Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

in mind, the wish in the heart;

      It plucked out from grey folds of secrecy

      The motives which from their own sight men hide.

      He felt the beating life in other men

      Invade him with their happiness and their grief;

      Their love, their anger, their unspoken hopes

      Entered in currents or in pouring waves

      Into the immobile ocean of his calm.

      He heard the inspired sound of his own thoughts

      Re-echoed in the vault of other minds;

      The world’s thought-streams travelled into his ken;

      His inner self grew near to others’ selves

      And bore a kinship’s weight, a common tie,

      Yet stood untouched, king of itself, alone.

      A magical accord quickened and attuned

      To ethereal symphonies the old earthy strings;

      It raised the servitors of mind and life

      To be happy partners in the soul’s response,

      Tissue and nerve were turned to sensitive chords,

      Records of lustre and ecstasy; it made

      The body’s means the spirit’s acolytes.

      A heavenlier function with a finer mode

      Lit with its grace man’s outward earthliness;

      The soul’s experience of its deeper sheaths

      No more slept drugged by Matter’s dominance.

      In the dead wall closing us from wider self,

      Into a secrecy of apparent sleep,

      The mystic tract beyond our waking thoughts,

      A door parted, built in by Matter’s force,

      Releasing things unseized by earthly sense:

      A world unseen, unknown by outward mind

      Appeared in the silent spaces of the soul.

      He sat in secret chambers looking out

      Into the luminous countries of the unborn

      Where all things dreamed by the mind are seen and true

      And all that the life longs for is drawn close.

      He saw the Perfect in their starry homes

      Wearing the glory of a deathless form,

      Lain in the arms of the Eternal’s peace,

      Rapt in the heart-beats of God-ecstasy.

      He lived in the mystic space where thought is born

      And will is nursed by an ethereal Power

      And fed on the white milk of the Eternal’s strengths

      Till it grows into the likeness of a god.

      In the Witness’s occult rooms with mind-built walls

      On hidden interiors, lurking passages

      Opened the windows of the inner sight.

      He owned the house of undivided Time.

      Lifting the heavy curtain of the flesh

      He stood upon a threshold serpent-watched,

      And peered into gleaming endless corridors,

      Silent and listening in the silent heart

      For the coming of the new and the unknown.

      He gazed across the empty stillnesses

      And heard the footsteps of the undreamed Idea

      In the far avenues of the Beyond.

      He heard the secret Voice, the Word that knows,

      And saw the secret face that is our own.

      The inner planes uncovered their crystal doors;

      Strange powers and influences touched his life.

      A vision came of higher realms than ours,

      A consciousness of brighter fields and skies,

      Of beings less circumscribed than brief-lived men

      And subtler bodies than these passing frames,

      Objects too fine for our material grasp,

      Acts vibrant with a superhuman light

      And movements pushed by a superconscient force,

      And joys that never flowed through mortal limbs,

      And lovelier scenes than earth’s and happier lives.

      A consciousness of beauty and of bliss,

      A knowledge which became what it perceived,

      Replaced the separated sense and heart

      And drew all Nature into its embrace.

      The mind leaned out to meet the hidden worlds:

      Air glowed and teemed with marvellous shapes and hues,

      In the nostrils quivered celestial fragrances,

      On the tongue lingered the honey of paradise.

      A channel of universal harmony,

      Hearing was a stream of magic audience,

      A bed for occult sounds earth cannot hear.

      Out of a covert tract of slumber self

      The voice came of a truth submerged, unknown

      That flows beneath the cosmic surfaces,

      Only mid an omniscient silence heard,

      Held by intuitive heart and secret sense.

      It caught the burden of secrecies sealed and dumb,

      It voiced the unfulfilled demand of earth

      And the song of promise of unrealised heavens

      And all that hides in an omnipotent Sleep.

      In the unceasing drama carried by Time

      On its long listening flood that bears the world’s

      Insoluble doubt on a pilgrimage without goal,

      A laughter of sleepless pleasure foamed and spumed

      And murmurings of desire that cannot die:

      A cry came of the world’s delight to be,

      The grandeur and greatness of its will to live,

      Recall of the soul’s adventure into space,

      A traveller through the magic centuries

      And being’s labour in Matter’s universe,

      Its search for the mystic meaning of its birth

      And joy of high spiritual response,

      Its throb of satisfaction and content

      In all the sweetness of the gifts of life,

      Its large breath and pulse and thrill of hope and fear,

      Its taste of pangs and tears and ecstasy,

      Its rapture’s poignant beat of sudden bliss,

      The sob of its passion and unending pain.

      The murmur and whisper of the unheard sounds

      Which crowd around our hearts but find no window

      To enter, swelled into a canticle

      Of