We have here in this Mantra the definition of the Mantra itself,framed by the heart and confirmed or established by the mind, hrida tastan manasa dhyai. In this Rik of Agastya we have perhaps the earliest recorded theory of the creative Word, expounding the process by which the supreme utterance takes birth in the poet-seer's consciousness. It is this Mantra that makes him a Rishi. Sri Aurobindo comments on the Rik as follows: "In the system of the Mystics, which have partially survived in the schools of Indian Yoga, the Word is a power, the Word creates. For all creation is expression, everything exists already in the secret abode of the Infinite, guha hitam, and has only to be brought out here in apparent form by the active consciousness. Certain schools of Vedic thoughts even suppose the worlds to have been created by the goddess Word and sound as first etheric vibration to have preceded formation. In the Veda itself there are passages which treat the poetic measures of the sacred Mantras, anushtubha, trishtubha, jagati, gayatri as symbolic of the rhythms in which the universal movement of things is cast. By expression then we create and men are even said to create the gods in themselves by the mantra. Again, that which we have created in our consciousness by the Word, we can fix there by the Word to become part of ourselves and effective not only in our inner life but upon the outer physical world. By expression we form, by affirmation we establish. As a power of expression the word is termed gih or vacas; as a power of affirmation, stoma. In either aspect it is named manma or mantra, expression of thought in mind, and brahman, the expression of the heart or the soul,for this seems the earlier sense of the word brahman, afterwards applied to the supreme Soul or Universal Being. The process of formation of the mantra is described in the second verse along with the conditions of its effectivity. Agastya presents the stoma, hymn at once of affirmation and of submission, to the Maruts. Fashioned by the heart, it receives its just place in the mentality through confirmation by the mind. The Mantra, though it expresses thought in mind, is not in its essential part a creation of the intellect. To be sacred and effective word, it must have come as an inspiration from the supramental plane, termed in the Veda ritam, the Truth and have been received into the superficial consciousness either through the heart or by the luminous intelligence, manisha... Fashioned by the heart, it is confirmed by the mind."[3]

Again, while discussing the characteristics of the overhead poetic aesthesis, Sri Aurobindo writes in one of his letters that "the Mantra... is a word of power and light that comes from the overmind inspiration or from some very high plane of Intuition. Its characteristics are a language that conveys infinitely more than the mere surface sense of the words seems to indicate, a rhythm that means even more than the language and is born out of the Infinite and disappears into it, and the power to convey not merely the mental, vital or physical contents or indications or values of the things uttered, but its significance and figure in some fundamental and original consciousness which is behind all these and greater."[4]

And what does the Mantra do? When established, the Yoga of the aspirant progresses on its onward and upward path; marching triumphantly he climbs peak after silent peak, moves freely in realms of sweetness and harmony. Vast possibilities of Truth-Consciousness open out for his possession. The Vedic Rishi, winning immortality, lives in the company of the shining gods, even as they take him to their heaven of beatitude. Singing the word of illumination he calls the divine Agni, kindles it and offers to it obeisances. The body of the mantric sound becomes a chariot for his wide-ranging accomplishments in the triple glory of truth-conscient awareness of delight.

Sometimes the Mantra comes with a decisive command to change the humdrum of the terrestrial life, giving to it an altogether new direction. In it there is a sudden inflow of energy altering the course of events and happenings to shape the future in its happy superconscient dynamism. When the calm listening ear is attuned to it, with the cerebral activity falling quiescent, and when its power starts operating, the hearer is led to his soul's deepmost truth; world after world opens out and he is face to face with God:

The Word repeats itself in rhythmic strains:
Thought, vision, feeling, sense, the body's self
Are seized unalterably and he endures
An ecstasy and an immortal change;
He feels a Wideness and becomes a Power,
All knowledge rushes on him like a sea:
Transmuted by the white spiritual ray
He walks in naked heavens of joy and calm,
Sees the God-face and hears transcendent speech.[5]

The receiver of the Word, the listener of the transcendent speech, para vani, awakens to its true reality and unhesitatingly gives himself to its unblemished task and objective. A total transmutation gets effected. Knowledge and Power become instruments of his new mission and he is bidden, as an aspect of creative unfoldment in the happiness of life, to engage himself in the spirit's working.

