Sri Aurobindo - Karuna Yoga

Note on the Text 729
a scheme of six cantos and an epilogue. The canto titles were:
Love, Fate, Death, Night, Twilight and Day.
After making a few drafts in cantos, he started substituting
the word “book” for “canto”. There were now six books with
the same names as the former cantos. Meanwhile the larger division
had reappeared as two parts, “Earth” and “Beyond”. At
first each part comprised three books, not counting the epilogue.
But before long, the rapidly growing first book was broken up
into two. The second book kept the name “Love”; the first was
renamed “Quest”.
A manuscript beginning with “Book I / Quest” has the title
“Sâvithrî: A Tale and a Vision”. (In early versions, “Sâvithrî”
was the usual spelling of the heroine’s name.) Sri Aurobindo
referred to this stage in the poem’s history in a letter of 1936:
“Savitri was originally written many years ago before the
Mother came [i.e., before the Mother’s final arrival in 1920], as a
narrative poem in two parts, Part I Earth and Part II Beyond . . .
each of four books — or rather Part II consisted of three books
and an epilogue.”
This was the plan of Savitri at the end of the first phase
of its composition. But the last manuscript actually completed
was in six cantos and an epilogue. After “books” replaced the
“cantos” and the number of books increased, some books were
worked over several times. Others were hardly touched. There
is a partial draft of “Book III / Death”, for example; there is
none from the stage when “Death” would have been the fourth
book. After 1945 when Sri Aurobindo incorporated material
from the early poem into what was by then a full-fledged epic,
he sometimes went back to a manuscript of the six “cantos” as
his starting-point.
Savitri was apparently put aside during most of the 1920s, a
period when Sri Aurobindo did little writing. The first evidence
of its resumption is found in a letter of 1931. Here he speaks of a
radical change in the conception and scope of the poem. Already
the subtitle, “A Legend and a Symbol”, is present in his mind:
“There is a previous draft, the result of the many retouchings of
which somebody told you; but in that form it would not have