Sāvitrī possesses unity of structure in a remarkable degree. The legend on which it is founded affords an ample story element for such a unity. The opening canto with the Symbol Dawn brings us straight to the crisis of the story—the imminent death of Satyavan and introduces the chief character Savitri in glowing and divine colours. It brings out at the same time the nature of the crisis, its cosmic significance and thereby raises the character of Savitri to that of the "saviour" of men. The attention of the reader is gripped,—if he can enter into the Seer's vision—and he is anxious to know how Savitri is going to meet Yama, the god of Death. To show how Savitri came to be constituted as a "half-divine" being even in her external being the Seer rightly pursues the thread of her birth and explains to us how "a world's desire compelled her mortal birth". This brings us to the character of Aswapati, her father, who is no ordinary king but a "colonist from immortality". His attempts at self-perfection and his great spiritual attainments form a very natural background for the birth of so great a spiritual figure as Savitri. The "epic climb" of human soul really gains an epic grandeur in the vision of the Master and endows this earth with a tremendous significance. There are greater worlds than the earth, higher levels of consciousness than man's, but there is no more significant world than this our earth in the great divine destiny that it holds.

The canvas of Sāvitrī. is as wide as the cosmos and it takes into its purview worlds of being that are connected with humanity which are not perceived by it because of its limitations of ignorance. Nevertheless, these levels do act upon human consciousness. They also include higher planes of consciousness which have not yet manifested here but which are pressing upon the earth-consciousness for manifestation. They contain beings, powers and presences that live on those planes of Light, Consciousness and Bliss, the worlds of Truth. The soul of aspiring humanity symbolised in Aswapati, the Lord of manifested Life, first descends from his human consciousness into nether regions of unconsciousness and materiality, the regions of the lower vital, its heaven and its hell, as a conscious witness. He then ascends to the regions of Heavens of the higher Vital and then crosses over to the Heavens of the Mind. After scaring into regions above Mind, into the Heavens of the Ideal and Illumined Mind he passes beyond the borders of manifested creation to the centre from which creation proceeds. Through a great shaft of Light across a tunnel that leads to the centre, he comes face to face with the World-Soul, the Two-in-One. It is there that he experiences the presence of the Divine Mother who supports the cosmos. It is She, the Power of the Supreme, supporting the cosmos, who bestows on him the boon that saves mankind from the stark imprisonment of Ignorance and subjection to Death. Being a power of the Truth-Consciousness Savitri not only liberates man but creates conditions here for the embodiment of the Light Supreme. She shows how man's life here can be fulfilled in a life divine.

This complex and rich yet clear cosmogony revealed in Aswapati's voyage enriches the significance of the earth as a crucial centre of a divine experiment and enriches the life of man beyond his highest dreams. Incidentally it indicates the nature of the task awaiting Savitri and the tremendous odds against which she would have to contend. Aswapati himself has advanced a great deal on the path to self-perfection. Throughout his vast journey through the various worlds.

He travelled in his mute and single strength

Bearing the burden of the world's desire.

(Sāvitrī, p. 101) 

But he, a "protagonist of the mysterious play", "a thinker and a toiler in the ideal's air", "one in the front of the immemorial quest",—felt baffled when he considered the destiny of the race. When the Divine Mother commands him to continue his labours for man's perfection he invokes her help. A boon is given to him in answer to his prayer. Savitri's mortal birth was thus in answer to "a world's desire". Even ordinary incidents in Savitri get endowed with cosmic significance. There is nothing that is not conscious—even the seasons are not a mere mechanical succession of external changes but conscious operations in the cosmic body.

Thus we see the problem and the difficult conditions for its solution. The problem is of man's imperfection and his unquenchable thirst for perfection, of his groping in the Darkness of ignorance and his seeking for Light, of his mortality and his thirst for immortality. It can be solved by spiritual efforts alone—no external change however well-meaning or seemingly successful would really solve his problem. And even the highest spiritual effort of man cannot attain the goal unaided,—the task is impossible. It can be solved only if the supreme Divine can be persuaded to descend on earth and take up the burden of man. Such higher and divine sources of help are available to man. In fact, that is the claim and testimony of man's religion, mysticism, philosophy, and all his upward efforts. Savitri lays down the conditions of the problem in the clearest manner. The story attains its cosmic significance and the fate of Satyavan rings with the destiny of man. Man, the middle term between the Nescience and the Superconscience, sees the forces of the nether worlds and feels their impact upon his life. He sees also the possibilities of Higher Worlds and feels their action upon himself. He has to work out his destiny with the Divine help upon this terrestrial globe. This has been determined by a supreme Wisdom and Power. All this we see while we share the Master's cosmic gaze turned towards the earth. The vision of the elements that help and those that hinder,—and by their very hindrance make the final victory possible,—the imprisoning limitations even of those that help, gives us some idea of the tangled weft of human life with its baffling complexity and brings out the need of looking up beyond all mental and ethical idealism to something above all that man has attempted and attained up till now.

