The Poet introduces himself by Narendra

It was the hour before the Gods awake.

The opening line of Savitri has the sense of a poetic rendering of a fact; of the kind that could be noted by an observer, rather affirmed. But with many a mystic dimensions. First being that Time is not experienced upon as the moments or shadowed as the past or even divined as possible future but rather perceived with trīkaldŗşti as “dots upon a page”:

As if a story long written but acted now,
In his present he held his future and his past,
Felt in the seconds the uncounted years
And saw the hours like dots upon a page.

After some reflection on the opening line it can be perceived that the observer-poet is locating the current state of creation “hour before” in Matter within the evolutionary-map from the vantage-point or standpoint of someone who has decreed the entire evolutionary curve and finds it positioned just before the landmark of “Gods awake”. Such rendering is confirmed by the occurrence of other evolutionary landmarks that occur consistently through The Symbol Dawn: Birth in Inconscient by Aspiration, waking of Ignorance, Piercing of eye of deity, Call for the adventure of consciousness, Goddess’s descent, waking of Savitri, culminating in Satyavan must Die.

Even grammatically the three tenses of Time are inbuilt in the opening line. “It was” presents the past; “Gods awake” and not “Gods awoke” clearly is indicative of this event to be in the womb of imminent future and the present is in “the hour before”. The view is clearly transcendental of Time but it is not of an observer who is withdrawn from Time as would be the case for the Self-Absorbed Transcendent, in Turiya state, but the gaze is purposeful, assuredly turned towards Its struggling ignorant Force; finally after numerous apparent failures, Pralayas, affirming to her the closeness of the long awaited, aspired and worked out moment, the Divine Event, to Earth. Also notable is the scale of Time in the first line: it is of a completely different order. It is the hours of manifestation-cycles, the human-cycles for the present, as in the hours of the Day of Brahma which are seen as dots.

But the big question is who can Assure of the Deathlessness around the corner of the Present? It is to be noted that the declaration in the opening line is not of the type of a vision, or even of the kind of a revelatory promise, but of the kind of an imminent realization. And that it would be the fulfilment of the Promise made by the Supreme to his labouring Force. So who can declare such an Epiphany, who has the Certitude? Possibly the one charged with realizing such a possibility on Earth. Possibly who has worked out this “Direct action from the Supreme”. It cannot be none other than the glorious Avatar who has been so appointed and so labouring. And for the yogi-poet to so declare he has to be Him.

So it is the Avatar-Poet who introduces Himself and declares the success of His working out of His “immemorial quest” in the opening line. From the perspective of the import and significance of this line, these eight words,—It was the hour before the Gods awake—might as well be considered as the most important words ever uttered, most victorious ever affirmed.