Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
CWSA 27
Fragment ID: 6898
Comments on Specific Lines and Passages of the Poem [14]
I shall answer in this letter only about the passage in the description of Savitri which has been omitted.1 The simplest thing would be to leave the description itself and the article as they are. I am unable to accept the alterations you suggest because they are romantically decorative and do not convey any impression of directness and reality which is necessary in this style of writing. A “sapphire sky” is too obvious and common and has no significance in connection with the word “magnanimity” or its idea and “boundless” is somewhat meaningless and inapt when applied to sky. The same objections apply to both “opulence” and “amplitude”; but apart from that they have only a rhetorical value and are not the right word for what I want to say. Your “life’s wounded wings of dream” and “the wounded wings of life” have also a very pronounced note of romanticism and do not agree with the strong reality of things stressed everywhere in this passage. In the poem I dwell often upon the idea of life as a dream, but here it would bring in a false note. It does not seem to me that magnanimity and greatness are the same thing or that this can be called a repetition. I myself see no objection to “heaven” and “haven”; it is not as if they were in successive lines; they are divided by two lines and it is surely an excessively meticulous ear that can take their similarity of sound at this distance as an offence. Most of your other objections hang upon your overscrupulous law against repetitions. I shall speak about that in a later letter; at present I can only say that I consider that this law has no value in the technique of a mystic poem of this 
kind and that repetition of a certain kind can be even part of the technique; for instance, I see no objection to “sea” being repeated in a different context in the same passage or to the image of the ocean being resorted to in a third connection. I cannot see that the power and force or inevitability of these lines is at all diminished in their own context by their relative proximity or that that proximity makes each less inevitable in its place.
Then about the image about the bird and the bosom, I understand what you mean, but it rests upon the idea that the whole passage must be kept at the same transcendental level. It is true that all the rest gives the transcendental values in the composition of Savitri’s being, while here there is a departure to show how this transcendental greatness contacts the psychic demand of human nature in its weakness and responds to it and acts upon it. That was the purpose of the new passage and it is difficult to accomplish it without bringing in a normal psychic instead of a transcendental tone. The image of the bird and the bosom is obviously not new and original, it images a common demand of the human heart and does it by employing a physical and emotional figure so as to give it a vivid directness in its own kind. This passage was introduced because it brought in something in Savitri’s relation with the human world which seemed to me a necessary part of a complete psychological description of her. If it had to be altered,– which would be only if the descent to the psychic level really spoils the consistent integrality of the description and lowers the height of the poetry,– I would have to find something equal and better, and just now I do not find any such satisfying alteration.
As for the line about the strength and silence of the gods, that has a similar motive of completeness. The line about the “stillness” and the “word” gives us the transcendental element in Savitri,– for the Divine Savitri is the word that rises from the transcendental stillness; the next two lines render that element into the poise of the spiritual consciousness; this last line brings the same thing down to the outward character and temperament in life. A union of strength and silence is insisted upon in this poem as one of the most prominent characteristics of Savitri and I have dwelt on it elsewhere, but it had to be brought in here also if this description of her was to be complete. I do not find that this line lacks poetry or power; if I did, I would alter it. Your objection to the substitution of wideness for vastness2 is quite justified though not because of any reason of repetition, but because vastness is the right word and wideness is much inferior; the change was not deliberate but came by inadvertence due to a lapse of memory. I have restored vastness in the poem.
But, for all this, it may perhaps be better to keep the passage as you have written it [with omissions] since it is a particular characteristic of poetic style at its highest which you want to emphasise, and anything which you feel to lower or depart from that height may very properly be omitted. So unless you positively want to include the omitted passage kept as I have written it, we will leave your article and quotations to stand in their present form. The rest in another letter.
P.S. One thing occurs to me that the lines you most want to include might be kept, while the passage about the bird and the “haven” down to the “warmth and colour’s rule” could be left out. This would throw out all the things to which you object except the frequency of the sea and sky images and the recurrence of “great” after “greatness”; those have to remain, for I feel no disposition to alter those defects, if defects they are. Unless you think otherwise, we will so arrange it. In that case the alteration you want made in your article will find its place.
11 March 1946
1 This letter was written in response to suggestions made by K. D. Sethna (Amal Kiran) before he reproduced certain passages from Savitri in his article “Sri Aurobindo – A New Age of Mystic Poetry” (Sri Aurobindo Circle 2 [1946]). In that article Sethna omitted a number of lines from passages he quoted from the poem. The lines under discussion here are those that begin “Near to earth’s wideness, intimate with heaven” (pp. 14–16). – Ed.
2 In her he met a wideness like his own; [cf. p. 16].