Aurobindo 163 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

'The Woman answered to the mighty Shade,
And as she spoke, mortality disappeared;
Her Goddess self grew visible in her eyes,
Light came, a dream of heaven, into her face.'
A long preaching on God she discoursed
The omnipresent all and ever pervading
In this and that, here and there, all and nothing
Formed and formless that can be only felt...

'O Death, thou too art God and yet not He, Line 543 to
And earthly life become the life divine.' Line 805
Through my eyes into my heart these words when seat
Overwhelmed and spellbound my mind with no move next
You read and feel the God therein my dear friend...
'But who can show to thee Truth's glorious face?
Our human words can only shadow her.'
Ah, harken, how great she enunciates....

'To thought she is an unthinkable rapture of light,
To speech a marvel inexpressible.
O Death, if thou couldst touch the Truth supreme
Thou wouldst grow suddenly wise and cease to be.
If our souls could see and love and clasp God's Truth,
Its infinite radiance would seize our hearts,
Our being in God's image be remade
And earthly life become the life divine.'

'Then Death the last time answered Savitri:
'If Truth supreme transcends her shadow here
Severed by Knowledge and the climbing vasts,
What bridge can cross the gulf that she has left
Between her and the dream-world she has made? '
'O soul who flutterest to escape my net? '...

............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 656

"O Death, thou too art God and yet not He,
But only his own black shadow on his path
As leaving the Night he takes the upward Way
And drags with him its clinging inconscient Force.

All contraries are aspects of God's face.
The Many are the innumerable One,
The One carries the multitude in his breast;

He is the Impersonal, inscrutable, sole,
He is the one infinite Person seeing his world;

The Silence bears the Eternal's great dumb seal,
His light inspires the eternal Word;

He is the Immobile's deep and deathless hush,
Its white and signless blank negating calm,
Yet stands the creator Self, the almighty Lord
And watches his will done by the forms of Gods
And the desire that goads half-conscious man
And the reluctant and unseeing Night.

These wide divine extremes, these inverse powers
Are the right and left side of the body of God;

Page 657

A still deep sea, he laughs in rolling waves;
Universal, he is all, transcendent, none.

Page 658

Ingenious notes plugged into a motived score,
These million discords dot the harmonious theme
Of the evolution's huge orchestral dance.

Its gleaming shards are Wisdom's diamond thoughts,
Its shadowy reflex our ignorance.

Page 659

A demigod animal, came thinking man;
He wallows in mud, yet heavenward soars in thought;

A few have dared the last supreme ascent
And break through borders of blinding light above,
And feel a breath around of mightier air,
Receive a vaster being's messages
And bathe in its immense intuitive Ray.

On summit Mind are radiant altitudes
Exposed to the lustre of Infinity,
Outskirts and dependencies of the house of Truth,
Upraised estates of Mind and measureless.
There man can visit but there he cannot live.
A cosmic Thought spreads out its vastitudes;
Its smallest parts are here philosophies
Challenging with their detailed immensity,
Each figuring an omniscient scheme of things.
But higher still can climb the ascending light;

Page 660

A highest flight climbs to a deepest view:

Intuition's lightnings range in a bright pack
Hunting all hidden truths out of their lairs,
Its fiery edge of seeing absolute
Cleaves into locked unknown retreats of self,
Rummages the sky-recesses of the brain,
Lights up the occult chambers of the heart;

Thought there has revelation's sun-bright eyes;

The Word, a mighty and inspiring Voice,
Enters Truth's inmost cabin of privacy
And tears away the veil from God and life.


The Powers that build the cosmos station take
In its house of infinite possibility;
Each god from there builds his own nature's world;

Page 662

A cosmic vision, a spiritual sense
Feels all the Infinite lodged in finite form
And seen through a quivering ecstasy of light
Discovers the bright face of the Bodiless,
In the truth of a moment, in the moment's soul
Can sip the honey-wine of Eternity.

Page 662&663

The Truth supreme, vast and impersonal
Fits faultlessly the hour and circumstance,
Its substance a pure gold ever the same
But shaped into vessels for the spirit's use,
Its gold becomes the wine jar and the vase.
All there is a supreme epiphany: