Sri Aurobindo - Karuna Yoga

730
been a ‘magnum opus’ at all. Besides, it would have been a legend
and not a symbol. I therefore started recasting the whole thing;
only the best passages and lines of the old draft will remain,
altered so as to fit into the new frame.”
Throughout the thirties and early forties, it was primarily
Book One that was affected by this recasting. At first this book
was still called “Quest”. It extended as far as Savitri’s arrival at
“The Destined Meeting-Place” (the eventual title of Book Five,
Canto One). But in the early thirties, the brief description of the
Yoga of King Aswapati near the beginning swelled to hundreds
of lines. What was to become the second and longest book of
the epic, “The Book of the Traveller of the Worlds”, began to
take shape.
In a letter of 1936, Sri Aurobindo mentioned a new first
book, the “Book of Birth”, carved out of the overgrown
“Quest”. Another letter of the same year reveals the internal
structure of this book. It was “divided into sections and the
larger sections into subsections”. Up to this point, the books
had been divided only into passages separated by spaces, as
many cantos are now. As these sections increased in length, they
were recognised as formal units and began to be named and
numbered. Section marks (§) were usually put before and after
the numbers.
The Book of Birth, whose last section related the birth and
childhood of Savitri, was still disproportionately long and was
constantly growing. Early in 1937, Sri Aurobindo expressed
his intention of rearranging the opening books into a Book of
Beginnings and a Book of Birth and Quest.
Progress on the poem was intermittent in the thirties due
to Sri Aurobindo’s heavy load of correspondence. From the end
of 1938 to mid-1940, work on Savitri was suspended. But on 6
September 1942, a 110-page draft of the Book of Beginnings was
completed. The fourth of its eight sections, “The Ascent through
the Worlds”, accounted for more than half the total length and
had twelve subsections. In the next version, this section became
Book Two with the title it now has. The last four sections were
grouped into Book Three, “The Book of the Divine Mother”.