A persistent thrill of a transfiguring touch
Persuaded the inert black quietude
And beauty and wonder disturbed the fields of God.
Here are the first 89 lines of Savitri which in his last hand-written draft, probably of 1942,
were only 38. Sri Aurobindo was constantly revising the epic, particularly the
first canto. In fact he wrote to Nirodbaran, though much earlier than this
draft, in 1936, that Savitri was not
regarded by him as a poem to be written and finished, but as a field if
experimentation to see how far poetry could be written from one’s own yogic
consciousness and how that could be made creative. (Savitri, pp. 3-4)
A wandering hand of pale enchanted light
That glowed along a fading moment's brink,
Fixed with gold panel and opalescent hinge
A gate of dreams ajar on mystery's verge.
The great act of the wandering hand is to fix a gate of
dreams, a gate ajar on mystery’s verge. It is the mystery of the black quietude
visioning the marvel, the enchantment of God in the possibility of the diviner
things taking shape here. A sight opens out.
One lucent corner windowing hidden things
Forced the world's blind immensity to sight.
The darkness failed and slipped like a falling cloak
From the reclining body of a god.
Then through the pallid rift that seemed at first
Hardly enough for a trickle from the suns,
Outpoured the revelation and the flame.
The brief perpetual sign recurred above.
The revelation and the flame—that is the sign of the
Avatar’s coming, says the Mother. It is Sri Aurobindo’s symbol. In it is the
spiritual poetry at its magnificence, coming from some far-off Overmental realm
of sunshine and gold.
A glamour from the unreached transcendences
Iridescent with the glory of the Unseen,
A message from the unknown immortal Light
Ablaze upon creation's quivering edge,
Dawn built her aura of magnificent hues
And buried its seed of grandeur in the hours.
What is the message it brings? But it is the message of
new creation. The old tired want has made way for the arrival of bright joyous
hope and expectation, of optimism, of promise on the verge of fulfilment. The
mystic sense behind all that is here is about to be revealed, disclosed. It will be
disclosed in the nature of the myth, the story of Savitri. It is the story of
this earth which has been written in the transcendent, and is now going to be
worked in the thickness of the terrestrial circumstance, in this mortal world,
on this gainful mŗtyuloka. The Divine
himself is its author and he wrote it in his creative joy. It is the story of truth and beauty a home on earth, a home of sweetness indeed.
An instant's visitor the godhead shone:
On life's thin border awhile the Vision stood
And bent over earth's pondering forehead curve.
Interpreting a recondite beauty and bliss
In colour's hieroglyphs of mystic sense,
It wrote the lines of a significant myth
Telling of a greatness of spiritual dawns,
A brilliant code penned with the sky for page.
About some of these lines belonging to an earlier draft
of 1936, there is a discussion with Amal Kiran. Sri Aurobindo explains in great
detail the technicalities of the new poetry he was writing. Its epic lyricism
and majesty come from the luminous spiritual realm where the expression has its
first birth, the omniscient Hush. The expectation is, we have to have some
contact with it in order to enter into its spirit which itself will elevate
further our spirits to the widening worlds of creative joy and beauty and
truth carrying also the power of establishing them here.
Then a faint hesitating glimmer broke.
A slow miraculous gesture dimly came,
The persistent thrill of a transfiguring touch
Persuaded the inert black quietude
And beauty and wonder disturbed the fields of God.
A wandering hand of pale enchanted light
That glowed along a fading moment's brink
Fixed with gold panel and opalescent hinge
A gate of dreams ajar on mystery's verge.
Can't see the validity of any prohibition of double
adjectives in abundance. If a slow wealth-burdened movement is the right thing,
as it certainly is here1 in my judgment, the necessary means have to be used to
bring it about—and the double adjective is admirably suited for the purpose....
Do not forget that Savitri is an experiment in mystic poetry, spiritual poetry
cast into a symbolic figure. Done on this rule, it is really a new attempt and
cannot be hampered by old ideas of technique except when they are assimilable.
