His soul retired from all that he had done.
Hushed was the futile din of human toil,
Forsaken wheeled the circle of the days;
In distance sank the crowded tramp of life.

When Aswapati looked at the world and saw the doubtfulness of everything here, ‘His soul retired from all that he had done’: it detached itself, withdrew, stepped back, ‘retired’. As it did so, all the noise of the world, ‘the futile din of human toil’ was ‘hushed’ and fell silent. ‘Din’ means a lot of noise, especially the noise of many people working. To the soul, perhaps, all this human effort seems ‘futile’ or useless. Time went on; ‘the circle of the days’, the years, the seasons, continued turning around and around like a wheel, but he had stopped paying attention to it, he had ‘forsaken’ it. The sound of the ‘crowded tramp of life’, all the many feet of all the living beings moving around in the world, faded away into the distance.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Volume 1]

To a few is given that godlike rare release.

To a few’: only a very, very few people are granted the great blessing of that ‘rare release’ from the pull of the earth atmosphere. A ‘release’ happens when someone or something is set free; ‘rare’ implies that this does not happen often but is something very unusual and exceptional. Sri Aurobindo says this ‘release’ is ‘godlike’: it goes beyond human limitations, becoming like a god, able to leave the earth atmosphere and the pull of earth’s gravity.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Volume 1]

One among many thousands never touched,
Engrossed in the external world’s design,
Is chosen by a secret witness Eye
And driven by a pointing hand of Light
Across his soul’s unmapped immensitudes.

This release comes only very rarely, to one person out of ‘many thousands’ who are ‘never touched’. Most of us are ‘Engrossed in the external world’s design’: all our attention is absorbed in the way that things are happening here, on the surface of things, in ‘the external world’s design’; we are ‘Engrossed’, as if swallowed up by all these happenings on the surface. That is normal for human beings; but out of ‘many thousands’ just one person will be ‘chosen’ by a higher power, ‘a secret witness Eye’: a higher power who is keeping an eye on everything that happens in the universe will say, “Yes! This one is ready. Let us take this one.” First, one is ‘chosen’, and then he is ‘driven by a pointing hand of Light’. Something inside him wakes up and he feels the push and sees the ‘pointing hand of Light’ which shows him, “Go that way!” That one is driven ‘Across his soul’s unmapped immensitudes’. While we are engrossed in the external world’s design, we may feel that our soul is just a very tiny part of us. The Upanishads say that it is no bigger than a man’s thumb,a tiny little being of light; but if we once enter into contact with that being of light, we find that it opens out to vast spaces, ‘unmapped immensitudes’. ‘Immense’ means ‘very big’, ‘huge’. This word ‘immensitudes’, meaning ‘largenesses’, has been coined by Sri Aurobindo. The spaces within the soul are so wide that nobody has ever been able to make a map of them. There is no map to follow, only the ‘pointing hand’ which indicates “Go this way; this way; this way.” The chosen one is ‘driven’ across the vast distancesof his inner being. This happens only to ‘One among many thousands never touched’.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Volume 1]

A call was on him from intangible heights;
Indifferent to the little outpost Mind,
He dwelt in the wideness of the Eternal’s reign.

‘A call was on him’, almost like a kind of spell, an enchantment; he has heard a ‘call’ which is holding his full attention; it has come to him ‘from intangible heights’, high levels that cannot be touched: if something is ‘intangible’, it cannot be felt by our physical sense of touch. To Aswapati now, Mind seems like a ‘little outpost’, a small outlying camp at a great distance; and he is not very interested in what is happening there; he is ‘indifferent’ to ‘the little outpost Mind’ because he is living, dwelling ‘in the wideness of the Eternal’s reign’, in the Silence, in this immense shrine of the witness Spirit.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

Aware of his occult omnipotent Source,
Allured by the omniscient Ecstasy,
A living centre of the Illimitable
Widened to equate with the world’s circumference,
He turned to his immense spiritual fate.

Aswapati has become aware of his ‘Source’, his Origin. That ‘Source’ is ‘occult’, hidden, and all-powerful, ‘omnipotent’. He is being ‘Allured’, attracted by the ‘omniscient Ecstasy’, the all-knowing bliss, the intense delight, that belongs to the ‘Source’. He is experiencing himself as ‘A living centre of the Illimitable’, and that centre has widened ‘to equate with the world’s circumference’: he feels himself as wide as the ‘circumference’ of the whole world, and that means not only the earth, but the entire manifestation. He is living as a ‘centre of the Illimitable’, and because there is no limit, the consciousness of that ‘centre’ can be widened to become equal with the entire manifestation and universal in consciousness. In that state, Aswapati ‘turned to his immense spiritual fate’: his journey is not yet over, he has some enormous task still to do; even though he has gained this high spiritual realisation, he still has more work to do. He wants to bring that state down to the earth and make it normal here.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savotri, Book 1]

Opponent of that glory of escape,
The black Inconscient swung its dragon tail
Lashing a slumbrous Infinite by its force
Into the deep obscurities of form:
Death lay beneath him like a gate of sleep.

