Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

old

      And monuments of her titanic reign,

      Opening to depths like dumb appalling jaws

      That wait a traveller down a haunted path

      Attracted to a mystery that slays,

      They watched across her road, cruel and still;

      Sentinels they stood of dumb Necessity,

      Mute heads of vigilant and sullen gloom,

      Carved muzzle of a dim enormous world.

      Then, to that chill sere heavy line arrived

      Where his feet touched the shadowy marches’ brink,

      Turning arrested luminous Satyavan

      Looked back with his wonderful eyes at Savitri.

      But Death pealed forth his vast abysmal cry:

      “O mortal, turn back to thy transient kind;

      Aspire not to accompany Death to his home,

      As if thy breath could live where Time must die.

      Think not thy mind-born passion strength from heaven

      To uplift thy spirit from its earthly base

      And, breaking out from the material cage,

      To upbuoy thy feet of dream in groundless Nought

      And bear thee through the pathless infinite.

      Only in human limits man lives safe.

      Trust not in the unreal Lords of Time,

      Immortal deeming this image of thyself

      Which they have built on a Dream’s floating ground.

      Let not the dreadful goddess move thy soul

      To enlarge thy vehement trespass into worlds

      Where it shall perish like a helpless thought.

      Know the cold term-stones of thy hopes in life.

      Armed vainly with the Ideal’s borrowed might,

      Dare not to outstep man’s bound and measured force:

      Ignorant and stumbling, in brief boundaries pent,

      He crowns himself the world’s mock suzerain,

      Tormenting Nature with the works of Mind.

      O sleeper, dreaming of divinity,

      Wake trembling mid the indifferent silences

      In which thy few weak chords of being die.

      Impermanent creatures, sorrowful foam of Time,

      Your transient loves bind not the eternal gods.”

      The dread voice ebbed in the consenting hush

      Which seemed to close upon it, wide, intense,

      A wordless sanction from the jaws of Night.

      The Woman answered not. Her high nude soul,

      Stripped of the girdle of mortality,

      Against fixed destiny and the grooves of law

      Stood up in its sheer will a primal force.

      Still like a statue on its pedestal,

      Lone in the silence and to vastness bared,

      Against midnight’s dumb abysses piled in front

      A columned shaft of fire and light she rose.

      End of Canto One

      Canto Two

      The Journey in Eternal Night and the Voice of the Darkness

      Awhile on the chill dreadful edge of Night

      All stood as if a world were doomed to die

      And waited on the eternal silence’ brink.

      Heaven leaned towards them like a cloudy brow

      Of menace through the dim and voiceless hush.

      As thoughts stand mute on a despairing verge

      Where the last depths plunge into nothingness

      And the last dreams must end, they paused; in their front

      Were glooms like shadowy wings, behind them, pale,

      The lifeless evening was a dead man’s gaze.

      Hungry beyond, the night desired her soul.

      But still in its lone niche of templed strength

      Motionless, her flame-bright spirit, mute, erect,

      Burned like a torch-fire from a windowed room

      Pointing against the darkness’ sombre breast.

      The Woman first affronted the Abyss

      Daring to journey through the eternal Night.

      Armoured with light she advanced her foot to plunge

      Into the dread and hueless vacancy;

      Immortal, unappalled, her spirit faced

      The danger of the ruthless eyeless waste.

      Against night’s inky ground they stirred, moulding

      Mysterious motion on her human tread,

      A swimming action and a drifting march

      Like figures moving before eyelids closed:

      All as in dreams went slipping, gliding on.

      The rock-gate’s heavy walls were left behind;

      As if through passages of receding time

      Present and past into the Timeless lapsed;

      Arrested upon dim adventure’s brink,

      The future ended drowned in nothingness.

      Amid collapsing shapes they wound obscure;

      The fading vestibules of a tenebrous world

      Received them, where they seemed to move and yet

      Be still, nowhere advancing yet to pass,

      A dumb procession a dim picture bounds,

      Not conscious forms threading a real scene.

      A mystery of terror’s boundlessness,

      Gathering its hungry strength the huge pitiless void

      Surrounded slowly with its soundless depths,

      And monstrous, cavernous, a shapeless throat

      Devoured her into its shadowy strangling mass,

      The fierce spiritual agony of a dream.

      A curtain of impenetrable dread,

      The darkness hung around her cage of sense

      As, when the trees have turned to blotted shades

      And the last friendly glimmer fades away,

      Around a bullock in the forest tied

      By hunters closes in no empty night.

      The thought that strives in the world was here unmade;

      Its effort it renounced to live and know,

      Convinced at last that it had never been;

      It perished, all its dream of action done:

      This clotted cypher was its dark result.

      In the smothering stress of this stupendous Nought

      Mind could not think, breath could not breathe, the soul

      Could