From the
shelter of her parents' home and city, Savitri loses herself in the wide
world's unchartered ways, and feels dazzled by the unfolding panorama of
"new brilliant scenes" and diverse soil and country, clans and
peoples. She is a part of all she meets, the very stars and winds are her dear
comrades, and she feels sometimes as though she is but tracing "again a
journey often made". She sees and remembers, or she remembers and sees,
and from her silent heights she can peer through the dim play of appearance.
She sees multi-foliate Nature and million-hued humanity, and winds her way
through the still untravelled world:
Her carven
chariot with its fretted wheels
Threaded
through clamorous marts and sentinel towers
Past
figured gates and high dream-sculptured fronts
And gardens
hung in the sapphire of the skies,
Pillared
assembly halls with armoured guards,
Not
populous far-famed cities only but the humbler haunts of common folk also draw
Savitri's attention and affectionate gaze. The virgin silences of unfrequented
hills and valleys have a deep purpose of their own for it is there the great
Creatrix nurses "her symbol mysteries" and guards for "her
pure-eyed sacraments":
The valley
clefts between her breasts of joy,
Her
mountain altars for the fires of dawn
And nuptial beaches where the ocean couched
And the
huge chanting of her prophet woods.
Deep in the woods' recesses are the
hermitages of the wise, and Savitri visits them too and studies the lives of
the "strong king-sages" and their "young grave disciples".
They are not as other men, but live "immaculate in tranquil heights of
self"; and their ministry makes their neophytes "comrades of the
cosmic urge/No longer chained to their small separate selves”. They are masters
of knowledge, and "vessels of the cosmic Force"; they are pacifiers
and harmonisers, and they are the healers of the "hard and wounded
world". And when they lisp in numbers, they sing "Infinity's names
and deathless powers/In metres that reflect the moving worlds”. Active or passive,
in speech or in silence, in creation or in contemplation, these wise children
of the forest help the world in its toils and guard and extend the immaculate
treasures of the spirit.
As Savitri glides in and out of these
hermitages and haunts of the wise, her sensibilities are quickened still
further and she feels "the kinship of eternal calm". Yet her quest
keeps her moving on and on, for she is yet to find what she has set out to
seek. She calls the Powers to her help, and hopes that she may not be
"overwhelmed by the immensity" of the world stretching before her.
Still Nature lures her on, still she wanders, gazes, communes; the crickets'
cry rings in her ears, the serpentine road seems an endless coil; the desert
sands are bleak, the jungle voices are eerie; yet she will persevere in her
quest, however hard the earth and torridly oppressive the sky:
The months had fed the passion of the sun
And now his burning breath assailed the
soil.
The tiger heats prowled through the
fainting earth;
All was licked up as by a lolling tongue.
The spring winds failed; the sky was set
like bronze.
(“Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri –
A study of the cosmic epic”, Dr. Premanandakumar, Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust,
Puducherry)
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