Least of all by a standard proper to a mere intellectual and abstract poetry
which makes "reason and taste" the supreme arbiters, aims at a
harmonised poetic intellectual balanced expression of the sense, elegance in
language, a sober and subtle use of imaginative decoration, a re-strained
emotive element etc. The attempt at mystic spiritual poetry of the kind I am at
demands above all a spiritual objectivity, an intense psycho-physical
concreteness. I do not know what you mean exactly here by "obvious"
and "subtle". According to certain canons, epithets should be used
sparingly, free use of them is rhetorical, an "obvious" device, a
crowding of images is bad taste, there should be subtlety of art not displayed
but severely concealed—summa ars est celare artem. Very good for a certain
standard of poetry, not so good or not good at all for others. Shakespeare
kicks over these traces at every step, Aeschylus freely and frequently,
With hideous ruin and combustion, down
To bottomless perdition, there to dwell
In adamantine chains and penal fire
or
Wilt thou upon the high and giddy mast
Seal up the shipboy's eyes and rock his brains
In cradle of the rude imperious surge
(note two double adjectives in three lines in the
last)—are not subtle or restrained, or careful to conceal their elements of
powerful technique, they show rather a vivid richness or vehemence, forcing
language to its utmost power of expression. That has to be done still more in
this kind of mystic poetry. I cannot bring out the spiritual objectivity if I
have to be miserly about epithets, images, or deny myself the use of all
available resources of sound-significance. The double epithets are indispensable
here and in the exact order in which they are arranged by me. You say the rich
burdened movement can be secured by other means, but a rich burdened movement
of any kind is not my primary object, it is desirable only because it is needed
to express the spirit of the action here; and the double epithets are wanted
because they are the best, not only one way of securing it. The
"gesture" must be "slow miraculous"—if it is merely
miraculous or merely slow, that does not create a picture of the thing as it
is, but of something quite abstract and ordinary or concrete but ordinary—it is
the combination that renders the exact nature of the mystic movement, with the
"dimly came" supporting it, so that "gesture" is not here a
metaphor, but a thing actually done. Equally a pale light or an enchanted light
may be very pretty, but it is only the combination that renders the luminosity
which is that of the hand acting tentatively in the darkness. That darkness
itself is described as a quietude, which gives it a subjective spiritual
character and brings out the thing symbolised, but the double epithet
"inert black" gives it the needed concreteness so that the
quietude ceases to be something abstract and becomes something concrete,
objective, but still spiritually subjective.... Every word must be the right
word, with the right atmosphere, the right relation to all the other words,
just as every sound in its place and the whole sound together must bring out
the imponderable significance which is beyond verbal expression. One can't chop
and change about on the principle that it is sufficient if the same mental
sense or part of it is given with some poetical beauty or power. One can only
change if the change brings out more perfectly the thing behind that is seeking
for expression—brings out in full objectivity and also in the full mystic
sense. If I can do that, well, other considerations have to take a backseat or
seek their satisfaction elsewhere.
In the passage about Dawn your two suggestions I find
unsatisfying. "Windowing hidden things" presents a vivid image and
suggests what I want to suggest and I must refuse to alter it;
"vistaing" brings in a very common image and does not suggest
anything except perhaps that there is a long line or wide range of hidden
things. But that is quite unwanted and not a part of the thing seen.
"Shroud" sounds to me too literary and artificial and besides it
almost suggests that what it covers is a corpse which would not do at all; a
slipping shroud sounds inapt while "slipped like a falling cloak"
gives a natural and true image. In any case, "shroud" would not be
more naturally continuous in the succession of images than
"cloak".—1946
I am afraid I shall not be able to satisfy your demand
for rejection and alteration of the lines about the Inconscient1 and
the cloak any more than I could do it with regard to the line about the silence
and strength of the gods. I looked at your suggestion about adding a line or
two in the first case, but could get nothing that would either improve the passage
or set your objection at rest. I am quite unable to agree that there is
anything jargonish about the line any more than there is in the lines of Keats,
Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty—that is all
Ye know on earth and all ye need to know.
That amounts to a generalised philosophical statement
or enunciation and the words "beauty" and "truth" are
abstract metaphysical terms to which we give a concrete and emotional value
because they are connected in our associations with true and beautiful things
of which our senses or our minds are vividly aware. Men have not learnt yet to
recognise the Inconscient on which the whole material world they see is built,
or the Ignorance of which their whole nature including their knowledge is
built; they think that these words are only abstract metaphysical jargon flung
about by the philosophers in their clouds or laboured out in long and wearisome
books like The Life Divine. But it is not so with me and I take my stand
on my own feeling and experience about them as Keats did on his about truth and
beauty. My readers will have to do the same if they want to appreciate my
poetry, which of course they are not bound to do.
