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Dawn, the message from the immortal Light stood, like an instant’s, visitor, on life’s thin border –
”Interpreting a recondite beauty and bliss In colour’s hieroglyphs of mystic sense, It wrote the lines of a significant myth Telling of a
greatness of spiritual dawns, A brilliant code penned with the sky for page. ”
The dawn godhead paints on the sky, using it as page significant myth a myth that tells of greatness of spiritual dawns that are still to
come. Obviously, the writing is not in any human language, but it is in colour’s hieroglyph. One who can understand or interpret the hieroglyphs can get at the ’significant myth’. In fact, the whole of Savitri is itself a significant myth telling of a greatness of spiritual dawn.
A myth is in its essence an archetypal story which is relevant to all times. Taking different forms and characters, depending upon the times and the
cultures it repeats itself endlessly in every individual person and every day. As a legend it may be situated in the past, but in its essence it is eternel and universal. As writes the poet:
”The Past is also Now,
What was is also a living event...
Two fold unity of Then and Now,
It fulfils its mystery....
The moment it is realised,
It is the festival of the Gods.”
The myth type that Sri Aurobindo uses for Savitri is the genuine secular legend type and not the ’religious-philosophical allegory’ type seen in the Puranas. The religious myths are ”type of poetry addressed to a peculiar mental constitution....in which a strong metaphysical bent towards religion combines with an imaginative tendency seeking symbol both as an atmosphere around religion, which would otherwise dwell on too breathless mountaintops, and as a safeguard against the spirit of dogma”. (SABCL’: 27, p. 149)
The secular legends of the type found in the Mahabharata, edited of its inferior accretions, are ”very simple and beautiful, in their peculiar Hindu
type, ... with infinite possibilities of sweetness and feeling, and in the hands of great artists have blossomed into dramas and epics of the most delicate tenderness or the most sublimity.” (SABCL: 27, p. 150).
What Sri Aurobindo means by Hindu type of myth is:
”The Hindu myth has not the warm passionate life of the Greek. The Hindu mind was too austere and idealistic to be sufficiently sensitive to the rich
poetical colouring inherent in crime and sin and overpowering passion; an Oedipus or an Agamemnon stands therefore outside the line of its creative faculty... Inferior in warmth and colour and quick life and the
savour of earth to the Greek; they had a superior spiritual loveliness and exaltation; not clothing the surface of the earth with imperishable beauty, they search deeper into the white - hot core of things and in
their cyclic orbit of thought curve downward round the most hidden foundations of existence and upward over the highest, almost invisible arches of ideal possibility. Let me touch the subject a little more
precisely. The difference between the Greek and Hindu temperaments was that one was vital, the other super-vital; the one physical, the other metaphysical; the one sentient of sunlight as its natural atmosphere and
the bound of its joyous activity, the other regarding it as a golden veil which hid from it beautiful and wonderful things for which it panted... Hence the enormous difference of level between different legends or
the same legend in different hands, the sublimity or tenderness of the best the banality of the worst, with a little that is mediocre and intermediate shading the contrast away. To take with a reverent hand the old
myths and cleanse them of soiling accretions, till they shine with some of the antique strength, simplicity and solemn depth of beautiful meaning, is an ambition which Hindu poets of today may and do worthily
cherish.” (SABCL: 27, p. 150,151)
It is perhaps with this idea, namely, ”to take with a reverent hand the old myths and cleanse them of soiling accretions, till they shine with some of
the antique strength” that Sri Aurobindo had taken up the story of Ruru and Priyumvada which he found to be ”among the most significant and powerful in idea of our legends; for it is rather an idea than a tale”. So
too did Sri Aurobindo take up the legend of Savitri from the Mahabharata for he was caught by the ”the passion of a single woman in its dreadful silence and strength pitted against Death, the divorcer of souls.”
(Ibid., P. 154) The mythic truth which is eternal about this legend of Savitri is the central conception of the Veda which is the conquest of the Truth in the darkness of Ignorance and by the conquest of the Truth
the conquest also of Immortality. This eternal truth which is enacted as the cosmic as well as the individual levels is best caught by the story of Savitri, especially when it gains the spiritual and Supramental
dimensions in the hands of the Kavi Sri Aurobindo.
