VII         'THE DESCENT INTO NIGHT'         Aswapati, having reached this dead end, this cactus end of final frustration in Life's efforts at self-transcendence, is anxious to locate the cause of it all, and so he dons the mantle of giant courage, peers into the "viewless Vast", and sees,    ...a grey carved mask of Night Watching the birth of all created things.81    He has plunged into an immitigable abyss and recognises therein the sources of misrule, which are really perversions of the sources of order above. Power, presence, light, love—all are here, but only in a twisted and perverted shape. The subtle serpent Ignorance can spew out "a perverse sweetness, he

VI      POETRY         Last of all, let us turn to the poet. There are a few unusual circumstances here: Sri Aurobindo, a Bengali, brought up both in India and England till his twentieth year in ignorance of his mother tongue, became a classical scholar, and wrote verses in Greek and Latin—and also in English—in his Cambridge days. He had besides an intimacy with several European literatures, and after returning to India, he tried to gain an equal intimacy with Sanskrit, Bengali and some other modern Indian literatures. Apart from the undergraduate Greek and Latin exercises in versification, all Sri Aurobindo's poetry is in English.         The earliest pieces were prob

 XV         SAVITRI: ITS SYMBOLIC ACTION IN       A COSMIC BACKGROUND   A comparison of the extended scheme of Savitri with that of the earlier narrative poem will make clear that the major additions are Aswapati's Yoga, Savitri's Yoga and the new accent or dimension given to the struggle between Savitri and Death in Book IX, X and XI. The intention behind these additions and changes is to impose on the simple austere ambrosial human drama a vast symbolic dimension so that what happens in an apparently obscure place on earth may be made to carry implications on a truly cosmic scale. The opening line in canto three of Book I: "A world's desire compelled her mortal birth," succinct

      XII         'THE HEAVENS OF THE IDEAL'         The tireless traveller of the worlds, Aswapati continues the ascent, looking out for new worlds still:         At each pace of the journey marvellous       A new degree of wonder and of bliss,       A new rung formed in Being's mighty stair,       A great wide step trembling with jewelled fire.115   Beyond the triple realm of ordered thought are the "heavens of the ideal Mind.. ./The lovely kingdoms of the deathless Rose".116 Such an inspired poem, mantric in its efficacy, as Sri Aurobindo's Rose of God is uncannily appropriate to this region of the deathless Rose, where at the feet of God unfol

      IX         'SAVITRI' IN THE VEDA   "Always precise", that is to say, precise in its denotation; but the connotation may vary from age to age, even from person to person. For instance, there can be no denotative ambiguity about Darkness and Light, but the area or depth or intensity of the meaning we invest them with may vary. When they become the symbols of ignorance and knowledge, the sense is precise enough, yet there may be layers and layers of significance which in one quick view we cannot hope to exhaust. Now Light itself is too abstract, and hence we may wisely choose to equate the Sun with Light, and sunrise with the gradual unfoldment of light. "The sun with its powerful rays

       III         'THE GLORY AND FALL OF LIFE'         The passage from the world of subtle matter brings Aswapati to the life-realms, where the 'vital', the principle of life, has full play. The law of life here comprises birth, growth, decay and death. With an endless but blind appetite the life-principle explores all possibilities, regardless of consequences. Change and danger, pain and defeat, are the playfellows and pests of this region. Here people sit and 'hear each other groan'; dolorous their converse, transient their joy; pure felicity forever eludes. But thought-sick though life be and knotted with failure, yet Life too derives from the Timeless and carries the memory of "

 III         'THE SUPREME CONSUMMATION"         The Supreme's blissful word comes at last:   My will is thine, what thou hast chosen I choose. All thou hast asked I give to earth and men.86   Thesis and antithesis have been clashing through the symbol worlds °f night, twilight and day, and even in the highest realms of the Supreme; the possibility of any true ideals being quarried out of the crude hard rocks of the Inconscience has been questioned, and the possibility of earthly realisations being permanent has been doubted; the advisability of leaving the earth and mankind to their fate and achieving a personal salvation either through the enjoyment of

     III        'SATYAVAN AND SAVITRI'         There is recognition in the depths of their being, joy wells up, yet they strive for understanding speech. There is resistance from "the screen of the external sense", the inner sight is impeded, the right words are slow in coming. Satyavan first comes out of the trance of fascination and apostrophises her as one might a goddess who has swum across one's view:         Whence hast thou dawned filling my spirit's days,       Brighter than summer, brighter than my flowers,       Into the lonely borders of my life,       O Sunlight moulded like a golden maid?190   Not unused to the denizens of the upper ai

XIII         TECHNIQUE AND INSPIRATION IN SAVITRI    If the neatly and meaningfully balanced single lines in Savitri recall Pope, the richly elaborated similies must be conceded to be in the true epic manner, almost Miltonic in their impact though not in their technical organisation. Milton himself thought that the virtue of blank verse lay in "apt numbers, fit quantity of syllables, and the sense variously drawn out from one verse into another." Can it be said that in Savitri the 'sense' is "variously drawn out from one verse into another?" Certainly, to judge from the passages quoted above, variety is not lacking, there is free modulation, and even an extra syllable at the end i

  V        'THE FINDING OF THE SOUL'         Leaving the three Madonnas behind, Savitri presses on her quest to the "soul's mystic cave" and first steps into "a night of God" where the familiar powers of the world-knowledge, wisdom, truth—are held in a screened solution in the reigning holy hush and dark:   In a simple purity of emptiness        Her mind knelt down before the unknowable.       All was abolished save her naked self       And the prostrate yearning of her surrendered heart:294   It is somewhat like the mixing and merging of a drop with the ocean,         A night of person in a bare outline       Crossing a fathomless impersonal