Book 2, Canto 3 – The Glory and the Fall of Life, Section 3

The gulf between dream-truth, earth-fact was crossed,
The wonder-worlds of life were dreams no more;
His vision made all they unveiled its own:
Their scenes, their happenings met his eyes and heart
And smote them with pure loveliness and bliss.

There seems to be a deep ‘gulf’, an unbridgeable gap between the ‘earth-fact’ of material realities and the truth of those ‘dreams’, those intuitions, of the pure life worlds. But now Aswapati has crossed that gulf. The ‘wonder-worlds of life’ are no longer only dreams: he has developed a power of vision which is able to identify with everything that they revealed, ‘unveiled’. ‘Their scenes, their happenings met his eyes and heart’. He could see them and he could feel them intimately and intensely. ‘Smote’ is the past tense of the verb ‘to smite’, which means ‘to strike’, ‘to give a blow’. Aswapati’s eyes and heart receive the ‘pure loveliness and bliss’ of those  life-heavens with a shock of delightful astonishment.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 2]

A breathless summit region drew his gaze
Whose boundaries jutted into a sky of Self
And dipped towards a strange ethereal base.
The quintessence glowed of Life’s supreme delight.

Aswapati’s ‘gaze’, his look, is attracted to a ‘breathless summit region’, as if of high mountain peaks where the atmosphere is windless and too rarefied to breathe. The outlines of those peaks are seen reaching up ‘into a sky of Self’, of pure existence: that ‘breathless summit region’ reaches up towards a high, pure sky of self-existence, and at the same time it dips down ‘towards a strange ethereal base’, a mysteriously delicate and subtle foundation. These regions glow with ‘The quintessence … of Life’s supreme delight’. ‘Quintessence’ is a term which has been assimilated into our ordinary language from the ancient science of alchemy. Alchemists, the early chemists, used to distil different substances to extract their essences. To get the greatest possible purity, they would repeat the distillation process five times; what remained after these five purifications was considered to be the utterly pure essence of that substance. ‘Quintessence’ means ‘fifth-essence’, the purest possible state of a substance. What Aswapati sees glowing in those ‘summit regions’ is the pure and concentrated essence of ‘Life’s supreme delight’.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 2]

Inverting the spirit’s apex towards life,
She spends the plastic liberties of the One
To cast in acts the dreams of her caprice,
His wisdom’s call steadies her careless feet,
He props her dance upon a rigid base,
His timeless still immutability
Must standardise her creation’s miracle.

‘She’ here refers to the creative World-Force of the Divine. She inverts ‘the spirit’s apex’ towards life: the spirit is imaged as an upward-pointing triangle; the World-Force inverts the triangle so that its ‘apex’ or highest point is turned downwards, towards life. The One omnipresent reality is unlimited by anything – not by time or space or any imaginable kind of restriction or boundary. It is able to be everything. Because it is the One, it can take any shape or form. The World-Force uses those freedoms of the One, its ‘plastic liberties’ to ‘cast in acts the dreams of her caprice’. The word ‘plastic’ means ‘mouldable’ – any substance that can be moulded into various shapes can be described as ‘plastic’. ‘Caprice’ means ‘a fancy’ or ‘a sudden shift in mood or behaviour’. The World-Force uses the very substance of the One, which can be moulded into any form, to cast or shape all her fanciful dreams into forms and happenings. Whatever her fancy wills she makes. But the One is always supporting and steadying her: ‘His wisdom’s call steadies her careless feet’. It is as if Life can never be completely random because the shaping will of the divine wisdom is always steadying her dance, ‘her careless feet’. ‘He props her dance upon a rigid base’: the World-Force is in constant motion, whirling in her dance of Kali, the dance of time, but she needs a floor to dance on. In the traditional image Siva allows her to dance on his breast, providing her a firm and steady base for her dance. The ‘timeless still immutability’ of the One is there to ‘standardise her creation’s miracle’, so that the unpredictable magic that she performs, all that she creates, forms a harmony rather than a chaos, and once a form or a species has come into existence, it tends to remain in existence for some time: things do not just come and go in a moment, because the eternal changelessness of the One is providing a stable base for the creative dance of the World-Force.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 2]

At her will the inscrutable Supermind leans down
To guide her force that feels but cannot know,
Its breath of power controls her restless seas
And life obeys the governing Idea.