-2-

Such was the mantric command, to take an example from Savitri, received by Aswapati's daughter. She had just entered into full youth but no suitor had come to claim her hand in marriage. The father was somewhat concerned about it; but then he was a Yogin also:

King Aswapati listened through the ray
To other sounds than meet the sense-formed ear.
On a subtle interspace which rings our life
Unlocked were the inner spirit's trance-closed doors:
The inaudible strain in Nature could be caught... .
He heard the voice repressed of unborn Powers
Murmuring behind the luminous bars of Time... .
A word that leaped from some far sky of thought,
Admitted by the cowled receiving scribe
Traversed the echoing passages of his brain
And left its stamp on the recording cells.[6]

It is in this state that he tells his daughter Savitri to set her conquering foot on Chance and Time,because he knows that a "mighty Presence still defends her frame"[7]; he adds further that, with that Presence with her, she should venture to find her mate in this wide uncertain world. She has to challenge the disguise and meet a greater God beyond Time. Alchemy of the uttered Word did the miracle and with it was reshaped the inscrutable destiny.

If such is the theory of the supreme Word, the Mantra that can create in us the worlds of splendour and joy, we must ask whether such an occult-esoteric concept of poetry is in practice realisable at all and, if so, whether every "inspired and inevitable" expression can be considered mantric. There is no doubt that the entire Vedic poetry is the highest possible mantra given to mankind in respect of its language, rhythm, substance and the power that can immediately put us in touch with the gods of heaven as much as they, through it, feel happy to associate themselves with us by coming closer to us. Thus when Rishi Vasishtha invites Agni to come with desirable gifts and riches, we have in his prayer the fulfilment of poetry also:

O Fire, companioning the shining ones bring to us Indra, companioning the Rudras bring vast Rudra, with the Adityas bring the boundless and universal Mother, with those who have illumined word bring the master of the word in whom are all desirable things.[8]

We cannot say that in this particular Rik there is much conceptual substance or colourful dazzle of images which we normally tend to associate with poetry; yet its rhythm is absolutely magnificent, calm, spreading widely in ten directions, carrying the power to actualise what it is expressing. The Rishi's whole tapasya gets quintessenced in such an utterance.

In contrast to this the Upanishadic poetry is somewhat different in nature. Not always the direct experiential Word, it now and then slips into a kind of analytical intuition instead of holding on to the power of revelation to let it work out in its world-action the miracle of the Self of Knowledge, atmajnana. More for the sake of fixing a certain thought or intuition or an experience rather than an aesthetic perception of some beauty or delight or happy sweet feeling is this poetry. It is an utterance of the spirit of another time that has in it the strength of a luminously dense thought. Take for instance the very first verse of the Isha Upanishad and we at once get convinced that, presently, the mantra is coming with the power which carries in its movement the faculty of gnostic thinking:

All this is for habitation by the Lord, whatsoever is individual universe of movement in the universal motion. By that renounced thou shouldst enjoy; lust not after any man's possession.[9]

The whole philosophy of assertive existence with its Yogic-spiritual process finds in this shloka a compacted utterance which holds in its contents the wide infinity of knowledge itself. Not that the Upanishadic poetry is quantitatively dense always to this degree. We have lyrical moments also. Thus at times does the Rishi loudly chant the glory of the universal spirit in men and moments and happenings in the inexhaustible delight of existence everywhere, with happy psychic inspiration flooding his poetry:

Thou art woman and Thou art man also; Thou art the boy, or else Thou art the young virgin, and Thou art yonder worn and aged man that walkest bending upon a staff. Lo, Thou becomest born and the universe groweth full of Thy faces. Thou art the blue bird and the green and the scarlet-eyed; Thou art the womb of Lightning and the Seasons and the Oceans. Spirit without beginning, because Thou hast poured Thyself multifoldly into all forms, therefore the worlds have being. There is one Unborn Mother; she is white, she is black, she is blood-red of hue; having taken shape, lo, how she giveth birth to many kinds of creatures; for One of the two Unborn taketh delight in her and lieth with her, but the other hath exhausted all her sweets and casteth her from him. They are two birds that cling to one common tree; beautiful of plumage, yoke-fellows are they, eternal companions; and one of them eateth the delicious fruit of the tree and the Other eateth not, but watcheth His fellow.[10]

