A glory of lightnings traversing the earth-scene,
Their sun-thoughts fading, darkened by ignorant minds,
Their work betrayed, their good to evil turned,
The cross their payment for the crown they gave,
Only they leave behind a splendid Name.

This is what happens to the messengers, the beings from the higher levels who come to save the earth. They come like ‘a glory of lightnings’, a short passage of powerful light, and then leave again. They traverse ‘the earth scene’: they pass across the stage of history, lighting everything up, and then depart. When they have passed, their thoughts that were as bright as suns and came from the supreme sun of Truth, begin tofade because they get darkened by the ignorant minds of human beings who could not assimilate them, could not understand them. The work that they came to do seems to be betrayed: those who were supposed to carry it on fail, distort the message; the good news that they came to sharegets distorted and used for evil, just the opposite of what they intended. Here again we cannot help thinking of Jesus Christ when Sri Aurobindo says ‘the cross their payment for the crown they gave’: the messengers want to bring something wonderful to earth, a new and liberating power, a ‘crown’ representing freedom and mastery, but the payment that the earth-nature gives for their efforts is suffering and death. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have told us that the Cross is the symbol of the resistance of the world of matter to the pouring down of the divine grace. ‘Only they leave behind a splendid Name’: we remember their names with reverence, but we cannot live up to what they have taught us.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Volume 1]

All the fierce question of man’s hours relived.
The sacrifice of suffering and desire
Earth offers to the immortal Ecstasy
Began again beneath the eternal Hand.

‘All the fierce question of man’s hours’: Why are we here? And why must it be so painful? When Savitri wakes up, this riddle of human life becomes alive again; it is a ‘fierce question’, one that is full of intensity, even anger: Why? Why? Why must it be like this? Sri Aurobindo says that all the suffering and desire which human beings experience is a ‘sacrifice’ that ‘Earth offers to the immortal Ecstasy’, the immortal Delight, the Ananda of the Supreme. Earth is offering this special kind of delight, of rasa, a mixture of suffering and desire, to the infinite Ananda which upholds the universe; that offering begins again as earth-beings wake up to the first light of day. Above them is the eternal Hand stretched out in sanction, saying ‘Yes’ to all this.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Volume 1]

Akin to the eternity whence she came,
No part she took in this small happiness;
A mighty stranger in the human field,
The embodied Guest within made no response.

Savitri also wakes up, but she does not share in this ‘small happiness’, the joyful welcome to the new day that all the other forest creatures give. Here Sri Aurobindo gives us a first indication of Savitri as he sees her, very different from the Savitri we read about in the Mahabharata, the Savitri who is traditionally remembered in India, the ‘sukanya’ whose devotion to her husband enables her to save his life. Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri has come from eternity with a mission. ‘Akin’ means ‘closely related’. Savitri is closely related to the eternal world that she has come from, ‘the eternity whence she came’. ‘Whence’ means ‘from where’. She is not lured by the beauty of the apparent ways; she is not attracted by the ephemeral joys that are acclaimed by earth-creatures. Withinher is ‘A mighty stranger in the human field’, ‘The embodied Guest within’: she has come into our human field, our human world, as an embodiment of the Love of the Supreme Divine Mother. That Guest makes no response to the small happiness that lures earthly creatures.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

The call that wakes the leap of human mind,
Its chequered eager motion of pursuit,
Its fluttering-hued illusion of desire,
Visited her heart like a sweet alien note.

When we wake to morning’s call the mind leaps up and thinks, ‘What have I got to do? What will happen today?’ The call of daylight wakes the mind, makes it leap into action and sets it off on its ‘chequered eager motion of pursuit’. That enthusiastic movement of chasing after things is ‘chequered’:  English poets have used this word to refer to alternating light and shade, the effect of the sun through leaves on the ground beneath, for example; Sri Aurobindo uses the word here for the alternation of light and dark in the mind’s eager motion of pursuit. The mind is always enthusiastically chasing after one thing or another that attracts it, as a child might chase after a butterfly, a beautiful coloured thing that flutters in front of it, luring it on: ‘the fluttering-hued illusion of desire’; desire waves some misleading attraction in front of us, to keep us moving on. Savitri is aware of this call and of the mind’s response, which touch her heart like some ‘sweet alien note’; this note is ‘sweet’ because she has so much compassion and love for human beings and the earth, but it is ‘alien’ to her, strange, foreign, belonging to another world; it does not wake up in her the same ‘eager motion of pursuit’ as it does in human beings and the creatures of the forest.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