The Creatrix, the creative World-Force, is guided by the thought of the One and steadied, stabilised, by the unmoving presence of the One, whose power she is and whose thoughts she is materialising. In the process of manifestation, between the Supreme, the One, and his Creation lies the Truth- conscious power of Supermind. At the will of the World- Force, ‘the inscrutable Supermind leans down / To guide her force that feels but cannot know’. If something is ‘inscrutable’ it cannot be read or understood, it is mysterious and ungraspable; but that mysterious power of Supermind leans down from its great height to guide the apparently unconscious movements of the creative World-Force. The ‘breath of power’ coming from the Supermind also controls the ‘restless seas’ of her energies, so that despite all her apparent play of caprice ‘life obeys the governing Idea’: the divine Idea, the original concept of what the evolutionary manifestation should be, which gets expressed through the creative Supermind.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 2]

At her will, led by a luminous Immanence
The hazardous experimenting Mind
Pushes its way through obscure possibles
Mid chance formations of an unknowing world.

The universal principle of Mind is a projection or reflection of Supermind working on the lower levels of the manifestation. There it is experimenting, groping to find its way by trial and error, and it is ‘hazardous’, taking risks, trying things out, unsure of the outcome; but the power of Mind is being ‘led by a luminous Immanence’: a presence full of light which is dwelling within it. Mind, driven by the World-Force and led by that luminous in-dwelling presence ‘Pushes its way through obscure possibles’: all sorts of possibilities that may come up in the midst of the ‘chance formations of an unknowing world’, this world of ignorance. Despite all the obscurity and uncertainty of the Ignorance, Mind is always exploring and experimenting and trying things out, and gradually extending the range of its knowledge and mastery.

This creative World-force may appear to us as the unconscious, blind force of Nature or Prakriti, but in fact she is the expression of the Conscious-Force of the Supreme, Shakti, Ishwari, the Mother of the universe. So she can command Supermind, universal Mind and universal Life, and these lower powers have to obey her. Even as apparently unconscious Nature, she is drawing on the higher powers of the One that are involved and immanent in the manifestation.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 2]

The worlds, the forms her goddess fancy makes
Have lost their origin on unseen heights:
Even severed, straying from their timeless source,
Even deformed, obscure, accursed and fallen,—
Since even fall has its perverted joy
And nothing she leaves out that serves delight,—
These too can to the peaks revert or here
Cut out the sentence of the spirit’s fall,
Recover their forfeited divinity.

The worlds and forms that the creative World-Force makes as the goddess of life have lost their higher origin. But even though they have been ‘severed’, cut off from their true source, even though they are ‘straying’, wandering away from ‘their timeless source’, even though some of them have become ‘deformed, obscure, accursed and fallen’ because there is a ‘perverted joy’, a distorted delight even in falling and the Life goddess does not leave out anything that serves delight, even so, the poet says, it is still possible for them to ‘revert’, which means to turn back or return, to their original heights; or even here, in the material universe, they may still be able to ‘Cut out the sentence of the spirit’s fall’ – abolish the consequences of the fall from their origin, and ‘Recover their forfeited divinity’ and regain the divine state which they have lost; ‘to forfeit’ means ‘to lose’ or ‘had to give up’, for example, some right or privilege.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 2]

There were worlds of her laughter and dreadful irony,
There were fields of her taste of toil and strife and tears;
Her head lay on the breast of amorous Death,
Sleep imitated awhile extinction’s peace.

But he also sees other realms of Life, where she indulges in a darker kind of delight: her taste for ‘irony’ and for ‘toil and strife and tears’. ‘Irony’ is a mocking, sarcastic form of humour in which words are used to convey the opposite of their literal meaning, or a situation or statement which holds a meaning different from what it appears to mean; or it can be used of a condition in which a person seems to be mocked or made fun  of by fate or facts. ‘Amorous’ means ‘loving’. In those worlds Life seems to be in love with Death, her opposite, while sleep, which ought to be peaceful, refreshing and restorative, instead seems to offer the peace of extinction, non-existence.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 2]