IX         'THE PARADISE OF THE LIFE-GODS'         Like a man returned to life, Aswapati luxuriates in the "great felicitous Day" that now warms him up and intoxicates him with the "wine of God". Here life is in league with light and love; it beats "a jewel-rhythm of the laughter of God" and lies "on the breast of love".93 Aswapati can now move with light dancing steps, on plain or ridge or hillside, or look over "dreaming cities of Gandharva kings". He can visit "shining Edens of the vital gods" and watch Beauty, Peace, Love, Strength, Desire, Pleasure and Dream play their truly appropriate roles. All here is under God's sway; pain changes to joy, the commonplace to the

     III         PARADISE LOST AND SAVITRI         When Milton, "long choosing and beginning late", decided at last to make the Tall of Man' the subject of his epic, he felt the need for an aggressive defence of his choice and so devoted the Exordium of Book IX to this purpose:         Sad task! yet argument       Not less but more heroic than the wrath       Of stern Achilles on his foe pursued       Thrice fugitive about Troy wall; or rage       Of Turnus for Lavinia disespoused;       Or Neptune's ire, or Juno's, that so long       Perplexed the Greek, and Cytherea's son:...       Not sedulous by nature to indite       Wars, hither

  X         THE KINGDOMS AND GODHEADS OF THE LITTLE MIND'         The Life-Gods' paradisal felicity is complete and final; there is no further progress, nor any possible regress. This "breath of hundred hued felicity" renews eternally, and flawless happiness forever prevails. This is the Life-Heavens, whose inhabitants cherish their happiness on the mid-way peaks of ascent, nor wish to mount to the ultimate heights. Not so Aswapati. He still must respond to "a greater adventure's call" and scale the climb to Timelessness. Be the hazard what it may, Aswapati must march on, and stop not till the goal is reached.         First he meets "a silver-grey expanse where D

  V         'THE GODHEADS OF THE LITTLE LIFE'         Aswapati has seen clearly enough that all the Kingdoms in the Empire of the Little Life—even the most advanced in appearance —are encased in a giant ignorance. But as he peers closer into this empire, he is able to glimpse the godheads behind it:         As when a search-light stabs the Night's blind breast       And dwellings and trees and figures of men appear       As if revealed to an eye in Nothingness,       All lurking things were torn out of their veils       And held up in his vision's sun-white blaze.64   These are the forces that urge, however obscurely or unconsciously, the 'little

     BACKGROUNDS AND ANTECEDENTS         Thoughts odour is so pale that in the air         Nostrils inhale, it disappears like fire         Put out by water. Drifting through the coils    Of the involved and sponge-like brain it frets     The fine-veined walls of secret mental cells,    Brushing their fragile fibre as with light   Nostalgic breezes: And it's then we sense     Remote presentiment of some intensely bright     Impending spiritual dawn, of which the pure Immense illumination seems to pour  In upon our existence from beyond The edge of knowing.                                                                 

    X         DANTE AND SRI AUROBINDO         In Savitri Sri Aurobindo has tried to make poetry, partly out of his mystic experiences and realisations, partly out of the philosophy that he elaborated (plainly on the basis of these realisations) in The Life Divine, both sources of inspiration—the mystic and the philosophic—flowing into and filling with rich significance the mould of the ancient legend of Savitri and Satyavan. The question now arises: to what extent is mystic experience or philosophical statement amenable to transformation as poetry? It may be readily conceded that the rendering of mystical experience in terms of poetry, while it is perpetually necessary (for such poetry

  XIV         SAVITRI: ITS ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN         On a first view it cannot be denied that the original scheme of Savitri in two parts had a neat simplicity, even as the scheme of the Divina Commedia (Hell: Purgatory: Paradise) has an obvious rounded completeness. However, a closer view will show that the revised Savitri too is not lacking in a firm architectural design. The poem begins, as Western epics often do, at a critical point; it plunges into the middle of things—in medias res. Retrospective narration follows (as in Paradise Lost): the thread of the story is taken up again, and now we follow it without any further interruption, till the unfolding of the triumphant conclu

 II         'THE JOURNEY IN ETERNAL NIGHT          AND THE VOICE OF THE DARKNESS'         Arrived at length at the "chill dreadful edge of night", all three pause in vague expectancy:         Heaven leaned towards them like a cloudy brow       Of menace through the dim and voiceless hush.15   Now daring all, Savitri first affronts the abyss and foots, "the ruthless eyeless waste" and grapples with the "mystery of terror's boundlessness". A realm of sinister Nought, "clotted cipher", this Death's dark kingdom is a place where:         Mind could not think, breath could not breathe, the soul       Could not remember or feel itself; it s

   XV         SAVITRI: HER POWER AND PERSONALITY         Gods and men and all Nature awake with the Dawn, and Savitri awakes too on this day of all days "when Satyavan must die". She is burdened by the foreknowledge about her Satyavan's fate, but she would share the burden with none; she cannot cry, she will not woo despair:         Amid the trivial sounds, the unchanging scene       Her soul arose confronting Time and Fate.225   The issue will soon be joined, and she must gather force and be ready. And she is ready. "All in her pointed to a nobler kind", for she might very well be "the forerunner or first creator of a new race."226 Then follows