Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

      Turned from the fruitless motion of the years,

      Deserting the fierce labour of the worlds,

      Aloof from beings, lost in the Alone.

      How shall thy mighty spirit brook repose

      While Death is still unconquered on the earth

      And Time a field of suffering and pain?

      Thy soul was born to share the laden Force;

      Obey thy nature and fulfil thy fate:

      Accept the difficulty and godlike toil,

      For the slow-paced omniscient purpose live.

      The Enigma’s knot is tied in humankind.

      A lightning from the heights that think and plan,

      Ploughing the air of life with vanishing trails,

      Man, sole awake in an unconscious world,

      Aspires in vain to change the cosmic dream.

      Arrived from some half-luminous Beyond

      He is a stranger in the mindless vasts;

      A traveller in his oft-shifting home

      Amid the tread of many infinities,

      He has pitched a tent of life in desert Space.

      Heaven’s fixed regard beholds him from above,

      In the house of Nature a perturbing guest,

      A voyager twixt Thought’s inconstant shores,

      A hunter of unknown and beautiful Powers,

      A nomad of the far mysterious Light,

      In the wide ways a little spark of God.

      Against his spirit all is in dire league,

      A Titan influence stops his Godward gaze.

      Around him hungers the unpitying Void,

      The eternal Darkness seeks him with her hands,

      Inscrutable Energies drive him and deceive,

      Immense implacable deities oppose.

      An inert Soul and a somnambulist Force

      Have made a world estranged from life and thought;

      The Dragon of the dark foundations keeps

      Unalterable the law of Chance and Death;

      On his long way through Time and Circumstance

      The grey-hued riddling nether shadow-Sphinx,

      Her dreadful paws upon the swallowing sands,

      Awaits him armed with the soul-slaying word:

      Across his path sits the dim camp of Night.

      His day is a moment in perpetual Time;

      He is the prey of the minutes and the hours.

      Assailed on earth and unassured of heaven,

      Descended here unhappy and sublime,

      A link between the demigod and the beast,

      He knows not his own greatness nor his aim;

      He has forgotten why he has come and whence.

      His spirit and his members are at war;

      His heights break off too low to reach the skies,

      His mass is buried in the animal mire.

      A strange antinomy is his nature’s rule.

      A riddle of opposites is made his field:

      Freedom he asks but needs to live in bonds,

      He has need of darkness to perceive some light

      And need of grief to feel a little bliss;

      He has need of death to find a greater life.

      All sides he sees and turns to every call;

      He has no certain light by which to walk;

      His life is a blind-man’s-buff, a hide-and-seek;

      He seeks himself and from himself he runs;

      Meeting himself, he thinks it other than he.

      Always he builds, but finds no constant ground,

      Always he journeys, but nowhere arrives;

      He would guide the world, himself he cannot guide;

      He would save his soul, his life he cannot save.

      The light his soul had brought his mind has lost;

      All he has learned is soon again in doubt;

      A sun to him seems the shadow of his thoughts,

      Then all is shadow again and nothing true:

      Unknowing what he does or whither he tends

      He fabricates signs of the Real in Ignorance.

      He has hitched his mortal error to Truth’s star.

      Wisdom attracts him with her luminous masks,

      But never has he seen the face behind:

      A giant Ignorance surrounds his lore.

      Assigned to meet the cosmic mystery

      In the dumb figure of a material world,

      His passport of entry false and his personage,

      He is compelled to be what he is not;

      He obeys the Inconscience he had come to rule

      And sinks in Matter to fulfil his soul.

      Awakened from her lower driven forms

      The Earth-Mother gave her forces to his hands

      And painfully he guards the heavy trust;

      His mind is a lost torch-bearer on her roads.

      Illumining breath to think and plasm to feel,

      He labours with his slow and sceptic brain

      Helped by the reason’s vacillating fires,

      To make his thought and will a magic door

      For knowledge to enter the darkness of the world

      And love to rule a realm of strife and hate.

      A mind impotent to reconcile heaven and earth

      And tied to Matter with a thousand bonds,

      He lifts himself to be a conscious god.

      Even when a glory of wisdom crowns his brow,

      When mind and spirit shed a grandiose ray

      To exalt this product of the sperm and gene,

      This alchemist’s miracle from plasm and gas,

      And he who shared the animal’s run and crawl

      Lifts his thought-stature to the Immortal’s heights,

      His life still keeps the human middle way;

      His body he resigns to death and pain,

      Abandoning Matter, his too heavy charge.

      A thaumaturge sceptic of miracles,

      A spirit left sterile of its occult power

      By an unbelieving brain and credulous heart,

      He leaves the world to end where it began:

      His work unfinished he claims a heavenly prize.

      Thus has he missed creation’s absolute.

      Half-way