“Savitri: A Legend And A Symbol (Guidance from Sri Aurobindo)”

“Savitri: A Legend And A Symbol (Guidance from Sri Aurobindo)”

March 1, 2012

PART ONE
BOOKS !-III BOOK ONE
The Book of Beginnings
Canto one
The Symbol Dawn
IT WAS the hour before the God’s awake.
Across the path of the divine Event
The huge forboding 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.
A power of fallen boundless self
awake
Between the first and the last
Nothingness,
Recalling the tenebrous womb
from which it came,
Turned from the insoluble
mystery of birth
And the tardy process of
mortality
And longed to reach its end in
vacant Nought.
As in a dark beginning of all
things,
A mute featureless semblance of all
things,
A mute featureless semblance of
the Unknown
repeating for ever the
unconscious act,
Prolonging for ever the unseeing
will,
Cradled the cosmic drowse of
ignorant Force
Whose moved creative slumber
kindles the suns
And carries our lives in its
somnabulist whirl.
Athwart the vain enormous
trance of Space,
Its formless stupor without mind
or life,
A shadow spinning through a
soulless Void,
Thrown back once more into unthinking dreams,
Earth wheeled abandoned in the
hollow gulfs
Forgetful of her spirit and her
fate.
The impassive skies were
neutral, empty, still.
Then something in the
inscrutable darkness stirred;
A nameless movement, an
unthought Idea
Insistent, dissatisfied, without an aim,
Something that wished but knew
not how to be,
Teased the Inconscient to wake
Ignorance.
A throe that came and left a
quivering trace,
Gave room for an old tired want
unfilled,
At peace in its subconscient
moonless cave
To raise its head and look for
absent light,
Straining closed eyes of vanished
memory,
Like one who searches for a by gone self
And only meets the corpse of his
desire.
It was as though even in this
Nought’s profound,
Even in this ultimate
dissolution core,
There lurked an unremembering entity,
Survivor of a slain and buried
past
Condemned to resume the effort
and the pang,
Reviving in another frustrate
world.
An unshaped consciousness
desired light
And a blank prescience yearned
towards distant change.
As if a childlike finger laid on a
cheek
Reminded of the endless need in things
The heedless Mother of the
universe,
An infant longing clutched the
sombre Vast, Insensibly somewhere a breach began:
A long lone line of hesitating hue
like a vague smile tempting a
desert heart
Troubled the far rim of life’s
obscure sleep.
Arrived from the other side of
boundlessness
An eye of deity peered through
the dumb deeps;
A scout in a reconnaissance from
the sun,
I seemed amid a heavy cosmic
rest,
The torpor of a sick and weary
world, To seek for a spirit sole and
desolate
Too fallen to recollect forgotten
bliss.
Intervening in a mindless universe,
Its message crept through the
reluctant hush
calling the adventure of
consciousness and joy
And, conquering Nature’s
disillusioned breast,
Compelled renewed consent to
see and feel.
A thought was sown in the
unsounded Void,
A sense was born within the
darkness’ depths,
A memory quivered in the heart
of Time
As if a soul long dead were
moved to live:
But the oblivion that succeeds
the fall,
Had blotted the crowded tablets
of the past,
And all that was destroyed must
be rebuilt
And old experience laboured out
once more.
All can be done if the god-touch
is there.
A hope stole in that hardly dared
to be
Amid the Night’s forlorn
indifference.
As if solicited in an alien world
with timid and hazardous instinctive grace,