Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

heart,

      A rude refuge of the thought and will of man

      Watched by the crowding giants of the wood.

      Arrived in that rough-hewn homestead they gave,

      Questioning no more the strangeness of her fate,

      Their pride and loved one to the great blind king,

      A regal pillar of fallen mightiness

      And the stately care-worn woman once a queen

      Who now hoped nothing for herself from life,

      But all things only hoped for her one child,

      Calling on that single head from partial Fate

      All joy of earth, all heaven’s beatitude.

      Adoring wisdom and beauty like a young god’s,

      She saw him loved by heaven as by herself,

      She rejoiced in his brightness and believed in his fate

      And knew not of the evil drawing near.

      Lingering some days upon the forest verge

      Like men who lengthen out departure’s pain,

      Unwilling to separate sorrowful clinging hands,

      Unwilling to see for the last time a face,

      Heavy with the sorrow of a coming day

      And wondering at the carelessness of Fate

      Who breaks with idle hands her supreme works,

      They parted from her with pain-fraught burdened hearts

      As forced by inescapable fate we part

      From one whom we shall never see again;

      Driven by the singularity of her fate,

      Helpless against the choice of Savitri’s heart

      They left her to her rapture and her doom

      In the tremendous forest’s savage charge.

      All put behind her that was once her life,

      All welcomed that henceforth was his and hers,

      She abode with Satyavan in the wild woods:

      Priceless she deemed her joy so close to death;

      Apart with love she lived for love alone.

      As if self-poised above the march of days,

      Her immobile spirit watched the haste of Time,

      A statue of passion and invincible force,

      An absolutism of sweet imperious will,

      A tranquillity and a violence of the gods

      Indomitable and immutable.

      At first to her beneath the sapphire heavens

      The sylvan solitude was a gorgeous dream,

      An altar of the summer’s splendour and fire,

      A sky-topped flower-hung palace of the gods

      And all its scenes a smile on rapture’s lips

      And all its voices bards of happiness.

      There was a chanting in the casual wind,

      There was a glory in the least sunbeam;

      Night was a chrysoprase on velvet cloth,

      A nestling darkness or a moonlit deep;

      Day was a purple pageant and a hymn,

      A wave of the laughter of light from morn to eve.

      His absence was a dream of memory,

      His presence was the empire of a god.

      A fusing of the joys of earth and heaven,

      A tremulous blaze of nuptial rapture passed,

      A rushing of two spirits to be one,

      A burning of two bodies in one flame.

      Opened were gates of unforgettable bliss:

      Two lives were locked within an earthly heaven

      And fate and grief fled from that fiery hour.

      But soon now failed the summer’s ardent breath

      And throngs of blue-black clouds crept through the sky

      And rain fled sobbing over the dripping leaves

      And storm became the forest’s titan voice.

      Then listening to the thunder’s fatal crash

      And the fugitive pattering footsteps of the showers

      And the long unsatisfied panting of the wind

      And sorrow muttering in the sound-vexed night,

      The grief of all the world came near to her.

      Night’s darkness seemed her future’s ominous face.

      The shadow of her lover’s doom arose

      And fear laid hands upon her mortal heart.

      The moments swift and ruthless raced; alarmed

      Her thoughts, her mind remembered Narad’s date.

      A trembling moved accountant of her riches,

      She reckoned the insufficient days between:

      A dire expectancy knocked at her breast;

      Dreadful to her were the footsteps of the hours:

      Grief came, a passionate stranger to her gate:

      Banished when in his arms, out of her sleep

      It rose at morn to look into her face.

      Vainly she fled into abysms of bliss

      From her pursuing foresight of the end.

      The more she plunged into love that anguish grew;

      Her deepest grief from sweetest gulfs arose.

      Remembrance was a poignant pang, she felt

      Each day a golden leaf torn cruelly out

      From her too slender book of love and joy.

      Thus swaying in strong gusts of happiness

      And swimming in foreboding’s sombre waves

      And feeding sorrow and terror with her heart, –

      For now they sat among her bosom’s guests

      Or in her inner chamber paced apart, –

      Her eyes stared blind into the future’s night.

      Out of her separate self she looked and saw,

      Moving amid the unconscious faces loved,

      In mind a stranger though in heart so near,

      The ignorant smiling world go happily by

      Upon its way towards an unknown doom

      And wondered at the careless lives of men.

      As if in different worlds they walked, though close,

      They confident of the returning sun,

      They wrapped in little hourly hopes and tasks, –

      She in her dreadful knowledge was alone.

      The rich and happy secrecy that once

      Enshrined her as if in a silver bower

      Apart in a bright nest of thoughts and dreams

      Made room for tragic hours of solitude

      And lonely