In an age when Science and Materialism dominate and possess the human consciousness, Sri Aurobindo brings back an ancient myth, transmits it and gives
it as a gift to the future humanity. It may seem incompatible, but, as Herbert Read wrote:
”... the further science penetrates into the mystery of life, the more it reverts to a mythological world. I refer more particularly to the
science of the individual psyche, where all science culminates; for we know nothing unless we know ourselves. And the more we learn about ourselves the objective methods of observation and analysis, the more we
realise that our knowledge is already crystallised in the ancient myths... Myths that were dead are now alive again, and it may be that in the course of time all the old gods and heroes that for centuries peopled
and pacified the minds of men, will return and resume their symbolic functions.” (Quoted in A Study of Savitri by Prema Nandakumar, P. 308)
Again, the importance of myth in our times is brought out sharply by Bedyaev in his book The Meaning of History when he observes:
”The human consciousness reflects and repeats the historical and cosmogenic processes of nature, which take the form of mythology in its primal stages.
The mythological consciousness is thus full of cosmic myths in which man is revealed as a natural being related’ to the spirits of nature. These myths also disclose the ties uniting man with the primary processes of
world creation and formation, which go back much further than the consolidation of matter from which science later, dates its study of world evolution ... Mythology is the original source of human history”. (Ibid.,
p 308)
However, in Sri Aurobindo, the legend of Savitri not only reflects from the spiritual angle the primary processes of world creation and formation but
also the world’s future and man’s spiritual destiny. Out of the different approaches that can be taken towards myth, namely, the allegorical, the moral and psychological, Sri Aurobindo has taken the ’analogical
symbolic approach’ which depicts the epic climb of human soul. Seen in this light, the Vedic myth and the story from the Mahabharata get transmitted into a prophecy and a promise of the earth fulfilling itself in a
life divine.
”The canvas of Savitri is as wide as the cosmos and it takes into its purview worlds of being that are connected with humanity which are not perceived by it because of its limitations of ignorance. Nevertheless, these levels do act upon human consciousness. They also include higher planes of consciousness which have not yet manifested here but which are pressing upon the earth-consciousness for manifestation. They contain beings, powers and presences that live on those planes of Light, Consciousness and Bliss, the worlds of Truth. The soul of aspiring humanity symbolised in Uswapathy, the Lord of manifested Life, first descends from his human consciousness into nether regions of unconsciousness and materiality, the regions of the lower vital, its heaven and its hell, as a conscious witness. He then ascends to the regions of Heavens of the higher vital and then crosses over to the heavens of the Mind. After soaring into regions above Mind, into the Heavens of the Ideal and Illumined Mind he passes beyond the borders of manifested creation to the centre from which creation proceeds. Through a great shaft of light across a tunnel that leads to the centre, he comes face to face with the World-Soul, the Two-in-One. It is there that he experiences the presence of the Divine Mother who supports the cosmos. It is She, the power of the Supreme, supporting the cosmos, who bestows on him the boon that saves mankind from the stark imprisonment of Ignorance and subjection to Death. Being a power of Truth-Consciousness Savitri not only liberates man but creates conditions here for the embodiment of Light Supreme. She shows how man’s life here can be fulfilled in a life divine.” (A. B. Purani, Savitri, An Approach and a Study, p. 31-32)
Thus the verses that Sri Aurobindo writes to depict Usha, the Dawn goddess, namely,
apply magnificently to Savitri itself.
Getting back to the description of Dawn, the poet writes:
Almost that day the epiphany was disclosed
Of which our thoughts and hopes are signal flares;
A lonely splendour from the invisible goal
Almost was flung on the opaque Inane.
