The inconscient that loomed on the distant horizon is called the great dragon. The image is suggestive of both horror and tenacity. The dragon of the inconscient keeps trying to defend itself, but is seen eventually fleeing down a grey slope of Time.
Canto I Book X continues with the coming of the morning twilight of the gods there comes the splendour of a new birth. Savitri slips into this twilight of the new world. The predominant note of this realm is haziness or indistinctness. She sees vague fields, vague pastures, vague trees - a material world, but not like of the gross matter. Here the forms are subtly elusive. ‘Fugitive beings’ and ‘elusive shapes’ are the natural inhabitants of this world. Here, Sri Aurobindo, in this Canto shows his realm of creativity. The Nature of creativity is explained here through telling images. Here nothing is fixed or stays for long, and beauty evades settled line and form. There is unearthly beauty, bliss and thrill. Though momentary, things are far sweeter than the earth has ever known. Reminded here of John Keats’s ‘Ethereal things’ as described in Endymion that transports man into the world of beauty and truth reachable only in the realm of …show more content…
Both begin without any introduction or preamble of background. The same background and setting of ‘twilight’ and ‘vagueness’, denoting death and darkness, so elaborately painted in picturesque detail in the preceding one hold ground. The background of twilight and of total negation is made more unspeakably imponderable and sombre here, with Death occupying the centre stage, he being made more stentorian and loud-mouthed. No poetic prelude or peroration is made to mitigate or assuage the impact of these two Cantos. The directness of discussion of the two mighty opponents creates the climate with relentless, trenchant simplicity, with little embellishment to boot. In the second Canto, the God of Death has his field day; howsoever Savitri sedately refutes and corrects Him. The supremacy of the matter characterizes general human life. For ignoramus, unenlightened man, matter is the sole and absolute Reality; and death is the end, not only of life, but also of all human values and ideals, including love. This is the major thrust of the Death-incarnate’s argument. And one, prone to worldly ways patterned and conditioned to our usual mundane ways of life, finds it quite convincing. His argument appears to man very logical and real. For, matter is concrete, as Nadkarni says, “concrete substance is the touchstone of reality for man, and whatever is not concrete and tangible is to that extent less