Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

was given him from within,

      To other scenes he moves and other players

      And laughs and weeps mid faces new, unknown.

      The body thou hast loved is cast away

      Amidst the brute unchanging stuff of worlds

      To indifferent mighty Nature and becomes

      Crude matter for the joy of others’ lives.

      But for our souls, upon the wheel of God

      For ever turning, they arrive and go,

      Married and sundered in the magic round

      Of the great Dancer of the boundless dance.

      Our emotions are but high and dying notes

      Of his wild music changed compellingly

      By the passionate movements of a seeking Heart

      In the inconstant links of hour with hour.

      To call down heaven’s distant answering song,

      To cry to an unseized bliss is all we dare;

      Once seized, we lose the heavenly music’s sense;

      Too near, the rhythmic cry has fled or failed;

      All sweetnesses are baffling symbols here.

      Love dies before the lover in our breast:

      Our joys are perfumes in a brittle vase.

      O then what wreck is this upon Time’s sea

      To spread life’s sails to the hurricane desire

      And call for pilot the unseeing heart!

      O child, wilt thou proclaim, wilt thou then follow

      Against the Law that is the eternal will

      The autarchy of the rash Titan’s mood

      To whom his own fierce will is the one law

      In a world where Truth is not, nor Light nor God?

      Only the gods can speak what now thou speakst.

      Thou who art human, think not like a god.

      For man, below the god, above the brute,

      Is given the calm reason as his guide;

      He is not driven by an unthinking will

      As are the actions of the bird and beast;

      He is not moved by stark Necessity

      Like the senseless motion of inconscient things.

      The giant’s and the Titan’s furious march

      Climbs to usurp the kingdom of the gods

      Or skirts the demon magnitudes of Hell;

      In the unreflecting passion of their hearts

      They dash their lives against the eternal Law

      And fall and break by their own violent mass:

      The middle path is made for thinking man.

      To choose his steps by reason’s vigilant light,

      To choose his path among the many paths

      Is given him, for each his difficult goal

      Hewn out of infinite possibility.

      Leave not thy goal to follow a beautiful face.

      Only when thou hast climbed above thy mind

      And liv’st in the calm vastness of the One

      Can love be eternal in the eternal Bliss

      And love divine replace the human tie.

      There is a shrouded law, an austere force:

      It bids thee strengthen thy undying spirit;

      It offers its severe benignancies

      Of work and thought and measured grave delight

      As steps to climb to God’s far secret heights.

      Then is our life a tranquil pilgrimage,

      Each year a mile upon the heavenly Way,

      Each dawn opens into a larger Light.

      Thy acts are thy helpers, all events are signs,

      Waking and sleep are opportunities

      Given to thee by an immortal Power.

      So canst thou raise thy pure unvanquished spirit,

      Till spread to heaven in a wide vesper calm,

      Indifferent and gentle as the sky,

      It greatens slowly into timeless peace.”

      But Savitri replied with steadfast eyes:

      “My will is part of the eternal Will,

      My fate is what my spirit’s strength can make,

      My fate is what my spirit’s strength can bear;

      My strength is not the Titan’s; it is God’s.

      I have discovered my glad reality

      Beyond my body in another’s being:

      I have found the deep unchanging soul of love.

      Then how shall I desire a lonely good,

      Or slay, aspiring to white vacant peace,

      The endless hope that made my soul spring forth

      Out of its infinite solitude and sleep?

      My spirit has glimpsed the glory for which it came,

      The beating of one vast heart in the flame of things,

      My eternity clasped by his eternity

      And, tireless of the sweet abysms of Time,

      Deep possibility always to love.

      This, this is first, last joy and to its throb

      The riches of a thousand fortunate years

      Are poverty. Nothing to me are death and grief

      Or ordinary lives and happy days.

      And what to me are common souls of men

      Or eyes and lips that are not Satyavan’s?

      I have no need to draw back from his arms

      And the discovered paradise of his love

      And journey into a still infinity.

      Only now for my soul in Satyavan

      I treasure the rich occasion of my birth:

      In sunlight and a dream of emerald ways

      I shall walk with him like gods in Paradise.

      If for a year, that year is all my life.

      And yet I know this is not all my fate

      Only to live and love awhile and die.

      For I know now why my spirit came on earth

      And who I am and who he is I love.

      I have looked at him from my immortal Self,

      I have seen God smile at me in Satyavan;

      I have seen the Eternal in a human face.”

      Then none could answer to her words. Silent

      They sat and looked into the eyes of Fate.

      End of Canto One

      Canto Two

      The Way of Fate and the Problem of Pain

      A