(p.6)
Right away our attention is drawn to the word ”that day” –
It is ”that day” when Dawn announces the Epiphany or the manifestation of a greater Light that the world had never seen before; that day
when the obscurity of the Void, the resistance of the Earth is broken down by the ’lonely splendour’, that day when Satyavan dies and yet does not die; that day when
On that day,
It is the gentle, soft tread of Usha that perturbed, or disturbed, like ’beauty and wonder that disturbed the fields of God’ the vacant
Vasts. The ’vacant Vasts are vacant Nought’ ’sombre Vast’ ’unsounded Void’ ’opaque Inane’.
All these cognates placed in different parts of the canto ”keep constantly before the view of the reader” writes-Sri Aurobindo, ”not
imaginative but attentive to seize the whole truth of the vision in its totality, the ever-present sense of the Inconscience in which everything is occurring. It is the frame as well as the background without which
all the details would either fall apart or stand out only as separate incidents. That necessity lasts until there is the full outburst of the dawn and then it disappears; each phrase gives a fixture of this
Inconscience proper to its place and context. It is the entrance of the ”lonely splendour” into an otherwise inconscient obstructing and unreceptive world that has to be brought out and that cannot be done without
the image of the ”opaque inane” of the Inconscience which is the scene and cause of the resistance. There is the same necessity for reminding the reader that the ”tread” of the Divine Mother was an intrusion on the
vacancy of the Inconscience and the herald of deliverance from it.” (Savitri, p. 908).
The Divine Dawn, Usha, is also the Divine Mother, as hinted by Sri Aurobindo in the above quote. The Dawn - Infinity’s centre, a Face of rapturous calm
Parted the eternal lids that open heaven; A form from far beatitudes seemed to near. (P. 7)
How can ”Infinity” have a ”Centre”, one may ask. True, the Infinite and ’the Eternal have neither a centre nor a circumference, but when
manifestation takes place, the eternal formless Spirit takes upon itself a Form and that Form carries all the potentialities of all future formations. That Form is the Aditi; the Divine Mother of whom Sri Aurobindo
writes in The Mother.
”The one original transcendent shakti, the Mother stands above all the worlds and bears in her external consciousness the Supreme Divine. Alone, she
harbours the absolute Power and the ineffable Presence; continuing or calling the Truths that have to be manifested, she brings them down from the Mystery in which they were hidden into the light of her infinite
consciousness and gives them a form of force in her omnipotent power and her boundless life and a body in the universe. The Supreme is manifest in her for ever as the everlasting Satchidananda, manifested through
her in the worlds as the one and dual consciousness of Ishwara - Shakti and the dual principle of Purusha - Prakriti, embodied by her in the Worlds and the Planes- and the Gods and their Energies and figured because
of her as all that is in the known worlds and in unknown others.”
So it can be said that it is the Aditi who, now, in this opening Canto of Savitri, represented as the Dawn-goddess, is the ”Ambassadress twixt eternity and change.” She is the one who brings forth the Eternal into the Multiplicity, Change, Mortality.
She is also ’The omniscient Goddess’, because when the Absolute wanted to become Many, he first brings forth out of himself the Knowledge and the Power
which form Aditi. With the Supreme as Knowledge and Power, Aditi goes forth to create the worlds as she holds within herself the knowledge of how the worlds are to be worked out.
From the Vedic angle too we see an identification between the Divine Mother and Usha. In the Secret of the Veda, Sri Aurobindo explains (SABCL:10, p. 126):
”Usha is described repeatedly as the Mother of the Cows... But we see in the Veda that Aditi, the Mother of the gods, is described both as the Cow and
as the general Mother; she is the supreme Light and all radiances proceed from her... Usha as the Mother of the cows can only be a form or power of this supreme light, of this supreme consciousness, of Aditi. In
fact, we do find her so described in I. 113, 19:... ’Mother of the gods, form (or power) of Aditi.”
Usha, writes Sri Aurobindo, ’leaned across the breadths’
’That wrap the fated journeyings of’ the stars’ and then, just before appearing on the world, she gives a last longing look at Surya,
who follows her like a young lover, and then, she ’went to her immortal work.’ And what may be the ’immortal work’ of Usha? Rishi - Gotama Rahugana answers:
”The goddess fronts and looks upon all the worlds, the eye of vision shines with an utter wideness; awakening all life for movement she discovers
speech for all that thinks.”
