Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

to life.

      Holding her forehead’s candid stainless space

      Behind the student arch a noble power

      Of wisdom looked from light on transient things.

      A scout of victory in a vigil tower,

      Her aspiration called high destiny down;

      A silent warrior paced in her city of strength

      Inviolate, guarding Truth’s diamond throne.

      A nectarous haloed moon her passionate heart

      Loved all and spoke no word and made no sign,

      But kept her bosom’s rapturous secrecy

      A blissful ardent moved and voiceless world.

      Proud, swift and joyful ran the wave of life

      Within her like a stream in Paradise.

      Many high gods dwelt in one beautiful home;

      Yet was her nature’s orb a perfect whole,

      Harmonious like a chant with many tones,

      Immense and various like a universe.

      The body that held this greatness seemed almost

      An image made of heaven’s transparent light.

      Its charm recalled things seen in vision’s hours,

      A golden bridge spanning a faery flood,

      A moon-touched palm-tree single by a lake

      Companion of the wide and glimmering peace,

      A murmur as of leaves in Paradise

      Moving when feet of the Immortals pass,

      A fiery halo over sleeping hills,

      A strange and starry head alone in Night.

      End of Canto One

      Canto Two

      The Growth of the Flame

      A land of mountains and wide sun-beat plains

      And giant rivers pacing to vast seas,

      A field of creation and spiritual hush,

      Silence swallowing life’s acts into the deeps,

      Of thought’s transcendent climb and heavenward leap,

      A brooding world of reverie and trance,

      Filled with the mightiest works of God and man,

      Where Nature seemed a dream of the Divine

      And beauty and grace and grandeur had their home,

      Harboured the childhood of the incarnate Flame.

      Over her watched millennial influences

      And the deep godheads of a grandiose past

      Looked on her and saw the future’s godheads come

      As if this magnet drew their powers unseen.

      Earth’s brooding wisdom spoke to her still breast;

      Mounting from mind’s last peaks to mate with gods,

      Making earth’s brilliant thoughts a springing-board

      To dive into the cosmic vastnesses,

      The knowledge of the thinker and the seer

      Saw the unseen and thought the unthinkable,

      Opened the enormous doors of the unknown,

      Rent man’s horizons into infinity.

      A shoreless sweep was lent to the mortal’s acts,

      And art and beauty sprang from the human depths;

      Nature and soul vied in nobility.

      Ethics the human keyed to imitate heaven;

      The harmony of a rich culture’s tones

      Refined the sense and magnified its reach

      To hear the unheard and glimpse the invisible

      And taught the soul to soar beyond things known,

      Inspiring life to greaten and break its bounds,

      Aspiring to the Immortals’ unseen world.

      Leaving earth’s safety daring wings of Mind

      Bore her above the trodden fields of thought

      Crossing the mystic seas of the Beyond

      To live on eagle heights near to the Sun.

      There Wisdom sits on her eternal throne.

      All her life’s turns led her to symbol doors

      Admitting to secret Powers that were her kin;

      Adept of truth, initiate of bliss,

      A mystic acolyte trained in Nature’s school,

      Aware of the marvel of created things

      She laid the secrecies of her heart’s deep muse

      Upon the altar of the Wonderful;

      Her hours were a ritual in a timeless fane;

      Her acts became gestures of sacrifice.

      Invested with a rhythm of higher spheres

      The word was used as a hieratic means

      For the release of the imprisoned spirit

      Into communion with its comrade gods.

      Or it helped to beat out new expressive forms

      Of that which labours in the heart of life,

      Some immemorial Soul in men and things,

      Seeker of the unknown and the unborn

      Carrying a light from the Ineffable

      To rend the veil of the last mysteries.

      Intense philosophies pointed earth to heaven

      Or on foundations broad as cosmic Space

      Upraised the earth-mind to superhuman heights.

      Overpassing lines that please the outward eyes

      But hide the sight of that which lives within

      Sculpture and painting concentrated sense

      Upon an inner vision’s motionless verge,

      Revealed a figure of the invisible,

      Unveiled all Nature’s meaning in a form,

      Or caught into a body the Divine.

      The architecture of the Infinite

      Discovered here its inward-musing shapes

      Captured into wide breadths of soaring stone:

      Music brought down celestial yearnings, song

      Held the merged heart absorbed in rapturous depths,

      Linking the human with the cosmic cry;

      The world-interpreting movements of the dance

      Moulded idea and mood to a rhythmic sway

      And posture; crafts minute in subtle lines

      Eternised a swift moment’s memory

      Or showed in a carving’s sweep, a cup’s design

      The underlying patterns of the unseen:

      Poems in largeness cast like moving worlds

      And metres surging with the ocean’s voice

      Translated