There was a writhing of half-conscious force
Hardly awakened from the Inconscient’s sleep,
Tied to an instinct-driven Ignorance,
To find itself and find its hold on things.

Writhing’ describes the movement of an earthworm or a snake. Force or energy is often represented by a snake, a worm or a dragon. The first manifestation of Life in matter is ‘half-conscious force’, writhing, moving, struggling, and ‘Hardly awakened from the Inconscient’s sleep’: not fully awoken from the unconscious sleep-state of inorganic matter. This ‘writhing’ is the first movement, the first ‘seeking stir’, of an ignorant consciousness that is driven by ‘instinct’ to try to find itself and to explore and grasp the world around it. ‘Instinct’ is consciousness expressing itself not as knowledge but as movement and action which is often amazingly accurate, precise and exact, as if infallible, faultless.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 2]

A Power beyond earth’s scope has touched the earth;
The repose that might have been can be no more;
A formless yearning passions in man’s heart,
A cry is in his blood for happier things:
Else could he roam on a free sunlit soil
With the childlike pain-forgetting mind of beasts
Or live happy, unmoved, like flowers and trees.

Sri Aurobindo uses the word ‘earth’ here to refer to the material principle. In the Indian tradition, Prithvi, Earth, represents the principle of matter. With the coming of Life, a Power from beyond has entered into matter: ‘A Power beyond earth’s scope has touched the earth’. In this way, the original material harmony has been destroyed: ‘The repose that might have been’, that might have lasted forever, ‘can be no more’; it cannot last any longer, because the material realm has been touched by the influence of a new principle, the principle of Life. As a result, ‘A formless yearning passions in man’s heart’. Here the word ‘passions’ is used as a verb, to convey the movement of an intense longing for something that cannot be formulated or imagined, but which is constantly longed for. Surely every human being has the feeling that things should be better than they are: there is a cry in our blood ‘for happier things’. What we are really longing for is the Ananda, the Bliss, of the pure original plane from which Life has entered into Matter. The poet says it is conceivable that if things had happened differently, there could have  been human-like forms roaming on this ‘free sunlit soil’, experiencing all the beauty of the material world ‘With the childlike pain-forgetting mind of beasts’. The Mother has pointed out that animals of course suffer pain but they do not make it worse for themselves by thinking about it, dwelling on it; they forget it quickly as young children seem to do. Earth- beings might have been able to live ‘happy, unmoved, like  flowers and trees’. But in us mental beings the longing which is the characteristic of the fallen Life-Force imprisoned in the grip of matter becomes conscious and casts a shadow over all our experience.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 2]

Insatiate seeker, he has all to learn:
He has exhausted now life’s surface acts,
His being’s hidden realms remain to explore.
He becomes a mind, he becomes a spirit and self;
In his fragile tenement he grows Nature’s lord.
In him Matter wakes from its long obscure trance,
In him earth feels the Godhead drawing near.

‘Insatiate’ means not only ‘unsatisfied’ but ‘unsatisfiable’. We human beings are ‘satiated’ when we have taken in so much food or so much experience that we cannot take any more; but we digest it and then again we feel dissatisfied. The human being is an ‘Insatiate seeker’ who has everything to learn. To a certain extent mankind has learned about the surface of Life but the ‘hidden realms’ of our being remain to be explored. A human being is not an animal although we have animal bodies; we become truly human when we develop the mind and become mental beings. A human being can become ‘a spirit and self’. Even though he lives in the ‘fragile tenement’ of a physical body, he can become ‘Nature’s lord’, master of Nature. A ‘tenement’ is a temporary home – usually an apartment building with many cheap rooms or flats for poor people. We do not own the perishable body we are occupying for the moment, we are only living in it temporarily; but in this weak ‘fragile tenement’, this easily damaged body, a human being can become to a certain extent the master of his nature and the world around him. In her human children, her creations, material nature ‘wakes from its long obscure trance’ that has lasted so many billions of years. In humanity ‘earth’, the material principle, feels ‘the Godhead drawing near’: she feels the approach of the divine being and the divine life which is the destined goal of earth and men.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 2]