The last shloka is from the Rig Veda itself; its bright dense symbolism packed with the supernatural shows once more that the Vedic poetry can also be lyrically spiritual. To it we can well apply the Agastyan formula of the mantra. Still, if the utterance of a Vedic Rishi invariably bears the gleaming mark of a seer-poet, of the hearer of the truth-word, satyasrutah, the Upanishadic expression mostly remains the thought of a thinker-poet, kavirmanishi. It is more the language of a contemplator of the world and of the spirit than the language of one who constantly lives in the company of the gods, he as their intimate household friend and associate. No doubt this poetry is from beginning to end overhead, belonging to the high plane of intuition, its rhythm carrying that sense and substance; yet the revelatory wonder, the heavenly ease and honey-bright felicity of the other, certainly appears to be a thing of the past. It is in this sense that we can say that the poetry of the Gita is more Upanishadic than Vedic, as for instance in the following shlokas:

Thou art the ancient Soul and the first and original Godhead and the supreme resting place of this all; Thou art the knower and that which is to be known and the highest status; O infinite in form, by Thee was extended the universe. Thou art Yama and Vayu and Agni and Soma and Varuna and Prajapati, father of creatures, and the great-grandsire. Salutations to Thee a thousand times over and again and yet again salutation, in front and behind and from every side, for Thou art each and all that is, Infinite in might and immeasurable in strength of action. Thou pervadest all and art every one.[11]

If in these verses we have Vedic bhakti raised to epic loftiness, we also see in them the beginning of another kind of lyrical devotionalism entering into poetry. Still weighty, rather splendidly heavy, quantitative in its substantiality, still very solid and classical in its greatness and grandeur, yet in its poetry we begin to feel another element entering in. It brings in its poignancy the sweetness and charm of an ardent soul approaching with confidence the god of its adoration. The easy felicity in its flow is the new gift we receive from the Muse. Another landmark gets established in its beautiful revelatory mood.

The mantric sweetness and charm of the Ramayana is of another kind. Poetry moves swiftly from place to place and from event to event, and all with epic speed. Whether it be the birth of the divine child, or the valour of the young prince, or the palace crisis, the visit of the royal exiles to Rishi Agastya's Ashram, or Sita's abduction, Shabari's offering of the woodland fruits with all her devotion to the incarnate ones, gathering up of an army to fight the fierce occult battle against the Asuric forces, or discovery of Sita in the distant and inaccessible Ashoka forest-grove, or the final victory over the great ten-headed Rakshasa who had usurped the seven worlds,everything is narrated with a poetic elan that breathes the creative delight of yet another dimension, unknown to the Vedic and Upanishadic Rishis. Another spring of mantric poetry has started flowing through green lands and happy luminous hearts in the beauty and joy of life fulfilling the spirit's urges in the world. It is the crystalline lyrical word claiming divinity in the land of sorrowing humanity. The classical becomes richly and elevatingly romantic, lifting a sort of collective cry to the chant of the gods,with the chanting in of the gods to affirm themselves in response to the cry.

Let us take at random a couple of examples, by way of a brief illustration. Rama and Lakshmana have arrived at Shabari's hermitage, on the western bank of the Pampa Lake in a forest bearing the name of the great Rishi Matanga who, by his arduous tapasya, had ascended to Heaven in his radiant form. By observing strictly the sacred vows and by attending to the preceptors of exceptional merit the devout-ascetic Shabari had already attained great perfection, received Yogic siddhis difficult to get otherwise. She tells to Rama:

