Although her kingdom of marvellous change within
Remained unspoken in her secret breast,
All that lived round her felt its magic’s charm:
The trees’ rustling voices told it to the winds,
Flowers spoke in ardent hues an unknown joy,
The birds’ carolling became a canticle,
The beasts forgot their strife and lived at ease.

In the poetry of all cultures, a comparison or parallel is sometimes drawn between the feelings of human beings and the moods of nature around them. Sri Aurobindo is doing that in these lines. Savitri does not tell anyone about the ‘marvellous change’ that has occurred within her, it remains ‘unspoken in her secret breast’, but the charm of its magic affects ‘All that lived round her’. The sounds of the gently moving leaves of the forest trees seem to be spreading the news of Savitri’s inner change, whispering about it ‘to the winds’; The flowers are telling the world about her new ‘unknown joy’ by their ‘ardent hues’, their intense and brilliant colours. The happy songs of birds, their ‘carolling’, has become a sacred chant: ‘a canticle’, and even ‘the beasts’, the wild animals, are affected by Savitri’s changed inner state: they forget their fears and conflicts and ‘lived at ease’, in peace with each other. The few human beings who are living nearby in the forest also experience the effect of the great change that has come about in Savitri:

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 7]

Earlier Savitri herself was feeling intense grief and pain because she knew that Satyavan was destined to die very soon; she seemed to see his head, which she loved and ‘cherished’ or treasured, surrounded by a dark sphere, ‘Fate’s dark and lethal orb’. Something that is ‘lethal’ kills you; an ‘orb’ is a globe or sphere. It was as if there was a dark shadow around the head of Satyavan. But now, in her changed state, instead ‘A golden circle round a mystic sun’ is revealed to ‘her new-born predicting sight’. ‘To predict’ means ‘to foretell what will happen in the future’. As a result of the psychic transformation which has come to Savitri, she gets an indication that Satyavan’s life will not be cut short prematurely, but that he will liv to enjoy ‘The cyclic rondure of a sovereign life.’ This adjective ‘cyclic’ is connected to the noun ‘cycle’; ‘rondure’ implies a curve. Savitri’s new power of prophetic vision suggests to her that Satyavan is going to live out the full cycle of a human life, from youth to maturity to grand old age followed by a great departure, and that his life will be that of a ‘sovereign’: a powerful ruler.

[Shraddhavan’s  English of Savitri, Book 7]

But now no longer in these great wild woods
In kinship with the days of bird and beast
And levelled to the bareness of earth’s brown breast,
But mid the thinking high-built lives of men
In tapestried chambers and on crystal floors,
In armoured town or gardened pleasure-walks,
Even in distance closer than her thoughts,
Body to body near, soul near to soul,
Moving as if by a common breath and will
They were tied in the single circling of their days
Together by love’s unseen atmosphere,
Inseparable like the earth and sky.

As Savitri looks into her future life with Satyavan, she does not see them in ‘these great wild woods’ where they met and are now living together, in ‘kinship’ or close relation with birds and animals, ‘levelled to the bareness of earth’s brown breast’, in a very spare and simple way, very close to the earth. Instead her inner sight perceives them moving together ‘mid the thinking high-built lives of men’, amongst highly developed and cultured people, in ‘tapestried chambers’ with rich woven or embroidered pictures on the walls, and floors made of shining stone. She sees them moving through an ‘armoured town’ that is fortified with walls and guards to protect the inhabitants, or in ‘gardened pleasure-walks’ like those she  enjoyed in her father’s palace. As she looks into the future at what is destined for them, she sees that even when they have to be physically separated for some time she will still be feeling his presence ‘closer than her thoughts’. They will still be feeling ‘Body to body near, soul near to soul’, deeply united, ‘Moving as if by a common breath and will’, with a shared life-force and a shared will, wishing the same things, joined together in ‘the single circling of their days’ from dawn to dusk and from dusk to dawn, always connected ‘by love’s unseen atmosphere’, ‘Inseparable like the earth and sky’. She feels that just as earth and sky cannot be separated, Savitri and Satyavan will always be united.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 7]

Once as she sat in deep felicitous muse
Still quivering from her lover’s strong embrace,
And made her joy a bridge twixt earth and heaven,
An abyss yawned suddenly beneath her heart.

