The Issue
The title of Canto 2 and the canto where the poem states what is actually at stake. "Issue" is being used in its older sense — the matter in dispute, the question to be settled, the lawsuit being tried. The canto frames Savitri's situation not as a private grief over Satyavan's death but as a cosmic case being argued on humanity's behalf.
Why the canto matters
Canto 1 is image and atmosphere. Canto 2 is argument. It lays out, in deliberately judicial language, what Savitri must do and why it has cosmic weight. Without Canto 2, the rest of the poem could be misread as a long love story. With it, the reader is told plainly: this is a trial of the soul against the cosmic order, and the soul's case is being argued for everyone.
The case as Sri Aurobindo states it
The canto frames the situation in legal terms throughout. Savitri is "the adventurer soul" in front of:
a grey tribunal of the Ignorance, An Inquisition of the priests of Night.
Death's verdict is the "stark decree" of "the mechanic justicer." Karmic law is:
the deep need of universal pain And hard sacrifice and tragic consequence.
Savitri "must plead her case upon extinction's verge."
What she is contesting is the whole cosmic settlement under which mortal beings exist — the bargain that lets the world continue but at the price of death, ignorance, and limitation.
Altered must be Nature's harsh economy; Acquittance she must win from her past's bond.
She is not asking for an exception for Satyavan; she is challenging the law itself.
The deeper question
Beneath the legal framing, the canto poses a metaphysical question: is the human being a victim of forces (Chance, Necessity, Karma, Death), or is the human being a conscious soul that can override those forces by an act of will?
Whether to bear with Ignorance and death Or hew the ways of Immortality, To win or lose the godlike game for man, Was her soul's issue thrown with Destiny's dice.
The canto's answer is given by Savitri herself, in act rather than speech.
Her head she bowed not to the stark decree Baring her helpless heart to destiny's stroke... Her single will opposed the cosmic rule. To stay the wheels of Doom this greatness rose.
The poem's argument — sustained over the rest of the epic — is that this refusal is possible and that it changes the cosmic order when it happens. Savitri's case is winnable.
A scenario to ground the idea
Imagine a defendant in a court that has never lost a case. The court is right by its own rules; the defendant is also right, by deeper rules the court has not heard of. The defendant cannot win by appealing to the court's procedures — those are stacked against her — but only by refusing the court's authority and forcing it to recognise a higher law. That is the position the canto puts Savitri in. She is not arguing technicalities. She is contesting the court's right to judge her at all.
This is also why the poem treats her refusal as a cosmic act. If a defendant won that kind of trial, every other defendant's case would be reopened. If Savitri overturns Death's verdict, every mortal life's verdict is implicitly reviewable.
The turn at the end of the canto
The last passage of Canto 2 is the canto's pivot: "But one stood up and lit the limitless flame." From that line to the end, the canto stops describing the case against the soul and starts describing the soul's reply. The phrasing accelerates:
Her single will opposed the cosmic rule... A flaming warrior from the eternal peaks Empowered to force the door denied and closed Smote from Death's visage its dumb absolute And burst the bounds of consciousness and Time.
The canto ends in mid-action. The case has not been resolved — that takes the rest of the poem — but the answer to the framing question (will the soul submit or contest?) has been given. She will contest. The rest of the epic is the contesting.
Connections
The Issue is the cosmic case Savitri will argue against Death. The "tribunal of the Ignorance" she faces is one face of The Inconscient in its judicial aspect. The rising of "the great World-Mother... in her" at the canto's climax is The Divine Mother taking up the case in person. The whole metaphysical background that makes this case intelligible — the two natures of the Spirit, the hidden Divine in the world — is what The Secret Knowledge (Canto 4) lays out.
Open questions
The actual trial — the long debate with Death — happens in Books 9–11. Worth revisiting this article then to see how the case Canto 2 frames is finally argued and decided.