Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

in the paths of Time

      Arrives on the frontiers of eternity.

      In the transient symbol of humanity draped,

      He feels his substance of undying self

      And loses his kinship to mortality.

      A beam of the Eternal smites his heart,

      His thought stretches into infinitude;

      All in him turns to spirit vastnesses.

      His soul breaks out to join the Oversoul,

      His life is oceaned by that superlife.

      He has drunk from the breasts of the Mother of the worlds;

      A topless Supernature fills his frame:

      She adopts his spirit’s everlasting ground

      As the security of her changing world

      And shapes the figure of her unborn mights.

      Immortally she conceives herself in him,

      In the creature the unveiled Creatrix works:

      Her face is seen through his face, her eyes through his eyes;

      Her being is his through a vast identity.

      Then is revealed in man the overt Divine.

      A static Oneness and dynamic Power

      Descend in him, the integral Godhead’s seals;

      His soul and body take that splendid stamp.

      A long dim preparation is man’s life,

      A circle of toil and hope and war and peace

      Tracked out by Life on Matter’s obscure ground.

      In his climb to a peak no feet have ever trod,

      He seeks through a penumbra shot with flame

      A veiled reality half-known, ever missed,

      A search for something or someone never found,

      Cult of an ideal never made real here,

      An endless spiral of ascent and fall

      Until at last is reached the giant point

      Through which his Glory shines for whom we were made

      And we break into the infinity of God.

      Across our nature’s border line we escape

      Into Supernature’s arc of living light.

      This now was witnessed in that son of Force;

      In him that high transition laid its base.

      Original and supernal Immanence

      Of which all Nature’s process is the art,

      The cosmic Worker set his secret hand

      To turn this frail mud-engine to heaven-use.

      A Presence wrought behind the ambiguous screen:

      It beat his soil to bear a Titan’s weight,

      Refining half-hewn blocks of natural strength

      It built his soul into a statued god.

      The Craftsman of the magic stuff of self

      Who labours at his high and difficult plan

      In the wide workshop of the wonderful world,

      Modelled in inward Time his rhythmic parts.

      Then came the abrupt transcendent miracle:

      The masked immaculate Grandeur could outline,

      At travail in the occult womb of life,

      His dreamed magnificence of things to be.

      A crown of the architecture of the worlds,

      A mystery of married Earth and Heaven

      Annexed divinity to the mortal scheme.

      A Seer was born, a shining Guest of Time.

      For him mind’s limiting firmament ceased above.

      In the griffin forefront of the Night and Day

      A gap was rent in the all-concealing vault;

      The conscious ends of being went rolling back:

      The landmarks of the little person fell,

      The island ego joined its continent.

      Overpassed was this world of rigid limiting forms:

      Life’s barriers opened into the Unknown.

      Abolished were conception’s covenants

      And, striking off subjection’s rigorous clause,

      Annulled the soul’s treaty with Nature’s nescience.

      All the grey inhibitions were torn off

      And broken the intellect’s hard and lustrous lid;

      Truth unpartitioned found immense sky-room;

      An empyrean vision saw and knew;

      The bounded mind became a boundless light,

      The finite self mated with infinity.

      His march now soared into an eagle’s flight.

      Out of apprenticeship to Ignorance

      Wisdom upraised him to her master craft

      And made him an archmason of the soul,

      A builder of the Immortal’s secret house,

      An aspirant to supernal Timelessness:

      Freedom and empire called to him from on high;

      Above mind’s twilight and life’s star-led night

      There gleamed the dawn of a spiritual day.

      As so he grew into his larger self,

      Humanity framed his movements less and less;

      A greater being saw a greater world.

      A fearless will for knowledge dared to erase

      The lines of safety Reason draws that bar

      Mind’s soar, soul’s dive into the Infinite.

      Even his first steps broke our small earth-bounds

      And loitered in a vaster freer air.

      In hands sustained by a transfiguring Might

      He caught up lightly like a giant’s bow

      Left slumbering in a sealed and secret cave

      The powers that sleep unused in man within.

      He made of miracle a normal act

      And turned to a common part of divine works,

      Magnificently natural at this height,

      Efforts that would shatter the strength of mortal hearts,

      Pursued in a royalty of mighty ease

      Aims too sublime for Nature’s daily will:

      The gifts of the spirit crowding came to him;

      They were his life’s pattern and his privilege.

      A pure perception lent its lucent joy:

      Its intimate vision waited not to think;

      It enveloped all Nature in a single glance,

      It looked into the very self of things;

      Deceived no more by form he saw the soul.

      In beings it knew what lurked to them unknown;

      It