Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

      A dreadful murmur rose like a dim sea;

      The Serpent of the threshold hissing rose,

      A fatal guardian hood with monstrous coils,

      The hounds of darkness growled with jaws agape,

      And trolls and gnomes and goblins scowled and stared

      And wild beast roarings thrilled the blood with fear

      And menace muttered in a dangerous tongue.

      Unshaken her will pressed on the rigid bars:

      The gate swung wide with a protesting jar,

      The opponent Powers withdrew their dreadful guard;

      Her being entered into the inner worlds.

      In a narrow passage, the subconscient’s gate,

      She breathed with difficulty and pain and strove

      To find the inner self concealed in sense.

      Into a dense of subtle Matter packed,

      A cavity filled with a blind mass of power,

      An opposition of misleading gleams,

      A heavy barrier of unseeing sight,

      She forced her way through body to the soul.

      Across a perilous border line she passed

      Where Life dips into the subconscient dusk

      Or struggles from Matter into chaos of mind,

      Aswarm with elemental entities

      And fluttering shapes of vague half-bodied thought

      And crude beginnings of incontinent force.

      At first a difficult narrowness was there,

      A press of uncertain powers and drifting wills;

      For all was there but nothing in its place.

      At times an opening came, a door was forced;

      She crossed through spaces of a secret self

      And trod in passages of inner Time.

      At last she broke into a form of things,

      A start of finiteness, a world of sense:

      But all was still confused, nothing self-found.

      Soul was not there but only cries of life.

      A thronged and clamorous air environed her.

      A horde of sounds defied significance,

      A dissonant clash of cries and contrary calls;

      A mob of visions broke across the sight,

      A jostled sequence lacking sense and suite,

      Feelings pushed through a packed and burdened heart,

      Each forced its separate inconsequent way

      But cared for nothing but its ego’s drive.

      A rally without key of common will,

      Thought stared at thought and pulled at the taut brain

      As if to pluck the reason from its seat

      And cast its corpse into life’s wayside drain;

      So might forgotten lie in Nature’s mud

      Abandoned the slain sentinel of the soul.

      So could life’s power shake from it mind’s rule,

      Nature renounce the spirit’s government

      And the bare elemental energies

      Make of the sense a glory of boundless joy,

      A splendour of ecstatic anarchy,

      A revel mighty and mad of utter bliss.

      This was the sense’s instinct void of soul

      Or when the soul sleeps hidden void of power,

      But now the vital godhead wakes within

      And lifts the life with the Supernal’s touch.

      But how shall come the glory and the flame

      If mind is cast away into the abyss?

      For body without mind has not the light,

      The rapture of spirit sense, the joy of life;

      All then becomes subconscient, tenebrous,

      Inconscience puts its seal on Nature’s page

      Or else a mad disorder whirls the brain

      Posting along a ravaged nature’s roads,

      A chaos of disordered impulses

      In which no light can come, no joy, no peace.

      This state now threatened, this she pushed from her.

      As if in a long endless tossing street

      One driven mid a trampling hurrying crowd

      Hour after hour she trod without release

      Holding by her will the senseless meute at bay;

      Out of the dreadful press she dragged her will

      And fixed her thought upon the saviour Name;

      Then all grew still and empty; she was free.

      A large deliverance came, a vast calm space.

      Awhile she moved through a blank tranquillity

      Of naked Light from an invisible sun,

      A void that was a bodiless happiness,

      A blissful vacuum of nameless peace.

      But now a mightier danger’s front drew near:

      The press of bodily mind, the Inconscient’s brood

      Of aimless thought and will had fallen from her.

      Approaching loomed a giant head of Life

      Ungoverned by mind or soul, subconscient, vast.

      It tossed all power into a single drive,

      It made its power a might of dangerous seas.

      Into the stillness of her silent self,

      Into the whiteness of its muse of Space

      A spate, a torrent of the speed of Life

      Broke like a wind-lashed driven mob of waves

      Racing on a pale floor of summer sand;

      It drowned its banks, a mountain of climbing waves.

      Enormous was its vast and passionate voice.

      It cried to her listening spirit as it ran,

      Demanding God’s submission to chainless Force.

      A deaf force calling to a status dumb,

      A thousand voices in a muted Vast,

      It claimed the heart’s support for its clutch at joy,

      For its need to act the witness Soul’s consent,

      For its lust of power her neutral being’s seal.

      Into the wideness of her watching self

      It brought a grandiose gust of the Breath of Life;

      Its torrent carried the world’s hopes and fears,

      All life’s, all Nature’s dissatisfied hungry cry,

      And the longing all eternity cannot fill.

      It called to the mountain secrecies of the soul

      And the miracle