Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

life’s boughs

      And the winds of Paradise visit mortal air.

      Even if thou rain down intuition’s rays,

      The mind of man will think it earth’s own gleam,

      His spirit by spiritual ego sink,

      Or his soul dream shut in sainthood’s brilliant cell

      Where only a bright shadow of God can come.

      His hunger for the eternal thou must nurse

      And fill his yearning heart with heaven’s fire

      And bring God down into his body and life.

      One day I will return, His hand in mine,

      And thou shalt see the face of the Absolute.

      Then shall the holy marriage be achieved,

      Then shall the divine family be born.

      There shall be light and peace in all the worlds.”

      End of Canto Four

      Canto Five

      The Finding of the Soul

      Onward she passed seeking the soul’s mystic cave.

      At first she stepped into a night of God.

      The light was quenched that helps the labouring world,

      The power that struggles and stumbles in our life;

      This inefficient mind gave up its thoughts,

      The striving heart its unavailing hopes.

      All knowledge failed and the Idea’s forms

      And Wisdom screened in awe her lowly head

      Feeling a Truth too great for thought or speech,

      Formless, ineffable, for ever the same.

      An innocent and holy Ignorance

      Adored like one who worships formless God

      The unseen Light she could not claim nor own.

      In a simple purity of emptiness

      Her mind knelt down before the unknowable.

      All was abolished save her naked self

      And the prostrate yearning of her surrendered heart:

      There was no strength in her, no pride of force;

      The lofty burning of desire had sunk

      Ashamed, a vanity of separate self,

      The hope of spiritual greatness fled,

      Salvation she asked not nor a heavenly crown:

      Humility seemed now too proud a state.

      Her self was nothing, God alone was all,

      Yet God she knew not but only knew he was.

      A sacred darkness brooded now within,

      The world was a deep darkness great and nude.

      This void held more than all the teeming worlds,

      This blank felt more than all that Time has borne,

      This dark knew dumbly, immensely the Unknown.

      But all was formless, voiceless, infinite.

      As might a shadow walk in a shadowy scene,

      A small nought passing through a mightier Nought,

      A night of person in a bare outline

      Crossing a fathomless impersonal Night,

      Silent she moved, empty and absolute.

      In endless Time her soul reached a wide end,

      The spaceless Vast became her spirit’s place.

      At last a change approached, the emptiness broke;

      A wave rippled within, the world had stirred;

      Once more her inner self became her space.

      There was felt a blissful nearness to the goal;

      Heaven leaned low to kiss the sacred hill,

      The air trembled with passion and delight.

      A rose of splendour on a tree of dreams,

      The face of Dawn out of mooned twilight grew.

      Day came, priest of a sacrifice of joy

      Into the worshipping silence of her world;

      He carried immortal lustre as his robe,

      Trailed heaven like a purple scarf and wore

      As his vermilion caste-mark a red sun.

      As if an old remembered dream come true,

      She recognised in her prophetic mind

      The imperishable lustre of that sky,

      The tremulous sweetness of that happy air

      And, covered from mind’s view and life’s approach,

      The mystic cavern in the sacred hill

      And knew the dwelling of her secret soul.

      As if in some Elysian occult depth,

      Truth’s last retreat from thought’s profaning touch,

      As if in a rock-temple’s solitude hid,

      God’s refuge from an ignorant worshipping world,

      It lay withdrawn even from life’s inner sense,

      Receding from the entangled heart’s desire.

      A marvellous brooding twilight met the eyes

      And a holy stillness held that voiceless space.

      An awful dimness wrapped the great rock-doors

      Carved in the massive stone of Matter’s trance.

      Two golden serpents round the lintel curled,

      Enveloping it with their pure and dreadful strength,

      Looked out with wisdom’s deep and luminous eyes.

      An eagle covered it with wide conquering wings:

      Flames of self-lost immobile reverie,

      Doves crowded the grey musing cornices

      Like sculptured postures of white-bosomed peace.

      Across the threshold’s sleep she entered in

      And found herself amid great figures of gods

      Conscious in stone and living without breath,

      Watching with fixed regard the soul of man,

      Executive figures of the cosmic self,

      World-symbols of immutable potency.

      On the walls covered with significant shapes

      Looked at her the life-scene of man and beast

      And the high meaning of the life of gods,

      The power and necessity of these numberless worlds,

      And faces of beings and stretches of world-space

      Spoke the succinct and inexhaustible

      Hieratic message of the climbing planes.

      In their immensitude signing infinity

      They were the extension of the self of God

      And housed, impassively receiving all,

      His figures and his small and mighty acts

      And his passion and