One night Savitri is sitting ‘in deep felicitous muse’, in a deep and blissful concentration, still feeling the delight of Satyavan’s embrace, and making her joy into ‘a bridge twixt earth and heaven’, a conscious connection between the joys of earth and the raptures of heaven. This is a characteristic of the psychic experience by which the divine presence is perceived in everything earthly. Suddenly a deep dark ‘abyss’ opens up ‘beneath her heart’, like a huge mouth opening up in a yawn. One moment her heart is in a blissful state of love and happiness; the next, everything suddenly gives way and leaves a deep, dark, threatening hole below her heart

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 7]

It seemed to cry to her without thought or word
The message of its dark eternity
And the awful meaning of its silences:
Out of some sullen monstrous vast arisen,
Out of an abysmal deep of grief and fear
Imagined by some blind regardless self,
A consciousness of being without its joy,
Empty of thought, incapable of bliss,
That felt life blank and nowhere found a soul,
A voice to the dumb anguish of the heart
Conveyed a stark sense of unspoken words;
In her own depths she heard the unuttered thought
That made unreal the world and all life meant.

This darkness, this black infinity, this will to destroy seems to be calling out to Savitri. Without any thought or words it is powerfully communicating to her ‘The message of its dark eternity’ and ‘the awful meaning of its silences’. This being, this ‘person’ who is also ‘a black infinity’ seems to have risen out of ‘some sullen monstrous vast’. ‘Monstrous’ means ‘unnatural’, ‘huge’; a person who is ‘sullen’ refuses to be happy: whatever you do to cheer them up, they go on being miserable. The ‘sullen monstrous vast’ is also ‘an abysmal deep of grief and fear’. That seems to be the origin of this dreadful being. Such a place, such a state, the poet tells us, could only exist in the imagination of a ‘blind regardless self’, a self which is blind because it refuses to see. Throughout this poem Sri Aurobindo uses the word ‘regard’ in its French sense, meaning ‘a look’ or ‘gaze’. This being is blind: it has no way of looking. That is also why it does not care or pay any attention to anything else: because it can only see itself. This is a self which has ‘A consciousness of being without its joy’: which is conscious of existing, but does not experience the joy of existence. This state is the opposite of Satchidananda, where existence, consciousness and bliss are inseparable. Here there is existence with consciousness but without bliss, an existence that is ‘Empty of thought, incapable of bliss’, which ‘felt life blank and nowhere found a soul’. Out of that ‘sullen monstrous vast’ emerges ‘A voice’ which conveys to ‘the dumb anguish’ of Savitri’s heart ‘a stark sense of unspoken words’: no words are spoken or heard, but a terrible painful meaning is conveyed and understood. ‘In her own depths’ Savitri hears ‘the unuttered thought’, the thought which has not been spoken, which has not been put into words. That ‘unuttered thought’ ‘made unreal the world and all life meant’, so that the whole world and everything that we mean by ‘life’ seemed unreal, without any reality or significance. Perhaps people who fall into deep depression might be experiencing something like this –it seems to be a state that is very difficult to emerge from, and it is this state that the ‘voice’ conveys to Savitri’s ‘anguish of the heart’ by the power of its ‘unuttered thought’:

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 7]

Hope not to be happy in a world of pain
And dream not, listening to the unspoken Word
And dazzled by the inexpressible Ray,
Transcending the mute Superconscient’s realm,
To give a body to the Unknowable,
Or for a sanction to thy heart’s delight
To burden with bliss the silent still Supreme
Profaning its bare and formless sanctity,
Or call into thy chamber the Divine
And sit with God tasting a human joy.

That Being of Darkness is mocking Savitri’s happiness and her new realisation. He says, “Do not dream that you can be happy in this ‘world of pain’: the earth is a realm of suffering, where happiness is only temporary and deceptive. Perhaps you have had some contact with ‘the unspoken Word’, or had a glimpse of ‘the inexpressible Ray’ that comes from even beyond the silent realm of ‘the mute Superconscient’, but do not let yourself be misled by those illusory experiences into imagining that it is possible for ‘the Unknowable’, the Supreme Reality, to inhabit a body, a form. Do not imagine that you can get some divine sanction or approval for the delight of your earthly heart, by thinking that ‘the silent still Supreme’ experiences anything like ‘bliss’: that imagination of yours profanes ‘its bare and formless sanctity’.” ‘Sanctity’ means ‘sacredness’ or ‘holiness’ and ‘to profane’ means ‘to spoil something sacred by treating it disrespectfully, as if it were ordinary’, treating something divine as if it were human. That being of darkness is silently telling Savitri, “The Supreme is beyond all your bliss and your dreams and imaginations: It is bare, it is formless, it is sacred. It has nothing to do with you and your feelings. And do not think that you can call the Divine into your chamber, into your private space, or that you can sit with God as if he were an ordinary human being. ‘Tasting a human joy’ and sharing the Divine Presence at the same time – that is out of the question, an impossible illusion. Do not dream for a moment that you are going to be able to incarnate divinity here on earth in the imperfect human-animal body and make your illusory joy ‘a bridge twixt earth and heaven’. That is nonsense.”

