The Destined Meeting-Place
Book 5, Canto 1 — the opening of the Book of Love. After the unfulfilled wandering of The Quest, Savitri turns into one last region of the world: a remote highland valley where spring and summer rule together, where no human work has yet imposed itself, and where Nature is at her most undisturbed. She does not know it yet, but this is where she has been going all along. The canto ends in a single line: Love in the wilderness met Savitri.
What the canto is doing
It is the poem's most extended landscape passage so far, and the landscape is doing the structural work. Sri Aurobindo wants us to understand that the meeting between Savitri and Satyavan does not happen in the world that the sages of The Quest inhabited — not in cities, courts, or hermitages — but in a place that is older than human life. The canto's long descriptions of the valley are establishing what kind of ground Love is born on. It has to be ground untouched by human striving, where the original satisfaction of Nature is still intact, because what is about to happen is, in Sri Aurobindo's reading, the cosmic equivalent of the first marriage of Heaven and Earth — and that needs a setting that has not yet been spoiled by The Little Life|the human story of effort and loss.
The opening: the play of Fate
The canto opens with a metaphysical claim that sets the frame for everything that follows. What looks like chance is not chance:
BUT NOW the destined spot and hour were close; Unknowing she had neared her nameless goal. For though a dress of blind and devious chance Is laid upon the work of all-wise Fate, Our acts interpret an omniscient Force That dwells in the compelling stuff of things, And nothing happens in the cosmic play But at its time and in its foreseen place.
This is the canto's keynote. Savitri has been wandering for what looked like a search; she has, all along, been being brought to a particular spot at a particular hour. The "calm Presence" of The Quest is still steering. The reader is being told, before the meeting happens, that the meeting is not random — every step that looked like searching was actually arrival.
The highland of unfallen Nature
She comes into a valley unlike anything the Quest had passed through. Sri Aurobindo describes it as a sanctuary outside the human story:
To a space she came of soft and delicate air That seemed a sanctuary of youth and joy, A highland world of free and green delight Where spring and summer lay together and strove In indolent and amicable debate, Inarmed, disputing with laughter who should rule.
What follows is one of the most luxuriant passages of natural description in the poem — armoured mountains, emerald woods, threaded streams, white cranes, peacocks, doves, wild-drakes on silver pools. Earth is repeatedly described as a lover and a mother, satisfied in her own being:
Earth couched alone with her great lover Heaven, Uncovered to her consort's azure eye. In a luxurious ecstasy of joy She squandered the love-music of her notes, Wasting the passionate pattern of her blooms And festival riot of her scents and hues.
The key claim about this landscape is given a few lines later. This is what the world looks like before human thought has come in to measure it:
Man the deep-browed artificer had not come To lay his hand on happy inconscient things, Thought was not there nor the measurer, strong-eyed toil, Life had not learned its discord with its aim. The Mighty Mother lay outstretched at ease.
This is not a description of an actual prehistoric era. It is the spiritual character of the place: a corner of the world where the original satisfaction of Nature with herself has not been broken. The "Mighty Mother" is the same The Divine Mother|Divine Mother who appeared to Aswapati — here in her aspect as Nature, the cosmic creative Force experienced as the visible world.
The ascetic at the edge
The valley has a far boundary, and Sri Aurobindo gives it a striking figure. At the end of the landscape stand mountains that are not the playful peaks of the foreground but something austere, something that has withdrawn from the play:
At the end reclined a stern and giant tract Of tangled depths and solemn questioning hills, Peaks like a bare austerity of the soul, Armoured, remote and desolately grand Like the thought-screened infinities that lie Behind the rapt smile of the Almighty's dance.
And then the great figure that closes the landscape:
A matted forest-head invaded heaven As if a blue-throated ascetic peered From the stone fastness of his mountain cell Regarding the brief gladness of the days; His vast extended spirit couched behind. A mighty murmur of immense retreat Besieged the ear, a sad and limitless call As of a soul retiring from the world.
The "blue-throated ascetic" is Shiva. The point is not decoration. Sri Aurobindo is staging, in the geography of the meeting-place itself, the spiritual situation that the whole Book of Love will challenge. On one side: the unfallen joy of Nature, of Earth wedded to Heaven, of Life as celebration. On the other: the great call of withdrawal, the renunciate's pull toward the silence beyond. The Book of Love will, in The Vision and the Boon|the manner already established by Aswapati's refusal, side with the first — with the descent into life rather than the retreat out of it. But the canto honours the second by giving it the horizon.
The ambiguous Mother
The canto ends by naming, for the first time in Book 5, the cosmic figure whose work this is:
This was the scene which the ambiguous Mother Had chosen for her brief felicitous hour; Here in this solitude far from the world Her part she began in the world's joy and strife.
The word ambiguous is doing careful work. The Mother is ambiguous because she is at once the mother of all this delight and the mother of all that opposes it — she is Nature in her joy and she is the one who has put Death inside the joy. The "brief felicitous hour" she has chosen is the year of love that Savitri and Satyavan will have together, and the brevity is already named: it is felicitous because love arrives, and brief because Death will arrive at the end of it.
The last line
The canto closes with the meeting that the rest of Book 5 will narrate. Sri Aurobindo gives it in four lines that are among the most compressed in the poem:
A stranger on the sorrowful roads of Time, Immortal under the yoke of death and fate, A sacrificant of the bliss and pain of the spheres, Love in the wilderness met Savitri.
Each line is doing work. Stranger on the sorrowful roads of Time — the one she meets is, like her, not native to mortal time. Immortal under the yoke of death and fate — Satyavan is what the Author's Note calls him, "the soul carrying the divine truth of being within itself but descended into the grip of death and ignorance." A sacrificant of the bliss and pain of the spheres — the cosmic offering language is foregrounded; this meeting is itself a sacrament. And the fourth line names what arrives. Not a man met Savitri. Not Satyavan met Savitri. Love met Savitri — as if Love were the agent, and Satyavan the form it took.
Connections
This canto follows directly from The Quest and opens the Book of Love. The landscape is the natural-world counterpart to the spiritual landscape of The Paradise of the Life-Gods — unfallen Life in her original state. The "ambiguous Mother" is The Divine Mother in her cosmic-Nature aspect. The blue-throated ascetic on the horizon prefigures the renunciate counter-pull that Aswapati also faced and refused in The Vision and the Boon. The meeting itself is narrated in Satyavan (Canto 2) and consummated in Satyavan and Savitri (Canto 3).