Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

      One struggling, bound, intense, its portion here.

      A tie between them still could bridge two worlds;

      There was a dim response, a distant breath;

      All had not ceased in the unbounded hush.

      His heart lay somewhere conscious and alone

      Far down below him like a lamp in night;

      Abandoned it lay, alone, imperishable,

      Immobile with excess of passionate will,

      His living, sacrificed and offered heart

      Absorbed in adoration mystical,

      Turned to its far-off fount of light and love.

      In the luminous stillness of its mute appeal

      It looked up to the heights it could not see;

      It yearned from the longing depths it could not leave.

      In the centre of his vast and fateful trance

      Half-way between his free and fallen selves,

      Interceding twixt God’s day and the mortal’s night,

      Accepting worship as its single law,

      Accepting bliss as the sole cause of things,

      Refusing the austere joy which none can share,

      Refusing the calm that lives for calm alone,

      To her it turned for whom it willed to be.

      In the passion of its solitary dream

      It lay like a closed soundless oratory

      Where sleeps a consecrated argent floor

      Lit by a single and untrembling ray

      And an invisible Presence kneels in prayer.

      On some deep breast of liberating peace

      All else was satisfied with quietude;

      This only knew there was a truth beyond.

      All other parts were dumb in centred sleep

      Consenting to the slow deliberate Power

      Which tolerates the world’s error and its grief,

      Consenting to the cosmic long delay,

      Timelessly waiting through the patient years

      Her coming they had asked for earth and men;

      This was the fiery point that called her now.

      Extinction could not quench that lonely fire;

      Its seeing filled the blank of mind and will;

      Thought dead, its changeless force abode and grew.

      Armed with the intuition of a bliss

      To which some moved tranquillity was the key,

      It persevered through life’s huge emptiness

      Amid the blank denials of the world.

      It sent its voiceless prayer to the Unknown;

      It listened for the footsteps of its hopes

      Returning through the void immensities,

      It waited for the fiat of the Word

      That comes through the still self from the Supreme.

      End of Canto Three

      Canto Four

      The Vision and the Boon

      Then suddenly there rose a sacred stir.

      Amid the lifeless silence of the Void

      In a solitude and an immensity

      A sound came quivering like a loved footfall

      Heard in the listening spaces of the soul;

      A touch perturbed his fibres with delight.

      An Influence had approached the mortal range,

      A boundless Heart was near his longing heart,

      A mystic Form enveloped his earthly shape.

      All at her contact broke from silence’ seal;

      Spirit and body thrilled identified,

      Linked in the grasp of an unspoken joy;

      Mind, members, life were merged in ecstasy.

      Intoxicated as with nectarous rain

      His nature’s passioning stretches flowed to her,

      Flashing with lightnings, mad with luminous wine.

      All was a limitless sea that heaved to the moon.

      A divinising stream possessed his veins,

      His body’s cells awoke to spirit sense,

      Each nerve became a burning thread of joy:

      Tissue and flesh partook beatitude.

      Alight, the dun unplumbed subconscient caves

      Thrilled with the prescience of her longed-for tread

      And filled with flickering crests and praying tongues.

      Even lost in slumber, mute, inanimate

      His very body answered to her power.

      The One he worshipped was within him now:

      Flame-pure, ethereal-tressed, a mighty Face

      Appeared and lips moved by immortal words;

      Lids, Wisdom’s leaves, drooped over rapture’s orbs.

      A marble monument of ponderings, shone

      A forehead, sight’s crypt, and large like ocean’s gaze

      Towards Heaven, two tranquil eyes of boundless thought

      Looked into man’s and saw the god to come.

      A Shape was seen on threshold Mind, a Voice

      Absolute and wise in the heart’s chambers spoke:

      “O Son of Strength who climbst creation’s peaks,

      No soul is thy companion in the light;

      Alone thou standest at the eternal doors.

      What thou hast won is thine, but ask no more.

      O Spirit aspiring in an ignorant frame,

      O Voice arisen from the Inconscient’s world,

      How shalt thou speak for men whose hearts are dumb,

      Make purblind earth the soul’s seer-vision’s home

      Or lighten the burden of the senseless globe?

      I am the Mystery beyond reach of mind,

      I am the goal of the travail of the suns;

      My fire and sweetness are the cause of life.

      But too immense my danger and my joy.

      Awake not the immeasurable descent,

      Speak not my secret name to hostile Time;

      Man is too weak to bear the Infinite’s weight.

      Truth born too soon might break the imperfect earth.

      Leave the all-seeing Power to hew its way:

      In thy single vast achievement reign apart

      Helping the world with thy great lonely days.

      I ask thee not to merge thy heart of flame

      In the Immobile’s