Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

not remember or feel itself; it seemed

      A hollow gulf of sterile emptiness,

      A zero oblivious of the sum it closed,

      An abnegation of the Maker’s joy

      Saved by no wide repose, no depth of peace.

      On all that claims here to be Truth and God

      And conscious self and the revealing Word

      And the creative rapture of the Mind

      And Love and Knowledge and heart’s delight, there fell

      The immense refusal of the eternal No.

      As disappears a golden lamp in gloom

      Borne into distance from the eyes’ desire,

      Into the shadows vanished Savitri.

      There was no course, no path, no end or goal:

      Visionless she moved amid insensible gulfs,

      Or drove through some great black unknowing waste,

      Or whirled in a dumb eddy of meeting winds

      Assembled by the titan hands of Chance.

      There was none with her in the dreadful Vast:

      She saw no more the vague tremendous god,

      Her eyes had lost their luminous Satyavan.

      Yet not for this her spirit failed, but held

      More deeply than the bounded senses can

      Which grasp externally and find to lose,

      Its object loved. So when on earth they lived

      She had felt him straying through the glades, the glades

      A scene in her, its clefts her being’s vistas

      Opening their secrets to his search and joy,

      Because to jealous sweetness in her heart

      Whatever happy space his cherished feet

      Preferred, must be at once her soul embracing

      His body, passioning dumbly to his tread.

      But now a silent gulf between them came

      And to abysmal loneliness she fell,

      Even from herself cast out, from love remote.

      Long hours, since long it seems when sluggish time

      Is measured by the throbs of the soul’s pain,

      In an unreal darkness empty and drear

      She travelled treading on the corpse of life,

      Lost in a blindness of extinguished souls.

      Solitary in the anguish of the void

      She lived in spite of death, she conquered still;

      In vain her puissant being was oppressed:

      Her heavy long monotony of pain

      Tardily of its fierce self-torture tired.

      At first a faint inextinguishable gleam,

      Pale but immortal, flickered in the gloom

      As if a memory came to spirits dead,

      A memory that wished to live again,

      Dissolved from mind in Nature’s natal sleep.

      It wandered like a lost ray of the moon

      Revealing to the night her soul of dread;

      Serpentine in the gleam the darkness lolled,

      Its black hoods jewelled with the mystic glow;

      Its dull sleek folds shrank back and coiled and slid,

      As though they felt all light a cruel pain

      And suffered from the pale approach of hope.

      Night felt assailed her heavy sombre reign;

      The splendour of some bright eternity

      Threatened with this faint beam of wandering Truth

      Her empire of the everlasting Nought.

      Implacable in her intolerant strength

      And confident that she alone was true,

      She strove to stifle the frail dangerous ray;

      Aware of an all-negating immensity

      She reared her giant head of Nothingness,

      Her mouth of darkness swallowing all that is;

      She saw in herself the tenebrous Absolute.

      But still the light prevailed and still it grew,

      And Savitri to her lost self awoke;

      Her limbs refused the cold embrace of death,

      Her heart-beats triumphed in the grasp of pain;

      Her soul persisted claiming for its joy

      The soul of the beloved now seen no more.

      Before her in the stillness of the world

      Once more she heard the treading of a god,

      And out of the dumb darkness Satyavan,

      Her husband, grew into a luminous shade.

      Then a sound pealed through that dead monstrous realm:

      Vast like the surge in a tired swimmer’s ears,

      Clamouring, a fatal iron-hearted roar,

      Death missioned to the night his lethal call.

      “This is my silent dark immensity,

      This is the home of everlasting Night,

      This is the secrecy of Nothingness

      Entombing the vanity of life’s desires.

      Hast thou beheld thy source, O transient heart,

      And known from what the dream thou art was made?

      In this stark sincerity of nude emptiness

      Hopest thou still always to last and love?”

      The Woman answered not. Her spirit refused

      The voice of Night that knew and Death that thought.

      In her beginningless infinity

      Through her soul’s reaches unconfined she gazed;

      She saw the undying fountains of her life,

      She knew herself eternal without birth.

      But still opposing her with endless night

      Death, the dire god, inflicted on her eyes

      The immortal calm of his tremendous gaze:

      “Although thou hast survived the unborn void

      Which never shall forgive, while Time endures,

      The primal violence that fashioned thought,

      Forcing the immobile vast to suffer and live,

      This sorrowful victory only hast thou won

      To live for a little without Satyavan.

      What shall the ancient goddess give to thee

      Who helps thy heart-beats? Only she prolongs

      The nothing dreamed existence and delays

      With the labour of living thy eternal sleep.

      A fragile miracle of thinking clay,

      Armed with illusions walks the child of Time.

      To