THE OPENING SECTIONS OF THE 1936-37

VERSION OF SRI AUROBINDO'S SAVITRI

EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION

The story of how Sri Aurobindo disclosed in private to one of his disciples the growing wonder of his Savitri has already been recounted in different ways in three books: Sri Aurobindo - the Poet, Light and Laughter, Our Light and Delight. But parts of it are especially relevant now that the actual text of the disclosed version is being published.¹

Soon after I arrived in the Ashram on December 16, 1927 I started to hear snatches of information to the effect that a poetic masterpiece by Sri Aurobindo had been in progress for many years. But nobody could claim to have set eyes on the slowly developing epic. I was extremely eager to catch some scent of this creation which promised to become a veritable "thousand-petalled lotus" at the top of the human poetic endeavour. Once in 1931 and again in the two succeeding years I received in reply to my questions short general answers from the Master about his work on the poem and about the technique of its blank verse. But I remained in the dark as to its living reality.

Savitri first came to light for me - or rather to light me up - incognito. Having had from my school-days the urge to make verses I continued to jot down whatever seemed to

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1 [Reproduced here under the title 'Sri Aurobindo - Letters on Savitri: Editor's Note to the 1951 Edition', see p. 49.]

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pour into me by intermittent inspiration. Sri Aurobindo was as expert a literary guru as a spiritual one. Judicious criticism, balanced encouragement, illuminative analysis met every effort I made towards better and better composition. On one such occasion, to illustrate some point, he sent me with his helpful comments two lines of poetry describing, as he put it, "the Ray from the transcendent penetrating through the mind's passive neutral reflection of the supreme quietude of the silent Brahman". They ran:

Piercing the limitless Unknowable,

Breaking the vacancy and voiceless peace.

I was struck by the profound word-reverberations that reinforced the mystical word-suggestions with a tremendous immediacy of spiritual fact. But there was no sign of the source of the lines: they were a "limitless Unknowable". I could not help asking where they had come from. The reply was: "Savitri."

I never forgot this initial brief impact of the closely guarded secret. Even before it, Sri Aurobindo had tried to make me aware of a certain element in poetry that hailed from what he called the Overhead planes, the hidden ranges of consciousness above the intellect, with their inherent light of knowledge and their natural experience of the infinite. He broadly distinguished four planes: Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition, Overmind. The last-named has been, according to him, the highest reach of the dynamic side of man's spirituality so far. The master dynamism of the Divine, the integral earth-transformative power which Sri Aurobindo designated Supermind or Gnosis or Truth-Consciousness and which was his own outstanding personal realisation, rendering his Yoga a unique hope for the world, has lain unmanifest and mostly unseized. Until certain radical conditions are completely fulfilled, it cannot find direct expression in life or literature. More and more Sri Aurobindo

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sought to help me not only to respond, in my appreciation of poetry, to the rising scale of the already captured Overhead note but also to bring some strain of it into my own verses. The quest of that note grew for me a dominant passion and most of all I prayed for the Overmind's touch.

One day, emboldened by his innumerable favours of tutorship, I made a singular request. I wrote:

"I shall consider it a favour indeed if you will give me an instance in English of the inspiration of the pure Overmind. I don't mean just a line like Milton's

Those thoughts that wander through Eternity

or Wordsworth's

Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone,

which has a brief burst of it, but something sustained and plenary. I want to steep my consciousness in its rhythm and its revelation. It will be a most cherished possession. Please don't disappoint me by saying that, as no English writer has a passage of this kind, you cannot do anything for me."

Sri Aurobindo wrote back in his characteristic vein:

"Good Heavens! how am I to avoid saying that, when it is the only possible answer - at least so far as I can remember? Perhaps if I went through English poetry again with my present consciousness I might find intimations like that line of Wordsworth, but a passage sustained and plenary? These surely are things to come - the 'future poetry' perhaps, but not the past."

