XIII         SAVITRI AND FAUST         A poem like Savitri that was, as we have seen, some fifty years a-growing, a poem that attempts to present at one and the same time a human and a cosmic drama, a poem besides that reveals some of the features of a tantalising palimpsest, must needs, as Sri Aurobindo himself has admitted, show traces of variations in tone and changes in style. In this respect, as also in others, Savitri challenges comparison with another great poetic masterpiece, Goethe's Faust,122 which was years a-growing. Sri Aurobindo greatly admired Goethe and once wrote to a disciple:   Yes, Goethe goes much deeper than Shakespeare; he had an incomparably greater

      II         THE OVERHEAD PLANES OF CONSCIOUSNESS   At the present stage of the evolutionary advance, man has a body, certain vital instincts and passions, and a directing and controlling mind. Mental man is a great improvement on the mere animal, but he is also a prey to various dissatisfactions. What is the reason? Sri Aurobindo's diagnosis is pointed and clear: the mind of man, a helper in many ways, a gleaner of bits of truth and partial fragments of knowledge, is nevertheless rooted in a basic Ignorance, functions from behind a veil that separates it from the source of the Truth-consciousness, and hence commits error upon error and piles up misery upon misery. As Sri Aurobindo wr

  SECTION E   'EPILOGUE: THE RETURN TO EARTH'   Savitri now awakes from out of the "abysmal trance" of her spirit; she espies the "green-clad branches" above, and peering through an "emerald lattice-window of leaves" notes the thinning day and the evening's peace. Satyavan's living body is by her side, and all her being rejoices in enfolding his:         Supine in musing bliss she lay awhile       Given to the wonder of a waking trance.94   But Satyavan is still asleep, "like an infant spirit unaware", reclining on her breast; presently awake, he finds her eyes waiting for his, he feels her hands, and embracing her and vaguely recollecting strange impossible h

   X         BATTLES OF THE SOUL   The third major ingredient of the epic, Savitri, is the prolonged trial of strength between Savitri and Death. In the original legend, Death (Yama) is no villain, no principle of primordial Evil, but a bright God, Dharma himself. In Sri Aurobindo's poem, he is referred to neither as Yama nor as Dharma, but only as Death. Savitri and Death meet by the side of prone Satyavan as antagonistic powers and personalities, and once the issue is joined, they struggle to the bitter end. A battle, whether symbolic or real, whether fought with material or other weapons, between the forces of Good and Evil can be as exciting as, perhaps even more exciting t

   PART III          SAVITRI:  SIGNIFICANCES         And thou reachest, O Savitri, to the three shining "worlds of heaven; and thou art made manifest       by the rays of the Sun;  and thou encirclest the Night upon either side; and thou becomest the Lord of Love by the law of thy actions, O God.                                                                                           Rig Veda        THE 'LEGEND' AND       THE 'SYMBOL         The face of Truth is hidden by a brilliant golden lid; that do thou remove, O fostering Sun,  for the Law

 V       THE CANTOS   Apart from Whitman, whom Sri Aurobindo obviously admired, though with the necessary qualifications, he was doubtless also influenced as a practitioner of verse by the work of contemporaries like Yeats, Eliot and Ezra Pound. While the extent of the influence might not have been very appreciable, there can be no question about the reality of Sri Aurobindo's intelligent interest in contemporary English poetry. Passages from The Hollow Men are scanned in Sri Aurobindo's essay on quantitative metre as examples of the new 'ametric poetry', and once, in 1946, in defence of his use of the French word 'flasque' in Savitri, he said that he had done it "somewhat af

 XI         SAVITRI AND THE COMMEDIA         Sri Aurobindo's Savitri, in its earliest version,106 must have approximated much closer to the 'legend' in the Mahabharata than to the present epic. The power of Savitri's radiant purity of purpose and fiery chastity confronts Yama; and Yama who is both the Lord of Death and the upholder of Dharma, being irresistibly awakened by her mere presence and the flow of apt speech from her to a realisation of his latter role, consents at last to release the 'soul' of Satyavan, and so the lovers return to their hermitage. It was during his early years at Pondicherry that Sri Aurobindo glimpsed clearly the possibility of the supramentalisation of ma

IV         MYSTIC POETRY AND THE MANTRA         If overhead poetry is the high-ranging Himalayas, then the mantra is their ultimate peak, Everest itself. Rhythm, verbal form, thought-substance, thought's radiant soul-quality, all fuse in the mantra to produce the effect of an incantation. When a Vedic rishi articulates a mantra, it really surges with a potent inevitability from the depths of his soul, and presently sinks into the depths of the hearer's soul, leaping over or penetrating intervening barriers like the analytical intellect, the sensory faculties, the bodily sheaths. Sri Aurobindo himself describes the process thus:         Its message enters stirring the bl

       II         'THE PARABLE OF THE SEARCH FOR THE SOUL'         Her nights are sleepless, for still she hears and sees "the dumb tread of Time and the approach of ever-nearing Fate". Then one night she is startled by a mighty voice invading her mortal life; she is jerked into a trance and becomes "a stone of God lit by an amethyst soul". What use Savitri—"O spirit, O immortal energy"!—coming to "this dumb deathbound earth" if it was merely to nurse a hopeless grief in a helpless heart? Not passive sufferance but positive action is expected of her:         Arise, O soul, and vanquish Time and Death.   Still in her tranced state, Savitri replies: How can she striv