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 7]

I have created all, all I devour
I am Death and the dark terrible Mother of life,
I am Kali black and naked in the world,
I am Maya and the universe is my cheat.

That dark Presence is claiming, “I have created all this. I am the creator and I am the destroyer. I devour it. I eat it all up. I am Death and at the same time I am ‘the dark terrible Mother of life’. I give birth to everything. I take the form of Kali, ‘black and naked in the world’. I am Maya, the power of illusion, and this whole universe is ‘my cheat’, the trick I play on all of you.” Here we begin to see that this is Savitri’s first encounter with the power of Death and Negation that she is going to have to deal with in the later Books of the poem.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 7]

For only the blank Eternal can be true.
All else is shadow and flash in Mind’s bright glass,
Mind, hollow mirror in which Ignorance sees
A splendid figure of its own false self
And dreams it sees a glorious solid world.

He wants only the eternal absolute nothingness to remain. For him, ‘only the blank Eternal can be true’. According to him, all appearance is illusion. Everything except ‘the blank Eternal’, all this that we experience, is only ‘shadow and flash’, the contrasts of light and darkness reflected in the ‘bright glass’ of Mind. And Mind, he says, is a ‘hollow mirror’: it is empty, there is nothing in it, but our Ignorance sees reflected on its shining surface ‘A splendid figure of its own false self’: an impressive image of its own unreality, and dreams that it is seeing ‘a glorious solid world’. There are philosophies which teach that everything we see and experience has no real existence, it is only produced by some play of light and darkness happening in the mind.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 7]

Then from the heights a greater Voice came down,
The Word that touches the heart and finds the soul,
The voice of Light after the voice of Night:
The cry of the Abyss drew Heaven’s reply,
A might of storm chased by the might of the Sun.

Savitri has heard the wordless voice of Night, of darkness and death and denial which claimed its Nothingness to be the origin and end of everything. That has a devastating effect on her happiness, laying waste her inner world. But as she waits to know what the Supreme wants for her, into her soul’s emptiness a greater Voice comes down from the heights, ‘The voice of Light’, carrying ‘The Word that touches the heart and finds the soul’ – the Word of Truth. This is the ‘voice of Light’, which comes as ‘Heaven’s reply’ to that terrible ‘cry of the Abyss’. That darkness came over her like a huge storm, but now the power of that storm is driven away by the Sun of Divine Truth 

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 7]

“O soul, bare not thy kingdom to the foe;
Consent to hide thy royalty of bliss
Lest Time and Fate find out its avenues
And beat with thunderous knock upon thy gates.

The voice of Light advises Savitri, “Do not expose your newly- won inner ‘kingdom of delight’ to the enemy, ‘the foe’. Keep your ‘royalty of bliss’ hidden, so that the destructive forces of ‘Time and Fate’ do not find out the way to your kingdom; otherwise they will come and attack you, they will ‘beat with thunderous knock upon thy gates’, demanding that you let them in.” ‘Lest’ is a very useful word for poets: it means ‘so that (something) may not happen’. Savitri is being told to keep her new inner bliss hidden to protect it from attack by ‘Time and Fate’.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 7]

Hide whilst thou canst thy treasure of separate self
Behind the luminous rampart of thy depths
Till of a vaster empire it grows part.

The voice of Light advises Savitri, “For as long as you can, ‘Hide … thy treasure of separate self’. You have found your soul, your true self, and the treasure of your true individuality, your ‘separate self’, but keep it hidden ‘behind the luminous ramparts of thy depths’.” ‘Ramparts’ are protective walls around a fort or a capital city. The deeper levels of Savitri’s being are ‘luminous rampart’, protecting the secret home of the soul with their light and strength. The voice tells Savitri, “Keep this great treasure which you have found hidden, until the separate self which you have discovered, your individual ‘kingdom of delight’, can become part of ‘a vaster empire’.” A small kingdom will always be vulnerable to attack, but if it merges with a vast empire it will be supported by a greater power and many allies. Then the voice reveals something else to Savitri:

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 7]

But not for self alone the Self is won:
Content abide not with one conquered realm;
Adventure all to make the whole world thine,
To break into greater kingdoms turn thy force.

She is told, “You gained awareness of your true individual self. But that victory was not granted to you only for your own personal benefit. So do not remain satisfied with that single victory, over just ‘one conquered realm’. That is only one ‘camp of God … pitched in human time’.” Instead she is advised to ‘Adventure all’, to risk everything for a greater victory: ‘to make the whole world thine’, to use her newly won strength to go further and ‘break into greater kingdoms’.

