Almost they saw who lived within her light

Her playmate in the sempiternal spheres

Descended from its unattainable realms

In her attracting advent's luminous wake,

The white-fire dragon bird of endless bliss

Drifting with burning wings above her days:

Heaven's tranquil shield guarded the missioned child.

There is a special artistic feature in lines 2-5 of the above passage: “sempiternal spheres”, “unattainable realms”, “luminous wake”, and “endless bliss”, these four adjective-noun pairs coming at the end of the respective lines. Sri Aurobindo was asked by Amal Kiran: "Is an accumulating grandiose effect intended by the repetition of adjective-and-noun in four consecutive line-endings?" Sri Aurobindo replied: “Yes; the purpose is to create a large luminous trailing repetitive movement like the flight of the Bird with its dragon tail of white fire.” [1936] The whole description was also preparing the happy arrival of the white-fire dragon bird, it mystically and majestically drifting into our sky. And what a gorgeous bird it is! Savitri is the incarnation of the Bird of the Transcendent, fiery and gold-winged and splendiferous, coming here in the greatness of her flight, coming from the realms unattainable to us.

There is a contrast between the two realms, the transcendental and the mortal, the mortal here inevitably carrying with it the “mournful” phrase of expression. After presenting Savitri as a perfect Shrine for the God of Love, we have here she in relationship with the factuality of this sorrowful and imperfect world of ours. There is no question of anxiety and suffering and unhappiness in those high domains to which she belongs; but now she has accepted the mortal’s lot, hers are breath-fastened orbs of sight, is subject to earthly limitations. Yet she remembers the place to which she really belongs, and that remembrance itself provides her safety of every kind in this dim and dangerous world. Her walk still keeps the measure of the gods. Elaborate or simple stained glass may have its own cathedral beauty, but here is she retaining transparency and brilliance of the bright liquidity of the glass itself. No earthly metallic salts colouring the glass—for instance cobalt oxide for blue—in different shades and depths colour her. If Savitri is a perfect shrine, then here is a shrine whose windows do not need stained glass to provide to it transparent walls, controlling the light entering into it from outside.

But then who is this bird flying in our skies? and who its relatives? There was a question related with it from Amal, about the dragon bird: "In the mystical region, is the dragon bird any relation of your Bird of Fire with 'gold-white wings' or your Hippogriff with 'face lustred, pale-blue-lined'? And why do you write: 'What to say about him? One can only see'?" here is the reply from Sri Aurobindo: “All birds of that region are relatives. But this is the bird of eternal Ananda, while the Hippogriff is the divinised Thought and the Bird of Fire is the Agni-bird, psychic and tapas. All that however is to mentalize too much and mentalising always takes most of the life out of spiritual things. That is why I say it can be seen but nothing said about it.” [1936]

Here is Sri Aurobindo’s Bird of Fire written on 15 October 1933:

Gold-white wings a-throb in the vastness, the bird of flame went glimmering over a sunfire curve to the haze of the west,

Skimming, a messenger sail, the sapphire-summer waste of a soundless wayless burning sea.

Now in the eve of the waning world the colour and splendour returning drift through a blue-flicker air back to my breast,

Flame and shimmer staining the rapture-white foam-vest of the waters of Eternity.

Gold-white wings of the miraculous bird of fire, late and slow have you come from the Timeless. Angel, here unto me

Bringst thou for travailing earth a spirit silent and free or His crimson passion of love divine,—

White-ray-jar of the spuming rose-red wine drawn from the vats brimming with light-blaze, the vats of ecstasy,

Pressed by the sudden and violent feet of the Dancer in Time from his sun-grape fruit of a deathless vine?

White-rose-altar the eternal Silence built, make now my nature wide, an intimate guest of His solitude,

But golden above it the body of One in her diamond sphere with Her halo of star-blooql and passion-ray!

Rich and red is thy breast, 0 bird, like blood of a soul climbing the hard crag-teeth world, wounded and nude,

A ruby of flame-petalled love in the silver-gold altar-vase of moon-edged night and rising day.

0 Flame who art Time's last boon of the sacrifice, offering-flower held by the finite's gods to the Infinite,

0 marvel bird with the burning wings of light and the unbarred lids that look beyond all space,

One strange leap of thy mystic stress breaking the barriers of mind and life, arrives at its luminous term thy flight;

Invading the secret clasp of the Silence and crimson Fire thou frontest eyes in a timeless Face.

This poem was in the nature of a metrical experiment combining stress system with the foot measure. The stanza is of four lines where the second and fourth line can be read as a ten-foot line of mixed iambs and anapaests, the first and third mainly readable by stresses—explains Sri Aurobindo. “The Bird of Fire is the living vehicle of the gold fire of the Divine Light and the white fire of the Divine Tapas and the crimson fire of Divine Love—and everything else of the Divine Consciousness.”

Here are some letters from Sri Aurobindo explaining the bird as a symbol:

·          A bird is a very frequent symbol of the soul, and the tree is the standing image of the universe—The Tree of Life.

·          It is in answer to your aspiration that the Mahakali force descended—the serpent is the Energy from above working in the vital answering to the Serpent Kundalini which rises from below. The white fire is the fire of aspiration, the red fire is the fire of renunciation and tapasya, the blue fire is the fire of spirituality and spiritual knowledge which purifies and dispels the Ignorance.

·          The bird is a symbol of the individual soul.

·          The bird is usually a symbol of some soul power when it is not the soul itself—here it is a power (awakened in the soul) of the whitish blue light—Sri Aurobindo's light.

·          Birds often indicate either mind-powers or soul-powers.

And Hymns to Mystic Fire [VIII:115:3] has the following:

He is to you like a bird settled on a tree, like the divine-moon-flow of the Soma-plant, like a clamorous spreading ocean; he is as one who carries in his mouth of flame, exuberant in strength, mighty in the way of his works, rushing on his paths.