Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

shapes,

      An ardent hunt of soul looking for soul,

      A seeking and a finding as of gods.

      There Matter is the Spirit’s firm density,

      An artistry of glad outwardness of self,

      A treasure-house of lasting images

      Where sense can build a world of pure delight:

      The home of a perpetual happiness,

      It lodged the hours as in a pleasant inn.

      The senses there were outlets of the soul;

      Even the youngest child-thought of the mind

      Incarnated some touch of highest things.

      There substance was a resonant harp of self,

      A net for the constant lightnings of the spirit,

      A magnet power of love’s intensity

      Whose yearning throb and adoration’s cry

      Drew God’s approaches close, sweet, wonderful.

      Its solidity was a mass of heavenly make;

      Its fixity and sweet permanence of charm

      Made a bright pedestal for felicity.

      Its bodies woven by a divine sense

      Prolonged the nearness of soul’s clasp with soul;

      Its warm play of external sight and touch

      Reflected the glow and thrill of the heart’s joy,

      Mind’s climbing brilliant thoughts, the spirit’s bliss;

      Life’s rapture kept for ever its flame and cry.

      All that now passes lived immortal there

      In the proud beauty and fine harmony

      Of Matter plastic to spiritual light.

      Its ordered hours proclaimed the eternal Law;

      Vision reposed on a safety of deathless forms;

      Time was Eternity’s transparent robe.

      An architect hewing out self’s living rock,

      Phenomenon built Reality’s summer-house

      On the beaches of the sea of Infinity.

      Against this glory of spiritual states,

      Their parallels and yet their opposites,

      Floated and swayed, eclipsed and shadowlike

      As if a doubt made substance, flickering, pale,

      This other scheme two vast negations found.

      A world that knows not its inhabiting Self

      Labours to find its cause and need to be;

      A spirit ignorant of the world it made,

      Obscured by Matter, travestied by Life,

      Struggles to emerge, to be free, to know and reign;

      These were close-tied in one disharmony,

      Yet the divergent lines met not at all.

      Three Powers governed its irrational course,

      In the beginning an unknowing Force,

      In the middle an embodied striving soul,

      In its end a silent spirit denying life.

      A dull and infelicitous interlude

      Unrolls its dubious truth to a questioning Mind

      Compelled by the ignorant Power to play its part

      And to record her inconclusive tale,

      The mystery of her inconscient plan

      And the riddle of a being born from Night

      By a marriage of Necessity with Chance.

      This darkness hides our nobler destiny.

      A chrysalis of a great and glorious truth,

      It stifles the winged marvel in its sheath

      Lest from the prison of Matter it escape

      And, wasting its beauty on the formless Vast,

      Merged into the Unknowable’s mystery,

      Leave unfulfilled the world’s miraculous fate.

      As yet thought only some high spirit’s dream

      Or a vexed illusion in man’s toiling mind,

      A new creation from the old shall rise,

      A Knowledge inarticulate find speech,

      Beauty suppressed burst into paradise bloom,

      Pleasure and pain dive into absolute bliss.

      A tongueless oracle shall speak at last,

      The Superconscient conscious grow on earth,

      The Eternal’s wonders join the dance of Time.

      But now all seemed a vainly teeming vast

      Upheld by a deluded Energy

      To a spectator self-absorbed and mute,

      Careless of the unmeaning show he watched,

      Regarding the bizarre procession pass

      Like one who waits for an expected end.

      He saw a world that is from a world to be.

      There he divined rather than saw or felt,

      Far off upon the rim of consciousness,

      Transient and frail this little whirling globe

      And on it left like a lost dream’s vain mould,

      A fragile copy of the spirit’s shell,

      His body gathered into mystic sleep.

      A foreign shape it seemed, a mythic shade.

      Alien now seemed that dim far universe,

      Self and eternity alone were true.

      Then memory climbed to him from the striving planes

      Bringing a cry from once-loved cherished things,

      And to the cry as to its own lost call

      A ray replied from the occult Supreme.

      For even there the boundless Oneness dwells.

      To its own sight unrecognisable,

      It lived still sunk in its own tenebrous seas,

      Upholding the world’s inconscient unity

      Hidden in Matter’s insentient multitude.

      This seed-self sown in the Indeterminate

      Forfeits its glory of divinity,

      Concealing the omnipotence of its Force,

      Concealing the omniscience of its Soul;

      An agent of its own transcendent Will,

      It merges knowledge in the inconscient deep;

      Accepting error, sorrow, death and pain,

      It pays the ransom of the ignorant Night,

      Redeeming by its substance Nature’s fall.

      Himself he knew and why his soul had gone

      Into earth’s passionate obscurity

      To share the labour of an errant Power

      Which by division hopes to find the One.

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