Let us look at the line “An hour
comes when fail all Nature's means.” (Savitri,
p. 11) This line in the Revised Edition reads as follows: “An hour arrives when
fail all Nature's means.” The obvious question is, how has the line undergone
such a change, though perhaps not of a very crucial kind, interesting yet it is
from a certain point of view.
In fact, there is an editorial
problem here, though of a minor nature, whether it should be “An hour comes…”
or “An hour arrives…” As far as the sense is concerned there is really not much
to choose between “comes” and “arrives”. From the point of view of poetic
technique we have: An hour/ arrives/ when fail/ all Nat/ ure’s means—four
beautiful iambs with spondee as the fourth foot; An ho/ ur comes/ when fail/
all Nat/ ure’s means—this is also acceptable, with ‘hour’ taken with two
syllables, not an uncommon thing in Savitri;
with this ‘ho /ur’ the first line—It was the hour before the Gods awake—would
become iamb-iamb-anapaest-iamb-iamb, which could also pass without any
technical objection. In many places Sri Aurobindo scans ‘inspires’ or ‘desires’
with three syllables, trisyllabic though generally they are disyllabic; so too
could be taken ‘hour’ as ‘ho/ ur’. As far as rhythm is concerned, it is a
matter of one’s taste and association, one’s predilections also; nor can there
be any strict formula everywhere for the same poet; it could depend upon the
situation. Then, while in the ‘arrival’-line there is a strong ‘r’-alliterative
effect, in the ‘comes’-line the additional ‘m’-alliteration brings a kind of
self-closing poetic result. Nor is this line that kind of a mantra in which
nothing can be changed, the exact word in the exact position. There is neither
the inevitability of ‘arrives’ nor of ‘comes’.
And yet there is a problem. The whole passage we are discussing was written
first by Sri Aurobindo around 1945, written on a tiny chit-pad sheet. On it our
line in his hand is ‘An hour arrives when fail all Nature's means.” But there
were revisions by dictation around it and when the scribe made a fair copy of
the text he put—inadvertently we might suppose, probably being carried away by
the sense of the sentence—‘comes’ instead of ‘arrives’. Obviously, ‘comes’
continued to be there through all the subsequent stages of composition,
including a number of times the line with ‘comes’ having read out to Sri
Aurobindo. Nirodbaran’s fair copy, that is, the ledger, as well as several
earlier manuscripts, had ‘comes’; Nolini’s type-sheets, proofs from the press
on three or four occasions—all of them were read out to Sri Aurobindo and he never
felt uneasy with his ‘arrives’ having been “changed” to ‘comes’ by somebody
else. It should also be noted that, in a few cases, there are differences
between what was sent to the press and what came out of it; obviously the
proofs had on them Sri Aurobindo’s revisions by dictation, but unfortunately
those proofs have not survived. Which could make room for one to argue that Sri
Aurobindo, at that stage, could have re-dictated the line as follows: “An hour
approaches when fail all Nature's means” with the third foot as an anapaest,
the line scanning as iamb-iamb-anapaest-spondee-iamb; but this dictated change
was not carried out by the press, again, something which is quite conceivable. However,
it must be admitted that in ‘approaches’ we do not have the naturalness of
‘comes’ or ‘arrives’.
One way of looking at the situation, as vehemently suggested by the upholders
of the ‘arrives’, the editors of the blemished Revised Edition, is as follows.
In their general remarks they write: “…an accident produced a reading that was
not noticeably wrong and even found its way into the printed text. This raises
the question: when Sri Aurobindo let a variant introduced by someone else
remain intact, is it the same as if he had written it himself? If we want an
authentic edition of Savitri in which
each word is Sri Aurobindo’s own, it would seem that in such a case the word
found in his manuscript should be restored in place of the word that was
inadvertently substituted for it by another person.” That is a very rational
argument no doubt, and sounds indisputable. But then there could also be
another way of looking at things. If the author has allowed to stand something,
can we really object to him in that respect? If he has passed something—“passed
unnoticed and remained in the published version,” as the editors put it—can we
overrule him and change the text? If Sri Aurobindo keeps something, though not
his, who are we to dismiss it? Can that which Sri Aurobindo retained be said to
be not ‘authentic’ or less ‘authentic’? In this case, it is not that ‘comes’
did not exist earlier; it did. Perhaps there should be some other way to
resolve the issue. Is there any? But let us look at the problem from the
perspective of objective detailing of the facts. This has unfortunately been
not made known to the readers and researchers of Savitri.
At the moment we are analysing the situation arising out of ‘comes’ / ‘arrives’ without really knowing how the said passage developed in the process of its composition. If it had remained intact all through, except for the inadvertent change of ‘arrives’ to ‘comes’ while making a fair copy of the manuscript, then perhaps one can concede the restoration of the author’s hand-written word. But around it, if there are new dictations or changes due to dictation, then the case becomes weak. We have absolutely no knowledge of it, and there is reason to say that the whole revision has been done in a kind of hush-hush manner. That makes it highly vulnerable, even if there is plenty of scholarship and hard work behind it. We have argued about some of these aspects in Editing Savitri—a Brief Discussion but a more detailed look into it is essential. This can happen only if there is access to the archival documents. Until then one can only point out uncertainties in the revised text and leave the matters at that.