Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

measure they could not reach but bore her touch,

      Answering with the flower’s answer to the sun

      They gave themselves to her and asked no more.

      One greater than themselves, too wide for their ken,

      Their minds could not understand nor wholly know,

      Their lives replied to hers, moved at her words:

      They felt a godhead and obeyed a call,

      Answered to her lead and did her work in the world;

      Their lives, their natures moved compelled by hers

      As if the truth of their own larger selves

      Put on an aspect of divinity

      To exalt them to a pitch beyond their earth’s.

      They felt a larger future meet their walk;

      She held their hands, she chose for them their paths:

      They were moved by her towards great unknown things,

      Faith drew them and the joy to feel themselves hers;

      They lived in her, they saw the world with her eyes.

      Some turned to her against their nature’s bent;

      Divided between wonder and revolt,

      Drawn by her charm and mastered by her will,

      Possessed by her, her striving to possess,

      Impatient subjects, their tied longing hearts

      Hugging the bonds close of which they most complained,

      Murmured at a yoke they would have wept to lose,

      The splendid yoke of her beauty and her love:

      Others pursued her with life’s blind desires

      And claiming all of her as their lonely own,

      Hastened to engross her sweetness meant for all.

      As earth claims light for its lone separate need

      Demanding her for their sole jealous clasp,

      They asked from her movements bounded like their own

      And to their smallness craved a like response.

      Or they repined that she surpassed their grip,

      And hoped to bind her close with longing’s cords.

      Or finding her touch desired too strong to bear

      They blamed her for a tyranny they loved,

      Shrank into themselves as from too bright a sun,

      Yet hankered for the splendour they refused.

      Angrily enamoured of her sweet passionate ray

      The weakness of their earth could hardly bear,

      They longed but cried out at the touch desired

      Inapt to meet divinity so close,

      Intolerant of a Force they could not house.

      Some drawn unwillingly by her divine sway

      Endured it like a sweet but alien spell;

      Unable to mount to levels too sublime,

      They yearned to draw her down to their own earth.

      Or forced to centre round her their passionate lives,

      They hoped to bind to their heart’s human needs

      Her glory and grace that had enslaved their souls.

      But mid this world, these hearts that answered her call,

      None could stand up her equal and her mate.

      In vain she stooped to equal them with her heights,

      Too pure that air was for small souls to breathe.

      These comrade selves to raise to her own wide breadths

      Her heart desired and fill with her own power

      That a diviner Force might enter life,

      A breath of Godhead greaten human time.

      Although she leaned down to their littleness

      Covering their lives with her strong passionate hands

      And knew by sympathy their needs and wants

      And dived in the shallow wave-depths of their lives

      And met and shared their heart-beats of grief and joy

      And bent to heal their sorrow and their pride,

      Lavishing the might that was hers on her lone peak

      To lift to it their aspiration’s cry,

      And though she drew their souls into her vast

      And surrounded with the silence of her deeps

      And held as the great Mother holds her own,

      Only her earthly surface bore their charge

      And mixed its fire with their mortality:

      Her greater self lived sole, unclaimed, within.

      Oftener in dumb Nature’s stir and peace

      A nearness she could feel serenely one;

      The Force in her drew earth’s subhuman broods;

      And to her spirit’s large and free delight

      She joined the ardent-hued magnificent lives

      Of animal and bird and flower and tree.

      They answered to her with the simple heart.

      In man a dim disturbing somewhat lives;

      It knows but turns away from divine Light

      Preferring the dark ignorance of the fall.

      Among the many who came drawn to her

      Nowhere she found her partner of high tasks,

      The comrade of her soul, her other self

      Who was made with her, like God and Nature, one.

      Some near approached, were touched, caught fire, then failed,

      Too great was her demand, too pure her force.

      Thus lighting earth around her like a sun,

      Yet in her inmost sky an orb aloof,

      A distance severed her from those most close.

      Puissant, apart her soul as the gods live.

      As yet unlinked with the broad human scene,

      In a small circle of young eager hearts,

      Her being’s early school and closed domain,

      Apprentice in the business of earth-life,

      She schooled her heavenly strain to bear its touch,

      Content in her little garden of the gods

      As blooms a flower in an unvisited place.

      Earth nursed, unconscious still, the inhabiting flame,

      Yet something deeply stirred and dimly knew;

      There was a movement and a passionate call,

      A rainbow dream, a hope of golden change;

      Some secret wing of expectation beat,

      A growing sense of something new and rare

      And beautiful stole across the heart of Time.

      Then a faint whisper of her touched the soil,

      Breathed