Unused Versions and Omitted Passages

A. BOOK TWO, CANTO SIX

The passages below have been transcribed from Sri Aurobindo's last handwritten version of the end of Book Two, Canto Six. An earlier manuscript was revised by dictation and used as the basis for the published text. Sri Aurobindo worked extensively on the first section of the version reproduced below, up to "A Sphinx whose eyes looked up to an unseen Sun."¹ The manuscript continues to the middle of Canto Seven, but since the remainder of it contains only minor verbal alterations and few lines not found in the text of the poem, only selected passages are presented here. Some punctuation missing in the manuscript has been supplied by the editors.

Immortal secrecies, seer-wisdoms lost²

In the descent towards our mortal fate

Spoke from the figures of her masquerade

In a familiar and forgotten tongue,

Or peered from the recondite magnificence

And subtle splendour of her draperies.

In sudden scintillations of the Unknown,

Glints from the opaque and strange translucencies,

Appearances and objects changed their powers;

Things without value heavenly values took,

Inexpressive sounds became veridical,

Ideas without meaning flashed apocalypse:

Wise tokens spelled out gibberish to the untaught,

And phrases which meant nothing and meant all

Wrapped in defensive armoured visored sight,

And oracles and sibylline prophecies

Offered themselves by the roadside for a price

Increased at each rejection by the mind;

Voices that seemed to come from unseen worlds

1 It was probably because of this reworking that the manuscript became separated from the final manuscript of the preceding portion of Book Two. Consequently it must have been overlooked at the time of the final dictated revision, with the result that an earlier version was taken up for this purpose.

2 This line was intended to follow "And wordless mouths unrecognisable." (cf. 189.33). There was a full stop after "unrecognisable" in this version.

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Uttered the syllables of the Unmanifest

And clothed the body of the mystic Word;

The wizard diagrams of an occult Force

Fixed for the world's magic processes the law

Of their precise unaccountable miracle,

And hue and figure brought their unsounded deeps

Of mindless context to reconstitute

In the brooding hush of intuitive stillnesses

The herald blazon of Time's secret things.

Amid her symbols of reality

(For such they seemed to a vision too remote

As we to a greater being symbols are,)

His life-walk was and new spiritual home:

He moved and lived with them as real forms,

Their lives were as concrete as the lives of men,

Their touch as vivid as our fellows' touch;

Their divine bodies make our fancies true

And bring to us breathing and animate

What in ourselves we only think and feel.

A grace of scenes quivered around him there

That were almost embodied sympathies;³

Their breath of dreams and language without speech

Answered to the thought and passion of the soul.

There form and feeling were identical,

And shape and thought a single harmony;

Nothing was there brute and inanimate.

These scenes were signs in life's long miracle-play.

In her green wildernesses and lurking depths,

In her thickets of joy where danger clasps delight,

He glimpsed the hidden wings of her songster hopes,

A glimmer of blue and gold and scarlet fire.

Along her wandering lanes and chance by-paths

And by her galloping rivulets and calm lakes

He plucked the glossy fruits of her self-ease

Or shared her rich content in browsing herds,

The light wayward flitting of her butterfly hours

3 The word "sympathies" is taken from a previous draft; the last manuscript reads "scenes", apparently repeated by mistake from the previous line.

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And her love-callings in the voice of birds,

And felt her embodied sweetness in her vales,

Her wide hill-breasts glowing in the greatness of morn

And the lounging hips of her grasslands' large sun-sleep

And her covert raptures in her forest haunts

And the beauty of her flowers of dream and muse.

Often in the radiant slumber of her noons

He saw incarnate in a swarm of gleams

On a glamour and gladness of bright surfaces,

A smile of depths, a cry of secrecies,

Thought's dance of dragonflies on mystery's stream

That skim but dare not dip in the murmur and race;

Or the levity of her immortal mind

He heard in the laughter of her rose desires,

Running to lure the bliss of the heart's surprise

Into a world of bloom and song and light

And through the scented ways to guide pursuit

Jangling sweet anklet-bells of fantasy.

A comrade of the silence of her heights

Accepted by her mighty loneliness,

He sat with her on meditation's peaks

Where life and being are a sacrament

Offered to a Reality beyond

And stood with her upon the edge of Time

Looking into ineffable formlessness,

Or climbed a perilous stair in silent Mind

And from a watch-tower in self's solitudes

He saw her loose into infinity

Her hooded eagles of significance,

Messengers of Thought to the Unknowable.

