As if lost remnants of forgotten light,
Before her mind there fled with trailing wings
Dimmed revelations and delivering words,
Emptied of their mission and their strength to save,
The messages of the evangelist gods,
Voices of prophets, scripts of vanishing creeds.

Savitri also sees images which are like ‘lost remnants of forgotten light’: remains of revelations which have illumined humanity but then been lost. A ‘remnant’ is something that is left over – a bit of cloth or the remains of a meal or a fire. These are fragments and remains of ‘light’ from the past which have lost their power to help humanity. They pass in front of Savitri’s mind on weak and ‘trailing wings’. These are ‘Dimmed revelations and delivering words’, messagesfrom higher levels of consciousness which have lost their brightness, their meaning and saving power: their light and energy have been exhausted, used up and finished. These things had once been ‘revelations’, great lights, which have now become dim, liberating words which have lost their meaning. They were once ‘The messages of the evangelist gods’. An ‘evangel’ is a message that brings salvation, and an ‘evangelist’ is one who shares a divine message; but now the value of those messages has faded and died. There have been ‘prophets’ in the past, there have been scriptures of old religions, but Savitri sees all these things passing before her mind, ‘Emptied of their mission and their strength to save’: they have no power or value left.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 10]

Each in its hour eternal claimed went by:
Ideals, systems, sciences, poems, crafts
Tireless there perished and again recurred,
Sought restlessly by some creative Power;
But all were dreams crossing an empty vast.

Each of these messages in its own time was believed to be of eternal value; now Savitri sees them passing and perishing and being revived again because ‘some creative Power’ is restlessly seeking them. Death shows all these to her as ‘forced creations of an ignorant Mind’. High ‘Ideals’ and wonderfully organised ‘systems’, ‘sciences, poems, crafts’ – all these admirable products of human effort have existed in the past; craftsmen with amazing skill have made things which astonish us: we wonder how they could have been made. But Death is showing Savitri how these human achievements perish, and then return in slightly different forms because ‘some creative Power’ in the manifestation needs and wants them, but then they just perish again. He shows them to her as mere empty ‘dreams crossing an empty vast’. Death is showing all these things to Savitri to convince her of the uselessness of earthly reality. This is not Sri Aurobindo’s view, this is not our view, this is the view of Death, who denies all value to human dreams and hopes and efforts for great future possibilities, negating all the great fulfilments which Sri Aurobindo promises as the true destiny of our earth.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 10]

Unwearied all returned insisting still
Because of joy in the anguish of pursuit
And joy to labour and to win and lose
And joy to create and keep and joy to kill.

Why do all these movements of hope and effort go on returning ‘Unwearied’ and ‘insisting still’? Because different forms and tastes of delight are sustaining them. There is a certain ‘joy in the anguish of pursuit’: when you are making a big effort to achieve an aim or to realise some goal, that brings a kind of joy, even though the effort may be causingyou ‘anguish’ – intense pain. There is a ‘joy’ in working hard  and doing things as well as you possibly can; there is a ‘joy’ in winning, but also maybe in losing. There is a ‘joy’ in creating – that may be one of the most intense and satisfying kinds of joy that we human beings can experience; there is also a ‘joy’ in keeping and looking after and caring for and maintaining things. And there is also a kind of ‘joy’ in killing and destroying.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 10]

The rolling cycles passed and came again,
Brought the same toils and the same barren end,
Forms ever new and ever old, the long
Appalling revolutions of the world.

Savitri sees all this happening in this symbol world: ‘The rolling cycles’ of time, the aeons and the yugas, arriving and passing and coming again, and always bringing ‘the same toils’, the same hard labour and efforts and striving, and ‘the same barren end’ – the same fruitless outcome. She sees the same forms appearing again and again, ‘Forms ever new and ever old’, endlessly repeating themselves. All of this adds up to ‘the long / Appalling revolutions of the world’. By ‘revolutions’ the poet means not only violent political upheavals and changes, although those are a part of this endless repetitive process, but also the ‘revolutions’ or the cyclic movements of a wheel turning round and round and round for ever. It is this that is ‘Appalling’: the fact that everything goes on and on, round and round and round without ever significantly changing. This is indeed ‘Appalling’: ‘horrifying’, ‘dismaying’ – something that makes you turn pale with horror and despair. This is the picture of earthly reality which Death is showing to Savitri.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 10]