Overhead Poetry

Savitri

A rose of dawn, her smile lights every gaze—

Her love is like a nakedness of noon:

No flame but breathes in her the Spirit's calm

And pours the omnipresence of a sun.

Her tongues of fire break from a voiceless deep

Dreaming the taste of some ineffable height—

A cry to clasp the one God-hush in all,

A universal hunger's white embrace

That from the Unknown leaps burning to the Unknown.

Sri Aurobindo's Comment

"Exceedingly fine; both the language and rhythm are very powerful and highly inspired. When the inspiration is there, you reach more and more a peculiar fusion of the three influences, higher mental, illumined mental and intuitive, with a touch of the Overmind Intuition coming in. This touch is strongest here in the second and the two closing lines, but it is present in all except two—the third which is yet a very fine line indeed and the seventh where it is not present in the typed version ('A cry to clasp in all the one God-hush') but seems just to touch perhaps in the written one ('A cry to clasp the one God-hush in all'). In the typed version the higher mental is strongest but in the written one which is less emphatic but more harmonious, the rhythm gets in a higher influence. In the other lines the illumined mental influence lifting up the higher mental is strongest, but is itself lifted up to the intuitive—in all but the third just high enough to get the touch of the overmental intuition."

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