The Winds of Wonder

“Across the Path of the Divine Event”

Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri opens with the following, at once stating the objective and providing the basis for its realisation through the divinely Yoga-Tapasyā.

It was the hour before the Gods awake. ||1.1||

Across the path of the divine Event

The huge foreboding mind of Night, alone

In her unlit temple of eternity,

Lay stretched immobile upon Silence’ marge. ||1.2||

Almost one felt, opaque, impenetrable,

In the sombre symbol of her eyeless muse

The abysm of the unbodied Infinite;

A fathomless zero occupied the world. ||1.3||

The second line has a direct mention of Tennyson’s phrase “divine event” from In Memoriam, Epilogue, with E-cap in “Event”.

That God, which ever lives and loves,

One God, one law, one element,

And one far-off divine event,

To which the whole creation moves.

Here is the full text, octosyllabic ABBA stanzas:

O true and tried, so well and long,

Demand not thou a marriage lay;

In that it is thy marriage day

Is music more than any song.

Nor have I felt so much of bliss

Since first he told me that he loved

A daughter of our house; nor proved

Since that dark day a day like this;

Tho’ I since then have number’d o’er

Some thrice three years: they went and came,

Remade the blood and changed the frame,

And yet is love not less, but more;

No longer caring to embalm

In dying songs a dead regret,

But like a statue solid-set,

And moulded in colossal calm.

Regret is dead, but love is more

Than in the summers that are flown,

For I myself with these have grown

To something greater than before;

Which makes appear the songs I made

As echoes out of weaker times,

As half but idle brawling rhymes,

The sport of random sun and shade.

But where is she, the bridal flower,

That must be made a wife ere noon?

She enters, glowing like the moon

Of Eden on its bridal bower:

On me she bends her blissful eyes

And then on thee; they meet thy look

And brighten like the star that shook

Betwixt the palms of paradise.

O when her life was yet in bud,

He too foretold the perfect rose.

For thee she grew, for thee she grows

For ever, and as fair as good.

And thou art worthy; full of power;

As gentle; liberal-minded, great,

Consistent; wearing all that weight

Of learning lightly like a flower.

But now set out: the noon is near,

And I must give away the bride;

She fears not, or with thee beside

And me behind her, will not fear.

For I that danced her on my knee,

That watch’d her on her nurse’s arm,

That shielded all her life from harm

At last must part with her to thee;

Now waiting to be made a wife,

Her feet, my darling, on the dead

Their pensive tablets round her head,

And the most living words of life

Breathed in her ear. The ring is on,

The ‘wilt thou’ answer’d, and again

The ‘wilt thou’ ask’d, till out of twain

Her sweet ‘I will’ has made you one.

Now sign your names, which shall be read,

Mute symbols of a joyful morn,

By village eyes as yet unborn;

The names are sign’d, and overhead

Begins the clash and clang that tells

The joy to every wandering breeze;

The blind wall rocks, and on the trees

The dead leaf trembles to the bells.

O happy hour, and happier hours

Await them. Many a merry face

Salutes them?maidens of the place,

That pelt us in the porch with flowers.

O happy hour, behold the bride

With him to whom her hand I gave.

They leave the porch, they pass the grave

That has to-day its sunny side.

To-day the grave is bright for me,

For them the light of life increased,

Who stay to share the morning feast,

Who rest to-night beside the sea.

Let all my genial spirits advance

To meet and greet a whiter sun;

My drooping memory will not shun

The foaming grape of eastern France.

It circles round, and fancy plays,

And hearts are warm’d and faces bloom,

As drinking health to bride and groom

We wish them store of happy days.

Nor count me all to blame if I

Conjecture of a stiller guest,

Perchance, perchance, among the rest,

And, tho’ in silence, wishing joy.

But they must go, the time draws on,

And those white-favour’d horses wait;

They rise, but linger; it is late;

Farewell, we kiss, and they are gone.

A shade falls on us like the dark

From little cloudlets on the grass,

But sweeps away as out we pass

To range the woods, to roam the park,

Discussing how their courtship grew,

And talk of others that are wed,

And how she look’d, and what he said,

And back we come at fall of dew.

