Sri Aurobindo in 1950

1916 version of a passage in Book Nine, Canto One

A page of a 1947 draft for Book Ten, Canto Four

Author's Note

The tale of Satyavan and Savitri is recited in the Mahabharata as a story of conjugal love conquering death. But this legend is, as shown by many features of the human tale, one of the many symbolic myths of the Vedic cycle. Satyavan is the soul carrying the divine truth of being within itself but descended into the grip of death and ignorance; Savitri is the Divine Word, daughter of the Sun, goddess of the supreme Truth who comes down and is born to save; Aswapati, the Lord of the Horse, her human father, is the Lord of Tapasya, the concentrated energy of spiritual endeavour that helps us to rise from the mortal to the immortal planes; Dyumatsena, Lord of the Shining Hosts, father of Satyavan, is the Divine Mind here fallen blind, losing its celestial kingdom of vision, and through that loss its kingdom of glory. Still this is not a mere allegory, the characters are not personified qualities, but incarnations or emanations of living and conscious Forces with whom we can enter into concrete touch and they take human bodies in order to help man and show him the way from his mortal state to a divine consciousness and immortal life.

SRI AUROBINDO

PART ONE

BOOKS I ­ III

BOOK ONE

The Book of Beginnings

Canto One

The Symbol Dawn

Across the path of the divine Event

In her unlit temple of eternity,

Almost one felt, opaque, impenetrable,

The abysm of the unbodied Infinite;

A power of fallen boundless self awake

Recalling the tenebrous womb from which it came,

And the tardy process of mortality

As in a dark beginning of all things,

Repeating for ever the unconscious act,

Cradled the cosmic drowse of ignorant Force

And carries our lives in its somnambulist whirl.

Its formless stupor without mind or life,

Thrown back once more into unthinking dreams,

Forgetful of her spirit and her fate.

Then something in the inscrutable darkness stirred;

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Something that wished but knew not how to be,

A throe that came and left a quivering trace,

At peace in its subconscient moonless cave

Straining closed eyes of vanished memory,

And only meets the corpse of his desire.

Even in this ultimate dissolution's core,

Survivor of a slain and buried past

Reviving in another frustrate world.

And a blank prescience yearned towards distant change.

Reminded of the endless need in things

An infant longing clutched the sombre Vast.

A long lone line of hesitating hue

Troubled the far rim of life's obscure sleep.

An eye of deity peered through the dumb deeps;

It seemed amid a heavy cosmic rest,

To seek for a spirit sole and desolate

Intervening in a mindless universe,

Calling the adventure of consciousness and joy

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Compelled renewed consent to see and feel.

A sense was born within the darkness' depths,

As if a soul long dead were moved to live:

Had blotted the crowded tablets of the past,

And old experience laboured out once more.

A hope stole in that hardly dared to be

As if solicited in an alien world

Orphaned and driven out to seek a home,

Into a far-off nook of heaven there came

The persistent thrill of a transfiguring touch

And beauty and wonder disturbed the fields of God.

That glowed along a fading moment's brink,

A gate of dreams ajar on mystery's verge.

Forced the world's blind immensity to sight.

From the reclining body of a god.

Hardly enough for a trickle from the suns,

The brief perpetual sign recurred above.

Iridescent with the glory of the Unseen,

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Ablaze upon creation's quivering edge,

And buried its seed of grandeur in the hours.

On life's thin border awhile the Vision stood

Interpreting a recondite beauty and bliss

It wrote the lines of a significant myth

A brilliant code penned with the sky for page.

Of which our thoughts and hopes are signal flares;

Almost was flung on the opaque Inane.

Infinity's centre, a Face of rapturous calm

A Form from far beatitudes seemed to near.

The omniscient Goddess leaned across the breadths

And saw the spaces ready for her feet.

Then, thoughtful, went to her immortal work.

The waking ear of Nature heard her steps

And, scattered on sealed depths, her luminous smile

All grew a consecration and a rite.

The wide-winged hymn of a great priestly wind

The high boughs prayed in a revealing sky.

