PREFACE TO THE      FIRST EDITION         This book is substantially the same as the thesis for which the Andhra University, on the unanimous recommendations of a Board consisting of Professors Vivian de Sola Pinto, H. O. White and T.J.B. Spencer, awarded the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy on me at the Annual Convocation held in December 1961. The present publication has been kindly sponsored by the Andhra University, with the help of a grant-in-aid from the University Grants Commission (UGC), and I am duly grateful to both ,y Alma Mater and the UGC for thus facilitating the publication of this book so soon after the award of the Degree.         D

   II         LIFE-SKETCH         Sri Aurobindo was born on 15 August 1872, an hour before sunrise, in Calcutta. His parents were Krishnadhan Ghose, a physician, and Swarnalata Ghose. Sri Aurobindo's elder brother, Manomohan, became a poet of considerable distinction and a Professor of English. His younger brother, Barindra Kumar, became a revolutionary. Sri Aurobindo's own birth on 15 August 1872 has a double national significance: it was the centenary year of the birth of Raja Rammohan Roy, the Father of Modern India and seventy-five years later, on 15 August 1947, India became a free country. Thus Sri Aurobindo's birthday and India's Independence Day are now being celebrated together.

SECTION D         'THE BOOK OF EVERLASTING DAY'    I    'THE ETERNAL DAY'         The great Savitri-Yama dialectic has spanned the ineluctable spaces of Eternal Night and the Double Twilight, and with the withdrawal of the shadow, twilight gives place to day—the symbol realm of Everlasting Day—and Savitri and Satyavan are alone though still with the nameless veil, the translucent wall, between them. Death's thesis and Savitri's antithesis have rung in our ears and echoed through the corridors of the symbol worlds of night and twilight. With Death's retreat, can it be said that Savitri's antithesis has decisively and finally vanquished Death's thesis? This woul

 VI         'THE KINGDOMS AND GODHEADS OF THE GREATER LIFE'         From the "grey anarchy" of the lower vital' world, Aswapati now approaches the 'higher vital' world, a region ineffectual and purposeless still, where life see-saws between vain denial and dubious hope. It is a world of deceptive illuminations and spasmodic actions, of hopes unrealised and possibilities unfulfilled. Life goes round and round as it were, but goal there seemingly is none. Allurements come from every direction, only to be followed by discomfiture. All is "unsafe, miraculous and half-true".         As Aswapati travels further on from these outskirts, the sky clears, the earth smiles, and he rea

          VII         SAVITRI: FIVE-FOLD AIM BEHIND           ITS COMPOSITION   We come now, at long last, to Savitri. It is clear that Sri Aurobindo, in writing this colossal poem, had a five-fold aim. In the first place, he wished to write a modern epic, retelling the legendary story of Savitri with an epic amplitude and sweep. In the second place, he wished to write a poem that would at the same time be also a Manual of Yoga, embodying stairs and spirals of spiritual aspiration, involving trials and struggles, doubts and difficulties, but culminating in the summits and high-mountain lakes of spiritual victory and realisation; the poem was thus to comprise both the toi

'OVERHEAD' POETRY AND SAVITRI         The lost music returns: a few bring it, Verse like the straining of pointed waves shoreward: The stress of the blades, the cradle of the slack between, Some rising, some falling, the whole Tumult order and beauty, but above all The power and the heartbeat and male music of our being.                                                                                          Brewster Ghiselin       I         THE PROBLEM         What is 'overhead' poetry? What are the 'overhead' planes of consciousness? How does 'overhead aesthesis' function in the poet no less than the responsive re

  II         'DEATH IN THE FOREST'         On the great day when the issue is to be joined, the dawn finds Savitri awake earlier than Satyavan, recapitulating the events of the year just about to end:         The whole year in a swift and eddying race       Of memories swept through her and fled away       Into the irrecoverable past.3   This is clearly an earlier draft of the poem, not fully brought in tune with the new inspiration. The opening canto itself, after describing 'The Symbol Dawn, refers to Savitri awaking among the forest tribes and hastening "to join the brilliant Summoner's chant", and the second canto states that "twelve pas

 XVI         SAVITRI AND THE 'SONNETS'   Some of the key-ideas projected vividly in Savitri, and especially in the Book of the Traveller of the Worlds, are not only elaborately expounded in The Life Divine but are also succinctly and poetically expressed in the series of sonnets that Sri Aurobindo wrote during the thirties and the forties, roughly contemporaneously with the composition of Savitri in its present form. Indeed, K.D. Sethna goes so far as to say that, "in many respects the Sonnets are the best brief approach for us to Savitri", and in many of these sonnets we have broad clues to the worldview inherent in the drama of Savitri as also, "the element of spiritual autobiography

   XII         SIMILES IN SAVITRI         The simile, already quoted on an earlier page, that describes the effect on the yogin of the mantra, in the context of Savitri's response to the word from Aswapati, is a remarkable example of the 'overhead' poetry; the Word is the Spirit, it is Power, it is creative joy, it is the aftermath of calm as well. The following simile compares Aswapati the pioneer and leader of the human race to a solitary star:         As shines a solitary witness star       That burns apart, Light's lonely sentinel,       In the drift and teeming of a mindless Night,       A single thinker in an aimless world       Awaiting s