Time’s message of brief light was not for her.
In her there was the anguish of the gods
Imprisoned in our transient human mould,
The deathless conquered by the death of things.

The beginning of each new day conveys ‘Time’s message of brief light’, one day at a time, one life at a time; but this message is not meant for Savitri. She is carrying within her ‘the anguish of the gods’, the intense suffering of divine beings imprisoned in the human mould, divine souls who are aware of all the limitations, restrictions and unconsciousness of this ‘human mould’, the physical body. They have accepted to become human here on earth to help us, but in the material body they feel their greatness ‘Imprisoned’ by its smallness and incapacity; they feel how short-lived, how ‘transient’ it is. The word ‘mould’ has a double suggestion: we use a mould for giving a shape to something shapeless, to wax for making a candle, to metal for making a statue; but the word ‘mould’ is also used for rich soil that is full of organic matter; in Savitri the body is often referred to as ‘clay’ or ‘earth’; here there is a similar idea: body is a mould for spirit, Sri Aurobindo tells us: life in a physical body allows formless spirit to take on a shape, to become individualised. The body is ‘transient’: passing, short-lived; the gods are deathless, immortal, but when they inhabit a human body they are subject to the law of death and experience anguish when they feel ‘conquered by the death of things’, the law of mortality ruling the material world, which is the opposite of their true immortal nature.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

In vain now seemed the splendid sacrifice.
A prodigal of her rich divinity,
Her self and all she was she had lent to men
Hoping her greater being to implant
And in their body’s lives acclimatise
That heaven might native grow on mortal soil.

Savitri’s coming to earth in a human form, Sri Aurobindo says, was a ‘splendid sacrifice’. She had come to lend her self and all she was to humanity for a time, hoping to implant her greater being here on earth Savitri wanted to implant all the higher possibilities of the divine planes here, in earthly soil. The poet says that in doing this, she was ‘A prodigal of her rich divinity’. A ‘prodigal’ does not count the cost, does not care how much he spends or lends or gives away, so the word is often used in a negative sense of a wastrel, an extravagant and foolish person who wastes his wealth; here Sri Aurobindo uses it to express the immense generosity of Savitri, who has left her blissful place in the higher worlds to lend all ‘her rich divinity’, her self, everything that she is, to human beings in the hope that ‘her greater being’, which is much greater than our present ordinary human nature, will take root in human life and get acclimatised here. In the early days of Auroville people started trying to introduce plants that were not native to this country or this climate at all. They had a hard time, most of the plants died, but after some time many varieties got ‘acclimatised’, adapted to the local conditions, and now plants from all over the world grow well here. Savitri was hoping to acclimatise all her own rich divinity as a normal part of human life, so that ‘heaven might native grow on mortal soil’, so that the qualities of the higher nature could become a natural part of earth life, like natives, born here, belonging here.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

Inflicting on the heights the abysm’s law,
It sullies with its mire heaven’s messengers:
Its thorns of fallen nature are the defence
It turns against the saviour hands of Grace;
It meets the sons of God with death and pain.