That is to say, ”Dawn releases life and mind into their fullest wideness.” At a deeper level, Dawn awakens man to the need of spiritual life, or, as
Rishi Vasishta says, ”Dawn comes divine repelling by the Light all darkness and evils.” She is indeed the leader not only of happy truths, but of our spiritual wealth and joy, bringer of the felicity which is
reached by man or brought to him by the Truth.” (SABCL 10, p. 130)
But, in Savitri the first stage of Dawn’s appearance is felt first by Nature who welcomes her:
The waking ear of Nature heard her steps ...
Air was a vibrant link between earth and heaven;
The wide-winged hymn of a great priestly wind
Arose and failed upon the altar hills;
The high boughs prayed in a revealing sky.
(P. 7)
Regarding this passage, Sri Aurobindo has given us an exhaustive comment which gives us hints into the Poets’ way of looking at the symbols, the
similes and the realities behind the symbols. Here is the long but most inspiring self-analysis:
”I come next to the critic’s trenchant attack on that passage in my symbolic vision of Night and Dawn in which there is recorded the conscious
adoration of Nature when it feels the passage of the omniscient Goddess of eternal Light... I was not seeking for originality but for truth and the effective poetical expression of my vision... His main charge is
that there is a violent and altogether illegitimate transference of epithet in the expression ”the wide-winged hymn of a great priestly wind”. A transference of epithet is not necessarily illegitimate, especially if
it expresses something that is true or necessary to convey a sound feeling and vision of things...
The critic thinks that I imagined the wind as having a winged body and then took away the wings from its shoulders and clapped them on to its voice or
hymn which could have no body. But I did nothing of the kind; I am not bound to give wings to the wind. In an occult vision the breath, sound, movement by which we physically know of a wind is not its real being but
only the physical manifestation of the wind-god or the spirit of the air, as in the Veda the sacrificial fire is only a physical birth, temporary body or manifestation of the god of Fire, Agni. The god of the Air
and other godheads in the Indian tradition have no wings, the Maruts of storm-gods ride through the skies in their galloping chariots with their flashing golden lances, the beings of the middle world in the Ajanta
frescoes are seen moving through the air not with wings but with a gliding natural motion proper to ethereal bodies. The epithet ”wide-winged” then does not belong to the wind and is not transferred from it, but is
proper to the voice of the wind which takes the form of a conscious hymn of aspiration and rises ascending from the bosom of the great priest, as might a great-winged bird released into the sky and sinks and rises
again, aspires and fails and aspires again on the ”altar hills”. One can surely speak of a voice or a chant of aspiration rising on wide wings and I do not see how this can be taxed as a false or unpoetic image.
Then the critic objects to the expression ”altar hills” on the ground that this is superfluous as the imagination of the reader can very well supply this detail for itself from what has already been said: I do not
think this is correct, a very alert reader might do so but most would not even think of it, and yet the detail is an essential and central feature of the thing seen and to omit it would be to leave a gap in the
middle of the picture by dropping out something which is indispensable to its totality. Finally he finds that the line about the high boughs praying in the revealing sky does not help but attenuates, instead of more
strongly etching the picture. I do not know why, unless he has failed to feel and to see. The picture is that of a conscious adoration offered by Nature and in that each element is conscious in its own way, the wind
and its hymn, the hills, the trees. The wind is the great priest of this sacrifice of worship, his voice rises in a conscious hymn of aspiration, the hills offer themselves with the feeling of being all altar of the
worship, the trees lift their high boughs towards heaven as the worshippers, silent figures of prayer, and the light of the sky into which their boughs rise reveals the Beyond towards which all aspires. At any rate
this ”picture” or rather this part of the vision is a complete rendering of what I saw in the light of the inspiration and the experience that came to me. I might indeed have elaborated more details, etched out at
more length but that would have been superfluous and unnecessary; or I might have indulged in an ampler description but this would have been appropriate only if this part of the vision had been the whole. The last
line is an expression of an experience which I often had whether in the mountains or on the plains of Gujarat or looking from my window in Pondicherry not only in the dawn but at other times and I am unable to find
any feebleness either in the experience or in the words that express it.