With the familiarity - almost the impudence - he permitted us, I replied:

"I think the favour I asked was expressed in perfectly clear language. If no English poet has produced the passage I want, then who has done so in English? God alone knows. But who is capable of doing it? All of us know. Well, then, why not

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be kind enough to grant this favour? If difficult metres could be illustrated on demand, is it impossible to illustrate in a satisfying measure something so natural as the Overmind? I am not asking for hundreds of lines - even eight will more than do - all pure gold to be treasured for ever. So please... Perhaps it is possible only on Sunday: I can wait answerless for twenty-four hours with a sweet samatā."

The answer came the very next morning:

"I have to say Good Heavens again. Because difficult metres can be illustrated on demand, which is a matter of metrical skill, how does it follow that one can produce poetry from any blessed plane on demand? It would be easier to furnish you with hundreds of lines already written out of which you could select for yourself anything overmindish if it exists (which I doubt) rather than produce 8 lines of warranted overmind manufacture to order. All I can do is to give you from time to time some lines from Savitri on condition you keep them to yourself for the present. It may be a poor substitute for the Overmental, but if you like the sample, the opening lines, I can give you more hereafter -and occasionally better."

And then after an "E.G." there followed in his own fine and sensitive yet forceful hand sixteen lines of the very first section of Savitri as it stood then, dealing with the "Symbol Dawn." Below the quotation were the words: "There! Promise fulfilled for a wonder."

After a whole day's absorption in the absolute nectar, I sent Sri Aurobindo a note:

"Like the sample? Rather! It is useless for me to attempt thanking you. The beauty of what you have sent may move one to utterance but the wideness takes one's breath away. I read the lines over and over again. I am somewhat stunned by the magnitude and memorableness of this day: I think your description of the divine dawn can very well apply to its spiritually poetic importance for me. Perhaps you will laugh, but I had two strange feelings before writing this letter. I was

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reading your verses, when I had the mute sense of big tears in the heart and a conviction that having seen what I had seen I could not possibly die! What do you say to my madness?"

The day of days was October 25,1936. From then onwards for a time Sri Aurobindo kept sending passages which I typed and he touched up again or slightly expanded. About the next passage I remarked:

"It goes reverberating in depth upon depth of one's being. What I admire is that the burden of infinite suggestion is carried with such a flexible ease. There is no attempt - as in the poetry of us lesser fry - to make things specially striking or strange or new, but a simple largeness of gesture which most naturally makes one surprising revelation after another of beauty and power."

His comment was:

"Well, it is the difference of receiving from above and living in the ambience of the Above - whatever comes receives the breadth of largeness which belongs to that plane."

The precious gift of passages continued for months. Although there were long interruptions at a later stage, it was only at the close of February 1938 that the series stopped. A visit by me to Bombay got prolonged into a stay for many years. In the meanwhile Sri Aurobindo met with an accident: he broke his right leg on the eve of the darshan of November 24, 1938. During his convalescence he turned to revising several of his writings. The Life. Divine was taken up first and, some years later, Savitri got its chance. It underwent revision and expansion on a much grander scale than ever before. What he had already begun on the typescript much earlier is characterised in a couple of letters from him at the commencement of my Bombay-visit.

"I have been too occupied with other things to make much headway with the poem - except that I have spoilt your beautiful neat copy of the 'Worlds' under the oestrus of the restless urge for more and more perfection; but we are here for World-improvement, so I hope that it is excusable."

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"I have pulled up the third section to a higher consistency of level: the 'Worlds' have fallen into a state of manuscript chaos, corrections upon corrections, additions upon additions, rearrangements on rearrangements out of which perhaps some cosmic beauty will emerge!"

It would seem that the opening passages of the poem were not touched until long after the accident. I came to know of the radical change only in 1946 in connection with Nirodbaran's reading out to Sri Aurobindo the typescript of my treatment of Savitri in the final chapter of The Poetic Genius of Sri Aurobindo, based on the 1936 version.¹ Sri Aurobindo sent me the following letter: "You will see when you get the full typescript [of the first three books] that Savitri has grown to an enormous length so that it is no longer quite the same thing as the poem you saw then... In the new form it will be a sort of poetic philosophy of the Spirit and of Life much profounder and vaster in its scope than was intended in the original poem..."