Life has poured herself and her gifts into the world of matter and has herself become imprisoned in its inertia and unconsciousness; but she is struggling for release, trying to free herself. With her dreams and her longing to recover her lost bliss, this ‘mighty prisoner’ is disturbing ‘the vast routine’, the fixed ways and habits of the ‘slumbering universe’. The inert cells of material bodies wake up, stimulated by her yearning. Physical hearts no longer simply beat to carry the prana in the blood stream around the body: they get filled with ‘a fire of passion and need’. The inertia and ‘deep calm of inanimate things’, of lifeless objects, get upset by Life’s ‘great voice of toil and prayer and strife’. That disturbs the routine, the settled ways of Matter, so that something wakes up and gets expressed on the most material level in the form of the first living cells. When things evolve further we come to the human level: in human hearts the ‘fire of passion’, intense feeling and need, is aroused. All this disturbs ‘the deep calm of inanimate things’. How simple things must have been before there was any life at all! Of course there were volcanoes and storms and so on, but ‘Matter’s harmony’ prevailed. But then the voice of Life arose amid that ‘deep calm of inanimate things’ and it is still one of the strongest forces on earth: it has produced so much toil and effort, striving and conflict, and the needs and dissatisfactions which constantly dominate our psychology and our life and our experience, and are driving us on our upward evolutionary journey.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 2]

Obeying the push of unborn things towards birth
Out of her seal of insentient life she broke:
In her substance of unthinking mute soul-strength
That cannot utter what its depths divine,
Awoke a blind necessity to know.

There is a ‘push of unborn things towards birth’, a pressure of things that have not yet manifested but want to be born, latent possibilities that want to be realised. That is what the creative Life-Force has come into the material world to do. She obeys ‘the push of unborn things’ that want to be born. That impulsion helps her to break out of the ‘seal of insentient life’. A ‘seal’ is used to close something and keep it closed. The drive ‘of unborn things towards birth’ enables the Life-power to break out of her imprisonment in ‘insentient life’, the earliest life-forms without any sense-capacity. The substance of Life is ‘unthinking’, for thought is still withheld, but it is a substance of ‘unthinking mute soul-strength’: even without the capacity for sense or thought or expression it is full of ‘soul-strength’, but it ‘cannot utter’ – it is unable to express ‘what its depths divine’. ‘To divine’ means ‘to know intuitively’. There are ‘water-diviners’ who can walk across a field and feel the best place to dig a well; they cannot say exactly how they know that water is there, but they are often amazingly accurate in their divinations: they feel with a subtle sense or intuit where water can be found. This word is connected with the French word ‘deviner’, which means ‘to guess’; but such sensitive people do not really guess: they know intuitively or through some subtle sense where there is a good reserve of water. In the depths of life-substance there is a hidden consciousness by which she blindly knows things that she cannot express. Responding to the pressure of unborn or unmanifested things to take birth, within living matter there wakes up ‘a blind necessity to know’.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 2]

Adorer of a joy without a name,
In her obscure cathedral of delight
To dim dwarf gods she offers secret rites.
But vain unending is the sacrifice,
The priest an ignorant mage who only makes
Futile mutations in the altar’s plan
And casts blind hopes into a powerless flame.

