II         THE GOSPEL OF DEATH AND THE VANITY OF THE IDEAL   The gossamer evanescence of this twilight world tempts Death to try his wiles once more. See this unsubstantial pageant, he tells Savitri ingratiatingly; this is the source of her idealistic dreams and cravings, mere ethereal stuff as dreams are made on—no more, no more!         The ideal dwells not in heaven, nor on the earth,       A bright delirium of man's ardour of hope       Drunk with the wine of its own fantasy.30   And love, is there such a thing as love? Flesh calls to flesh no doubt, and lust calls itself love! Death grows subtly rhetorical, as if pitying the human lot and man's capa

      II         'THE SOUL'S CHOICE'   Savitri has successfully withstood the blandishments and temptations of the Dark God. An even subtler trial awaits her now. A voice rises as it were from her heart. The voice of "inviolable Ecstasy", she is the "beauty of the unveiled Ray", and death itself is the "tunnel" she drives through life to reach her "unseen distances of bliss". Heaven and Earth have an intimate kinship:         Heaven in its rapture dreams of perfect earth,       Earth in its sorrow dreams of perfect heaven.77   Savitri and Satyavan can "serve the dual law" now only distantly glimpsed, and serve the earth and its inhabitants; but if they would rather le

      VII         'ROSE OF GOD'310         Meantime Savitri lives her routine in the forest, gracious to all, striking them as being no different from what she has always been. She is "the same perfect Savitri", apt in speech and action, although inhabiting a total silence of mind. The power behind her life is "the miraculous Nihil... a cipher of God". It is a trance, a somnambulistic play of life, not the life that we know; yet nothing is wrongly done or said, whether she is with Satyavan or with "the sages of the woods"; sometimes, indeed, her mouth becomes the channel of "ineffable truths", and the sages marvel at her,         ...for she seemed to know       W

 III         YOGA   There have been great fighters in modern India like Tilak, philosophers like Vivekananda, poets like Tagore, and 'mahatmas' like Gandhi. But Sri Aurobindo was all these, and a yogi as well. To the question, what is yoga, it is not possible to return an easy or facile answer, and unfortunately the word 'yoga' is being bandied about too often and used too indiscriminately.         "Indian Yoga", writes Sri Aurobindo, "in its essence a special action or formulation of certain great powers of Nature, itself specialised, divided and variously formulated, is potentially one of these dynamic elements of the future life of humanity."35         Yoga, then, is

     XIV         'DAWN' IN SAVITRI   There is no mistaking the vision that inspired, nor the voice that articulated, the magnificent 'Exordium', 'The Symbol Dawn':         It was the hour before the Gods awake.       Across the path of the divine Event       The huge foreboding mind of Night, alone       In her unlit temple of eternity,       Lay stretched immobile upon Silence' marge.       Almost one felt, opaque, impenetrable,       In the sombre symbol of her eyeless muse       The abysm of the unbodied Infinite;       A fathomless zero occupied the world.204   The knot of opposing tenses ('was' and 'awake') in the first lin

      V         'OVERHEAD' POETRY         While describing Savitri's pilgrimaging in the "inner countries", Sri Aurobindo at one point snaps the scene where she confronts the throng of powers that are really the "messengers, the occult gods" who awake humanity to the beauty and truth of things:   Into dim spiritual somnolence they break Or shed wide wonder on our waking self, Ideas that haunt us with their radiant tread, Dreams that are hints of unborn Reality, Strange goddesses with deep-pooled magical eyes, Strong wind-haired gods carrying harps of hope, Great moon-hued visions gliding through gold air, Aspiration's sun-dream head

 V         PHILOSOPHY         In 1934 Sri Aurobindo wrote: "I am supposed to be a philosopher, but I never studied philosophy—everything I wrote came from yogic experience, knowledge and inspiration."56 Again, declining an invitation to contribute to a volume on 'Contemporary Indian Philosophy', he said that it was "quite impossible for me to write philosophy to order."57 On a later occasion also, with regard to a statement in an article that he had derived his philosophical technique from Shankara, Sri Aurobindo said:   That is not true. I have not read much of philosophy. It is like those who say that I am influenced by Hegel. Some even say that I am influenced

      PART I         TOWARDS SAVITRI         Beholding      the higher Light   beyond the darkness     we came      to the divine Sun      in the Godhead,    to the highest    Light of all.                                       Rig Veda         SRI AUROBINDO:     HIS LIFE AND WORK          I         INTRODUCTION   When I behold thy face, 'mid bondage, pain and wrong And black indignities, I hear the soul's great song. Of rapture unconfined, the chant the pilgrim sings In which exultant hope's immortal splendour rings, Solemn voice and calm...the spirit of Bharat-land,

  VII         SAVITRI         There remains Savitri.         Reading Ilion people interject: "Isn't it entirely Greek?" Reading Savitri people might likewise exclaim: "How entirely Indian!" These can only be one's first reactions. Closer study must reveal whole new universes of meaning—and this is particularly true of Savitri. Gilbert Murray says rightly that, "one cardinal fact about great poetry.. .is that its main value lies in a process, not in a result.. .we do not understand a great poem till we have felt it through and as far as possible recreated in ourselves the emotions which it originally carried."123 And A.E. Housman says that it is the peculiar