”While Nature is all receptive to the goddess of eternal light, man in his half-lit ignorance is unaware of the Light; he is, ”still dumb in his
consciousness and therefore he does not respond to her. It is as if with reluctance that
Regarding this line, Sri Aurobindo writes to a disciple: ”I think you said in a letter that in the line ’Our prostrate soil bore the
awakening ray’, ’soil’ was an error for ’soul’! But ’soil’ is correct; for I am describing the revealing light falling upon the lower levels of the earth, not on the soul. No doubt, the whole thing is symbolic, but
the symbol has to be kept in the front and the thing symbolised has to be concealed or only peep out from behind, it cannot come openly into the front and push aside the symbol”. (Savitri P. 860)
Inspite of this reluctance and the unpreparedness of man, ’the vision and the prophetic gleam’
As the Vedic verse says, ”The goddess... looks upon all the worlds, the eye of vision shines with an utter wideness”. She does not leave
this and light up that; she ’shines’ upon all the worlds common and rare, higher and lower, man and Nature.
But, man being ’death-bound’ – limited and imperfect - cannot stand for too long the Presence and the Power, the Awakening Ray, the omniscient Goddess,
a face of rapturous calm, the Revelation and the Flame. He feels insecure, oppressed, strained, disturbed, uneasy in the presence of higher consciousness. He is too used to his littleness, to his smallness and he it
reluctant to change, to expansion, to evolution. That is why all that demands of him an inner self exceeding is rejected. The higher aspiration in man is only momentary, for as Sri Aurobindo writes in his poem,
’Man, the Despot of Contraries’:
And again in ’The Children of Wotan’:
Have we not put Christ on the Cross? How many of our saints have we not killed or burnt? We want even the godhead to walk with us in our
Ignorance and his call to us to arise is meted out with torture and pain of Cross. Hence –
Only a little the god light can stay.
The supernal light feels unwanted
Then the divine afflatus, spent, withdrew.
Unwanted, fading from the mortal’s range...
That transitory glow of magic fire
So now dissolved in bright accustomed air.
The message ceased and waned the messenger
The single Call, the uncompanioned Power,
Drew back into some far-off secret world...
She looked no more on our mortality.
The excess of beauty natural to God-kind
Could not uphold its claim on time-born eyes;...
Her body of glory was expunged from heaven:
The rarity and wonder lived no more.
Thus the Divine Goddess withdrew from earth and
There was the common light of earthly day...
Once more the rumour of the speed of Life
Pursued the cycles of her blinded quest...
Man lifted up the burden of his fate.
The Divine Dawn only withdraws but does not abandon earth and men. In fact the first glimpses of the Divine Mother as Dawn are only ”the
prescience of the marvellous birth to come”. Several times in the past the Divine Messenger came down upon earth to prepare mankind for his spiritual destiny. It is slowly and in stages that man has to be prepared
for a Divine Life upon earth. That is the meaning, in fact, of the ten Avatars who have come in succession, each at a higher stage of mankind’s growth and perfection. ”The excess of beauty natural to God-kind” is an
anthem to mankind. So the single Call drew back and man fell back from that divine afflatus into the common light of common day. A greater power than Usha, the Dawn Goddess, is needed to change, uplift and transform
earth and men and that greater strength, consciousness and love is Savitri, for is she not, as clarifies Sri Aurobindo in a letter written 1936, ”an incarnation of the Divine Mother”?
”This incarnation is supposed to have taken place in far past times when the whole thing had to be opened, so as to hew the ways of
Immortality”. (Savitri, p. 823)
And Savitri too awoke among these tribes
That hastened to join the brilliant Summoner’s chant
And, lured by the beauty of the apparent ways,
Acclaimed their portion of ephemeral joy.