On receiving "the new form" I saw that the Symbol-Dawn prelude of 16 lines had not only been slightly altered in phrase but also stood in a passage of 93 lines with its opening and its close considerably separated. At first I felt a regret at the alteration. Sri Aurobindo answered that I had been so accustomed to the old prelude that I could not sufficiently outgrow the samskāras to respond easily to the new. Even now a faint nostalgia lingers for the dawn's direct breaking after the first few lines instead of its appearance being delayed by the lengthy evocation of the preceding night and the vision conjured up through it of the original Inconscience from which the material world evolved as well as of the unmanifest Unknown negatively reflected by that Inconscience. But I can appreciate well the awesome effect of lines like those four about the suggestion emanating from

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1 [Included in the present collection of articles under the title 'Sri Aurobindo - A New Age of Mystical Poetry', p. 1.]

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"the huge foreboding mind of Night" which has replaced her earlier "huge unslumbering spirit":

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. [p. 1]

The third line. here is indeed one of Sri Aurobindo's tremendous single-pentameter Mantras comparable to the mightily tranquil

All can be done if the God-touch is there [p. 3]

or the deeply surprising

Our minds hush to a bright Omniscient [p. 48]

or the revelation-packed

Earth's winged chimeras are Truth's steeds in Heaven [p. 52]

or the inward-alluring

Unweave the stars and into silence pass. [p. 696]

Excepting the last of these brief miracles, which occurs towards the end of the present Savitri, all have their places in contexts which Sri Aurobindo sent me in 1936: they are products of the great subsequent enlargement. But there is enough in the old draft to render it an amazing feat. For instance, it contains the description of the poem's heroine, starting

Near to earth's wideness, intimate with heaven [p. 14]

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and ending

And moved in her as in his natural home -

a passage of 31 lines which was subsequently expanded to 51 but which even in its original form constitutes a rarity in all literature for its sustained spiritual height. I asked Sri Aurobindo: "Are not these lines which I regard as the ne plus ultra in world-poetry a snatch of the sheer Overmind?" He replied: "This passage is, I believe, what I might call the Overmind Intuition at work expressing itself in something like its own rhythm and language. It is difficult to say about one's own poetry, but I think I have succeeded here and in some passages later on in catching that difficult note; in separate or briefer passages (i.e. a few lines at a time) I think it comes in not unoften."

Considering Sri Aurobindo's remark in 1946 about his attitude ten years earlier - "At that time I hesitated to assign anything like Overmind touch or inspiration to passages in English or other poetry and did not presume to claim any of my own writings as belonging to this order" - and considering that several lines of other poets which he had hesitated about were later adjudged by him to be from the Overmind, it seems certain that this passage which he had ascribed to the Overmind Intuition, a plane he had defined as not Overmind itself but an intermediate level where intuition proper grows massive in substance and rhythm, would have been traced by him to the supreme source if he had been privately asked about it again.

Several lines of extreme originality are already in the 1936 version:

His wide eyes bodied viewless entities.

The Craftsman of the magic stuff of Self

Who labours at his high and difficult plan

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In the wide workshop of the wonderful world,

Moulded in inward Time his rhythmic parts....

A figure in the ineffable Witness' shrine

Pacing the vast cathedral of his thoughts

Under its arches dim with infinity

Mid heavenward brooding of invisible wings....

One-pointed to the immaculate Delight,

Questing for God as for a splendid prey,

He mounted burning like a cone of fire....

There is also that coinage - along the lines of "infinitude" and "vastitude" - in the vivid passage which, except for one additional phrase towards the end, is found fully in the old draft:

To a few is given that godlike rare release.

One among many thousands never touched,

Engrossed in the external world's design,

Is driven by a pointing hand of light

Across his soul's unmapped immensitudes.

We have, however, to mark significant enrichments in many places in the later revision. Thus earlier we read how "hidden altitudes" keep for us as "our rapturous heritage"

The calm immunity of spirit space,

The golden plateaus of immortal Fire,

The moon-flame oceans of unfallen Bliss,

To which the indwelling Daemon points our flight.