These lines must describe an experience that Sri Aurobindo had. We can hardly imagine it. In that moment of intense aspiration, as Aswapati leaves the earth’s atmosphere, shooting off like an arrow or a rocket towards the heights, there is a resistance from below, something is opposing that ‘escape’. Aswapati’s aspiration has been so strong and swift that he has escaped from the pull of the earth’s gravity, but there is a recoil from below: ‘The black Inconscient swung its dragon tail’. The ‘Inconscient’ is sometimes imaged as a black ‘dragon’, a fierce darkness. When the dragon’s tail swings, it lashes a ‘slumbrous Infinite’ ‘Into the deep obscurities of form’. The Inconscient is infinite, but asleep: ‘slumbrous’ means ‘sleepy’ or ‘sleeping’. There is a sudden movement as the dragon lashes its tail, things move, there is friction and as a result obscure forms appear. And then the poet says: ‘Death lay beneath him like a gate of sleep’: Aswapati has gone beyond the mortal state, beyond the power of ‘Death’; maybe that darkness is still visible like some great black hole below him.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

A pilgrim of the everlasting Truth,
Our measures cannot hold his measureless mind;
He has turned from the voices of the narrow realm
And left the little lane of human Time.

That chosen ‘one’ who is travelling through the ‘unmapped immensitudes’ of his soul is a ‘pilgrim’, a person who is on a journey towards a sacred place. This ‘pilgrim’ is not going to Sabarimalai or Kedarnath or Benares; he is travelling towards ‘the everlasting Truth’. ‘Our measures cannot hold his measureless mind’: when that one has been chosen and has started on his journey to the everlasting Truth, our human ‘measures’, our standards, no longer apply to him. We have ideas about how human beings should behave and what they should do; but when someone has come into contact with his soul’s ‘unmapped immensitudes’ and his mind has widened to Infinity, when he is being guided by a ‘pointing hand of Light’, none of our normal human standards apply to him any longer, because ‘He has turned from the voices of the narrow realm’, the laws and customs of our narrow human world, and from all the voices that try to tell him, ‘You should do this’, ‘You should do that’. He has that ‘pointing hand’ to show him where he should go and what he should do. He has ‘left the little lane of human Time’. If we look at ‘human Time’ the scientists tell us that for a few hundred thousand years there have been human beings on earth; but Sri Aurobindo says that compared with the vastnesses of the soul, this is just like a narrow little path, ‘the little lane of human Time’. When the pilgrim sets out on his quest for the everlasting Truth, he has turned away from that narrow little lane and entered a vaster dimension.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

Far from compulsion of created things
Thought and its shadowy idols disappear,
The moulds of form and person are undone:
The ineffable Wideness knows him for its own.

‘Compulsion’ is what we experience when we are forced to do something and have no choice in the matter; when you are studying, for example, certain subjects are ‘compulsory’: you have to study them whether you like it or not, if you do not study them then you will not get your certificate; but there are also other compulsions in daily life, things we feel we have no choice about, we just have to do them, we cannot help it, whether we like or not. In the world of ‘created things’ there are forces which compel us; now the pilgrim is free from all that, he is ‘Far from compulsion of created things’; he has gone beyond this universe with all its compelling circumstances and forces. There, ‘Thought’ and all the things that ‘Thought’ believes in, its ‘shadowy idols’, disappear. An idol is a form for a deity that we worship; we worship many ‘idols’; but now for this pilgrim all these ‘shadowy idols’ disappear. ‘The moulds of form and person are undone’. We have come across the word ‘mould’ before; when we want to make a candle or a metal statue, we create a mould and into it we pour the bronze or the wax. Sri Aurobindo tells us that all forms in the world, even our own individualities, are ‘moulds’ for spirit, for soul: soul and spirit are formless; in order to take form they are poured into a mould. There are not only physical moulds such as our bodies, there are also psychological ones; there is a person who has a name, Shraddhavan or Kumari or Lella; the person is a kind of form; but when the pilgrim steps beyond the manifestation into ‘the precincts of a vaster plan’ all those forms ‘are undone’, dissolved, non-existent as far as he is concerned.

‘The ineffable Wideness knows him for its own.’ ‘Ineffable’ is another word that we have come across many times: it means ‘beyond description’, ‘beyond expression’. There is a ‘Wideness’, an immensitude, which we cannot describe in any way; that ‘Wideness’ is conscious and it recognises the pilgrim, the chosen one as belonging to it, it knows him as ‘its own’.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

A lone forerunner of the Godward earth,
Among the symbols of yet unshaped things
Watched by closed eyes, mute faces of the Unborn,
He journeys to meet the Incommunicable,
Hearing the echo of his single steps
In the eternal courts of Solitude.

That chosen one, that pilgrim, is ‘A lone forerunner of the Godward earth’: the whole earth is moving towards God, moving towards its fulfilment.The earth is moving ‘Godward’: towards God; and this one who has been chosen, this pilgrim, is a ‘forerunner’ of the rest of the earth: he is going ahead and gradually the whole earth will follow him. He is alone, ahead of all the rest of the earth-evolution. He is journeying ‘Among the symbols of yet unshaped things’, the signs of things and beings that do not yet have any shape because they have not yet manifested; they are ‘the Unborn’, immortal beings who will, in the future, manifest in transient forms. He feels as if he is being watched by those unborn beings, even though their eyes are still closed and their faces are ‘mute’ and expressionless because they are not yet born. He passes them as he journeys ‘to meet the Incommunicable’. We try to communicate; just now I am trying to communicate to you my understanding of these lines; but in these lines there are many, many things that I cannot communicate: I can only try to give you some indication of the surface meanings of the words. Underneath, beyond, is something ‘Incommunicable’ which cannot be communicated and which you would have to experience and feel for yourselves. The pilgrim is travelling towards ‘the Incommunicable’, which is beyond all our powers of explanation or communication or expression. As the pilgrim moves on, he hears the ‘echo of his single steps’, the sound of his own footsteps; he is all alone, there are no other footsteps, he can only hear his own ‘single steps’ that echo as he moves through ‘the eternal courts of Solitude’.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]