Thus close to her in body and in spirit,

Identified by soul-vision and soul-sense

And made one with all she was and longed to be,

He thought with her thoughts, suited to her steps his steps,

Lived by her breath and saw things with her eyes,

Fainted with her weakness, was powerful with her strength,

That so he might learn the secret of her soul.

He admired her splendid front of pomp and play

And the marvels of her rich and delicate craft

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And her magic of order and her swift caprice,

And her indomitable will to be,

And thrilled with the insistence of her cry

And bore like a Mother's ardent despot clutch

Her force that admits no other way than its own,

Her hands that knead Fate in their violent grasp,

Her touch that moves, her powers that seize and drive.

A will was in her to exceed her forms

Impatient to transfigure the finite world,

A huge desire to marry the Infinite;

He felt in her her hope and her despair,

The trouble and rapture of her heaving breasts,

The passion that possessed her yearning limbs,

Her mind that toiled dissatisfied with its fruits,

Her heart that captured not the one Beloved.

But all that he could see or she disclose

Left still the ultimate secret unrevealed;

Something she was unknown to him or her.

Always he met a veiled and seeking Force,

An exiled Goddess building mimic heavens,

A Sphinx whose eyes looked up to an unseen Sun.

Often he was near to a Spirit in her forms

Whose passive presence was her nature's strength;

But nowhere could be found its outward trace,

Or its stamp on her acts was indecipherable.

Only at times, as in a blurred vignette,

The eye that looks on the dark side of things

Made out an imagined figure from the blot.

Amid a fitful sleet of dazzling light

Was seen a half-blind chained divinity

Bewildered by the world in which he moved:

Yet conscious of the light prompting his soul

He sought his way amidst her laughter and call

And the index chaos of her myriad steps,

Led by the fluting of a distant player

Towards a total deep infinitude.

Around him was the forest of her signs:

In an inconsequent crowding sequence came

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The changing coloured roadlights of idea

And the hieroglyph of her symbol pageantries

And, like strange stars studding the cosmic map,

Her landmarks on the tangled paths of Time.

In her mazes of pursuit and of retreat

All ways she leads him, but no way is sure.

To every side she draws him and rejects.

Allured by the many-toned marvel of her chant,

Attracted by the witchcraft of her moods

And moved by her casual touch to joy and grief,

He loses himself in her, but wins her not.

A fugitive paradise smiles at him from her eyes;

He dreams of her beauty he shall hold as his joy,

He dreams of his mastery her limbs shall bear,

He dreams of the magic of her breasts of bliss.

In her illumined script, her fanciful

Translation of God's pure original text,

He hopes to find the Scripture Wonderful,

Hieratic key of unknown beatitudes.

But the word of Life is hidden in its script,

The chant of Life has lost its divine note.

A fire and colour tint her harmonies,

Yet they but bring a thrill of transient grace

And brief unsatisfied soon-spent delight

Wallowing in ravishments of mind and sense

And miss the luminous answer of the soul.

An ecstasy of unfulfilled desire

Is now the golden summit of her song;

A pathos of lost heights is her appeal,⁴

4 Cf. 192.3, where this line (with "its" instead of "her" before "appeal") occurs as part of a previous passage. The version reproduced here is Sri Aurobindo's fair copy, revised in his own hand, of the manuscript which, differently revised by dictation, was used for the published text of the canto. In the earlier manuscript, the line in question was written between two columns with no clear indication of where it was to be inserted. It was evidently intended to go with the right column, as in Sri Aurobindo's own copy (printed above). But when the manuscript was revised by dictation and copied by the scribe, this line was taken with the left column. It remained there through much subsequent revision of the passage into which it was introduced as well as of the passage with which it originally belonged. The extent of this revision has deterred the editors from shifting it back to its original position in the text, though it would read well after "Track the last heavenward climbings of her voice." (193.35).

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A blind heart-throb that reaches joy through tears:

She cherishes sorrow as her deepest call.

A wanderer on forlorn despairing routes,

Along the roads of sound a frustrate voice

Forsaken cries to a forgotten bliss.

In caverns of the echo of desire

There murmurs low a sourdined faint lament,

Or lingers upon sweet and errant notes

Hunting for pleasure in the heart of pain:

Its happier tunes are fragments of an hour.

(Cf. 189.34-194.18)

*

For being is eternal, endless life.

And whatsoever our will, to endure or cease,

From life we escape only by greater life.

