
The twilight floated still but changed its hues
And heavily swathed a less delightful dream;
It settled in tired masses on the air;
Its symbol colours tuned with duller reds
And almost seemed a lurid mist of day.

And through stern breakings of the lambent glare
Her vision caught a hurry of driving plains
And cloudy mountains and wide tawny streams,
And cities climbed in minarets and towers
Towards an unavailing changeless sky:
Long quays and ghauts and harbours white with sails
Challenged her sight awhile and then were gone.


Page 641&642

A savage din of labour and a tramp
Of armoured life and the monotonous hum
Of thoughts and acts that ever were the same,
As if the dull reiterated drone
Of a great brute machine, beset her soul,
A grey dissatisfied rumour like a ghost
Of the moaning of a loud unquiet sea.

A huge inhuman cyclopean voice,
A Babel-builders' song towering to heaven,
A throb of engines and the clang of tools
Brought the deep undertone of labour's pain.
As when pale lightnings tear a tortured sky,
High overhead a cloud-rimmed series flared
Chasing like smoke from a red funnel driven,
The forced creations of an ignorant Mind:

Page 642&643

Ascetic voices called of lonely seers
On mountain summits or by river banks
Or from the desolate heart of forest glades
Seeking heaven's rest or the spirit's worldless peace,
Or in bodies motionless like statues, fixed
In tranced cessations of their sleepless thought
Sat sleeping souls, and this too was a dream.