Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

his return to immortality.

      To the abiding and eternal is their climb,

      To the pure existence everywhere the same,

      To the sheer consciousness and the absolute force

      And the unimaginable and formless bliss,

      To the mirth in Time and the timeless mystery

      Of the triune being who is all and one

      And yet is no one but himself apart.

      There was no step of breathing men, no sound,

      Only the living nearness of the soul.

      Yet all the worlds and God himself were there,

      For every symbol was a reality

      And brought the presence which had given it life.

      All this she saw and inly felt and knew

      Not by some thought of mind but by the self.

      A light not born of sun or moon or fire,

      A light that dwelt within and saw within

      Shedding an intimate visibility

      Made secrecy more revealing than the word:

      Our sight and sense are a fallible gaze and touch

      And only the spirit’s vision is wholly true.

      As thus she passed in that mysterious place

      Through room and room, through door and rock-hewn door,

      She felt herself made one with all she saw.

      A sealed identity within her woke;

      She knew herself the Beloved of the Supreme:

      These Gods and Goddesses were he and she:

      The Mother was she of Beauty and Delight,

      The Word in Brahma’s vast creating clasp,

      The World-Puissance on almighty Shiva’s lap, –

      The Master and the Mother of all lives

      Watching the worlds their twin regard had made,

      And Krishna and Radha for ever entwined in bliss,

      The Adorer and Adored self-lost and one.

      In the last chamber on a golden seat

      One sat whose shape no vision could define;

      Only one felt the world’s unattainable fount,

      A Power of which she was a straying Force,

      An invisible Beauty, goal of the world’s desire,

      A Sun of which all knowledge is a beam,

      A Greatness without whom no life could be.

      Thence all departed into silent self,

      And all became formless and pure and bare.

      Then through a tunnel dug in the last rock

      She came out where there shone a deathless sun.

      A house was there all made of flame and light

      And crossing a wall of doorless living fire

      There suddenly she met her secret soul.

      A being stood immortal in transience,

      Deathless dallying with momentary things,

      In whose wide eyes of tranquil happiness

      Which pity and sorrow could not abrogate

      Infinity turned its gaze on finite shapes:

      Observer of the silent steps of the hours,

      Eternity upheld the minute’s acts

      And the passing scenes of the Everlasting’s play.

      In the mystery of its selecting will,

      In the Divine Comedy a participant,

      The Spirit’s conscious representative,

      God’s delegate in our humanity,

      Comrade of the universe, the Transcendent’s ray,

      She had come into the mortal body’s room

      To play at ball with Time and Circumstance.

      A joy in the world her master movement here,

      The passion of the game lighted her eyes:

      A smile on her lips welcomed earth’s bliss and grief,

      A laugh was her return to pleasure and pain.

      All things she saw as a masquerade of Truth

      Disguised in the costumes of Ignorance,

      Crossing the years to immortality;

      All she could front with the strong spirit’s peace.

      But since she knows the toil of mind and life

      As a mother feels and shares her children’s lives,

      She puts forth a small portion of herself,

      A being no bigger than the thumb of man

      Into a hidden region of the heart

      To face the pang and to forget the bliss,

      To share the suffering and endure earth’s wounds

      And labour mid the labour of the stars.

      This in us laughs and weeps, suffers the stroke,

      Exults in victory, struggles for the crown;

      Identified with the mind and body and life,

      It takes on itself their anguish and defeat,

      Bleeds with Fate’s whips and hangs upon the cross,

      Yet is the unwounded and immortal self

      Supporting the actor in the human scene.

      Through this she sends us her glory and her powers,

      Pushes to wisdom’s heights, through misery’s gulfs;

      She gives us strength to do our daily task

      And sympathy that partakes of others’ grief

      And the little strength we have to help our race,

      We who must fill the role of the universe

      Acting itself out in a slight human shape

      And on our shoulders carry the struggling world.

      This is in us the godhead small and marred;

      In this human portion of divinity

      She seats the greatness of the Soul in Time

      To uplift from light to light, from power to power,

      Till on a heavenly peak it stands, a king.

      In body weak, in its heart an invincible might,

      It climbs stumbling, held up by an unseen hand,

      A toiling spirit in a mortal shape.

      Here in this chamber of flame and light they met;

      They looked upon each other, knew themselves,

      The secret deity and its human part,

      The calm immortal and the struggling soul.

      Then with a magic transformation’s speed

      They rushed into each other and grew one.

      Once more she was human upon earthly soil

      In the muttering night amid the rain-swept woods