After the body's death when all seems done,

Our acts compel us and perforce we must still

Continue in the orbit we have made:

Carried from birth to birth, from world to world,

There is a mute command from the Supreme,

There is creation's occult need to serve:

If earth should perish, another earth would come,

Some ancient deep impulsion labours on;

All is in labour with incessant birth;

No silent peak is found where Time could rest.

This was reflected in that greater scene;

There flowed a magic stream that could not cease.

(Cf. 197.5-17.)

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B. BOOK TWO, CANTO SEVEN

These passages have been selected from Sri Aurobindo's last handwritten version of the first part of Book Two, Canto Seven. The selections contain most of the lines occurring in this version that are not found in the published text. The manuscript was discontinued after an extensive reworking of the passage corresponding to pp. 212-13 in the Revised Edition. Two versions of this last passage are included below.

A fateful Influence upon creatures stole:

Its lethal touch pursued the immortal spirit,

On life was laid the finger of cold numb death

And overcome with error and grief and pain

The soul's native will for truth and joy and light.

A deformation coiled that claimed to be⁵

The being's very turn, Nature's true drive,

The twist and curve that cosmos takes in its birth,

An idiosyncracy of the Absolute.

In every corner ensconced of conscious life

A hostile and invading Mind was at work

Corrupting Truth with its own formulas,

Afflicting Knowledge with the hue of doubt.

Nothing was safe from the cunning of its touch

Or armed against the irony of its smile.

Interceptor of the listenings of the soul

It captured the oracles of the occult gods,

Cancelled the firm rock-edicts graved by Time,

Effaced the sign-posts of Life's pilgrimage,

And on the foundations of the cosmic Law

Erected its bronze pylons of misrule.

(Cf. 203.4-20)

In silence the inaudible voices spoke,

Hands that none saw planted the fatal grain,

No form was seen, yet a dire work was done.

In the heart, of seerhood's natural right deprived,

5 This line, found in the previous manuscript, was omitted by Sri Aurobindo in the present version. It is clearly needed to complete the sense.

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The will of God could now no more be read;

An iron decree in crooked uncials written

Imposed a law of sin and adverse fate.

(Cf. 204.4-8)

*

It was a space where nothing could be true;

For all was other than it claimed to be

And none confessed to himself his own deceit

But justified his wrong as native right;

Each clung to his falsehood as to heaven's truth,

Hiding from his soul, from Nature and from God:

A vast deception was the law of things.

Only by that deception they could live:

In error they moved and breathed and found their force.

All that attracted had a hollow charm;

Each rainbow brilliance was a splendid lie:

A beauty unreal wore a glamour face.

(Cf. 206.20-35)

*

There Life displayed to the spectator soul

The shadow depths of her strange miracle.

As might a harlot empress in a bouge,

Nude, unashamed, exulting she upraised

Her evil face of perilous beauty and charm

And drawing panic to a shuddering kiss

Twixt the magnificence of her fatal breasts,

Allured to their abyss the spirit's fall.

Once it had plunged, it asked not for release,

It took fierce joy in the ecstasy of its pains,

It found freedom's taste in a choice of delicate bonds

And reigned, sovereign of its own decadence.

A plethora of scenes besieged the gaze,

Thought-webs that reproduced themselves in life

And taught the nature to be what it saw;

For it is mind that makes the form of the days

With the colours it absorbs from the world's hues

And thought decides the destiny of the soul.

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Across the field of sight she multiplied,

As on a scenic film or moving plate,

The implacable splendour of its nightmare pomps

And her rapture vision of infernal joys:

A glory of abominable things.

On the dark background of a soulless world

She staged between a lurid light and shade

Her dramas of the sorrow of the depths

Written on the anguished nerves of living things:

Her epics of horror and grim ruthless deeds

Paralysed pity in the hardened breast,

And the spectacle of the degraded soul

Dried up the founts of natural sympathy.

In her booths of sin and night-repairs of vice

Her sordid imaginations etched in flesh,

Signed photogravures of her infamy,

Published the covered dirt of Nature's guilt,

And foul scenarios hideous and macabre

And gargoyle masques obscene and terrible

Came televisioned from the gulfs of Night:

And twisted caricatures of reality

And art chef-d'oeuvres of weird distorted lines

Trampled the torn sense into tormented shapes.

A Craft of ingenious monstrosities

Made vileness great and sublimated filth.

(Cf. 212.1-213.5.)

*

(Another version of part of the preceding)

Once caught, nothing could help it any more,

Torn with the flame of dire beatitudes.