The Indian conception of the Avatār, the descent of the Divine in earth-consciousness, undergoes in the character of Savitri a profound change. Savitri, the Supreme Power of Grace descended into life, is the only feminine Avatār in the world. It is perhaps in the fitness of things that the Divine Mother in all her love, sympathy and deep understanding should descend to help her children on earth in the fight against the forces of Inconscience and bring to birth a new race of men embodying here the higher Supramental Consciousness But in the current Indian conception even though the Avatār is the Divine descended into the earth-consciousness he is not supposed to participate in human imperfections. He comes down generally to do a divine work—to save humanity in a crisis or help it forward in its evolution. But he remains all the time and always Divine and to the Divine nothing could be impossible. When he labours at his task it is only to conform to the human law that he does so. In reality, his divinity does everything. An Avatār, thus, is in humanity but not of it; his experiences are not like those of other men. Sri Aurobindo for the first time has brought out clearly the necessity of complete identification in his nature part by the Avatār with the nature of man in order to save humanity. This identification, be it noted, is not an ignorant subjection on his part to Nature or even an outcome of sympathy as ordinarily understood by man. It proceeds on the basis of knowledge,—it is an act of divine compassion, an act of grace.

The greatest saviours of men do not have to deal directly with outwardly great or critical events in the life of humanity. For, when properly understood, man's problems are all inner, psychological and spiritual. The roots of man's conflicts are within him and it is his inner conflict that projects itself into his outer life. Some of the great spiritual battles that are fought within man's soul stamp themselves on human history, as in the case of Christ and Buddha. The epic Sāvitrī accomplishes two difficult tasks; it creates a personality, Savitri, a human-divine character and secondly it succeeds in making all the inner spiritual experiences of man real, concrete and direct. It is well known that the highest spiritual experiences defy expression in language. But Sāvitrī  for the first time succeeds in such a thorough objectification of them in terms of images and symbols that the sensitive reader feels their concreteness. Out of many examples we shall just give one here as an illustration: it describes the work of the Goddess of inspiration,—

In darkness' core she dug out wells of light,

On the undiscovered depths imposed a form,

Lent a vibrant cry to the unuttered vasts,

And through great shoreless, voiceless, starless breadths

 Bore earthward fragments of revealing thought

Hewn from the silence of the Ineffable.

(Sāvitrī, p. 41)

One feels the concreteness of the silence of the Ineffable and the "hewn fragments of revealing thought" being borne slowly earthwards.

This was no result of a happy accident but a result of the conscious art of the great Master. That he was conscious of it becomes clear from the following quotation taken from a letter in reply to certain criticism of Sāvitrī. He speaks about the plan of Sāvitrī:

It has been planned not on the scale of Lycidas or Comus or same brief narrative poem, but of the larger epical narrative, almost a minor, though a very minor Rāmāyana; it aims not at the minimum but at an exhaustive exposition of its world-vision or world-interpretation. One artistic method is to select a limited subject and even on that to say what is indispensable, what is centrally suggestive and leave the rest to the imagination or under- standing of the reader. Another method which I hold to be equally artistic or, if you like, architectural is to give a large and even a vast, a complete interpretation, omitting nothing that is necessary, fundamental to the completeness: that is the method I have chosen in Sāvitrī.

Sāvitrī deals with a realm of experience that is not known to the common man and it is therefore likely that it may not meet with general appreciation or understanding at first. The creator of Sāvitrī knew this very well and so he wrote: "Sāvitrī  is a record of a seeing, of an experience, which is not of the common kind, and it is often very far from what the general human mind sees or experiences". But even the modernist poet cannot lay claim to a universal understanding and appreciation of his work. Sāvitrī demands a certain minimum of capacity of vision in addition to a broad cosmopolitan enlightened outlook familiar with the latest advances in several branches of human knowledge. But that cannot be a bar to its high epic qualities. On the contrary, it opens out an altogether new and rich realm of experience to the reader and if he has to make an effort to enter into the spirit of it, lie will find that his labours are more than amply rewarded.