Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

godlike wings grow wider with each fall.

      Its splendid failures sum to victory.

      O man, the events that meet thee on thy road,

      Though they smite thy body and soul with joy and grief,

      Are not thy fate, – they touch thee awhile and pass;

      Even death can cut not short thy spirit’s walk:

      Thy goal, the road thou choosest are thy fate.

      On the altar throwing thy thoughts, thy heart, thy works,

      Thy fate is a long sacrifice to the gods

      Till they have opened to thee thy secret self

      And made thee one with the indwelling God.

      O soul, intruder in Nature’s ignorance,

      Armed traveller to the unseen supernal heights,

      Thy spirit’s fate is a battle and ceaseless march

      Against invisible opponent Powers,

      A passage from Matter into timeless self.

      Adventurer through blind unforeseeing Time,

      A forced advance through a long line of lives,

      It pushes its spearhead through the centuries.

      Across the dust and mire of the earthly plain,

      On many guarded lines and dangerous fronts,

      In dire assaults, in wounded slow retreats,

      Holding the ideal’s ringed and battered fort

      Or fighting against odds in lonely posts,

      Or camped in night around the bivouac’s fires

      Awaiting the tardy trumpets of the dawn,

      In hunger and in plenty and in pain,

      Through peril and through triumph and through fall,

      Through life’s green lanes and over her desert sands,

      Up the bald moor, along the sunlit ridge,

      In serried columns with a straggling rear

      Led by its nomad vanguard’s signal fires,

      Marches the army of the waylost god.

      Then late the joy ineffable is felt,

      Then he remembers his forgotten self;

      He has refound the skies from which he fell.

      At length his front’s indomitable line

      Forces the last passes of the Ignorance:

      Advancing beyond Nature’s last known bounds,

      Reconnoitring the formidable unknown,

      Beyond the landmarks of things visible,

      It mounts through a miraculous upper air

      Till climbing the mute summit of the world

      He stands upon the splendour-peaks of God.

      In vain thou mournst that Satyavan must die;

      His death is a beginning of greater life,

      Death is the spirit’s opportunity.

      A vast intention has brought two souls close

      And love and death conspire towards one great end.

      For out of danger and pain heaven-bliss shall come,

      Time’s unforeseen event, God’s secret plan.

      This world was not built with random bricks of Chance,

      A blind god is not destiny’s architect;

      A conscious power has drawn the plan of life,

      There is a meaning in each curve and line.

      It is an architecture high and grand

      By many named and nameless masons built

      In which unseeing hands obey the Unseen,

      And of its master-builders she is one.

      “Queen, strive no more to change the secret will;

      Time’s accidents are steps in its vast scheme.

      Bring not thy brief and helpless human tears

      Across the fathomless moments of a heart

      That knows its single will and God’s as one:

      It can embrace its hostile destiny;

      It sits apart with grief and facing death,

      Affronting adverse fate armed and alone.

      In this enormous world standing apart

      In the mightiness of her silent spirit’s will,

      In the passion of her soul of sacrifice

      Her lonely strength facing the universe,

      Affronting fate, asks not man’s help nor god’s:

      Sometimes one life is charged with earth’s destiny,

      It cries not for succour from the time-bound powers.

      Alone she is equal to her mighty task.

      Intervene not in a strife too great for thee,

      A struggle too deep for mortal thought to sound,

      Its question to this Nature’s rigid bounds

      When the soul fronts nude of garbs the infinite,

      Its too vast theme of a lonely mortal will

      Pacing the silence of eternity.

      As a star, uncompanioned, moves in heaven

      Unastonished by the immensities of Space,

      Travelling infinity by its own light,

      The great are strongest when they stand alone.

      A God-given might of being is their force,

      A ray from self’s solitude of light the guide;

      The soul that can live alone with itself meets God;

      Its lonely universe is their rendezvous.

      A day may come when she must stand unhelped

      On a dangerous brink of the world’s doom and hers,

      Carrying the world’s future on her lonely breast,

      Carrying the human hope in a heart left sole

      To conquer or fail on a last desperate verge,

      Alone with death and close to extinction’s edge.

      Her single greatness in that last dire scene

      Must cross alone a perilous bridge in Time

      And reach an apex of world-destiny

      Where all is won or all is lost for man.

      In that tremendous silence lone and lost

      Of a deciding hour in the world’s fate,

      In her soul’s climbing beyond mortal time

      When she stands sole with Death or sole with God

      Apart upon a silent desperate brink,

      Alone with her self and death and destiny

      As on some verge between Time and Timelessness

      When being must end or life rebuild its base,

      Alone she must conquer or alone must fall.

      No human aid can reach her in that hour,

      No