Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

      Filling the universe with its dangerous breath,

      A denser darkness than the Night could bear,

      Enveloped the heavens and possessed the earth.

      A rolling surge of silent death, it came

      Curving round the far edge of the quaking globe;

      Effacing heaven with its enormous stride

      It willed to expunge the choked and anguished air

      And end the fable of the joy of life.

      It seemed her very being to forbid,

      Abolishing all by which her nature lived,

      And laboured to blot out her body and soul,

      A clutch of some half-seen Invisible,

      An ocean of terror and of sovereign might,

      A person and a black infinity.

      It seemed to cry to her without thought or word

      The message of its dark eternity

      And the awful meaning of its silences:

      Out of some sullen monstrous vast arisen,

      Out of an abysmal deep of grief and fear

      Imagined by some blind regardless self,

      A consciousness of being without its joy,

      Empty of thought, incapable of bliss,

      That felt life blank and nowhere found a soul,

      A voice to the dumb anguish of the heart

      Conveyed a stark sense of unspoken words;

      In her own depths she heard the unuttered thought

      That made unreal the world and all life meant.

      “Who art thou who claimst thy crown of separate birth,

      The illusion of thy soul’s reality

      And personal godhead on an ignorant globe

      In the animal body of imperfect man?

      Hope not to be happy in a world of pain

      And dream not, listening to the unspoken Word

      And dazzled by the inexpressible Ray,

      Transcending the mute Superconscient’s realm,

      To give a body to the Unknowable,

      Or for a sanction to thy heart’s delight

      To burden with bliss the silent still Supreme

      Profaning its bare and formless sanctity,

      Or call into thy chamber the Divine

      And sit with God tasting a human joy.

      I have created all, all I devour;

      I am Death and the dark terrible Mother of life,

      I am Kali black and naked in the world,

      I am Maya and the universe is my cheat.

      I lay waste human happiness with my breath

      And slay the will to live, the joy to be

      That all may pass back into nothingness

      And only abide the eternal and absolute.

      For only the blank Eternal can be true.

      All else is shadow and flash in Mind’s bright glass,

      Mind, hollow mirror in which Ignorance sees

      A splendid figure of its own false self

      And dreams it sees a glorious solid world.

      O soul, inventor of man’s thoughts and hopes,

      Thyself the invention of the moments’ stream,

      Illusion’s centre or subtle apex point,

      At last know thyself, from vain existence cease.”

      A shadow of the negating Absolute,

      The intolerant Darkness travelled surging past

      And ebbed in her the formidable Voice.

      It left behind her inner world laid waste:

      A barren silence weighed upon her heart,

      Her kingdom of delight was there no more;

      Only her soul remained, its emptied stage,

      Awaiting the unknown eternal Will.

      Then from the heights a greater Voice came down,

      The Word that touches the heart and finds the soul,

      The voice of Light after the voice of Night:

      The cry of the Abyss drew Heaven’s reply,

      A might of storm chased by the might of the Sun.

      “O soul, bare not thy kingdom to the foe;

      Consent to hide thy royalty of bliss

      Lest Time and Fate find out its avenues

      And beat with thunderous knock upon thy gates.

      Hide whilst thou canst thy treasure of separate self

      Behind the luminous rampart of thy depths

      Till of a vaster empire it grows part.

      But not for self alone the Self is won:

      Content abide not with one conquered realm;

      Adventure all to make the whole world thine,

      To break into greater kingdoms turn thy force.

      Fear not to be nothing that thou mayst be all;

      Assent to the emptiness of the Supreme

      That all in thee may reach its absolute.

      Accept to be small and human on the earth,

      Interrupting thy new-born divinity,

      That man may find his utter self in God.

      If for thy own sake only thou hast come,

      An immortal spirit into the mortal’s world,

      To found thy luminous kingdom in God’s dark,

      In the Inconscient’s realm one shining star,

      One door in the Ignorance opened upon light,

      Why hadst thou any need to come at all?

      Thou hast come down into a struggling world

      To aid a blind and suffering mortal race,

      To open to Light the eyes that could not see,

      To bring down bliss into the heart of grief,

      To make thy life a bridge twixt earth and heaven;

      If thou wouldst save the toiling universe,

      The vast universal suffering feel as thine:

      Thou must bear the sorrow that thou claimst to heal;

      The day-bringer must walk in darkest night.

      He who would save the world must share its pain.

      If he knows not grief, how shall he find grief’s cure?

      If far he walks above mortality’s head,

      How shall the mortal reach that too high path?

      If one of theirs they see scale heaven’s peaks,

      Men then can hope to learn that titan climb.

      God must be born on earth and be as man

      That