What Savitri experienced in the previous canto was ‘The finding of the soul’, what in Sri Aurobindo’s Yoga is called ‘the psychic realisation’, by which we discover and unite with our own inner divinity. That is a very important realisation and she experienced it not only inwardly: there was also a transformation of the nature: all the chakras or subtle energy centres were transformed. But now she is being told that this was only a first step. To prepare herself for her great task of saving Satyavan from the grip of Ignorance and Death she needs to do more. The voice tells her:

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 7]

Fear not to be nothing that thou mayst be all
Assent to the emptiness of the Supreme
That all in thee may reach its absolute.

“Do not be afraid to be nothing, ‘Assent to the emptiness of the Supreme’: agree to or accept this emptiness you are feeling now, because that will enable you to become everything: everything you need to be, everything that the Supreme wants you to be, everything in the universe and beyond. Agree to experience ‘the emptiness of the Supreme’, so that everything in you ‘may reach its absolute’

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 7]

If for thy own sake only thou hast come,
An immortal spirit into the mortal’s world,
To found thy luminous kingdom in God’s dark,
In the Inconscient’s realm one shining star,
One door in the Ignorance opened upon light,
Why hadst thou any need to come at all?

She is reminded, “You are an ‘immortal spirit’, not subject to death and ignorance; If you had come into this human world only for your own sake, for your own benefit, to establish your own individual ‘luminous kingdom’ here on earth in the midst of God’s darkness, as just one ‘shining star’ in the midst of ‘the Inconscient’s realm’, as just one door open to the higher light in the midst of the earthly Ignorance, what was the need of coming here at all? You were already immortal and full of light and bliss. Why would you come to earth just to have an individual human realisation? You have come for a greater  purpose than that.”

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 7]

To open to Light the eyes that could not see,
To bring down bliss into the heart of grief,
To make thy life a bridge twixt earth and heaven;

Her mission is to open the blind eyes of human beings to the Light of the higher consciousness and bliss. She has come to heal the suffering heart of humanity by bringing Ananda to it. She has taken a human birth in order to make her life into a bridge, connecting the earth, where this slow and difficult process of evolution is going on, with the higher planes where everything is already perfect in its own way. So the voice tells her, “ ‘If thou wouldst save the toiling universe’, this universe that is making such an effort and going through so much pain and suffering in order to evolve further, if that is your aim, you are going to have to feel fully in yourself ‘The vast universal suffering’: all the suffering that is going on in the whole universe, not only on the earth. You have come to heal it, so you are going to have to bear it yourself, because ‘The day-bringer must walk in darkest night’.” The ‘day-bringer’ is the morning star, the star that appears just above the dark horizon before sunrise. It is the herald of the dawn – the dawn follows, but the star itself must travel through ‘darkest night’. Savitri herself is the ‘day- bringer’ whose mission is to bring the Light of Truth to the earth and to humanity; in order to do that she has to pass through a great darkness.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 7]

He who would save the world must share its pain.
If he knows not grief, how shall he find grief’s cure?
If far he walks above mortality’s head,
How shall the mortal reach that too high path?

One who wants to save the world has to share its pain; if he does not, if he does not know what suffering is and where it comes from, how can he find the cure for it? And if he is moving on some high level, immune and untouched by all the difficulties that human beings suffer from, how will ordinary human beings, mortals like us, be able to reach ‘that too high path’?

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 7]

If one of theirs they see scale heaven’s peaks,
Men then can hope to learn that titan climb.
God must be born on earth and be as man
That man being human may grow even as God.

If we see another human being like ourselves achieving great spiritual realisations and reaching ‘heaven’s peaks’, then we can hope that it is possible for us too ‘to learn that titan climb’ and follow the same path to the spiritual heights. But to enable that to happen, ‘God must be born on earth and be as man’, the Divine must take birth as a human being and become like us, so we humans ‘may grow even as God’ by finding and uniting with our inner divinity.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 7]

His soul must be wider than the universe
And feel eternity as its very stuff,
Rejecting the moment’s personality
Know itself older than the birth of Time,
Creation an incident in its consciousness,
Arcturus and Belphegor grains of fire
Circling in a corner of its boundless self,
The world’s destruction a small transient storm
In the calm infinity it has become.

