Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

guidance turned the dumb revolving wheels

      And in the eager body of their speed

      The dim-masked hooded godheads rode who move

      Assigned to man immutably from his birth,

      Receivers of the inner and outer law,

      At once the agents of his spirit’s will

      And witnesses and executors of his fate.

      Inexorably faithful to their task,

      They hold his nature’s sequence in their guard

      Carrying the unbroken thread old lives have spun.

      Attendants on his destiny’s measured walk

      Leading to joys he has won and pains he has called,

      Even in his casual steps they intervene.

      Nothing we think or do is void or vain;

      Each is an energy loosed and holds its course.

      The shadowy keepers of our deathless past

      Have made our fate the child of our own acts,

      And from the furrows laboured by our will

      We reap the fruit of our forgotten deeds.

      But since unseen the tree that bore this fruit

      And we live in a present born from an unknown past,

      They seem but parts of a mechanic Force

      To a mechanic mind tied by earth’s laws;

      Yet are they instruments of a Will supreme,

      Watched by a still all-seeing Eye above.

      A prescient architect of Fate and Chance

      Who builds our lives on a foreseen design

      The meaning knows and consequence of each step

      And watches the inferior stumbling powers.

      Upon her silent heights she was aware

      Of a calm Presence throned above her brows

      Who saw the goal and chose each fateful curve;

      It used the body for its pedestal;

      The eyes that wandered were its searchlight fires,

      The hands that held the reins its living tools;

      All was the working of an ancient plan,

      A way proposed by an unerring Guide.

      Across wide noons and glowing afternoons,

      She met with Nature and with human forms

      And listened to the voices of the world;

      Driven from within she followed her long road,

      Mute in the luminous cavern of her heart,

      Like a bright cloud through the resplendent day.

      At first her path ran far through peopled tracts:

      Admitted to the lion eye of States

      And theatres of the loud act of man,

      Her carven chariot with its fretted wheels

      Threaded through clamorous marts and sentinel towers

      Past figured gates and high dream-sculptured fronts

      And gardens hung in the sapphire of the skies,

      Pillared assembly halls with armoured guards,

      Small fanes where one calm Image watched man’s life

      And temples hewn as if by exiled gods

      To imitate their lost eternity.

      Often from gilded dusk to argent dawn,

      Where jewel-lamps flickered on frescoed walls

      And the stone lattice stared at moonlit boughs,

      Half-conscious of the tardy listening night

      Dimly she glided between banks of sleep

      At rest in the slumbering palaces of kings.

      Hamlet and village saw the fate-wain pass,

      Homes of a life bent to the soil it ploughs

      For sustenance of its short and passing days

      That, transient, keep their old repeated course,

      Unchanging in the circle of a sky

      Which alters not above our mortal toil.

      Away from this thinking creature’s burdened hours

      To free and griefless spaces now she turned

      Not yet perturbed by human joys and fears.

      Here was the childhood of primaeval earth,

      Here timeless musings large and glad and still,

      Men had forborne as yet to fill with cares,

      Imperial acres of the eternal sower

      And wind-stirred grass-lands winking in the sun:

      Or mid green musing of woods and rough-browed hills,

      In the grove’s murmurous bee-air humming wild

      Or past the long lapsing voice of silver floods

      Like a swift hope journeying among its dreams

      Hastened the chariot of the golden bride.

      Out of the world’s immense unhuman past

      Tract-memories and ageless remnants came,

      Domains of light enfeoffed to antique calm

      Listened to the unaccustomed sound of hooves

      And large immune entangled silences

      Absorbed her into emerald secrecy

      And slow hushed wizard nets of fiery bloom

      Environed with their coloured snare her wheels.

      The strong importunate feet of Time fell soft

      Along these lonely ways, his titan pace

      Forgotten and his stark and ruinous rounds.

      The inner ear that listens to solitude,

      Leaning self-rapt unboundedly could hear

      The rhythm of the intenser wordless Thought

      That gathers in the silence behind life,

      And the low sweet inarticulate voice of earth

      In the great passion of her sun-kissed trance

      Ascended with its yearning undertone.

      Afar from the brute noise of clamorous needs

      The quieted all-seeking mind could feel,

      At rest from its blind outwardness of will,

      The unwearied clasp of her mute patient love

      And know for a soul the mother of our forms.

      This spirit stumbling in the fields of sense,

      This creature bruised in the mortar of the days

      Could find in her broad spaces of release.

      Not yet was a world all occupied by care.

      The bosom of our mother kept for us still

      Her austere regions and her musing depths,

      Her impersonal reaches lonely and inspired

      And the mightinesses of her rapture haunts.

      Muse-lipped