This is our very first introduction to Savitri. We are introduced to her as we would be introduced to any other human being. The princess,
Savitri, wakes up on the morning of that dreadful day. We see Savitri the human personality – though a ”Heaven made woman”!
The ’omniscient Goddess’, Usha the Dawn-goddess has come and ’There was the common light of earthly day’ or, as Sri Aurobindo describes it in Ilion:
Dawn in her journey eternal compelling the labour of mortals,
Dawn the beginner of things with the night for their rest or their ending,
Pallid and bright-lipped arrived from the mists and the chill of the Euxine.
Earth in the dawn-fire delivered from starry and shadowy vastness
Woke to the wonder of life and its passion and sorrow and beauty.
All on her bosom sustaining, the patient compassionate mother,
So too the tribe amongst whom Savitri lives woke up to ’the wonder of life’ lured by ephemeral beauty and joy. It may have been a common day
like any other for the people of the tribe. But for Savitri, this dawn had a different message, a deeper import which has hid in it universal consequences. To borrow lines from llion which describe wonderfully the meaning and the burden of this particular dawn:
Closer now gliding glimmered the golden feet of the goddess.
Over the hills and headlands spreading her garment of splendour,
Fateful she came with her eyes impartial looking on all things,
Bringer to man of the day of his fortune and day of his downfall.
Full of her luminous errand, careless of eve and its weeping,
Fateful she paused unconcerned....
Fateful she lifted the doom-scroll red with the script of the Immortals,
Deep in the invisible air that folds in the race and its morrows
Fixed it, and passed on smiling the smile of the griefless and deathless,-
Dealers of death though death they know not, who in the morning
Scatter the seed of the event for the reaping ready at nightfall.
Over the brooding of plains and the agelong trance of the summits
Out of the sun and its spaces she came, pausing tranquil and fatal,
And, at a distance followed by the golden herds of the sun-god,
Carried the burden of Light and its riddle and danger to Hellas.
Thus, on this fateful morning, which ’lifted up the doom-scroll’ announcing the death of Satyavan, Savitri took no part in ’the small
happiness’ of the common people around her. She felt herself like ”a mighty stranger in the human field. She was human indeed, ’imprisoned in our transient human mould’, but, she was not human only. She was
something more too:
The proud and conscious wideness and the bliss
She had brought with her into the human form
The calm delight that weds one soul to all.
The key to the flaming doors of ecstasy...
Her strength was founded on the cosmic mights;
The universal mother’s love was hers.
Savitri is the Divine Consciousness who has put upon herself a ’human mould’, abandoning her ’Vaster Nature’s joy’ because it is only thus
can she change man’s fate of death and sorrow, transform man’s human nature into the divine nature. It is indeed a divine holocaust, the sacrifice of the Divine Mother. Savitri is the Divine’s response to the call
of the earth:
”Vision delightful alone on the hills whom the silences cover,
Closer yet lean to mortality; human, stoop to thy lover...
Tread through the edges of dawn, over twilight's grey-lidded margin;
Heal earth’s unease with thy feet, O heaven-born delicate virgin.
(Ahana)
Savitri has come to share with man her divinity:
A prodigal of her rich divinity,
Herself and all she was she had lent to men,
Hoping her greater being to implant
That heaven might native grow on mortal soil.
Or, as Sri Aurobindo writes in his poem, Ahana:
Two are the ends of existence, two are dreams of the Mother:
Heaven unchanging, earth with her time - beats yearn to each other, -
Earth-souls needing the touch of the heavens peace to recapture,
Heaven needing earth’s passion to quiver its peace into rapture.
”But the task is not easy”, comments Nolinikanta Gupta. ”The flesh is weak. It is incapable of holding or receiving the breath of
immortality”:
”Not only so,” continues Nolinida, ”it has a positive aversion, a bad will: it is refractory, antipathetic to the touch of the spirit”:
”Matter is dull and dumb, dark and obdurate: mortality loves and clings jealously and exclusively to its mortal home. The earthly being does
not know, cannot appreciate the gift, the boon that is brought to him, to his very door: he has only to receive and accept in order to be saved out of all ignorance and grief, impotence and death. The Divine Mother
has forgotten herself, has made herself as small and as close and native to earth as any earthly creature, like any one of us, taken upon herself all limitations and indignities, the entire burden of an earthly
life, graced with her presence this mortal atmosphere.” (NKG, Vol. 3, p. 165) But,
In vain now seemed the splendid sacrifice.
