In Savitri the last three passages dictated by Sri Aurobindo
[Following is the account narrated by Nirodbaran, the last three passages in Savitri dictated by Sri Aurobindo, just three weeks before his withdrawal on 5 December 1950. This had first appeared in the second edition of Savitri, the University Edition, published in 1954. Nirodbaran was his scribe since 1944. The full passage running into seventy-two lines is absolutely the last dictation in the composition of Savitri, the last line uttered by him being “But leave her to her mighty self and Fate”, a perfect pentametric line with five disyllables, the last word “Fate”.]
Some months before his passing, Sri Aurobindo, as if in foreknowledge of the event, said: “I want to finish Savitri soon.” The words took by utter surprise the disciple, his scribe, who had been used to the grandly patient way in which so far it had been composed and frequently retouched and amplified. Even when, in the past, composition had been extraordinarily swift — once four to five hundred lines needing hardly any change were dictated in succession — there had been no hurry in the poet’s attitude to his work. But now he increased immensely the general tempo of composition and revision. There seemed a race with time. And it was almost towards the end that, after rapidly revising the long second canto of the Book of Fate, he paused with some satisfaction. Then he inquired what still remained to be written. On being told about the Book of Death and the Epilogue entitled The Return to Earth, which were yet to be caught up into a larger utterance, he remarked: “Oh, that? We shall see about that afterwards.” Savitri, as the footnote to the Book of Death indicates, was not completed in the common meaning of the term and indeed Sri Aurobindo’s original plan was to give this part of the poem as well as the Epilogue a thorough recasting. But his strange remark suggests that later, for reasons of his own, he was not anxious about them and that what he had thought necessary had been done. So it is impossible to say definitely that he did not wish Savitri to be, on the whole, just as he had left it after making corrections and additions in the Canto already mentioned of the Book of Fate.
These corrections and additions were the last things he wrote in this epic of 23,837 (4th edition, 1993) lines, over which he spent so many years. Among them, in view of subsequent circumstances, three newly written passages in the speech of Narad stand out most significantly. The first is about the sacrifice the God-Man gives in history:
He who has found his identity with God
Pays with the body’s death his soul’s vast light. ||108.40||
His knowledge immortal triumphs by his death. ||108.41||
The second dwells on the inner meaning with which Satyavan’s departure from the earth is packed:
In vain thou mournst that Satyavan must die;
His death is a beginning of greater life,
Death is the spirit’s opportunity. ||112.38||
A vast intention has brought the souls close
And love and death conspire towards one great end. ||112.39||
For out of danger and pain heaven-bliss shall come,
Time’s unforeseeing event, God’s secret plan. ||112.40||
The third is the passage of seventy-two lines, absolutely the last piece of poetry dictated in one stretch by Sri Aurobindo, in which, with a sound as of massive repeating bells, Narad admonishes King Aswapathy’s wife when she protests against the fate of loneliness that will be her daughter’s, Savitri’s, in consequence of the predestined passing of Satyavan, even as it appeared to be that of Sri Aurobindo’s spiritual coworker, the Mother, at the time the Master of the “Integral Yoga” withdrew from his body. :
Queen, strive no more to change the secret will;
Time’s accidents are steps in its vast scheme. ||112.43||
Bring not thy brief and helpless human tears
Across the fathomless moments of a heart
That knows its single will and God’s as one:
It can embrace its hostile destiny;
It sits apart with grief and facing death,
Affronting adverse fate armed and alone. ||112.44||
In this enormous world standing apart
In the mightiness of her silent spirit’s will,
In the passion of her soul of sacrifice
Her lonely strength facing the universe,
Affronting fate, asks not man’s help nor god’s:
Sometimes one life is charged with earth’s destiny,
It cries not for succour from the time-bound powers. ||112.45||
Alone she is equal to her mighty task. ||112.46||
Intervene not in a strife too great for thee,
A struggle too deep for mortal thought to sound,
Its question to this Nature’s rigid bounds
When the soul fronts nude of garbs the infinite,
Its too vast theme of a lonely mortal will
Pacing the silence of eternity. ||112.47||
As a star, uncompanioned, moves in heaven
Unastonished by the immensities of space,
Travelling infinity by its own light,
The great are strongest when they stand alone. ||112.48||
A God-given might of being is their force,
A ray from self’s solitude of light the guide;
The soul that can live alone with itself meets God;
Its lonely universe is their rendezvous. ||112.49||
A day may come when she must stand unhelped
On a dangerous brink of the world’s doom and hers. ||112.50||
Carrying the world’s future on her lonely breast,
Carrying the human hope in a heart left sole
To conquer or fail on a last desperate verge;
Alone with death and close to extinction’s edge,
Her single greatness in that last dire scene,
She must cross alone a perilous bridge in Time
And reach an apex of world-destiny
Where all is won or all is lost for man. ||112.51||
In that tremendous silence lone and lost
Of a deciding hour in the world’s fate,
In her soul’s climbing beyond mortal time
When she stands sole with Death or sole with God
Apart upon a silent desperate brink
Alone with her self and death and destiny
As on some verge between Time and Timelessness
When being must end or life rebuild its base,
Alone she must conquer or alone must fall. ||112.52||
No human aid can reach her in that hour,
No armoured God stand shining at her side. ||112.53||
Cry not to heaven, for she alone can save. ||112.54||
For this the silent Force came missioned down;
In her the conscious Will took human shape:
She only can save herself and save the world. ||112.55||
O queen, stand back from that stupendous scene,
Come not between her and her hour of Fate. ||112.56||
Her hour must come and none can intervene:
Think not to turn her from her heaven-sent task,
Strive not to save her from her own high will. ||112.57||
Thou hast no place in that tremendous strife;
Thy love and longing are not arbiters there,
Leave the world’s fate and her to God’s sole guard. ||112.58||
Even if he seems to leave her to her lone strength,
Even though all falters and falls and sees an end
And the heart fails and only are death and night,
God-given her strength can battle against doom
Even on a brink where Death alone seems close
And no human strength can hinder or can help. ||112.59||
Think not to intercede with the hidden Will,
Intrude not twixt her spirit and its force
But leave her to her mighty self and Fate. ||112.60||
In one of the comments below we have the following sentence, Savitri, Book Two Canto Six:
In sudden scintillations of the unknown,
Inexpressive sounds became veridical,
Ideas that seemed unmeaning flashed out truth;
Voices that came from unseen waiting worlds
Uttered the syllables of the Unmanifest
To clothe the body of the mystic Word,
And wizard diagrams of the occult Law
Sealed some precise unreadable harmony,
Or used hue and figure to reconstitute
The herald blazon of Time’s secret things. ||52.13||
This is scanned as in the image:
Socrates drinking the cup of hemlock
The Winds of Wonder 
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