In the final form we come across:

Our souls can visit in great lonely hours

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Still regions of imperishable Light,

All-seeing eagle-peaks of silent Power,

And moon-flame oceans of swift fathomless Bliss

And calm immensities of spirit Space. [p. 47]

Here and there a fascinating mystic touch has entered the text. The earlier draft had some members of the occult fauna: "the gold hawk", "the enemy-Serpent" and "the white-fire dragon-bird of endless bliss." The new brought in many strange figures in place of psychological simple postures. Thus what once was a straightforward exceeding of-the mental consciousness -

For him the limiting firmament ceased above.

In a tense period of the sleepless urge

A gap was rent in the all-concealing vault -

had later not only the first line slightly modified but also the second turned completely into a flash of enigmatic symbolism with a half-lion half-eagle emerging from a Vedic vision:

In the griffin forefront of the Night and Day... [p. 25]

At times the felicities of a passage are moved apart to make entirely different revelations. Originally there were the lines:

Caught in a voiceless white epiphany

The toiling thinker widened and grew still,

Wisdom transcendent touched his quivering heart,

And with a silver cry of opening gates,

Breaking the intellect's hard and lustrous lid,

Across our mental sky he glimpsed above

The superconscious realms of motionless peace

Where judgment ceases and the word is mute

And the Unconceived lies pathless and alone.

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This combination of thrilled spirituality and occult vision directed towards a soul-fulfilling Beyond which is brought home on the breath of a Mantra whose music conveys most profoundly the sense of the supreme Ineffable - this many-faceted whole gets distributed into three equally inevitable moments at considerable intervals packed with extra matter of great spiritual and occult importance:

Awakened to new unearthly closenesses,

The touch replied to subtle infinities,

And with a silver cry of opening gates

Sight's lightnings leaped into the invisible.... [p. 31]

His centre was no more in earthly mind,

A power of seeing silence filled his limbs:

Caught by a voiceless white epiphany

Into a vision that surpasses forms,

Into a living that surpasses life,

He neared the still consciousness sustaining all.... [p. 32]

Thought lay down in a mighty voicelessness;

The toiling Thinker widened and grew still,

Wisdom transcendent touched his quivering heart:

His soul could sail beyond thought's luminous bar;

Mind screened no more the shoreless infinite.

Across a void retreating sky he glimpsed

Through a last glimmer and drift of vanishing stars

The superconscient realms of motionless peace

Where judgment ceases and the word is mute

And the Unconceived lies pathless and alone. [pp. 33-34]

At each step in the final version we have this kind of proliferation. Sri Aurobindo justified it in a letter to me answering some criticisms by a friend of mine who had a penchant for compositions like Milton's Lycidas or Comus and who reacted unfavourably to the gradual detailed

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unfoldment of the theme in the very first canto. Sri Aurobindo explained the reason for such an unfoldment as well as the general principle of the final version:

"Its length is an indispensable condition for carrying out its purpose and everywhere there is this length, critics may say an 'unconscionable length' -1 am quoting the description of the Times Literary Supplement's criticism of The Life Divine - in every part, in every passage, in almost every canto or section of a canto. It has been planned not on the scale of Lycidas or Comus or some brief narrative poem, but of the longer epical narrative, almost a minor, though a very minor Ramayana; it aims not at a minimum but at an exhaustive exposition of its world-vision or world-interpretation. One artistic method is to select a limited subject and even on that to say only what is indispensable, what is centrally suggestive and leave the rest to the imagination or understanding of the reader. Another method which I hold to be equally artistic or, if you like, architectural is to give a large and even a vast, a complete interpretation, omitting nothing that is necessary, fundamental to the completeness: that is the method I have chosen to follow in Savitri. But X has understood nothing of the significance or intention of the passages he is criticising, least of all, their inner sense - that is not his fault, but is partly due to the lack of the context and partly to his lack of equipment and you have there an unfair advantage over him which enables you to understand and see the poetic intention. He sees only outward form of words and some kind of surface sense which is to him vacant and merely ornamental or rhetorical or something pretentious without any true meaning or true vision in it: inevitably he finds the whole thing false and empty, unjustifiably ambitious and pompous without deep meaning or, as he expresses it, pseudo and phoney. His objection of longueur would be perfectly just if the description of the night and the dawn had been simply of physical night and physical dawn; but here the physical night and physical dawn are, as the title of