Again the feast, the speech, the glee,

The shade of passing thought, the wealth

Of words and wit, the double health,

The crowning cup, the three-times-three,

And last the dance;?till I retire:

Dumb is that tower which spake so loud,

And high in heaven the streaming cloud,

And on the downs a rising fire:

And rise, O moon, from yonder down,

Till over down and over dale

All night the shining vapour sail

And pass the silent-lighted town,

The white-faced halls, the glancing rills,

And catch at every mountain head,

And o’er the friths that branch and spread

Their sleeping silver thro’ the hills;

And touch with shade the bridal doors,

With tender gloom the roof, the wall;

And breaking let the splendour fall

To spangle all the happy shores

By which they rest, and ocean sounds,

And, star and system rolling past,

A soul shall draw from out the vast

And strike his being into bounds,

And, moved thro’ life of lower phase,

Result in man, be born and think,

And act and love, a closer link

Betwixt us and the crowning race

Of those that, eye to eye, shall look

On knowledge, under whose command

Is Earth and Earth’s, and in their hand

Is Nature like an open book;

No longer half-akin to brute,

For all we thought and loved and did,

And hoped, and suffer’d, is but seed

Of what in them is flower and fruit;

Whereof the man, that with me trod

This planet, was a noble type

Appearing ere the times were ripe,

That friend of mine who lives in God,

That God, which ever lives and loves,

One God, one law, one element,

And one far-off divine event,

To which the whole creation moves.

what is the background of Tennyson’s In Memoriam, Epilogue? AI answers:

The background of the

Epilogue

to Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s

In Memoriam A.H.H.

(1850) marks the formal resolution of a 17-year journey from devastating grief to spiritual and philosophical peace. While the main body of the poem mourns the death of his friend Arthur Henry Hallam, the Epilogue shifts the focus to a celebration of life through marriage.

The Victorian Web +3

Historical and Personal Context

The Occasion: The Epilogue is an epithalamion (a nuptial poem) written for the wedding of Tennyson’s sister, Cecilia Tennyson, to his friend Edmund Law Lushington on 10 October 1842.
Contrast with Emily Tennyson: The choice of Cecilia’s wedding is poignant because Hallam had been engaged to another of Tennyson’s sisters, Emily, before his sudden death in 1833. By focusing on Cecilia’s marriage nine years later, Tennyson symbolizes that while the specific future he imagined with Hallam (as a brother-in-law) was lost, the cycle of family and love continues.
Composition: Although the wedding occurred in 1842, Tennyson did not finish the poem until the late 1840s. He told Lushington in 1845 that he had “brought in your marriage at the end” to provide a sense of closure and a “cheerful” conclusion to the work.

Thematic Significance

From Grief to Joy: It serves as a structural “turning point,” moving from the personal despair and religious questioning found in earlier cantos to an affirmation of hope and the healing power of unity.
Evolution and “The Crowning Race”: Influenced by contemporary scientific theories like those of Charles Lyell, Tennyson uses the wedding to contemplate humanity’s future. He envisions the couple’s future child as a link to a “higher race”—a nobler form of humanity that Hallam himself had foreshadowed.
Spiritual Resolution: The Epilogue concludes with the famous vision of a “far-off divine event / To which the whole creation moves,” representing Tennyson’s final reconciliation of faith and science. He portrays Hallam not as a lost ghost, but as a “noble type” who now “lives in God”.

While Tennyson’s “divine event” is a mystical promise, more a religious than a spiritual-cosmic possibility, Savitri’s “divine Event” is at the highest revelation. It at once sees a possibility and sets itself to resolve whatever is coming in its realisation. The Poem running into 24000 lines is a grand and triumphant account of this manifestation. Tennyson of course has no idea about it. The Savitri-myth belongs to the Vedic cycle but Avataric Yoga-Tapasyā had to go into it to bring it at our doorsteps. This has been done.

Let us scan the Savitri-passage.

The Paintings are by Huta

Savitri Book 11 Canto 1 – The Eternal Day: The Soul’s Choice and the Supreme Consummation

Pursuing her in her fall, implacably sweet,
A face was over her which seemed a youth’s,
Symbol of all the beauty eyes see not,
Crowned as with peacock plumes of gorgeous hue
Framing a sapphire, whose heart-disturbing smile
Insatiably attracted to delight,
Voluptuous to the embraces of her soul. ||156.6||

Changed in its shape, yet rapturously the same,
It grew a woman’s dark and beautiful
Like a mooned night with drifting star-gemmed clouds,
A shadowy glory and a stormy depth,
Turbulent in will and terrible in love. ||156.7||
Eyes in which Nature’s blind ecstatic life
Sprang from some spirit’s passionate content,
Missioned her to the whirling dance of earth. ||156.8||

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