Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

illumined eve.

      At first glimmering like an unshaped idea

      Passive she lay sheltered in wordless sleep,

      Involved and drowned in Matter’s giant trance,

      An infant heart of the deep-caved world-plan

      In cradle of divine inconscience rocked

      By the universal ecstasy of the suns.

      Some missioned Power in the half-wakened frame

      Nursed a transcendent birth’s dumb glorious seed

      For which this vivid tenement was made.

      But soon the link of soul with form grew sure;

      Flooded was the dim cave with slow conscient light,

      The seed grew into a delicate marvellous bud,

      The bud disclosed a great and heavenly bloom.

      At once she seemed to found a mightier race.

      Arrived upon the strange and dubious globe

      The child remembering inly a far home

      Lived guarded in her spirit’s luminous cell,

      Alone mid men in her diviner kind.

      Even in her childish movements could be felt

      The nearness of a light still kept from earth,

      Feelings that only eternity could share,

      Thoughts natural and native to the gods.

      As needing nothing but its own rapt flight

      Her nature dwelt in a strong separate air

      Like a strange bird with large rich-coloured breast

      That sojourns on a secret fruited bough,

      Lost in the emerald glory of the woods

      Or flies above divine unreachable tops.

      Harmoniously she impressed the earth with heaven.

      Aligned to a swift rhythm of sheer delight

      And singing to themselves her days went by;

      Each minute was a throb of beauty’s heart;

      The hours were tuned to a sweet-toned content

      Which asked for nothing, but took all life gave

      Sovereignly as her nature’s inborn right.

      Near was her spirit to its parent Sun,

      The Breath within to the eternal joy.

      The first fair life that breaks from Nature’s swoon,

      Mounts in a line of rapture to the skies;

      Absorbed in its own happy urge it lives,

      Sufficient to itself, yet turned to all:

      It has no seen communion with its world,

      No open converse with surrounding things.

      There is a oneness native and occult

      That needs no instruments and erects no form;

      In unison it grows with all that is.

      All contacts it assumes into its trance,

      Laugh-tossed consents to the wind’s kiss and takes

      Transmutingly the shocks of sun and breeze:

      A blissful yearning riots in its leaves,

      A magic passion trembles in its blooms,

      Its boughs aspire in hushed felicity.

      An occult godhead of this beauty is cause,

      The spirit and intimate guest of all this charm,

      This sweetness’s priestess and this reverie’s muse.

      Invisibly protected from our sense

      The Dryad lives drenched in a deeper ray

      And feels another air of storms and calms

      And quivers inwardly with mystic rain.

      This at a heavenlier height was shown in her.

      Even when she bent to meet earth’s intimacies

      Her spirit kept the stature of the gods;

      It stooped but was not lost in Matter’s reign.

      A world translated was her gleaming mind,

      And marvel-mooned bright crowding fantasies

      Fed with spiritual sustenance of dreams

      The ideal goddess in her house of gold.

      Aware of forms to which our eyes are closed,

      Conscious of nearnesses we cannot feel,

      The Power within her shaped her moulding sense

      In deeper figures than our surface types.

      An invisible sunlight ran within her veins

      And flooded her brain with heavenly brilliances

      That woke a wider sight than earth could know.

      Outlined in the sincerity of that ray

      Her springing childlike thoughts were richly turned

      Into luminous patterns of her soul’s deep truth,

      And from her eyes she cast another look

      On all around her than man’s ignorant view.

      All objects were to her shapes of living selves

      And she perceived a message from her kin

      In each awakening touch of outward things.

      Each was a symbol power, a vivid flash

      In the circuit of infinities half-known;

      Nothing was alien or inanimate,

      Nothing without its meaning or its call.

      For with a greater Nature she was one.

      As from the soil sprang glory of branch and flower,

      As from the animal’s life rose thinking man,

      A new epiphany appeared in her.

      A mind of light, a life of rhythmic force,

      A body instinct with hidden divinity

      Prepared an image of the coming god;

      And when the slow rhyme of the expanding years

      And the rich murmurous swarm-work of the days

      Had honey-packed her sense and filled her limbs,

      Accomplishing the moon-orb of her grace,

      Self-guarded in the silence of her strength

      Her solitary greatness was not less.

      Nearer the godhead to the surface pressed,

      A sun replacing childhood’s nebula

      Sovereign in a blue and lonely sky.

      Upward it rose to grasp the human scene:

      The strong Inhabitant turned to watch her field.

      A lovelier light assumed her spirit brow

      And sweet and solemn grew her musing gaze;

      Celestial-human deep warm slumbrous fires

      Woke in the long fringed glory of her eyes

      Like altar-burnings in a mysteried shrine.

      Out of those crystal windows gleamed a will

      That