Sri Aurobindo - Karuna Yoga

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the case of other books on which he bestowed his full attention
in the 1940s. Only the Book of Death and the Epilogue stayed
closer to their original shape, but he always intended to come
back to these.
On the other hand, old drafts of “Twilight” formed merely
a starting-point for the four cantos of Book Ten. The speeches
of Savitri and Death were refashioned, rearranged in their order,
and new ones inserted. As he proceeded from one canto to the
next, Sri Aurobindo added longer and longer passages that were
quite new. The first section of Canto One, the long speech of
Death which ends Canto Two, all but the last few pages of
Canto Three, and most of Canto Four — especially its second
half, where Savitri finally triumphs over Death — owe little or
nothing to any early version.
In a letter of 22 April 1947, Sri Aurobindo summarised the
status of the various books of the second and third parts. Books
Four, Five, Six, Nine and Ten had by then “been completed, in
a general way, with a sufficient finality of the whole form but
subject to final changes in detail”. The other four books were
far from even a provisional completion.
A “drastic recasting of the last two books” was felt to be
needed and “only a part of the eleventh” had been subjected to
that process. But a yet larger task lay ahead, the splitting up of
the original Book of Death and the writing of the new cantos
that would go into the Book of Yoga. In his letter of April 1947
Sri Aurobindo did not say what he planned to do next. But there
are reasons to believe that, rather than going on directly from
Book Ten to Book Eleven, he now retraced his steps to Book
Seven.
The description of Savitri’s Yoga, complementing that of
Aswapati’s Yoga in Part One, was drafted in a thick notebook
whose first hundred pages are filled with drafts for Book Ten,
Canto Four. By March 1947, even before finishing the tenth
book, Sri Aurobindo had begun to use this notebook for preliminary
work on Book Seven. The scribe was not asked to
copy the semi-legible handwriting of the draft. Instead, Sri Aurobindo
dictated to him the lines he had jotted down, often in a