In this sentence, the ‘It’ which is repeated again and again is ‘mortality’, the earth-nature that is subject to death and pain and limitation. It insists that the higher levels of consciousness, the higher beings who come, must obey the law of the lower levels, ‘the abysm’s law’, the law of unconsciousness, darkness, limitation and separation, with its resistance to progress and love and truth. An ‘abysm’ is a very deep dark place, a bottomless dark hole. The earth- nature ‘sullies with its mire heaven’s messengers’; ‘mire’ is sticky dirty mud, the sort of mud that is mixed with filth and debris in the streets of slums; ‘to sully’ means to dirty, to stain: the lower nature throws mud and filth on the divine messengers who want to share a higher truth. It defends itself from ‘the saviour hands’ of divine Grace that would lift it up into a higher state, by turning against them its ‘thorns of fallen nature’, the lower nature that is distorted and perverted. When we read the word ‘thorns’ we think of Jesus who was made to wear a crown of thorns; but it also reminds me of something else. Some of you may know the book ‘Le Petit Prince’ – ‘The Little Prince’, by the French author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry; it is a beautiful story about an innocent little prince who has left his own planet and come to earth; on that planet he has a rose growing and he worries about his rose, because he has left her all alone and all she has to defend herself against danger are her thorns. Why does the rose, that most beautiful of flowers, have those painful thorns? They are its defence. Mortality too has thorns which it uses to defend itself from change, even from ‘the saviour hands’ of divine Grace; when the Avatars come, mortality meets the sons of God, the divine messengers, with death and pain.

[Shraddhvan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

A fire has come and touched men’s hearts and gone;
A few have caught flame and risen to greater life.

These lines too refer to God’s messengers: their coming is like a fire, touching people, inspiring them; but when they leave only a few people have ‘caught flame’, have kindled with the divine fire and been able to rise to a greater life; otherwise the sun-thoughts brought by the divine ones are fading away, ‘darkened by ignorant minds’.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

A dark foreknowledge separated her
From all of whom she was the star and stay;
Too great to impart the peril and the pain,
In her torn depths she kept the grief to come.

Foreknowledge’: at the very beginning of the poem we read the word ‘foreboding’, the sense that something very bad is approaching; ‘foreknowledge’ means ‘knowing beforehand, in advance’. Savitri alone knows that Satyavan must die one year after their marriage. That is the ‘dark foreknowledge’ which separates her from all the people around her. She is their star, their guiding light, their ‘stay’, their support. An ordinary human being who had that dark foreknowledge of coming tragedy would not be able to refrain from sharing it, but Savitri does not share her pain with anyone. ‘To impart’ means to share information with somebody, to communicate your knowledge to someone. Savitri does not want to share the danger and pain with anyone around her. She is holding deep within all the grief that she is feeling, that she knows she is going to feel when Satyavan dies, the grief that she knows others must feel when Satyavan dies. Sri Aurobindo says that her depths are ‘torn’, deeply wounded; she is carrying a terrible pain deep inside.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

The long-foreknown and fatal morn was here
Bringing a noon that seemed like every noon.

This is the morning which she has known for a long time would come: it is ‘long-foreknown’, known far in advance; and it is ‘fatal’; a fatal wound is one that kills you; this morning is fatal, the morning of the day of death. But it will be a day like any other day. ‘Noon’ is the middle of the day: this day will have a noon that seems like every other noon, as far as the rest of the world is concerned. But at noon, Satyavan will die.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

Yet only her outward self suffered and strove;
Even her humanity was half divine:
Her spirit opened to the Spirit in all,
Her nature felt all Nature as its own.

Sri Aurobindo has shown us Savitri’s suffering and her great courage; but now he tells us that this is the experience of her outer human self, her self turned ‘outward’. Even in her outer humanity the divinity of her inner self is very much apparent; inwardly, her spirit is open to the one Spirit that pervades the whole universe; and even her nature, the outward expression of her inner being, ‘felt all Nature’, the whole manifestation, ‘as its own’; that cord of sympathy is there not only on the soul- level, not only on the spirit level, but also on the nature level.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

Apart, living within, all lives she bore;
Aloof, she carried in herself the world:
Her dread was one with the great cosmic dread,
Her strength was founded on the cosmic mights;
The universal Mother’s love was hers.

