Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

look down on the magic and the play

      Where the God-child lies on the lap of Night and Dawn

      And the Everlasting puts on Time’s disguise.

      To the still heights and to the troubled depths

      His equal spirit gave its vast assent:

      A poised serenity of tranquil strength,

      A wide unshaken look on Time’s unrest

      Faced all experience with unaltered peace.

      Indifferent to the sorrow and delight,

      Untempted by the marvel and the call,

      Immobile it beheld the flux of things,

      Calm and apart supported all that is:

      His spirit’s stillness helped the toiling world.

      Inspired by silence and the closed eyes’ sight

      His force could work with a new luminous art

      On the crude material from which all is made

      And the refusal of Inertia’s mass

      And the grey front of the world’s Ignorance

      And nescient Matter and the huge error of life.

      As a sculptor chisels a deity out of stone

      He slowly chipped off the dark envelope,

      Line of defence of Nature’s ignorance,

      The illusion and mystery of the Inconscient

      In whose black pall the Eternal wraps his head

      That he may act unknown in cosmic Time.

      A splendour of self-creation from the peaks,

      A transfiguration in the mystic depths,

      A happier cosmic working could begin

      And fashion the world-shape in him anew,

      God found in Nature, Nature fulfilled in God.

      Already in him was seen that task of Power:

      Life made its home on the high tops of self;

      His soul, mind, heart became a single sun;

      Only life’s lower reaches remained dim.

      But there too, in the uncertain shadow of life,

      There was a labour and a fiery breath;

      The ambiguous cowled celestial puissance worked

      Watched by the inner Witness’s moveless peace.

      Even on the struggling Nature left below

      Strong periods of illumination came:

      Lightnings of glory after glory burned,

      Experience was a tale of blaze and fire,

      Air rippled round the argosies of the Gods,

      Strange riches sailed to him from the Unseen;

      Splendours of insight filled the blank of thought,

      Knowledge spoke to the inconscient stillnesses,

      Rivers poured down of bliss and luminous force,

      Visits of beauty, storm-sweeps of delight

      Rained from the all-powerful Mystery above.

      Thence stooped the eagles of Omniscience.

      A dense veil was rent, a mighty whisper heard;

      Repeated in the privacy of his soul,

      A wisdom-cry from rapt transcendences

      Sang on the mountains of an unseen world;

      The voices that an inner listening hears

      Conveyed to him their prophet utterances,

      And flame-wrapped outbursts of the immortal Word

      And flashes of an occult revealing Light

      Approached him from the unreachable Secrecy.

      An inspired Knowledge sat enthroned within

      Whose seconds illumined more than reason’s years:

      An ictus of revealing lustre fell

      As if a pointing accent upon Truth,

      And like a sky-flare showing all the ground

      A swift intuitive discernment shone.

      One glance could separate the true and false,

      Or raise its rapid torch-fire in the dark

      To check the claimants crowding through mind’s gates

      Covered by the forged signatures of the gods,

      Detect the magic bride in her disguise

      Or scan the apparent face of thought and life.

      Oft inspiration with her lightning feet,

      A sudden messenger from the all-seeing tops,

      Traversed the soundless corridors of his mind

      Bringing her rhythmic sense of hidden things.

      A music spoke transcending mortal speech.

      As if from a golden phial of the All-Bliss,

      A joy of light, a joy of sudden sight,

      A rapture of the thrilled undying Word

      Poured into his heart as into an empty cup,

      A repetition of God’s first delight

      Creating in a young and virgin Time.

      In a brief moment caught, a little space,

      All-Knowledge packed into great wordless thoughts

      Lodged in the expectant stillness of his depths

      A crystal of the ultimate Absolute,

      A portion of the inexpressible Truth

      Revealed by silence to the silent soul.

      The intense creatrix in his stillness wrought;

      Her power fallen speechless grew more intimate;

      She looked upon the seen and the unforeseen,

      Unguessed domains she made her native field.

      All-vision gathered into a single ray,

      As when the eyes stare at an invisible point

      Till through the intensity of one luminous spot

      An apocalypse of a world of images

      Enters into the kingdom of the seer.

      A great nude arm of splendour suddenly rose;

      It rent the gauze opaque of Nescience:

      Her lifted finger’s keen unthinkable tip

      Bared with a stab of flame the closed Beyond.

      An eye awake in voiceless heights of trance,

      A mind plucking at the unimaginable,

      Overleaping with a sole and perilous bound

      The high black wall hiding superconscience,

      She broke in with inspired speech for scythe

      And plundered the Unknowable’s vast estate.

      A gleaner of infinitesimal grains of Truth,

      A sheaf-binder of infinite experience,

      She pierced the guarded mysteries of World-Force

      And her magic methods wrapped in a thousand veils;

      Or