WHAT BASICALLY IS SAVITRI? What basically is Savitri? It can be regarded, in its own language, as Sight's sound-waves breaking from the soul's great deeps. [p. 383] So to approach it I would try to concentrate in the heart-centre and plunge into it until I felt it as not only intense but also immense - and in that secrecy of warm wideness I would become all eyes and ears bent upon feeling Savitri as the outflow of my own true self. Here would be an attempt to enter into Sri Aurobindo through my own profundities and, catching a sense of identity with him, achieve in the form of this poem's super-art what the Rigvedic Rishis termed "the seeing and he

-020_Sri Aurobindo^s First Fair Copy of His Earliest Version of Savitri.htm SRI AUROBINDO'S FIRST FAIR COPY OF HIS EARLIEST VERSION OF SAVITRI EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION Towards the end of 1968 Nirodbaran put into my hands two old exercise-books he had found among Sri Aurobindo's papers. One had a cover greyish green and the other a brown cover. Both had been made in Madras and bore the trademark "Hanuman". A glance at their pages immediately gave the impression that they dated back to Sri Aurobindo's early days in Pondicherry, for his script showed his early practice of writing the English "e" like the Greek epsilon (e). And this script, in two or three kinds of ink and with some portion

SRI AUROBINDO THE POET (In anticipation of August 15, 1991, the 113th anniversary of Sri Aurobindo's birth, All India Radio Pondicherry brought together at 8 p.m. on August 12 five voices from the Sri Aurobindo Ashram to broadcast enlightening words on the Master's manifold achievement. Here is the speech of Amal Kiran.) Sri Aurobindo was a poet on a grand scale, the scale natural to all the sides of his versatile personality. He has given us poetry of various kinds - several narratives, numerous lyrics and sonnets, half a dozen dramas, a substantial body of experiments in new metres and, to top everything, an epic of nearly 24,000 lines of blank verse, the lo

-022_The Opening Sections of the 1936-37 Version of Sri Aurobindo^s Savitri.htm 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 b

-004_Sri Aurobindo- Letters on Savitri Editor^s note to the 1951 Edition.htm SRI AUROBINDO - LETTERS ON SAVITRI: EDITOR'S NOTE TO THE 1951 EDITION Sri Aurobindo intended to write a long Introduction to Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol. Together with one Book out of the twelve of his epic - significantly enough the Book of Death - the eagerly awaited Introduction never got written. Nothing that anybody may pen, however acute, can replace it as an expository and illuminative document on the unusual poetic afflatus - unusual both in message and music - that blows through the twenty-five thousand and odd lines of this Legend of the past that is a Symbol of the future. But luckily we have a substant

SAVITRI: SOME GLIMPSES AND REFLECTIONS1 On August 15, 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 Aurobindo's occupation with his

INDEX OF LINES IN SAVITRI A being no bigger than the thumb of man115 A brute half-conscious body serves as means116 A bull-throat bellowed with its brazen tongue71 A deathless body and a divine name70 A dragon power of reptile energies67 A formless void oppressed his struggling brain363 A gap was rent in the all-concealing vault304 A gate of dreams ajar on mystery's verge367 A greater darkness waited, a worse reign245 A greater force than the earthly held his limbs123 A hope stole in that hardly dared to be248 A last high world was seen where all worlds met111 A lonely freedom cannot satisfy

THE OPENING OF SAVITRI1 SOME QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS ON BOOK ONE CANTO ONE 1 Would you kindly help me to understand the following points in Savitri (International University Centre Edition, with the Author's Letters on the Poem, 1954)? P. 3. "A power of fallen boundless self..." Is it the same as "The huge foreboding mind of Night"? Pp. 3, 4. The above-mentioned "power" longing "to reach its end in vacant Nought", "A mute featureless semblance of the Unknown", "Repeating for ever the unconscious act...", and the Earth wheeling "abandoned in the hollow gulfs" - are these movements successive or simultaneous? The doubt has come on

BIBLIOGRAPHY The Poetic Genius of Sri Aurobindo, K.D. Sethna (Amal Kiran), 1947, 2nd rev. ed. 1974, Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry The Thinking Corner - Causeries on Life and Literature, Amal Kiran (K.D. Sethna), 1996, The Integral Life Foundation, Waterford CT, 06385, U.S.A. Sri Aurobindo - Letters on Savitri, Edited by K.D. Sethna, 1951, 2000, Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry Sri Aurobindo-The Poet, K.D. Sethna, 1970,1999, Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education, Pondicherry Inspiration and Effort: studies in literary attitude and expression, Amal Kiran (K.D. Sethna), 1995, The Integral Life Foundation, Waterford CT, 06385,

SRI AUROBINDO - A NEW AGE OF MYSTICAL POETRY1 Missioned voices drive to me from God's doorway Words that live not save upon Nature's summits, Ecstasy's chariots.2 These three lines make a most magnificent picture, Vedic and Upanishadic in its symbolism, and the sound-strokes of the words leave reverberations that are mantric: the impulsion of the supreme Spirit is poetised in language and rhythm which are themselves received from the immense Overworld known to the ancient Rishis. They are the aptest and most inwardly representative summing-up possible of the afflatus that creates Sri Aurobindo's Savitri and of the impression le