Aurobindo 51 Savitri Book 2 Poem by Indira Renganathan

Aurobindo 51 Savitri Book 2 - Poem by Indira Renganathan
An appreciation on Savitri-
Book Two: The Book of the Traveller of the Worlds
Canto Ten: The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Little Mind
Words within inverted commas are Aurobindo's

'A sovereign worker through the centuries
Observing and remoulding all that is,
Confident she took up her stupendous charge.'
A rigorous stare in her creative eyes
Coercing the plastic stuff of cosmic Mind,
She sets the hard inventions of her brain
In a pattern of eternal fixity:
'For the world seen she weaves a world conceived: '

'In her high works of pure intelligence, ..'
'There dawns no light of heavenly certitude.'
'A million faces wears her knowledge here
And every face is turbaned with a doubt.'
'An inconclusive play is Reason's toil.
Each strong idea can use her as its tool; '
'Absolute her judgments seem but none is sure; '
Time cancels all her verdicts in appeal.

'An aided sense is her seeking's arbiter.
This now she uses as the assayer's stone.'
'As if she knew not facts are husks of truth,
The husks she keeps, the kernel throws aside.'
'An ancient wisdom fades into the past, '
'Only she seeks mechanic Nature's keys.'
'A lifeless Energy irresistibly driven, '
'Then wonders why all was and whence it came.'

'The little Mind is tied to little things: '
'The Truth is known only when all is seen.'
'A fire shall come out of the infinitudes,
A greater Gnosis shall regard the world '
'A timeless knowledge it shall bring to Mind,
Its aim to life, to Ignorance its close.'

............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 10


Page 250

She leans to forge her credos and iron codes
And metal structures to imprison life
And mechanic models of all things that are

Page 250&251

She spins in stiff but unsubstantial lines
Her gossamer word-webs of abstract thought,
Her segment systems of the Infinite,
Her theodicies and cosmogonic charts
And myths by which she explains the inexplicable.

At will she spaces in thin air of mind
Like maps in the school-house of intellect hung,
Forcing wide Truth into a narrow scheme,
Her numberless warring strict philosophies;

Out of Nature's body of phenomenon
She carves with Thought's keen edge in rigid lines,
Like rails for the World-Magician's power to run,
Her sciences precise and absolute.

On the huge bare walls of human nescience
Written round Nature's deep dumb hieroglyphs
She pens in clear demotic characters
The vast encyclopaedia of her thoughts;

An algebra of her mathematics' signs,
Her numbers and unerring formulas
She builds to clinch her summary of things.

Page 252

The eternal Advocate seated as judge
Armours in logic's invulnerable mail
A thousand combatants for Truth's veiled throne
And sets on a high horse-back of argument
To tilt for ever with a wordy lance
In a mock tournament where none can win.

A bullock yoked in the cart of proven fact,
She drags huge knowledge-bales through Matter's dust
To reach utility's immense bazaar.
Apprentice she has grown to her old drudge;

Page 253

Our thoughts are parts of the immense machine,
Our ponderings but a freak of Matter's law,
The mystic's lore was a fancy or a blind;
Of soul or spirit we have now no need:

Matter is the admirable Reality,
The patent unescapable miracle,
The hard truth of things, simple, eternal, sole.

Page 254

Late shall the self-disintegrating Force
Contract the immense expansion it has made:
Then ends this mighty and unmeaning toil,
The Void is left bare, vacant as before.

Matter was an incident in being's flow,
Law but a clock-work habit of blind force.


Page 255

A hard compression held down anarchy
And liberty was only a phantom's name:
Creation and destruction waltzed inarmed
On the bosom of a torn and quaking earth;
All reeled into a world of Kali's dance.

Thus tumbled, sinking, sprawling in the Void,
Clutching for props, a soil on which to stand,
She only saw a thin atomic Vast,
The rare-point sparse substratum universe
On which floats a solid world's phenomenal face.

Page 256

But many-visaged is the cosmic Soul;
A touch can alter the fixed front of Fate.
A sudden turn can come, a road appear.

A greater Mind may see a greater Truth,
Or we may find when all the rest has failed
Hid in ourselves the key of perfect change.

Ascending from the soil where creep our days,
Earth's consciousness may marry with the Sun,
Our mortal life ride on the spirit's wings,
Our finite thoughts commune with the Infinite.

In the bright kingdoms of the rising Sun
All is a birth into a power of light:
All here deformed guards there its happy shape,
Here all is mixed and marred, there pure and whole;
Yet each is a passing step, a moment's phase.

Page 257

In this small mould of infant mind and sense
Desire is a child-heart's cry crying for bliss,
Our reason only a toys' artificer,
A rule-maker in a strange stumbling game.

The world she has made is an interim report
Of a traveller towards the half-found truth in things
Moving twixt nescience and nescience.
For nothing is known while aught remains concealed;

Page 258

Even now great thoughts are here that walk alone:
Armed they have come with the infallible word
In an investiture of intuitive light
That is a sanction from the eyes of God;
Announcers of a distant Truth they flame
Arriving from the rim of eternity.

End of Book 2-Canto 10