Savitri

          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 toil and the reward, the human effort to transcend humanity and the final blissful realisation, the manifestation, of the Divine. In the third place, Savitri was to be a cosmic epic, its human action symbolising the cosmic action, the visible terrestrial drama symbolising the total cosmic drama of the lila or ecstatic play of the Lord; this really meant translating into poetic terms the massive dialectic of The Life Divine. In the fourth place, Sri Aurobindo wished to make Savitri, a foretaste of the 'future poetry', the poetry of the overhead planes, the poetry that crystallises at auspicious moments into the mantra. Finally Sri Aurobindo wished to reproduce in Savitri something of the Valmikian, Upanishadic and Kalidasian verse movement; in other words, to evolve a blank verse movement that would strive to combine a Sanskritic clarity and purity with a Vedic manifoldness in meaning. It was to be a legend and a symbol, an experiment and an experience, a poetic philosophy and a yoga manual.

      Sri Aurobindo's aims and hopes find candid expression in his correspondence:

      In the new form it will be a sort of poetic philosophy of the Spirit

      and of Life...⁸⁶

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...it expresses or tries to express a total and many-sided vision

and experience of all the planes of being and their action upon

each other.⁸⁷

Savitri is an experiment in mystic poetry, spiritual poetry cast

into a symbolic figure...it is really a new attempt and cannot

be hampered by old ideas of technique except when they are

assimilable...'⁸⁸

I was not seeking for originality but for truth and the effective

poetical expression of my vision...What I am trying to do

everywhere in the poem is to express exactly something seen,

something felt or experienced...⁸⁹

Savitri is the record of a seeing, of an experience which is not

of the common kind and is often very far from what the general

human mind sees and experiences.. .there must be a new extension

of consciousness and aesthesis to appreciate a new kind of mystic

poetry. Moreover if it is really new in kind, it may employ a new

technique.. .new in some or many of its elements.⁹⁰

...if I have not poetical genius, at least I can claim a sufficient, if

not an infinite capacity for painstaking.. .for waiting and listening

for the true inspiration and rejecting all that fell short of it...⁹¹

But this (a spiritual vision such as that of the Vedantin arriving

beyond the world towards the Ineffable) is not what Savitri has

to say or rather it is only a small part of it and, even so, bound up

with a cosmic vision and an acceptance of the world...⁹²

The cardinal fact, then, is that Sri Aurobindo has seen something, experienced something, so vividly that, although many-splendoured, it is a living vision to him; this 'mystic' experience has comprised life and spirit, the world, the cosmos and the transcendent, and it is therefore a total, if also a many-sided, vision; the epic, Savitri, is an attempt both to retell an old story and to record in symbolic terms this experience, to project this vision, to interpret it in terms of philosophy; this being so unusual a theme and Sri Aurobindo's aim being so out of the ordinary, he has had, wherever necessary, to resort to new poetic techniques, and especially he has had to forge an overhead aesthesis as the main instrument of his poetic expression. He has had to wait and listen to the voice from above, the voice that can alone rightly interpret the beatific vision and find the right words and rhythm for its projection in a poetic form.

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