It took fierce joy in the ecstasy of its pains

And reigned, sovereign of its own decadence.

A plethora of scenes besieged his gaze.

Across his field of sight she multiplied

As on a scenic film or moving plate

The implacable splendour of her nightmare pomps

And her rapture-vision of infernal joys:

On the dark background of a soulless world

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She staged between a lurid light and shade

Her dramas of the sorrow of the depths

Written on the agonised nerves of living things;

Her epics of horror and grim majesty

Paralysed pity in the hardened breast,

Accustoming to carnage as to a meal,

To torture as to a pleasant boxing-bout,

Abolishing the mind's outcry and recoil,

The life's revolt, the body's antipathy.

C. BOOK FOUR, CANTO TWO

The top and carbon copies of a typescript of this canto were differently revised by Sri Aurobindo on separate occasions. When the canto was prepared for publication in 1950, the text was based primarily on the revised carbon copy, the middle part of which contained extensive additions. A few lines from the other revised copy of the typescript were inserted near the beginning, with minor modifications that show some involvement of Sri Aurobindo in the process. Otherwise this version was not used. The opening portion of the unused version contains significant revision which cannot always be combined with the version on which the final text is based. This is printed below.

A land of mountains and wide sun-beat plains

And giant rivers pacing to vast seas,

A marvellous land of reverie and trance,

Silence swallowing life's act into its sea

And action springing from spiritual hush,

Of thought's transcendent climb or heavenward leap,

Home of the mightiest works of God and man

Where Nature seemed a dream of the Divine

And beauty and grace and grandeur flowered from its dream,

Harboured the childhood of the incarnate Flame.

Over her watched millennial influences

And the deep godheads of a grandiose past

Looked out and saw the future's godheads come.

Earth's brooding wisdom spoke to her still breast;

Mounting from mind's last peaks to mate with gods,

Making earth's brilliant thoughts a springing board

To dive into the cosmic vastnesses

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The knowledge of the thinker and the seer

Saw the unseen and thought the unthinkable,

Opened large doors upon infinity

And gave a shoreless sweep to mortal acts.

Art and the vision of beauty called to the eyes

Figure and hues native to higher worlds

Till this world's images took that greater stamp.

Nature and soul vied in nobility.

Ethics keyed earthly lives to imitate heaven's;

The harmony of a rich culture's tones

Exhausted and exceeded earth's full store,

Refined the sense and magnified its reach

To hear the unheard and glimpse the invisible

In subtle fields that escape our narrow ken

And taught the soul to soar beyond the known

And steal entry into the Immortals' worlds.

Inspiring life to greaten beyond its bounds

Leaving earth's safety daring wings of Mind

Bore her above the trodden roads of thought

To live on eagle heights nearer the Sun

Where wisdom sits on her eternal throne.

All her life's turns led her to symbol doors

Admitting to secret Powers who were her kin;

Initiate of bliss and child of Light,

A mystic acolyte trained in Nature's school

Aware of the marvel of created things

Her soul's gifts she gave, earth-magic's miracles

Laid on the altar of the Wonderful;

Her hours were a ritual in a timeless fane;

Her acts she made gestures of sacrifice.

Invested with the rhythm of higher spheres

The word became a hieratic means

For the release of the imprisoned spirit

Into communion with its comrade gods:

Helping to new expression and new form

Some immemorial Soul in men and things,

Seeker of the Unknown and the Unborn,

It drew the veil from Nature's secrecies.

(Cf. 359.1-360.25.)

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D. BOOK FIVE, CANTO THREE

These lines are found, written in the scribe's hand, at the end of a typed copy of this canto.

Now she travelled through many changing lands,

Earth round her was illumined by her joy;

Its hours were long supports for rapture's face;

Life was an outbreak of the All-Wonderful.

All hope and chance took on a brighter shape:

This ordinary life of man could change;

The seal was there of the Ineffable.

This meeting cut across old Nature-lines

To pen upon its bold decisive page

The foreword of her soul's biography.

Two powers had come down from the unknown Beyond

To play their part upon the cosmic ground.

These spirits linked two lines of eternity,

These bodies joined two points of the infinite.

These lives must serve the Timeless and Unseen

For writing out in symbol human acts

The meaning of God's mystery play in Time.

E. BOOK SIX, CANTO TWO

This is another version, written by Sri Aurobindo in a small note-pad, of the passage following the line, "It keeps for her her privilege of pain." (457.2). The manuscript is difficult to decipher. A few readings are slightly uncertain and some punctuation has been supplied by the editors.