Today has the fruition of my austerities been attained by me through your blessed sight. Today my birth has borne fruit and my elders have been duly adored. My asceticism has become fruitful today and the highest heaven too will definitely fall to my lot, now that you, the foremost of gods, have been worshipped by me, O Rama, the flower of humanity. Hallowed by your gracious look, O gentle one, bestowing honour on others, I shall by your grace ascend to realms knowing no decay, O subduer of foes! When you reached Chitrakoot, the sages whom I served ascended to Heaven from this place in aerial cars of incomparable splendour. Nay, I was reassured by those eminent and highly blessed seers of Vedic mantras who knew what is right. "Sri Rama will visit this highly sacrosanct hermitage of yours; he should be hospitably received by you as a guest; having seen him you will ascend to realms that know no decay." I was reassured by those highly blessed souls in these words on that occasion, O jewel among men! Produce of the forest of every description grown on the brink of Pampa has therefore been gathered by me for you, O tiger among men, the flower of humanity.[12]

The soul of sweetness in this poetry becomes devotionally spiritual, making that devotion a Yogic means to attain siddhis that are inaccessible even to austere tapasya. Take just another example, incarcerated Sita's despair and a sudden turn of events in the Ashoka Grove. Hanuman has discovered her in the Grove and, sitting on the branch of a close-by tree, he is reciting the story of Rama. Sita has heard it and presently she is amazed that someone should be chanting in a sweet melodious voice the hymn of her Lord's glory and greatness. She even doubts if her perception is correct:

Pondering with my mind at all times on the concept conveyed by the word 'Rama' and speaking of the same Rama with my tongue, I hear as well a talk corresponding to the same thought and likewise visualise the talk heard by me in conformity with the same theme. Constantly thinking of him alone, tormented as I am by longing for him, my whole affection being fastened on him, I likewise behold him and hear him alone. I speculate that what I am seeing may be a mere image; yet I reflect with my mind as to what can be the cause of this apparition; for a conceptual image has no concrete form, while this monkey appearing before me has a distinct form and is also talking to me. Let my salutations be to Sage Brihaspati the master of speech, along with Indra who is armed with a thunderbolt, to Brahma, the self-born creator as well as to the god of fire, the deity presiding over the organ of speech! May all that which has been uttered now in my presence by this monkey prove true and not otherwise.[13]

This bhakti-poetry climbs peak after calm snow-white peak of the very delight of existence in the Puranic expression of God's creation and his participation in it. If the happiness of the soul can be mantric, then here we have another mood of the inspired Muse bestowing remarkable boons of god-passion and god-love in the harshness and crudity of this mortal's lot. Life becomes a song.

The sweet face of a child, the beauty of a woman, charm of a girl, the thought of a thinker, the nobility of a large heroic and patrician heart, imagination of an artist, the calm face carved in a granite rock by a sculptor, or the idea-logic of a scientist,anything can be happy and pleasing to the creative soul. When it comes in contact with the inner reality it is trying to express, we are at once put in touch with the spirit that upholds all our activities and all that it can offer to us. The attempt to outgrow our little humanness and bring to it the gifts of the spirit is indeed the definition of the "inspired and inevitable" Word, the Mantra. It can be a word of power, of knowledge, beauty, joy, awareness, love, life, a word that can release heavenly springs of sweet luminous waters flooding our heart and mind and the very will to be in divinity's arms. Poetry has many suns and whatever can kindle these suns, or a sun in us, makes poetry also mantric. Thus the Agastyan scope of Mantra gets widened in several directions. This shall be the expression of the new age dawning upon us. To live in it and to express it severally in beautiful forms is to give to truth the wonder of growing delight.

-3-

It is in this play of the transcendent speech or para vani that we have the completest fulfilment of the expressive power of the supreme Logos. Like sweet and fertilisng waters of luminous music the soul of delight grows from richness to richness, bringing to our worlds the supernal harmonies.

But always these rivers of sound are borne by an all-pervasive silence. The Unspoken upholds, with its power of countless possibilities, that which it lets itself lose in inundations of the spoken. Sri Aurobindo's Savitri is at once such "a power of silence in the depths of God" and "the Force, the inevitable Word"[14] by whose shining magical strength the supremely potential becomes the superbly actual. It is the flawless fusion of sense and sound and sight, ever ushering in the divine experience. It is Mantra. In the listening quiet of the receiver's mind a miracle is wrought by its upstreaming and downstreaming incantations and its self-willed and self-assured cadences.

