Characterising the possibilities of the future poetry, Sri Aurobindo writes: “The mantra, poetic expression of the deepest spiritual reality, is only possible when three highest intensities of poetic speech meet and become indissolubly one, a highest intensity of rhythmic movement, a highest intensity of interwoven verbal form and thought-substance, of style, and a highest intensity of the soul’s vision of truth… it is only at a certain highest level of the fused intensities that the mantra becomes possible. It is from a certain point of view the rhythm, the poetic movement that is of primary importance… There must be a deeper and more subtle music, a rhythmical soul-movement entering into the metrical form and often overflooding it before the real poetic achievement begins.”

We have in the present passage, hymning the Divine Mother, a powerful example of the three intensities coming together, the confluence of three rivers, triveni sangam, pouring their heavenly waters on the aspiring soul of man.

Sri Aurobindo saw the possibility of the mantra as an authentic and sustained speech of the future, as the Word of the creative-expressive Spirit, and, to realise it, put his yogic force into it. “That possibility is the discovery of a closer approximation to what might be called the mantra in poetry, that rhythmic speech which, as the Veda puts it, rises at once from the heart of the seer and from the distant home of the Truth,—the discovery of the word, the divine movement, the form of thought proper to the reality which, ‘lies in the apprehension of a something stable behind the instability of word and deed, something that is a reflection of the fundamental passion of humanity for something beyond itself, something that is a dim shadowing of the divine urge which is prompting all creation to unfold itself and to rise out of its limitations towards its Godlike possibilities.’ Poetry in the past has done that in moments of supreme elevation; in the future there seems to be some chance of its making it a more conscious aim and steadfast endeavour.”

The Upanishad speaks of passing through the door of the sun, sūryasya dwārah; in Savitri these doors of the divine utterance have been thrown open. But it is not always that one passes through those doors. One needs an authentic gate-pass for the purpose that which can be won by a special kind of vāg-yajna or vāg-tapas, as the Gita insists. A qualifying spiritual tapas or concentrated luminous effort is needed.

When the mystical doors open out, they do not necessarily take the poet to the mantric utterance, nor do the emotion-charged devotional songs to the high-winging lyricism of the spirit. Occult ranges have their own awe-inspiring white and dazzling peaks of achievements; but they may yet miss the pure ethereality of the seeing word and the hearing sight. When it comes to the question of spiritual poetry, aglow with several suns of beauty, joy, life, power, truth in manifold combinations, or severally, one has to rise much above the human level, spend years of intense effort to enter into the world of the original sound where revelation and inspiration find their native expression, sound held by the deep and luminous hush. We may have ample poetic intelligence and creative insight, an unfailing aesthetic sense too, yet the vision and language and rhythm of the mantra may be quite lacking. A direct perception not only of the mysterious and the divinely haunting, a living contact with the reality is that which alone can give us such poetry. One large sustained example is in the ancient poetry of the Rig Veda; in our own times, dimensions of the infinite joining the aspiring soul’s, and in the answering benediction of the Gracious, are in Savitri.

To get that kind of poetry one has to be a Yogi-Poet indeed.