Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

two puissant wings.

      Our body’s subtle self is throned within

      In its viewless palace of veridical dreams

      That are bright shadows of the thoughts of God.

      In the prone obscure beginnings of the race

      The human grew in the bowed apelike man.

      He stood erect, a godlike form and force,

      And a soul’s thoughts looked out from earth-born eyes;

      Man stood erect, he wore the thinker’s brow:

      He looked at heaven and saw his comrade stars;

      A vision came of beauty and greater birth

      Slowly emerging from the heart’s chapel of light

      And moved in a white lucent air of dreams.

      He saw his being’s unrealised vastnesses,

      He aspired and housed the nascent demigod.

      Out of the dim recesses of the self

      The occult seeker into the open came:

      He heard the far and touched the intangible,

      He gazed into the future and the unseen;

      He used the powers earth-instruments cannot use,

      A pastime made of the impossible;

      He caught up fragments of the Omniscient’s thought,

      He scattered formulas of omnipotence.

      Thus man in his little house made of earth’s dust

      Grew towards an unseen heaven of thought and dream

      Looking into the vast vistas of his mind

      On a small globe dotting infinity.

      At last climbing a long and narrow stair

      He stood alone on the high roof of things

      And saw the light of a spiritual sun.

      Aspiring he transcends his earthly self;

      He stands in the largeness of his soul new-born,

      Redeemed from encirclement by mortal things

      And moves in a pure free spiritual realm

      As in the rare breath of a stratosphere;

      A last end of far lines of divinity,

      He mounts by a frail thread to his high source;

      He reaches his fount of immortality,

      He calls the Godhead into his mortal life.

      All this the spirit concealed had done in her:

      A portion of the mighty Mother came

      Into her as into its own human part:

      Amid the cosmic workings of the Gods

      It marked her the centre of a wide-drawn scheme,

      Dreamed in the passion of her far-seeing spirit

      To mould humanity into God’s own shape

      And lead this great blind struggling world to light

      Or a new world discover or create.

      Earth must transform herself and equal Heaven

      Or Heaven descend into earth’s mortal state.

      But for such vast spiritual change to be,

      Out of the mystic cavern in man’s heart

      The heavenly Psyche must put off her veil

      And step into common nature’s crowded rooms

      And stand uncovered in that nature’s front

      And rule its thoughts and fill the body and life.

      Obedient to a high command she sat:

      Time, life and death were passing incidents

      Obstructing with their transient view her sight,

      Her sight that must break through and liberate the god

      Imprisoned in the visionless mortal man.

      The inferior nature born into ignorance

      Still took too large a place, it veiled her self

      And must be pushed aside to find her soul.

      End of Canto Two

      Canto Three

      The Entry into the Inner Countries

      At first out of the busy hum of mind

      As if from a loud thronged market into a cave

      By an inward moment’s magic she had come.

      A stark hushed emptiness became her self:

      Her mind unvisited by the voice of thought

      Stared at a void deep’s dumb infinity.

      Her heights receded, her depths behind her closed;

      All fled away from her and left her blank.

      But when she came back to her self of thought,

      Once more she was a human thing on earth,

      A lump of Matter, a house of closed sight,

      A mind compelled to think out ignorance,

      A life-force pressed into a camp of works

      And the material world her limiting field.

      Amazed like one unknowing she sought her way

      Out of the tangle of man’s ignorant past

      That took the surface person for the soul.

      Then a Voice spoke that dwelt on secret heights:

      “For man thou seekst, not for thyself alone.

      Only if God assumes the human mind

      And puts on mortal ignorance for his cloak

      And makes himself the Dwarf with triple stride,

      Can he help man to grow into the God.

      As man disguised the cosmic Greatness works

      And finds the mystic inaccessible gate

      And opens the Immortal’s golden door.

      Man, human, follows in God’s human steps.

      Accepting his darkness thou must bring to him light,

      Accepting his sorrow thou must bring to him bliss.

      In Matter’s body find thy heaven-born soul.”

      Then Savitri surged out of her body’s wall

      And stood a little span outside herself

      And looked into her subtle being’s depths

      And in its heart as in a lotus-bud

      Divined her secret and mysterious soul.

      At the dim portal of the inner life

      That bars out from our depths the body’s mind

      And all that lives but by the body’s breath,

      She knocked and pressed against the ebony gate.

      The living portal groaned with sullen hinge:

      Heavily reluctant it complained inert

      Against the tyranny of the spirit’s touch.

      A formidable voice cried from within:

      “Back, creature of earth,