On Sri Aurobindo's Savitri

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 substantial number of letters by Sri Aurobindo on what can be called, if any one achievement by so vastly and variously creative a genius can lay claim to the title, his literary life-work. Out of these letters an introductory ensemble - necessarily in certain places more informal, personal, unreserved, focussed on details, quick-shifting, repetitive than a specially composed piece for the public would be -has been made with the object of throwing, in the poet's own valuable words, some light on the poem's conception and development and on its qualities of inspiration, vision and technique.¹

1 Some of the more general letters —whole or in part— have already appeared in "Letters of Sri Aurobindo" (Third Series). (Now 'Letters on Poetry, Literature and Art".) But as they are linked up with the kind of poetry that Savitri is and as they were actually written with direct or indirect reference to this poem, their most significant place is in the same setting as those treating

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It will perhaps be of interest to touch upon the origin of the series of notes that have been compiled and presented here. No sooner did I commence my contact with Sri Aurobindo in 1927 than I found the air of his Ashram humming with rich rumours of the masterpiece that had been in progress ever since his days in Baroda. Having always had a passion for poetry and having myself tried to catch a spark of the celestial fire, I was extremely thrilled and longed to set eyes on this most significant work of his which he was repeatedly recasting to make it accord with the ever higher ascension of his own consciousness in Yoga. But Sri Aurobindo was in no hurry to show it before it reached the intensest spiritual perfection. It was I, on the contrary, who kept showing him my own little efforts at expressing the few strange glimmers of beauty and truth that at times my discipleship under so gracious a spiritual and literary guru brought me. On one such occasion, to illustrate some point, he sent back with his helpful comments two lines describing "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.

of particular points. Among the latter, one or two short entries are included nor so much because they illustrate anything in rhe poem as because they have either a flavour of personality or some other psychological bearing. The letters have been divided into sections, each section determined mostly by similarity of theme in its contents or by their broad subsumableness under a common head. The order of the sections—and sometimes also that of their contents—is dictated by two considerations. One is semi-logical sequence; the other is textual reference—thar is, passages that allude to something in other passages have to come later and certain remarks must he on later pages because, without this being so, their exact sense may not emerge.

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I was struck by the profound word-reverberations that reinforced the mystical word-suggestions with a tremendous immediacy of spiritual fact, I asked where the lines came from. The reply was: "Savitri."

I never forgot this first brief impact of the closely guarded secret. Even before it, Sri Aurobindo had tried to make me conscious 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 distinguished four planes: Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition, Overmind. The last-named has been, according to him, the top reach of the dynamic side of man's spirituality so far: a transcendental poise of immutable Brahman or featureless Nirvana is the Beyond to it usually realised when in isolated cases there is a leap to the ultimate status of that infinite silence of self-liberation which can be attained on any plane of the cosmos by an inner withdrawal. The master dynamism of the Divine, the integral earth-transformative power which Sri Aurobindo designated as 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 and, until certain radical conditions are completely fulfilled, cannot find direct expression in life or literature. Even the expression of the Overmind with its massive and comprehensive yet intensely immediate vision - especially in the entire authenticity of its undertones and overtones of rhythm - is rare, as is also to a less degree that of the Higher Mind's broad connective clarity, the Illumined Mind's many-sided opulence of colourful insight, the Intuition's swift and close and all-seizing focus. What the ancients termed the mantra - the stuff of Divinity itself appearing to become revelatory scriptural word as in some parts of the Vedas, the Upanishads and the Gita - is the clearest voice

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of the Overmind in its few past visitations on earth. Less openly, the Overmind is the chief presence in the world's greatest poetic phrases of various types. More and more Sri Aurobindo sought - by patiently criticising, appraising, distinguishing - to help me not only respond, in my appreciation of poetry, to the rising scale of the Overhead note but also bring some strain of it into my own verses. The quest of that note grew for me a dominant occupation and most I prayed for a touch of the Overmind.

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.

He 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 more intimations like that line of Wordsworth, but a passage sustained and plenary? These surely are

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things yet 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 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 naturally Aurobindonian 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 - the day dedicated to golden Surya and rich for you with leisure from correspondence: I can wait answerless for twenty-four hours with a sweet samata.

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.

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And then with an "e.g." there followed in his own fine and sensitive yet forceful hand sixteen lines of the very first Canto of Savitri as it stood then:¹

It was the hour before the Gods awake.

Across the path of the divine Event

The huge unslumbering spirit of Night, alone

In the unlit temple of immensity,

Lay stretched immobile upon silence' marge,

Mute with the unplumbed prevision of her change.

The impassive skies were neutral, waste and still.

Then a faint hesitating glimmer broke.

A slow miraculous gesture dimly came,

The insistent thrill of a transfiguring touch

Persuaded the inert black quietude

And beauty and wonder disturbed the fields of God.

That glowed along the moment's fading brink

Fixed with gold panel and opalescent hinge

A gate of dreams ajar on mystery's verge.

Below the quotation were the words: "There! Promise fulfilled for a wonder."

After a whole day's absorption in the absolute nectar, I sent him 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

1 At present this prelude - slightly altered in phrase and with its opening and its close considerably separated - stands in a passage of 93 lines: Savitri, Vol. I, pp. 3-5 (pp. 1-3 in the 1993 edition).

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poetic importance for me. Perhaps you will laugh, but I had two strange feelings before writing this letter. I was reading your verses, when I had a mute sense of big tears in the heart and a conviction that having seen what I had seen I could not possibly remain a mere mortal! What do you say to my madness?

The day of days was October 25,1936. From then onwards, for months, Sri Aurobindo kept sending passages which I typed out and he touched up again or 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 - intended, no doubt, for only my eyes, for in his public pronouncements he rarely spoke about his own work without reserve - was:

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

Our correspondence went on and it continued, though with several long breaks, up to almost the end. It was a correspondence with many features. All the critical appreciation and understanding I was capable of I brought to Savitri and all that I could write in my own manner by way of Introduction to the poem was put into the last chapter of my book The Poetic Genius of Sri Aurobindo, about which Sri Aurobindo was both generous and modest enough to say:

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"it seems to me very fine both in style and substance, but as it is in high eulogy of my own writing, you must not expect me to say more." But while I could not help eulogising most of Savitri with whatever analytic and imaginative apparatus was at my disposal, I did not abstain from questioning a few things here and there. Nor did Sri Aurobindo either expect or desire me to abstain. The precise character and motive of this questioning have been indicated in a footnote in the body of the selection of replies by Sri Aurobindo which I have made from my file. And the amount of fault-finding was too little for me to be ashamed of, but even so I feel that occasionally I encroached with the play of the surface intelligence overmuch on Sri Aurobindo's meagre and precious spare time. On the other hand, without that little amount and without my pressing upon his notice some unfavourable comments by an academic friend outside the Aurobindonian circle, the chance would have been missed for ever of seeing the finest critic I have known pass elucidatory judgment on the greatest poem I have read - a poem written by the most enlightened Master of Yoga and the most patient as well as considerate Superman one could hope to have the privilege to serve.

(Sri Aurobindo - Letters on Savitri, 2000)

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