Sri Aurobindo - Karuna Yoga

736
Although a few pages of an early version were significantly
retouched at some stage, the concluding two sections of the
Epilogue stayed almost exactly as they were. Thus the closing
pages of the epic, like most of Book Eight, remained as a sample
of the style in which Savitri was originally written.
Near the end of his life, Sri Aurobindo’s eyesight was so
poor that he no longer wrote at all. He made no more drafts for
Savitri and the work proceeded entirely by dictation. Virtually
the whole revision of “The Book of Everlasting Day” was done
in this purely oral manner and may be inferred to belong to this
late period. There exist only a few pages of drafts for it in Sri
Aurobindo’s hand, found in note-pads he used around 1946. He
was probably referring to these when he wrote in 1947 that he
had already recast “part of the eleventh” book.
Book Eleven culminates in the longest continuous dictated
passage in Savitri. The passage was written by the scribe in a separate
note-pad and seems to have no antecedent in any previous
draft. This is the section which begins on p. 702 with “Descend
to life . . . ”, and ends at the bottom of p. 710 with “This earthly
life become the life divine.” Regarding Sri Aurobindo’s dictation
in Book Eleven, the scribe reports that “line after line began to
flow from his lips like a smooth and gentle stream and it was on
the next day that a revision was done to get the link for further
continuation.”
By this time, cantos of Parts Two and Three were coming out
in journal instalments and fascicles like those of Part One. Most
of the cantos of Books Four, Five, Six and Nine were published
in this way in 1949-50. Unlike the fascicles of the first part, they
were not revised afterwards by Sri Aurobindo.
But in 1948, an extract from Book Six, Canto Two had
already been printed in the Sri Aurobindo Mandir Annual. An
offprint of this was read to Sri Aurobindo and the changes he
dictated were incorporated in a retyped copy. The painstaking
revision of this second typescript was reportedly the last work
he did on Savitri. A short paragraph before the concluding description
of Narad’s departure was the final passage to receive
detailed attention in November 1950, less than a month before