Opening Remarks
Aswapati now moves from dusk towards the Night. His face is turned away from all that is human and living and joyous and beautiful. His steps take him towards the grim solitude of the Night.
Lone discoverer
A lone discoverer in these menacing realms
Guarded like termite cities from the sun,
Oppressed mid crowd and tramp and noise and flare,
Passing from dusk to deeper dangerous dusk,
He wrestled with powers that snatched from mind its light
And smote from him their clinging influences.
Aswapati now finds himself alone in these dark and dangerous realms remote from Light and guarded against the sun like termite cities. All around him are noises of the crowd and the tramp and flare of or powers that find support in the dusk. These powers could snatch the reasoning power from the mind and make the mind a dark blank. All these Aswapati resisted as he advanced.
Failing eve
Soon he emerged in a dim wall-less space.
For now the peopled tracts were left behind;
He walked between wide banks of failing eve.
But now he entered a dim space where the dusk itself seemed to fail.
A sinister loneliness
Around him grew a gaunt spiritual blank,
A threatening waste, a sinister loneliness
That left mind bare to an unseen assault,
An empty page on which all that willed could write
Stark monstrous messages without control.
A dull blank state imitating the spiritual silence, the sense of waste and a sinister loneliness left his mind open to attacks from the forces of the Night. The voices from a hostile world sought to fill his ‘blank’ mind with monstrous messages without control or check.
Sense of death
A travelling dot on downward roads of Dusk
Mid barren fields and barns and straggling huts
And a few crooked and phantasmal trees,
He faced a sense of death and conscious void.
Travelling down the dusk towards the Night, Aswapati faced the sense of death in that dark void. Around him were barren fields and straggling huts and a few crooked and denuded phantom like trees.
A hostile life
But still a hostile Life unseen was there
Whose deathlike poise resisting light and truth
Made living a bleak gap in nullity.
Yet this blank state of death-like loneliness was filled with the sense of hostile beings resisting truth and light. To live was a labour in that realm.
Horror of the growing Night
He heard the grisly voices that deny;
Assailed by thoughts that swarmed like spectral hordes,
A prey to the staring phantoms of the gloom
And terror approaching with its lethal mouth,
Driven by a strange will down ever down,
The sky above a communiqu´e of Doom,
He strove to shield his spirit from despair,
But felt the horror of the growing Night
And the Abyss rising to claim his soul.
Entering the grim Night Aswapati encountered the grisly voices that denied light and truth. They filled the thought with terror and gloom and led the soul towards an ever increasing darkness if a prey was being pushed towards its doom. The Abyss gaped and opened its mouth to claim him and the sense of despair tried to invade his being.
The horror of the Night surrounded his soul.
Closing Remarks
Thus Aswapati enters into the Night to explore its boundaries and powers.
About Savitri | B1C1-10 The Response of Earth (p.5)