Hardly, too close beset by the world’s care,
Can the dense mould in which we have been made
Return sheer joy to joy, pure light to light.
For its tormented will to think and live
First to a mingled pain and pleasure woke
And still it keeps the habit of its birth:
A dire duality is our way to be.

‘Hardly’ means ‘with difficulty’. ‘The dense mould in which we have been made’, the dense matter of our physical form, has great difficulty in responding to pure joy and light – it is almost impossible for it, because although it is living matter, it is still full of inertia; and at the same time it is constantly ‘beset by the world’s care’, under attack from all the trouble and sorrow and anxiety of the world which affect us through our nerves and feelings and emotions. This ‘dense mould in which we have been made’ can only ‘Hardly’, with great difficulty ‘Return sheer joy to joy, pure light to light’. It simply cannot respond. There is a distortion in its response. And this is because of its evolutionary past. This is because in our living matter the ‘will to think and live’ first awoke to a mixture of ‘pain and pleasure’, and it still keeps that habit: ‘A dire duality is our way to be’. Our physical substance cannot experience anything fully or purely; every sensation and emotion leads to its opposite: pleasure turns to pain, enthusiasm leads to exhaustion, sweet turns to bitter or sour, happiness to sorrow. In fact it often seems that we cannot experience or enjoy anything without feeling the contrast of its opposite. We would not feel cold if we had not been feeling hot earlier. This ‘dire duality’ afflicts our ‘will to think and live’ so that it becomes twisted and perverted and tormented. It cannot help feeling pain. If Life is divine and blissful in its origin, how did this state of things come about? Sri Aurobindo will explain this to us in a way that is very different from the scientific understanding of how evolution has unfolded.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 2]

When earth was built in the unconscious Void
And nothing was save a material scene,
Identified with sea and sky and stone
Her young gods yearned for the release of souls
Asleep in objects, vague, inanimate

When this planet earth was formed ‘in the unconscious Void’, in the emptiness of universal space, there was nothing but ‘a material scene’. We can try to imagine the earth before any life appeared on it: there was nothing but ‘sea and sky and stone’ – a very different earth from the one we know today. But there were young divine beings, creative powers, inhabiting the earth and looking after it. At first they were totally identified with the ‘material scene’, with all that ‘sea and sky and stone’; but because the divine principle was involved in matter, those ‘young gods’ began to yearn, to long for ‘the release of souls’. Hidden within the material forms, there were small sparks of the divine, ‘Asleep in objects, vague, inanimate’. The forms, the objects, could not exist unless the divine presence was within them. The ‘young gods’ of earth began to wish, to aspire that those soul-sparks should wake up and become free, released from the grip of unconscious matter.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 2]

The poised inconscience shaken with a touch,
The intuitive Silence trembling with a name,
They cried to Life to invade the senseless mould
And in brute forms awake divinity.

Everything had been ‘poised’ – in perfect balance – in the inconscient harmony and equilibrium of Matter, but now that has been ‘shaken’ with the ‘touch’ of their intense longing. The ‘deaf stillness’ becomes an ‘intuitive Silence’ which is ‘trembling with a name’, as if sensing the suggestion, the hint of ‘a name’, the very beginning of form and personality. Those young gods ‘cried to Life to invade the senseless mould’, calling out to the Life principle to enter into Matter. The word ‘mould’ has a double suggestion: we use a ‘mould’ to shape wax into a candle or metal into a statue; but ‘mould’ can also mean ‘earth’, ‘soil’. That original ‘material scene’ had no Life, no senses, no capacity to see and feel; but earth’s young gods appealed passionately to Life to pour herself into that ‘senseless mould’ to awaken the possibility of ‘divinity’ in the inert crude forms of material objects.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 2]

Aware of its own buried reality
Remembering its forgotten self and right,
It yearned to know, to aspire, to enjoy, to live.

That being, that soul who has been denied conscious existence, wakes up to awareness of its own reality, even though that reality is buried and imprisoned; it remembers who it is, ‘its forgotten self’ and its ‘right’ to consciousness and joy. It has been deeply asleep for an immeasurable length of time, but now it wakes up and yearns ‘to know, to aspire, to enjoy, to live’.

These lines and what they express remind us of the very beginning of the poem, where in the total darkness something stirs; the Mother says it is like the very first movement of aspiration; then that ‘unremembering entity’ begins to wake. This call to Life is something like that.

[ Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 2]

As comes a goddess to a mortal’s breast
And fills his days with her celestial clasp,
She stooped to make her home in transient shapes;
In Matter’s womb she cast the Immortal’s fire,
In the unfeeling Vast woke thought and hope,
Smote with her charm and beauty flesh and nerve
And forced delight on earth’s insensible frame.

