Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

      In which she lived and knew herself in it

      One, multitudinous in its multitudes.

      She was a single being, yet all things;

      The world was her spirit’s wide circumference,

      The thoughts of others were her intimates,

      Their feelings close to her universal heart,

      Their bodies her many bodies kin to her;

      She was no more herself but all the world.

      Out of the infinitudes all came to her,

      Into the infinitudes sentient she spread,

      Infinity was her own natural home.

      Nowhere she dwelt, her spirit was everywhere,

      The distant constellations wheeled round her;

      Earth saw her born, all worlds were her colonies,

      The greater worlds of life and mind were hers;

      All Nature reproduced her in its lines,

      Its movements were large copies of her own.

      She was the single self of all these selves,

      She was in them and they were all in her.

      This first was an immense identity

      In which her own identity was lost:

      What seemed herself was an image of the Whole.

      She was a subconscient life of tree and flower,

      The outbreak of the honied buds of spring;

      She burned in the passion and splendour of the rose,

      She was the red heart of the passion-flower,

      The dream-white of the lotus in its pool.

      Out of subconscient life she climbed to mind,

      She was thought and the passion of the world’s heart,

      She was the godhead hid in the heart of man,

      She was the climbing of his soul to God.

      The cosmos flowered in her, she was its bed.

      She was Time and the dreams of God in Time;

      She was Space and the wideness of his days.

      From this she rose where Time and Space were not;

      The superconscient was her native air,

      Infinity was her movement’s natural space;

      Eternity looked out from her on Time.

      End of Canto Seven

      End of Book Seven

      BOOK EIGHT

      The Book of Death

      The Book of Death was taken from Canto Three of an early version of Savitri which had only six cantos and an epilogue. It was slightly revised at a late stage and a number of new lines were added, but it was never fully worked into the final version of the poem. Its original designation “Canto Three”, has been retained as a reminder of this.

      Canto Three

      Death in the Forest

      Now it was here in this great golden dawn.

      By her still sleeping husband lain she gazed

      Into her past as one about to die

      Looks back upon the sunlit fields of life

      Where he too ran and sported with the rest,

      Lifting his head above the huge dark stream

      Into whose depths he must for ever plunge.

      All she had been and done she lived again.

      The whole year in a swift and eddying race

      Of memories swept through her and fled away

      Into the irrecoverable past.

      Then silently she rose and, service done,

      Bowed down to the great goddess simply carved

      By Satyavan upon a forest stone.

      What prayer she breathed her soul and Durga knew.

      Perhaps she felt in the dim forest huge

      The infinite Mother watching over her child,

      Perhaps the shrouded Voice spoke some still word.

      At last she came to the pale mother queen.

      She spoke but with guarded lips and tranquil face

      Lest some stray word or some betraying look

      Should let pass into the mother’s unknowing breast,

      Slaying all happiness and need to live,

      A dire foreknowledge of the grief to come.

      Only the needed utterance passage found:

      All else she pressed back into her anguished heart

      And forced upon her speech an outward peace.

      “One year that I have lived with Satyavan

      Here on the emerald edge of the vast woods

      In the iron ring of the enormous peaks

      Under the blue rifts of the forest sky,

      I have not gone into the silences

      Of this great woodland that enringed my thoughts

      With mystery, nor in its green miracles

      Wandered, but this small clearing was my world.

      Now has a strong desire seized all my heart

      To go with Satyavan holding his hand

      Into the life that he has loved and touch

      Herbs he has trod and know the forest flowers

      And hear at ease the birds and the scurrying life

      That starts and ceases, rich far rustle of boughs

      And all the mystic whispering of the woods.

      Release me now and let my heart have rest.”

      She answered: “Do as thy wise mind desires,

      O calm child-sovereign with the eyes that rule.

      I hold thee for a strong goddess who has come

      Pitying our barren days; so dost thou serve

      Even as a slave might, yet art thou beyond

      All that thou doest, all our minds conceive,

      Like the strong sun that serves earth from above.”

      Then the doomed husband and the woman who knew

      Went with linked hands into that solemn world

      Where beauty and grandeur and unspoken dream,

      Where Nature’s mystic silence could be felt

      Communing with the secrecy of God.

      Beside her Satyavan walked full of joy

      Because she moved with him through his green haunts:

      He showed her all the forest’s riches, flowers

      Innumerable of every odour and hue

      And soft thick clinging creepers red and green

      And strange rich-plumaged birds, to every cry

      That haunted sweetly distant boughs replied