The voice is telling Savitri what she will have to do in order to be able to save Satyavan and to save the ‘earth and men’. It says, “If you are to fulfil your mission, Savitri, like everyone else who comes with a similar mission, your soul must become vaster than this whole universe. It must be able to feel that its whole substance and nature is eternity, transcendent beyond space and time. In order to achieve that, your soul will have to reject ‘the moment’s personality’, the little self which it has taken on for the moment. That has to be set aside so that the soul can remember that it is ‘older than the birth of Time’, and realise that the whole Creation is just ‘an incident in its consciousness’, and that the great stars ‘Arcturus and Belphegor’ are in reality only ‘grains of fire’, constantly wheeling ‘in a corner of its boundless self’. Your soul will have to realise that even the destruction of the whole world would be only a small passing storm in ‘the calm infinity it has become’. That will only be possible if your soul can become ‘wider than the universe’ and feel ‘eternity as its very stuff’, its essential substance.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 7]

If thou wouldst a little loosen the vast chain,
Draw back from the world that the Idea has made,
Thy mind’s selection from the Infinite,
Thy senses’ gloss on the Infinitesimal’s dance,
Then shalt thou know how the great bondage came.

She is told “If you want to follow your mission and loosen ‘the vast chain’ of ignorance and limitation that is afflicting humanity with suffering and death, what you have to do is to ‘Draw back’, to detach your consciousness ‘from the world that the Idea has made’, from this world of appearances that has been made by ‘the Idea’. In The Life Divine, Sri Aurobindo traces the creative process and explains how all the forms and movements and processes of this particular universe have been conceived in Divine Mind by the creative Idea. From that level there has been a progressive stepping down: a process of involution by which the different levels of consciousness have been manifested and the infinite and eternal Oneness has expressed itself in this world of material appearances, of forms and names. We experience this world through our ‘mind’s selection from the Infinite’: we do not normally experience the formless, nameless eternal and infinite Oneness that expresses itself through these forms and names. Our minds feed the universal oneness to us divided up into individual appearances spread out in time and space which we receive through our physical senses: our ‘senses’ gloss on the Infinitesimal’s dance’. A ‘gloss’ is an interpretation. What we perceive of the world around us is an interpretation of the ‘the Infinitesimal’s dance’ – the continuous movement of infinitely small sub-atomic particles in space which makes up what our senses experience as solid Matter. Our minds come into contact with the world around us through sense impressions which get translated into ideas and forms to which we give names. We experience this world ‘that the Idea has made’ through a selection that our mind makes for itself out of the infinite play of forces and possibilities which comes to it through ‘The senses’ gloss on the infinitesimal’s dance.’ Now Savitri is being asked to step back from this way of perceiving the world, to separate her perception and understanding from this selection and interpretation, so that she can become aware of how ‘the great bondage’ has come about, so that she can see and understand the whole process and why it is as it is. Then she will be able to help humanity to ‘loosen the vast chain’ of Ignorance ‘a little’. So now the voice will tell her how to do this stepping back:

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 7]

Thou shalt be one with God’s bare reality
And the miraculous world he has become
And the diviner miracle still to be
When Nature who is now unconscious God
Translucent grows to the Eternal’s light,
Her seeing his sight, her walk his steps of power
And life is filled with a spiritual joy
And Matter is the Spirit’s willing bride.

The voice tells Savitri that if she can achieve this great step, of withdrawing from this world of appearances ‘that the Idea has made’, she will become united with three aspects of the Divine: first she will become ‘one with God’s bare reality’, with the formless transcendent reality of the Supreme. She will also become one with ‘the miraculous world he has become’. This is the great Secret and Mystery behind all appearances: the Supreme himself has become all this, everything that is and moves in this moving universe. And she will also become one with ‘the diviner miracle still to be’, which will be revealed in the future, when ‘Nature’, ‘who is now unconscious God’, the Divine veiled with a thick disguise of inconscient Matter, grows ‘Translucent’. Something that is translucent allows light to pass through it. In the course of evolution, material Nature will become translucent ‘to the Eternal’s light’ of Consciousness, Power and Bliss, so that the eternal Consciousness will become Nature’s consciousness, his Power will become her Power, the earth-life will be ‘filled with a spiritual joy’ and Matter will become ‘the Spirit’s willing bride’: the willing and conscious partner of the Spirit. If Savitri wants to participate in this process of transforming earth-life into the divine life, then she will have to do what is described in the next three lines:

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 7]

Consent to be nothing and none, dissolve Time’s work,
Cast off thy mind, step back from form and name.
Annul thyself that only God may be.”

She must ‘Consent’, agree, accept ‘to be nothing and none’, to dissolve into nothingness, to dissolve all the work that has been done in and by Time to make her what she is now. She must ‘Cast off’ her mind, withdraw from the mind’s and senses’ perception of ‘form and name’. She must ‘Annul’ herself, dissolve her separate existence, so that for her nothing will exist except God, the ultimate Reality.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 7]