Apropos of the thesis of The Symbol Dawn presented by Amal Kiran, here are two quotations picked up by him from the correspondence he had with Sri Aurobindo. His view is that there is a common mistaken impression about the opening passage of the epic, that it holds it to be the very beginning of the universal manifestation instead of, as he suggests, a particular day on which the death of Satyavan is to occur. Here are the relevant passages from the Savitri-letters:

... do you seriously want me to give an accurate scientific description of the earth half in darkness and half in light so as to spoil my impressionist symbol or else to revert to the conception of earth as a flat and immobile surface? I am not writing a scientific treatise, I am selecting certain ideas and impressions to form a symbol of a partial and temporary darkness of the soul and Nature which seems to a temporary feeling of that which is caught in the Night as if it were universal and eternal. One who is lost in that Night does not think of the other half of the earth as full of light; to him all is Night and the earth a forsaken wanderer in an enduring darkness. If I sacrifice this impressionism and abandon the image of the earth wheeling through dark space I might as well abandon the symbol altogether, for this is a necessary part of it. As a matter of fact in the passage itself earth in its wheeling does come into the dawn and pass from darkness into the light. You must take the idea as a whole and in all its transitions and not press one detail with too literal an insistence.

Amal Kiran unfortunately brings the post-Copernican science into discussion and writes that the above extract from Sri Aurobindo’s letter rather puts forward the “partial and temporary night that impressionistically serves for the symbolisation.”

However, in the same letter Sri Aurobindo writes significantly the following: “Rapid transitions from one image to another are a constant feature in Savitri as in most mystic poetry. I am not here building a long sustained single picture of the Dawn with a single continuous image or variations of the same image. I am describing a rapid series of transitions, piling one suggestion upon another… In such a race of rapid transitions you cannot bind me down to a logical chain of figures or a classical monotone. The mystic Muse is more of an inspired Bacchante of the Dionysian wine than an orderly housewife… In this poem I present constantly one partial view of life or another temporarily as if it were the whole in order to give full value to the experience of those who are bound by that view, as for instance, the materialist conception and experience of life, but if any one charges me with philosophical inconsistency, then it only means that he does not understand the technique of the Overmind interpretation of life… The thinking [in Savitri] is not intellectual but intuitive or more than intuitive, always expressing a vision, a spiritual contact or a knowledge which has come by entering into the thing itself, by identity.”

Perceptive suppleness is what is expected to be present while one is with a multi-faced creation that is Savitri, particularly when there is “a race of rapid transitions”, images shifting from one into another even as they trying to bring into our vision things of the afar and the unseen.  There are associated with them larger contents bordering on the transcendent, they trying to enter into our language so inadequate for the revelatory truth and vision of a luminous and dynamic world.

The second quotation given by Amal Kiran to support his particularity of the discussion is again in the context of the very problem of universal manifestation, it being pitched against a specific day or night. It runs as follows:

His objection of longueur would be perfectly just if the description of the night and the dawn had been simply of physical night and physical dawn; but here the physical night and physical dawn are, as the title of the canto clearly suggests, a symbol, although what may be called a real symbol of an inner reality and the main purpose is to describe by suggestion the thing symbolised; here it is a relapse into Inconscience broken by a slow and difficult return of consciousness followed by a brief but splendid and prophetic outbreak of spiritual light leaving behind it the "day" of ordinary human consciousness in which the prophecy has to be worked out. The whole of Savitri is, according to the title of the poem, a legend that is a symbol and this opening canto is, it may be said, a key beginning and announcement. So understood there is nothing here otiose or unnecessary; all is needed to bring out by suggestion some aspect of the thing symbolised and so start adequately the working out of the significance of the whole poem.

Again, we notice that in the narrative of the dawn the “main purpose is to describe by suggestion the thing symbolized”, describe in great epic style the involutionary-evolutionary unfoldment going on in the process of cosmic time; it has to attend the issue of the mortal creation poised to manifest the secret divinity residing in it. There is superconscient wisdom behind the unfoldment and the attempt is to convey it as much as our limited and imperfect language can do. In fact, if it has to be done it must be done creatively, and in order to do creatively so Sri Aurobindo has used every possible way of expression and presented the spiritual truth that is behind as well as above it. The images of night and day and dawn, or the narration of a human story as an evocative representation, or the entire depiction as a legend and a symbol are but some of the communicative means to achieve this objective. But Amal Kiran sees in the phrase “relapse into Inconscience” just the earth passing every night and day through the unconscious condition. He considers it as “the physical night and physical dawn constituting the earth’s daily phases”; he holds that what is conjured up in the description of the “dark beginning of all things” is only “an instance of the earth’s recurrent nocturnal phase”. But it is obvious that this temporal or phase-wise interpretation at once robs the Savitri-beginning of the rich transcendental element that alone is the reality behind everything. We have to appreciate that the mystic-spiritual poet is simply employing a mechanism of expression, pressing into use every device to communicate that which cannot be caught in our idiom and phrase. The impression we get is of the symbol dawn breaking not in earthly but in the unbounded transcendental sky, a prolegomenon of the superconscient functioning.