Canto II: The Gospel of Death and Vanity of the Ideal

Death takes Matter to be the origin of creation and hence the final determinant of everything.

Death is not to give in easily. He tries to refute Savitri’s stand aggressively with his materialistic doctrine.

Savitri gives a hint of the love that she feels for Satyavan.

Savitri replies to the condescending arguments of Death.

Death points towards the vanity of life and the fruitless waste of all efforts.

Death tries to show how love lives only for a while and then dies buried in the human heart helpless against the law of earthly life.

Death mocks at the effort of human idealism to immortalise love that stays so briefly in the human heart.

Death denies any possibility of the Ideal ever being established upon earth.

The supreme Divine Reality is also described as the supreme Nothingness since nothing can define or describe it.