Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

and the blind walls of Form;

      A timeless Light is in his hidden eyes;

      He sees the secret things no words can speak

      And knows the goal of the unconscious world

      And the heart of the mystery of the journeying years.

      But all is screened, subliminal, mystical;

      It needs the intuitive heart, the inward turn,

      It needs the power of a spiritual gaze.

      Else to our waking mind’s small moment look

      A goalless voyage seems our dubious course

      Some Chance has settled or hazarded some Will,

      Or a Necessity without aim or cause

      Unwillingly compelled to emerge and be.

      In this dense field where nothing is plain or sure,

      Our very being seems to us questionable,

      Our life a vague experiment, the soul

      A flickering light in a strange ignorant world,

      The earth a brute mechanic accident,

      A net of death in which by chance we live.

      All we have learned appears a doubtful guess,

      The achievement done a passage or a phase

      Whose farther end is hidden from our sight,

      A chance happening or a fortuitous fate.

      Out of the unknown we move to the unknown.

      Ever surround our brief existence here

      Grey shadows of unanswered questionings;

      The dark Inconscient’s signless mysteries

      Stand up unsolved behind Fate’s starting-line.

      An aspiration in the Night’s profound,

      Seed of a perishing body and half-lit mind,

      Uplifts its lonely tongue of conscious fire

      Towards an undying Light for ever lost;

      Only it hears, sole echo of its call,

      The dim reply in man’s unknowing heart

      And meets, not understanding why it came

      Or for what reason is the suffering here,

      God’s sanction to the paradox of life

      And the riddle of the Immortal’s birth in Time.

      Along a path of aeons serpentine

      In the coiled blackness of her nescient course

      The Earth-Goddess toils across the sands of Time.

      A Being is in her whom she hopes to know,

      A Word speaks to her heart she cannot hear,

      A Fate compels whose form she cannot see.

      In her unconscious orbit through the Void

      Out of her mindless depths she strives to rise,

      A perilous life her gain, a struggling joy;

      A Thought that can conceive but hardly knows

      Arises slowly in her and creates

      The idea, the speech that labels more than it lights;

      A trembling gladness that is less than bliss

      Invades from all this beauty that must die.

      Alarmed by the sorrow dragging at her feet

      And conscious of the high things not yet won,

      Ever she nurses in her sleepless breast

      An inward urge that takes from her rest and peace.

      Ignorant and weary and invincible,

      She seeks through the soul’s war and quivering pain

      The pure perfection her marred nature needs,

      A breath of Godhead on her stone and mire.

      A faith she craves that can survive defeat,

      The sweetness of a love that knows not death,

      The radiance of a truth for ever sure.

      A light grows in her, she assumes a voice,

      Her state she learns to read and the act she has done,

      But the one needed truth eludes her grasp,

      Herself and all of which she is the sign.

      An inarticulate whisper drives her steps

      Of which she feels the force but not the sense;

      A few rare intimations come as guides,

      Immense divining flashes cleave her brain,

      And sometimes in her hours of dream and muse

      The truth that she has missed looks out on her

      As if far off and yet within her soul.

      A change comes near that flees from her surmise

      And, ever postponed, compels attempt and hope,

      Yet seems too great for mortal hope to dare.

      A vision meets her of supernal Powers

      That draw her as if mighty kinsmen lost

      Approaching with estranged great luminous gaze.

      Then is she moved to all that she is not

      And stretches arms to what was never hers.

      Outstretching arms to the unconscious Void,

      Passionate she prays to invisible forms of Gods

      Soliciting from dumb Fate and toiling Time

      What most she needs, what most exceeds her scope,

      A Mind unvisited by illusion’s gleams,

      A Will expressive of soul’s deity,

      A Strength not forced to stumble by its speed,

      A Joy that drags not sorrow as its shade.

      For these she yearns and feels them destined hers:

      Heaven’s privilege she claims as her own right.

      Just is her claim the all-witnessing Gods approve,

      Clear in a greater light than reason owns:

      Our intuitions are its title-deeds;

      Our souls accept what our blind thoughts refuse.

      Earth’s winged chimaeras are Truth’s steeds in Heaven,

      The impossible God’s sign of things to be.

      But few can look beyond the present state

      Or overleap this matted hedge of sense.

      All that transpires on earth and all beyond

      Are parts of an illimitable plan

      The One keeps in his heart and knows alone.

      Our outward happenings have their seed within,

      And even this random Fate that imitates Chance,

      This mass of unintelligible results,

      Are the dumb graph of truths that work unseen:

      The laws of the Unknown create the known.

      The events that shape the appearance of our lives

      Are a cipher of subliminal quiverings

      Which