Hard is it to persuade earth - nature’s change;
Mortality bears ill the eternal’s touch:
It fears the pure divine intolerance
Of that assault of ether and of fire;
It murmurs at its sorrowless happiness,
Almost with hate repels the light it brings...
”Indeed, mortality is enamoured of the tangled beam of joy and sorrow, of laughter and tears, of light and shadow and cannot contemplate the
unalloyed sheer delight in Eternity. It is out of breath in the serene rarefied air of immortality; it pines for the terra firma, the mud and slime”. (Ibid., p. 166) Therefore, humanity in general ’trembles at the naked power of Truth” and
It sullies with its mire heaven’s messengers:
Its thorns of fallen nature are the defence
It turns against the saviour hands of Grace;
It meets the sons of God with death and pain.
Man is most at ease in his cosy ignorance, in ”the abysm’s law”, for it does not disturb him. It allows him to wallow in his lower nature.
Whereas the ’naked power of Truth,’
prod him, pressurise him to awaken to his higher potentialities. Being in love with his sorrow and happiness, he avoids the ’eternal’s touch’ and
evades ’the divine intolerance’, the Hound of Heaven:
Across the margent of the world l fled,
And troubled-the gold gateways of the stars,
Smiting for shelter on their clanged bars;
To all swift things for swiftness did I sue;
Clung to the whistling mane of every wind.
’The Hound of Heaven’
Unable to bear the Light –
The Truth of truths men fear and deny,
The Light of lights they refuse,
(A God’s Labour)
Man sullies ’the heaven’s messengers’ with the ’hate of hell and human spite’. They ’turn against the saviour hand of grace’, shouting:
Who art thou that babblest of heavenly ease
And joy and golden room
To us who are waifs on inconscient seas
And bound to life’s iron doom?
This earth is ours, a field of Night
For our petty flickering fires,
How shall it brook the sacred Light
Or suffer a god’s desires?
Come, let us slay him and end his course!
Then shall our hearts have release
From the burden and call of his glory and force
And the curb of his wide white peace.
And slay he did ’the sons of God with death and pain’ - an apt example would be of Jesus Christ. The saviour hands of Grace are struck to
bleed by man who refuses to change!
It is to change man’s resistance, his inconscient nature, his ignorance, that the heaven’s messengers come again and again to the earth scene. Each
time they put into earth’s consciousness a greater intensity of light, knowledge and consciousness. Once their work is done, they leave the earth- scene:
A glory of lightnings traversing the earth scene...
Their work betrayed, their good to evil turned,
The cross their payment for the crown they gave,
Only they leave behind a splendid Name
The work of these saviours is often betrayed by man because man twists the message of the saviour to his advantage; perverts their good to
evil. Man turns the teachings and the message of the saviour into religion, into a codified system, emphasising on the code of law only with a view to control the common man and society. The religionism bars the
common man from experiencing the message. In this attempt to get greater numbers of followers, in this struggle to acquire larger areas, regions, countries under their influence, the religion-makers, preservers slay
each other, slaughter all others who do not subscribe to their beliefs. They thus hang not only the sons of God but also they bury the truth the messenger tries to bring. Thus, what remains of ”the splendid
sacrifice” is only ”a splendid Name”.
In this perpetual tragedy of man, however, when -
So, all is not an utter waste. When the ’fire’, the messenger, comes with his Truth-seed, a few human beings get attracted by the deeper
truth and they open their minds and hearts to the new Light. They sacrifice their lives to the saviour’s work, for they are ”caught” by ”the flame”. It is this sacrifice, this rising to greater life by a few that
plant the Truth-seed in the earth-scene. These are the apostles, the shishyas who act as the bridge between the divine incarnate and the human lot.
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