Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

them crouched a dream of emerald woods

      And gleaming borders solitary as sleep:

      Pale waters ran like glimmering threads of pearl.

      A sigh was straying among happy leaves;

      Cool-perfumed with slow pleasure-burdened feet

      Faint stumbling breezes faltered among flowers.

      The white crane stood, a vivid motionless streak,

      Peacock and parrot jewelled soil and tree,

      The dove’s soft moan enriched the enamoured air

      And fire-winged wild-drakes swam in silvery pools.

      Earth couched alone with her great lover Heaven,

      Uncovered to her consort’s azure eye.

      In a luxurious ecstasy of joy

      She squandered the love-music of her notes,

      Wasting the passionate pattern of her blooms

      And festival riot of her scents and hues.

      A cry and leap and hurry was around,

      The stealthy footfalls of her chasing things,

      The shaggy emerald of her centaur mane,

      The gold and sapphire of her warmth and blaze.

      Magician of her rapt felicities,

      Blithe, sensuous-hearted, careless and divine,

      Life ran or hid in her delightful rooms;

      Behind all brooded Nature’s grandiose calm.

      Primaeval peace was there and in its bosom

      Held undisturbed the strife of bird and beast.

      Man the deep-browed artificer had not come

      To lay his hand on happy inconscient things,

      Thought was not there nor the measurer, strong-eyed toil,

      Life had not learned its discord with its aim.

      The Mighty Mother lay outstretched at ease.

      All was in line with her first satisfied plan;

      Moved by a universal will of joy

      The trees bloomed in their green felicity

      And the wild children brooded not on pain.

      At the end reclined a stern and giant tract

      Of tangled depths and solemn questioning hills,

      Peaks like a bare austerity of the soul,

      Armoured, remote and desolately grand

      Like the thought-screened infinities that lie

      Behind the rapt smile of the Almighty’s dance.

      A matted forest-head invaded heaven

      As if a blue-throated ascetic peered

      From the stone fastness of his mountain cell

      Regarding the brief gladness of the days;

      His vast extended spirit couched behind.

      A mighty murmur of immense retreat

      Besieged the ear, a sad and limitless call

      As of a soul retiring from the world.

      This was the scene which the ambiguous Mother

      Had chosen for her brief felicitous hour;

      Here in this solitude far from the world

      Her part she began in the world’s joy and strife.

      Here were disclosed to her the mystic courts,

      The lurking doors of beauty and surprise,

      The wings that murmur in the golden house,

      The temple of sweetness and the fiery aisle.

      A stranger on the sorrowful roads of Time,

      Immortal under the yoke of death and fate,

      A sacrificant of the bliss and pain of the spheres,

      Love in the wilderness met Savitri.

      End of Canto One

      Canto Two

      Satyavan

      All she remembered on this day of Fate,

      The road that hazarded not the solemn depths

      But turned away to flee to human homes,

      The wilderness with its mighty monotone,

      The morning like a lustrous seer above,

      The passion of the summits lost in heaven,

      The titan murmur of the endless woods.

      As if a wicket gate to joy were there

      Ringed in with voiceless hint and magic sign,

      Upon the margin of an unknown world

      Reclined the curve of a sun-held recess;

      Groves with strange flowers like eyes of gazing nymphs

      Peered from their secrecy into open space,

      Boughs whispering to a constancy of light

      Sheltered a dim and screened felicity,

      And slowly a supine inconstant breeze

      Ran like a fleeting sigh of happiness

      Over slumbrous grasses pranked with green and gold.

      Hidden in the forest’s bosom of loneliness

      Amid the leaves the inmate voices called,

      Sweet like desires enamoured and unseen,

      Cry answering to low insistent cry.

      Behind slept emerald dumb remotenesses,

      Haunt of a Nature passionate, veiled, denied

      To all but her own vision lost and wild.

      Earth in this beautiful refuge free from cares

      Murmured to the soul a song of strength and peace.

      Only one sign was there of a human tread:

      A single path, shot thin and arrowlike

      Into this bosom of vast and secret life,

      Pierced its enormous dream of solitude.

      Here first she met on the uncertain earth

      The one for whom her heart had come so far.

      As might a soul on Nature’s background limned

      Stand out for a moment in a house of dream

      Created by the ardent breath of life,

      So he appeared against the forest verge

      Inset twixt green relief and golden ray.

      As if a weapon of the living Light,

      Erect and lofty like a spear of God

      His figure led the splendour of the morn.

      Noble and clear as the broad peaceful heavens

      A tablet of young wisdom was his brow;

      Freedom’s imperious beauty curved his limbs,

      The joy of life was on his open face.

      His look was a wide daybreak of the gods,

      His head was a youthful Rishi’s touched with light,

      His body was a