Is it really a fact that even the ordinary reader would
not be able to see any difference between the Inconscient and Ignorance unless
the difference is expressly explained to him? This is not a matter of
philosophical terminology but of common sense and the understood meaning of
English words. One would say "even the inconscient stone" but one
would not say, as one might of a child, "the ignorant stone". One
must first be conscious before one can be ignorant. What is true is that the
ordinary reader might not be familiar with the philosophical content of the
word Inconscient and might not be familiar with the Vedantic idea of the
Ignorance as the power behind the manifested world. But I don't see how I can
acquaint him with these things in a single line, even with the most
illuminating image or symbol. He might wonder, if he were Johnsonianly minded,
how an Inconscient could be teased or how it could wake Ignorance. I am afraid,
in the absence of a miracle of inspired poetical exegesis flashing through my
mind, he will have to be left wondering. I am not set against adding a line if
the miracle comes or if some vivid symbol occurs to me, but as yet none such is
making its appearance.
In the other case also, about the cloak, I maintain my
position. Here, however, while I was looking at the passage an additional line
occurred to me and I may keep it:
The darkness failed and slipped like a falling cloak
From the reclining body of a god.
But this additional line does not obviate your
objection and it was not put in with that object. You have, by the way, made a
curious misapplication of my image of the careful housewife; you attribute this
line to her inspiration. A careful housewife is meticulously and methodically
careful to arrange everything in a perfect order, to put every object in its
place and see that there is no disharmony anywhere; but according to you she
has thrust a wrong object into a wrong place, something discordant with the
surroundings and inferior in beauty to all that is near it; if so, she is not a
careful housewife but a slattern. The Muse has a careful housewife,—there is
Pope's, perfect in the classical or pseudo-classical style or Tennyson's, in
the romantic or semi-romantic manner, while as a contrast there is Browning's
with her energetic and rough-and-tumble dash and clatter.
You ask why in these and similar cases I could not
convince you while I did in others. Well, there are several possible
explanations. It may be that your first reaction to these lines was very vivid
and left the mark of a samskār which could not be obliterated. Or
perhaps I was right in the other matters while your criticism may have been
right in these,—my partiality for these lines may be due to an unjustified
personal attachment founded on the vision which they gave me when I wrote them.
Again, there are always differences of poetical appreciation due either to
preconceived notions or to different temperamental reactions. Finally, it may
be that my vision was true but for some reason you are not able to share it.
For instance, you may have seen in the line about the cloak only the objective
image in a detailed picture of the dawn where I felt a subjective suggestion in
the failure of the darkness and the slipping of the cloak, not an image but an
experience. It must be the same with the line,
The strength, the silence of the gods were hers.
You perhaps felt it to be an ordinary line with a
superficial significance; perhaps it conveyed to you not much more than the
stock phrase about the "strong silent man" admired by biographers,
while to me it meant very much and expressed with a bare but sufficient power
what I always regarded as a great reality and a great experience. —1946
Then through the pallid rift that seemed at first
Hardly enough for a trickle from the suns
Outpoured the revelation and the flame.
Your "barely enough", instead of the finer
and more suggestive "hardly", falls flat upon my ear; one cannot
substitute one word for another in this kind of poetry merely because it means
intellectually the same thing; "hardly" is the mot juste in
this context and, repetition or not, it must remain unless a word not or only
juste but inevitable comes to replace it.... On this point I may add that
in certain contexts "barely" would be the right word, as for
instance, "There is barely enough food left for two or three meals",
where "hardly" would be adequate but much less forceful. It is the
other way about in this line. —1946
A lonely splendour from the invisible goal
Almost was flung on the opaque Inane.
No word will do except "invisible". I don't
think there are too many "l's"—in fact such multiplications of a
vowel or consonant assonance or several together as well as syllabic assonances
in a single line or occasionally between line-endings (e.g. face-fate) are an accepted
feature of the technique in Savitri. Purposeful repetitions also, or
those which serve as echoes or key notes in the theme. —1936
Air was a vibrant link between earth and heaven.
No, it is because "link twixt", two heavy
syllables (heavy because ending with two consonants) with the same vowel, makes
an awkward combination which can only be saved by good management of the whole
line—but here the line was not written to suit such a combination, so it won't
do. —1936
[Earlier the line was: "Air was a vibrant step twixt
earth and heaven."]
I think you said in a letter that in the line
Our prostrate soil bore the awakening ray
"soil" was an error for "soul". But
"soil" is correct; for I am describing the revealing light falling
upon the lower levels of the earth, not on the soul. No doubt, the whole thing
is symbolic, but the symbol has to be kept in the front and the thing
symbolised has to be concealed or only peep out from behind, it cannot come
openly into the front and push aside the symbol. —1946