All life is a kind of sacrifice, Sri Aurobindo says, whether made willingly or unwillingly. If we are conscious we can make a voluntary sacrifice in order to progress; but if we are not conscious then nature imposes the sacrifice on us and in that way forces us to progress. Here in these lines of Savitri he shows us how the ignorant sacrifice is carried out by the Life-Force imprisoned in matter. She is adoring and worshipping ‘a joy without a name’: she does not know clearly what she is worshipping. She is offering worship in ‘her obscure cathedral of delight’. A ‘cathedral’ is an important place of worship, but because at this stage she is confined in the lowest life-forms, Life’s ‘cathedral’, her sacred place of worship dedicated to ‘delight’, is obscure, dark, full of shadows. There, ‘To dim dwarf gods she offers secret rites’. The powers to which she is offering worship are small dark beings, the ‘Godheads of the Little Life’ which Sri Aurobindo will introduce to us in the next canto. Although she repeats her sacrifice unendingly it does not bring the desired result. For a sacrifice to have its full effect, it has to be offered by a person with knowledge who can perform the ritual correctly and with the right consciousness. For us, the priest of our sacrifice should be Agni, the flame of Will and Aspiration that can carry our prayers to the higher powers; but in the lower levels of Life the priest is ‘an ignorant mage’. A ‘mage’ is a person who practices magic, and this mage is ignorant: he does not know how to do the rites properly. All he can do is to make ‘Futile mutations in the altar’s plan’. Matter provides the altar and the things to be offered, and there is the flame of Life-energy; but instead of performing the sacrifice correctly and with full consciousness, this ‘ignorant mage’ can only rearrange the implements on the altar. Sometimes, observing things that we human beings do in our lives, these words come into my mind: ‘Futile mutations’: useless or insignificant rearrangements. We think that we are making meaningful changes and do not notice that we are only rearranging the implements on the altar because we do not know how to take meaningful actions that will lead to real improvements. That priest only ‘casts blind hopes into a powerless flame’: no real conscious offering goes into the sacrificial fire, the purifying flame that should carry our aspirations to the gods; only ‘blind hopes’ are offered; and this is ‘a powerless flame’: it is not going to bring about the results that we are hoping for.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 2]

 Aburden of transient gains weighs down her steps
And hardly under that load can she advance;
But the hours cry to her, she travels on
Passing from thought to thought, from want to want;
Her greatest progress is a deepened need.

By her efforts, the Life-power does achieve some results, but they are ‘transient gains’: they do not last long; they even become a ‘burden’ to her, a load that she has to carry, and such a heavy load that she can hardly move forward under its weight. But time is passing – she is impelled to continue her journey, ‘Passing from thought to thought, from want to want‘, from one thing to the next without really knowing where she is going. ‘Her greatest progress is a deepened need’: the greatest progress that she can make is a deepening of the need she feels, so that she can no longer remain satisfied with a succession of trivial surface enjoyments and begins to long for deeper, higher and truer aims.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 2]

Only a glimmer sometimes splits mind’s sky
Justifying the ambiguous providence
That makes of night a path to unknown dawns
Or a dark clue to some diviner state.

The maximum that happens is that ‘mind’s sky’ is occasionally split open by a faint gleam of light. It is not very bright, only ‘a glimmer’, but even that faint light is an indication that Life’s strivings are worthwhile in a way. ‘Providence’ is the Divine’s way of taking care of his Creation and his creatures. Often we do not understand his ways. In our ignorance we cannot distinguish what is good or bad for us. But when that ‘glimmer’ comes into our minds we may just for a moment glimpse that this terrible night of inconscience and ignorance might become ‘a path to unknown dawns’. Sri Aurobindo tells us that every night is preparing a dawn, and perhaps the darker the night, the more glorious may be the dawn that follows. The night of inconscience and ignorance may lead to the dawning of a new light, new knowledge, newconsciousness. Or, the poet says, it may be ‘a dark clue to some diviner state’. A ‘clue’ is a guiding indication, a thread that shows us the way. In mystery stories the detective is always looking for clues that will help him to solve the riddle. The original meaning of the word is a spool of thread that we can follow to find our way through the labyrinth of life. This can happen even in the lower states of Life: a faint light comes from above into the mind and suggests that the darkness we are passing through may be a necessary preparation for entering into a higher state.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 2]

In Nescience began her mighty task,
In Ignorance she pursues the unfinished work,
For knowledge gropes, but meets not Wisdom’s face.

Life began ‘her mighty task’ – the enormous work she has to do – in ‘Nescience’, the not-knowing of unconscious matter. As a result of her work, ‘Ignorance’ has emerged. There is a difference between the two states: ‘Nescience’ is completely without any knowledge, but ‘Ignorance’ is a state of partial knowledge in which we know enough to be aware that we do not know everything. In the Ignorance, Life ‘pursues’ or continues the ‘unfinished work’ that she has begun. She continues to grope, feeling her way through the darkness to find knowledge, but she is unable to meet the face of Wisdom, of true knowledge.

[Shraddhavan’s English ofSavitri, Book 2]