Invocation 08 - Auroville

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.
In 1936, Amal Kiran, who at that time was the only person to whom
Sri Aurobindo had shown certain passages from Savitri, asked the Master:
"Are not these lines, which I regard as the ne plus ultra in world-poetry, a
snatch of the sheer Overmind?"
Sri Aurobindo replied :
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.
This was in 1936. In 1946 Sri Aurobindo remarked about his attitude ten
years earlier:
At that time I hesitated to assign anything like Overmind touch
or inspiration to passages in English or other poetry and did
not presume to claim any of my own writing as belonging to this
order.
Considering this, and and considering also that several lines of other poets
which he had hesitated about were later adjudged by him to be from the
Overmind, it seems certain that this passage which he had ascribed to the
Overmind Intuition, a plane defined by him as not Overmind itself but an
intermediate level, would have been traced by him to the supreme source if
he had been privately asked about it again.
These 31 lines of the 1936 version were subsequently changed slightly
here and there, and expanded to 51. In 1946, in answer to another query
from Amal Kiran, Sri Aurobindo made another important comment on this
passage describing Savitri :
The image of the bird and the bosom is obviously not new and
original, it images a common demand of the human heart and
does it by employing a physical and emotional figure so as to
5