To put it in Sri Aurobindo's own words the Mantra

is a direct and most heightened, an intensest and most divinely burdened rhythmic word which embodies an intuitive and revelatory inspiration and ensouls the mind with the sight and the presence of the very self, the inmost reality of things and with its truth and with the divine soul-forms of it, the Godheads which are born from the living Truth. Or, let us say, it is a supreme rhythmic language which seizes hold upon all that is finite and brings into each the light and voice of its own infinite.[15]

This is precisely what we have in Savitri, this poem of sacred delight. Of this para vani rhythm, sight, and the reality of things are thus the revelatory attributes. If sometimes all the three come as a trinity from the sheer plenary Truth-world, very often it is one aspect or other that stands out in a more perceptibly significant manner.

Thus we have the pure mantra lucid and undiminished anywhere in its calm undisturbed sea-like grandeur lit by the blazing sun from within and mooned by the goddess of beauty in the wide tranquil sky:

A burning Love from white spiritual founts
Annulled the sorrow of the ignorant depths;
Suffering was lost in her immortal smile.
A Life from beyond grew conqueror here of Death:
To err no more was natural to mind;
Wrong could not come where all was light and love.
The Formless and the Form were joined in her.
Immensity was exceeded by a look,
A Face revealed the crowded Infinite.
Incarnating inexpressibly in her limbs
The boundless joy the blind world-forces seek,
Her body of beauty mooned the seas of bliss.
At the head she stands of birth and toil and fate,
In their slow rounds the cycles turn to her call;
Alone her hands can change Time's dragon base.
Hers is the mystery the Night conceals;
The spirit's alchemist energy is hers;
She is the golden bridge, the wonderful fire.
The luminous heart of the Unknown is she,
A power of silence in the depths of God;
She is the Force, the inevitable Word,
The magnet of our difficult ascent,
The Sun from which we kindle all our suns,
The Light that leans from the unrealised Vasts,
The joy that beckons from the impossible,
The Might of all that never yet came down.
All Nature dumbly calls to her alone
To heal with her feet the aching throb of life
And break the seals on the dim soul of man
And kindle her fire in the closed heart of things.[16]

All the elements of poetry are aglow like several suns in their high spiritual brilliancy and all in a neo-Vedic soul-body of the Mantra. At times gentle and soft overtones pushing a suggestive sense to culmination of the reality's substance, at times a marvellous iconopoeia carrying with it both logopoeia and melopoeia as in the line "Her body of beauty mooned the seas of bliss", or often enough revealing the occultly packed mystery of the Night in a lustrous creative play, we have here a gold-and-topaz fire pouring the raptures of luminous gods on the expectant heart of terrestrial things. To bring happiness and perfection to this sorrowful material world does a Presence come out of the utter Unknowable by the power of that invocation. The prayerlike Agni himself sweet of joy and one who has with him the Truthis a persuasive and even absolute and compelling adoration of that benign All-Beautiful to bestow on the suffering creature boons of God-light and God-felicity. Only then can the divine multitude, or as the Veda says, the Divine People, divyam janam, appear on the earth to make Time step into Eternity's marvels. Only then shall the "indignity of mortal life" be cancelled and pain turned into ecstasy. If Mantra is a power, a Word that creates happy majesties and desirable excellences, then we have here Sri Aurobindo's supreme Word established in the earth-consciousness to transform it into the divine substance of Truth, Beauty, Delight, into God-Life, all held by the Spirit's vast calm.

To always see this kind of a totality of the mantric utterance in the whole of Savitri would easily be tantamount to idolatry. There are variations in the quality of the Overhead contents of the poem no doubt, yet there is always the "thing intended by the higher inspiration in every line and passage."[17]

When the critics find some portions of Savitri as "arid" tracts, or when they assert that there is "nothing extraordinary" in the opening line, "It was the hour before the Gods awake", all that one can say is that they miss the breath of the spirit that blows through every line and word and punctuation-mark of this "sapphire cutting" from Heaven. Even from a purely technical point of view a lot can be said about the profundity and extraordinariness of this line. Let us simply quote here K. D. Sethna's interpretatively penetrating reading: "The contrast of the past tense 'was' with the present tense 'awake' strikes, at once the poem's sheer opening, the note of one particular night to which applied a truth valid for night after night as the darkness draws to a close.... The past tense [awoke] would show the once-for-all primal awakening..."[18]

