Sri Aurobindo’s Epic Savitri - M P Pandit

A substantial part of Sri Aurobindo’s writings is poetry and on poetry. To Sri Aurobindo poetry, like all art, is an interpreter of the Reality, whether finite or infinite. It is not a decorative element in life. True poetry communicates an experience, a message, a vision of truth. It embodies something that is lived by the soul and seeks to communicate it. It follows that the word to convey this truth must carry its characteristic vibration. It must answer to the quality of the message that seeks expression. Poetry is thus a living vehicle of truth-experience. It not only records the experience but is potent enough to communicate it to the reader or hearer. This in fact was the nature of the poetry of the ancient Vedic Rishis or the seers of the Upanishad. The Mantra was the inevitable word that came vibrating out of their spiritual depths and took shape in the mind. Sri Aurobindo perceives that with the turn of the Soul of humanity towards the Truth of the Spirit, poetry is on its way to assume its rightful function and he expounds the direction in which world-poetry is fast developing. He himself has written a great body of poetry –– and prose poetry –– illustrating this movement towards a living expression of mystic truth. The tour de force in this field is his work Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol –– the longest epic in the English language –– running into twenty-three thousand lines and more.

Sri Aurobindo draws upon the well-known story of Savitri-Satyavan from the Vanaparva of the Mahabharata but in his hands it ceases to be a mere didactic narrative extolling the virtues of wifely devotion. As A Legend and a Symbol, it is at once the spiritual history of the world and the epic of man in his struggle from Darkness, Falsehood and Death to Light, Truth and Immortality.

© "Sri Aurobindo and His Yoga" by MP Pandit, published by Lotus Light Publications, PO Box 2, Wilmot, WI 53192 USA. Reprinted with permission.

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