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the canto clearly suggests, a symbol, although what may be called a real symbol of an inner reality and the main purpose is to describe by suggestion the thing symbolised; here it is a relapse into Inconscience broken by a slow and difficult return of consciousness followed by a brief but splendid and prophetic outbreak of spiritual light leaving behind it the 'day' of ordinary human consciousness in which the prophecy has to be worked out. The whole of Savitri is, according to the title of the poem, a legend that is a symbol and this opening canto is, it may be said, a key beginning and announcement. So understood there is nothing here otiose or unnecessary; all is needed to bring out by suggestion some aspect of the thing symbolised and so start adequately the working out of the significance of the whole poem. It will, of course, seem much too long to a reader who does not understand what is written or, understanding, takes no interest in the subject; but that is unavoidable."

The amount of elaboration done on the older draft can be gauged from two letters. One dated 1936 refers to the form existing in that year as compared to earlier attempts: "Savitri was originally written many years ago before the Mother came as a narrative poem in two parts, Part I Earth and Part II Beyond (these two parts are still extant in the scheme) each of four books - or rather Part II consisted of three books and an epilogue. Twelve books to an epic is a classical superstition, but the new Savitri may extend to ten books - if much is added in the final version it may be even twelve. The first book has been lengthening and lengthening out till it must be over 2000 lines, but I shall break up the original first four into five, I think in fact I have already started doing so. These first five will be, as I conceive them now, the Book of Birth, the Book of Quest, the Book of Love, the Book of Fate, the Book of Death. As for the second Part, I have not touched it yet."

The second letter is of 1948. We have quoted its first few lines already as well as some from its closing paragraph. Sri Aurobindo writes: "There are now three books in the

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first part. The first, the Book of Beginnings, comprises five cantos which cover the same ground as what you typed out but contains much more that is new. The small passage about Aswapathy and the other worlds has been replaced by a new book, the Book of the Traveller of the Worlds, in fourteen cantos with many thousand lines. There is also a third sufficiently long book, the Book of the Divine Mother. In the new plan of the poem there is a second part consisting of five books: two of these, the Book of Birth and Quest and the Book of Love, have been completed and another, the Book of Fate, is almost complete. Two others, the B6ok of Yoga and the Book of Death, have still to be written, though a part needs only a thorough recasting. Finally, there is the third part consisting of four books, the Book of Eternal Night, the Book of the Dual Twilight, the Book of Everlasting Day and the Return to Earth, which have to be entirely recast and the third of them largely rewritten. So it will be a long time before Savitri is complete... I am trying of course to keep it at a very high level of inspiration, but in so large a plan covering most subjects of philosophical thought and vision and many aspects of spiritual experience there is bound to be much variation of tone: but that is, I think, necessary for the richness and completeness of the treatment."

Yes, the new Savitri is not only a Legend and a Symbol but also a Philosophy and, as we have quoted its author as saying, "profounder and vaster in its scope", besides being poetically a more lavish luminousness. But the 1936 version, although less complex, is yet no mere narrative poem. It has epical proportions of its own and very markedly the same afflatus in essence as the later recension. Sri Aurobindo declared on November 3, 1936 about the work then in progress: "As it now stands there is a general Overmind influence, I believe, sometimes coming fully through, sometimes colouring the poetry of the other higher planes fused together, sometimes lifting any one of these higher planes to the highest or the

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psychic, poetic intelligence or vital towards them." Again, like the final version it not only strikes the identical opening chord -

It was the hour before the Gods awake - [p.1]

a semi-Vedic cosmic suggestion found only in the last of the nearly dozen recastings that preceded that of 1936: the 1936 draft also depicts for the first time at some length the climbing of planes, which, as Sri Aurobindo says in a letter of November 1 of that year, "was only a brief interlude of a few lines formerly". Furthermore, it has had the unique luck of being the one version from which Sri Aurobindo read extracts to the Mother.

