Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

      Her many-hued raiment glistening in the light

      Hovered a moment over the wind-stirred grass,

      Mixed with a glimmer of her body’s ray

      Like lovely plumage of a settling bird.

      Her gleaming feet upon the green-gold sward

      Scattered a memory of wandering beams

      And lightly pressed the unspoken desire of earth

      Cherished in her too brief passing by the soil.

      Then flitting like pale-brilliant moths her hands

      Took from the sylvan verge’s sunlit arms

      A load of their jewel-faces’ clustering swarms,

      Companions of the spring-time and the breeze.

      A candid garland set with simple forms

      Her rapid fingers taught a flower song,

      The stanzaed movement of a marriage hymn.

      Profound in perfume and immersed in hue

      They mixed their yearning’s coloured signs and made

      The bloom of their purity and passion one.

      A sacrament of joy in treasuring palms

      She brought, flower-symbol of her offered life,

      Then with raised hands that trembled a little now

      At the very closeness that her soul desired,

      This bond of sweetness, their bright union’s sign,

      She laid on the bosom coveted by her love.

      As if inclined before some gracious god

      Who has out of his mist of greatness shone

      To fill with beauty his adorer’s hours,

      She bowed and touched his feet with worshipping hands;

      She made her life his world for him to tread

      And made her body the room of his delight,

      Her beating heart a remembrancer of bliss.

      He bent to her and took into his own

      Their married yearning joined like folded hopes;

      As if a whole rich world suddenly possessed,

      Wedded to all he had been, became himself,

      An inexhaustible joy made his alone,

      He gathered all Savitri into his clasp.

      Around her his embrace became the sign

      Of a locked closeness through slow intimate years,

      A first sweet summary of delight to come,

      One brevity intense of all long life.

      In a wide moment of two souls that meet

      She felt her being flow into him as in waves

      A river pours into a mighty sea.

      As when a soul is merging into God

      To live in Him for ever and know His joy,

      Her consciousness grew aware of him alone

      And all her separate self was lost in his.

      As a starry heaven encircles happy earth,

      He shut her into himself in a circle of bliss

      And shut the world into himself and her.

      A boundless isolation made them one;

      He was aware of her enveloping him

      And let her penetrate his very soul

      As is a world by the world’s spirit filled,

      As the mortal wakes into Eternity,

      As the finite opens to the Infinite.

      Thus were they in each other lost awhile,

      Then drawing back from their long ecstasy’s trance

      Came into a new self and a new world.

      Each now was a part of the other’s unity,

      The world was but their twin self-finding’s scene

      Or their own wedded being’s vaster frame.

      On the high glowing cupola of the day

      Fate tied a knot with morning’s halo threads

      While by the ministry of an auspice-hour

      Heart-bound before the sun, their marriage fire,

      The wedding of the eternal Lord and Spouse

      Took place again on earth in human forms:

      In a new act of the drama of the world

      The united Two began a greater age.

      In the silence and murmur of that emerald world

      And the mutter of the priest-wind’s sacred verse,

      Amid the choral whispering of the leaves

      Love’s twain had joined together and grew one.

      The natural miracle was wrought once more:

      In the immutable ideal world

      One human moment was eternal made.

      Then down the narrow path where their lives had met

      He led and showed to her her future world,

      Love’s refuge and corner of happy solitude.

      At the path’s end through a green cleft in the trees

      She saw a clustering line of hermit-roofs

      And looked now first on her heart’s future home,

      The thatch that covered the life of Satyavan.

      Adorned with creepers and red climbing flowers

      It seemed a sylvan beauty in her dreams

      Slumbering with brown body and tumbled hair

      In her chamber inviolate of emerald peace.

      Around it stretched the forest’s anchorite mood

      Lost in the depths of its own solitude.

      Then moved by the deep joy she could not speak,

      A little depth of it quivering in her words,

      Her happy voice cried out to Satyavan:

      “My heart will stay here on this forest verge

      And close to this thatched roof while I am far:

      Now of more wandering it has no need.

      But I must haste back to my father’s house

      Which soon will lose one loved accustomed tread

      And listen in vain for a once cherished voice.

      For soon I shall return nor ever again

      Oneness must sever its recovered bliss

      Or fate sunder our lives while life is ours.”

      Once more she mounted on the carven car

      And under the ardour of a fiery noon

      Less bright than the splendour of her thoughts and dreams

      She sped swift-reined, swift-hearted but still saw

      In still lucidities of sight’s inner world

      Through the cool-scented wood’s luxurious gloom

      On shadowy paths between