The glory he had glimpsed must be his home.

Through his yoga Aswapati had received a glimpse of this high possibility. He had seen the presence of the Divine in the world; he saw that Nature and the Divine Lord are One, that there is a purpose to the evolutionary unfolding in time: the full manifestation of God in the material world. He has had a glimpse of that glorious possibility, seen higher worlds and higher levels of consciousness. Now he says “That must be my home”: he wants to bring down into the materialworld all the wonderful possibilities that he had seen on the heights.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Volume 1]

There is no perfect answer to our hopes;
There are blind voiceless doors that have no key;
Thought climbs in vain and brings a borrowed light,
Cheated by counterfeits sold to us in life’s mart,
Our hearts clutch at a forfeited heavenly bliss.

The ‘tessellated whole’ we live in is a world of fragments, and so there seems to be ‘no perfect answer to our hopes’. Our hopes may get fulfilled to a certain extent, but there is always some imperfection and dissatisfaction. As we move forward in our lives we come up against doors that will not open, that do not express anything to us; we do not know what is lying beyond, where those doors might lead; they seem to have no key, we have reached a dead end. We make use of our minds; our thought tries to climb up and find a solution; it may find something, but all it can find is a ‘borrowed light’. The image of the higher mind is the moon, which does not have any light of its own: it gives only a reflected light, a light that is borrowed from the sun. On the life level, we are always looking for ‘bliss’; ‘Our hearts’ are always trying to seize ‘heavenly bliss’; but instead we are offered and accept things that are ‘sold to us in life’s mart’ or market, which are not real but ‘counterfeits’, fakes and forgeries; they cannot give us the ananda our hearts are longing for, but we accept them as substitutes.

[Shraddhavn’s English of Savitri, Volume 1]

And yet a greater destiny may be his,
For the eternal Spirit is his truth.

Sri Aurobindo shows us one side of the picture and then he shows us the other: we have this sad story of cradles and graves, of a small torch of consciousness that is lit only to be quenched, but there is the possibility of a greater destiny for us: ‘A greater destiny may be his’. This is true for each human being and for the race as a whole, because the truth of each and all of us is ‘the eternal Spirit’: our truth is neither the body that dies, nor the limited force and knowledge that we have, but what we really are in our essence, ‘the eternal Spirit’.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Volume 1]

A Will, a hope immense now seized his heart,
And to discern the superhuman’s form
He raised his eyes to unseen spiritual heights,
Aspiring to bring down a greater world.

As a result of the ‘Secret Knowledge’ that Aswapati gained, a ‘Will’, and an immense hope, now seized hold of him. Wanting to ‘discern’, to perceive, the superhuman form which the Divine is going to manifest in the future, he ‘raised his eyes to unseen spiritual heights’: he has conceived the aspiration ‘to bring down a greater world’. This is a very significant moment in the poem, for it is where we read for the first time of the aspiration which is going to carry Aswapati on his immense quest, all the way through to the end of Book Three, where he is finally able to ask a boon of the supreme Mother. He has glimpsed the possibility that if there is a purpose in the ‘whims of Time’, if there is an evolutionary direction, then maybe it is possible for him to collaborate, to help that future ‘greater world’ to manifest sooner. Why should evolution take so long, why should it follow ‘the stumbling pace of Chance’? Maybe, if he can join his will with the supreme Will, he can help it to happen more quickly. This ‘Will’ for a divine life upon earth lies at the heart of Sri Aurobindo’s Integral Yoga. In the poem, it is Aswapati’s aspiration and tapasya which compels the birth of Savitri, in answer to the world’s desire for a higher destiny. This moment, when his heart is seized by this Will and this immense hope, releases the spring that sets the whole course of the story moving.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

A brighter heavenlier sun must soon illume
This dusk room with its dark internal stair
The infant soul in its small nursery school
Mid objects meant for a lesson hardly learned
Outgrow its early grammar of intellect
And its imitation of Earth-Nature’s art,
Its earthly dialect to God-language change,
In living symbols study Reality
And learn the logic of the Infinite.

In our present state of consciousness we are like young children learning in a dim room. We can move up and down to other levels of our being, using this ‘dark internal stair’. Our schoolroom is ourself, and within us there are different levels, with a stairway leading up and down. Aswapati wants ‘A brighter heavenlier sun’ to bring light into this dusky room, and he wants it to happen ‘soon’: a new consciousness must bring a greater light than that of the mind. In that dim room, the ‘infant soul’, the undeveloped human soul is learning ‘in its small nursery school’;  Gradually the ‘infant soul’ must grow out of ‘its early grammar of intellect’. In those days, when a young child first started lessons, it would be taught to speak correctly: similarly our logical mind, our intellect has to outgrow its ‘early grammar’, its childish way of expressing itself, to gain a more advanced consciousness. The children in those Victorian schoolrooms would be given things to copy, they were taught to draw. In one of his essays on education Sri Aurobindo has written that this is a very good thing for children to do because it teaches them accurate observation and trains the hand to express what it sees. But the soul has to grow beyond copying; it has to learn a higher creativity. When children first start lessons, they may not speak correctly. In Manchester, in those Victorian times when Sri Aurobindo was there, ordinary children spoke a ‘dialect’, a local version of English that was not suitable for an educated person to use, they had to be taught to speak Standard English. Similarly the language that we now speak in our present human state is a ‘dialect’, an imperfect form of the language that is local to earth; we have to change that way of speaking for ‘God-language’, a diviner speech; instead of those object lessons in the schoolroom, we have to ‘study Reality’ in the form of ‘living symbols’, learning to see all forms in the world around us as ‘living symbols’ of the underlying Reality; going beyond the ‘early grammar of intellect’ we must learn ‘the logic of the Infinite’. Aswapati wants to help bring about this great change: human beings who are now infant souls, learning in a dim enclosed room from objects that have been brought in there, copying things, speaking a primitive language, must ‘Outgrow’, grow out of, our present state to reach a much higher one.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

The Ideal must be Nature’s common truth,
The body illumined with the indwelling God,
The heart and mind feel one with all that is,
A conscious soul live in a conscious world.

