-007_Savitri —- A Factual Account of its Composition.htm Savitri —- A Factual Account of its Composition Savitri is the supreme revelation of Sri Aurobindo's vision* It is my task to give here factual account of the long process that led to Savitri in its final form. As the grand epic has captured many hearts all over the world by its supernal beauty, I thought that they would be much interested in the history of its growth, development and final emergence — the birth of the Golden Child. But I own that it is a formidable task. Though I had the unique good fortune to see Sri Aurobindo working on the epic in its entire revised version, and had some small share in being its scribe, to tr

-005_Savitri — The Word of Sri Aurobindo.htm PART II Savitri — The Word of Sri Aurobindo -l- Savitri, the poem, the word of Sri Aurobindo is the cosmic Answer to the cosmic Question. And Savitri, the person, the Godhead, the Divine Woman is the Divine's response to the human aspiration. The world is a great question mark. It is a riddle, eternal and ever-recurring. Man has faced the riddle and sought to arrive at a solution since he has been given a mind to seek and interrogate. What is this universe? From where has it come? Whither is it going? What is the purpose of it all? Why is man here? What is the object of his existence? Such is the mode of human

Savitri as an Epic This is the age of what is called 'modernist' poetry and the possibility of an epic being written in modem times is strongly discounted. It is supposed that an epic requires a certain primitive atmosphere for its birth and growth, and the modem age is not suitable for it. Although in some of their latest tendencies in painting, sculpture and poetry the modernists are trying hard to reproduce primitivism, it is considered a practical impossibility to attempt a great epic, and succeed, because reason dominates and materialism is a living force today. But Sri Aurobindo has made the impossible possible. He has written an epic of the New Age.

-020_An Approach to Sri Aurobindo^s Savitri.htm An Approach to Sri Aurobindo's Savitri 1. A Legend and a Symbol The great epic, the epic of epics, one of the four pillars of the stupendous structure of supramental work, may from a point of view be regarded and studied as an epitome of the unimaginable labour of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. This they undertook for hewing out the path of supramental realisation, for divinising man and heavenising the earth. In particular it epitomises the holocaust of the Mother in her gigantic work of breaking the rocks of the inconscient world, for laying the foundation of physical immortality. The day will come when poets, philosophers, and

The Yoga of Savitri The Finding of the Soul -1- After her marriage with Satyavan, Savitri leaves Madra and travels to the hermitage at Shalwa and takes charge of the blind king, Dyumtlsena, and the queen. In the new surroundings, which seemed quite heavenly to her, she commenced a new life in the company of her husband: At first to her beneath the sapphire heavens The sylvan solitude was a gorgeous dream- Two lives were locked within an earthly heaven.1 But soon with the change of seasons, and setting in of the Monsoon, the dark clouds with the sobbing winds and the cruel storm that came crashing in bro

A Survey of Savitri -l- The Savitri story is of great antiquity. It was already ancient at the time of the Mahabharata events, for it was one of the stories that Rishi Markandeya narrated to Yuddhishtira during the year of his exile to console him and fortify his spirits. Several of Sri Aurobindo's narrative poems or fragments — Love and Death, Vidula, Chitrangada, Uloupy, Nala — were based on, or translated from, the Mahabharata, yet the fascination was inexhaustible, and in particular the Savitri story, like the Nala story, had a special attraction for Sri Aurobindo as embodying the early morning glory of Rishi Vyasa's poetic genius: The Savitri i

-011_Savitri — Some Glimpses and Reflections.htm PART III Savitri — Some Glimpses and Reflections On 15 August 1954, the eighty-second birthday of Sri Aurobindo, a most splendid offering to the Master was the one-volume edition brought out by the Ashram of his greatest poetic achievement — Savitri, a Legend and a Symbol — over which he had worked for, we may say, almost his lifetime. It is on record that Virgil devoted approximately ten years to his Aeneid, Dante sixteen intermittently and six wholly to his Divina Commedia, Milton at least eight to Paradise Lost and Goethe spread the writing of his Faust, with long intervals, over nearly fifty years of crowded life. Sri A

Diction of Savitri In his introduction to Modern Indo-Anglian Poetry, P. Lai announces the adherence of the Unofficial Poets Workshop to certain basic "principles of language, method and intention." His statement raises a number of issues. I shall only deal here with one or two of them that refer to style and diction. For example, he says that he considers expressions like "the sunlight sweet" and "deep booming voice" to be ridiculous. I quite see what that statement implies. Nevertheless, I think that the verdict of "ridicule" may be passed only after examining the context in which such a phrase occurs. I look up a poem in the very anthology that P. Lai has edite

-015_Savitri — A Subjective Poem.htm Savitri — A Subjective Poem -l- All Sri Aurobindo's works lead up to Savitri: A Legend and A Symbol. He had been at work upon the poem for years, made several revisions. A work by itself unlike all the others, was the author's own considered view, not to be treated lightly. Yet he was aware that, for a long time to come, the appeal of the poem might be limited. The divided modem consciousness cannot experience, much less unify different levels of reality, it is this that largely explains the lack of response. The easiest way out of the difficulty is to describe the poem as philosophical and leave it at that. The charge might have some ground whe

A Study of Similes in Savitri -l- Every great poet or artist is an explorer who discovers new lands and oceans in his imaginative vision, reveals new truths and beauties and hidden routes and pathways quite unfamiliar and unknown to the workaday humanity, and his word acts, what Keats would say, as ... the leaven That, spreading in this dull and clodded earth, Gives it a touch ethereal — a new birth. Thus Mayakovsky, the modem Russian poet, who was "bombarding with verses the horror of every day" and "Everything ossifying and assifying living", observed: One must snatch gladness from the days that are In this life