There are twenty-four occurrences of the word “necessity” in Savitri. But only in one we see it as a feminine noun, Book III Canto iv, “Necessity”:
For even through the mists of mortal thought
Infallible are thy mysterious steps,
And, though Necessity dons the garb of Chance,
Hidden in the blind shifts of Fate she keeps
The slow calm logic of Infinity’s pace
And the inviolate sequence of its will. ||90.20||
The dictionary meaning of “necessity” is:
necessity
[nuh–ses-i-tee]
Phonetic (Standard)IPA
noun
plural:necessities
- (sometimes plural) something needed for a desired result; prerequisite
necessities of life
- a condition or set of circumstances, such as physical laws or social rules, that inevitably requires a certain result
it is a matter of necessity to wear formal clothes when meeting the Queen
- the state or quality of being obligatory or unavoidable
- urgent requirement, as in an emergency or misfortune
in time of necessity we must all work together
- poverty or want
- rare, compulsion through laws of nature; fate
- philosophy
- a condition, principle, or conclusion that cannot be otherwise
- the constraining force of physical determinants on all aspects of life Compare freedom
- logic
- the property of being necessary
- a statement asserting that some property is essential or statement is necessarily true
- the operator that indicates that the expression it modifies is true in all possible worlds
- inevitably; necessarily
Clearly, in our context we have to take only the philosophical-logical suggestion with all its significant connotations, “the quality of following inevitably from logical, physical, or moral laws.” In our example it is with N-cap, “Necessity”. The line scans as follows:
And, though| Nece|ssity dons| the garb| of Chance|
pyrrhic-iamb-anapæst-iamb-iamb.
Here personalised “Necessity” is “she”. She is holding the calm logic of infinity’s rhythms and movements, and the will which is irreversible, with an inalterability of absoluteness. In other places the possessive “necessity’s” make her a personalised being.
This certainly has the contents of the Greek theories and concepts of Necessity and Chance, they more or less linked always together. Necessity is the Goddess-Power and even the highest gods obey her. Her name is Ananke. The following verses are pertinent to it:
In the aimless mounting total of things done
Existence seemed a vain necessity’s act,
A wrestle of eternal opposites
In a clasped antagonism’s close-locked embrace,
A play without denouement or idea,
A hunger march of lives without a goal,
Or, written on a bare black board of Space,
A futile and recurring sum of souls,
A hope that failed, a light that never shone,
The labour of an unaccomplished Force
Tied to its acts in a dim eternity. ||54.34||
On each event they stamped its curves of law
And its trust and charge of burdened circumstance;
A free and divine incident no more
At each moment willed or adventure of the soul,
A line foreseen of an immutable plan,
It lengthened a fate-bound mysterious chain,
One step more in Necessity’s long march. ||71.17||
Assessed was the system of the probable,
The hazard of fleeing possibilities,
To account for the Actual’s unaccountable sum,
Necessity’s logarithmic tables drawn,
Cast into a scheme the triple act of the One. ||71.32||
In the wide sequence of Necessity’s steps
Predicted, every act and thought of God,
Its values weighed by the accountant Mind,
Checked in his mathematised omnipotence,
Lost its divine aspect of miracle
And was a figure in a cosmic sum. ||71.36||
On peaks beyond our ken the All-Wisdom sits:
A single and infallible look comes down,
A silent touch from the supernal’s air
Awakes to ignorant knowledge in its acts
The secret power in the inconscient depths,
Compelling the blinded Godhead to emerge,
Determining Necessity’s rude dance
As she passes through the circuit of the hours
And vanishes from the chase of finite eyes
Down circling vistas of aeonic Time. ||71.48||
Fate followed her foreseen immutable road. ||114.1||
Man’s hopes and longings build the journeying wheels
That bear the body of his destiny
And lead his blind will towards an unknown goal. ||114.2||
His fate within him shapes his acts and rules;
Its face and form already are born in him,
Its parentage is in his secret soul;
Here Matter seems to mould the body’s life
And the soul follows where its nature drives:
Nature and Fate compel his free-will’s choice. ||114.3||
But greater spirits this balance can reverse
And make the soul the artist of its fate. ||114.4||
This is the mystic truth our ignorance hides:
Doom is a passage for our inborn force,
Our ordeal is the hidden spirit’s choice,
Ananke is our being’s own decree. ||114.5||
Agents of darkness imitating light,
Spirits obscure and moving things obscure,
Unwillingly they serve a mightier Power. ||45.21||
Ananke’s engines organising Chance,
Channels perverse of a stupendous Will,
Tools of the Unknown who use us as their tools,
Invested with Power in Nature’s nether state,
Into the actions mortals think their own
They bring the incoherences of Fate,
Or make a doom of Time’s slipshod caprice
And toss the lives of men from hand to hand
In an inconsequent and devious game. ||45.22||
I’m reminded also of Kierkegaard’s ‘despair of possibility’ and ‘despair of necessity’ in The Sickness onto Death in which “necessity” is the check on “possibility”. I’ve taken the experience of teetering near the abyss of this despair of possibility – as if all things were possible and nothing were actual. Grace plucked me out of that and I’ve been implanted in Integral Yoga, the knowledge of Mother and Sri Aurobindo and the becoming.
The Winds of Wonder 
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