Earlier Sri Aurobindo told us that Savitri was separated from all those she loved, all those who loved her, by the dark foreknowledge she was carrying within her; but here he tells us that while living within herself, she is connected with all other lives. ‘Aloof’ means ‘at a distance’. Savitri is living in a remote hermitage in the forest, she does not meet many people; but she is carrying the whole world within her consciousness; the ‘dread’, the grief and fear which she is feeling, is not just an individual thing: ‘Her dread was one with the great cosmic dread’, an individual experience of all the grief and fear that is part of universal existence; whatever that dread represents, she is carrying within herself. In her sense of oneness with the whole of nature, she shares the cosmic suffering; she is able to do that because she is also carrying the immortal universal strength within her. Her strength is based on, ‘founded on’ the universal ‘mights’ or powers; that strength enables her to bear the ‘cosmic dread’. More than that, she is carrying the love of the Mother of the universe, to help, to save and to transform.

[Shradhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

Against the evil at life’s afflicted roots,
Her own calamity its private sign,
Of her pangs she made a mystic poignant sword.

What wonderful lines! Out of her ‘pangs’, her pain, Savitri creates a weapon, ‘a mystic poignant sword’. ‘Poignant’ means sharp, pointed, piercing. A sword needs to be sharp to be effective, but this word is more often used in a psychological sense: something that is ‘poignant’ touches your emotions painfully. Savitri is going to use this sword ‘Against the evil at life’s afflicted roots’. Here life is imaged as a great tree, with a destructive worm eating away at its roots. When a tree in your garden starts to lose its leaves and turn brown and bare, if you dig down into the roots you may find a worm there, eating away. Savitri’s own private ‘calamity’, her own personal disaster – of a woman whose dearly beloved husband is going to die in the prime of his youth, when they have been together for only one year – is a sign of the evil which is causing suffering, perversion, distortion and death at the very roots of life in the material universe. In the face of this individual pain which she is experiencing, she is not just going to collapse and weep and wail: she is turning it into a weapon which she will use to fight against ‘the evil at life’s afflicted roots of life’.

Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

But now she stirred, her life shared the cosmic load.
At the summons of her body’s voiceless call
Her strong far-winging spirit travelled back,
Back to the yoke of ignorance and fate,
Back to the labour and stress of mortal days,
Lighting a pathway through strange symbol dreams
Across the ebbing of the seas of sleep.

When Savitri moves, when she stirs, her life again becomes part of the universal life, the cosmic movement; and that little movement is a ‘summons’, ‘a voiceless call’ to her spirit, her consciousness: the movement of her body signals to the consciousness ‘Now I am moving, it is time to wake up’, and then ‘Her strong far-winging spirit’ returns. It has been far away in the subtle worlds; now it knows that it is time to return to the mortal body, so it travels back – back to all the loads and limitations of human life. It comes back to this ‘yoke’, this load of ‘ignorance and fate’, back to the ‘labour and stress of mortal days’. A yoke can be a wooden bar carried across the shoulders, joining two buckets or baskets so that they can be carried together; or it can be the frame that joins the bullock to the cart it has to pull; the idea in this word is ‘joining’: a yoke joins two things, holds them together, and in its origin, this old English word is connected with the Sanskrit word ‘yoga’. Yoga links us to the Divine and is meant to bring us into union with the Divine. When Savitri’s spirit rejoins her body, it takes up again ‘the yoke of ignorance’, of not-knowing, blindness, helplessness, and along with that the load of fate: subjection to the laws of matter, the universal laws, above all the law of death. Her ‘far-winging spirit’, which has been travelling in other worlds and planes while her body slept, returns to take up again the load of all the effort, tension, stress, that fill our human days. As it returns to Savitri’s body lying in a simple hut in the forest, her conscious spirit lights up a pathway ‘through strange symbol dreams’. Usually we remember only the dreams that come to us just before we wake up; perhaps these are memories of what our spirit has seen on its pathway back to our body. That pathway gets lit up by the consciousness, ‘Across the ebbing of the seas of sleep’. This word ‘ebbing’ is associated with the sea’s tides. The tides mount, get higher, come further up onto the land, and then turn and start to ebb: gradually the waters draw back and expose more and more of the shore. Here there is the suggestion that as we sleep we are submerged in an ocean; as our consciousness returns and we begin to wake up, the ‘seas of sleep’ ebb away and we wake up on the shore of another day.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

