Aurobindo-16-Savitri-Book -2 Poem by Indira Renganathan

An appreciation on Savitri-
Book II The Book of the Traveller of the Worlds
Canto I The World-Stair
Words within inverted commas are Aurobindo's

'If earth were all and this were not in her,
Thought could not be nor life-delight's response
Only material forms could then be her guests
Driven by an inanimate world-force.
Earth by this golden superfluity
Bore thinking man and more than man shall bear'
Very true, wonder at His mercy, or else
We will be 'Driven by an inanimate world-force'

'This higher scheme of being is our cause
And holds the key to our ascending fate;
It calls out of our dense mortality
The conscious spirit nursed in Matter's house.'
'Our life is a holocaust of the Supreme.'
'Our earth is a fragment and a residue; '
'Her power is packed with the stuff of greater worlds
And steeped in their colour-lustres dimmed by her drowse; '


'An attempt, a drawing half-done is the world's life; '
'A Mystery's process is the universe.
At first was laid a strange anomalous base,
A void, a cipher of some secret Whole,
Where zero held infinity in its sum
And All and Nothing were a single term,
An eternal negative, a matrix Nought: '
'Into its forms the Child is ever born'

'A slow reversal's movement then took place'
'Upon earth's new-born soil God's tread was heard.'
'His call had reached the Traveller in Time.'
'A formless Stillness called, a nameless Light.'
'He mounted towards an indiscernible end
On the bare summit of created things.....'

............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 lines from
Book-2 canto-1


Page 99

The living symbol of these conscious planes,
Its influences and godheads of the unseen,
Its unthought logic of Reality's acts
Arisen from the unspoken truth in things,
Have fixed our inner life's slow-scaled degrees.

Its steps are paces of the soul's return
From the deep adventure of material birth,
A ladder of delivering ascent
And rungs that Nature climbs to deity.


The great World-Mother by her sacrifice
Has made her soul the body of our state;
Accepting sorrow and unconsciousness
Divinity's lapse from its own splendours wove
The many-patterned ground of all we are.
An idol of self is our mortality.


Page 99&100

Our earth is a fragment and a residue;
Her power is packed with the stuff of greater worlds
And steeped in their colour-lustres dimmed by her drowse;

Page100

An atavism of higher births is hers,
Her sleep is stirred by their buried memories
Recalling the lost spheres from which they fell.
Unsatisfied forces in her bosom move;

An attempt, a drawing half-done is the world's life;
Its lines doubt their concealed significance,
Its curves join not their high intended close.

Page 101

Caught in a blind stone-grip Force worked its plan
And made in sleep this huge mechanical world,
That Matter might grow conscious of its soul
And like a busy midwife the life-power
Deliver the zero carrier of the All.

A spirit dreamed in the crude cosmic whirl,
Mind flowed unknowing in the sap of life
And Matter's breasts suckled the divine Idea.
A miracle of the Absolute was born;

Infinity put on a finite soul,
All ocean lived within a wandering drop,
A time-made body housed the Illimitable.
To live this Mystery out our souls came here.

Page 102

No term was fixed to the high-pitched attempt;
World after world disclosed its guarded powers,
Heaven after heaven its deep beatitudes,
But still the invisible Magnet drew his soul.

End of Book 2-Canto 1