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 [6]

Here where our half-lit ignorance skirts the gulfs

On the dumb bosom of the ambiguous earth,

Here where one knows not even the step in front

And Truth has her throne on the shadowy back of doubt,

An anguished and precarious field of toil

Outspread beneath some large indifferent gaze,

Our prostrate soil bore the awakening Light.

Here too the glamour and prophetic flame

Touched for an instant trivial daylong shapes,

Then the divine afflatus, lost, withdrew,

Dimmed, fading slowly from the mortal’s range.

A sacred yearning lingered in its trace,

The worship of a Presence and a Power

Too perfect to be held by death-bound hearts,

The prescience of a marvellous birth to come.

Affranchised from its respite of fatigue,

Once more the rumour of the speed of Life

Renewed the cycles of the blinded quest.

All sprang to their unvarying daily acts;

The thousand peoples of the soil and tree

Obeyed the unforeseeing instant’s urge,

And, leader here with his uncertain mind,

Alone who seeks the future’s covered face,

Man lifted up the burden of his fate. [cf. pp. 5 – 6]

A deep and large suggestive tone is here, with every word doing perfect expressive duty; but it would be interesting to know if there is some shifting of the plane — if the poetry is nearer the Higher Mind than in the preceding passages where a more direct luminosity seemed to be at work.

The former pitch continues, as far as I can see, up to “Light”, then it begins to come down to an intuitivised higher mind in order to suit the change of the subject — but it is only occasionally that it is pure higher mind — a mixture of the intuitive or illumined is usually there except when some truth has to be stated to the philosophic intelligence in as precise a manner as possible.

28 October 1936