Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

the magnificent dawning of his force

      Built like a moving statue of delight

      He illumined the border of the forest page.

      Out of the ignorant eager toil of the years

      Abandoning man’s loud drama he had come

      Led by the wisdom of an adverse Fate

      To meet the ancient Mother in her groves.

      In her divine communion he had grown

      A foster-child of beauty and solitude,

      Heir to the centuries of the lonely wise,

      A brother of the sunshine and the sky,

      A wanderer communing with depth and marge.

      A Veda-knower of the unwritten book

      Perusing the mystic scripture of her forms,

      He had caught her hierophant significances,

      Her sphered immense imaginations learned,

      Taught by sublimities of stream and wood

      And voices of the sun and star and flame

      And chant of the magic singers on the boughs

      And the dumb teaching of four-footed things.

      Helping with confident steps her slow great hands

      He leaned to her influence like a flower to rain

      And, like the flower and tree a natural growth,

      Widened with the touches of her shaping hours.

      The mastery free natures have was his

      And their assent to joy and spacious calm;

      One with the single Spirit inhabiting all,

      He laid experience at the Godhead’s feet;

      His mind was open to her infinite mind,

      His acts were rhythmic with her primal force;

      He had subdued his mortal thought to hers.

      That day he had turned from his accustomed paths;

      For One who, knowing every moment’s load,

      Can move in all our studied or careless steps,

      Had laid the spell of destiny on his feet

      And drawn him to the forest’s flowering verge.

      At first her glance that took life’s million shapes

      Impartially to people its treasure-house

      Along with sky and flower and hill and star,

      Dwelt rather on the bright harmonious scene.

      It saw the green-gold of the slumbrous sward,

      The grasses quivering with the slow wind’s tread,

      The branches haunted by the wild bird’s call.

      Awake to Nature, vague as yet to life,

      The eager prisoner from the Infinite,

      The immortal wrestler in its mortal house,

      Its pride, power, passion of a striving God,

      It saw this image of veiled deity,

      This thinking master creature of the earth,

      This last result of the beauty of the stars,

      But only saw like fair and common forms

      The artist spirit needs not for its work

      And puts aside in memory’s shadowy rooms.

      A look, a turn decides our ill-poised fate.

      Thus in the hour that most concerned her all,

      Wandering unwarned by the slow surface mind,

      The heedless scout beneath her tenting lids

      Admired indifferent beauty and cared not

      To wake her body’s spirit to its king.

      So might she have passed by on chance ignorant roads

      Missing the call of Heaven, losing life’s aim,

      But the god touched in time her conscious soul.

      Her vision settled, caught and all was changed.

      Her mind at first dwelt in ideal dreams,

      Those intimate transmuters of earth’s signs

      That make known things a hint of unseen spheres,

      And saw in him the genius of the spot,

      A symbol figure standing mid earth’s scenes,

      A king of life outlined in delicate air.

      Yet this was but a moment’s reverie;

      For suddenly her heart looked out at him,

      The passionate seeing used thought cannot match,

      And knew one nearer than its own close strings.

      All in a moment was surprised and seized,

      All in inconscient ecstasy lain wrapped

      Or under imagination’s coloured lids

      Held up in a large mirror-air of dream,

      Broke forth in flame to recreate the world,

      And in that flame to new things she was born.

      A mystic tumult from her depths arose;

      Haled, smitten erect like one who dreamed at ease,

      Life ran to gaze from every gate of sense:

      Thoughts indistinct and glad in moon-mist heavens,

      Feelings as when a universe takes birth,

      Swept through the turmoil of her bosom’s space

      Invaded by a swarm of golden gods:

      Arising to a hymn of wonder’s priests

      Her soul flung wide its doors to this new sun.

      An alchemy worked, the transmutation came;

      The missioned face had wrought the Master’s spell.

      In the nameless light of two approaching eyes

      A swift and fated turning of her days

      Appeared and stretched to a gleam of unknown worlds.

      Then trembling with the mystic shock her heart

      Moved in her breast and cried out like a bird

      Who hears his mate upon a neighbouring bough.

      Hooves trampling fast, wheels largely stumbling ceased;

      The chariot stood like an arrested wind.

      And Satyavan looked out from his soul’s doors

      And felt the enchantment of her liquid voice

      Fill his youth’s purple ambience and endured

      The haunting miracle of a perfect face.

      Mastered by the honey of a strange flower-mouth,

      Drawn to soul-spaces opening round a brow,

      He turned to the vision like a sea to the moon

      And suffered a dream of beauty and of change,

      Discovered the aureole round a mortal’s head,

      Adored a new divinity in things.

      His self-bound nature foundered as in fire;

      His life