Aurobindo 33-Savitri-Book -2 Poem by Indira Renganathan

An appreciation on Savitri
Book IIThe Book of the Traveller of the Worlds
Canto VThe Godheads of the Little Life
Words within inverted commas are Aurobindo's

'Trivial amusements stimulate and waste
The energy given to him to grow and be.
His little hour is spent in little things.'
'If something great awakes, too frail his pitch
To reveal its zenith tension of delight,
His thought to eternise its ephemeral soar,
Art's brilliant gleam is a pastime for his eyes,
A thrill that smites the nerves is music's spell.'

'His motion on too short an axis wheels; '
'Hardly a few can climb to greater life.
All tunes to a low scale and conscious pitch.
His knowledge dwells in the house of Ignorance; '
'Rare are his visits of heavenly ecstasy.'
Rare is man's bon trip en route to heaven,
Rare is he awake of living in His haven..
'He is satisfied with his common average kind; '

'In a narrow plot he has pitched his tent of life
Beneath the wide gaze of the starry Vast.
He is the crown of all that has been done:
Thus is creation's labour justified;
This is the world's result, Nature's last poise! '
'At times all looks unreal and remote: '
'We seem to live in a fiction of our thoughts'..
'A figment or circumstance in cosmic sleep.'

'All here is dreamed or doubtfully exists,
But who the dreamer is and whence he looks
Is still unknown or only a shadowy guess.
'Or the world is real but ourselves too small,
Insufficient for the mightiness of our stage.'
Such is our scene in the half-light below.

............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 2 Canto 5

Page 164

A touch of friendship mid indifferent crowds
Draw his heart-plan on life's diminutive map.

Page 165

Amidst his harassed toil and welter of cares,
Pressed by the labour of his crowding thoughts,
He draws sometimes around his aching brow
Nature's calm mighty hands to heal his life-pain.

His days are tinged with the red hue of strife
And lust's hot glare and passion's crimson stain;
Battle and murder are his tribal game.


The bliss which sleeps in things and tries to wake,
Breaks out in him in a small joy of life:
This scanty grace is his persistent stay;
It lightens the burden of his many ills
And reconciles him to his little world.

Page 166

His being's kinship to infinity
He has shut away from him into inmost self,
Fenced off the greatnesses of hidden God.
His being was formed to play a trivial part
In a little drama on a petty stage;

We seem to live in a fiction of our thoughts
Pieced from sensation's fanciful traveller's tale,
Or caught on the film of the recording brain,
A figment or circumstance in cosmic sleep.

Page 166&167

A somnambulist walking under the moon,
An image of ego treads through an ignorant dream
Counting the moments of a spectral Time.

In a false perspective of effect and cause,
Trusting to a specious prospect of world-space,
It drifts incessantly from scene to scene,
Whither it knows not, to what fabulous verge.

Page 167

A thin life-curve crosses the titan whirl
Of the orbit of a soulless universe,
And in the belly of the sparse rolling mass
A mind looks out from a small casual globe
And wonders what itself and all things are.