All came back to her: Earth and Love and Doom,
The ancient disputants, encircled her
Like giant figures wrestling in the night:

When memory’s casements open, everything comes back to her: Savitri remembers where she is, what day it is, what is going to happen. And then she is surrounded by these presences, ‘Like giant figures wrestling in the night’. They are struggling and fighting in the darkness, encircling her, she is at the centre of their struggle. There are three of them: ‘Earth’: Savitri has come to save the earth and men, but Earth also represents all the resistances as well as all the potentialities of Matter; ‘Love’: she has come embodying Divine Love, the love that longs to save; and she is in love with Satyavan, who represents the soul of mankind; but because all this is being acted out in the human world, she and the earth and Satyavan are all threatened by ‘Doom’, the law of Death. This is not just a personal struggle for two human beings: these are great cosmic principles and they are ‘ancient disputants’, they have been ‘wrestling’, opposing each other, trying to gain the upper hand, for a very long time.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

The godheads from the dim Inconscient born
Awoke to struggle and the pang divine,
And in the shadow of her flaming heart,
At the sombre centre of the dire debate,
A guardian of the unconsoled abyss
Inheriting the long agony of the globe,
A stone-still figure of high and godlike Pain
Stared into Space with fixed regardless eyes
That saw grief’s timeless depths but not life’s goal.

These ‘giant figures’ of Earth and Love and Doom are ‘godheads’, individualised aspects of the Supreme, which have been born from the ‘dim Inconscient’, from the darkness, from the night. Now as Savitri wakes up, they wake up too: to their struggle, and to the ‘pang divine’, the divine pain of divided consciousness, the pain of love in the ignorance. The poet speaks of Savitri’s heart as ‘flaming’, like a fire, full of heat and light and energy and purifying intensity. A fire in the darkness is surrounded by shadows: in the shadow of her heart lies the ‘sombre’, dark, centre of that dreadful struggle, that ‘dire debate’ which is going on and on between those giant figures. At the centre of the darkness and the debate there is another godhead: ‘A stone-still figure of high and godlike Pain’, like a statue of Pain. There is something noble about it; it is ‘high’ and ‘godlike’. It too is a ‘guardian’, keeping safe ‘the unconsoled abyss’: all the deep darkness that has never been touched by light and love and comfort. ‘To console’ someone means to comfort them, to give them sympathy, help them bear their troubles. We can only console someone by taking away their grief; in the lower depths there is so much suffering, so much grief that is ‘unconsoled’. This figure is the guardian and representative of all that pain; it has inherited ‘the long agony of the globe’, all the suffering that has ever been on our earth since the very beginning; there he is, staring into Space ‘with fixed regardless eyes’, eyes that are not really looking. Sri Aurobindo is using the French sense of the word ‘regard’ meaning a look, a gaze, a way of seeing. These eyes do not see properly, they can only see the timeless depths of grief; they do not see where life is going to, the goal towards which all this suffering is leading; that might make the suffering worthwhile, might console him, but he cannot see ‘life’s goal’.

         [Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

Amid the trivial sounds, the unchanging scene
Her soul arose confronting Time and Fate.

Surrounded by the ‘trivial sounds’ of the forest, those unimportant, insignificant noises, and ‘the unchanging scene’ – for what she can see is what she sees every day, it is the same as always – her soul rises up erect, ‘confronting Time and Fate’. ‘Confronting’ means ‘looking something directly in the face, ready to deal with it’. She knows that today she will have to face the outcome of the unstoppable passage of Time and Fate, the event which the forward movement of time is inevitably going to bring.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

Immobile in herself, she gathered force.
This was the day when Satyavan must die.

‘She gathered force’, collecting her soul-strength, ‘immobile’, unmoving, because she knows that this is ‘the day when Satyavan must die’. It is fixed, destined and cannot be avoided: this is the Fate, the Doom which she must confront in order to fulfil her mission.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]