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 [13]

Are not these lines a snatch of the sheer Overmind?

All in her pointed to a nobler kind.

Near to earth’s wideness, intimate with heaven,

Exalted and swift her young large-visioned spirit,

Winging through worlds of splendour and of calm,

O’erflew the ways of Thought to unborn things.

Ardent was her self-poised unstumbling will,

Her mind, a sea of white sincerity,

Passionate in flow, had not one turbid wave.

As in a mystic and dynamic dance

A priestess of immaculate ecstasies,

Inspired and ruled from Truth’s revealing vault,

Moves in some prophet cavern of the Gods,

A heart of silence in the hands of joy

Inhabited with rich creative beats

A body like a parable of dawn

That seemed a niche for veiled divinity

Or golden temple-door to things beyond.

Immortal rhythms swayed her time-born steps;

Her look, her smile awoke celestial sense

In this earth-stuff and their intense delight

Poured a supernal beauty on men’s lives.

The great unsatisfied godhead here could dwell.

Vacant of the dwarf self’s imprisoned air,

Her mood could harbour his sublimer breath

Spiritual that can make all things divine:

For even her gulfs were secrecies of light.

At once she was the stillness and the Word,

An ocean of untrembling virgin fire,

A continent of self-diffusing peace.

In her he met a vastness like his own;

His warm high subtle ether he refound

And moved in her as in his natural home. [cf. pp. 14–16]

This passage is, I believe, what I might call the Overmind Intuition at work expressing itself in something like its own rhythm and language. It is difficult to say about one’s own poetry, but I think I have succeeded here and in some passages later on in catching that very difficult note; in separate lines or briefer passages (i.e. a few lines at a time) I think it comes in not unoften.

3 November 1936