Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

      His arms were a circle of the arrival of joy.

      His voice was a call to the Transcendent’s sphere

      Whose secret touch upon our mortal lives

      Keeps ever new the thrill that made the world,

      Remoulds an ancient sweetness to new shapes

      And guards intact unchanged by death and Time

      The answer of our hearts to Nature’s charm

      And keeps for ever new, yet still the same,

      The throb that ever wakes to the old delight

      And beauty and rapture and the joy to live.

      His coming brought the magic and the spell;

      At his touch life’s tired heart grew glad and young;

      He made joy a willing prisoner in her breast.

      His grasp was a young god’s upon earth’s limbs:

      Changed by the passion of his divine outbreak

      He made her body beautiful with his kiss.

      Impatient for felicity he came,

      High-fluting with the coïl’s happy voice,

      His peacock turban trailing on the trees;

      His breath was a warm summons to delight,

      The dense voluptuous azure was his gaze.

      A soft celestial urge surprised the blood

      Rich with the instinct of God’s sensuous joys;

      Revealed in beauty, a cadence was abroad

      Insistent on the rapture-thrill in life:

      Immortal movements touched the fleeting hours.

      A godlike packed intensity of sense

      Made it a passionate pleasure even to breathe;

      All sights and voices wove a single charm.

      The life of the enchanted globe became

      A storm of sweetness and of light and song,

      A revel of colour and of ecstasy,

      A hymn of rays, a litany of cries:

      A strain of choral priestly music sang

      And, swung on the swaying censer of the trees,

      A sacrifice of perfume filled the hours.

      Asocas burned in crimson spots of flame,

      Pure like the breath of an unstained desire

      White jasmines haunted the enamoured air,

      Pale mango-blossoms fed the liquid voice

      Of the love-maddened coïl, and the brown bee

      Muttered in fragrance mid the honey-buds.

      The sunlight was a great god’s golden smile.

      All Nature was at beauty’s festival.

      In this high signal moment of the gods

      Answering earth’s yearning and her cry for bliss,

      A greatness from our other countries came.

      A silence in the noise of earthly things

      Immutably revealed the secret Word,

      A mightier influx filled the oblivious clay:

      A lamp was lit, a sacred image made.

      A mediating ray had touched the earth

      Bridging the gulf between man’s mind and God’s;

      Its brightness linked our transience to the Unknown.

      A spirit of its celestial source aware

      Translating heaven into a human shape

      Descended into earth’s imperfect mould

      And wept not fallen to mortality,

      But looked on all with large and tranquil eyes.

      One had returned from the transcendent planes

      And bore anew the load of mortal breath,

      Who had striven of old with our darkness and our pain;

      She took again her divine unfinished task:

      Survivor of death and the aeonic years,

      Once more with her fathomless heart she fronted Time.

      Again there was renewed, again revealed

      The ancient closeness by earth-vision veiled,

      The secret contact broken off in Time,

      A consanguinity of earth and heaven,

      Between the human portion toiling here

      And an as yet unborn and limitless Force.

      Again the mystic deep attempt began,

      The daring wager of the cosmic game.

      For since upon this blind and whirling globe

      Earth-plasm first quivered with the illumining mind

      And life invaded the material sheath

      Afflicting Inconscience with the need to feel,

      Since in Infinity’s silence woke a word,

      A Mother-wisdom works in Nature’s breast

      To pour delight on the heart of toil and want

      And press perfection on life’s stumbling powers,

      Impose heaven-sentience on the obscure abyss

      And make dumb Matter conscious of its God.

      Although our fallen minds forget to climb,

      Although our human stuff resists or breaks,

      She keeps her will that hopes to divinise clay;

      Failure cannot repress, defeat o’erthrow;

      Time cannot weary her nor the Void subdue,

      The ages have not made her passion less;

      No victory she admits of Death or Fate.

      Always she drives the soul to new attempt;

      Always her magical infinitude

      Forces to aspire the inert brute elements;

      As one who has all infinity to waste,

      She scatters the seed of the Eternal’s strength

      On a half-animate and crumbling mould,

      Plants heaven’s delight in the heart’s passionate mire,

      Pours godhead’s seekings into a bare beast frame,

      Hides immortality in a mask of death.

      Once more that Will put on an earthly shape.

      A Mind empowered from Truth’s immutable seat

      Was framed for vision and interpreting act

      And instruments were sovereignly designed

      To express divinity in terrestrial signs.

      Outlined by the pressure of this new descent

      A lovelier body formed than earth had known.

      As yet a prophecy only and a hint,

      The glowing arc of a charmed unseen whole,

      It came into the sky of mortal life

      Bright like the crescent horn of a gold moon

      Returning