This is an expression of Aswapati’s aspiration for what the world should be like in future: ‘The Ideal’, the perfect form of the world which exists on a higher plane, must become ‘Nature’s common truth’, our spontaneous way of living. The body, this dark room that we live in, must be ‘illumined’, filled with the light of ‘the indwelling God’: the divine Presence dwelling in the body must fill it with light; our hearts and minds that now feel separated from the rest of the world must learn to ‘feel one with all that is’; the ‘infant soul’ must grow up to become fully conscious and ‘live in a conscious world’. This is the ‘Ideal’; this is the ‘Will’ and the ‘hope’ that have seized hold of Aswapati.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

Or all seems a misfit of half ideas,
Or we saddle with the vice of earthly form
A hurried imperfect glimpse of heavenly things,
Guesses and travesties of celestial types.

Or, if we do not accept the purely materialist view of our universe, it may look to us as if there are many different ‘half ideas’ in play here which do not fit together, are not in harmony. Or maybe we get a ‘hurried imperfect glimpse of heavenly things’: we glimpse them for a brief moment and then we try to force them into an ‘earthly form’; there are two words to look at here: ‘saddle’ and ‘vice’. A ‘saddle’ is the seat that we put on a horse when we want to ride it; when we ‘saddle’ somebody with something, we give him a responsibility he is unwilling to accept, but cannot refuse. The word ‘vice’ has several different meanings but I think that here it refers to a tool which is used to hold two pieces of metal or wood tightly together so that they cannot move. We get a ‘glimpse of heavenly things’ and then try to screw them tightly into our ‘earthly’ conception, our ‘earthly form’ of how they should be. Our ideas about the things we see around us in the universe are only ‘Guesses’; we do not know what they really are in their higher reality, we just guess what they are. Our ideas about them are ‘travesties’; a ‘travesty’ is a distorted representation, a caricature. Our perceptions are just ‘guesses’ and ‘travesties’ of ideal forms, ‘celestial types’, ‘heavenly things’ that exist on higher planes.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

There is provender for the mind’s satiety,
There are thrills of the flesh, but not the soul’s desire.

‘Provender’ is dry food for animals, like hay or straw. ‘Satiety’ means feeling so full that you cannot take any more; but it does not mean that you are satisfied: you are just full. We stuff our minds full with all kinds of ‘provender’ and experience physical delights, ‘thrills of the flesh’. The mind gets sated, the flesh gets thrilled, but the soul is dissatisfied: it does not find what it is longing for.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

For all we have acquired soon loses worth,
An old disvalued credit in Time’s bank,
Imperfection’s cheque drawn on the Inconscient.

Here is an image from banking. Sri Aurobindo is showing us the comparative worthlessness of all our human achievements once we have glimpsed the higher spiritual possibilities. Whatever we have ‘acquired’ or gained in the material world soon loses its value and becomes worthless. Whatever we have gained and saved may be written in our passbook as a credit, but that credit has no value anymore. When we write a cheque it is drawn on our bank, from our account. But since all our achievements in the material world ‘soon lose worth’ and become only ‘An old disvalued credit in Time’s bank’, that cheque issued by ‘Imperfection’ and ‘drawn on the Inconscient’ has no lasting value.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

He saw the doubtfulness of all things here,
The incertitude of man’s proud confident thought,
The transience of the achievements of his force.

Aswapati saw ‘the doubtfulness of all things here’; we human beings are so proud of our minds and the achievements of our minds, we are confident that we can work things out with our reason, with our science and technology; but Aswapati saw the opposite of that: ‘The incertitude’, the uncertainty ‘of man’s proud confident thought’. Certitude is the sense of being absolutely sure of something; but with the mind, with our thoughts, we can never be absolutely certain of anything; somebody can always come and prove the opposite, or life may prove to us how wrong we were. Aswapati sees the ‘transience’, the impermanence of human achievements; we do have some limited force, so we can and do achieve things; but our achievements do not last very long, they are transient, passing, short-lived.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

He can re-create himself and all around
And fashion new the world in which he lives:
He, ignorant, is the Knower beyond Time,
He is the Self above Nature, above Fate.

We do not usually realise that we can ‘re-create’, make ourselves new. And if we can ‘re-create’ ourselves, we can ‘re-create’ our environment, we can even ‘re-create’, remake or reshape and ‘fashion new’ the world in which we live. Man is ‘ignorant’; but in essence, he is the Supreme, ‘the Knower beyond Time’; the One knows all this because he is all this. He is beyond Time, beyond Space, beyond the entire manifestation; but he is also the Self of each of us and the entire creation. He is above Nature and above what we call ‘Fate’ or Destiny; because he dwells within us, we can re- create ourselves and everything that is around us, and shape our world anew: that is the other aspect of humanity which we too often forget.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]