‘As comes a goddess to a mortal’s breast / And fills his days with her celestial clasp’. These lines must refer to an experience Sri Aurobindo himself had. He has written a poem about the legend of the union between the Apsara Urvasie and the powerful rishi-King Pururavas. The possibility of a marriage, a union between a divine power and a human being is referred to in many ancient traditions. Sri Aurobindo is comparing the descent of the Life principle into Matter with such a union between a divine being and a human. In a similar way, Life stoops down, bends down ‘to make her home’ in the ‘transient’, short-lived, forms of the material world, and plants ‘the Immortal’s fire’, the energy of immortal Life, in the womb of Matter so that material Nature can give birth to living forms. In the midst of the apparently unconscious and insensitive vastness of the material universe, the Life principle awakens the possibility of ‘thought and hope’, and ‘Smote with her charm and beauty flesh and nerve’. ‘Smote’ is the past tense of the verb ‘to smite’, meaning ‘to give a strong blow’. ‘With her charm and beauty’ Life gives a shock to ‘flesh and nerve’, the physical matter into which she has infused her energy, and in this way ‘forced delight on earth’s insensible frame’, the material framework of living beings. The purely material world had no capacity for sensation or delight,  but now that the Life-Force has poured herself into matter, delight be possible even in the physical body. Then Sri Aurobindo gives us a wonderful description of the living earth:

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 2]

Alive and clad with trees and herbs and flowers
Earth’s great brown body smiled towards the skies,
Azure replied to azure in the sea’s laugh;
New sentient creatures filled the unseen depths,
Life’s glory and swiftness ran in the beauty of beasts,
Man dared and thought and met with his soul the world.

This is the result of the descent of Life into Matter. Earth becomes alive, her ‘great brown body’ is ‘clad’ or clothed with plants: ‘trees and herbs and flowers’, and it is as if she is smiling upwards ‘towards the skies’. A living consciousness is there, so that ‘Azure replied to azure in the sea’s laugh’. ‘Azure’ is a poetic word for vivid blue. Of course even before the descent of Life the sea and sky must have been blue, but there was no living consciousness to experience and enjoy it: now the whole earth has become alive and is filled with ‘sentient creatures’, creatures with senses, who can see and feel and  respond to the world around them. The poet is giving a very condensed evocation of the evolution of Life in matter, of the way that life seems to have emerged first in the sea, and then on land, where ‘Life’s glory and swiftness ran in the beauty of beasts’ and eventually even in human beings who can express the potentialities of Life in courage, daring, and thought, and have souls to face and experience the world around them.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 2]

But while the magic breath was on its way,
Before her gifts could reach our prisoned hearts,
A dark ambiguous Presence questioned all.
The secret Will that robes itself with Night
And offers to spirit the ordeal of the flesh,
Imposed a mystic mask of death and pain.

But although these potentialities of Life do get realised on earth, something else also happens: something intervenes, a ‘dark ambiguous Presence’ which perverts the pure delight of Life into ‘a mystic mask of death and pain’. The Life which prevails on earth now is not the divine Life which Aswapati witnessed in the original blissful worlds which are the ‘native home’ of the goddess. The divine gifts of Life have not reached our human hearts imprisoned in Matter. How and why has this distortion come about? Sri Aurobindo tells us that there is a ‘secret Will’ which clothes itself with darkness and ‘offers to spirit the ordeal of the flesh’ – as if offering the spirit a painful test and challenge, but at the same time a great opportunity. The experience of physical existence in a mortal body has imposed on the glorious and blissful Life-goddess ‘a mystic mask of death and pain’: a mysterious disguise which is the very opposite of her true original nature.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 2]

Interned now in the slow and suffering years
Sojourns the winged and wonderful wayfarer
And can no more recall her happier state,
But must obey the inert Inconscient’s law,
Insensible foundation of a world
In which blind limits are on beauty laid
And sorrow and joy as struggling comrades live.

‘To sojourn’ means ‘to stay’, ‘to live for some time’. Now ‘the winged and wonderful wayfarer’, the pure free-moving spirit of Life, is living ‘Interned’, detained and imprisoned in the painful passage of earth-time, ‘the slow and suffering years’ and has to obey ‘the inert Inconscient’s law’ – the law of Matter. That law is the ‘Insensible foundation’, the insensitive, unfeeling basis of our material world, which imposes ‘blind limits’ on beauty and makes sorrow and joy inseparable in earth-experience, forcing them to live side by side as comrades and partners who are in constant conflict.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 2]

A dim and dreadful muteness fell on her:
Abolished was her subtle mighty spirit
And slain her boon of child-god happiness,
And all her glory into littleness turned
And all her sweetness into a maimed desire.
To feed death with her works is here life’s doom.

The glorious goddess of Life, imprisoned in Matter, has become dumb, mute – she can no longer express ‘her subtle mighty spirit’; her wonderful gift of ‘child-god happiness’ has been destroyed, and ‘all her glory’ has been turned ‘into littleness’: diminished and impoverished. All her divine sweetness has been transmuted into ‘a maimed desire’, injured and disabled. Here, in the material world, Life is doomed to ‘feed death with her works’: all her achievements and creations are eaten up by the insatiable universal hunger that is death.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 2]

So veiled was her immortality that she seemed,
Inflicting consciousness on unconscious things,
An episode in an eternal death,
A myth of being that must for ever cease.
Such was the evil mystery of her change.

In fact in the inconscient material universe the glorious immortal Spirit of Life appears out of place: ‘An episode in an eternal death’: a transient phenomenon in a world ruled by mortality, where she seems to be ‘Inflicting consciousness on unconscious things’: forcing consciousness on material forms that would prefer to remain peacefully unconscious. In our world it even seems as if Life is no more than ‘A myth of being that must for ever cease’: an unreal, illusory appearance of existence, which cannot possibly continue but must cease to be .This is ‘the evil mystery’ of the way that the glorious Life- goddess has been changed by her immersion in Matter, her subjection to the law of unconsciousness and death.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 2]