Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Poetry and Art

SABCL - Volume 27

Part 2. On His Own and Others’ Poetry
Section 1. On His Poetry and Poetic Method
On Savitri

Comments on Specific Lines and Passages of the Poem [1]

As if solicited in an alien world

With timid and hazardous instinctive grace,

Orphaned and driven out to seek a home,

An errant marvel with no place to {{0}}live,[[Sri Aurobindo, Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol, volume 33 of The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo, p. 3. Subsequent page references are given in square brackets after the line or lines quoted. The passages Sri Aurobindo was asked to comment on were often revised later. Here the passages are reproduced from a version written at or near the time of Sri Aurobindo’s comment. Where this version differs significantly from the final version, the page reference is preceded by “cf.” (compare). The letters are arranged according to the order of the lines in the final text of Savitri. — Ed.]]

I see no sufficient reason to alter the passage; certainly, I could not alter the line beginning “Orphaned ... ”; it is indispensable to the total idea and its omission would leave an unfilled gap. If I may not expect a complete alertness from the reader,— but how without it can he grasp the subtleties of a mystical and symbolic poem? — he surely ought to be alert enough when he reads the second line to see that it is somebody who is soliciting with a timid grace and it can’t be somebody who is being gracefully solicited; also the line “Orphaned etc.” ought to suggest to him at once that it is some orphan who is soliciting and not the other way round: the delusion of the past participle passive ought to be dissipated long before he reaches the subject of the verb in the fourth line. The obscurity throughout, if there is any, is in the mind of the hasty reader and not in the grammatical construction of the passage.

1946