The direct and pointed reference to the day of Satyavan's death, the focal issue of the poem, would have got otherwise de-emphasised in the construction. "The particularity would not have then be self-evident." Indeed, each line of Savitri is an encompassing wholeness of the rest of Savitri. The spirituo-esoteric is present everywhere and it is in that oneness that the true soul of Savitri can be perceived to the extent possible for us. To put it in simpler words: we can say that if we are looking for a commentary on a given particular line or phrase of Savitri, then it is provided by the rest of Savitri itself. Therefore it always contains the remarkable completeness, unity and extraordinariness of poetic creation that it is.

-4-

Let us take some examples from Savitri wherein one aspect or other stands out more prominently, as if in bold relief in the totality of sense-sound-sight of the mantric manifold. Thus we could lend ourselves to the magical incomprehensibility of a perplexing sense, being caught in the power of the Word, and with it

If all existence could renounce to be
And Being take refuge in Non-being's arms
And Non-being could strike out its ciphered round,
Some lustre of that Reality might appear.[19]

There is a picture, there is a rhythm, but what holds us most in its grip in these lines is the substance, the dialectic of a tremendously mystifying super-logic. Only That, the highest Non-being, has all the power to strike out the Void and reveal through such an action the One who stands unmanifest behind it. Savitri's Yoga has advanced to the last stage of annulment in which the whole of her personality, the I-ness of the old,and even phenomenality and causality of the world,is going to be dissolved. After finding her soul she is on the path of the transcendent Nirvana which alone can remove the lingering vestige of Nature and make the way clear for a supreme realisation of the absolute Unmanifest. A bit of that ineffable Reality could only be glimpsed if the three successive conditions as described in the passage are fulfilled. Being is an assertion; Non-being standing behind or around it is also an assertion. Now if the assertion of the Non-being, the cipher holding in it the Being, is abolished then the true Positive beyond both of them is reached. It is that Positive alone which can make all existence, Being, and Non-being, and everything, transcendentally valid or meaningful. By this assertive laya or dissolution or true Nirvana, by merging her self in the not-Self, Savitri attains the state of formless liberation. From the substance-packed contents of poetry we are taken through a peculiar dynamism of the insubstantiality to a Reality-filled massiveness of Existence.

When there is sight riding sound we enter into another landscape of the immense Savitri-world. The unseen becomes mantrically more visible, and audible, even as

Still regions of imperishable Light,
All-seeing eagle-peaks of silent Power
And moon-flame oceans of swift fathomless Bliss
And calm immensities of spirit Space[20]

open to us their many-gleaming grandeurs, as does a mystery's bud its core of the dawn-wakened and day-charged beauty. If there are "still regions" and "calm immensities" that come to our sudden view in a spiritual blaze, we also have the mystic and the occult geographical, rather cosmographical, wonders of the "eagle-peaks" and "moon-flame oceans" unfolding, in a calm silent receptive hour, something that shall change Time-born men into hero-warriors of Eternity. What else is here if not the super-Lawrencian "insistence of the sun" descending in a flood of luminous poetry bearing the rhythms of a silence that as though must bring the "sounds of wisdom's sea" closer to our deaf-insentience? How marvellous these emerald waters invading our refractory continents!

Of sight and sound fused together take yet another example. Aswapati has received the boon from the divine Mother and now has, "flaming through spiritual gates", returned to the mortal world; he resumes the daily routines and attends to the business of mundane things. But even in these crowded material preoccupations he is receptive to messages that come from some far-off skies inaccessible to us:

Once more he moved amid material scenes,
Lifted by intimations from the heights
And twixt the pauses of the building brain
Touched by the thoughts that skim the fathomless surge
Of Nature and wing back to hidden shores.[21]