This observation rests on what Huta has recorded in the article entitled Spiritual and Occult Truths and published in Mother India, February 21,1978. The Mother disclosed to her in 1961 "how she had achieved in her tender age the highest occult truths, how she had realised all the visions set forth in Savitri". Here indeed is a marvellous flash of psychic autobiography. Huta continues the report based on the Mother's words: "Actually, she had experienced the poem's fundamental revelations before she arrived in Pondicherry and before Sri Aurobindo read out Savitri to her early in the morning day after day at a certain period of the Ashram. She also said to me that she had never told Sri Aurobindo all that she had seen beforehand." What could have been "a certain period"? The years when Savitri underwent ample revisions and extensions were after the accident to the poet's right leg at almost the end of 1938. Now the poet was surrounded by a small number of attendants, to one of whom - Nirodbaran -he accorded a privilege whose gloriousness I most envy, for after some time he commenced dictating his re-creation of the poem to him. From the end of 1938 to December 5, 1950 when Sri Aurobindo departed from his body there was no occasion in the midst of his constant attendants to read Savitri

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to the Mother. The period in question is almost certainly the years when he copied, chiselling as he went on, from his manuscript the passages he sent to me every morning in large envelopes. Before enclosing them, usually with the Mother's "Amal" inscribed on the covers, he must have read out the verse to her prior to breaking up their joint sessions of correspondence with the sadhakas late at night and through the small hours of the morning. The year and a half from nearly October's end in 1936 to the close of February 1938 must have contained that period of shining surprise not only to the Grace-inundated disciple to whom Savitri was sent but also on a far deeper plane to the Mother for the wonderful language in which the Master unveiled his high visions and to the Master himself because the Mother had anticipated them in mystic silence thirty years in advance.

From various viewpoints I feel encouraged to lay before the readers of Mother India whatever stream of Savitri came to me in private before it ceased in early 1938 like the fabled river Sarasvati of the Rigvedic symbolism.

Postscript

Several times I have said: "in private." But a small qualification is needed. The circumstances were such that to keep Savitri a total secret was very difficult. In those days Nolini was Sri Aurobindo's postman to the sadhakas or - shall we say? - the messenger Mercury from the Olympian Jupiter of Pondicherry. He used to distribute the Master's daily replies: we would wait eagerly for him around 7 a.m. Seeing the large envelopes, he guessed that some special correspondence was going on between Sri Aurobindo and me. Not out of curiosity but literary interest, occasionally when he handed me my "post" he slightly lifted his eyebrows and lingered for a few seconds. I looked very innocent, took the envelope and waited for him to depart before opening it. It happened like that four or five times. Then I felt a little nervous, so I wrote

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to Sri Aurobindo my impression that Nolini would soon get it into his head to inquire. "What should I do?" I asked. Sri Aurobindo very blandly replied: "Let us hope he will not get it into his head" (14.5.1937). But the silent inquisition of the lifted eyebrows for a moment or two did not cease. Then I wrote in desperation to Sri Aurobindo that I was sure the question would come and I must know whether to take Nolini into the secret or not. Sri Aurobindo answered: "Yes." So this secret was shared between Nolini and me for ten years - that is, until 1946, when I wrote a book on Sri Aurobindo's poetry. The third section of this book, like the other sections, came out first in the annual of the Sri Aurobindo Circle of Bombay. It was thus that excerpts from Savitri were divulged to the world - with Sri Aurobindo's approval. Afterwards the Ashram published whole cantos in various journals and in a number of fascicles and then the entire epic in two volumes.

(Mother India, November 1982, pp. 703-13)¹

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1 [The compiler was given a photocopy of the end of this article, with a few words added in Amal's handwriting. They have been inserted here. The book referred to is The Poetic Genius of Sri Aurobindo, of which the third part, dealing with Savitri, is reproduced here on pp. 1 ff.]

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