But hard it is for human mind to feel

Heaven's good in life's crash and the iron grasp of Doom

Or tolerate the dreadful mystery

Of pain and grief and evil masking God.

How can it seize the thousand-sided drive,

The single act pointing a million acts,

The mystic total of the magical sum

Or swept by the world-ocean's rushing waves

Sense mid the wash and spume and loud multitude

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The one all-discerning Will, the touch, the tread

Of God's indivisible reality?

Man's thought is like a diamond cutting gems,

Man's will is like a labourer hewing stones:

He cuts into sky-strips the boundless Truth

And takes each strip as if it were all the heavens.

His knowledge chained to thought and led by words

Is gaoled in the divisions it has made.

He looks at infinite possibility

And gives to its plastic Vast the name of Chance;

He sees the long result of the all-wise Force

And feels the cold rigid limbs of lifeless Law.

The will of the Timeless working out in Time

In the free absolute steps of cosmic Truth

He thinks a dead machine, an unconscious Fate.

It is decreed and Satyavan must die;

Her hour is known, foreseen the fatal stroke.

What else shall be is written in her soul,

But till the hour reveals the fateful script,

The writing waits illegible and mute.

Her mortal breast hides her immortal Fate.

O King, thy fate is a transaction fixed

In long advance but altered and renewed

At every hour between Nature and thy soul.

Its items ever grow and ever change;

It is a balance drawn in Destiny's book.

Thou canst open with thy fate a new account

Begun upon a stainless virgin page.

Thou canst dispute her formidable claim

With God as the foreseeing arbiter,

Thou canst accept thy fate, thou canst refuse.

Even if the Judge maintains the unseen decree

Yet thy refusal is in thy credit written:

Death is no end, Fate moves, it stands not still.

Its will unshaken by the bronze blare of Doom,

The spirit soars up stronger by defeat,

Its godlike wings grow wider with each fall.

Its growth within is watered by its wounds,

Its splendid failures' sum is victory.

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Thy fate touches the abyss to leap at heaven.

Thy fate is like an army's marching ranks;

It has many fronts and stands on many lines.

Thy future's map is kept in planes unseen,

Thy soul has planned its strategy with God.

Thy body's fate comes first, a column pushed

Through the forts of the present to a city unknown;

Its march is marshalled by the wheeling stars

That carry its cosmic consigns in their light.

It sees not where it goes but walks by faith;

It smites its way through the world's opponent powers,

Or, frustrate, longs and waits a happier birth.

A second front is in a greater plane;

Thence thy life-forces drive like rolling waves

Its small or large formations towards earth's days

And swell the might of thy terrestrial fate.

Or as the wind-gods' squadrons jostle in heaven,

Trumpeting with breath of storm and thunder's call

And their arrows like gold lightnings fill the sky,

Such is their coming, such their clamour and charge.

In armour bright the shining riders come,

Leaders hurrying Destiny's tardy pace,

Victors preparing grander shocks to come.

If the soul could rise into that greater plane

And with its motions quicken man's petty life,

Erasing the firm consigns of the stars

Thy will could then give orders to thy fate.

On the radiant skyline of a greater Mind

The Ideas that Fate fulfils not yet are seen.

The secret Will has its headquarters there

That planned the tactics of the things that are

And behind them plans for greater things to be.

Thence gleam the reconnaissances divine,

Thence come the prophet scouts, the observer seers,

The godlike dreams, the vast and wide-winged thoughts

That cannot yet take shape in earthly life,

But here and there small part-fulfilments dawned

And of their fragments is our present made.

But if the soul could live upon those heights,

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Then would his life be the plaything of his thoughts,

His mind could be the shaper of his fate.

Above all glows a supramental range.

There is God's staff; there is his High Command.

The Truth lives there which oversees the world,

Of which all things are the disfiguring robe.

O mortal, even now couldst thou receive

Only some influence from that marvellous plane,

All then would change, divinity be thy fate.

F. BOOK SEVEN, CANTO THREE

These lines were printed in a footnote in previous editions as an alternative to the twelve lines beginning with "Here was a quiet country of fixed mind," (498.5-16).

This narrowed life's pedestrian thought and will

Debouched into a little continent space

Where soul was not nor spirit, and thinking mind

Laboured content with small finalities.

It seemed to it the top of being's arc

And the last circle of the quest of life.

It was a paradise for thought's crowned ease

Where nothing more was left to find or know,

A tabernacle of wise contented life.

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