Sri Aurobindo as an imager of thought-birds and as an artist of exceptional merit making these heavenly visitors slip between the pauses of the building brainwhen the brain is in the phase of intense activity symbolic of the duties of the ruler with a concern for his kingdomis just superb. There is something remarkable here from the point of view of poetic expression achieving through its round-aboutness a very unusual result. Complex in structure but metrically well-poised with a pyrrhic between a pair of iambs on either side, the third line in the above passage depicts exactly the whole process by which Aswapati the Yogi is presently seen engrossed in matters of public business, a typical Aurobindonian integration of the secular and the esoteric. Yet the round-aboutness of the expression is not something artificial, designed just to produce a certain effect. There is the faultless and accomplished intuition behind it. In the earlier drafts of this very passage the line had 'in' and not 'twixt', but the change in one word is a master-stroke of inspiration indeed! Thereby the whole philosophy of dynamic spirituality in life once again gets asserted, which only means that we have to be extremely alert not only to the technical side of the poem but also to the spiritual tones and suggestions, whether these be made in an overt or covert manner. Such deeper shades and nuances are actually present throughout it and it is these which positively enrich it in terms of subtler and finer aspects of the expressive power that the spiritual poetry can possess. Quite often knowledgeable critics and exponents of Savitri consider in their too confident a wisdom such situations in the text as inadvertent slips on the part of Sri Aurobindo himself, a hasty and very ill-considered view taken in the obstinacy of one's own notions of things.

-5-

We should also guard ourselves against yet another tendency, that it is not always that we have the Agastyan Mantra in Savitri. Thus to read the full expression of that supreme Word, for instance in the following, will only be a misplaced aesthetic fervour:

As floats a sunbeam through a shady place,
The golden virgin in her carven car
Came gliding among meditation's seats.[22]

The aesthetic soul of this "poem of sacred delight" has many moods and what gives it a mantric quality is the joy of calm intensities that pervades throughout its body of flame-ethereality. There is a sweet enchantment of psychic lyricism, a rich abundance of occult symbol-images, mystical elevations, experiential revelations, spiritual realisations, all filled with the spirit of delight. Thus we have:

The peacock scattering on the breeze his moons [23]

superbly Kalidasean in its mood of romanticism;

Ringing for ever with the crickets' cry [24]

reminding us of Vyasa;

A casual passing phrase can change our life [25]

moving smoothly with an epic ease;

Sight's sound-waves breaking from the soul's great deeps [26]

occultly packed with the supernatural;

She seemed burning towards the eternal realms [27]

rising in a great style;

... Mind motionless sleeps waiting Light's birth [28]

pouring out its supremely realised contents;

To live, to love are signs of infinite things [29]

uttering a forceful mantra; or else

The riven invisible atom's omnipotent force [30]

bursting with the power of the original Word, the creative bang, sphota, by which and in which the expression was born at the moment of the conceptive explosion.

While explaining the features of the Overhead Poetry,  Sri Aurobindo draws our attention towards the fact that its essential character is in the rhythm and language that come from some cosmic self rather than from the mind or the vital emotion. There is in it always a largeness of the One and the Infinite which itself may not be the subject-matter of the poem; what we have is some unmistakable felicity of wondrous sound lifting up mantrically substance and sight to its own world of rhythmic harmony. Thus there is nothing mystic or Upanishadic in Shakespeare's

Absent thee from felicity awhile
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain

and yet the lines do possess "the Overhead touch in substance, the rhythm and the feeling".[31]

Wordsworth's "The Winds come to me from the fields of sleep" hails from Overmind and is Upanishadic, but is not of the same assuring spirit-intimacy as for instance we have in the following:

Near to earth's wideness, intimate with heaven,
Exalted and swift her young large-visioned spirit
Voyaging through worlds of splendour and of calm
Overflew the ways of Thought to unborn things.[32]

We have here at once the calm and wide sweep of magnificence and exaltation in a rich measure of para vani or transcendent speech, bringing to us in their rush the "unborn things" in the splendour of creative and assertive joy. Here is the abundance of beauty, unflawed, and which is spontaneous in its response to the soul of the original Word. Savitri's Overheadness is of a different quality: it has always the dimension of the infinite's awareness of delight in truth's perception. The Mantra of Savitri is a sun that does not just shine in the blue sky above our head but becomes one with the earth which it illumines. We reach its world even as does that world come unto us.

Incantatory verses, although they may be loaded with profound mystico-philosophical ideas, will easily fail to appeal to the inmost sense of aesthetic perception if the leaving breath of the spirit is absent in them, as in Eliot's Burnt Norton:

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps are present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.

