-02_Spring, an Ardent Lover - 23 Nov 2014.htm

Spring, an Ardent Lover

Then Spring, an ardent lover, leaped through leaves

And caught the earth-bride in his eager clasp;

His advent was a fire of irised hues,

His arms were a circle of the arrival of joy. ||93.23||

His voice was a call to the Transcendent’s sphere

Whose secret touch upon our mortal lives

Keeps ever new the thrill that made the world,

Remoulds an ancient sweetness to new shapes

And guards intact unchanged by death and Time

The answer of our hearts to Nature’s charm

And keeps for ever new, yet still the same,

The throb that ever wakes to the old delight

And beauty and rapture and the joy to live. ||93.24||

His coming brought the magic and the spell,

At his touch life’s tired heart grew glad and young;

He made joy a willing prisoner in her breast. ||93.25||

His grasp was a young god’s upon earth’s limbs:

Changed by the passion of his divine outbreak

He made her body beautiful with his kiss. ||93.26||

Impatient for felicity he came,

High-fluting with the coïl’s happy voice,

His peacock turban trailing on the trees;

His breath was a warm summons to delight,

The dense voluptuous azure was his gaze. ||93.27||

A soft celestial urge surprised the blood

Rich with the instinct of God’s sensuous joys;

Revealed in beauty, a cadence was abroad

Insistent on the rapture-thrill in life:

Immortal movements touched the fleeting hours. ||93.28||

A godlike packed intensity of sense

Made it a passionate pleasure even to breathe;

All sights and voices wove a single charm. ||93.29||

The life of the enchanted globe became

A storm of sweetness and of light and song,

A revel of colour and of ecstasy,

A hymn of rays, a litany of cries:

A strain of choral priestly music sang

And, swung on the swaying censer of the trees,

A sacrifice of perfume filled the hours. ||93.30||

Asocas burned in crimson spots of flame,

Pure like the breath of an unstained desire

White jasmines haunted the enamoured air,

Pale mango-blossoms fed the liquid voice

Of the love-maddened coïl, and the brown bee

Muttered in fragrance mid the honey-buds. ||93.31||

The sunlight was a great god’s golden smile. ||93.32||

All Nature was at beauty’s festival. ||93.33||

No greater, more beautiful or powerful description of Spring has ever been written than this passage from Savitri. We see Spring as an ardent lover who leaping through leaves, the first sign of life after winter, catches the earth-bride in his clasp. When Spring comes the earth is indeed a bride, bedecked with innumerable fragrances and colours in a thousand hues. Note that Sri Aurobindo hyphenates the word, earth-bride, creating a new word, not simply joining two words. The earth, of all the worlds and galaxies is divinely sanctioned to be the home of the Life Divine.

This is how I know her and know Mother India as well, sacred, pure, though now defiled by men but one day will be returned to perfect beauty and glory to us unimaginable. As man will be superseded by a higher man, a diviner man, so too the earth will blossom with new flowers, new fragrances, expressing her divinity to all.

I once wrote to Mother the following: "If our flower-offering depends on our state of consciousness, does it help us to learn the significances of flowers even if it is purely mental to begin with?

Mother replied, "Yes, surely"

The photograph is one of many of Spring in 'Mother's Garden' in Georgia, U.S.A. The significance of daffodils, botanical name, narcissus, as given by the Mother is 'Pride of Beauty.

In future blogs we will delight in a virtual feast of flowers, many rarely seen before.

Narad