Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

beloved despot of our thoughts and acts,

      She streams into us with her unbound force,

      Into mortal limbs the Immortal’s rapture and power.

      An inner law of beauty shapes our lives;

      Our words become the natural speech of Truth,

      Each thought is a ripple on a sea of Light.

      Then sin and virtue leave the cosmic lists;

      They struggle no more in our delivered hearts:

      Our acts chime with God’s simple natural good

      Or serve the rule of a supernal Right.

      All moods unlovely, evil and untrue

      Forsake their stations in fierce disarray

      And hide their shame in the subconscient’s dusk.

      Then lifts the mind a cry of victory:

      “O soul, my soul, we have created Heaven,

      Within we have found the kingdom here of God,

      His fortress built in a loud ignorant world.

      Our life is entrenched between two rivers of Light,

      We have turned space into a gulf of peace

      And made the body a Capitol of bliss.

      What more, what more, if more must still be done?”

      In the slow process of the evolving spirit,

      In the brief stade between a death and birth

      A first perfection’s stage is reached at last;

      Out of the wood and stone of our nature’s stuff

      A temple is shaped where the high gods could live.

      Even if the struggling world is left outside

      One man’s perfection still can save the world.

      There is won a new proximity to the skies,

      A first betrothal of the Earth to Heaven,

      A deep concordat between Truth and Life:

      A camp of God is pitched in human time.

      End of Canto Five

      Canto Six

      Nirvana and the Discovery of the All-Negating Absolute

      A calm slow sun looked down from tranquil heavens.

      A routed sullen rearguard of retreat,

      The last rains had fled murmuring across the woods

      Or failed, a sibilant whisper mid the leaves,

      And the great blue enchantment of the sky

      Recovered the deep rapture of its smile.

      Its mellow splendour unstressed by storm-licked heats

      Found room for a luxury of warm mild days,

      The night’s gold treasure of autumnal moons

      Came floating shipped through ripples of faery air.

      And Savitri’s life was glad, fulfilled like earth’s;

      She had found herself, she knew her being’s aim.

      Although her kingdom of marvellous change within

      Remained unspoken in her secret breast,

      All that lived round her felt its magic’s charm:

      The trees’ rustling voices told it to the winds,

      Flowers spoke in ardent hues an unknown joy,

      The birds’ carolling became a canticle,

      The beasts forgot their strife and lived at ease.

      Absorbed in wide communion with the Unseen

      The mild ascetics of the wood received

      A sudden greatening of their lonely muse.

      This bright perfection of her inner state

      Poured overflowing into her outward scene,

      Made beautiful dull common natural things

      And action wonderful and time divine.

      Even the smallest meanest work became

      A sweet or glad and glorious sacrament,

      An offering to the self of the great world

      Or a service to the One in each and all.

      A light invaded all from her being’s light;

      Her heart-beats’ dance communicated bliss:

      Happiness grew happier, shared with her, by her touch

      And grief some solace found when she drew near.

      Above the cherished head of Satyavan

      She saw not now Fate’s dark and lethal orb;

      A golden circle round a mystic sun

      Disclosed to her new-born predicting sight

      The cyclic rondure of a sovereign life.

      In her visions and deep-etched veridical dreams,

      In brief shiftings of the future’s heavy screen,

      He lay not by a dolorous decree

      A victim in the dismal antre of death

      Or borne to blissful regions far from her

      Forgetting the sweetness of earth’s warm delight,

      Forgetting the passionate oneness of love’s clasp,

      Absolved in the self-rapt immortal’s bliss.

      Always he was with her, a living soul

      That met her eyes with close enamoured eyes,

      A living body near to her body’s joy.

      But now no longer in these great wild woods

      In kinship with the days of bird and beast

      And levelled to the bareness of earth’s brown breast,

      But mid the thinking high-built lives of men

      In tapestried chambers and on crystal floors,

      In armoured town or gardened pleasure-walks,

      Even in distance closer than her thoughts,

      Body to body near, soul near to soul,

      Moving as if by a common breath and will

      They were tied in the single circling of their days

      Together by love’s unseen atmosphere,

      Inseparable like the earth and sky.

      Thus for a while she trod the Golden Path;

      This was the sun before abysmal Night.

      Once as she sat in deep felicitous muse,

      Still quivering from her lover’s strong embrace,

      And made her joy a bridge twixt earth and heaven,

      An abyss yawned suddenly beneath her heart.

      A vast and nameless fear dragged at her nerves

      As drags a wild beast its half-slaughtered prey;

      It seemed to have no den from which it sprang:

      It was not hers, but hid its unseen cause.

      Then rushing came its vast and fearful Fount.

      A formless