There is recognition in the
depths of their being, joy wells up, yet they strive for understanding speech.
There is resistance from "the screen of the external sense", the
inner sight is impeded, the right words are slow in coming. Satyavan first
comes out of the trance of fascination and apostrophises her as one might a
goddess who has swum across one's view:
Whence hast thou dawned filling my
spirit's days,
Brighter than summer, brighter than my
flowers,
Into the lonely borders of my life,
O Sunlight moulded like a golden maid?
Not unused to the denizens of
the upper air, Satyavan has in the past heard the "centaur's wizard
song", glimpsed the apsaras in their abandon, and "beheld the princes
of the Sun"; has she come too from "the Thunderer's worlds?"
Perhaps she will condescend to abide with mortals:
If our time-vexed affections thou canst
feel,
Earth's ease of simple things can satisfy,
If thy glance can dwell content on
earthly soil,
And this celestial summary of delight,
Thy golden body, dally with fatigue
Oppressing with its grace our terrain,
while
The frail sweet passing taste of earthly
food
Delays thee and the torrent's leaping
wine,
Descend. Let thy journey cease, come down
to us.
His father's hermitage is near,
where "bare, simple is the sylvan hermit-life"; there she can find a
"resting chamber" fit for her.
Savitri, shaking herself free from the
magic web of his echoing voice, tells her name—"I am Savitri, Princess of
Madra"—and asks in turn for his, and why he is content to abide in the
forest's inaccessible solitudes. He tells his story too; he is Satyavan, the Shalwa
King Dyumatsena's son—but a king no more, for he has lost eyesight and kingdom
both:
Outcast from empire of the outer light,
Lost to the comradeship of seeing men,
He sojourns in two solitudes, within
And in the solemn rustle of the woods.
And so has Satyavan been led to
cultivate "the frankness of the primal earth", with the sunlight's
companionship in day-time, and "the moonbeam's silver ecstasy"
shaping his sleep at night. Nature's ministry has been gentle and unfailing,
and has given him intimations vast and profound; kingfisher, swan, pranked
butterfly, peacock, spotted deer, these and other "high beauty's
visitants" have found ways of reaching to his soul. Above all he says,
I carved my vision out of wood
and stone;
I caught the echoes of a word
supreme
And metred the rhythm-beats of
infinity
And listened through music for
the eternal Voice.
He has seen fragments of
humanity, the Self obscured beyond recognition, each living "in himself
and for himself alone"; and he has "sat with the forest sages in
their trance" and pierced the veil of the many to reach the presence of
the One. Yet matter's stubborn resistance to change has defeated him, he has
failed to convert the Inconscience, and Death and the Void are giant spectres
still. If only Savitri would share Satyavan's life, could they not with their
joint efforts succeed where singly he had failed?
But Savitri would like Satyavan to
continue speaking—it is music to her ears—till her spirit's intimations arm her
'mortal mind' with the power to see and the will to accept. And Satyavan's
heart melts in "many-coloured waves of speech" and floods her with
the joy of growing recognition. Satyavan describes his ardours and longings,
his strivings and realisations; he has roamed in dark caverns with thought for
his lantern; he has made a deep study of logic and semantics, ethics and
metaphysics; he has seen through matter's atomic universe, its "secret
laws and sorceries"; he has explored aesthetics, and sought in beauty and
art the clue to the still elusive ultimate Truth; yet one or the other has
always failed him, the hither or the thither shore. But Savitri's very
appearance is like a cure for all Satyavan's earlier frustrations. From his
heart's depths comes the cry:
A strange new world swims to me in thy
gaze
Approaching like a star from unknown
heavens;
A cry of spheres comes with thee and a
song
Of flaming gods...
Come nearer to me from thy car of light
On this green sward disdaining not our
soil...
O my bright beauty's princess Savitri,
By my delight and thy own joy compelled
Enter my life, thy chamber and thy
shrine.
"I know that thou and only
thou art he," says Savitri as she steps down from her car "with a
soft and faltering haste". Then follows a passage of great sensuous beauty
touched also by the accents of the purer poetry of the soul. The woman whose
whole response has been awakened offering her love and herself to the man who
has kindled this fire of ardour and adoration in her, is the archetype of the
world's most thrilling and most moving romantic poetry. There is a traditional
ritual about this sacrificial offering which is the basis of life's perennial
resurrection. In India from times immemorial it is the girl who advances,
bashfully yet bravely, with garland in hand, and so does Savitri here:
A candid garland set with simple forms
Her rapid fingers taught a flower song,
The stanzaed movement of a marriage hymn.
Profound in perfume and immersed in hue
They mixed their yearning's coloured
signs and made
The bloom of their purity and passion
one.
A sacrament of joy in treasuring palms
She brought, flower-symbol of her offered
life,...
She bowed and touched his feet with
worshipping hands;...
Satyavan humbly bends to receive
her and gather her into an embrace, and Savitri feels "her being flow into
him as in waves/A river pours into a mighty sea". The river has found the
sea, the mortal has wakened into Eternity. This is the phoenix hour, the time
of their ineffable union. They are married already in the eyes of Heaven, and
the symbol rites take their own course:
On the high glowing cupola of the day
Fate tied a knot with morning's halo
threads
While by the ministry of an auspice-hour
Heart-bound before the sun, their
marriage fire,
The wedding of the eternal Lord and
Spouse
Took place again on earth in human forms:...
The priest-wind chants the
mantras, the leaves hymn the "choral whisperings", and "one
human moment was eternal made".
Now Satyavan leads Savitri to their
future home, and calm and content possess her heart. But before she can rest in
this felicity she needs must return to Madra and tell Aswapati the choice she
has made. But she will return, nor ever again agree to part from Satyavan. So
saying she mounts her car once more, and speeds "swift-reined,
swift-hearted" towards her parental home; but in the "still
lucidities of sight's inner world" she is with Satyavan still in his
hermit thatch behind the nave of forest trees.
(“Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri – A study of the cosmic
epic”, Dr. Premanandakumar, Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust, Puducherry)
