Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

he moved away; behind him Death

      Went slowly with his noiseless tread, as seen

      In dream-built fields a shadowy herdsman glides

      Behind some wanderer from his voiceless herds,

      And Savitri moved behind eternal Death,

      Her mortal pace was equalled with the god’s.

      Wordless she travelled in her lover’s steps,

      Planting her human feet where his had trod,

      Into the perilous silences beyond.

      At first in a blind stress of woods she moved

      With strange inhuman paces on the soil,

      Journeying as if upon an unseen road.

      Around her on the green and imaged earth

      The flickering screen of forests ringed her steps;

      Its thick luxurious obstacle of boughs

      Besieged her body pressing dimly through

      In a rich realm of whispers palpable,

      And all the murmurous beauty of the leaves

      Rippled around her like an emerald robe.

      But more and more this grew an alien sound,

      And her old intimate body seemed to her

      A burden which her being remotely bore.

      Herself lived far in some uplifted scene

      Where to the trance-claimed vision of pursuit,

      Sole presences in a high spaceless dream,

      The luminous spirit glided stilly on

      And the great shadow travelled vague behind.

      Still with an amorous crowd of seeking hands

      Softly entreated by their old desires

      Her senses felt earth’s close and gentle air

      Cling round them and in troubled branches knew

      Uncertain treadings of a faint-foot wind:

      She bore dim fragrances, far callings touched;

      The wild bird’s voice and its winged rustle came

      As if a sigh from some forgotten world.

      Earth stood aloof, yet near: round her it wove

      Its sweetness and its greenness and delight,

      Its brilliance suave of well-loved vivid hues,

      Sunlight arriving to its golden noon,

      And the blue heavens and the caressing soil.

      The ancient mother offered to her child

      Her simple world of kind familiar things.

      But now, as if the body’s sensuous hold

      Curbing the godhead of her infinite walk

      Had freed those spirits to their grander road

      Across some boundary’s intangible bar,

      The silent god grew mighty and remote

      In other spaces, and the soul she loved

      Lost its consenting nearness to her life.

      Into a deep and unfamiliar air

      Enormous, windless, without stir or sound

      They seemed to enlarge away, drawn by some wide

      Pale distance, from the warm control of earth

      And her grown far: now, now they would escape.

      Then flaming from her body’s nest alarmed

      Her violent spirit soared at Satyavan.

      Out mid the plunge of heaven-surrounded rocks

      So in a terror and a wrath divine

      From her eyrie streams against the ascending death,

      Indignant at its crouching point of steel,

      A fierce she-eagle threatened in her brood,

      Borne on a rush of puissance and a cry,

      Outwinging like a mass of golden fire.

      So on a spirit’s flaming outrush borne

      She crossed the borders of dividing sense;

      Like pale discarded sheaths dropped dully down

      Her mortal members fell back from her soul.

      A moment of a secret body’s sleep,

      Her trance knew not of sun or earth or world;

      Thought, time and death were absent from her grasp:

      She knew not self, forgotten was Savitri.

      All was the violent ocean of a will

      Where lived captive to an immense caress,

      Possessed in a supreme identity,

      Her aim, joy, origin, Satyavan alone.

      Her sovereign prisoned in her being’s core,

      He beat there like a rhythmic heart, – herself

      But different still, one loved, enveloped, clasped,

      A treasure saved from the collapse of space.

      Around him nameless, infinite she surged,

      Her spirit fulfilled in his spirit, rich with all Time,

      As if Love’s deathless moment had been found,

      A pearl within eternity’s white shell.

      Then out of the engulfing sea of trance

      Her mind rose drenched to light streaming with hues

      Of vision and, awake once more to Time,

      Returned to shape the lineaments of things

      And live in borders of the seen and known.

      Onward the three still moved in her soul-scene.

      As if pacing through fragments of a dream,

      She seemed to travel on, a visioned shape

      Imagining other musers like herself,

      By them imagined in their lonely sleep.

      Ungrasped, unreal, yet familiar, old,

      Like clefts of unsubstantial memory,

      Scenes often traversed, never lived in, fled

      Past her unheeding to forgotten goals.

      In voiceless regions they were travellers

      Alone in a new world where souls were not,

      But only living moods: a strange hushed weird

      Country was round them, strange far skies above,

      A doubting space where dreaming objects lived

      Within themselves their one unchanged idea.

      Weird were the grasses, weird the treeless plains;

      Weird ran the road which like fear hastening

      Towards that of which it has most terror, passed

      Phantasmal between pillared conscious rocks

      Sombre and high, gates brooding, whose stone thoughts

      Lost their huge sense beyond in giant night.

      Enigma of the Inconscient’s sculptural sleep,

      Symbols