In contrast to this, we have even in a simple verse of Vyasa the sure touch when he speaks of the Truth by which the saints lead the sun, the askesis by which they uphold the earth, and in whom all the three divisions of Time find refuge.

Both are incantatory no doubt, but the deep calm one feels in Vyasa's almost Overmental stanza is missing in the inner mental lines of Eliot.

Open Savitri anywhere and what we witness is the unmistakable silence of the Word's powerful contents holding sight-sound-sense, silence in which even the ghastly or the fearful or the uncouth in its naked bareness does not frighten us:

Their bodies born out of some Nihil's womb
Ensnare the spirit in the moment's dreams,
Then perish vomiting the immortal soul
Out of Matter's belly into the sink of Nought.[33]

Or

There crawled through every tense and aching nerve
Leaving behind in poignant quaking trail
A nameless and unutterable fear.[34]

The most puzzling as well as assuring aspect of it is that, in the face of this "nameless and unutterable fear", there is also the protection provided by the very power of the verse that pours on the suffering soul peace which cannot be mutilated. We have, extending sublimity beyond Dante, a soothing and redeeming certitude that not only did God create Hell in his mood of infinite love and justice, but also took particular care that out of such a possibility shall emerge in striking and dignified proportion the one adventuring delight's multiplicity. Savitri may be said to be that kind of justification of the ways of God to man which is based not so much on the orchestral symphony but on the calm power that upholds all creation. It is the Word that has taken birth in the Infinite's bosom, the bosom of Silence, in the "omniscient hush"[35]. Savitri's substratum is the divinely pervasive Shanta Rasa.

When this sheer Shanta Rasa rains from the sky of ecstasy the whole earth's aspiration rising from her soul turns into an Anthem of Felicity, a movement of the Gods ascending to the Blissful One as would the Veda say. Thus when Savitri sings such a Hymn of Delight in the Pit of Death, an inner triumph in the process of Time gets securely founded:

A secret air of pure felicity
Deep like a sapphire heaven our spirits breathe...
If this withdrew, the world would sink in the Void;
If this were not, nothing could move or live.
A hidden Bliss is at the root of things...
The All-Wonderful has packed heaven with his dreams,
He has made blank ancient Space his marvel-house;
He spilled his spirit into Matter's signs:
His fires grandeur burn in the great sun,
He glides through heaven shimmering in the moon;
He is beauty carolling in the fields of sound;
He chants the stanzas of the odes of Wind;
He is silence watching in the stars at night;
He wakes at dawn and calls from every bough,
Lies stunned in the stone and dreams in flower and tree...
There is joy in all that meets the sense...
Its sap runs through the plant and flowers of Pain...
The sun of Beauty and the sun of Power
Flatter and foster it with golden beams...[36]

The Hymn proceeds to declare that the immortal Bliss, in her "remembrance of the future", is working out a slow transfiguration of Matter's unknowing Force into the might of the Spirit. In fact for this

In the vast golden laughter of Truth's sun
Like a great heaven-bird on a motionless sea
Is poised her winged ardour of creative joy
On the still deep of the Eternal's peace.[37]

Savitri's poise too is that heaven-bird's. It is a presence whose dynamism can make our struggling world luminously bacchic. To lift all our night to the sun of Truth in the ardour of her creative joy is a realisable wonder packed in this great Word., Indeed, if we should desire to see one unique characteristic of this incarnate Word, we will have to go far beyond the Overheadness of poetry, perhaps even beyond the immediate notion of the mantra. For Savitri is a Song of Joy, the Spirit of Delight itself borne by the might of the Calm. It is the Mantra of the Real in whose body of Silence is enshrined the soul of Rapture, Ananda Rasa flowing in the ocean of Shanta Rasa. It is a "direct and sovereign descent and pouring of some absolute sight and word of the spirit,"[38] para vani that can transform earthly slime into some magical gold of the high Gods. And because it can do so, it at once becomes the "poem of sacred delight"[39] brought down holy Ganges-like to accomplish in our legacy of Inconscience the Real-Idea's all-time miracle, the supreme Miracle of the Eternal.