It was on 25 October 1936 Savitri had stepped out of Sri Aurobindo's Room for the first time. Amal Kiran had made an ardent request and Sri Aurobindo obliged him. Those were the early drafts of Savitri, which went through several stages afterwards. Amal used to type them out and send back to Sri Aurobindo. He also used to make comments for which he got always encouraging answers.

RYD

As I said in my previous comment, Savitri stepped out of Sri Aurobindo’s room for the first time on 25 October 1936. A few lines—16—by way of an example of spiritual-mystic poetry were sent to Amal Kiran at his persistent request. The sequel leading to this favour from Sri Aurobindo is described by him in Sri Aurobindo—the Poet, pp. 170-76, 1970. These lines are as follows:

It was the hour before the Gods awake.
Across the path of the divine Event
The huge foreboding mind of Night, alone
In her unlit temple of immensity,
Lay stretched immobile upon silence’ marge,
Mute with the unplumbed prevision of her change.
The impassive skies were neutral, waste and still.
Then a faint hesitating glimmer broke.
A slow miraculous gesture dimly came,
The insistence thrill of a transfiguring touch
Persuaded the inert black quietude
And beauty and wonder disturbed the fields of God.
A wandering hand of pale enchanted light
That glowed along the moment’s fading brink
Fixed with gold panel and opalescent hinge
A gate of dreams ajar on mystery’s verge.

The 93-line passage of 1993 is as follows:

It was the hour before the Gods awake.
Across the path of the divine Event
The huge foreboding mind of Night, alone
In her unlit temple of eternity,
Lay stretched immobile upon Silence' marge.
Almost one felt, opaque, impenetrable,
In the sombre symbol of her eyeless muse
The abysm of the unbodied Infinite;
A fathomless zero occupied the world.
A power of fallen boundless self awake
Between the first and the last Nothingness,
Recalling the tenebrous womb from which it came,
Turned from the insoluble mystery of birth
And the tardy process of mortality
And longed to reach its end in vacant Nought.
As in a dark beginning of all things,
A mute featureless semblance of the Unknown
Repeating for ever the unconscious act,
Prolonging for ever the unseeing will,
Cradled the cosmic drowse of ignorant Force
Whose moved creative slumber kindles the suns
And carries our lives in its somnambulist whirl.
Athwart the vain enormous trance of Space,
Its formless stupor without mind or life,
A shadow spinning through a soulless Void,
Thrown back once more into unthinking dreams,
Earth wheeled abandoned in the hollow gulfs
Forgetful of her spirit and her fate.
The impassive skies were neutral, empty, still.
Then something in the inscrutable darkness stirred;
A nameless movement, an unthought Idea
Insistent, dissatisfied, without an aim,
Something that wished but knew not how to be,
Teased the Inconscient to wake Ignorance.
A throe that came and left a quivering trace,
Gave room for an old tired want unfilled,
At peace in its subconscient moonless cave
To raise its head and look for absent light,
Straining closed eyes of vanished memory,
Like one who searches for a bygone self
And only meets the corpse of his desire.
It was as though even in this Nought's profound,
Even in this ultimate dissolution's core,
There lurked an unremembering entity,
Survivor of a slain and buried past
Condemned to resume the effort and the pang,
Reviving in another frustrate world.
An unshaped consciousness desired light
And a blank prescience yearned towards distant change.
As if a childlike finger laid on a cheek
Reminded of the endless need in things
The heedless Mother of the universe,
An infant longing clutched the sombre Vast.
Insensibly somewhere a breach began:
A long lone line of hesitating hue
Like a vague smile tempting a desert heart
Troubled the far rim of life's obscure sleep.
Arrived from the other side of boundlessness
An eye of deity peered through the dumb deeps;
A scout in a reconnaissance from the sun,
It seemed amid a heavy cosmic rest,
The torpor of a sick and weary world,
To seek for a spirit sole and desolate
Too fallen to recollect forgotten bliss.
Intervening in a mindless universe,
Its message crept through the reluctant hush
Calling the adventure of consciousness and joy
And, conquering Nature's disillusioned breast,
Compelled renewed consent to see and feel.
A thought was sown in the unsounded Void,
A sense was born within the darkness' depths,
A memory quivered in the heart of Time
As if a soul long dead were moved to live:
But the oblivion that succeeds the fall,
Had blotted the crowded tablets of the past,
And all that was destroyed must be rebuilt
And old experience laboured out once more.
All can be done if the god-touch is there.
A hope stole in that hardly dared to be
Amid the Night's forlorn indifference.
As if solicited in an alien world
With timid and hazardous instinctive grace,
Orphaned and driven out to seek a home,
An errant marvel with no place to live,
Into a far-off nook of heaven there came
A slow miraculous gesture's dim appeal.
The persistent thrill of a transfiguring touch
Persuaded the inert black quietude
And beauty and wonder disturbed the fields of God.
A wandering hand of pale enchanted light
That glowed along a fading moment's brink,
Fixed with gold panel and opalescent hinge
A gate of dreams ajar on mystery's verge.

This was more or less finalized by 1942. So between 1936 and 1942 the passage grew from 16 to 93 lines. It is interesting to note that the earlier versions had “gods” instead of “Gods” in the first line and “spirit of Night” instead of “mind of Night” in the third line. What attention to details! Everything has a significance in Savitri.

RYD

So, I'm wondering if the first 16 lines of Savitri that Sri Aurobindo sent to Amal Kiran originally read:

It was the hour before the gods awake.
Across the path of the divine Event
The huge foreboding spirit of Night, alone
In her unlit temple of immensity,
Lay stretched immobile upon silence’ marge,
Mute with the unplumbed prevision of her change.

~ ronjon

No, 'gods' and 'spirit' are not present in the 1936 draft that was sent to Amal. It has, as you read in the passage quoted, 'Gods' in the first line and 'mind' in the third. Actually 'gods' became 'Gods' in the 25th draft of the passage. Sri Aurobindo was still experimenting about the whole thing, The Symbol Dawn being the working ground.

RYD