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On the dumb bosom of the ambiguous earth,

And Truth has her throne on the shadowy back of doubt,

Outspread beneath some large indifferent gaze,

Our prostrate soil bore the awakening ray.

Lit into miracles common meaningless shapes;

Unwanted, fading from the mortal's range.

The worship of a Presence and a Power

The prescience of a marvellous birth to come.

Spiritual beauty illumining human sight

And squanders eternity on a beat of Time.

Adjoining mortal time to Timelessness,

Its lustre vanishes in the inconscient planes,

So now dissolved in bright accustomed air.

The single Call, the uncompanioned Power,

The hue and marvel of the supernal beam:

The excess of beauty natural to god-kind

Too mystic-real for space-tenancy

The rarity and wonder lived no more.

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Affranchised from the respite of fatigue

Pursued the cycles of her blinded quest.

The thousand peoples of the soil and tree

And, leader here with his uncertain mind,

Man lifted up the burden of his fate.

And Savitri too awoke among these tribes

That hastened to join the brilliant Summoner's chant

Acclaimed their portion of ephemeral joy.

No part she took in this small happiness;

The embodied Guest within made no response.

Its chequered eager motion of pursuit,

Visited her heart like a sweet alien note.

In her there was the anguish of the gods

The deathless conquered by the death of things.

But long could keep not its gold heavenly hue

A narrow movement on Time's deep abysm,

The proud and conscious wideness and the bliss

The calm delight that weds one soul to all,

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Rejected the undying rapture's boon:

Her passion-flower of love and doom she gave.

A prodigal of her rich divinity,

Hoping her greater being to implant

That heaven might native grow on mortal soil.

Mortality bears ill the eternal's touch:

Of that assault of ether and of fire;

Almost with hate repels the light it brings;

And the might and sweetness of its absolute Voice.

It sullies with its mire heaven's messengers:

It turns against the saviour hands of Grace;

A glory of lightnings traversing the earth-scene,

Their work betrayed, their good to evil turned,

Only they leave behind a splendid Name.

A few have caught flame and risen to greater life.

Her greatness weighed upon its ignorant breast

A portion of its sorrow, struggle, fall.

The mortal's lot became the Immortal's share.

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Awaiting her ordeal's hour abode,

Accepting life's obscure terrestrial robe,

The godhead greater by a human fate.

From all of whom she was the star and stay;

In her torn depths she kept the grief to come.

Takes up the load of an unwitting race,

Unknown her act, unknown the doom she faced,

The long-foreknown and fatal morn was here

For Nature walks upon her mighty way

Leaving her slain behind she travels on:

Even in this moment of her soul's despair,

No cry broke from her lips, no call for aid;

Calm was her face and courage kept her mute.

Even her humanity was half divine:

Her nature felt all Nature as its own.

Aloof, she carried in herself the world:

Her strength was founded on the cosmic mights;

Against the evil at life's afflicted roots,

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Her own calamity its private sign,

A solitary mind, a world-wide heart,

At first life grieved not in her burdened breast:

Inert, released into forgetfulness,

Obtuse and tranquil like the stone and star.

She lay remote from grief, unsawn by care,

Then a slow faint remembrance shadowlike moved,

And recognised the close and lingering ache,

But knew not why it was there nor whence it came.

Heavy, unwilling were life's servitors

Sullen, the torch of sense refused to burn;

Only a vague earth-nature held the frame.

At the summons of her body's voiceless call

Back to the yoke of ignorance and fate,

Lighting a pathway through strange symbol dreams

Her house of Nature felt an unseen sway,

And memory's casements opened on the hours

All came back to her: Earth and Love and Doom,

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The godheads from the dim Inconscient born

And in the shadow of her flaming heart,

A guardian of the unconsoled abyss

A stone-still figure of high and godlike Pain

That saw grief's timeless depths but not life's goal.

Bound to his throne, he waited unappeased

All the fierce question of man's hours relived.

Earth offers to the immortal Ecstasy

Awake she endured the moments' serried march

And heard the ignorant cry of living things.

Her soul arose confronting Time and Fate.

This was the day when Satyavan must die.

END OF CANTO ONE

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