Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

Presence still defends thy frame.

      Perhaps the heavens guard thee for some great soul,

      Thy fate, thy work are kept somewhere afar.

      Thy spirit came not down a star alone.

      O living inscription of the beauty of love

      Missalled in aureate virginity,

      What message of heavenly strength and bliss in thee

      Is written with the Eternal’s sun-white script,

      One shall discover and greaten with it his life

      To whom thou loosenest thy heart’s jewelled strings.

      O rubies of silence, lips from which there stole

      Low laughter, music of tranquillity,

      Star-lustrous eyes awake in sweet large night

      And limbs like fine-linked poems made of gold

      Stanzaed to glimmering curves by artist gods,

      Depart where love and destiny call your charm.

      Venture through the deep world to find thy mate.

      For somewhere on the longing breast of earth,

      Thy unknown lover waits for thee the unknown.

      Thy soul has strength and needs no other guide

      Than One who burns within thy bosom’s powers.

      There shall draw near to meet thy approaching steps

      The second self for whom thy nature asks,

      He who shall walk until thy body’s end

      A close-bound traveller pacing with thy pace,

      The lyrist of thy soul’s most intimate chords

      Who shall give voice to what in thee is mute.

      Then shall you grow like vibrant kindred harps,

      One in the beats of difference and delight,

      Responsive in divine and equal strains,

      Discovering new notes of the eternal theme.

      One force shall be your mover and your guide,

      One light shall be around you and within;

      Hand in strong hand confront Heaven’s question, life:

      Challenge the ordeal of the immense disguise.

      Ascend from Nature to divinity’s heights;

      Face the high gods, crowned with felicity,

      Then meet a greater god, thy self beyond Time.”

      This word was seed of all the thing to be:

      A hand from some Greatness opened her heart’s locked doors

      And showed the work for which her strength was born.

      As when the mantra sinks in Yoga’s ear,

      Its message enters stirring the blind brain

      And keeps in the dim ignorant cells its sound;

      The hearer understands a form of words

      And, musing on the index thought it holds,

      He strives to read it with the labouring mind,

      But finds bright hints, not the embodied truth:

      Then, falling silent in himself to know

      He meets the deeper listening of his soul:

      The Word repeats itself in rhythmic strains:

      Thought, vision, feeling, sense, the body’s self

      Are seized unutterably and he endures

      An ecstasy and an immortal change;

      He feels a Wideness and becomes a Power,

      All knowledge rushes on him like a sea:

      Transmuted by the white spiritual ray

      He walks in naked heavens of joy and calm,

      Sees the God-face and hears transcendent speech:

      An equal greatness in her life was sown.

      Accustomed scenes were now an ended play:

      Moving in muse amid familiar powers,

      Touched by new magnitudes and fiery signs,

      She turned to vastnesses not yet her own;

      Allured her heart throbbed to unknown sweetnesses;

      The secrets of an unseen world were close.

      The morn went up into a smiling sky;

      Cast from its sapphire pinnacle of trance

      Day sank into the burning gold of eve;

      The moon floated, a luminous waif through heaven

      And sank below the oblivious edge of dream;

      Night lit the watch-fires of eternity.

      Then all went back into mind’s secret caves;

      A darkness stooping on the heaven-bird’s wings

      Sealed in her senses from external sight

      And opened the stupendous depths of sleep.

      When the pale dawn slipped through Night’s shadowy guard,

      Vainly the new-born light desired her face;

      The palace woke to its own emptiness;

      The sovereign of its daily joys was far;

      Her moonbeam feet tinged not the lucent floors:

      The beauty and divinity were gone.

      Delight had fled to search the spacious world.

      End of Canto Three

      Canto Four

      The Quest

      The world-ways opened before Savitri.

      At first a strangeness of new brilliant scenes

      Peopled her mind and kept her body’s gaze.

      But as she moved across the changing earth

      A deeper consciousness welled up in her:

      A citizen of many scenes and climes,

      Each soil and country it had made its home;

      It took all clans and peoples for her own,

      Till the whole destiny of mankind was hers.

      These unfamiliar spaces on her way

      Were known and neighbours to a sense within,

      Landscapes recurred like lost forgotten fields,

      Cities and rivers and plains her vision claimed

      Like slow-recurring memories in front,

      The stars at night were her past’s brilliant friends,

      The winds murmured to her of ancient things

      And she met nameless comrades loved by her once.

      All was a part of old forgotten selves:

      Vaguely or with a flash of sudden hints

      Her acts recalled a line of bygone power,

      Even her motion’s purpose was not new:

      Traveller to a prefigured high event,

      She seemed to her remembering witness soul

      To trace again a journey often made.

      A