Sri Aurobindo's Savitri

Topic started by Vishvesh Obla (@ 63.65.68.246) on Wed Jun 6 13:28:12 .
All times in EST +10:30 for IST.

I got a greeting today from a friend of mine with a quote he had found in one of those books of quotations. It said it was from Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri. I have read this poem in bits and pieces long time back, and I got curious to look into it again, being struck by the poetic construction of the passage. Thanks to Google, I could find the entire text of the poem in a minute.

Savitri is an epic which runs to about 24000 lines in twelve parts. It is written in blank verse, the iambic without rhyme, which is the ideal medium for a poem of this magnitude. He deals with the subject of a spiritual journey through the well-known legend of Savitri. Now apart from its spiritual significance, what struck me was the structure of the verse. I don’t know if this work has had any significant criticism as a poem apart from the lots of comments and articles by A’s disciples and followers. The blank verse is supposed to be capable of far subtler expressions as I have found in the versification of Shakespeare, Milton and even Keats (in his Hyperion). I was wondering if A was flat or if he was much cruder.


Her body of glory was expunged from heaven:
The rarity and wonder lived no more.
There was the common light of earthly day.
Affranchised from the respite of fatigue
Once more the rumour of the speed of Life
Pursued the cycles of her 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 stares at the future's covered face
Man lifted up the burden of his fate.


There you find the movement, which is typically epic in style. But then there was something of another significance missing in it. Take, for instance, a stanza taken at random, from Keats’s Hyperion:


This passion lifted him upon his feet,
And made his hands to struggle in the air,
His Druid locks to shake and ooze with sweat,
His eyes to fever out, his voice to cease.
He stood, and heard not Thea’s sobbing deep;
A little time, and then again he snatch’d
Utterance thus.—“But cannot I create?
“Cannot I form? Cannot I fashion forth
Another world, another universe
“To overbear and crumble this to nought?
“Where is another chaos? Where?”—That word
Found way unto Olympus, and made quake
The rebel three.—Thea was startled up,
And in her bearing was a sort of hope,
As thus she quick-voic’d spake, yet full of awe.


There is a fluidity in Keats’s verse that is definitely not there in the former. I think that comes by a greater mastery of versification alone. Not to mention that Aurobindo Ghosh wasn’t as qualified in his study of English poetry as Keats was, but to show that greater poetry has something else which Savitri as a poem seemed to me to lack. Its subject matter is much loftier, no doubt. Its theme and expression was a greater experimentation of a spiritual journey goes without dispute. But still poetry, as I read it, is much more of a comprehensive experience of thought and feeling, which seemed to me a little less in balance in Savitri. Well, to read the whole work, seemed to me, could be possible only to his disciples. I would rather personally prefer his Life Divine or his books on Integral Yoga to know more of him than this massive work.


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