Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

torment edging the dire force of lust

      That wakes kinetic in earth’s dullard slime

      And carves a personality out of mud,

      The sorrow by which Nature’s hunger is fed,

      The oestrus which creates with fire of pain,

      The fate that punishes virtue with defeat,

      The tragedy that destroys long happiness,

      The weeping of Love, the quarrel of the Gods,

      Ceased in a truth which lives in its own light.

      His soul stood free, a witness and a king.

      Absorbed no more in the moment-ridden flux

      Where mind incessantly drifts as on a raft

      Hurried from phenomenon to phenomenon,

      He abode at rest in indivisible Time.

      As if a story long written but acted now,

      In his present he held his future and his past,

      Felt in the seconds the uncounted years

      And saw the hours like dots upon a page.

      An aspect of the unknown Reality

      Altered the meaning of the cosmic scene.

      This huge material universe became

      A small result of a stupendous force:

      Overtaking the moment the eternal Ray

      Illumined That which never yet was made.

      Thought lay down in a mighty voicelessness;

      The toiling Thinker widened and grew still,

      Wisdom transcendent touched his quivering heart:

      His soul could sail beyond thought’s luminous bar;

      Mind screened no more the shoreless infinite.

      Across a void retreating sky he glimpsed

      Through a last glimmer and drift of vanishing stars

      The superconscient realms of motionless Peace

      Where judgment ceases and the word is mute

      And the Unconceived lies pathless and alone.

      There came not form or any mounting voice;

      There only were Silence and the Absolute.

      Out of that stillness mind new-born arose

      And woke to truths once inexpressible,

      And forms appeared, dumbly significant,

      A seeing thought, a self-revealing voice.

      He knew the source from which his spirit came:

      Movement was married to the immobile Vast;

      He plunged his roots into the Infinite,

      He based his life upon eternity.

      Only awhile at first these heavenlier states,

      These large wide-poised upliftings could endure.

      The high and luminous tension breaks too soon,

      The body’s stone stillness and the life’s hushed trance,

      The breathless might and calm of silent mind;

      Or slowly they fail as sets a golden day.

      The restless nether members tire of peace;

      A nostalgia of old little works and joys,

      A need to call back small familiar selves,

      To tread the accustomed and inferior way,

      The need to rest in a natural pose of fall,

      As a child who learns to walk can walk not long,

      Replace the titan will for ever to climb,

      On the heart’s altar dim the sacred fire.

      An old pull of subconscious cords renews;

      It draws the unwilling spirit from the heights,

      Or a dull gravitation drags us down

      To the blind driven inertia of our base.

      This too the supreme Diplomat can use,

      He makes our fall a means for greater rise.

      For into ignorant Nature’s gusty field,

      Into the half-ordered chaos of mortal life

      The formless Power, the Self of eternal light

      Follow in the shadow of the spirit’s descent;

      The twin duality for ever one

      Chooses its home mid the tumults of the sense.

      He comes unseen into our darker parts

      And, curtained by the darkness, does his work,

      A subtle and all-knowing guest and guide,

      Till they too feel the need and will to change.

      All here must learn to obey a higher law,

      Our body’s cells must hold the Immortal’s flame.

      Else would the spirit reach alone its source

      Leaving a half-saved world to its dubious fate.

      Nature would ever labour unredeemed;

      Our earth would ever spin unhelped in Space,

      And this immense creation’s purpose fail

      Till at last the frustrate universe sank undone.

      Even his godlike strength to rise must fall:

      His greater consciousness withdrew behind;

      Dim and eclipsed, his human outside strove

      To feel again the old sublimities,

      Bring the high saving touch, the ethereal flame,

      Call back to its dire need the divine Force.

      Always the power poured back like sudden rain,

      Or slowly in his breast a presence grew;

      It clambered back to some remembered height

      Or soared above the peak from which it fell.

      Each time he rose there was a larger poise,

      A dwelling on a higher spirit plane;

      The Light remained in him a longer space.

      In this oscillation between earth and heaven,

      In this ineffable communion’s climb

      There grew in him as grows a waxing moon

      The glory of the integer of his soul.

      A union of the Real with the unique,

      A gaze of the Alone from every face,

      The presence of the Eternal in the hours

      Widening the mortal mind’s half-look on things,

      Bridging the gap between man’s force and Fate

      Made whole the fragment-being we are here.

      At last was won a firm spiritual poise,

      A constant lodging in the Eternal’s realm,

      A safety in the Silence and the Ray,

      A settlement in the Immutable.

      His heights of being lived in the still Self;

      His mind could rest on a supernal ground

      And